Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop is one heck of a great anime series. I love its use of all kinds of different musical genres, and the distinct voices, personalities, histories and motivations of its characters. Not to mention the depiction of the hand-to-mouth, ragged-edge-of-disaster existence of bounty hunters in space, in the year 2071 AD. This series has an amazing depth to its backstory, from the Gate Disaster of 2021 which cracked the Moon in half and rendered the Earth's surface mostly uninhabitable, to the settlement of most of the moons and planets in the solar system, each with its unique culture and language, ecology and economy.

Notice the depiction of (gasp) smoking in the intro, not once, but several times! And (eek) guns. Smoking guns, even. Truly the hallmark of great animation. Think of the lasting impact that Scooby Doo or The Smurfs could have had, if only those shows had had more cigarettes and guns.

Sigh.

First private liquid-fueled rocket in orbit!

I wasn't paying attention - Space Exploration Technologies Corporation managed to get the Falcon 1 rocket into Shuttle-altitude orbit at about 6oo km. That's pretty good! It's the first non-governmental United States liquid-fueled rocket to achieve Earth orbit.

That's good, considering the Chinese just performed their first spacewalk from the Shenzhou spacecraft. They are preparing to build their first space station, and then go to the moon.

I think America and Russia, for their own sake, had better get back to the moon first, before the Chinese decide they own it. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 sounds very nice, but it doesn't stop anyone from taking the high ground and holding it. And only 13 nations have ratified the Moon Agreement of 1979, which says that there cannot be private property in outer space, and other moons and planets cannot be terraformed (made habitable for humans).

The next decade will be very interesting for humanity.

A touch

I was thinking about touching today. It occurred to me that I go days or even weeks without touching anyone, or being touched, except for when I am with my darling wife on the weekends. Normally I don't perceive the physical space around my body unless someone penetrates it. My personal space exists automatically, like my breathing.

Sometimes people penetrate that space, either on purpose or by accident. A handshake in a meeting; a bump in the hallway. Once in awhile someone hugs me, or pats me on the shoulder. Once, a friend took my hand and placed it on her pregnant belly, and I felt the baby moving inside her. It was a rare touch, made all the more memorable by the intimacy and the trust she placed in me. But generally, I exist in spatial isolation.

Some people I know like to be touched. They crave it, and seek it out. They revel in being touched. I don't really understand that. It's not that I don't like to be touched - I do, generally. But I never think of it, because it so seldom happens.

Do other people touch each other a lot? I don't know. There are friends whom I have not touched in years, even if I see them on a regular basis. There are strangers whom I touch more regularly than my friends.

It seems odd to me that I touch strangers more than the people I love. Perhaps it's not odd. It's one of those things that seems strange when you think about it, like when you consider a common word that suddenly seems like a very weird word, when you focus on it.

Fear of the unknown is not a good reason

I'm still going on about the bailout. Bear with me for a minute.

The people who are pushing the bailout are basically saying, "We don't know what will happen if we DON'T do a bailout."

I'm sorry, but fear of the unknown is not a good reason. I see many people waste time and money and talent because they're afraid of the unknown. It's going to cost us a lot of money for a bailout. Nobody knows what will happen if we DON'T do a bailout. So? Let's find out. I'm willing to bet that not much will happen at all. In fact, I AM betting my entire retirement fund, and also the cash in the bank, that not much will happen. The main thing that will happen is that banks and brokerages who SHOULD go bankrupt, WILL go bankrupt. And that's actually good for the economy, because it punishes the people who made bad decisions, and it forces them to recognize that the assets upon which they built their houses of cards in fact have very little value. That's called "mark-to-market accounting," which forces you to recognize your assets at their current market value. Dumping the mark-to-market standard, as some pundits are arguing for, will cause a heck of a lot of accounting upheaval. I think it would allow businesses to perpetuate the fallacy of "oh, I'm worth THIS much money" when in fact they are worth much less.

Besides, you know where they got that $700 billion bailout number? They made it up.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

I'm sorry, but making up big numbers to scare people into doing what you want doesn't work for me. It shouldn't work for anyone.

So the Dow is down 778 points? So what?

That's a drop of 6.9 percent. By contrast, Monday, October 19, 1987 saw a drop in the Dow's value of 22.7 percent. THAT was a scary day, and it illustrated the dangers of electronic program trading.

People need some perspective. Especially brainless prats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator John Kerry. "Waaaaah!" they whine. "We want a bailout."

Fortunately, most Americans don't. Only rich people who've lost their investments want a bailout. And they don't deserve one. "You pays your money and you takes your chances." They lost. The rest of America does not need to, and should not be forced to, pay for their losses.

Sadly, our idiot congresspeople are going to try for another bailout later this week. And I will call my congresspeople again, and remind them that I will do everything possible to see that they are defeated (and/or recycled into compost) in their next election race if they support such a massive theft of taxpayer money.

These people are pathetic. Andrew Jackson, America's seventh president, was right when he said in 1832 to a group of bankers:
“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

America needs an Andrew Jackson. Sadly, they've only got Barney Frank and Henry Paulson.

UPDATE: Here's a link or two to some articles about why the bailout is bad.

• http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html
• http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWE3OWU3OTExYzNlNTUzMzY2YmJmOWZjMzcwN2M1NjU=
• http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzhkYzEyNjFjMzFmZGE4NjUzMTcyYTZkZGE4MzRjYjk= (Lowry WANTS a bailout, but only to help the little guy still get credit. I disagree - pay cash for everything. Credit cards are the bane of the average person's existence. Get rid of them and live on cash. Even Suze Orman will tell you that. If you can't afford it, do without, and save up until you can afford it, by which time you probably figure out that you don't actually need it.)
• http://www.newsweek.com/id/161079

Kill the bailout, kill the bailout...

(sung to the tune of "Kill The Wabbit" or "Ride of the Valkyries" from Bugs Bunny)

I called all the congressmen who supposedly represent the district where I spend the most time, and asked them to vote against the bailout bill now being argued on the floor of the House. One senator's voicemail was full, so I sent him a nice email.

But I will be watching how they vote. And if they support it . . . well, after the Martian invasion is complete, I will fill out the requisite form (UQJS-1936T) to recommend said congressmen as "Suitable for Medical Experimentation." If they survive the invasion, of course.

Here's a nice rundown of the "crap sandwich" they're trying to sell you.

UPDATE: Good, they killed it. Apparently they got a LOT of calls and hate mail from the public about it. Good job, everyone.

The Beatles, "Getting Better"

This is one of my favorite tunes off the 1967 opus, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (otherwise known as SPLHCB among Beatles fans). It has a very clear and distinct bass line, separate from the melody and the rhythm guitar, which is unusual compared to today's often-muddy and overly-simplistic arrangements.

A loaded question

A dear friend of mine asked me the other day, "Do you think I'm too rigid?"

A loaded question.

One of the reasons people like me is that I'll call a spade a spade, but I'll always do it nicely, with a smile and a hug when needed. Like Vulcans, Martians can't lie. They can dissemble, prevaricate, or simply clam up, but they can't lie. Sometimes that translates into a devil-may-care attitude of being willing to "go there" when other people wouldn't. They know I mean well, clumsy though I may be with other people's human feelings.

Wheee!!!! I decided to "go there."

"Yes, I think you can be too rigid," I said. "Like you were back there, with the ineffectual man behind the counter in the store. You got impatient with him because he was ignoring me. And did you see how I behaved with him? I was nice. I was patient. And I didn't get worked up about how he was ignoring me."

"Yes, he WAS ignoring you!" she said. "What's so important about a workman fixing a light, when you're standing there to be waited on?"

"Certainly it was a bit rude," I said, "but you have to remember that he's getting paid a poor wage to do a relatively menial job. And he has a lot of different things demanding his attention, such as workmen who are repairing the store around him. The thing I focus on is, I am lucky to have the job and the life that I have, because a stroke of bad luck could put ME behind that counter in his place. I always try to be kind and patient with customer service people, because they get paid shit to do a shitty job, and there's no point in making their lives more difficult than they already are."

"Hmmmm," she said, unconvinced.

"And, think of it this way," I said. "What else do we have to do? Did we have anywhere important to go? No. An extra five minutes in the store is not going to kill us. And by being nice to him, we got better service than if we had been nasty to him."

"Yesssss..." she said, nodding.

"And my smile might be the only smile he sees all day."

"True," she agreed.

"And besides, if he was smart, he'd be working at NASA."

"Absolutely true!" She laughed.

"So my point is," I continued, "you can choose to be irritated when people don't live up to your expectations, or you can simply accept what they are willing and able to give. You hold yourself to a very high standard. While it's fine to do that to yourself, and you achieve greater things because of it, it's not very fair to hold other people to that standard."

"I see," she said, looking thoughtful.

"And when you become irritated with people who fail to live up to your own standards of behavior, it only makes you unhappy. It doesn't really change their behavior. So when you ask me if I think you are rigid, I agree, you ARE rigid, in ways that work for you in achieving goals that you set for yourself, but they may not work for other people."

"Like my friends," she said, looking worried.

"Yes, and because they're your friends, they may not say anything to you about it, they just say among themselves, 'oh, that's just how she is.' So I think you might work on being less rigid, for two reasons: one, you will make yourself happier by NOT expecting much of people, and therefore you won't be disappointed when they fail to deliver; and two, you may find your relationships with your friends to be more relaxed and easygoing."

"Hmm." She looked thoughtful, and then she smiled. Her face lights up when she smiles.

"Thank you!" she said.

Whew.

To debate or not to debate...

...is not really the question. The question is which recorded program I'll watch on Tivo.

