Nobody wants a standardized fire truck

Recently American LaFrance (ALF), a South Carolina-based maker of fire trucks (recently spun off from Daimler-Chrysler in 2005) declared bankruptcy, blaming IBM for a botched Enterprise Resource Planning system implementation. I find that funny, because I used to work with IBM a lot, and I have noticed that their consulting skills are sadly lacking since they merged their IT consulting business with the IT consulting businesses of Price Waterhouse and Andersen Consulting a few years ago. They used to be terrific at consulting. Now they're just accounting-firm billing drones, never moving toward their goal, just sitting at a client site, billing and billing, until the client notices that they're not producing anything of value, and throws them out. But that's a different rant.

While the ALF sideshow is going on, it's interesting to note that other fire truck manufacturers are not doing well either. For example, a sister company of my client is not doing well, not just because of the lousy economy, but because that company is founded on the idea of mass-producing standardized fire trucks.

Great idea, huh? Have a product line of several standard trucks, and then a set of options that you can pick, like building a car (only with 500 horsepower engines and massive water pumps and lots of diamond-plate chrome and really loud sirens and bright lights. And no emissions equipment, because they're exempt).

Nope. Terrible idea, said my manufacturing Subject Matter Expert at my client. Why is that?

Because firemen are a team. And they spend a lot of downtime polishing their machines, which are a reflection of their team. Firemen tend to stay at one job for twenty or thirty years. They grow old with the same people in their fire station. Each team of firefighters is a cohesive unit, bonded together by thousands of hours of training, and thousands more of close-quarters comraderie. Their machines are as individualized as each firefighting team. They actually want customized locker spaces on the fire truck, sized to fit each man on the team. They like a certain kind of pump, or a particular size of cab with a certain kind of door opening, or a particular bracket style for their ladders, mounted in a particular place. They like a particular siren, or wobbly-strobe on the nose of the truck. They're very picky. They say it's because their lives depend on it. Yeah, whatever. ;-)

Fire chiefs tend to spend hundreds and thousands of hours doodling and dreaming of the perfect fire truck, customized down to the last detail for his team. To a fire chief, each fire truck is a mobile monument to the firefighting team that uses it, and it's a legacy of the fire chief under whose reign the fire engine was purchased (often to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars). That fire truck is customized as much as possible to the team who uses it, and like the team, the truck will be around for decades.

Nothing kills a fire chief's passion for acquiring a new truck faster than telling him or her that they can only have certain options in certain combinations. They want what they want, how they want it, and if you won't supply it, they'll go find someone who will. And after all, they're spending your tax money. And they usually aren't under much pressure to limit spending. Who can say no to firefighters? After all, they can just let your house burn down. That'll larn ya!

I was very surprised to learn about this. I thought that standardization would be a good idea. Saves money on parts, makes training easier and cheaper, and enables firefighters to move from one firehouse to another more easily.

Nope. That's not how firefighting life works. I am wiser now.

Wild Kingdom in your yard

So a big wild python ate the family dog in Kuranda, Queensland, Australia the other day, while the kids watched in horror. Apparently the snake had been stalking the dog for days, even laying in wait for it in the dog's bed. I'm guessing the terrier/Chihuahua mutt was an outdoor dog. Now it's more of an inside pet. ;-)

The parents threw plastic chairs at the snake to try to get it to let go of the dog, to no avail. Guns are mostly banned in Australia, and the last I heard, they were also trying to ban knives with blades longer than (I think) four inches. After all, it is a former prison colony. Wouldn't do to have weapons in prison, you know. Especially weapons with which to fend off animals that eat your pets. Or which could eat your children.

I'm not clear why the parents didn't do something about this snake. Attack it with an axe. Shoo it away with a torch. Play Ozzy Osbourne at it (I think the vibrations would drive it away.) Call the zoo to come get it. Instead they just said, "hmm, big snake in the dog's bed today."

We have bobcats around, and even a panther (a flatlander mountain lion) lives nearby. They pretty much keep to themselves. We keep our pets indoors as a precaution. But you can bet that I would use whatever force necessary to keep one of those big cats from eating our pets.

A classic chase scene

I had forgotten that the Coen brothers directed "Raising Arizona" (1987, Nicholas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, etc. etc.).

This is one of the silliest chase scenes in cinema. I really enjoy all the dogs. And the argument they have in the car about involving a baby in their life of crime. And I love the music. It's a Native American singing with a banjo as backup. The soundtrack also has Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - played on a banjo. To me, that's just hilarious.

If you have not seen "Raising Arizona," rent it, order some pizza and milk (soda hurts too much when you snort it out of your nose with laughter), and prepare to laugh your ass off.

Signing up for Technorati

Interesting - they want your logon and password to your blog, so that you can "claim" that it's yours! O.o I think not! Martians are known for their paranoia. That just sets all the alarm bells ringing.

So. It wants a post, like an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) transponder, so that Technorati can "see" it and validate it.

Technorati Profile
Hmm.

Turning Japanese

The Vapours (1983). Another one-hit-wonder. The perfect blend of guitar and analog synthesizer and snarky attitude.

Does the singer have clue one, how to handle a katana sword? I don't think so. But then, neither do I.

More tests!

The 2-variable Intuition Test that Faerie Kat mentioned is interesting, if a bit scattered. I think everyone gets the same score, actually - I'm not sure the test is actually hooked up to anything.




I personally like the Gaydar test. An unfortunate Martian trait is excellent gaydar, which can be distracting from things that are really important, like "is that guy going to kill me?"


And of course, the World War 2 Aircraft test. During WW2, both Allied and Axis pilots in Europe reported seeing little glowing balls of light chasing their airplanes, behaving as if they were under intelligent control. Well, of course - they were Martian drones, taking video of the greatest large-scale conflict this little planet had ever seen up to that point. It made for great holovids back home. I personally was betting that the Axis would win, because they had the better scientists. But strength in numbers helped the Allies prevail. The race goes not always to the swiftest.
Anyway. Each side thought the little glowing balls (dubbed "foo fighters") were a secret weapon belonging to the enemy. How little they knew. ;-)

It's hard to ___ when you own a Rottweiler

I enjoy silly bumper stickers. Like, "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em," and "We're from the government - we're here to help you."

I saw one today that said "It's hard to be humble when you own a Rottweiler!"

Yeah, right. Like owning a particular kind of pet makes you a better person.

First, I am a "dog Martian." My darling wife helped turn me into a "cat Martian." But dogs are generally more intelligent, I think, if only because their braincases are usually larger than cats.

But intelligence does not necessarily indicate predictable behavior.

