Be kind when someone screws up...

For my father's 1200th birthday, we had S, a professional photographer, take group photos of our family on the beach. S was very good . . . she had an engaging manner, she told us what to do and how to do it, and she was very energetic. She's also a ballroom dancer, moving with a dancer's grace as she maneuvered herself and her equipment into different positions to capture her subjects.

We ordered a package of photos, and so did most of our family subgroups.

They received their photos. We didn't.

I called her up and left her a voicemail. She returned the call a few days later, and apologized, and said she'd sent our photos out a few days before.

A week went by and no photos arrived. I was starting to get annoyed because it was rather a lot of money, and we had nothing to show for it. So I called her again and left another voicemail.

She called me back, very contrite. "I checked my records, and I see that I never sent your package at all. I'm so very sorry. I'll make your package a priority today."

"That's fine," I said. "I can see from your website that you've been very busy with other clients, so business is good. Is everything going okay?"

"Well," she said, "I've been not quite 'with it' lately, because my husband walked out on me two weeks ago."

Ooops. My fault - I did ask. "I'm so sorry," I said, putting as much empathy as I could into my voice. "How long had you been married?"

"Twenty-two years," S said.

I commiserated with S, telling her that I hoped she would be okay, going through this difficult time. I asked if she had children (yes, two teenagers) and how they were taking it (pretty well, she said). We talked a little more, and I tried to be reassuring and empathetic. Hopefully it helped, I thought as we hung up.

I was glad that I didn't get snippy with S when I left her voicemails. I always try to be kind and courteous to people who make mistakes, because you really have no idea what trials and tribulations they're enduring. I was especially glad in this instance. Twenty-two years is a long time to invest, only to have it shattered without warning.

I hope S will be okay. My photos are suddenly less important, in the grand scheme of things.

Signs of the times

Big electronic signs over the highways in major cities often tell you about traffic conditions, like how long it will take to get to a major interchange, or to drive slowly in snow. In Denver, when they were putting one up near my house, they attached it with four bolts and then left for the evening, intending to return in the morning and finish the job. It fell onto the road a few hours later. I don't think anyone was injured, but that was a costly screwup, at taxpayers' expense.

But I like their honesty in Minnesota, describing the reason for the traffic jam:

(I thought of Corrina and Fashion Paramedic and Lara and the other readers who recently expressed similar sentiments about cellphones. I had to laugh.)

Found a turtle, found a turtle, found a turtle in the road...

"Stop the car!" yelled my wife. Usually she says this as we're passing a garage sale, or a particularly intriguing pile of junk.

This time, it was because a large freshwater turtle was sitting in the middle of the road.

(photo courtesy of Empire of the Turtle - I didn't have my camera with me.)

It was a Florida redbelly cooter (pseudemys nelsoni) I think, from the facial stripes. He was sitting in the middle of the road, with his neck stretched up as far as it would go, sniffing the air. He was trying to find water. He was a block away from the nearest pond; that's a long way to walk on two-inch legs.

He had been out there for awhile, we think. The moss on his back was all dry and crusty, and he seemed dry and shriveled. We knew that if we left him there for even another minute, he might get run over by a car. The old people here blithely drive over anything in their path, including sidewalks, stop signs, pedestrians, motorcyclists, and other cars. A turtle wouldn't even make them hesitate in the slightest.

So my wife got out of the car, carefully picked him up, and carried him down the block to the nearest retention pond. It was fenced in, so she slid him under the fence.

He stretched up his neck, sniffed the air, and practically scampered headlong toward the water, pausing only to do a clumsy forward somersault over a low retaining wall. He landed on his back, stretched out his head and levered himself upright again, and charged into the water.

We were relieved.

We went back yesterday to check on him. There he was, cruising around in the pond like a little battleship, happy as can be.

We were pleased. This almost makes up for my unfortunate accident with a chainsaw two weeks ago, which resulted in the untimely death of a corn snake. (Never mind the details... I felt badly, because I try never to injure or kill animals. I've even stopped fishing, for that reason - I hate hurting the little guys. The last ladyfish I caught from the beach pooped all over me as I struggled to get the hook out of his lip - he was so scared, and suffocating while I fumbled with the hook. It's not right for me to hurt them and scare them for my own catch-and-release amusement. But that's my personal choice. If I was going to eat them, I'd have no problem with it. But I'm not, so I won't.)

Google doesn't support the troops

I find Google's oddball logo changes to be annoying. Not the logos themselves, but the dates that they choose to have a special logo. Or not, as the case may be.

05/29/08 (today), Anniversary of first ascent of Mount Everest

05/18/08, 125th birthday of Walter Gropius, German architect who founded the boring and sterile Bauhaus movement in architecture

05/16/08, Anniversary of the invention of the laser (I like this one)


04/22/08, Earth Day (not coincidentally, also the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, one of the founders of the Soviet Union)



02/29/08, Leap Year

01/28/08, 50th anniversary of the Lego brick

But where was the Google logo for Memorial Day (May 26th, this year)? Nowhere. Just the plain old Google logo.


I realize that Google's staff is overwhelmingly liberal, and that their donations to political causes also skew that way. Liberals also complain that they don't like to be stereotyped as "not supporting the troops" or being "unpatriotic."

I think if Google doesn't want to earn a stereotype of being unpatriotic, they had better take a few seconds next year to scribble out some sort of logo honoring Memorial Day. They have a whole staff of graphic designers. Let an intern do it. Let a Google user do it for free.

A contest was held to do Google's job for them, and they came up with some very nice logos.

Heck, even Yahoo understands that you need to show some respect.



Others are also questioning Google's poor judgment.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-doesnt-google-honor-memorial-day-in-the-us/6967/
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017225.html
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2008/05/googles-treatment-of-memorial-day-is.php

In years past, Google has offered the following bullshit excuse:
We understand your interest in seeing a Memorial Day Google logo. If we were to commemorate this holiday, we'd want to express reverence; however, as Google's special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design.
We wouldn't want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

We have a long list of holidays that we'd like to celebrate in the future. We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage. We really appreciate your feedback regarding the Google logo, and please be assured that we're actively pursuing ways in which we can acknowledge Memorial Day and other such occasions in the future.

Regards,
The Google Team

I think that's a load of crap. And I think that it's pretty clear that Google is unpatriotic, and doesn't believe in the very country that gave Google its life. It's unfortunate.

And if this blog is suddenly deleted in the next few days, we'll know that Google's liberal views don't extend to criticism of its policies. ;-)

A related tune

This Norwegian duo, Royksopp (I'm not spelling it right without the umlaut, I know) has worked with The Kings of Convenience, and has a similar sound. Royksopp, Kings of Convenience, and other bands were part of an underground music scene in the Norwegian city of Bergen in the late 1990s/early 2000s. The Norwegian press called them "The Bergen Wave," because these bands had the unusual luck of international success beyond the borders of Norway.

This song was used in the Geico commercial, number 4 in the Geico Caveman series.

Royksopp, "Remind Me" (original version - a bit techno but VERY cool video)


Royksopp, "Remind Me" (Geico version, much more relaxing and sweet, starring a very sexy black Lamborghini)

Thoughtful beats for rainy days

This tune from a Norwegian duo evokes rain and memories, nostalgia on a cool gray spring afternoon.

The Kings of Convenience, "I Don't Know What I can Save You From"

A forcible realignment of priorities

Every time I drive down our main street, I see car dealer after car dealer, awash in used trucks. They are displayed prominently, desperately, in the hopes that some poor sap will buy them.