I think it's amusing that McCain wanted to postpone the debate on Friday, and has suspended his campaign temporarily, to focus on the bailout. The decision makes sense on its face: (a.) he will save some money by not campaigning, and (b.) he gets to look like the elder statesman who knows what he's doing in Washington, and is responsible enough to go do it, at the expense of his own campaign. However, I don't think it will help him much. I think he wants to lose the election. But then, it's his to lose.

But back to the debates. The debates don't matter. Each of them will spout the same meaningless, specific-less platitudes to make their constituents happy. If one of them is postponed or canceled, then you'll have saved two or three valuable hours of your life that you can devote to more productive things, like doing the laundry.

I know how I'm voting, based on the candidates' legislative records. The media could produce evidence that a candidate eats babies for breakfast, or is the Messiah himself, and it wouldn't matter to me. All that matters is the candidates' voting records, or lack of them. Unlike the crap floating around in the airwaves or on the Internet, the voting records are not easily falsified.

But I'm not foolish enough to think that anything will actually change as a result of the election in November. Nope. Only the Martian invasion will change anything. And for that, you can thank me later. ;-)

Alimentary, my dear Watson

Deep in the heart of Texas, there is a show on Telemundo called "Muy Buenos Dias." It seems to be a mishmash of live bands performing in a sunny parking lot with many barely-bikini-clad women dancing in high heels, interspersed with clips of Hispanic rap and hip-hop videos.

When they're showing the bands playing onstage, they show about five seconds of the band, and about twenty seconds of the women's grinding pelvises. Another five seconds of band, another twenty seconds of pelvis. Or breasts.

While I can appreciate it as a male, it's an annoying stereotype of the Hispanic culture, which tends to treat women as sex objects more than some other cultures do. They are not helping dispel stereotypes with this kind of television programming.

But when the camera swings back to take in the whole "crowd" (it's really just the band and about 40 people in front of the stage in the hot sun, in an otherwise empty parking lot, dancing just for the benefit of the cameras), the group of nearly-naked women writhing with their arms over their heads reminds me very much of coral polyps waving in the ocean current, snagging bits of food drifting by.

It's a short step from there to remember that most Earthly life consists of tubes, ingesting food at one end and excreting it at the other end.

All those wriggling alimentary canals, dancing to Mexican music in front of the stage.... yuck.

I'm feeling too alien today to watch this stuff. I'd rather watch reruns of CSI: Miami, which I don't even like.

[click]

Buying gold???

Some friends of mine bought gold recently. They plowed quite a lot of money into it. I haven't asked them about their reasons, but I think they expect the value of the dollar to drop precipitously after the bailout, along with the stock market. Hmph.

Gold is trading at almost $900 an ounce now. That's up from $600 an ounce in 2006, and $250 an ounce in 2001. It's a bit silly to invest in it now, at its height.

And, you're usually just buying shares in a lump of gold held somewhere else. You can't really spend it anywhere.

But let's say you buy some real gold that you can hold in your hand. How do you spend it? Shave off a sliver with a dremel grinder and say, "here, I want to buy a tire for my car?" I don't think it would be very successful.

I'm just kind of surprised that my friends would do that. But they must know something I don't. My financial advisor said that it wasn't very prudent to buy gold right now, especially since it's so high, and he advised to sit tight with my money in the FDIC-insured checking acount. He's going to a conference this weekend where people smarter than him might have different advice, though, so he will call me Monday and tell me anything new.

Gold. Hm. I don't think so. Gold-pressed latinum? Maybe.

I know! Ununpentium, otherwise known as Element 115, which allegedly powers UFOs. I wouldn't know about that - I've never looked under the hood.

To Do List

To Do List:

• Buy ammo
• Buy canned food - a lot of it
• Spend our saved money on our planned home renovations sooner, rather than later - before the money isn't worth anything anymore
• Buy a basket for the bike, because gas will be scarce

I happened to see President Bush's address last night about the $700 billion bailout, only because it was on right after "Bones." He tried his best to sell it. I'm still not buying it.

This whole crisis is the result of the United States' gradual shift from a postwar manufacturing economy, into a service economy, and now into a consumer economy. Consumerism is merely people buying things they don't need, with money they don't have. The consumerism of the last two decades has been fueled by cheap and easy credit, often funded by foreign investors. There's only so far that such activity can continue before it runs out of gas. The proposed bailout is merely an attempt to keep that doomed consumerism going. It's only going to postpone the inevitable "market reset," not avert it. It's going to be painful now, or it's going to be painful later. But the pain is inevitable. Job losses and vanishing retirements and hyperinflation are inevitable. It's unfortunate. But handing the people who caused the problem $700 billion more is not going to fix the problem - it's only going to make it worse, by devaluing the dollar, because we're paying money that doesn't exist. Where's it going to come from? By printing more money, which devalues the money that's already in circulation. Or by borrowing MORE money from foreigners - at ruinous interest rates.

Quibbling over capping executive salaries in the wake of the bailout is ridiculous. It assumes that the bailout will happen. And we should not assume that at all.

By the way, here's an interesting article that points out where the trouble all began - with President Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which required banks to lend money to low-income applicants who were inherently riskier investments. An interesting point of view. I'm not sure how much I blame the CRA for today's crisis, but it certainly plays a part in it.

And here's another interesting article about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's conflicts of interest. Is he doing what's best for the country? I doubt it.

Technological exhaustion

I am not a programmer. I just happen to be a sometime user of IBM's venerable AS/400 mainframe computers (now called the IBM Power System). The AS/400 is the most bulletproof, reliable mainframe computer I have ever worked on.

Its reliability comes from its simplicity. Its OS/400 operating system (now called IBM i) is similar to DOS for PCs. It's fast and easy to use, and system response time is nearly instant. If you know the right commands, there's nothing you can't do.

I don't know the right commands, of course. I know enough OS/400 commands to be dangerous, and that's it.

Luckily I have cubicle neighbors who speak OS/400 fluently. And they have been helping me fix my security issues and data problems in the new data environment that we're setting up for training.

It has been a long day, full of learning.

My brain hurts.

"Ronin," 1998 - one of the best car chases EVER

"Ronin" is a simple, fast-paced action flick, starring a whole bunch of excellent actors. But the two of the stars of the movie don't even have names - the BMW versus the Peugeot.

I have seldom seen a wilder car chase than this one. It really puts "Bullitt" to shame, and "Bullitt" is the movie that started the car chase genre.

People tell me things

You know how sometimes people deliberately misinterpret something you say, or even take something you said that was directed at someone else (like "I love you") and apply it to themselves?

"I love you too," a cubicle-neighbor said, overhearing a conversation with my wife. "I know you love me." And she came over and gave me a hug.

We laughed together, but I thought her comment was symptomatic of one of her underlying issues, of needing love and needing to feel attractive, but not feeling loved by her husband or her family. It's nothing we have discussed openly, of course. But I am somewhat psychic. I can see through many people, and see what they're thinking. Occasionally I meet someone whose mind is opaque to me, and I am quite guarded with them, because sometimes I'm fairly certain that they're not even human. (As if I am, LOL!)

People tell me things, because they can sometimes feel that I know them already. And I am an outsider, so they can be honest about things that they cannot be honest about with other people. They confess to me. It's awkward sometimes, but I think I am performing a service for them, letting them confess. For example, another cubicle-neighbor told me last week about her dissatisfaction with the company after 18 years of getting smaller raises than her peers, and getting passed over for promotions. She's looking for another job. I smiled and encouraged her to seek her happiness, to find a place where people value her for her skills and her experience.

But it's the lonelyhearts whose confessions make me uncomfortable. It's too raw of an intimacy for me, when I don't have a history with them, or a basis for them to lay their souls bare. Yet I grit my teeth and smile and listen, because I want to help. I like to think that I am helping.

At one time, when I was not thinking of becoming a lumberjack, I thought of becoming a priest. Yet I adhere to no particular religious dogma, and therefore I would be unsuitable to be a priest. I have no answers for people, no absolute truths. I merely know what I have learned through my own experiences, and what I have seen other people learn through their experiences. And I share those things, when I think they will do some good. Though I'm pretty convinced that people cannot "hear" advice that they do not, at some level, already know and understand. I myself have had that problem. I know other people do.

But most people are not seeking advice. They merely want someone to listen to them. And I do.

I laughed in the movie "Contact," when Matthew McConaughey describes himself as "a man of the cloth . . . without the cloth."

That's me.

Stuck in my head: "The Terminator" Theme

I love the whole robotic futuristic paranoia of "The Terminator" saga. It's great fun, with just enough plausibility to be truly terrifying when you think about it.

And the theme is stuck in my head today, particularly the symphonic beauty of the "Terminator 2" variant.



You can hear how it's changed from the original "Terminator" theme. Instead of lurching and uncoordinated like the original theme was, the Terminator 2 variant is more lyrical and in-step with itself, even though it still has that "hitch" at the end of every phrase.



But for lyric beauty, I really like the music at the end of "Terminator 3." It's such pastoral calm, juxtaposed against the horrific nuclear fire boiling across the landscape.

Big news roundup, yeehaw!