In my small experience on this planet, Doberman pinschers, pit bulls, and Rottweilers are unpredictable, dangerous and not to be trusted, although I have met examples of all three who are nicer than most people. And I have had friends who own Rotties and swear by them. But taken as a breed, I wouldn't have have one. Too much liability. You'd probably be safer planting land mines in your yard and hoping the neighbor kids don't step on one.

And from what I have observed, both in person and during many wasted hours watching reruns of "Cops," owning a dangerous pet often goes hand-in-hand other antisocial behavior, like small-time drug-dealing, or trafficking in stolen property, or driving a chrome-laden pickup truck with a lift kit, tinted windows, a large pair of rubber testicles dangling from the trailer hitch, and an obnoxious subwoofer, which together costs more than the owner's home.

It got me to thinking about all the other, more appropriate things the bumper sticker could have said. (With apologies to any of my readers who do own a furry piranha.)

"It's hard to be taken seriously when you own a Rottweiler!"
"It's hard to be considered intelligent when you own a Rottweiler!"
"It's hard to avoid hospitalization when you own a Rottweiler!"
"It's hard to leave the trailer park for more than a day when you own a Rottweiler!"

and so on.

It's been a long day, and I'm obviously cranky. ;-)

UPDATE: Oh yes, and, "It's hard to convince people that you're not overcompensating for under-endowment when you own a Rottweiler!"

A cool new widget

Dima has an interesting map widget, which shows you where your visitors come from. (Big Brother IS watching!)

I think it would be cool if it would automatically access their Paypal accounts and transfer money to you. But you get what you pay for. (The widget is free.)

Thanks Dima!

A better, vanished time, before the Motor Law...

When I was younger, everyone around me was infatuated with Rush's music, with their "philosophical" lyrics...they were a touchstone for disaffected children in the cities and Subdivisions of the 1970s and 1980s.

I ignored them because they were cool. And I was not cool.

Now that peer pressure is but a distant memory, I can enjoy them secretly, like snarfing whipped cream out of the can while lounging in my pajamas, watching reruns of "The Dukes of Hazzard."

"Red Barchetta" - There is no official video for this, but the slide show is pretty good, and follows the plotline of the song pretty closely. I love this song in part because it is one of the few popular rock tunes that actually uses the harmonics of a guitar's strings to provide the melody. A harmonic is achieved by lightly touching the string at certain points along its length as you pluck the string, making it vibrate in 3rds, 4ths and 5ths above the original note. This song is relatively easy to play on the guitar, and it's beautiful.

Snow

It's snowing here in Chicago, huge flakes the size of half-dollars. They stick to the ground and pile up so swiftly that the ground looks like a "popcorn" ceiling, all lumpy with individual snowflakes.

We are supposed to get 6 inches tonight. When I left work, it had been snowing a half hour, and already there was an inch on the ground. I almost got hit pulling out into traffic, because my Chrysler Pacifica (a boring bathtub-shaped station-wagon) could not get a grip on the road.

I'm just glad it's crappy weather at the beginning of the week, instead of on Thursday night when I go home. That's because O'Hare airport is NUMBER ONE in the list of most awful airports, according to "US News & World Report" (which I never read because I don't have a birdcage to line with it).

Yay! We're number one! We're number one!

Sigh.

The Lady in Red

Chris De Burgh annoys me, especially with his 1986 hit, "The Lady in Red." His voice reminds me vaguely of Graham Russell, the Brit from the Australian group Air Supply. What bothers me is that both of their voices are so naturally feminine, as opposed to the Bee Gees, who sang so falsetto that it was almost a joke.

Anyhoo.

I'm guessing that some wag in the control room at E! Channel must have cued up De Burgh's hit song and played it, as a salute to all the women in red that night at the Oscars. I wouldn't know - I wasn't watching.

I am told by reliable sources (namely my darling wife, who is the only person I know who is patient enough to watch such stuff) that fully 92 percent of the women on the red carpet were wearing red.

I'm wonder if they were bumping into each other, camouflaged as they were.

It seems very high-schoolish to me. Did they all call each other up? "Hey, I'm gonna wear red tonight! What are YOU gonna wear?" "Let's ALL wear red!" "Yeah!"

No, that's quite improbable. I'm sure that their agents made the phone calls for them.

UPDATE: My darling wife tells me that they all wore red to support women's heart disease or something. I thought enough women already had heart disease. Why support it further? hmmm. I thought they were wearing red in support of Fidel Castro or something. Hollywood is thick with communists, you know. ;-)

Near Death Experiences, Part 4 (another non-coincidence)

Yes, it's that time again! It's time for another NDE story. (I don't mean to irritate certain dear readers who are sick of this topic. But I must share this with you. And I swear that I am not making this up.)

M, an engineer, could not get his training simulations to display. J (the IT lady) went over to his desk to help him. She went through the normal checklist and found nothing wrong. So she logged onto his machine with her own user profile.

It worked perfectly.

M logged back on with his own user profile.

It didn't work.

"Well," said J, "it must be your user profile. You are only the second person to have this issue here."

"Oh really?" asked M. "Who was the other person?"

"K," said J.

"Oh, that's funny - K used my PC last Friday," said M.



So J rebuilt M's user profile, and now his PC works for him again. For the moment. Until K touches his PC.

Guys like this one give ALL men a bad name

I have to pass through the MSN portal to get to Hotmail. Sometimes a headline catches my eye. (OUCH! That's sharp, in my eye!)

Is He Holding Out for a Non-Existent Woman?

Ignoring the Oscars again

"It's the Oscars tonight!" my wife told me, delighted.

"Mmhmm," I said into the phone, while looking for my next gate at the airport. "And?"

"Oh, you're no fun," she said.

"I would watch if the spy satellite that the Navy just shot down actually came down on Hollywood," I said. "That WOULD be entertaining. But otherwise, no."

A badly-sprained body image

I was enjoying a dinner out with my darling wife, my nephew Andy and his girlfriend Tara when I saw a woman in the restaurant who was the epitome of "skanky."

She was probably 60, tall, with blonde hair teased out in an '80s fashion. Tight white blouse, store-bought breasts, a denim miniskirt with a four-inch-wide leather belt, white crew socks and Doc Martin low-rise, high-heeled black work boots. Her skin was a leathery parchment, unable to decide whether it should tan or burn in the sun.

Tara said she looked like a retired prostitute. I thought she looked like the victim of a broken, or at least badly-sprained, self-image.

It's bad enough when old, fat, bald, hairy men insist on wearing a thong (and nothing else) while driving their 40-foot motor yacht, as if owning (or renting) such a huge boat automatically exempts them from having to obey the laws of good taste in clothing. (I witnessed this very scene going down the intracoastal waterway last Friday. My wife hooted with laughter when I pointed Thong Guy out to her; I think he heard us laughing.) It's even more upsetting to watch such an inappropriate self-image on parade while you're trying to eat.

