The Super Bowl is being played right in my back yard, practically.
I don't really care. I don't even know who's playing.
I do know that we've been invited over to our neighbor's house to watch it on his big-screen TV with surround sound. There will be a bunch of people there.
Me, I'm going for the food, and to play with their dog.
And I'm taking earplugs.
The Illinois Senate impeached Governor Rod Blagojevich yesterday, 59-0, on corruption charges for attempting to sell the empty US Senate seat that was occupied by President Barack Obama when Obama was in the US Senate. (The Illinois Governor has the power to appoint a replacement for US Senators from Illinois.) The Illinois Senate replaced him with Lieutenant Governor Patrick Quinn.
The Illinois Senate also voted to prevent Blagojevich from ever holding public office in Illinois again.
I'm surprised. Blagojevich made the rounds of the network talk shows in New York City this week, trying to portray himself as an innocent victim, and it sounded like people were beginning to believe him.
I'm glad the Illinois Senate didn't.
Next question: Will the continuing FBI investigation of Blagojevich's corruption shed light on the corruption in Obama's past? I doubt it.
So, the US House of Representatives passed the trillion-dollar stimulus bill, 244-188, with 177 Republicans and 11 Democrats voting No. (And it WILL be a trillion dollars, or more, by next year.) Now it's off to the Senate, which will probably pass it.
It's correctly being called The Generational Theft Act of 2009 because it's placing an additional $6,700 of debt on every household in the United States, debt that your grandchildren will be paying. Sure, every household already owes $516,348 ($31,000 a year for 75 years) on the outstanding $56.1 trillion debt (as of 2007). So it's only a drop in a very big bucket. But it's getting worse, not better. And the national debt crisis can continue only as long as people have "faith" in the government. Eventually that will end, and it will be interesting to watch the chaos (from a safe place - like in orbit).
But for now, no one's really paying attention. And four years from now, when the economy is still limping, and the trillion dollars is gone, no one will be able to explain where it went, or why it didn't help. And the US will have nothing but hyper-inflation to show for it.
I only hope that the Representatives and Senators (and of course our Dear Leader Obama) who supported it now can be punished for its failure then. Because none of them have learned the lesson:
Sometimes you do more damage by doing something than by doing nothing.
And the people to whom they're handing the money are just going to waste it. Far better to let them starve, or go bankrupt, or whatever they would have done had they not gotten the money. It won't make any difference.
I like Rob Rogers' summation.
I'm a planning sort of alien. Calculating, if you will. I like to formulate a plan and stick with it unless there's convincing evidence to change it.
Plan 9, for example. That was a great plan. And it would have worked, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,484326,00.html
Anyway. We suddenly have a friend coming to visit for a week. This is sufficient evidence to change around our renovation plans. The master bath is now top priority, whereas it was once #3... or #9.
I am plugging in the jackhammer as I type.
Yesterday he:
One of those quintessential 1970s guitar-hero hits. I love music like this.
I drive a lot of rental cars. They all look the same. And more than once, I've gotten into the wrong car, and only realized it when I tried to start it, and it wouldn't start.
Most of the door keys are the same, you see. But the ignition keys are unique to the car. So if I didn't realize that the car wasn't mine until that point, failing to start it would be a big clue.
Usually the lack of trash in the passenger's footwell is also a big clue. I tend to shit up my cars, though I clean them out when I return them. But before I return them, the passenger's seat and footwell are a handy trash bin.
Anyway, a friend of mine bought something at a store yesterday, went out to the parking lot and put it in the passenger's seat of her car, then went back into the store.
When she came out and got into her car, her purchases were missing. At first she thought she'd been robbed.
Then she realized she'd put her purchases in someone else's car.
The other car was gone by that time, of course. Now she doesn't know what to do.
I feel badly for her, but I think this will be a good lesson.
"Shit up your car so you will recognize that you're in the wrong car more quickly."
Here endeth the lesson.
The local paper ran a front-page picture of one of the World War 2 bombers that was at our airport this week. But the picture showed a B-24 Liberator, and the caption identified it as a B-17.
I really wish "journalists" would take a little bit of care in their reporting. Just a little. The two aircraft look quite different, after all.
This is a B-24.