• That's cool, a stretch of highway in California with grooves cut into it, which plays "The William Tell Overture" (The Lone Ranger theme) when you drive on it. Unfortunately people are complaining, so they're paving it over. Sheesh. I think it's a great idea. I'd like to try cutting "Flight of the Bumblebee" into the roadway. That would be a trick.
• Searching for a firearm you used to own, with a particular serial number, finding it for sale, and actually buying it - that's odds of about a bazillion to one. Certainly I would never be so lucky. I like my M1 Garand rifle, myself. It's heavy, but easy to shoot, and very effective. I just need to get a bayonet for it.
• When someone breaks into your house, you kill them. Don't agree to their demands, because they'll probably try to kill you anyway. But, oh, wait, make sure you have your own gun. Otherwise it takes a LOT longer to kill the intruder. This is Texas - it's practically required to own a firearm.
• All that whining from State Department diplomats who didn't want to be drafted to go to Iraq, and for nothing, because they've got enough volunteers (for now). Personally, I would force the whiners to go instead of the volunteers, just for spite. Do your damn job. You swore an oath to do it, so do it. Or don't sign up in the first place. But once you've signed up, you're committed. Or you can be committed to Leavenworth. Take your pick.
• At university, the lowest grade I got was a C, in "Politics of the United Nations." I did a term paper on UN corruption such as this. The Teaching Assistant was one of those annoying moonbats, and graded me down just because she didn't like my opinion, not because I wrote a bad paper (all my other papers in Political Science got As). So I graduated with cum laude instead of with summa. Boohoo. I should have dragged her in front of the dean to argue my case, but I didn't really care. A college degree, IMHO, is merely a piece of paper that says you're employable. I haven't used my degrees, and I don't really mind. The time and money they required are merely the cost of doing business.
• I laughed when they dragged the UC Berkeley tree-huggers down out of the trees that they'd sat in for a couple years to protest the university's plans to cut them down. Now the university is suing them for all the police and fire and other services that the tree-sitters tied up during their vigil. In a better world, the tree-sitters would have been given one warning to leave, then the trees would have been cut down with them still in the branches, and the surviving tree-sitters and their enablers would have been marched off to jail. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do turn, even in California.
• As if the National Basketball Association needed another kick in the teeth about its reputation (remember the Pistons/Pacers riot in 2004?), Dallas Maverick Josh Howard exhibits some disgraceful, racist behavior. I expect they'll keep the cameras away from him from now on.
• This week, I'm staying at a less-than-savory hotel since my usual habitat is all booked up. It's my own fault - I forgot to make a reservation until the last minute. But one of my co-workers helpfully pointed out that I am staying next door to a hotel where the front desk clerk was recently murdered. Luckily they caught the murderers. But when people ask me why I carry a gun... this is why. You never know when you'll need it. And if I never need it, well then, the people around me will remain blissfully unaware that I have it. But I will know.

Tivo lives and breathes again

A few months ago, Tivo stopped working on my PC. I couldn't download any more programs from my Tivo machine using my wireless network. Tivo's Helpless Desk just shrugged and said, "It must be a Windows update that caused it to stop working." That was untrue, since I uninstalled ALL of the updates I'd received, back to a point before the date that it stopped working, and that didn't help. Tivo didn't care. Their tech support is most unhelpful.

Then my company insisted that I remove all non-company software from my PC, because we were being threatened by the Business Software Alliance, a group of lawyers who deserve to be the first ones against the wall when the revolution comes.

(Want to make someone miserable? Tell the BSA they're running pirated software. No one will ask you to prove it, and you will not have to face the accused. No one will know who you are. The BSA will threaten to sue the accused. If the accused coughs up money to buy off the BSA, the BSA will share it with you. It's the perfect extortion scheme.)

Of course, the nameless, sourceless accusations were baseless, and the threat melted away. Nevertheless, I am now forbidden to install anything on my corporate machine. I can't even have music files on it, music files that I bought and paid for. It doesn't matter. Can't have 'em on there.

So, it didn't matter that Tivo didn't work. I had to uninstall it. So I quit watching TV altogether, since I travel all the time, and I can't watch programs with any regularity and still understand what's going on.

Now, however, while drifting hither and yon like a cloud through the Internet, I found out that Tivo's standard PC software, while still free, no longer works. It either won't download television programs to your PC anymore, or it won't play them using Windows Media Player. You have to buy Tivo Plus and install it on your PC. This fixes both the downloading issue and the WMP issue. Which is fine, except Tivo doesn't say anything about that anywhere on their website, and their tech support is ignorant of it (or was. They probably still are).

Okay, so I got Tivo working on my wife's personal laptop, one that is free from scrutiny by the assholes at the BSA. The next issue was, how to download programs from it onto my Windows Mobile Pocket PC (an old HP iPaq hx2415, which I bought from my realtor for $65 at a garage sale because she didn't like it, and nobody else in our whole county would know what the hell it was).

After more wafting through the Internet, I found out that Coreplayer (http://www.coreplayer.com/) is an excellent audio-video player for Pocket PCs, letting you play programs that are encoded in MPEG-4 format, which happens to be a format that Tivo exports. So, I eventually bought a copy, downloaded it, installed it on my SD card in my iPaq, and voila. "Bones" is playing on it right now. Beautiful picture, too.

I am as happy as a pig in shit. Which is to say, quite happy.

CAUTION: Chainsaw-wielding oaf

At one time in the distant past, when I first arrived on this planet, I considered a career as a lumberjack. I liked the crisp clean air, the tang of gasoline, the bawl of the chainsaw, the feel of fresh moist sawdust on my skin, the oaky odor of vegetable death in my nose as I say a prayer for each tree that dies to give me life. There's something elemental about taking the life of a tree, with the intent of using its corpse to better one's own life. It's a sacred thing, I think. One should never cut down a tree without purpose.

But I chose a different path, and I'm glad I did. I have never seen the television programs about the life of a lumberjack today. But I know that the mechanized, impersonal logging operations today show no respect for the trees, and merely treat them as product. That makes me sad.

Once in awhile, I cut down a tree, or cut a dead one into manageable pieces. And I get to play with my chainsaw.

This past weekend, at my darling wife's behest, I cut down three scrub oak trees. They were blighted, sickly and also in the way of where we may someday put our swimming pool. And we wanted to use them for firewood. My darling wife told me to cut them into one-foot segments, so that she would be able to handle them easily when loading them into the firebowl. And she asked me to leave one of the trees intact, to be placed in a tub of concrete and be used as a plant hanger. I heard her instructions, understood them, and agreed to them.

And then I promptly forgot the most important bit, the bit about not cutting one of the trees into segments. It's almost as if my brain skipped, like a record needle skipping a groove, and I proceeded to cut all of the trees down, and I cut all of them into neat one-foot segments. It took perhaps ten minutes.

My darling wife returned to survey my work, saw what I had done, and was furious. She had thought and planned for the past year about ways to use that tree as a plant hanger. And here it was, in neat little sawdust-coated pieces on the ground.

I felt like an idiot. A chainsaw-wielding oaf. And my darling wife was very disappointed in me.

I have no excuse. My brain sometimes does that, skips a groove, and I forget what I was doing or where I was going. I catch myself walking into the store without the thing in my hand that I had planned to return. I forget to retrieve the power cord from the outside outlet where I was using it. I pick something up, put it down somewhere else, and forget where I put it. Do I have Attention Deficit Disorder? Even if I did, putting a name on it does not excuse my behavior, or my inattention to what I am doing.

I must do better next time, to avoid disappointing people. And I must not enjoy playing with my chainsaw quite so much.

Ignoring the Emmys

Nope. Don't care. It's just TV, which in perhaps 20 years will be declared a form of electromagnetic pollution, and will be phased out - in favor of beaming advertising directly into your brain.

Someday, you'll look back and laugh at the very idea that they gave out awards for pollution.

The face of avarice, part 2

We found out that when J showed up at Chuck's house the other day and discovered that he was gone, she already knew that he would be gone.

She wasn't after her mother's things. She was after the house. She expected to move in and live there.

I was appalled. I'm fairly certain that she would have no legal right to the house, since it is now wholly-owned by Chuck, because his wife Ellie (J's mother) died several months ago. It's up to Chuck to dispose of the house as he sees fit.

J doesn't understand that, or care, apparently. She expected to move in and live there as long as she could, and to fight any efforts to evict her.

Except that my darling wife, with her usual foresight, had advised Chuck to change the locks before he left. Which he did.

Chuck told us that J called him demanding access to the house, allegedly to retrieve a painting there that she claimed was her mother's. He pointed out that the painting had nothing to do with her mother, since he had acquired it years before he met her. At that point, having exhausted her make-believe reasons for wanting to get into the house, J got very nasty with him, and he hung up.

We called the realtor and warned her of the situation. Chuck said that J is still in our area, looking for a job, with no permanent place to stay.

I hope we don't see her again.