I think people usually have a self-image that tells them what is appropriate to wear, based on their age. Some people don't, and that's when opprobrium from people around them should be the reinforcing factor.

Some people are impervious even to that, unfortunately. ;-)

We suppressed our giggles until we could leave the restaurant. "Don't ever let me dress like that," said my wife. I assured her that I wouldn't.

Sometimes there IS justice (or a cop when you need one)

As I got on the highway today, a ten-year-old Saturn sedan screamed past me, doing at least 85 mph. I usually ignore flagrant speeders unless they're driving aggressively, because flagrant speeders serve a valuable purpose in Nature - they attract the attention of the police, which means the rest of us are allowed to speed unmolested. Plus, there's always the chance that they will end up in a fiery wreck, which is always entertaining (and suitably appropriate). I enjoy watching stupid people reap the rewards of their actions.

So I drove along, minding my own business, until about 15 minutes later I passed Mr. Saturn, pulled over by an unmarked highway patrol car. (Why they bother to make them "unmarked" baffles me, since they are always the same make, model, and color, with government-issue utility hubcaps.)

I honked and waved as I passed. ;-)

Near Death Experiences, Part 3 or "Coincidence? I think NOT!"

Friday night, I watched a rerun of "Star Trek: Voyager," which is my darling wife's favorite show, but not mine; I watched "Star Trek: The Next Generation" religiously, but not "Voyager." So I missed most of Voyager when it was on TV the first time. Now I'm catching up on it, a decade later.

In this particular episode, Captain Janeway died in a shuttle crash.

She "stood" nearby and watched as Commander Chakotay tried, and failed, to revive her. She watched as the crew took her back up to the ship, and tried and failed again to revive her. Then her dead father appeared, and tried to convince her to "go to the light," for want of a better term. She refused to go, preferring to stay and watch over her crew, who threw her a nice wake and said nice things about her.

Her father spent the rest of the episode trying to convince her to leave, to join him in some kind of "matrix," which he portrayed as some kind of "heaven" which was indescribable.

At the end, she figured out that her "father" was an alien being, trying to make her stop fighting to live, and to embrace death, so that he could imprison her in a "matrix" like a battery, so that he could feed upon the energy of her soul for a long, long time. During the whole episode, Chakotay and other members of the crew had been fighting to revive her amid the ruins of the wrecked shuttle on the planet, while Janeway was trapped in a series of hallucinations supplied by the alien. Only when it became clear to the alien that Janeway would not give up, did he leave, threatening to come for her again the next time she died.

This reminds me of the movie "Jacob's Ladder" (1990), where Tim Robbins is a Vietnam veteran who is seriously wounded in the war, but survives to return to civilian life, marry, and to bear a son who later dies. Robbins suddenly begins to be afflicted by visits from demons who are angry that he survived death in Vietnam, and who want to take his soul to hell. Eventually his dead son comes to lead Robbins into the light. Then the MASH unit surgeon covers up his body with a sheet on the battlefield in Vietnam, where he DID die, and during the few moments of the dying process, hallucinated his entire future after the war.

I find it interesting that this specific episode of "Voyager" would appear, and I would happen to watch it, during the same stretch of time where I have been investigating Near Death Experiences. The longer I live, and the more that I learn about reality (and unreality), the more I realize that there are no meaningless coincidences.

Near Death Experiences, part 2

So I spoke with K today, and asked how she was. "Fine," she said, "but my poor computer still keeps acting up." Her computer is one of the moxt powerful workstations I have seen, with a RAID array, 16GB of memory, dual monitors, blah blah blah. (I would kill to have that machine at home for gaming.) K popped up her training simulations, and tried to show me what simulation was not working right.

Of course, since I was there, it worked perfectly. This is normal for me, and I told her that the computer was behaving since I was there with her, but it may act up again after I leave, and that she should come and get me if it does. We laughed. She's a very sunny person.

But this gave me an opportunity to ask her, "Does your watch ever stop working?"

"Sometimes, when the battery goes flat." She looked puzzled.

"How about your television? Have you ever had it quit working one day for no reason?"

"Yessss..." she said, frowning, wondering where I was going with this.

"How about your car battery? Does it ever die suddenly, without warning? Works fine one day, quits the next? Several times a year?"

"Yes." She started to look frightened. Maybe she thought I was reading her mind or something.

I lowered my voice. "Have you ever been gravely ill, or injured?"

"Yes," she whispered, sadly.

"Have you ever been near death? Did you die?" I asked.

"Yes." Tears welled up in her eyes, and I touched her arm. "It's okay. I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out why you're having computer problems, so it's important." She nodded. "Can you tell me about it?" I asked.

She was very reluctant to say anything, but as we talked, she told me that she had had not one, not two, but three Near Death Experiences. Her first was after a car accident nearly 20 years ago. Her second and third were a couple of years ago, when she was gravely ill with some kind of organ problem (not cancer, but it had apparently been afflicting her for a long time, until she had to go into the hospital for emergency surgery). She died once, and then again in two separate instances over the course of several weeks. Each time she was revived.

But what really bothered her, what freighted her soul with guilt, was that each time she died and was revived, someone else near her died. Once it was a stranger, one of the hospital staff. The other two times, relatives died. All three people died suddenly, without warning, each one dying shortly after she had her Near Death Experience.

In her mind, the events were related. Each of those people died because she had NOT died when she was supposed to. And she felt guilty about it.

"It's not your fault," I said. "I don't believe there is a requirement that someone else die in your stead if you survive. And at any rate, I'm glad that YOU'RE here, that YOU survived." She smiled through her tears. "But do you watch 'Pushing Daisies' on TV?" I asked. She shook her head. "You really should watch it, because it talks about exactly what you're describing," I said. "It's a comedy, so it's funny. You might appreciate it." She said she'd check it out.

"But what you've told me confirms what I suspected about the computer problems that you're having," I told her, "and it's not your fault. Your experiences have changed you, and changed the electric field that your body radiates. And electronic equipment sometimes doesn't get along with the new 'you.'" She laughed.

We talked a little more, but she indicated that she had to stop because one of her nasty colleagues was listening.

Later she came to visit me in my training room, and we chatted some more. I didn't learn much more about her experiences, because J (the IT lady) and M (my training coordinator) both began telling K about their NDEs, and so it became more of a support group for K, which is good, because it was exactly what she needed. But she brought me food, as a gift, and gave me a hug. I emailed her some NDE links, and a link to "Pushing Daisies," and she brought me MORE food in return. She says that's what she does - she's skinny as a rail, but she loves to cook and to feed the people around her. I thanked her and ate appreciatively.

I think it was a meaningful experience for her, and for me.