Big, boxy, and a twin tail with rounded corners. Ten .50-caliber machineguns for defense, with a crew of ten. The B-24 was sometimes described as "the crate that the B-17 was shipped in." It's ungainly-looking, weighs the same as a B-17 (36,000 pounds empty), carries more bombload than the B-17 (8000 pounds), has the same engines (1200 hp Wrights) but is about 40 miles per hour faster (290 mph max) than the B-17, and has about 600 miles more range than the B-17, which was important for those long-distance bombing runs.
This is a B-17.
Slimmer, more graceful, with a large swoopy single tail. (Ignore the P-38 Lightning fighter in the background, flying escort.) Thirteen .50-caliber machineguns for defense, with a crew of ten. Six thousand pounds of bombload, max speed 25o mph, range 2400 miles. Poetry in motion, in my opinion. There's just something curvy and beautiful about its lines, which isn't true about the B-24.
I would send the newspaper editor a note to point out the error, but there are a million old farts in this area who know those planes much better than I do. A bunch of them flew on those planes, or serviced them. They'll send a bunch of nastygrams for me, because, after all, they have nothing better to do - they're retired.
"I think I'm gonna have a heart attack," he said, leaning on his shovel.
"Really," I said, not looking up from my concrete work. He had "resting" for a good twenty minutes now, and he'd been blathering on a bit, especially about the Bible. I was getting tired of his voice. I'm good with people, up to a point. Suddenly I reach that point, and I must withdraw, or I become insufferably rude.
"Yes," he said, oblivious to my irritation. "Every so often I feel like my heart stops, and it's an eternity before it starts again. But if God wants to call me home, I'm ready to go."
I'm ready for you to go too, I said to myself.
"How old are you?" I asked aloud, feigning concern.
"Forty-seven," he said.
"And you say it feels like your heart stops beating?" I asked.
"Yes!" he exclaimed.
"And after a minute, it starts beating again?"
"Yes! And my heart races too, sometimes. It feels like I'm running a marathon," he said.
"You probably have Pre-Ventricular Contractions, or PVCs," I said, offhandedly. "Half of all males over 40 have them, and most of them are unaware of them. But they get worse if you consume caffeinated drinks or foods. Did you have coffee this morning?"
"Yes," he said, doubtfully. "Three cups."
"Knock off the coffee," I said. "And the chocolate."
I don't think I gave him the sympathy he was looking for, because he shut up and got back to work.
And that was the effect I wanted.
Apparently so.
http://drowseymonkey.blogspot.com/2009/01/going-to-dark-side-or-whatever.html
That's not as bad as not having seen "GalaxyQuest," though. Not seeing that movie should be a crime.
I read a nice, thoughtful post about how to help suicidal people just by listening, giving them the space to talk through their feelings. And if they kill themselves anyway, it was their choice, and you did what you could. Just listen, and don't take responsibility. Listening is usually enough. The suicidal person has to take responsibility from that point on.
I remember doing that, from both sides, as talker and as listener. As a listener, I remember trying to empathize with the suicidal person without telling them what they should think, feel or do. And it's usually difficult for me just to keep quiet. Each time the opportunity presents itself, I try to do better. It's usually been helpful to them, I like to think.
As a talker, I remember the concerned-yet-guarded look in the listener's eyes, as she was being paid to listen, but frankly, she had absorbed all the pain that she could handle, and couldn't absorb any more. It was interesting to watch her listen, being professionally calm and supportive, yet still deflecting the emotional impact of the words she was hearing. At the time, I felt pity for her, interestingly enough, and I found it helpful to me.
Everyone's pain is relative, and it's helpful to witness someone else's pain to lessen your own.
And yet I still love this bumper sticker. It's one of my favorites. I don't think there's any situation in which you can't find some humor, no matter how black.
I like the arpeggiator keyboard and the vocal harmonies in this piece. But I have to say, the black human-shapes with pink mouths and white teeth remind me of nothing so much as highly-evolved leeches using drum machines. Pretty song, colorful graphics, disturbing interpretation in my own alien mind.
Still, the song has a catchy beat, and lyrics that are upbeat and positive. It makes one want to leap to one's pseudopods and glorp around the laboratory.