Some dealers have even stopped taking used trucks at all. They post "No Trucks for Trade-In" signs next to their driveways. Don't even stop here, they are saying, if you're looking to trade in your big gas-guzzling behemoth for a smaller car. We can't sell them, so we won't buy them from you.

I have to laugh. Some of these trucks are heavily customized, with quadruple shocks on each wheel, 35-inch lift kits, chrome exhausts, window louvers, racing chips, all sorts of silly stuff that begs one to wonder just what inadequacies the owner was overcompensating for. One used-truck classified ad in our paper says, "Over $100,000 in custom modifications!" on a $40,000 truck. Now there was a guy whose priorities were seriously out of whack. Or a guy who was seriously inadequate. Probably the latter.

There's nothing like four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline (or nearly five-dollar-a-gallon diesel) prices to help realign peoples' priorities.

I almost fell over at the pump yesterday, filling up my little Honda CR-V. Fifty dollars for a twelve-gallon tank. But you know what? I'm okay with it. Because nothing's going to change people's car-buying patterns or driving habits, or car manufacturers' skewed outputs of inefficient vehicles, except pain. A lot of it.

Meanwhile, these gaudy steel dinosaurs are slowly rusting in the Florida sun, monuments to the excesses and poor planning of their former owners. Reminders of a time when there wasn't nearly enough pain to help people make better decisions. Icons of inadequacy. ;-)

Flotsam of history

My darling wife was walking on the beach last week, and found an empty cartridge casing. It was a .30 Carbine casing, very corroded and worn. The .30 Carbine was a light battle rifle made from about 1942 through the 1960s. It was designed to be a replacement for the .45 ACP pistol, whose heavy recoil made it difficult for novice draftees to shoot. It never did replace the pistol, however. It was issued mainly to second-line and rear-area troops, though some front-line troops liked it because it was light and easy to shoot. Its penetrating power was poor, however, since it was mainly a pistol cartridge being fired from a rifle (which is what "carbine" means).




Every military cartridge casing has a headstamp on it, which indicates its maker and the year of manufacture. This one said "P C 43." That means Petersen Cartridge Company, 1943.

Someone back in World War Two, perhaps a guard at the nearby B-24 bomber base (which is now our municipal airport), engaged in some target practice on the beach. Sixty-three years later, my wife found evidence of that day. It's fascinating to me.

We've found other interesting things on the beach: cameras, cellphones, snorkeling equipment, various pieces of clothing and bed linens, lawn chairs and so on.

I keep hoping for a twin 40mm Bofors automatic cannon to wash up on the beach, complete in its shipping crate, packed in cosmoline-soaked canvas.


I am an eternal optimist, I know.

Leave my stuff ALONE!

I got a frantic call from one of my clients, MB, yesterday evening. (She knows I'm off the clock this week for her project, so she hesitated to call me. I reassured her that it was no problem, that I'm happy to hear from her.)

The training tracking server had been down since Friday, and people had been taking their electronic simulation training all weekend . . . to no avail, since the tracking server was not paying attention to anything they were doing.

The students were pissed. And management was not happy, especially since the entire organization is under pressure to complete their training before the thrice-delayed system go-live date arrives on Monday, June 2nd. There's money riding on this training; the student body (500 people) is divided into five teams, each of whom are competing for a cash prize of $150 per person to complete the training first as a group, with the highest collective average scores. So it's imperative that the server track the students' activity accurately and continuously. The students' confidence in the server is already diminished from several outages that we suffered in March and April. This latest one is just the icing on the cake.

I logged into the training server. It acted like I had never been there before; setting up a new profile, adding new icons for me.

I looked for the folder of linked documents that I placed there, for the students to access for their training. It had been moved into a new folder called "_Junk."

I tested the tracking server, running a few simulations, looking for my name to pop up, showing activity. Nothing.

I told MB that clearly someone who had admin access to this server had gone in and mucked it up. And since she had been on vacation, and I was temporarily off the project, we knew it wasn't us. So it had to be B (the IT server administrator), or someone down in the computer center who actually has access to the physical server. There is a very short list of people who could have done this.

It wasn't B, we discovered late last night. It WAS someone in the computer center, who was testing out a new backup scheduling program. And that someone had damaged our server, playing with it.

B worked all yesterday trying to fix the server, and has been unable to do so. Something else was damaged, something that we cannot find, something that normally allows the tracking server to monitor and grade the students' activity. But not anymore.

I wish to all the powers-that-be, that people would mind their own fucking business and just leave my stuff alone. I expressed that sentiment to B, who agreed that someone should be fired for this. He was not optimistic, though.

B hopes that he can restore the server to a previous backup image, which was taken early last week. Hopefully that will fix it. If nothing else, he can restore the server to its previous settings, and I will republish the entire training curriculum. (Not a big deal - just time-consuming.)

I am soooo glad that I was not onsite this week. And I am soooo glad to be a consultant. Because if I had to put up with this kind of inane bullshit on a regular basis, and be unable to do anything about it, I would surely go mad.

The appeal of "Lost"

... is apparently lost on me. I watched the first episode, where their jet plane crashed on the beach of the island (the series is shot on Oahu, in Hawaii). I found the characters unappealing and the situation annoying from the outset. My favorite part of the first episode was where one hapless survivor was sucked into a still-running jet engine. I secretly wished that the rest of them would be sucked in also. (Never mind that it's extremely unlikely that ANYONE would survive a crash on water or on a beach, and that a jet engine would survive the impact to be running hours later.)

But my darling "daughter" Becky has made it her mission to watch all of "Lost." So she spent a lot of her vacation with us watching old episodes online, on my wife's computer. I smiled to myself - I was the same way about "Babylon 5."

She tried to explain why she liked "Lost," but couldn't really find the words.

"I would have watched 'Lost' if it had had more cannibalism," I said, with a smile.

She rolled her eyes and went back to the computer.

Relying on a brain the size of a pea

Recently Yosuke the African Grey parrot got loose in the Tokyo suburb of Nagareyama. Police retrieved him and handed him over to a veterinarian, because no one knew to whom the parrot belonged. A few days later, after the parrot became comfortable with the vet, the parrot began telling the vet his name and address. "I am Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," he said, and told the vet his street address. And sure enough, there was a Nakamura family living there.

And there was much rejoicing.

Now, I have to ask - instead of relying on the whims of the avian brain to help get your lost pet home, wouldn't it be simpler just to band the bird? (Put a metal or plastic band on the bird's leg, with the owner's information.) Or "chip" it (put an RF ID tag in the bird's skin)?

I'm just asking.

PS - the idea of a parrot speaking Japanese makes me laugh.

Rooting for Danica

I haven't watched the Indianapolis 500 race in toto for decades. I used to loooove racing, but like any sport, I just can't muster up enough enthusiasm to really care. I won't watch today, either, but I hope Danica Patrick wins. I know she won't, and all the news stories are just media hype to boost declining viewership, but I think it's great that a woman is competing. If anything, she may dispel the myth that women are bad drivers. ;-)

Basket building

I remember this building, shown at

http://travel.msn.com//Guides/
MSNTravelSlideShow.aspx?cp-documentid=498870&imageindex=7

because I used to live in Ohio. I had forgotten all about it until I saw it on MSN as I logged into my webmail. My darling wife's best friend sells baskets made by this company, sort of like an Avon lady. Those baskets are super-expensive. My wife has successfully fended off sales pitches from her friend for perhaps 20 years now. ;-)

A clear glimpse of the future

I am tired of posting blurry pictures. My Kodak V570 does okay, but it's really just a party camera; stylish, like a derringer, but useless beyond fifteen feet.