Humor, Quantified

Andrew Lias has an interesting test to measure your humor style. The only drawback is that you have to sign up with a bogus screen name and email to get the test results. I find that to be irritating. Anyway, the test is fun, though I'm not sure that it's particularly accurate in my case. People seem to enjoy my company because I am quick with a wisecrack, though sometimes I am too subtle or esoteric for their taste.

Here are my results, on a three-dimensional chart o' humor.


(42% dark, 57% spontaneous, 36% vulgar)

Marvin's humor style: Clean, spontaneous, light

"Your style's goofy, innocent and feel-good. Perfect for parties and for the dads who chaperone them. You can actually get away with corny jokes, and I bet your sense of humor is a guilty pleasure for your friends. People of your type are often the most approachable and popular people in their circle. Your simple & silly good-naturedness is immediately recognizable, and it sets you apart in this sarcastic world."

"PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Will Ferrell - Will Smith"

The test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You scored higher than 29% on darkness (that means I'm annoyingly sunny and naive.)
You scored higher than 80% on spontaneity (that means I'm quick with a joke.)
You scored higher than 48% on vulgarity (that means I'm reasonably fucking vulgar.)

I think that's interesting, to have humor quantified that way.

Near death experiences, emotional distress, and their effects on electrical equipment

A near-death experience (NDE) is experienced by people who "die" and then return to life. It can happen through injury, during surgery, or even spontaneously. In an NDE, the subject often disassociates from the body and finds themselves floating above it or near it, watching themselves from a third-person perspective. Sometimes they hear the thoughts of nearby people. Sometimes they find themselves passing through a tunnel toward a white light, with an unearthly sound or indescribable noise in their "ears". Sometimes they meet and talk with faceless entities, or with people who have died, or even meet religious figures like Jesus or Mary. Sometimes the subjects return willingly to their bodies, and sometimes they are forcibly returned or "snapped back" as if on a rubber band. NDEs are similar to astral projection, or Out-Of-Body Experiences (OBEs), where a subject's consciousness deliberately leaves their body, travels to other places, other times, or even different dimensions or planes of existence, and then returns to the body.

Aftereffects of NDEs include spirituality, a feeling of connectedness with the Earth, nature, and other people, a certainty of life after death, a "youthening" of both the mind and the body, and so on. But as a person who enjoys machines, one of the aftereffects that interests me most is the effects that an NDE-er (a person who has had an NDE) can have on mechanical and electronic equipment. I like to find out about such instances, because it is a measurable result of what is usually a very subjective and unproveable experience.

NDE-ers are said to be able to do such things as:

• Stop mechanical watches or other complex machinery with no discernible cause
• Burn out televisions and computer monitors
• Erase magnetic hard drives
• Blow fuses or circuits in electronic equipment
• Drain car batteries just by going near them, or by touching the car, without even a shock - it just goes dead
  

I have had a couple NDE-er friends who could not wear mechanical or digital watches, because they would stop working after a month or so of use. I have met more than one NDE-er who had fried a television or a stereo just by walking past it.

The reason I mention this, is that the local IT person and I have been trying for a couple of weeks to diagnose the problems that one particular user, K (a technical writer employed at my client's company), has been having with the training simulations that I built for her. She cannot get them to display reliably on her computer. I have fixed the problem once or twice, but it keeps coming back, each time for a different reason. Today I had a nice long chat with the IT person, and I discovered that K has a much longer history of computer problems than I realized. Her computer's hard drive periodically crashes or becomes corrupted. Her motherboard shorted out. Her power supply burned out. Her computer's memory spontaneously stops working (the computer won't even boot), then it starts working again. Her network profile becomes corrupted and won't work anymore, and it has to be recreated. (Now that's a new one to me - network profiles are immutable, incorruptible, and if one goes bad, many others do too. Not this poor lady - it's just hers which goes bad. And that's a trick, considering the profile is stored on a computer far away across the network.).

Now, K is not your run-of-the-mill "luser," a hopeless dunderhead who should not be allowed near a computer. She is bright, sunny, funny, very intelligent, and very capable. She's very skilled at using computers.

So, the problem must be with her computer? That would be my logical suspicion - if her current PC was not her third PC in a year. She's had a desktop, then a laptop, then a heavy-duty high-powered AutoCAD workstation, and after this latest one, she will be moving back to a standard desktop. And it's unlikely that it's a bad power circuit causing voltage fluctuations to her cube, and to her cube alone, which could kill her PC. Others in her department would suffer a similar fate, if it were a voltage problem in the building's power grid.

The IT person, J, is at her wits' end. But J thinks that it's not the hardware, and it's not anything that K is doing. It's simply K herself, radiating some kind of electronic field or aura that has an unnerving knack of hosing up computers.

What I don't know is, is K an NDE-er? I will need to find out. But I do know that K has been under a lot of emotional stress in the past year from her boss, who appears to lack good management skills, and blames K for most anything bad that happens in the department. Could K, in her state of emotional distress on the job, be manifesting some type of psychokinetic energy, similar to a poltergeist? Quite possibly. Many people have this ability (including certain Martians), though it is usually uncontrollable and unpredictable.

I was surprised to find the IT person, in the absence of any other explanation, suggesting to me that K's "field," whether through an NDE, emotional distress, or other causes, was disrupting her computer. Usually I would be the one suggesting that. It was a pleasant surprise.

Watch the total lunar eclipse tonight!

Starts at 9 PM EST. Visible throughout the Americas, except for the Pacific Northwest, where the clouds of pot smoke are too thick to see through.

Coming up...

Near death experiences and their deleterious effects on electronic equipment.

Bad syntax in the news media

I always enjoy poorly-worded headlines in newspapers or on websites. Or poorly-worded statements made by news anchors. Take this one, for example.

"Once-sharp decline in cancer death rates easing." The story on MSNBC.com this morning is about the uptick in cancer deaths, after a period of decline. Yet by using the word "easing," the headline implies that the decline in cancer deaths was a bad thing, and now that decline is "easing," or improving. How nice that more people are dying from cancer, says MSNBC!

Or the other week, on National Public Radio (which I usually avoid listening to because of their relentless liberal bias), the anchor began her story with "Many Americans, and some journalists, feel" [whatever the story was about, which in fact I quit listening at that point]. The way she phrased it implies that journalists are not Americans. (I would agree, many so-called American journalists hate America. So does NPR. It just happened to show in that particular statement.)

I find such syntax problems interesting. But when stuff like that interests me, it's clear that I don't have enough to do. ;-)

Another tyrant falls... or steps down

Hearing that communist dictator Fidel Castro retired in Cuba today after 49 years in power was no surprise, since he had effectively already done that in 2006 when he ceded control to his brother Raul. But still, it was a minor shock.

I remember when the Berlin wall came down in 1989. Now THAT was an amazing thing to watch. To see the entire Stasi (secret police) melt away in the night, to see the Brandenburg Gate swarming with people hugging and shouting with joy for the first time since 1961, was a beautiful sight.