News roundup

• The Federal Reserve loaned AIG $85 billion of my money for two years to help it stay afloat, because it's "too big to fail," and its failure would cause too much turmoil in the world markets. Too fucking bad, I say. Let it fail. I do not appreciate being ripped off like this. And now the Dow is down another 500 points. Sigh. This is the kind of stuff that makes people stop paying their taxes. Why bother, when the government will just waste the money?
• Noel Gallagher, the lead singer of the band Oasis, was attacked by a fan onstage in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those crazy Canucks. Although I commend the attacker for his actions, because I hate Oasis too.
• Elsewhere in violence-plagued British Columbia, a black bear swam across a river, climbed onto a dock, jumped into a fisherman's boat and mauled him. The bear was probably just expressing some Canadians' dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's policies.
• Britain has legalized Muslim sharia courts. As long as both parties agree to be judged by the sharia court in civil disputes like divorce or business lawsuits, the sharia court's decisions are legally binding. I did not know that Jewish Beth Din courts have existed in Britain for over a century, in a similar arrangement. I can't help but think that such arrangements are a bad idea for the longevity of the state.
• Almost 500,000 federal employees failed to pay more than $3.5 billion in taxes that they owed last year. Of them, that's 31,000 US Postal Service employees, 1000 Capitol Hill employees, and 58 Executive Office of the President employees. Well, heck, if they don't pay, why should you?
• Companies are now shredding computer hard drives to prevent their data from being hacked. I think it's more fun to take my old hard drives to the rifle range and put a few armor-piercing rounds through them. Although now that I have a drill press, I can just do it in my garage, more quietly.
• Palm Beach County, Florida, gained notoriety in the 2000 Presidential election for the voters' inability to figure out how to vote using the age-old paper "butterfly ballot." Then they briefly switched to touch-screen machines (which were then discarded because there was no paper audit trail), and now they can't figure out how to use the paper-based optical scanning systems for their ballots. I think it's pathetic. Why even allow them to vote at all? (Although this time it seems that it's the election officials' fault, not the voters'.) Personally, I think it would be a triumph just to prevent dead people from voting. Though in Palm Beach County, it may be difficult to tell which voters are dead, and which are not.
• Scientists think that logic, not emotions, drive moral decisions. That's not a surprise to me, though I know some people who would be simply shocked, shocked that gambling is taking place in this establishment.
• Ten years after MTV's Total Request Live program began, they're cancelling it. That's about nine years later than it should have been cancelled. Actually, they should just shut down MTV while they're at it. I'm sure they could use the bandwidth for another Discovery Channel, like "Discovery Plumbing." They already have lots of saggy-pant plumber's cracks on MTV, so it would be just more of the same on The Plumbing Channel. No one would notice the difference.
• Pakistan says it will shoot at US forces if the US forces conduct another cross-border raid from Afghanistan into Pakistan to go after terrorists. Hmmm. I think they're kind of missing the point. After all, US forces wouldn't need to be there if the Pakistani forces were doing their job. Getting all surly about it doesn't help things.
• Here's a creepy skin condition called Morgellons, and doctors can't agree on whether it actually exists. Looks real to me. Those multicolored fibers are really weird.
• Plastic is bad for your health, especially bisphenol A (BPA). I thought everyone knew that already. But apparently the FDA still doesn't believe it. Sigh.
• Watch where you sit, especially on sofas made in China. They can give you a nasty rash.

National Public Radio - wrong about music, along with everything else

National Public Radio is the voice of the Democrat Party (note that I don't say "Democratic Party," because their "machine politics" prove that it's not). For that reason alone, NPR should have its public funding eliminated. It's inherently wrong to make all taxpayers support speech which benefits only one group. (If their opinions had enough supporters, it would pay for itself. This is why conservative talk radio is profitable, and liberal talk radio is not. But that's another post for another day.)

But a more important reason to kill NPR's public funding is that they, and their aging hippie listeners, despise '80s music. Their listeners voted 1969 as the best year for music. Boy, those folks are oooooooold. ;-)

Thou shalt not diss the 80s. It was the decade of some of the best, most inventive music ever made. Sure, there was a lot of crap, especially toward the end of the decade as the industry focused ever more on sales (creating "stars" out of nothing through sheer marketing) and less on creativity. But the late 70s and early 80s were an explosion of musical experimentation and creativity like nothing before. It was a wild time.

Anyway. NPR, and their audience, can get bent. The 80s rule.

(NOTE: I listen to NPR sometimes, mainly for the news. I filter it heavily to screen out the condescending tone and choice of words when they talk about things they don't like, and the smiley happy tone and word-choice when they talk about things they do like. Their bias is blatant. But I shut it off completely when one of their staff gets interviewed about a book they just wrote. I think it's the height of ethical corruption to use the apparatus of NPR to advertise wares on behalf of, and for the enrichment of, an NPR employee. That's just ridiculous.)

"She's not my kind of feminist"

The other day, I (and a bunch of other people) got an email from an acquaintance. It was a chain letter that's going around the Internet, talking about how Sarah Palin (the Republican candidate for Vice President) tried to ban a bunch of books when she was mayor of a small town. Only it's not true, of course.

So anyway, this highly-educated but apparently stupid person sent us all this chain letter. So I hit "Reply To All," to illustrate her idiocy to the other people on her email list (and hopefully put a stop to such foolishness in the future,) and said, "Really, I'm surprised you fell for that one! It's not true. http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/bannedbooks.asp."

And, feeling a bit pettish, I added, "And you're a feminist, right? Why aren't you supporting a woman's bid for the White House? Hmmmmm?" I did not expect a reply.

She did reply, but only to me. She said, "She's not my kind of feminist."

I was taken aback. I didn't know there were multiple kinds of feminists. I thought true feminists were genuinely interested in the advancement of women in society. Equality for women. Equal pay. Equal political representation, with positions of power in government.

But I think this acquaintance is another kind of feminist. The less-frequently-encountered, but more-vocal and more-politically-active kind. The rage-filled man-hating lesbian kind, like Maureen Dowd. The kind that supposedly want to further women's causes, but only on THEIR leftist sociopolitical terms. The kind who viciously attack women who don't fit their idea of what a feminist should be and do and think. The kind that give true feminists a bad name.

That would explain a lot of things about this acquaintance, including her lack of support for a woman in the White House.

It's unfortunate that she would rather pass up a chance for victory simply because it would not be achieved exactly as she wants it to be achieved, than admit that there is usually more than one way to reach your goals.

(Of course, people are opposed to Sarah Palin for purely ideological reasons. But I think it is quite hypocritical for alleged feminists to oppose her, especially with such vitriol, when she represents so many of the goals that they say they want to attain.)

Midnight Star, "No Parking on the Dance Floor"

This tune from 1983 just makes me laugh.

TV review: "Fringe"

Bleagh. That's it, in a word. "Fringe" wants to be a slick, highly-produced X-Files for the new millennium. And it fails, precisely because it IS slick, highly-produced, and not in the least bit dark, cheesy or creepy. Especially because it's not creepy and inscrutable and "what the hell just happened THERE?". It's entirely too predictable. And it's already locked itself into a single big conspiracy, which is inherently more limiting, whereas The X-Files had two or three main conspiracies, mingled with a few shorter story arcs, and a whole lot of one-episode wierdness. That made it a lot more fun than "Fringe."

Only 9.1 million people watched the pilot, which isn't enough to keep it going.

I think "Fringe" will die within half a dozen episodes. Nice try, though.

Set phasers to "wedgie"

Once upon a time, as a small larva, I found myself tossing pebbles at cars one summer afternoon. I sat on the curb with a friend, and flung little rocks the size of a pea at each car that passed on the wide, high-speed road near my house. It didn't occur to me that this was rude or dangerous.

Suddenly I heard a thunk from a passing car. I don't know if it was my pebble that had gotten caught underneath a spinning tire and was hurled into the wheel well, or if my friend had thrown a rock that was too big. Regardless, the car slammed on its brakes and screeched to a halt. My friend and I got up and ran as fast as we could toward a large hedge about 50 meters away. The driver, a woman in her 30s, yelled and shook her fist at us. She was very angry. And we were very frightened as we hid in the bushes.

I realized that what we were doing was a bad thing. And so I never did it again. I learned my lesson.

Garrett Burton probably didn't realize that throwing eggs at cars is rude and dangerous. But that's what he was doing, on a busy, high-speed road behind a friend's house in a town where I once lived. And he was doing it late at night.

Someone took offense, and rightfully so. An egg splattering on your windshield, especially at night, can cause you to have an accident, and could kill you, or someone else. That someone shot and killed Garrett Burton.

It's unfortunate that they chose to kill him. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to stop, catch him, and beat the crap out of him and his friend. Or just give them both a good wedgie, yanking up their underwear in painful, public humiliation. I think lethal force was overdoing it a bit.

Perhaps Garrett would have grown up to be a good citizen, a strong worker, a loving husband and a caring father. But his poor choice of late-night activities got him killed instead, before he could learn to be any of those things.

Garrett didn't have time learn a lesson from his mistakes, and to do better next time. But other children can. Do not (a.) fuck with other people's property, (b.) especially while they are in said property, and (c.) especially if what you are doing can injure or kill someone.

I'm glad I learned that lesson while I was young. I'm glad I survived it.

Goodbye, Richard Wright

Richard Wright, keyboardist for Pink Floyd, died today. He was 65.

Here's an appropriate epitaph.

"Goodbye, Cruel World" from "The Wall," 1979

Yeeeeeehaaaaaa!

So Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch sells itself to Bank of America to avoid bankruptcy, and AIG is stumbling badly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 504 points today. It's not that bad - only 4.4% of its value. However, it IS the biggest point loss since the 9/11 attacks.

Thankfully, the Federal Reserve refused to bail out Lehman Brothers. In my humble opinion, they should not have guaranteed Bear Stearns' debts for JP Morgan Chase. If a bank or brokerage is going to fail, let it fail. People will not learn their lessons otherwise, and they will not strive to avoid such problems in the future.

And it's too late to worry about the turmoil now. It's going to get worse before it gets better. As Slim Pickens said, riding the atomic bomb down to its target in "Dr. Strangelove"...

Yeeeeehaaaaaaa!

The face of avarice

Our friend Chuck moved to Atlanta last Thursday with his daughter Cathy. He left the house behind for us to finish cleaning up, staging and getting it on the market with the realtor. In the past three weeks, he and Cathy must have thrown out perhaps 20 trash cans' worth of usable items (sometimes brand new). He was a pack rat, although he was a very organized one. He had eight one-gallon-size jars of pickles, for example. Six large toothpaste tubes and several small ones. A dozen boxes of plastic bags, all sizes, labeled on the end of the box. Four or five copies of every hand tool known to man. Gallon-baggie sizes of every kind of nail and screw and nut and bolt and washer imaginable.

My darling wife rescued a lot of it from the trash, and made sure that it was donated to the Goodwill or to the Salvation Army. Some of it she missed, and she feels badly. But it was Chuck's material to throw out, and if he wanted to be wasteful, there was only so much she could do to stop it. He was only worried about getting out of the house, that's all, so I can understand why he just threw everything out.