I hope to acquire heavier artillery in the near future

The Panasonic Lumix FZ18. I am tired of missing great wildlife shots with the Kodak. And the other day, we were buzzed by two Ospreys - not the run-of-the-mill sea eagle, but two Navy V-22 Ospreys, the tilt-rotor aircraft that the Pentagon and Congress have been fighting over for decades. I didn't realize they were actually in active deployment. I would have LOVED to have gotten a shot of them.

Maybe soon.

Flowers for Algernon

"Flowers for Algernon" (Daniel Keyes, 1959) was one of those irritating books they make you read in school. I didn't enjoy it much, mainly because the ending was a downer. Life has enough sadness in it already. I enjoy books and movies that have happy endings, or at least which have a positive point to make. What was "Algernon"'s point?

• Don't bother even trying?
• You can never go home again?
• If you so smart, why ain't you rich?
• Charlie should have volunteered for the CIA's MK-ULTRA program instead?

I have no idea. I enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut much more, like "Sirens of Titan," or "Player Piano," or "Breakfast of Champions". Even though Kurt's a downer too sometimes, his zany sense of humor tickles me. He is thoughtful, if a bit cracked.

But I have some pictures, and I know GT281 looooves flowers, so these are for him.


This is the annual hibiscus flower show. It's only up for a half a day, because the flowers die quickly after they're clipped and mounted. People spend their whole year, and thousands of dollars, and large portions of their yards, cultivating hibiscuses (hibiscae?) just for this afternoon.

As The Who says, "Hope I die before I get old." And start cultivating hibiscuses.








This one has an interesting shape.


"Would you say we have a plethora" of hibiscae? ("The Three Amigos")




Sunlight gives it a nice sharp contrast.




One of the winners. To me, the winners look exactly like all the ones which didn't win. I think the judges just make it up as they go.

Beach stuff

These holes in the sand indicate that sand fleas or coquinas are down there.




A sea squirt (a tentacle-less sort of jellyfish).

I feel better now

The famous Rhythm & Blues singer James Brown's trademark song was "I Feel Good!"

I feel better than James Brown. (Which isn't difficult, now that he's dead.)

I like this tune for its crazy beatnik poetry style, the visuals, and of course, the beat.


Was (Not Was), "I Feel Better Than James Brown" (1990)


When we were in love I pretended you didn't exist
That way I loved you more
You suggested we get married and move into a house
I suggested that we jump overboard
And live underwater in the lost city of Atlantis
Where mermaids sing
And tuxedoed dolphins bring you breakfast

One year later I was transferred to the moon
Worse pay, better hours
I was transferred to the moon
Worse pay, better fellow workers

I built our love out of blood
I went to the dentist and told him "take out my heart"
I feel better than James Brown
I feel better now
I feel better than James Brown

I was attending Mardi Gras with Fidel Castro
Buxom cross-dressers threw fake gold coins at our feet
As we discussed the fate of the Revolution
Suddenly, CIA men dressed in bikinis
Tried to stab us with fountain pens
Fidel blew mustard gas from his cigar
And immobilized the lot of them
Nineteen tequilas later, we had a deal
Havana goes back to the mob
And Fidel and I open a chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken shops

Ain't life sweet? I feel good
I feel better than James Brown
I feel better now
I feel better than James Brown
I feel better now
How do you feel?

Ethan Allen: Got a Clue?

Furniture ads are generally pretty stupid, especially if they feature large-breasted blonde women and/or ferocious tigers lounging on the furniture. (They never show the sofa after the tiger sharpens its claws on it. I wonder why.)

Ethan Allen, a high-end furniture store, has a television commercial now which shows several quick clips of insanely expensive furniture that you'd find in your grandparents' house, and then ends on the Ethan Allen logo and the question: "Got an appointment?"

Ha. Are they seriously saying that you need a fucking appointment to go furniture-shopping? It's not a Faberge egg, for goodness' sake. It's a dresser. It's a product. I should be able to waltz in anytime between 9 AM and 6 PM and pick something out and have it delivered this Friday from the warehouse.

I certainly shouldn't need to make an appointment to go pick out furniture. It's not like it's a house, or plastic surgery. You walk in when they're open, sit here, sit there, sit over here again, flop onto a couch and pretend to sleep, flip through a catalog, find something you like, pick a fabric and a color, and order it. The salesman waits on you. That's what he's paid to do.

The idea of making an appointment to shop for furniture is simply ludicrous.

I had to laugh when I saw that commercial. Especially because a friend of mine made a point of getting all her furniture from Ethan Allen, and she spent a buttload of money on it. As I recall, I laughed then, also. Not to her face, of course.

Bicycle

I haven't ridden a bicycle much in the past decade, after an inattentive woman in a Jeep Cherokee hit me (at a sufficiently-low speed, or I would not be writing this today). Bones healed, but the bike frame didn't. I salvaged the usable parts, tossed the rest in the apartment dumpster, and it was gone within fifteen minutes, nabbed by a junkman.

I couldn't resist a great bargain at The Salvation Army a few months ago, though, and I picked up a nice Diamondback cross bike (a mountain bike with road tires, and center-pull brakes even!) for $50. I don't ride it much but it's in great shape and it goes very fast.

My darling wife had her favorite Raleigh ten-speed stolen when she was in college, and she never bought another bike, until we went shopping for Mother's Day and I got her this one, a seven-speed Drifter from Sun Bicycles.


Notice that the pedal cranks are set well forward of the seat, so that your legs are in roughly a 30-degree slant from the vertical. This lets you get full leg extension for maximum power on each downstroke, yet you can place both feet flat on the ground while still sitting on the seat. This makes for a very steady, stable bike, and it's verrrrry comfortable to ride.

Hers arrives in June. We had to order it, because they didn't have her favorite color (pink) in stock. (I was shocked and appalled. No, not really.)

I also got to test a recumbent (reclining) bike. I had never ridden one before.


This is their base model, a 21-speed I think. The steering is a bit twitchy because the front wheel is so small. But the acceleration is incredible. I was clicking through the gears at about one gear per second, until I hit 40 kph in about fifteen seconds. I thought I should take it easy, after that. I could ride such a bike all day. It's very comfortable. They market it as a "commuter" bike. It's only a thousand dollars. [eye roll] And my darling wife says she will not ride bikes with me if I have one of these, because it's just tooooo geeky. I can see her point.

Then there's this one. I have seen these only rarely, and I have never ridden one.


This tricycle design is called a "tadpole" for some reason. Bent Rider magazine liked it, saying it was a very inexpensive, well-built but heavy and sluggish example of the genre. It's only $1100. [another eye-roll]

This one even sets off my geek-dar. I'm sure it would send my darling wife into a seizure.

(But I still harbor a secret desire to ride one.)

This reminds me of Queen's "Bicycle Race" (1978).

Pissed off at Tivo

The Tivo (Digital Video Recorder, or DVR) service is a godsend. I never have to remember when something's on TV - it finds it by name, or by director, or by actor, or whatever search criteria I want, and it records it. It keeps it until I say to delete it, and then it deletes programs by itself. I can key in "wish lists" of things that haven't been on TV in years, so that if some fantastic show from yesteryear, like "Space: 1999" comes on again, it will find it and record it.

Fantastic stuff.

It also is supposed to let you download shows onto your computer using Tivo's "Tivo Desktop" software, to watch your recorded programs via Windows Media Player on your computer. And it did that, without trouble, since last year. Up until a few weeks ago, when it stopped working.

A call to the Tivo help line proved fruitless.

"It's probably a Windows update," he said. So I uninstalled all the Windows updates that had been applied since before Tivo Desktop stopped working. That didn't fix it.