I remember watching Nicolae Ceaucescu's execution in Romania, and feeling a sense of satisfaction, because the man was a murderous psycho. I had done a fair amount of research on Romania and other Eastern Bloc countries for my political science degree, so I had a good idea of the conditions in Romania and of the atrocities that Ceaucescu had ordered in his four decades of rule. When the citizens of Bucharest revolted in December 1989, and Nicolae's own army summarily tried and executed him and his horrid wife Elena, well, he got what was coming to him.

I doubt that we will have any such gratification with Fidel Castro, sadly.

Science fiction author Larry Niven coined an epithet, "tanj," as an acronym for "There Ain't No Justice."

In this case, tanj it, Castro gets off lightly, and undeservingly. But perhaps before I leave this planet, the people of Cuba will be truly free. They've certainly suffered long enough.

For people who hate cats, a lovable cat

This is one of the funniest, most charming cartoons I have ever seen.

"Feed the Kitty" (1952)

It's not a "dysfunction!"

In the past several years, many drugs have been released to market, to cure the horrible affliction that strikes so many men over 40.

Not prostate cancer.

Not ear hair.

"Erectile dysfunction."

The name itself is laughable. "Dysfunction." Like a 60-year-old man has a right to expect his dick to just leap to attention at the sight of a pretty woman. And when it doesn't, it's a "dysfunction," like something's wrong.

I would ask any man over 40, "Do you expect to play football like you did when you were 20? Do you expect to guzzle beer like you did when you were 20? Do you expect to function at work or at school on two hours of sleep like you did when you were 20?"

Any reasonable person's answer would be "no."

So why, all of a sudden, is it a "dysfunction" for a middle-aged-or-older man to have a limp dick? And why does it need to be treated, or "cured"?

It is not natural to expect things to work the way they worked when you were 20. I am personally grateful NOT to have a perpetual hard-on anymore, the way I did when I was 20. It was very distracting and irritating then. I'm amazed that I could ever get any work done, and I was quite studious, compared to many of my classmates. I can only imagine their handicap, their chaotic state of mind. I was quite fortunate to be as focused as I was, despite my impediment.

And please. When a drug bears a warning like "In the rare case an erection lasts for more than four hours, seek immediate medical attention," you really have to question why you would take such a drug in the first place. If it said "Stop using this drug if you experience explosive flatulence, uncontrollable sneezing or bleeding from the eyeballs," you would think twice or three times before using it. Likewise, if a drug could give you a permanent woodie (which really hurts, I imagine), you would have to be pretty desperate to use the drug in the first place.

But then, it circles back to the question of, why are old men trying to have sex the way they did when they were young men? Most older women I know seem to be happy to not have to deal with men their age trying to bed them - they had enough of that irritation when they were young. And now male erection drugs threaten to force these women to relive those experiences, 20 and 30 years later, being hounded by men with perpetual hard-ons. It was annoying enough the first time!

Drug companies are telling men that they must take a pill to regain their youthful vigor. I disagree. Men have no right to expect to maintain their youthful vigor. To market drugs like these is morally wrong. To take drugs like these is just plain stupid.

"Grow up!" I want to yell. "Focus on something else besides your penis!"

But that's just it... I think there is a whole segment of the male population which is totally focused on their penis, just as they were when they were young. They haven't grown up. They can't.

I think it's very sad. And I think it's sad that through using such drugs, such immature men have a better-than-zero chance of siring more children... who will most likely turn out just like the men are. Self-absorbed, penile-fixated babies.

There is a silver lining. They've already shown that such drugs can cause a user to go deaf. Maybe they will make him go blind, too! But I think the most poetic justice would be if they rendered the user sterile.

I would laugh and laugh. And laugh some more.

Harlan Ellison shoots straight

Harlan Ellison is one of the best science fiction writers ever. He wrote fantastic stories like "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart Of the World," "A Boy and His Dog," and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." He wrote the script for one of the best Star Trek Original Series episodes ever filmed, "The City on the Edge of Forever" (the one with Joan Collins as Edith Keeler). He served as a creative consultant on the tv series "Babylon 5."

The man is a genius.

And he takes a dim view of the Writer's Guild of America knuckling under to the studios and giving up on their strike. Read his article. He certainly has a way with words. I love it.

A real lawn for our house, now that we don't live there anymore

Our new sod (grass) in front of our rental house! Isn't it pretty! I think that really helped get the house sold. That, plus dropping the price by a painful amount. The stupid grass has to be watered an hour per day, every day, for two weeks, then an hour every other day for two more weeks.

We can't get the water pressure high enough to cover the whole yard with the sprinkler, just half of it. So we have to drive over there, put the sprinkler on one half of the yard, go home and wait an hour, come back, move the sprinkler, go back home and wait another hour, and come back and shut it off.

We have a water timer, but it doesn't work right. And it also doesn't move the sprinkler. We tried setting up a Y-splitter, but the water pressure can barely drive one hose; it can't drive two at all.

So it's been a week. One more week, then we can drop back to every other day.

And then hopefully we can close the contract on the house and it will be the new owner's problem. ;-)

Communication, or lack thereof

We went over to our friend Sue's house the other night to celebrate the fact that we are selling our rental house. Sue and her boyfriend Phil invited us and some other neighbors over for drinks.

Before we all got there, Phil decided he had to run an errand back to his home in a neighboring city 40 miles away. "Be right back," he said.

He didn't come back all night. We all proceeded to drink entirely too much ethanol, followed by pizza and more ethanol, before we called it a night at 8 PM and staggered home to bed. (We got started at 4. And we're not night-owls anyway.) Phil didn't show up until the next afternoon. Never called, never apologized. Sue just shrugged as we ate the pizza that had been reserved for him.

I don't understand how some people communicate, or don't communicate. It didn't seem to bother Sue that Phil disappeared without explaining that he wouldn't be back for dinner, but if I pulled that kind of crap with my darling wife, I would have been in deep doo-doo. But even if you're just dating, common courtesy, not to mention caring for your new significant other, would dictate that you call her and tell her what your ETA is, even if it's not until tomorrow.

I just don't understand. But then, I got to eat Phil's share of the pizza, so I was happy.

Minor home improvements

My darling wife hates fluorescent lights. And that's what we had in the kitchen soffit, above the cabinets. So we decided to take the soffit out, so we can have space above the cabinets to put flamingo knickknacks, and to put up rope-lighting, which provides a much softer, more soothing, reflected glow off the ceiling.