He left on Thursday. Friday and Saturday, my darling wife and I worked on his house and yard, making it more presentable for sale. My wife has worked very hard on this house for the past three weeks. It's because of her that it looks as good as it does. I just lift things and move things. She makes it beautiful. Or at least decent.

We were working in the garage on Saturday, piling up paint and chemicals to be donated, when a car pulled up in the driveway. A 50-something blonde woman eased out of the car, with that languid glide of the permanently-drunk alcoholic.

"Can I help you," I said, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

"I'm Chuck's stepdaughter," she said.

Oops. We knew who she was. She was J, the daughter of Chuck's late wife Ellie. The daughter who was supposed to come down during the summer and stay with Chuck and take care of him. The daughter who instead brought her husband with her, lived in Chuck's house for a couple of weeks, then while Chuck was out, proceeded to help themselves to quite a lot of Ellie's former possessions (now Chuck's), loaded them into Ellie's car (which was titled to Chuck), and drove the car back to Vermont.

Chuck was very hurt, angry and disappointed when that happened, but he didn't prosecute them. His face, however, was set against them.

So here was J, standing in front of us. She had flown down from Vermont again, without warning, intending to drop in, stay with Chuck again, and help herself to more stuff.

"Chuck moved to Atlanta on Thursday," my wife said. "Everything's gone, except the furniture that stays with the house to be sold."

J looked blank. Clearly she hadn't been told Chuck was moving. I'm not surprised, after what she did. This certainly didn't fit in with her plans. All of her mother's stuff? Gone? And no place for J to stay while she was here?

"Can I go inside the house? My mother's stuff is in there."

"No, there's nothing left," my darling wife said, flatly. She is never one to back down to anyone. Especially someone like J. "And we don't have the authority to let anyone else into the house. You'll have to call Chuck."

So J used her cellphone to call Chuck, while my darling wife shooed me into the house and closed the garage door. "Come on, we're leaving," she said. "We don't want to get involved in a family dispute." We hurried out of the house with our tools and supplies, loaded them into the car and quickly left, while J was still on the phone. I don't know what was said, but I'm fairly sure Chuck told her to fuck off.

I'm very glad my darling wife had the presence of mind to skedaddle. My inclination is always to stand my ground against someone obnoxious, especially when I have a right to be in a place and they don't. But my darling wife was smarter.

We went back a couple more times that weekend to check and make sure the house was undisturbed. J had gotten into the back lanai by jimmying a panel in the screen door, but was unable to get through the locked sliding doors. So we're fairly certain she went back to Vermont emptyhanded.

I have never seen such naked avarice face-to-face. I have never seen someone who could do such wrong, and yet be so certain that they deserved to do it.

I was happy to be a part of thwarting her. ;-)

Adventures in color blindness

Where I'm working right now is an unfriendly environment for a color blind alien.

In the ground-floor lobby, the elevators have a translucent bar across the top of the door opening. It lights up when the elevator doors are about to open, to indicate which elevator is coming for you. Today I discovered that the bar lights up in green (which looks white to me) to indicate that it's going up. It lights up red (which doesn't show at all, to me, unless I squint hard and stare at it to see it turn on or off) to indicate that it's going down. It took a trip to the basement for me to figure that out. And I've been working here for two months.

The microwaves in the main break room are R-21LCF models made by Sharp. They have a free-wheeling dial knob surrounded by light-up indicators for the number of seconds that you want the microwave to cook. As you turn the dial more and more clockwise, more second-indicators light up, and then when you let go of the dial, the microwave turns on, and the second indicators go dark in a counter-clockwise fashion, counting down the number of seconds until the microwave stops. That's just fine, if you can see the number-of-seconds indicators light up, which of course I can't. I have to count the number of clicks, and guess where the indicators are lit. It's really just easier to turn the knob 180 degrees, note the time on my watch, and then check my watch again when the microwave shuts off to see how much time has elapsed. It makes me long for the old spring-loaded egg-timer-style knobs, which tick downward to zero. At least those had a notch on the dial, and you could see where the notch was pointing. The Sharp's electronic knob has no such notch, because it spins freely, like a volume knob on a modern stereo.

Seven percent of the male population in the United States (more than 10 million people) have one or more types of color blindness. You would think that Sharp would know this. Surely more than one of the engineers who designed that microwave was color blind. Somebody needs a whack.

Peter Gabriel, "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)"

I love this quiet tune, especially the electronic Linn drum, and the sparse piano line. Like the Teletubbies TV show which repeated the same 15-minute segment twice due to babies' short attention spans, the song is repeated twice. It takes me back to lazy, happy mornings in front of the TV before I went to work, watching...the Teletubbies.

The song is about the psychological experiments of Stanley Milgram, which proved that nearly everyone has the capacity to do great evil when they are following orders from an authority figure.

I love those kinds of experiments. Squeamish, soft things that people are today, they would never allow such a dastardly experiment to take place now. But I think such science is necessary to understand, to learn.

Someone actually noticed what I was reading

I had a girl (a pretty one!) talk to me on the plane. That's the first conversation I've had with someone on the plane in at least two years. The plane is like the bus, for me. You wouldn't talk to people on the bus, generally. I don't talk to people on the plane. It's my quiet time. That's why, if they ever allow people to use cellphones on planes, I will start carrying a cellphone jammer. Shut the fuck up. It's my quiet time. Talk when you're at home on the ground.

Anyhoo. She loves the "Ender's Game" series, of which "Ender's Shadow" is a part, and wanted to know if I knew of any other series like that. I couldn't think of one for a moment. But then I started rattling them off, all books that were written before she was born (she's 22 - I asked): the Bolo series by Keith Laumer, about sentient battle tanks; the Ringworld series by Larry Niven, about an artificial world shaped like a ring around a sun; the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey; the Ship Who Sang series by Anne McCaffrey; the Miles Vorkosigan series by someone whose name escapes me. I was trying to think of things she might like, being a lady. (Okay, maybe sentient battle tanks won't get a woman's juices flowing, but they certainly do mine.)

She scribbled furiously in her notepad. I hope my suggestions help her find some cool old stuff to read, especially since so much of today's stuff (especially "media fiction") is complete shit. ;-)

DJ Icey, "Emerald"

Sure, it's monotonous and monochromatic. But it's got a groovy beat, and the single note lets your brain fill in all the major or minor harmonics you want, making a happy little tune out of it. I think it's melodically interesting to listen to, more for what's NOT there, than what IS there.

Turn up the bass on your subwoofer.

Reporters, PLEASE do some research

Okay, I am getting wired up on a rant here. Here's a story about the Tupolev Tu-160 bomber, code-named "Blackjack" by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, two of which landed in Venezuela recently on maneuvers. It's the largest combat aircraft ever built - a design copied from the American B-1B bomber, but much bigger, faster, and heavier.

Only Fox consistently misspells Tupolev as "Tupelov." Tupolev was a major aircraft manufacturer for the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century. If you're going to report on such things, at LEAST check Wikipedia for five seconds to make sure you're spelling it right. That's like someone writing a story about Boeing fighting with Northrop Grumman over the new air tanker refueling contract with the Pentagon, and misspelling "Boeing" throughout the article as "Being." There's really no excuse for that.

It must be scary to be a mom

I wouldn't know, of course. But this article makes it sound like playground politics among mothers can be vicious and debilitating.

Raising a child takes significant devotion and an inordinate amount of time and expense. I am selfish and cheap, so I decided to skip it. ;-) But despite all the hard work and chaos of raising a child, perhaps the mean mommies simply do not have enough to do, so they pick apart their fellow moms. I can't help but think that if they were dragged into a task, like, say, building a sandbag dike to protect their town from rising floodwaters, they might be inclined to be nicer to their comrades. There's nothing like a good natural disaster to build friendships and comraderie.

Then again, maybe such nasty people simply deserve a punch in the nose. (I think they were not spanked enough as children, personally.) But it made me feel bad for the nice mothers who have to put up with bratty mothers in their midst.

Hurricane protection on the cheap

Honoring the bargain-hunter's creed, "Never pay full price," we went shopping last weekend (instead of going to see Vin Diesel in "Babylon A.D." - we love a good action flick, but couldn't work up the enthusiasm to fork over $13) and found 89-inch aluminum hurricane panels at Home Despot for $14.00 each, marked down from $42.00 each (70 percent off). So we bought thirty of them to protect our back lanai. Our lanai is well-designed in that it is covered by the main roof of the house, so it doesn't look shacky and tacked-on, like some others in our neighborhood. But the danger is that wind will come into the lanai and push upward on the ceiling, and blow the roof off the house. You cannot allow hurricane winds to penetrate your walls inside the perimeter of the roof, or you risk losing the roof. Hence, the storm shutters.

However, we found out the reason that the panels were so cheap. Home Despot had bought a buttload of panels, but bought only half a buttload of the mounting track that the panels require at the top and bottom edges, to bolt the panels to the house. So a year and a half later after their mondo purchase, they still have a bunch of panels, and NO track. (This we discovered after wandering around the store for 20 minutes and asking six people.) So we will have to find the track somewhere else. Oddly enough, Lowe's is also out of the track. So we will have to special-order it. By the time I get it installed, hurricane season will be over.

Sometimes a bargain can be very annoying.

A Corvette show

We went to the first big Corvette show of the season. Many people come from all across the Southeast US. Attendance is down by half this season, because of the price of gas and the show entrance fees (which go to pay for the prizes). But there were still a ton of cars and people.

Our friend Al was there. He has two Corvettes. But we couldn't find him, even though we walked all over the place. It turns out that he had to run home to let the dogs out. So he wasn't even there when we showed up. Sigh. At least we tried.

I personally think the late 1970s Stingray models are the quintessential Corvette. Such beautiful curves. I like the two-tone paint on this one.