"It's probably your firewall," he said. "No," I said, "because it's always worked in spite of the firewall." He shrugged verbally. The problem is, I can't turn off the firewall on this corporate laptop, and my IT manager doesn't know HOW to turn it off (or she's lying).

So I am stuck. And I am pissed off, because now I can't watch ANY of my favorite television anymore, basically. We don't really have time to watch when I'm home, and when we DO watch something, it's usually my darling wife's programming, not mine. That's why I recorded my favorite shows and took them with me on the road, to watch on my computer.

Not anymore.

But that's okay - I need to read more anyway, as one of my dear readers pointed out. Now I will have more time to do that.

We want to see you lead a normal life

This is only half of the song - it picks up right in the middle with the only verse. However, the first half of the song is almost exactly like the second, without a drum. It's fairly peaceful. It reminds me of teaching children rhythm and melody, using xylophones. Even a six-year-old could play the rhythm part in this song.

Peter Gabriel, "Lead a Normal Life" (1980)

It's nice here with a view of the trees
Eating with a spoon (they don't give you knives)
(I) Expect you watch those trees blowing in the breeze
We want to see you lead a normal life

An absent-minded Martian

Amid the chaos of the last couple of months, where we were trying to sell a rental house, we were working on this house and the yard, and we were trying to get ready for my father's birthday party, I managed to:

• Forget to pay the electric bill
• Forget to pay a credit card bill
• Forget to cancel the fire insurance on our ex-rental house
  
• Pay the mortgage twice on our current house
  

As if I had a spare paycheck lying around to offhandedly give the mortgage company twice as much money in a month as I normally do. I have no idea how that happened. The electricity and the credit card, I can understand, since I get email bills, not paper ones, and I forgot to look at them. But the mortgage? I am at a loss to explain that one.

Now that the chaos is over, I am looking forward to pooping out predictable wads of cash at regular intervals to the appropriate payees. "Set up auto pay!" you suggest. "No!" paranoid Marvin replies, because it gives me the heebie-jeebies to have third parties automatically drafting my accounts for things. I have seen friends go through hell trying to get an accidental draft un-drafted, and while it's being sorted out, they are penniless and bouncing checks. No thank you. If I'm going to have a screwup with my bills, I am going to be the one who causes the screwup, not some high-school dropout at a bank or a mortgage company or a utility company.

Today is payday. Time to poop out some cash to the appropriate payees.

Geezer rage

I came to a stop at a red light the other day. To my left, a car with two old men in it eased past, coming to a stop a little further up. I noticed that the passenger was giving "the finger" to the old man driving the car in front of me, who was glaring back at the first two geezers. The driver of first geezermobile was so distracted by his passenger's fingering that he bumped into the pickup truck in front of him (the truck had its tailgate down in a vain attempt to increase gas mileage, which meant that the tailgate was edge-on to the geezer behind him, and therefore was not very visible).

So: two angry geezers next to me, one angry geezer in front of me, and a bewildered middle-aged bystander in the pickup truck who was now embroiled in the geezers' argument (whatever it was). The pickup driver got out, inspected the nonexistent damage, waved it off, got in and drove away. The three geezers resumed their glaring and gesticulating, and drove on ahead.

I hung back, because I didn't want to get in the middle of it if they decided to take it to the next level, and stop their geezermobiles and get out and start beating each other with their canes.

Eventually one of them turned and went in a different direction. The other drove on, left turn signal blinking vainly, signaling a turn which would never be made.

Geezer rage. It's restful, like watching tortoises battling during mating season.

It's only water in a stranger's tear

Before Linkin Park and the other emo-metal bands, there was Peter Gabriel.

Peter Gabriel, "Not One of Us" (1980)


It's only water
In a stranger's tear
Looks are deceptive
But distinctions are clear
A foreign body
And a foreign mind
Never welcome
In the land of the blind

You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is

You're not one of us!
Not one of us!
No, you're not one of us!

Priced to sell, or priced to keep

I was wandering through Staples (an office supply store) yesterday, to buy a telephone, since I broke mine recently in a fracas. Actually, I just broke another one the other day when I was kept on hold for fifteen minutes by my mortgage company, and then they disconnected me. As Elvis was to televisions, I am to telephones. Though I simply smash them, not shoot them. And I blame it on the fact that telephones are so cheaply made these days.

So, I was wandering through Staples, and I passed by the "Clearance" table.

On Mars, "Clearance" means "50% to 75% off regular price." That's because the store management wants to "clear out the inventory" to make room for more. They want to sell it.

Staples never heard of this, apparently. Because the prices on the "Clearance" table were about 10 percent off normal price. Even for items that were a couple of years old, like a metal carrying case for an HP iPaq pocket PC, which no one but me has anymore, and mine is gathering dust in the corner of my desk, after I bought it from a neighbor realtor for $50 and never really used it for anything. (Note to self - recycle the iPaq.)

A genius garage-sale maven once told me, "Price it to sell. Don't price it to keep. It doesn't matter what you paid for it, or what you think it's worth. All that matters is what the customer thinks it's worth."

Staples believes in pricing their merchandise to keep. And it works, because I didn't buy anything.

Sunflowers

My sunflowers are doing quite well. They would do better, I think, if I watered them regularly. I have three varieties in the boat. They all have different germination periods. The ones that feel like sprouting, have already. Some are blooming; others are just getting ready to bloom.



The bees love them.

Stupidity IS painful

I used to have a bumper sticker on my truck which said "Stupidity should be painful." I had many other interesting stickers, including a series of bullet holes down the side of the truck. It looked very convincing, and drew stares on the highway. Or maybe they were just staring at me because I was trying to run them off the road. Hmm.

Anyway.

Stupidity IS painful, I can attest. Because I fell asleep at the beach yesterday after resisting my darling wife's suggestions that I oil up. My tan is uneven because I usually wear a shirt, even when working in the yard. I wanted to even it up.

Nope. Now all of my un-tanned skin is a flaming red (so I am told). And it hurts. A lot.

And I have only my own stupidity to blame. ;-)

Rivers that flow from south to north

I had forgotten that most rivers on this planet flow from north to south. A notable exception is the Nile River in Egypt, and perhaps 30 others.

I am working about a mile from one of them; the Vermilion River in north-central Illinois. It's not very big (less than a hundred meters wide). But it is indeed unusual to see a river flowing "backwards."

Other south-to-north rivers are (from a list at worldatlas.com):
Athabasca Alberta, Canada, 765 miles
Bann Northern Ireland
Bighorn Wyoming and Montana, USA, 336 miles
Cauca Colombia, 597 miles
Deschutes Oregon, USA, 250 miles
Eel Northern California, USA, 78 miles
Erne Ireland and Northern Ireland, 60 miles
Essequibo Guyana, 600 miles
Genesee New York, USA, 144 miles
Jordan Utah, USA, 45 miles
Lena Russian Federation, 2735 miles
Little Bighorn, Wyoming and Montana, USA, 80 miles
Magdalena Colombia, 1062 miles
Mojave Southern California, USA, 100 miles
Monongahela Eastern USA, 128 miles
New Virginia and West Virginia, USA, 255 miles
Niagara Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, 39 miles.
Nile Africa, 4150 miles
Ob Russian Federation, 2289 miles
Oswego New York, USA, 24 miles
Otter Creek Vermont, USA, 75 miles
Pend Oreille Washington, USA, 62 miles
Red Minnesota, North Dakota, USA (into Canada), 318 miles
Richelieu Quebec, Canada, 208 miles
Saginaw Michigan, USA, 20 miles.
Saint Johns Florida, USA, 275 miles
San Pedro Mexico (into Arizona), 142 miles
Shennandoah Virginia and West Virginia, USA, 55 miles
Wilamette Oregon, USA, 188 miles
Wallkill New Jersey, USA, length unknown
Yenisey Russian Federation, 2548 miles
Youghiogheny Eastern USA, 151 miles

Photoshopping history

I am working at Vactor Manufacturing this week. They make vacuum trucks which are designed to suck out liquids (usually sewage) from sewers, storm drains and septic tanks. Not very sexy, but interesting anyway. I got a tour of the plant on Tuesday, and the workers seem to be happy, because business is good. They shipped a record 90 trucks last month, and have increased the size of their workforce nearly 20 percent in the past decade.