There isn't much that I feel I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house
There isn't much (isn't much) that I feel I need (that I feel I need)
A solid soul (solid soul) and the blood I bleed (blood I bleed)
With a little girl (with a little girl) and by my spouse (by my spouse)
I only want (I only want) a proper house (a proper house)
I don't care for fancy things
Or to take part in a vicious race
And children cry for the man who has
A real big heart and a father's grace
I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls
I got to see a B-17G bomber flying today, making its annual rounds through our little airport. I got to see them fire up the engines, taxi, and take off right over my head.
I'm surprised there's actually a book called "Never Trust a Man in Alligator Loafers: What His Shoes Say About His True Love Potential."
Please.
I think that men, in general, don't care what shoes they wear. They wear shoes that are practical and comfortable and which fit their profession. Women, in general, are the ones who care about shoes. A shoe is a statement for a woman. A shoe is a piece of functional clothing for a man.
In a woman's quest to figure out men, it makes sense to market a book to women using things that interest them, like shoes. But I think the shoe metaphor is quite stretched-out and ill-fitting.
I agree, in general, that men who wear alligator loafers tend to be sleazy and self-absorbed, the kind of middle-aged little man with greasy hair who thinks he's a stud, who pulls up to the corner gas station in his beat-up Cadillac to buy some cigarettes.
And men who wear sandals (the hiking kind) tend to be stringy, outdoorsy and irritatingly pious about environmental causes. (If they wear them with white socks, they are less outdoorsy, tend to have emotional issues, and/or are gay.)
But I'm not sure you can extrapolate much other male behavior through other types of shoes. ;-) Really.
I wear white Keds, most of the time. For work, I wear black leather loafers or oxfords. Occasionally I wear steel-toed boots, for difficult or dangerous terrain. I don't think this is so much a statement about me, as a statement about the work I do.
I think a person's car says more about them. I think within the purpose of transportation, the car or truck is a reliable baseline from which you can draw conclusions about the owner's personality. The vehicle still has four wheels and an engine, and it gets you there. Looks are entirely up to the owner. The choice of shoe is constrained by conformity to work rules, or fashion, or dedicated purpose, and therefore so is its appearance (and also its usefulness across varying types of terrain).
For example, from personal observation, a person driving a Volkswagen Jetta tends to be in their 20s and a bit of an asshole, but will generally back down in a confrontation. A person driving a Dodge Ram pickup tends to be in their 30s and may also display assholish tendencies, is slower to anger than a Jetta driver but is more likely to be violent in a confrontation. (Handy little tips there for dealing with terrestrial traffic.) Toyota Corolla drivers are generally young, calm, practical, and may be flattened with impunity, while Toyota Camry and Avalon drivers are progressively older, more oblivious to people behind them, still practical, though harder to crush.
Anyway. I think trying to understand men through shoes is a bit like trying to understand women through toasters. Outside of a narrow range of stereotypical male behavior, shoes are not a very good gauge.
This is the last half of the song from his 1994 album, "Sacrifice," with a video montage from various concerts. I've been lucky to see Gary several times. He's an awesome performer. And "Sacrifice" is a terrific album, not as dark or gothy as the more recent "Exile" or "Pure" or "Jagged."
I'm a ghost in the dark and I'm yours.
I belong in the past and I'm yours.
Like a song you forget, and I'm yours.
Like a dream in the night, and I'm yours.
The wrong place? The wrong time? I don't know.
The wrong face? Yours or mine? I don't know.
Like a tear when you sleep, I'll be yours.
Like a scar that won't fade, I'll be yours.
Like a pain in the cold, I'll be yours.
Like a fear in the heart, I'll be yours.
The wrong word when you cry I will be
Like the seed of a lie I will be
Like the germ of disease I will be
Like the last one who cared I will be
Like your shadow I will haunt you
Do you remember? I said to you
'Love is a mountain but harder to climb.
It should be forever but love is unkind
To me. Don't let me down.'
And you let me down.
I hate that question, personally. I used to tell people that I met my darling wife in jail, but for some reason, she didn't appreciate it. So now I just let her tell them that we met at a garage sale that she was having, when I brought a bunch of junk over for a mutual friend to sell. I had a huge beard to help hide my ill-fitting human face, which put her off. Later, when my face fit better, I removed the beard, and she liked me better.