One thing that I noticed was that most of the Corvette owners fit the same mold - 50 to 70 years old, short, wiry (some with potbellies), and weathered.

Personally, I think the average Corvette owner is just using a car to make up for a lack of testosterone. I drive a little Japanese car, because I have Martian testosterone to spare. ;-)

Lehman Brothers teeters on the edge

Wow, Bear Stearns went under recently, and now Lehman Brothers, another big investment bank, is nearly insolvent too. They just announced a $3.9 billion loss for the third quarter, and their weak stock has dropped from $16 a share to $8 a share in less than five days. Now they're scrambling to sell off parts of their business to raise the cash to cover their losses.

How the mighty have fallen.

Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris is a professional martial artist and movie actor who starred in a string of action films in the 1970s and 1980s, and who starred in "Walker, Texas Ranger" for a long time. Now he's written a book, "Black Belt Patriotism," and he's pushing it during guest appearances on various news channels. He looks pretty good. And he's more interesting than those godawful infomercials for the "Total Gym" that he does with former model Christie Brinkley.

These days, I keep getting spam email full of incredible "facts" about Chuck Norris, and how totally awesome he is. There's actually a website where all these awesome "facts" about Chuck are gathered together. http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/

There's some really funny stuff in there.

CNN gets punked by a fake photo

CNN is so anxious to make Sarah Palin look bad, they ran with a story on a fake photo of her in a bikini holding a gun. HA!

But what's even dumber is that CNN’s Lola Ogunnaike said that ..."people say, 'yes, she looks good in a bikini clutching an AK-47, but is she equipped to run the country?'"

That's clearly NOT an AK-47 the girl is holding. It's a Crosman pneumatic (pump-up) BB gun, model 664 if I'm not mistaken. It's not even a real firearm. Most journalists wouldn't know an AK-47 if someone jammed one up their ass. (An amusing thought.) Similarly, they always call armored personnel carriers (APCs) "tanks," because they're too stupid to spend half an hour studying up on what they're reporting on. Heck, I do more research for my blog posts than most journalists do for their stories. I don't get paid for it either. I do it because I like to learn stuff. I'm convinced, though, that most journalists aren't in the business of journalism to learn anything. They're in the business of journalism to tell everyone else what to think.

Anyway. CNN got punked, and I think it's funny. Morons.

Olmert's in trouble...

Oh man, the Israeli police want to indict Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on charges of bribery and corruption and money-laundering and "breach of the public trust." Wow. Only Olmert has said he's going to resign anyway this month because of the multiple corruption investigations into his activities. It's up to the Israeli attorney general to indict him, of course.

How embarrassing.

The world is going to end right about ... now

CERN is about to start up the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest atom-smasher, at 3:30 AM EDT Wednesday. So this may be the last blog post I write, because the tinfoil-hat crowd is claiming that it will create an artificial black hole which will swallow the Earth.

I'm actually thinking that might be a good thing. ;-)

(Remember, some people thought that the first atomic explosion would set all the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere on fire. I think Enrico Fermi was kidding, of course, but some people believed it.)

Of course, maybe it will only swallow up Belgium. Which would be a trick, seeing as how the LHC is on the Swiss/French border. But who knows, black holes can move around. Belgium would be a good start. Followed by the more polluted parts of eastern Germany. Mmmm. Maybe Paris. Or Marseilles.

Nobody talks about black holes (or nuclear weapons) as being useful tools for urban renewal. I think it's time humans gave it some thought.

Ignore polls, because they're usually wrong

Here's an interesting article about how pollsters' use of landline-only respondents tends to skew the results. Only old people have land lines anymore, LOL! So poll respondents tend to skew "old." And old people have their own set of issues that they care about, which are not necessarily of interest to anyone else.

I wish the article talked about the time of day that pollsters call, because that skews the results also. Pollsters who call during the day are more likely to get a respondent who doesn't work: the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the welfare recipients.

What would this do to a poll's results, do you think? ;-)

Blast it all, I never have a pen when I need it

I was listening to Air Musique (a French-language channel on XM) on Sunday, and they played a French remake of The Human League's "Don't You Want Me," sung by a woman, mostly in French, with a few phrases in English. I found it fascinating to hear a relatively-faithful rendition of a terrific New Wave tune, with the added spin of the French language. Or maybe it was Quebecois. My ear is not that discerning, though I am told that the French regard Quebec-style French as being equivalent to a Kentucky drawl, jarring to the ear and terribly low-class. (Hey, I'm just relaying what I've been told by Quebecers themselves. I personally have no opinion. The few Quebecers I have met are very nice people. And oddly, they choose to live somewhere else than in Quebec. Go figure.)

Anyway. The artist was a woman's name, one word. And I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. I want to go look it up and listen to it again, and I cannot fucking find it. It's VERY annoying.

Gary Numan, "We Are Glass"

I love the lyrical imagery in this song. Although I'm not really sure what it means. It's cold, futuristic, and typically Gary Numan circa 1980.



We are young we can break
Watch us fall
We can take some train
Down to the sea
We are glass, we are glass
We are real you can touch
Just for now
And then say
'Hey you, which way is down'
We are glass, we are glass

We are strong we run though
We have time
And to you I'm just
One of those boys
We are glass, we are glass
We are cold
We're not supposed to cry
But it's all just a thought
So here am I
We are glass, we are glass

They run fast
Impressions of the floors inviting
Stay with me, stay with me
They run past
With telephones they scream
Well would you turn all this down
Turn all this down

You are replaced you are you
And our dreams are real
And dreams are all we need
We are glass, we are glass

We slip down
And old eyes don't cry for me
Cause I doubt I'm and I doubt you
And never never going to doubt
We are glass, we are glass

They run fast
Impressions of the floors inviting
Stay with me, stay with me
They run past
With telephones they scream
Well would you turn all this down
Turn all this down

Holy unexpected justice, Batman!

• I'm very surprised that they actually arrested Hisham Talaat Moustafa, the Egyptian billionaire-businessman-turned-politician who has been accused of ordering the hit on Suzanne Tamim, a popular Lebanese singer, in Dubai, who had allegedly broken off an affair with him. Apparently Egyptians are also surprised at Moustafa's arrest, given that corruption is rampant there, and powerful businessmen and the political elite are considered to be untouchable. The government even banned the Egyptian media from talking about Tamim's murder in August, after accusations against Moustafa surfaced and he complained that such talk was bad for the economy. (?) We'll see if Moustafa is actually (a.) tried for the murder and (b.) convicted. But the fact that he was even arrested is amazing. Points for Egypt, even if Dubai's police are shaming them into cooperating.
• Albert Stanley, the former CEO of KBR (once a subsidiary of Halliburton), pled guilty last week to charges of paying bribes to foreign officials to secure oil contracts. (Paying bribes to employees of foreign governments is illegal under US law.) Now he has agreed to work with federal prosecutors to rat out his fellow oil businessmen who do the same thing, and it has the potential to snowball into a huge scandal. It may reach as high as Vice President Dick Cheney, or higher. This will be interesting.
• The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 is going into effect in November. That means creditors have to watch more diligently for common-sense "red flags" to identify fraudulent credit applications or identity-theft activity. I never even heard of this law; it's sad that it's taken five years to implement it, and sadder still that some people are still fighting it (citing expense, extra work, blah blah blah). I think that if the states re-institute public hangings, and start stringing up identity thieves, that will do a lot more to put a stop to it. ;-)
• The best antidote to a home invasion like this one is a gun. I'm not sure if the homeowners had one of their own, but they grabbed a shotgun from one of the home invaders and killed him with it, and wounded his partner. Bravery and quick thinking saved the homeowners' lives.

Honoring someone's sacrifice

We were walking along the beach yesterday, and found a young cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) sitting on the sand. He did not move as we approached, so we knew he was ill, or dying.


His right foot was folded under him, broken or torn off. Perhaps it made it difficult for him to swim, and to catch fish.

He sat there, looking at us. We called a naturalist friend of ours, who we thought might know who to call to come rescue him, since The Pelican Man's bird shelter is no longer operating. We left a message. She didn't call us back.


We wandered further down the beach, and came upon a scattering of small silver fish, baby mullet, that a fisherman had caught in his net and then discarded. They were fresh and pliable, only minutes or hours dead.


We picked up a handful of them and took them back to the cormorant. We washed the sand off of them in the surf, and tossed them to him, one by one.


He gobbled them down eagerly and then looked around for more, but we didn't have any more.

He seemed newly energized after his meal of fish. I hope it made the difference between his living and dying. As we walked away, he kept looking at his club foot, as if he was wondering why it wouldn't work right. I hope he survives in spite of it.


I hate to see animals suffer. And I hate to see the death of an animal wasted, like those baby fish who were caught and then simply discarded by an unthinking fisherman. That's why we made sure to make use of their bodies, to feed them to the cormorant, who in turn might live a little longer.


It's the right thing to do.

Olbermann and Matthews - BUSTED

I think it's amusing that Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews have been booted as co-anchors of political coverage on MSNBC, and were replaced by David Gregory. It's apparent that MSNBC is smarting under increasing pressure from the public and the blogosphere about its rampant leftist bias, epitomized by Olbermann and Matthews.

Not that Gregory is any better, of course. We'll see how long HE can pretend to be objective. ;-)

Freakishness in Fresno

A guy breaks into a house occupied by two sleeping farm laborers, rubs "Pappy's Seasonings" on one of them and hits the other one with a sausage, and runs away.

They caught him a few minutes later, after he left his wallet at the scene. Unfortunately the suspect dropped the assault sausage, which was then eaten by a dog.

I am very curious to know what the hell that guy was smoking. What ALL of them were smoking.