The Marketing department asked the IT department there recently to dig up any old photographs of early Vactor models. The company started as a pneumatic-powered farm machinery manufacturer in 1911, and switched to sewer cleaning in the 1960s. The IT guys dug around and came up with this picture.

The picture is of a Civil War-era Union army artillery unit, circa 1862. The Vactor truck is parked near some supply wagons on the left.

Marketing didn't use this picture, for some reason. Or even thank IT for sending it. I like it, though.

Discarding your advantage to make a point

Recently, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a group of law-abiding citizens who have concealed-carry weapon permits, has been visiting restaurants in a large group, carrying their weapons concealed (or openly, when required by law in their state at a liquor-serving establishment). At a predetermined signal, they stand up, announce that they're carrying weapons (but they do not draw them) to exercise their rights as free United States citizens, and then sit down and continue their meals.

Their goal is to point out to everyone else that perfectly normal, law-abiding citizens carry guns, and that it's nothing to be afraid of. In fact, everyone else around them is safer due to the Halo Effect, which demonstrates that when criminals don't know for sure who is armed, criminals are less likely to attack anyone, even those who are unarmed.

The newspaper story that I linked to above says that most people shrug when they discover that they are in the presence of armed citizens. They don't care. At two out of eight restaurants where the VCDL gathered, when the manager noticed that the group was armed, the manager asked the group to leave. One of the restaurants was Mike's American Grill. I will not eat there again, since they don't deserve my money. I don't see the restaurant manager guaranteeing my safety with his weapon - I know he will not, because I'm betting he doesn't have one.

I can understand what the VCDL members are trying to do; to strategically educate the public and business owners that guns are present yet unnoticed by most people, and that they are beneficial in the hands of law-abiding citizens. But I think that it's a tactical mistake. The point of concealed carry is that no one knows you are armed. Revealing that you are armed when no threat exists is to give up your element of surprise. And it also invites any psychotic/suicidal bystanders to attack you, just to prove that they're tough, forcing you to demonstrate that they're wrong.

I think it's better to be heavily armed and to say nothing about it. No one knows that I'm carrying weapons at any given time. But I know. And I know that if someone tries to hurt me or the people around me, I'm prepared to do something about it. Otherwise, my weapons are like my wallet, phone and keys - I make sure I have them with me when I leave the house, and otherwise, I don't worry about them.

Why make timid people fearful by revealing your weaponry? Don't scare the poor things. If a problem develops that requires shooting, then shoot, and let the timid bystanders wet their pants in fright while you render the enemy harmless. Their timidity is their worry. Survival is mine.

More 80s angst

Somehow, through no fault of my own, the TV was on in my hotel room tonight, and HBO was on. It was "Starter for 10," a 2006 movie about British university students competing in the "University Challenge" TV quiz show. The movie is set in 1985, and the producers really did their homework, because they had a ton of 80s music in the soundtrack, such as The Cure or Tears For Fears or Wham!. The movie was fairly good, but I was surprised that it was made recently, because it had that authentic John Hughes-style 80s-teen-movie feel. "What a good-quality copy of this movie," I thought to myself as I watched it, because twenty years later, 80s celluloid would have deteriorated somewhat. Well, duh, now I discover that it's only two years old.

One of the songs took me back to one of the first LP records that I acquired: Tears for Fears, "The Hurting" (1983). I like the lurching beat, the "I'm a whiner about to cry" sound of the singer's voice, similar to The Cure, and of course, the grating mechanical synthesizer sounds.

An expensive monitor cleaning

After I tried to get a new laptop yesterday by dropping my existing one onto a concrete floor (a ploy that failed - curses!), the Dell Gold Support technician came to fix it. He replaced the broken hinge and put in a new screen and laptop lid. (Lorelei, I have no idea how much Gold Support is - the number $300 sticks in my mind, but I can't remember. Whatever it is, it's worth it.)

I hadn't cleaned my screen since I acquired this machine in 2006. I didn't realize how dirty it was until the new one was in place and turned on. The brilliance! The colors! The sharpness!

I will have to drop my laptop on the floor more often. I sure do like having a clean screen. ;-)

Global Thermonuclear War isn't as much fun as it's cracked up to be

"WarGames" was a fantastic movie in 1983, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy and Dabney Coleman. Matthew was a teenager, playing with early PC computer equipment and modems, searching for mainframe computers on which to play games. (This was waaaaay before the Internet.) He found a computer that had a neat list of games, like Chess, or Checkers, or Poker, or... Global Thermonuclear War.

Of course, Matthew picked that one.

Little did he realize that he'd hacked into the mainframe computer at NORAD, the joint US-Canadian command center for the defense of North America, located inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And the computer was smart, and could think for itself. And once he started the Global Thermonuclear War simulation, it wouldn't stop. Of course, this played havoc with the NORAD personnel.


(It's a long clip, but worth it if you have not seen the movie. I think it's funny that when NORAD calls the President at about 8:25 in the clip, it's a four-digit extension that is also the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.)

Anyway, there is now a game called DEFCON, which is based on the movie. You basically play the wargame simulations that Matthew Broderick played. It's very pretty, and very detailed.

But it's also very empty. You simply choose your targets and then sit back and watch the annihilation. It has an ethereal, atmospheric New Age-y soundtrack. Here's a live demo of it.


Perhaps as a Martian, I have an old-fashioned view of what war should be. You need to close the gap and engage the enemy face-to-face. You need to see the faces of the people you are killing, and of the people who are trying to kill you. You need to be present in the moment, because you may only have a moment left to live. And it's that kind of experience that ensures that war is as horrible and as undesirable as possible, so that one does not ever engage in it lightly, or on a whim.

To me, as "pretty" as DEFCON is, this game is spiritually empty and unsatisfying.

I'm glad I only paid $6 for it at Big Lots. ;-)

Phone etiquette

When I first arrived here and learned to use a "telephone," I was taught that it is polite to identify yourself when you call someone, since they cannot see you using this antiquated equipment. "Hello, this is Marvin. May I please speak to Kqallk?"

I thought everyone else would have been taught the same thing, but no. That's why I have Caller ID on my telephone.

But sometimes it only displays the number, and not the name of the caller, or it helpfully displays a name of "FLORIDA". Not very helpful, actually. But if it's a local area code, I usually pick it up. If it's long-distance, and it's not a number I know, I let the answering machine get it.

So, a FLORIDA caller called us the other day.

"Hi."

"Hello," I said. And, realizing quickly that I was speaking with an uneducated telephone user, I cut to the chase and asked the obvious question, "Who's this?"

"Rodney."

Ah. Rodney. My wife and I speak with Rodney perhaps three times a year. He almost never calls us, so we would not recognize his number. Or his voice. His wife calls us more often than that, but she never identifies herself either.

Human voices are not that distinct, to me, or to my wife. I think it's odd that both Rodney and his wife would simply assume that we would recognize their voices, especially when we don't speak with each other very often (on the phone OR in person). But I think it all goes back to proper education in telephone etiquette. Caller ID or no Caller ID, it's proper and appropriate to identify yourself when you call someone.