Apparently, online is the most popular way for people to meet, now. I wonder what that does to the divorce rate, when couples who met online figure out that "you're not the person I thought you were." One is less likely to have that unfortunate realization if you meet potential mates in person first, when you can be more selective. It's easy for people to pretend to be who their potential mate wants them to be, when it's an online relationship. It's harder to hide who you really are if you begin your relationship in real life. Not impossible, of course, just harder.
Translating "online" into real life is the stumbling block, I think.
(Did you notice that in those eHarmony commercials, usually only one person in the couple speaks? The other person is always silent. I always like to imagine what the silent person is thinking, as their partner tells the world how wonderful their relationship is. I also wonder, as I watch the commercial, if those people are still together.)
Such a fun, bouncy tune. I think today's artists are quite unable to achieve such perfection as this.
Normally when I wake up and don't know where I am, I'm home. I never do that when I'm traveling.
Now I wake up and don't know where I am, because it's COLD. I moved to the jungle so it could be warm. I've had enough of -20 C and snow.
It's approaching zero Celsius tonight, and I'm sure our banana trees are not going to like it. I sure don't. The ocean is roaring, the wind is whipping, the sky is gray and the palm trees are lashing the air with their fronds.
It's definitely winter in the jungle.
The dreams right before you wake up are usually the most vivid and easily-remembered, simply because they are the most recent before waking. But this morning's dream was stranger than most.
I was standing in front of a Big Lots discount store, waiting for it to open. (I have never done that, but this is a dream.) The store was dark and quiet, even though it was two minutes to opening time. Then the scene shifted, the lights came on inside, and suddenly I was surrounded by a hundred or more people, all waiting to get into the Big Lots. They were getting impatient.
And then the women in the crowd began to sing "Put A Little Love In Your Heart," a song originally written and recorded by Jackie DeShannon in 1968, and covered by many others including Annie Lennox and Al Green for the "Scrooged" movie soundtrack in 1988.
The men joined in with a rough bass accompaniment, and the entire crowd sang together.
And then I woke up.
Darn, I thought, I never did get into Big Lots. ;-)
Many people have recorded that song, including... Leonard Nimoy in 1970.
To balance that out, here is the Annie Lennox/Al Green version. If you have not seen "Scrooged," it is very funny.
...for the 46 percent of American voters who showed some intelligence on Election Day two months ago.
An acquaintance of mine, a retired public school teacher, told me the other day that she's taken in a homeless man to live with her and her husband.
He does handyman stuff for them. And in return, they let him stay in their home with them.
Oh, he's very nice, she says. He has a girlfriend. Sometimes he stays with his girlfriend, sometimes he sleeps in his car, sometimes he stays with my acquaintance and her husband.
He just walked down the street one day, knocking on doors, asking if people needed yardwork to be done. And that's how they met him, a few months ago.
She said when they go away for several weeks in the spring, they'll leave him to live in their house and watch it for them.
"Oh," I said.
I'm all for helping the homeless. Especially if it's someone I know passingly well. Or if it's someone I sponsor through a church, not that I attend church. Everyone needs a helping hand, and I know that I would be exceedingly grateful if I needed help like he does, and I met a person like her who was willing to help me.
But knowing what I know about human nature, there's no way I could bring myself to do what my acquaintance is doing. She knows very little about this person. He could be a serial killer. (At any one time, there are between 20 and 50 serial killers operating in the United States, says the FBI.) She and her husband could wake up one day with their throats cut.
But even if he's not a serial killer, I can't imagine leaving my home and all my possessions in the care of a homeless person. There's a good chance that they wouldn't be there when I got back.
My acquaintances are very trusting. And perhaps when I am that old, and I don't value my life or my possessions anymore, I will be as trusting as they are.
But not now. ;-)
I like it when a person steps forward and wants to be my friend. It's always surprising to me, because I wonder why they would want to do that. Perhaps it's merely surprising because I never think about acquiring friends, only about losing them. Neither event occurs very often.
I think it's important to be grateful for the friends one has, and for the time they spend in our lives. Enjoy them while they're here.
None of us is here very long, after all. Souls arrive and leave this place all the time. What we do with each other during the time between arrival and departure is the only thing that really matters.
I learned something about hanging doors today. The short screws that hold the hinge plate onto the door frame are not very long, and they don't do much to prevent the door from sagging.