And here I thought Boulder was the weirdest place on Earth.

The biggest bailout in decades, and you're paying for it

Over the weekend, while they hoped no one was looking, the US federal government nationalized the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac). Sure, they were quasi-governmental entities anyway, which bought mortgages, packaged them into mortgage-backed securities, and sold them to investors. Together they own or guarantee half of the US' $12 trillion mortgage debt. They are responsible for more than 80 percent of new mortgages written in 2008.


Given the deteriorating state of the economy, and of real estate in particular, the government seized the two companies and merged them into a conservatorship called the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). And the taxpayers are stuck guaranteeing the bill of $5.4 trillion dollars.


They did this to avoid creating more turmoil worldwide in the stock markets, they say. I think they're just doing it to save what remains of their own investments. I believe in laissez-faire capitalism. If someone screws up, let the chips fall where they may. So if these two companies, which the government said are "too big to fail," actually DID fail, there will be economic turmoil. A depression. Soup kitchens, with people lined up around the block. Hyperinflation and food riots.

And if that happened, perhaps people would learn something from their mistakes. Bailing out these two mismanaged companies does not help anyone learn from their mistakes. Instead, it protects them, insulates them from the consequences of their mistakes.

But let's focus on the moment. Since the existing national debt (the money Americans owe themselves for governmental spending that is over and above the budget) is already $9.6 trillion dollars (that's 9,600,000,000,000 dollars), or $31,756 dollars per person in the United States, it seems to me that adding $5.4 trillion more dollars of FHFA debt (guaranteed by you, the taxpayer) equals $16 trillion dollars, or $52,512 per person in the United States, an increase of 66 percent overnight.

No one seems to be worried, particularly. But I think they should be. I think the government is just buying time with this weekend's action. I don't think it's going to alter the outcome.

Gary Wright, "Love Is Alive"

I need to buy some of Gary Wright's albums. I had forgotten that he did "Dreamweaver," another classic.

Set To Explode, "DFC"

I'm feeling very calm today, so this tune is not indicative of my mood or any particular situation. I just heard it on XM today and I thought it was funny. The album version sounds much better than this one. I enjoy the lyrics.



Another night of the fashion parade
Plastic lives and their downfall we crave
Say something clever we'll ruin your night
Hit & run, just for fun, then we're out of sight!

Don't fucking care, don't fucking care, don't fucking care, don't fucking care

How many friends can you make?
How many ideas can you fake?
The cool clothes that you wear
Your stupid fuckin' hair!

Keeping watch on the latest trends
Your search for an identity never ends
Cheap smiles making everything feel right
Drug induced conformity every night!

Don't fucking care, don't fucking care, don't fucking care, don't fucking care

"Police your territory or we'll do it for you"

I thought that the US's cross-border raid into the South Waziristan region of northern Pakistan to wipe out some terrorists (or civilians, depending on who's telling the story) was interesting. It said very loudly that since ex-president Pervez Musharraf had failed to bring terrorists to heel in the rough northern border, and since said terrorists were using Pakistan as a base from which to launch attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan, it was time to make it clear that scampering one mile across a line on the map does not necessarily make you safe from retaliation.

I thought that was amusing. And long overdue. Deliberately restraining oneself from achieving victory by refusing to cross some imaginary line only entices one's enemy to be more flagrant in their defiance. It's unfortunate that Pakistan's military and secret police are annoyed by the US' incursion, but then, since the loyalty of those forces is suspect, methinks they doth protest too much. If they won't do their jobs, someone else will do it for them.

Although the western media whined that such action endangered the presidential bid of pro-western candidate Asif Ali Zardari (widower of former PM Benazir Bhutto), it does not seem to have hurt him in the long run, since he in fact won the election on Saturday.

I just think it's interesting.

Duvall, "True"

I'm sure Spandau Ballet are spinning in their collective grave. Wait, they're not dead yet. Why, oh why then, do I feel so old?

Duvall (a Christian band, oddly enough), doing a cover of Spandau Ballet's "True."

Though they certainly aren't the only ones who have covered it. If only they hadn't played the original to death on the radio throughout the 1980s . . . perhaps I wouldn't feel the urge to hurl right now.

I think The Dead Milkmen could have done a breezier, snottier, more raucous version of it. THAT would be fun to hear.

I'm glad someone else is telling George Lucas to hang it up

I laughed out loud when I read this. George Lucas hasn't put out a decent movie since, oh, 1982. It's time he quit.

Although I would still like to see "Clone Wars," only because I like animation. And all the pretty colored lightsabers.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick folds

I am amazed that the Democrat mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, actually gave up, pled guilty to two of ten felony charges against him, and resigned. It's been a long and torturous series of criminal cases against him, and he was defiant to the end. Only when the Democrat Governor of Michigan opened a hearing against him yesterday to remove him from office, did he give up. He resigned, forfeited his city pension, lost his law license, and is forbidden to run for office again for five years. He will also serve at least 4 months in jail and must pay $1 million to the city of Detroit in restitution for all the money he wasted in inappropriate spending, lost in federal funds through bungling paperwork, and cost the citizens of Detroit in fighting his legal cases.

Thugs like Kilpatrick disgust me. He reminds me of District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry in the 1990s. Barry was busted multiple times for dealing drugs, and yet he was re-elected to the mayor's office after he served time in prison. I think that in some ways, that says worse things about the voters in DC than it does about Barry.

I'm glad Kilpatrick can't run again for five years. No doubt the judge was thinking about Marion Barry when he imposed that restriction. But would Detroit voters be stupid enough to vote for Kilpatrick again? Probably. They voted for him in the first place.

Sigh.

New tools

One of the benefits of helping our neighbor Chuck get ready to move away is that he wants to sell us (or give us) stuff. For example, an 8,000 watt gas-powered generator, only 3 years old, rarely used. Or a .35 Remington lever-action rifle, circa 1950, which just happens to be able to shoot the same bullets as the .357 revolver bullets I already use. (Not the same cartridge, of course, just the bullets. A happy coincidence of which I was unaware when he first suggested that I take it off his hands. I enjoy having shared components among my tools - it makes it easier to buy supplies for them.)

I insisted on paying him for those items, because they have a decent value, and I cannot bear to take advantage of an old man's kindness. I appreciate his generosity in wanting to give them to us, but I knew I would feel better if I paid him.

And I hope he does too.

The most useful tools in the world

In addition to the average pliers, screwdrivers, wire cutters, crescent wrenches, channel-lock pliers, socket wrenches, and power screwdrivers and cordless drills, every household should have these two essential pieces of power equipment:

• A reciprocating saw. You will be able to cut through almost anything with one of these. You will amaze yourself with how many uses you find for this tool, especially for hacksawing or demolition of wood or metal structures.
• A hammer drill. If you live in a concrete-block house, or one with materials that are difficult to penetrate with a regular drill, you have to have a hammer drill. Now I have one, a reconditioned Bosch purchased on Amazon for half-price, from the official Bosch tool reseller.

One of the things my darling wife taught me is to never pay full price. For example, she found our Makita cordless drill (a $150 item, new), for $5 at a garage sale, simply because the owner had lost the $65 charger. Bought a charger on Amazon, and seven years (and two batteries) later, it soldiers on. My hammer drill is brand new except for a few scratches. Well, I'm going to put a heck of a lot more scratches and gouges on it, so at least it's broken in.

With so many other irritating celebrities...

...why can't Egyptian tycoons-turned-government-bigwigs put a hit on someone more deserving? Like Britney Spears? Or Barbra Streisand?

I remember hearing something about the Dubai murder of Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim, but I don't think the old media here in the United States covered it, and I didn't glean enough from the other stories I read in the blogosphere to figure out what had happened.

Anyway. It was a horrific, stupid crime, and I'm glad to see that a culprit has been identified. But perhaps it sets a precedent. There's plenty of people who could be more deserving of Tamim's fate than she was. Someone's already compiled a list. ;-)

Altruistic gardening

I spent a couple hours early this morning to help my darling wife move a ton or two of compost and mulch from a large bin at the local county park into some new gardens that she and her master gardener friends are building.

She gets credit from the county for the volunteer hours that she works, such as the hours she worked this morning. These hours count toward her 100-hours-a-year requirement for volunteer work, needed to maintain her standing as a master gardener.

I get nothing but a sense of accomplishment in helping my darling wife do something she loves.

And an aching back.

I gave up my baby!

In a fit of insanity, I gave up my baby for adoption last week.

I had bought my Colt HBAR II heavy-barrelled AR-15 match rifle back in 1998 or so, when I had figured that I would be shooting long-distance NRA rifle matches with it. It had the short barrel, and a removable handle which I replaced with a very expensive Leupold 4.5x-14x variable power 60mm scope. It was a beautiful, bright scope, and did a good job of highlighting the tiny .223-caliber holes that the rifle made downrange.

I spent over $2100 on my baby, plus a dozen 30-round magazines and a pile of ammunition.

But I wasn't really happy with it.

• The .223 cartridge itself is a bit of a disappointment. It makes a lot of noise, but doesn't have great weight behind it. The tiny bullet gets blown around by the wind, and the hole is so small that it's difficult to see on a black NRA regulation target, even with a honking big scope. And it has poor penetrating power. That's why it's not allowed for most game hunting. In Viet Nam, the Army developed it to wound people, not kill them, with the philosophy that wounding one man removes three men from the battlefield (two other men to carry the wounded man). And if they ignore him and don't carry him away, his screams are demoralizing to his comrades. That bothers me. Use a .30-caliber round and do the job properly, I say. Don't make people suffer.
• The action tends to jam periodically, and you have to pound the bolt open with a metal rod and a hammer. The bolt has a little scoop indentation just for this purpose. But to me, it's a bad design if that's how it has to be done.
• Every time I fired it, the twang of the recoil spring inside the stock next to my ear grated on me. Twang. Twang. Twang. Very annoying.
• And of course, the short barrel meant that it is too short for most rifle racks. I had to lay it on the ground, which meant that it was a risk for people tripping over it. Not a good choice on my part.