I think telephones should have negative feedback devices (such as a 50,000-volt contact plate in the handset) so that users can both administer and receive feedback for inappropriate behavior, such as failing to identify yourself to the person you called.

"Hey, is Marvin there? GAAAAHHHHHH!!!" the caller would scream, as I administer a 50,000-volt reminder through the telephone that he should have identified himself.

This feature would eliminate telephone solicitation almost overnight, I think.

I will have to get a patent.

Prophetic words

Even as a larva, I always was very careful with my toys. I may have been messy, and I may have left them sitting out instead of putting them away (which resulted in my parents throwing them away more than once, in a vain attempt to teach me a lesson - all it taught me was not to trust my parents, really), but I always was gentle with my toys and I never broke them.

That was then. This is now.

This week, I am working at a small manufacturing facility to which I've never been before. I am teaching the training coordinator how to maintain the materials that I've built for her. So I am sharing her tiny office, and sitting next to her desk, with my computer on my lap, and my power cord and network cable trailing across the aisle. (You see where this is going, probably).

I set my computer aside, onto her desk, and got up to go somewhere. I managed to get a tentacle tangled in the cabling to my computer, and as I turned to leave, I dragged the computer off the desk onto the hard linoleum floor.

I haven't done something that stupid to one of my toys since 1997. It's very annoying.

So the right hinge is cracked, and the display now has a funny multicolored graininess similar to the old video games in the arcades, if you looked closely at a Pac-Man machine (for example) and you could count the pixels through the smudged glass of the monitor. That's what my monitor looks like now.

Thank goodness my company has Dell Gold Support. They'll have a tech here today or tomorrow to fix it. I've had them show up, reduce my machine to a pile of parts on the desk, replace the entire guts of the machine (in this case, a client's computer whose power input on the motherboard had cracked), and reassemble it into a working unit in less than an hour. Those guys are good.

But I am reminded of a question that my darling wife asked me last week.

"Your computer's kind of old, isn't it? When are you going to get a new one?"

"When I drop this one." I smiled sardonically.

I shouldn't have said that. I realize that now. ;-) But I'm not getting a new one, just fixes to this one. [This one is April 2006, said my IT manager. Yes, but I need a 1 GB Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX 2 video card and another 1 GB of memory so I can play "Call of Duty 4", I told her. She was unsympathetic.]

I need to take better care of my toys.

Happy news

After staying with us for a month, my nephew Andy and his girlfriend Tara moved out a few weeks ago into a friend's house. From there, they will move into an apartment. He has a job at a factory. She has no job, and he doesn't want her to work. (???)

Over the weekend, he asked her to marry him. She accepted. So they got engaged with a small, affordable engagement ring.

I'm happy for them. But I think they need to grow up a bit. And they both need to identify their problem areas (poor communication, unreasonable expectations, desire to control each other) and work on them before they seal the deal.

I say this from experience, and from watching other couples fall apart, couples who had problems not nearly as severe as Andy and Tara's. Marriage is like walking a long distance, a journey of ten thousand miles over many years. One's shoes must fit one's feet exactly, just as each partner must fit the other exactly. The shoes cannot rub the feet in any way; they cannot pinch or be lumpy or otherwise irritate the feet, or the irritation builds into annoyance into pain into agony with each step. Likewise, one's partner must fit the other exactly in temperament and intelligence and interests and emotional compatibility. If they do not, what seems to be an annoying habit or personality trait becomes more irritating each day, until the slightest hint of it sends the other person into a violent rage. Or, in an effort to protect oneself, the irritated partner withdraws into an icy silence, trying to alleviate the pain by simply not being present.

You probably know what I am talking about. I am sure you have seen this, or experienced this, before.

Andy and Tara need to learn this, and they need to either iron out their not-insignificant differences sooner, or suffer the consequences later. I hope that it is a relatively easy lesson for them to learn. For their sake.

Why are people pessimistic on the economy?

I have mentioned in the past that I tend to ignore the news. This is because it's a constant stream of negativity, especially with regard to the economy. The constant refrain for the past year in the American legacy media has been "recession, recession, recession." It annoyed me, because although the economy is weak, it has not been in a recession (defined as negative growth, or a contraction in the Gross Domestic Product).

So imagine my surprise when I read an article on one of the major news websites (CNN, MSNBC, Fox - I can't remember which one it was, unfortunately) in which the authors were surprised at the level of voter pessimism regarding the economy. After all, they admitted, the US economy (GDP) grew consistently, if very slowly, all the way up through the first quarter of this year, and the definition of a recession is that the economy is shrinking. But, following Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' rule that "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it," the media beat the recession drum long and hard in the past year. And magically, because the media keeps repeating that it is so, people think that the US is in a recession.

Yet the authors of the article were surprised at the level of pessimism among polled individuals, 97 percent of whom thought the US is indeed in a recession, when it's not. "Why is that?" the authors wondered.

I laughed out loud.

Extraordinary Machine

Fiona is a strange woman, but her voice is undeniably husky and powerful. I really like the orchestral arrangement of this song.

Fiona Apple, "Extraordinary Machine" (2005) (there is no "real" video for this song, but this will do.)

Schrodinger's cat is dead

Back in November, I wondered about Tami, the daughter of our next-door-neighbors in Denver. She had gone in for a heart/lung transplant back in... 2006? after being on the transplant list to replace her congenitally-defective units for more than 15 years. The doctors hadn't expected her to live past her teens, but she made it into her 40s, meeting and marrying a rather strange little man along the way, but one who loved her all the same, and whose insurance would ultimately pay to have her operation.

She didn't realize, when she went into the hospital for her surgery, that she would never come out. But that's exactly what happened. She got her surgery, and then she didn't really make an effort to get up and get active and get out of bed and recover. I'm not sure how much of it was just a true inability, and how much was a lack of will. Because willpower, more than anything, determines whether you live or die after a traumatic surgery or illness, and how quickly you recover if you live.

Tami's willpower kept her going for 660 days after her surgery. But she never left the hospital again, nor even got out of bed.

A bout of flu swept her ward in February. It sickened almost all of the patients, and it took some of them, including her. I don't remember the exact date. It doesn't really matter. We didn't find out about it until Mother's Day, when my darling wife called Eula, Tami's mother, to wish her a Happy Mother's Day. It was an unfortunate choice of occasions to make that call. But they hadn't called us or let us know, so four months later, we found out the hard way.

My alien hearts are saddened, saddened that tiny Tami hung on so long in a precarious, painful balance between life and death, existing with the help of machines and people and a staggering amount of medical resources and dollars, but never regaining the strength to get out of bed or even to breathe on her own. It seems to me to be an unnecessarily long and painful transition to the next plane of existence, especially when she had such hopes for a new life with her new heart and lungs (from a child who had fallen on a playground and died), and it turned out not to be.

Tami gambled with what little life she had left, and she lost. I wish, for her sake and for the sake of her family, that she had lost more quickly, to minimize her and their collective suffering.

Nevertheless, now she is at peace. I knew when she went into the hospital that she would not come out. Sometimes I hate having such prescience, because it's depressing. It's hard to smile and wish someone luck, when you know that it is not meant to be. But you do it anyway, because you hope and pray to be proven wrong.

I wish I had been.

Requiescat in pace, Tami.

An exciting landing

Airplanes usually control their approaches by using the throttle to stay on the flight path, increasing or decreasing power as needed. Last night on the way into Atlanta's Hartsfield International airport, the pilot suddenly increased power and pitched the plane up sharply as we were caught in a microburst, pushing the plane downward toward the ground. It looked to me like we were going to hit short of the runway, but he clawed for altitude and kept the plane from hitting the grass by about 100 feet. It was a very rough landing and we bounced heavily down the runway, nearly dragging the left wing. I expect the landing gear will need a checkup after that one.