To prevent the door from sagging, when you're all done hanging the door, you must remove the center screw from the top hinge, and then put in a replacement screw that's at least 2.5 inches long. That will bite into the stud behind the door frame, and help hold the hinge against the door frame, and prevent the door from sagging.
That one little screw fixed the new bedroom door that I put in last week. Instead of having to plane the door down still further, it now swings freely.
And to fix the hinge, I used the perfect screw. The perfect screw is made by Spax, in Germany. You can get Spax screws at Home Depot. The first half of the threads have teeth, so that the screw drills its own hole. They're the best screw for a wide variety of applications (mostly wood, not so much concrete. Tapcons are best in concrete, and you have to pre-drill. No getting around that).
I love Spax screws. And it's amazing what one little screw in the right place can do.
;-)
"or at least, not much. " - Monty Python
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28677174
Apparently I was asleep in 1984 when this came out. Of course, in the Midwest, there were no radio stations that played interesting music. It was all adult contemporary and R&B and religious. Bleagh.
I recognize some of these sounds from Roland and Yamaha FM synthesizers. My friends had keyboards and made similar music.
Sirius XM shares are down to 12 cents, as the company needs to pay a debt of $1 billion in 2009.
They were stupid, stupid, stupid to hire Howard Stern at $500 million for 5 years, plus stock options, back in 2004. And if Sirius' fears come true, that a majority of Sirius listeners will let their subscriptions lapse were Howard Stern to leave Sirius in 2010, then I would argue that Sirius was stupid to base their hopes for success on that demographic. And, of course, Sirius relies heavily on new car sales with Sirius radios to gain new customers. And everyone knows that's not happening much lately.
It's sad. Satellite radio is the only radio worth listening to, in my humble opinion. But if they're determined to run it into the ground with mismanagement, then the world can live without it.
In the past several years, I have met several men who like to talk. They would much rather talk than work. And what they like to talk about is the Bible.
They can quote you Scripture, chapter and verse, for any situation. They have the entire Bible memorized. And they are quite happy to stand there and jaw all day about what various bits of the Scripture mean and, of course, what God wants you to do about it.
And they often espouse their own beliefs along with the Scripture, and often those beliefs seem to run contrary to what the Scripture says. I don't bother to argue with them. I don't know the Bible terribly well, and to try to point out the splinter in their eye (Matthew 7:3) is futile. They will evade and dissemble and eventually shout you down. And I just don't care that much.
In my limited experience, it's always men who want to stand around and blather about the Bible. Women tend not to do that.
I wonder why that is. Perhaps women are just quieter about their religion, and men are innately loud and boorish.
But I also wonder... are lazy men drawn to the Bible? Perhaps because they have nothing better to do than to sit around and memorize it, and then repeat it ad infinitum?
Or is it that men who are deeply interested in the Bible tend to be lazy, and they use their Biblical study as an excuse to avoid work?
Which comes first? I don't know. But there's some kind of relationship there.
I always liked this tune. I think I like the fat keyboard droning with its "bow bow bow" sound, and the chord progression.
Typically British 80s stuff. Snappy dressers, they were. I've always liked a double-breasted suit or trenchcoat and a nice fedora. They conceal all sorts of alien anatomy. ;-)
This song is just so silly, I have to laugh. I have a hard time envisioning the South Miami Beach lifestyle, the clubs, the beautiful people, the casual recreational sex. It seems like a very alien world, a shallow, empty world.
But it's a catchy tune.
At lunch at a nearby marina the other day, I saw a boat that obviously belongs to an "X Files" fan.
A few days ago, my nephew and I ripped out an old pocket door (a sliding door) and replaced it with an actual swinging door. It's much nicer than that rattly old pocket door.
Except that for some reason, it didn't want to open or close, once we got it nailed into the wall. Even though the frame is straight and true, the door was about a quarter-inch too wide for the frame. So I had to plane it down. And that's a pain in the ass. Scraping with the planer along the long edge of the door, shaving away a bit at a time. Sigh.
I planed it down enough so that it would open and shut correctly. But I planed it so much that the lockset barely fits anymore. I still need to plane it some more. And I think I will have to move the hole for the lockset a bit, using a hole saw or a dremel.