So I was never really happy with it. Even though it was my most expensive firearm, and took up the most space in the safe, it wasn't doing it for me.

So after 10 years, I have put it up for consignment at a local shop. The proprietor says that it may not sell quickly, since most people like to customize their own AR-15s and hang "trash" all over them (lights, lasers, bayonets, pistol foregrips, etc.). Mine doesn't have any trash, other than the scope. And if he thinks I should sell them separately, I will. It doesn't matter to me anymore.

I was surprised at how suddenly, quickly, I arrived at my decision. But I think I made my decision years ago. I just finally acted on it now.

Watch and learn, grasshopper

My darling wife: "Do I need to bring my ID in case we get carded tonight?"

Mindless Marvin: "Naaaaaaahhhh."

Long pause.

Mindless Marvin: "Um, yes, YES, I think you SHOULD bring your ID. Absolutely. Yes."

My darling wife: (guffaws of laughter)

Mindless Marvin, to nephew: "Watch and learn from my mistakes, grasshopper. You will see this material again."

Nephew smiles.

Tramp stamps

We went and saw Carl Rimi at a local comedy club the other night. He was very funny, and one of the comments that he made was about "tramp stamps," which are tattoos on a woman's lower back.

He talked about a woman he met who had a tramp stamp that said "Trust No One," in a reference to a recurring theme in "The X Files."

To me, tramp stamps are designed to be best viewed from behind, during intimate moments. It's an oxymoron that such a phrase would be tattooed on a woman's back, to be viewed when she is in a submissive posture, when that very posture requires a certain amount of trust in her partner.

It seems strange to me. But then, it was just a joke.

I hope.

I had no idea...

...that the Republican National Convention was being held this week. Points for trying to boost a weak local economy there, but penalties for lousy, lousy coordination with the weather. ;-) Now I understand what one pundit on television said, in that if it weren't for bad luck, the Republicans would have no luck at all. Fortunately, Gustav is turning out to be less of a storm than Katrina was. Does that mean I'll watch the convention? No, of course not. Boooorrring. I think they should skip conventions, personally. They're just big media circuses that amount to nothing but a waste of airtime. Save the money and spend it on useful things, like . . . like . . . well, certainly not advertising. That's a waste too. I think I've seen five political ads on TV this season. I'm doing my best to avoid television. Maybe spend it on creating jobs, or paying down the national debt or something. Or fomenting revolution in former Soviet Georgia. Nahhh... that's been done. ;-)

(The only reason that I knew about the Democratic National Convention was being held was because it was being held in Denver, and generally, the Denverites I know were not pleased that it was being held there. That matched a poll online that I saw, which showed that most Denverites ignored the convention there. Perhaps San Francisco would have been more appreciative, had it been held there. Certainly the attendees would have blended in better.)

I think it's great that McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. She's sharp, conservative, family-oriented, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, and her eldest son is deploying to Iraq with the Army. (Can't have any cries of "chickenhawk" this time around.) It provides some interest to an otherwise dull and uninspiring election, especially because I think this time a woman WILL be successful at attaining the executive branch of the federal government. Does it change the election at all? Not really. It's not about vice presidents, who are merely presidents-in-waiting. It's all about the presidential candidates, who are still boring. But at least the whole package is less boring than it was. It's not worth paying attention to more than occasionally.

Luckily "Chuck" and "Bones" and "Reaper" and "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" and "The Big Bang Theory" will resume soon with their new seasons, or I would only have my DVDs of "Cowboy Bebop" to keep me from slipping into a coma this fall.

Lucky Chuck

I have seen many old people waste away, neglected by their children. There are a lot of old people here, and so I see it more than usual. But our friend Chuck, at 88, is very fortunate.

Ellie, Chuck's wife of 25 years, died back in the spring, after a severe stroke and a short stay in a nursing home. Ellie's daughter was supposed to move down from Vermont and take care of Chuck, since he was all alone. Instead, she came down for a week, ransacked the house and helped herself to all of her mother's possessions while Chuck was out shopping, and then took Ellie's car (titled in Chuck's name) and drove back to Vermont.

Chuck was despondent. He didn't bother to sic the police on her, since it would have just been more painful. But now he was really alone. Always a vigorous and keenly intelligent man, he spent long stretches of time alone in his house, and his health began to fail. We didn't know it, because we were busy, and we thought his daughter was taking care of him so we didn't worry about it.

Now another daughter, Cathy, from his first of three marriages, has come from Atlanta to help him. She's going to pack him up and move him home with her, to live out his days with her and her husband and her 16-year-old granddaughter. It will be a tight fit until they can find a different house in Atlanta, but at least Chuck has a place to go.

We're helping to pack him up, donate tons and tons of stored-up items and furniture, clean his house, mow his lawn, and get him moved out. We hooked him up with our realtor to get his house on the market. It's a terrible market right now, and the house is nothing special, but it has two lots, with a vigorous fruit grove on the second lot. It's a beautiful banana-filled rain forest. I think someone will like to buy it.

I feel badly for Chuck, because it's bewildering to him to see his whole life being packed up, sold off, or given away, before he himself is taken away to another city, never to return. But at the same time, there's nothing left for him here, and at least he'll live out his last days surrounded by family.

Chuck is very lucky. I'll miss him, but I'm very happy for him too.

The 80s Regeneration Tour

Saturday night was a fun concert - the 80s Regeneration Tour. The house was packed with about 5000 people; most of them were in their 40s and 50s, but many were in their 20s. I thought it was odd to see college girls singing all the words, and even dancing with choreographed moves, to songs that were on the radio before they were born. I suppose they learned them in the clubs when they have "80s Night."

Naked Eyes opened the set at 7:15, the earliest I have EVER had a rock concert open. It was nice to not have to sit around until 9:00 waiting for the "real" music to start. Naked Eyes were in good form, and played some of their old hits like "Always Something There To Remind Me" and "Promises Promises," as well as stuff from their new EP, "Movies I Dream" and their recent 2007 album, "Fumbling with the Covers." (At their website, you can hear an extended remix version of "Always Something There To Remind Me," which is kind of fun. I don't know if it's on rotation or not, but it plays in a popup.)

A Flock of Seagulls came on at 8:15, and the place really started jumping, especially to "Space Age Love Song" and "I Ran." Mike Score, the lead singer, pointed out that the drummer, Michael Brahm, is now wearing his signature two-pronged hairstyle since Mike no longer has enough hair to do it. (Mike wore a baseball cap with a long ponytail cascading down his back.) Guitarist Joe Rodriguez was simply amazing - I have rarely seen such an unassuming guitarist play so beautifully. No theatrics for him - he was in command, self-possessed, and in control, but not wild and over the top like other guitarists.

After a long intermission, Missing Persons came on around 9:15. Dale Bozzio, the lead singer, looks as beautiful as ever, though you couldn't really tell because she was wearing a narrow-brimmed fedora hat, a floppy knee-length blazer jacket and elephant-leg jeans. Her voice has also dropped half an octave in the past 25 years, and at 53, she reminds me a lot of comedienne Joan Rivers when she talks with a heavy New Yawk Jewish accent. She talked a bit in between songs, and seemed to be a bit flaky, but by the end of their set, I figured out that's just the way she is. She reminisced repeatedly about the late Frank Zappa (who was a family friend), thanked the audience repeatedly for being there, and during the intermission following their set, she and drummer Terry Bozzio (I think it was Terry - he was the right age, and I've never seen them before) got down into the audience and signed autographs for 20 minutes. I thought that was VERY cool. Musically, they didn't sound very "tight," and Dale's voice can't do the acrobatics that it used to, but it was wonderful to see them, and they were very appreciative of the audience. They played great hits like "Words," "Walking in LA" and "Mental Hopscotch," mostly off their Greatest Hits CD. It was lots of fun.

After another long intermission, The Romantics came on around 10:15. They played several of their hits, including "Talking In Your Sleep," "One In a Million" and "What I Like About You" (which is currently being used in a car commercial on TV). I think the audience got into Flock Of Seagulls and The Romantics the most during this concert, because everyone was on their feet dancing. The Romantics are interesting in that they are all guitar-based (they traded off guitars and basses at one point, and they all wore 1960s-style black suits (Brad Elvis, the drummer, even wore a tie!)). They have TONS of energy and put on a great show. I always loved the video for "What I Like About You." You don't see a drummer singing too often in a video, other than old Genesis. After their set, they came down and signed autographs also.

The last group, ABC, came on around 11:00. Martin Fry is in excellent vocal shape, and performed such hits as "Poison Arrow" and "Be Near Me" and "How to Be a Millionaire." They sounded VERY tight and practiced, and nearly everyone was dancing. I was surprised at Martin's Vegas-style white jacket with the sequins on the back, and his big sparkly belt buckle... his hair is fading toward white, so it seemed a bit cheesy to me, but I get the impression that he's always been flamboyant that way. The band put on an excellent show. Toward the end, Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons danced out onto the stage with a glass of wine and sang along with the bassist. It was very fun.

I'm glad I went. It was a bit of a shock to see how old we all were, but also nice to see young people in the crowd also. I had a nice chat with a couple next to me who were in their 40s; he was a dwarf from the Midwest, and she was a tall blonde British woman who was easily as tall as I am. They had been married for more than 20 years, and they had seen many 80s bands back in their heyday and more recently. It was nice to talk with fellow 80s fans.