As always, the thing that kept me calm is knowing that if I die, I will have company. It's a strange thing to find comforting, I know. But that's what makes it easier for me to get in these fragile, breakable, explosive airplanes and tempt fate every week.

A little chime of purity amid cacophony

With a forty-thousand-channel scanner in my ship, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer cacophony of electromagnetic noise that is constantly broadcast by the human race. But these four voices (well, two human voices, plus two guitars/banjos/assorted other instruments) are shining diamonds amid the mountains of crackling, crunching auditory coal that I sift through. They are "The Biscuit Burners," whom I would initially categorize as bluegrass, except that they are hardly restricted to that style. I especially like "Sujan Re" (strong influences from South India, according to the announcer, who said that one of the guitarists studied there under a renowned Indian musician) and "The Hatching Season" (harmonics, which are always my favorite).

Pictures from Sunken Gardens

We took these pictures at Sunken Gardens, a large arboretum in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's set in a large sinkhole, and has a distinctly tropical set of plants and animals because it's a micro-climate, wetter and cooler than the ground outside.







A HUGE snapping turtle.


A Dutchman's Pipe flower, with a caterpillar on it. We have these flowers in our yard.


A Bismarck palm. I want one of these.


Tadpoles, about to turn into frogs. They actually let us pet them. I don't think they could see us, looking up into the sun.




Big koi (fancy, expensive, spotted carp).




An orb spider in her web.




A bird-of-paradise bloom.




A Chilean flamingo. They were torpid in the heat, not very interactive today.

Breathing

I wonder what it's like to be an old, old tree, a hundred feet tall, and your only job is to drink in the sunshine and to breathe.

I wonder what trees think about. I believe they do think... very slow, vegetal thoughts.

Thursday pix

A nice afternoon at the beach. Found some nice fossil shark's teeth.


A dead corn snake. They're so pretty, even when they're a little flat in spots.

I am tired of hearing about it.

[Marvin is in a sour mood this morning.]

"He drinks too much."
"I can't find a job."
"He says mean things to me."
"He wants to date other women."
"I'm depressed."
"He wants to spend his money on toys."

Well, do something about it. Stop whining and leave him. Get off your lazy *ss and get a f*cking job. But I am tired of hearing the whining and seeing you not do a damn thing about it. So go away and make your life better. Otherwise, shut the f*ck up.

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill

The original song, "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel (1977) has an odd 7/8 meter, coupled with a pretty guitar riff and interesting, spiritual-seeming lyrics.


The reinterpretation by Erasure (2003) is typical electronica, and I really like the wind-up jet-engine noise at the beginning and at intervals throughout the song... on the way up to ultrasonic, it passes through the correct notes to stay in key with the rest of the tune. But I do wish that Andy Bell was not such a . . . bizarre person.

Obnoxious fun

I'm not a big fan of Limp Bizkit, but a couple things about this song I enjoy:

• The wild bass line
• The call-and-response motif of the chorus, as obnoxious as it is
• Bassist Sam Rivers' freaky black eyes
• The way the misogynist tone of the song contrasts with the crowds of attractive women

It's so aggressively male, it just makes me laugh. Poor Fred Durst (the singer) is probably speaking from the heart, which makes it even funnier. I think he learned all the wrong lessons from his experiences, if they are autobiographical.

Limp Bizkit, "Nookie" (warning: obnoxious, cheerfully misogynistic lyrics)

Flowers at Selby Gardens

I went with my father to see Selby Gardens, which is a large arboretum near us. They have a wide variety of plants and flowers.

I can't remember what these plants are. I'm sorry. I'm not the gardener... my darling wife is. ;-)





















These are balsa "masks" carved by Borucan Indians from Costa Rica. They feature plants and animals and themes about the Indian life. It's a conscious effort by the Borucans to teach their young people their cultural art, so these masks are by young people from the tribe.






This is a banyan tree, which is a type of ficus. Remember that next time you see a ficus plant in your office.


More plants from outside.


Orchids. I KNOW these are orchids. ;-)

Water stuff

Can you spot the alligator? Most people can't spot them in the bushes and reeds, which is why people are surprised when they get eaten.



This one is a baby, only six feet.


My wonderful sister, in her human guise, kayaking with me.

"Bet on the filly," she said

I was listening to a fawning report on the radio last Friday about Hillary Clinton's campaigning in Kentucky, prior to the Kentucky Derby. Amid the usual platitudes and empty promises, she revealed that she was rooting for the only filly (female colt) in the race, "Eight Belles."

"Bet on the filly," she advised.

Well, Eight Belles came in second in the race, four and a quarter horse-lengths behind the winner, "Big Brown," who had a time of 2:01.82.

As Eight Belles galloped onward around the next turn, slowing down, she broke both of her front ankles, probably as the result of stress fractures. (The horses are bred to be so large and muscular, and their legs so spindly, that as a group they are over-bred and very fragile.) She went down and had to be euthanized on the track.

I feel horrible for Eight Belles. She tried so hard, and was so happy to be running the race. She deserved a better fate. Hillary doesn't, of course. Hillary will probably have to be whapped in the head with the allegory bat, repeatedly, to get the symbolism here. But we'll see in November whether history repeats itself with her. ;-)

Explaining death to a child

We found a skate (related to a stingray) on the beach recently. He was only a few hours dead. But a child passing by didn't understand why the skate was lying on the sand, and not swimming in the water. We explained it to him.

The skate was firm and muscular and slippery. He looked as if he could just wake up and swim away. My darling wife picked him up and tossed him back in the surf, and he didn't come back up. Perhaps he was just stunned, and he woke up and swam away. I doubt it. But I would like to hope so.

Pictures from the recent Shark Tooth Festival

A trilobite from ~300 million years ago. This one is unusual in that he's a mold, or an inside-out fossil. Very detailed.


A huge plate of crinoids, or "sea lilies" from 500 million years ago. It's VERY rare to find them with their feathery arms. Usually you just see their tubular segmented stalks.



More trilobites.


Fossil fish.


Fossil shark's teeth.

Modern shark jaws. They boil them and soften them to flatten them out so they look bigger.


Look at all the layers of teeth! They're always growing in and falling out throughout the shark's life. A single shark may produce over 20,000 teeth in its lifetime.


A hammerhead shark.

Score one for democracy

I was pleased to see the US Supreme Court exercise some good judgment the other day, when they ruled 6-3 to uphold Indiana's 2005 voter identification law, which required voters to present some form of state-issued identification before being allowed to vote, in order to prevent voting fraud (where one person votes several times). The critics of the law (a variety of liberal special-interest groups) had complained that up to 43,000 Indiana residents (mostly illegal aliens, the homeless, and elderly poor) would be disenfranchised because they either "could not or would not" obtain the required identification. They claimed that the Indiana law was unnecessary to prevent fraud because there was no specific incident of voting fraud in Indiana to justify the law. The Supreme Court disagreed, saying that other states HAD experienced fraud that the law was designed to prevent, and that the needs of Indiana's 4.3 million legitimate voters to be protected from voting fraud outweighed the needs of the 43,000 illegals, homeless and elderly cranks who would not or could not get the required identification.

Indiana's voter ID law is the strictest in the nation. Hopefully this ruling will pave the way for the rest of the states to impose similar requirements. Each citizen has one vote to cast, legally, in an election. It's important to do whatever one can do to enforce that rule, to prevent
unscrupulous criminals from overriding the will of the legitimate majority.