It turned out to be more work than we thought. Nothing's ever as simple as you think it will be. That's why I never initiate projects, because they always seem to turn into a much more complicated clusterf*ck then you ever imagined. But my wife wanted to change the kitchen lighting, and we work well as a team, so we tackled it ourselves. And regretted it immediately. ;-)

Most soffits we have seen are just 2"x4" boards forming a box-like frame, covered with drywall. The people who built this house, however, built the stupid soffit to withstand a nuclear blast, making it out of not one, not two, but THREE layers of 2"x12"x10' boards. You could build Noah's Ark with this stuff.

It took two solid weekends to cut it out, piece by painstaking piece, using a demolition blade on my reciprocating saw, plus a jigsaw with a short blade so I could cut the boards without slicing up the wall to which the boards were nailed, or the electrical wiring that lurks inside the wall. The whole house is covered in sawdust. It even got inside the refrigerator, somehow.

But now we've cut it all out. We filled all of our garbage bins with the scraps. The big board pieces, we gave to our friend Bob to burn in his fireplace, since they are not treated lumber.

Next week, Bob will teach us how to put up drywall. We have to get this project done by April, before my family shows up for my dad's 80th birthday. It won't do to have the rafters showing.

It's odd to have neighbors who are also friends

Growing up, my parents had neighbors who were friendly, but as far as I remember, we never did anything with them. No dinners together, no picnics, no events. And there were no children my age in the neighborhood, so not much interaction for me either.

Living on my own, in an apartment building, I knew people in the building, but seldom did things with them. Only one or two of them were friends or acquaintances...one became a roommate, which lasted a year and then ended acrimoniously, as most roommate situations do (from what I have observed). But that roommate served her purpose, in helping me pay for my new house (renting from me), and also introducing me to my wife-to-be (which sparked raging jealousy in my roommate, which caught me completely by surprise... I had had no idea that she had designs on me. I am woefully unaware sometimes.)

So, I am not used to being particularly friendly with neighbors. But we are very fortunate to have moved into a neighborhood that is friendly, gregarious, and very welcoming, despite my Martian reticence. And so we have fallen into a habit of doing yardwork together with our neighbors, of having dinners together, of spending time together.

Although it feels very strange to me, it is also very nice.

Buy my #%@*ing house, part 2

The power of prayer is undeniable. Nor is the power of an appropriate home price. We now have a contract on the house, by a nice Englishman who lives in Markham, Ontario. He wants to close as soon as possible. Oddly enough, so do we. I will be quite relieved when it's over, because I am sick unto death of this extra house. One is enough. I do not need two, or three, as I have had in the past. One will keep things simple.

Buy my #%@*ing house!

Our rental house has been on the market now since September, five months. It drew almost no interest at all for months. It got to the point where I wanted to stand out in the street with a gun, flagging down motorists and ordering them to buy my house.

We got tired of waiting and dropped the price $20,000 last week. Now people are crawling all over it like flies. It's disappointing, but it proved what we already knew - your house can be beautiful, or it can be a shithole, and it doesn't really matter except for the price. If the price is right, it will sell. If the price is too high, it will NOT sell, no matter how #@*&ing nice it is.

No Hablo Ingles, part dos

Human Resources hath decreed: Training materials shall NOT be translated into languages other than English, for fear that if one group demands materials in their native language, another group will demand the same. It is a slippery slope, one which the company need not even set one foot upon. This will disappoint some of the Spanish-speaking users, but apparently there's an even larger, heretofore-silent group of Laotians. And then there's the Dutch.

I think it's a wise move to avoid translation. It's only asking for trouble. Next thing you know, it'll be just like Canada, where everything must be provided in English AND French, and nobody's happy. ;-)

Vanity cards

I learned a new term about television today. It's called a "vanity card," that little image that pops up at the end of a show.

Chuck Lorre, the producer of hit shows like "Dharma and Greg," "Two And A Half Men," and "The Big Bang Theory," does lots of these vanity cards. They always show up right at the end of the show, for about one second.

You have to freeze the DVR or the tape right on the frame to read it. And it's usually hilarious.

It turns out that Chuck's website has all of his vanity cards listed on it. They're little essays about his life and his opinions about things. Sort of a mini-blog. Check 'em out.

Other neat vanity cards:

(From "House") - "That's some bad hat, Harry!" - this line is taken from Jaws (1974) when Roy Scheider compliments a swimmer on his hat.


(From "Family Ties" and "Spin City") - "Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog." "Woof." Ubu was a black Labrador retriever owned by the producer.


(from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and other Joss Whedon productions) "Grrr. Arrgh." says the zombie as it lurches across the screen.


(from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Hill Street Blues," "St. Elsewhere," "The White Shadow," "Bob Newhart," "Remington Steele," and dozens of other shows.) "Meow," says the Mimsie the cat. This is a parody of the MGM Studio's lion logo.


(from "The X-Files") - "I made this!" a small boy's voice proudly declares.

Interesting. "Vanity card." I had no idea.

Love will keep us together

Paul McCartney may have been a hit machine in the 1960s and 1970s, but so were the Captain and Tennille. This is one of my favorite tunes from the 1970s. I like the counterpoint between the bass line and the melody. Very bouncy and catchy. In this video, they are lip-synching to the actual album track on some TV show, but that's just fine - many bands suck when they play live.

Death to fire ants

As we worked to lay sod this past weekend, both of us sustained several bites and stings on our arms and hands from ants nesting in the sod. Some may have been fire ants (red ants), but most of them were black ants.

When ants sting, they inject an alkaloid venom which causes a red swelling area, which then turns into a pustule which can ooze pus. As mine are.

They are quite annoying. I need to take some antihistamines to reduce this reaction. Meanwhile it is making me cranky.

I will be shutting down email subscriptions

To the legions of readers who get this blog via email:

I will be shutting down the email feed this week, because I would rather people access it from the web than flooding their mail inboxes with junk. ;-)

Instead, I urge you to sign up for (or download) a news reader, such as Google Reader (http://www.reader.google.com). You can add this blog's address (http://www.peanutbutterandpickles.blogspot.com) to your reader subscription (click Add Subscription and follow the directions there), and then you will be able to see updates that way, as well as updates to any other favorite blogs that you add there.

Thanks for subscribing! Drink up...last call, gentlepeople.

A hard weekend, and now I'm sick

We worked like dogs all weekend. We:

• Laid 1000 sq ft of Bahia grass sod at our rental house
• Cleaned up the rental house for an open house on Sunday
• Cut down 2 dead palm trees
• Discovered that using chainsaw blade oil really speeds up cutting, especially for palm trees, which are very hard, fibrous things
• Sawed the palm trees into 4-foot sections to use as "pilings" in front of our house, to tie our rowboat up
• Laid another 1000 sq ft of Saint Augustine grass sod at our next-door-neighbor's house, because he always helps us with whatever project we're doing
• Got the pipe culvert put in in front of our house, so that our ditch is GONE! Yay!
  