What the hell, it' s my first door that I've installed. I will do better next time.
I remember the Dead Milkmen doing a song called "You'll Dance to Anything" and they listed a whole bunch of lame bands, including Book of Love.
Sure, Book of Love is lame synthpop. But it's ear candy. I like it.
With the help of a local workman, I have finished bricking up the garage wall, and yesterday I installed my first window ever. Putting a window in a masonry wall is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than putting a window in a wood frame wall, because according to local building codes, you're not allowed to shim much with wood, only one-and-a-quarter inches. Therefore your masonry hole has to be quite accurate with respect to the window.
It's very tedious. But we got it done.
Today I will learn how to mix and apply stucco! I'm learning so many skills lately.
I was driving down the street near my house, and spied a gopher tortoise in the road. He was huge, the size of a turkey roaster, perhaps half a meter long. He was probably 30 or 40 years old.
It's important to make sure those tortoises stay safe, because they're endangered, they grow very slowly and they don't reproduce quickly. If I see one in the road, I stop, I pick him up gently, and take him to the other side of the road where he was headed. You can't turn him around and keep him on the same side of the road, because he'll just resume his original course. That's just the way they are. Forces of nature, immovable, immutable, unreasoning.
So I stopped to help him. As I got closer, I saw that he was pawing at his face, scraping, not paying attention to his task of trying to cross the road. I saw that he had bitten into a hard citrus fruit, like the center of a certain type of orange, and it had gotten stuck on his upper lip. He couldn't close his mouth, he couldn't chew it off, and he couldn't see around it.
I knelt next to him and gently tried to pull it off his face while he continued scraping at it, first with one foot and then the other. No luck. Meanwhile he couldn't decide if he was more scared of me, or more scared of this thing stuck to his face. He blinked at me, grunted and hissed at me, but he didn't move away.
I grasped his head gently with my thumb and forefinger, behind his skull, to keep him from withdrawing into his shell, and used a stick to scrape the citrus fruit off of his upper lip. He continued to grunt in protest.
Finally I got enough of it off of him that he could chew again. I backed away, and he resumed plodding unhurriedly across the road, masticating as he went.
I made sure he got across the road into the neighbor's yard before I got back in my car. At the first opportunity, I washed my hands vigorously with soap and water, because reptiles often carry salmonella and other germs on their skin, as part of their natural defenses.
It was nice to help him. Who knows, he might have been one of the tortoises that live on my property. They have a range of a few acres, and they dig multiple burrows and commute between them over time.
If I see him again, I'll have to number his shell with a permanent marker, and give him a name. Perhaps "George." Or "Wilbur." Or "Zeta Three."
Hmm.
I've written a thousand posts. Yippee skip. Of course, I passed the thousand mark a while ago... I've deleted a bunch during routine housecleaning. So I have no real idea of how many I've written. Or, had I started writing decades ago (had the Internet been available then), how many I would have written by now. Or how many people I might have offended by this point.
The mind boggles.
Vince Clarke is the God of synthpop. He helped catapult Depeche Mode to stardom, before he left to start Erasure.
One of his best tunes is "Just Can't Get Enough."
Here is the original. Vince is the mousy guy on the right with the shock of blonde hair, playing the keyboard. He's been bald for many years now.
Then here is a string version (quite interesting)
And a version used by The Gap (aren't they bankrupt now? Can't remember) which proves that models should NOT sing or even speak...
And a video mashup with Madonna's "Music"....
And a bizarre floaty Japanese version for a Nissan commercial...
And an Irish folk singer named Wallis Bird who sounds vaguely like Janis Joplin, who is left-handed and lost all her left-hand fingers in a lawnmower accident as a child, so she plays her right-handed guitar upside-down and backward...
"Erik The Viking" (1989) is a classic Terry Jones film, featuring most of the Monty Python crew. It's all about Erik getting tired of the usual Viking lifestyle of rape and pillage, and setting off to find the Horn Resounding, to blow the horn and wake the gods in Valhalla, so that they can bring an end to the Age of Ragnarok (endless clouds, freezing cold, and warfare) and usher in a new golden age of humanity.