Fashion silliness

I read that "Ugly Betty" is experiencing a sharp drop in its ratings. I don't know why, because it's still a smartly-written, quick-paced, hilarious show. I admit, I don't watch it much either, but I don't watch ANY television much. I caught most of an episode the other night, though, and I was very surprised to see two cameos from "Project Runway": Christian, last season's winner; and Nina Garcia, the mean Colombian judge who is the editor of "Elle" magazine. They both parodied their fashion-industry lives, especially Christian, who made fun of his bitchy gay self in a very humorous way.

I enjoyed it.

A brush with evil

You have probably met people who shine with an inner light, who bring joy to the people around them with an easy grace and a power that radiates through their actions, words and touch. It's an honor to meet those people, on the infrequent occasions that I do, because they are more than they seem, with one foot in this world and one foot in a different plane of existence.

Similarly, you probably have met people who are evil. A fog of darkness envelopes them, and they soil their surroundings and the people with whom they come in contact, through the lustful greediness of their grasp and the venom in their words. Fortunately I seldom meet those people either.

But once in a while I meet an entity who is truly frightening, an inhuman evil. You can see it in their eyes, in the vibrations that they radiate...the body that they inhabit only looks human, when it is actually possessed by a malignant force. Its gaze is one of malevolence, of hatred, of cunning calculation, and it is chilling to witness. I had the misfortune of meeting such an entity in the supermarket a month or two ago. I felt her more than saw her, from thirty feet away, a cloud of invisible darkness that seemed to dim the bright lights of the store. And when she turned toward me and LOOKED at me, it was like being stabbed by an icicle, a physical blow with the icy coldness of implacable malice. I stepped back in horror, turned and walked away quickly, looking back to see her smiling at me, a smile that had no kindness in it, a smile that meant she would kill me if she could, because she somehow seemed to recognize me as one who would oppose her, and it made her hate me all the more. It was horrible to see.

There are intelligent non-human entities on this planet, entities that cannot be perceived even by Martian senses; entities of kindness and good who help people escape accidents or recover from illnesses; entities of neutral self-interest who are only here to observe and to take what they need; and entities of black malignancy who take pleasure in hurting others and bringing darkness where there was light. One of the dark ones inhabited that woman, and it was a sharp reminder to me that one must be ever vigilant to avoid such entities, and to be ready to fight them and to destroy them when necessary.

Holidays with multiple meanings

Perhaps it's just because I'm a visitor here, but I think it's quite ironic that human workers would celebrate May Day, or International Worker's Day (a day celebrated mostly by adherents to the failed state religion of communism)... by NOT working. It seems to me that if one takes pride in their work, they would celebrate by doing their job with extra diligence and pride on that special day.

And it's even more unfortunate that May 1 is used as a day for communists, anarchists, illegal aliens and other undesirables to demonstrate or protest for whatever causes motivate them. It debases and undermines the achievements and the pride of the valiant, legal workers who drive the economies of the world's nations, who pay their taxes, and who otherwise keep in motion the economic infrastructure necessary to support the very people who are protesting (instead of working).

I just think it's interesting. I prefer to think of May Day in its original form, as a "cross-quarter day," which falls midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. As such, it was a pagan day of celebration, with such traditions as dancing around the Maypole and crowning the May Queen. To me, that is a much happier and more-(re)productive celebration. ;-)

Rude suicide

I have suicide on the brain tonight. Not my own - other people's. For example, more than 32,000 people a year, or about 25 people per 100,000, kill themselves in Japan. With the advent of the Internet, suicide website have become popular in Japan, providing information and advice and "support" (to use the term loosely) on the best way to kill oneself. Groups of people arrange meetings to commit suicide, or simply arrange a time during which all of the group's participants will kill themselves in their own homes.

The problem is so bad that the government actually offers free computer software to families, to block suicide-related websites.

Now the latest fad among suicide methods in Japan is to mix laundry detergent with other household chemicals like shampoo to produce hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a colorless gas that smells like rotten eggs. The problem with H2S is that it is extremely powerful. When the gas strikes, the victim smells rotten eggs for only a moment, before the H2S kills the olfactory nerve leading to the victim's brain. Then it causes pulmonary edema (swelling and fluid buildup in the lungs), leading to death within a few moments. It can kill at extremely low doses, as low as 350 parts per million. This makes it as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. At concentrations of 1000 parts per million, it can kill with one breath.

I worked in Kazakhstan, on the Caspian Sea, on a project designed to explore the massive East Kashagan oilfields off the west coast of Kazakhstan. The problem with the oil there is that it has massive quantities of H2S in it, which makes extracting it extremely hazardous. One blowout can kill the crew of an oil platform in a matter of seconds. Luckily I managed to avoid being around the wells much. My darling wife was a geologist, so she was very concerned about me being around such nasty stuff.

Today, 350 people in the city of Otaru on Hokkaido Island had to be evacuated when a 24-year-old man mixed chemicals in his house to kill himself. His 58-year-old mother was overcome by the fumes and barely survived.

I think that's very rude, to kill yourself without regard to your family or your neighbors. It's one thing if you want to be selfish and eliminate yourself; it's your life, it's your right. But you don't have a right to risk the lives of other people to end your own.

Some of the suicide websites that promote H2S suicide also helpfully provide "Danger: Poison Gas" signs, for suicidal people to print out and post on the door of their room to keep others from opening the door and also dying from the gas. But these suicidal people either don't know or don't care how toxic this gas is, and how easy it is for even low concentrations of the gas to escape and to harm others.

The Japanese people are known for their politeness. If they're going to "educate" people in how to kill themselves, the Japanese suicide advocates who run these websites have a duty to "educate" their suicidal customers in how to commit suicide . . . politely.

I doubt it was suicide

I must have been napping when Debra Jean Palfrey, "The D.C. Madam," was arrested last year on charges of running a prostitution ring in Washington D.C., with many high-ranking clients in government including married Senator David Vitter, R-Louisiana. I was also napping when she was convicted a few weeks ago of money-laundering, racketeering, and using the mail for illegal purposes, federal charges with a penalty of between five and six years.

Apparently she swore she'd never go to jail, and she threatened to release the names of some of her clients. And then she allegedly committed suicide at her mother's house in Tarpon Springs, FL today.

I say allegedly because if she was going to release more names of her clients, there's an awful lot of people who would be happy to see her dead, and probably more than a few among them would be willing to kill her.

The fact that she allegedly left not one, but two suicide notes for her mother, and then hung herself in a shed in back of the house, without ever evincing any indication of being suicidal or depressed, seems very odd to me.

One of Palfrey's girls, a former University of Maryland professor named Brandy Britton, also "committed suicide" in January 2007 before she was scheduled to go on trial for prostitution. Suicide by hanging.

Curiouser and curiouser.

What is art?

I try not to discuss "what is art" with my sister, because she's an artist, and therefore she has no idea. ;-) And she specializes in "nonrepresentational art," so it reeeeeeeally irritates her when I look at one of her pieces and say, "hmmm, that looks like a ____." "It's not supposed to look like anything!" she'll insist.

"Mmmmhmmm. Sure," I say.

I love this segment of "Creature Comforts," though, discussing "what is art." It's funny at so many levels:

• What they're saying, which is often goofy in itself
  
• The background scenery, like imitating "Dogs Playing Poker" or a Warhol Campbell's soup can
• The choice of animal who's talking, like a flounder talking about Picasso (who often put both of a subject's eyes on one side of the head, just like a flounder)
  
• What the animal is doing while it's talking (the dog making footprints on the carpet while talking about printmaking, or the gorilla painting a picture while discussing why an elephant cannot create art)

It's a stitch.