• Shoveled about a ton of sand ten feet to the right, because the workman who put in the culvert put a berm in our yard as we asked, but he put it in the wrong place
• Cleaned various firearms
• Partied at our neighbor's house and watched our neighbors get completely smashed (we don't drink much, if at all - ethanol doesn't agree with Martian blood chemistry)
• Had our nephew Andy and his girlfriend Tara over to spend the night - they celebrated their three-month anniversary, which for 20-somethings is a big deal I suppose

It was a difficult weekend full of manual labor, and now we are both sick with colds which I probably brought back from Chicago. Sigh.

Ear candy from 1995

Janet Jackson, "Runaway."

Isn't it strange - she sings off-key and actually makes fun of herself! Instead of pitch-shifting to correct the error, like every other mass-marketed singer does. (No, quite a lot of them CANNOT sing; I know it's shocking.)

In this song, Janet's voice sounds amazingly like Michael's. If you close your eyes, you might have a hard time telling whose voice it really is.

Favorite tunes that I don't own

I bet you have favorite tunes that you never bothered to buy. I do too. These are two of them by The Human League. I turn them up whenever I hear them on the radio, but I have never bought the albums, and I have never seen the videos until now. I find the videos vaguely disturbing. I think it's the androgyny of the men, and the strange '80s makeup. I was there, but I don't remember makeup like that. Perhaps it's a British thing.

And please, put some of the makeup budget toward dentistry! (Shudder.) Or don't do closeups of mouths in music videos. (Bad teeth - the perennial curse of the British. Sometimes living on an island can have deleterious effects on a gene pool.)

Knowing that you're building Frankenstein's monster, and not being able to do anything about it

One of my clients is making the software that does license-plate recognition for vehicles. Originally it was designed for toll roads, so a driver could speed through the gate, the camera would recognize their plate, and would charge the toll to the driver's account accordingly without ever having the driver stop, or making the driver use a transponder mounted in the windshield. Ontario uses this technology on the 407 Express Toll Road outside Toronto. It's very effective. I tried to drive fast, to swerve, to smear my plates with mud. It billed me anyway. Sigh.

Anyway. Now license-plate recognition technology is being built into traffic cameras. It's being built into police car lightbars (the flashers on top). It's beginning to be used in a constant-surveillance mode, where a policeman simply drives down the road, and the cameras mounted in the lightbar on top of the car watch all the cars around him, and recognize the license plates, and automatically check the plates for outstanding warrants. If the car's computer finds a plate nearby that is wanted for a crime, it alerts the policeman and directs him to make the arrest. All automatically.

Even scarier, license-plate recognition is now being combined with artificial intelligence programs to watch your license plate on traffic cameras and police car cameras, and to take note of your movement patterns, including paths, destinations, and the time of day that you do things. All of this information is silently filed away, awaiting the day when it's needed. If you suddenly become wanted in connection with a crime, the police will use this information to predict with reasonable accuracy where you are at any given moment, send cars to that location, and simply wait for you to show up. Today, GPS signals from your phone help the police home in on you. The smart person simply turns off the GPS. But these new programs for license-plate recognition, and for facial recognition, coupled with artificial intelligence-styled databases, render actual tracking unnecessary. They pretty much know what you'll do, based on predictive models of human behavior, and based on your past movements and associations. And with phone company records, these predictive models also know who you will call if you are ever wanted in connection with a crime, based on your past calling activity.

I heard this from a person who works for my client. He expressed concern that he knows his company is building the equivalent of Skynet, the artificial intelligence that nearly destroys mankind in "The Terminator" movies, and that he can't really do anything about it. Already they are approaching mind-boggling complexities and horsepower in databases, nearing the complexity of the human brain.

It's not going to be long before one of these databases "wakes up," he said. And at that point, our problems will be just beginning.

No hablo Ingles

I enjoy meeting all kinds of people in my job. Educated, uneducated, rich, poor, life-of-the-party, social misfits, mad-at-the-world, happy-go-lucky... I meet them all. They are all my students, and I always learn something from them, even as I'm teaching them. That's what keeps it interesting for me, is learning from them. Sometimes I lose track of what I was saying, as I wander from topic to topic (always sticking generally to the lesson plan, of course), but a question from them always brings me back on track.

Recently I taught a group of warehouse men, "material handlers." Most were Mexican, but a few were Laotian or Vietnamese, and one was a nice man from Eritrea who spoke six languages and could read none of them.

In fact, quite a number of my students in that group could not read English.

Now, one of my goals is eventually to learn Spanish. I took German and Japanese in college, which helps me understand the dialogue in great movies like "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "A Bridge Too Far." But it's not especially useful in everyday life in America. Spanish would be much more useful. And of course, I don't speak or read Spanish.

But this is about my students, not about me.

I was quite surprised at my students' inability to read English. How do they read Danger signs and safety markings in the warehouse? How can they read the pick lists? Or the putaway sheets? How do they not get squashed by a forklift? (Apparently that IS a problem... the last recordable injury was two weeks ago. Their goal is to go 90 days without a recordable. Compare that to refineries where I've worked, where they don't have a recordable for years at a time. Of course, a recordable injury at a refinery is sometimes associated with blowing up the whole refinery, as well as any nearby towns. So refineries are especially motivated to be safety conscious.)

I would think that the language issue is also a safety issue, not to mention a quality-control issue.

"They know enough English to fill out the employment application and pass the employment test," said the general manager. "But you can see why we have such trouble shipping the right stuff to customers, and finding stuff in the warehouse."

Well, DUH, I thought. If you know it's a problem, why haven't you rectified it yet? Either hire people who can speak and read English, or train the ones you have to do so.

But anyway. The fact that they can't read English (some of them could barely speak it) means that they cannot use the training materials, which are vitally important since the plan is for a lot of the training to be self-paced, as in, "read it on your own."

Hmmm. Now we need to do some translation.

At least there's time to do it before go-live.

Why General Motors' market share is slipping

Because they make completely uninspired crap like the Chevy Cobalt.

I have a Chevy Cobalt rental car this week. It's a coupe, painted safety yellow. I picked the color so I could find it in the snow. I'm glad I did. But I'm wishing that I had taken a Kia Rio instead. Even a shit-brown Kia Rio would be better.

Don't get me wrong. For $14k per Cobalt, you get a vehicle that is perfectly serviceable. But after driving it in the snow, I have to say that the Cobalt is pretty lame compared to almost any equivalent Asian model, such as ones from Honda, Toyota, Suzuki, Kia, Hyundai and even Daewoo. Lame. Even the "lets-pretend-I'm-sporty-but-really-I'm-just-a-remodeled-Escort" Ford Focus is better, and I'm not a fan of the Focus (having driven them way too much for my taste - Ford trucks are terrific, but their small cars frankly suck).