In this clip, Erik (Tim Robbins) hides from King Arnulf (Terry Jones) by hiding under Princess Aud's (Imogen Stubbs) "Cloak Invisible," a rag which the King believes makes people invisible. When the King is unable to find Erik, Erik believes in the cloak's "magic," and borrows the cloak to help his ship's crew fight off Halfdan The Black (John Cleese) and his band of marauders.
No one except Erik, King Arnulf, and Harald The Missionary (Freddie Jones) believes that the rag can make people invisible. Therefore everyone is quite bewildered by Erik's insane behavior while he thinks they can't see him.
Look for the Japanese slavemaster's tirade aboard Halfdan's ship at about 5:13. It's an amusing commentary on Japanese culture.
There's also a running discussion on what fear feels like, and of course how a proper Berzerker stores up his rage for release in battle.
I'm learning all about bricklaying this week, as I build a concrete block wall. How to mix concrete. How to spread it with a trowel. How to sponge partially-dried concrete for a smooth finish. How to set up a string and lay all the bricks at the same height, even when the blocks are unevenly shaped. How to put in steel reinforcement bars (rebar) and fill the cells of the blocks for added strength.
It's very interesting. And it takes a lot of muscle. I think I lifted over a ton of concrete this week.
Tomorrow I will learn how to frame and install a door. I'll rip out our horrible rattly pocket doors (the kind that slide sideways into the wall, which are impossible to open or close silently to avoid waking your darling spouse), and replace them with pretty, silent swinging doors. I'm cheating, using pre-hung doors that come already installed in a frame. Later I will replace the other three four doors in the house with the same type, only non-pre-hung. At that point, I will need to learn how to drill the hole for the doorknob, and how to install hinges on the door.
Some days I can feel my brain shriveling, weakening, aging. Other days I can feel it growing, expanding, taking in these new things I'm learning.
It's a nice feeling to learn.
Living in the jungle, it's hot, and people wear fewer clothes. This makes it harder to hide a concealed weapon on your person. Luckily, in the jungle, fewer clothes present less of an impediment to a speeding bullet. And most of the people in this particular jungle are elderly and thin-skinned, and are more likely to be drunk than hopped up on meth. Therefore a smaller, lighter gun is more appropriate than the heavier, big-bore guns that I carried "up north."
I acquired my newest baby the other day - a Smith and Wesson Model 638 revolver. It's a five-shot .38 Special, rated for +P ammunition (which is merely ammo that is loaded "hotter," with more propellant, than normal). It's light, rust-resistant, and can be easily concealed in a pocket. Its humpback shape (dating from the 1920s) provides a slotted shroud for the hammer. You can still thumb the hammer back to cock it for single-action fire, if you are shooting at a distant target ("distant" for a snubby is beyond 5 meters), but the shroud prevents the hammer from snagging on your pocket as you draw.
Or, you can fire it from inside your pocket if the situation requires it, and it won't jam like a semi-automatic pistol would. (Firing a semi-auto pistol inside clothing often jams the weapon, because there's insufficient clearance to eject the shell casing properly and load the next round for another shot.)
I need to take my new baby out this weekend for a trial run.
I've been ignoring the news, mostly, except for some interesting battle footage coming out of Israel lately.
At the risk of annoying some of my readers, I think it's amusing that some people are quick to condemn Israel for attacking the Gaza Strip, when Hamas militants have been launching thousands of unguided rockets each year into Israel in the hope of killing random civilians.
If militants in Tijuana or in Vancouver were launching rockets across the US border into San Diego or Seattle, you can bet that the US military would be over there kicking the crap out of them, and the American public would be howling for blood.
So I think it's a bit hypocritical for people to insist that Israel is wrong to barge in and kick the crap out of the people who have been harassing it with rockets and suicide bombs. What, Israel is supposed to sit there and take it? Yes, absolutely. The explicit message as stated by Hamas and nearby Iran are that the Jews are supposed to leave Palestine, or die, but they're not supposed to be THERE. So, get out, or the rockets continue.
But the fact remains that the Jews ARE there, and they are quite heavily armed and funded, and I seriously doubt they are going anywhere soon.