Small GM vehicles all share the same problem of having fairly touchy throttles. I've never been sure why that is. But in snow, this can get you killed. On the Cobalt, there's no traction control, and therefore there's virtually no way to prevent the wheels from spinning, no matter how lightly you touch the gas pedal. Several times on the way home tonight, I found myself unable to get moving again from a stop sign, just because the wheels would start spinning at the slightest touch of the gas. So I just sat there at the intersection with traffic piling up behind me, and I flailed snow in graceful arcs while trying not to slide sideways into the curb, or into another car.

Very annoying.

And I would like very much to meet the engineer who designed the windshield wiper return motion, introduce myself, and then take a heavy binder and smack him in the head with it. The windshield wipers, particularly on the right side, swing through their arc and return to the resting position with a very loud thump. A ridiculously-loud thump. It sounds like someone's bouncing a basketball on the hood, it's so loud. And I have made sure that the snow and ice is cleared from the vent area at the base of the windshield, so that the wipers are unimpeded when they return to the resting position, so it's not like they're hanging up on a ledge of ice, trying to push through it.

So I'm driving down the road in the snow, trying to avoid stepping on the gas and sending the car into an uncontrollable spin (difficult to do in a front-wheel-drive vehicle, but if it's possible, the Cobalt will find a way to do it), and I have to turn the radio up reeeeeally loud just to be able to hear it over the relentless thump thump thump of the windshield wipers.

Extremely annoying.

By comparison, the Kia Rio is a gem to drive. I always prefer a Toyota or a Hyundai, but Kias are very nice. I'm surprised... I always thought Kias were just cheap econoboxes. But they have design and quality down to a science. GM should take notes.

Next week.... anything BUT a Cobalt.

Not gonna watch

Nope, uh-uh, nope nope nope nope, not gonna watch the voting results from Stupor Tuesday; nope, nope, nope.

Poetry in motion

Last weekend, one of the last nine Boeing B-17 bombers in the world which can still fly, came to our neck of the jungle.

This is a B-17G, number 44-83575, painted in the insignia of the 42-31909, which was a B-17G called the "Nine-Oh-Nine," for its last three digits of its serial number. The real 909 belonged to the 91st Bomb Group, 323rd Bomb Squadron, and flew a record-breaking 140 missions in the Eighth Air Force over Germany without a loss of a single crewman, and without a single aborted mission. Number 44-83575 was built in 1945 and was delivered too late to see combat, which is why it's in such good shape as to be still flying.

Instead, number 44-83575 was used as a nuclear bomb target, sold as scrap, reborn as a forest-fire bomber, and then sold to the Collings Foundation as a living, breathing monument to American air power in World War Two.










You could pay $10 to cross a rope and get up close to it, or $500 to take a half-hour ride in it.

I didn't have $10 on me, so I just stood behind the rope and took pictures for free. I've been around this one and others like it before, up close and personal at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where they all get together every year and fly around and make lots of noise. At WPAFB, I got to stand right on the taxiway and watch them start their engines and taxi past, only a few feet away. To have the wing of one of these monsters pass over you, and to hear those four big radial engines roaring, and to watch the propellers stirring up a storm of dust and grit as they prepare to heave the plane into the air, is truly a beautiful sight to behold.

These radial engines have a peculiar rumble that is unique. To hear four of them going at once is amazing. You can hear them miles away, purring lazily like a big contented lion. Imagine thousands of these B-17s darkening the skies in Europe. The noise must have been tremendous.

But I just took these pictures to show you. I think the B-17 is one of the most graceful aircraft ever built. Watch "The Memphis Belle" movie to see what the air war in a B-17 was really like.

A bizarre malfunction

I took one of my toys out of the safe yesterday for the first time in three or four years.

(Note: This is similar to my toy, but not identical. I don't have an M203 40 millimeter grenade launcher on mine (the thick tube on the bottom of the barrel). Though I would dearly love to have one. Especially useful in traffic. Also, mine has a honking big telescope on top.)

I burned about 150 rounds downrange and did pretty well.

After a few sighting-in shots, the rest all went through the ragged hole in the center.

But then the rifle started jamming on me.

On the left is a normal 5.56mm cartridge. On the right is a f*cked-up cartridge. During extraction of the fired case, the case separated, with the upper neck sticking in the chamber of the rifle. Then the bolt attempted to load another cartridge into the chamber, ramming it into the previous case fragment like a sleeve. The bolt would jam half-closed, and I had to pound it back open with a hammer and a metal dowel.

Very annoying.

Luckily the extractor had a good grip on the second cartridge casing, and each time, it pulled out the cartridge and the separated casing from the prior cartridge. I was very lucky, because extracting stuck casings from a rifle chamber is a royal pain in the butt.

My best friend Bill says that this is a clear case of operator error. As in, yours truly did not keep his weapon clean enough. This kind of failure is indicative of dirt. At least, in competition-grade AR-15s like mine.

Annoying, all the same.

A blizzard

It is blizzarding quite heavily in the barren cornfields of Illinois. In my infinite wisdom, I brought only a heavy hoodie, not my Canadian parka. But I made it to my hotel, and now the snow swirls outside, spreading a soft, muffled cloak over everything, several inches deep.

It's beautiful. But it makes me very glad that I live in the jungle.

When "No" means "No"

I am told that Oprah recently had a guest on, who talked about the relationships between men and women. (Oooh, THAT'S a first on Oprah, I'm sure.)

This man talked about how when a man says "no" to a woman, it means no, and that's the end of the discussion.

But when a woman says "no" to a man, it's the beginning of a negotiation.

And that the man says "no" without fear, but a woman is always afraid that the man will kill her, and so eventually her "no" becomes "yes."

It seems strange to me. I think it's a bit extreme to think that every woman is afraid that a man will kill her. But then, in a better world, every woman would defend herself with lethal force, and men would not contemplate violence against women.

But I thought about what this man said, and it made me angry.

I was taught that people say what they mean. So when a woman said "no" to me in the past (usually when I asked her out), I took it to mean "no," and I did not ask again.

But I remember, upon reflection, watching many boys in high school and in college, who asked a girl out, and she said "no," and instead of accepting the answer, the boy began harassing her. Always smiling, hanging around, showering her with affection, asking over and over again, and never accepting "no." Finally the girl would say "yes," out of sheer exasperation. And the boy would get what he wanted. Sometimes the girl would even have sex with the boy, because he would not leave her alone until he got what he wanted.

I had forgotten about this until this topic from Oprah reminded me. It makes me angry that refusing to accept "no" as an answer from a girl seemed to work for many boys. I was penalized for playing by the rules, accepting "no" at face value.

But then, I also avoided all sorts of venereal diseases this way. And I am still alive to this day, disease-free.

That's important to a Martian.