Hamas (and Fatah and the PLO before Hamas) has a strategy of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, launching rockets from schools and residential neighborhoods and farms. Then they scream with calculated indignation when Israel hits those places to eliminate the rocket launchers and the "metalworking shops" that build them and the tunnels from Egypt that smuggle them into Gaza. And, of course, each Israeli response is used to inflame the Palestinians' hatred even more. The Palestinian culture, in their schools and in their media, states that all civilians, all Palestinians are expendable in the fight to reclaim their homeland. It's scary to watch that kind of propaganda. It reminds me of the old propaganda from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
And it's ironic that this whole mess was created by the United Nations in 1947. So was the never-ending, ever-failing "peace process."
What's sad is, the fighting there will never end until one side is driven out or exterminated, as in so many campaigns in Biblical history, where the occupants of the losing city were all "put to the sword."
The Palestinians lack the means, and Israel lacks the will.
And that's why the current fighting doesn't really matter, and won't resolve anything, except to give the IDF some target practice.
I'm going to change the channel.
...but I really, really want Billy Mays to come down with a vicious, long-lasting case of laryngitis.
I'm not one to pay attention to pop culture. I find it mind-numbingly stupid. But occasionally repeated jabs from TV commercials penetrate the wall I've erected to keep my sanity.
Commercials for Britney Spears' perfumes, for example. "Curious." "Fantasy." "In Control." "Believe."
And blurbs about her upcoming "Circus" tour.
All of these feature video clips of her looking vibrant, vivacious, energetic, and completely sane, which are the exact opposite of the images we've become used to seeing of her on the news in the past couple of years.
I think it's interesting how her marketing people are whitewashing her sordid history, completely ignoring it, and presenting a bright, fresh, new portrait of Britney, as if none of her weird shenanigans had ever happened. Her marriage to and immediate annulment from her childhood friend during a Vegas weekend. Her marriage and divorce from Kevin Federline ("K-Fed"). Her poor parenting skills (driving with her kids on her lap, dropping them on the ground). Her pantyless partying in public. Her stints in drug rehab. Her custody battles with Federline. Her car accidents. Her abortive attempts at comeback concerts.
I totally understand, though, that it's the purpose of marketing to do that, to present an image that isn't necessarily real.
And, of course, she's a person, with problems like anyone else, and she's got the ability to change course and to make her life better. Maybe she is. She's avoiding the newspeople, and focusing on presenting a positive image to "People" magazine and other tabloids. She's staying "on message," which I'm sure makes her manager and PR people very happy.
But the whole marketing campaign reminds me of the old Soviet Union, where some political figure would fall into disfavor, and he suddenly wouldn't be present at state functions anymore, and his picture would be edited out of existing photographs, and it was forbidden to mention his name in newspapers or public documents. Years or decades later, a new leader would decide that the dishonored person was "okay" again, and he would reappear, or his picture would be reinstated, or the newspapers would mention his name again. They called this process "rehabilitation."
So they're rehabilitating Britney Spears. I think it would be interesting to watch, if I had the patience.
It was a long month in December, and yet it flew by. I don't do vacations well. Before I met my darling wife, I never took vacation. I tended to stay weekends in the cities to which I traveled for work, so I explored the country and saw lots of things, and didn't really need a "vacation."
Plus I didn't have anyone to share a vacation with, and somehow, in my addled mind, a vacation is best shared with someone you love. So, taking a vacation alone would just point out how alone I was. So I didn't.
And so it went, for a decade or so. Sometimes I would take a week off and lay on the couch and watch the Speed Channel or Discovery. Most of the time I connived my boss into paying me for the vacation I wasn't taking.
Then I got married.
Now I plan my vacations around my darling wife, and her family. If the nephews and nieces are coming to visit for a week, I take that week off. If we have work to do on the house, I take that time off to do it.
It's been harder for us to "vacation" since we moved to the jungly beach, because the beach used to be our vacation spot. We have failed to identify another vacation spot. I vote for Maine or New Hampshire or someplace cold by the sea, with whales and lighthouses and fog. My darling wife hasn't really figured out where she wants to go. And so we stay here at the beach.
The month of December flew by. We:
We didn't get nearly as far as I hoped to get. But it's farther than we were at the beginning of December.
Today we began bricking up the garage, and I tried to kill my handyman by dropping a panel of the garage door on his head as I was taking it apart. He was very good-natured about it, and there's no blood that I can see. Of course, concussions don't make themselves obvious.
