The Aerie
My greatest invention ever remains "Dad and Kid Day," where I have custody of one of my kids for the day, despite being married. I came up with Dad and Kid Day, which is a monthly event with each of my kids individually, after being struck by how hard divorced men on certain mailing lists worked to get every minute of their custody of their kids.
I was jealous - I wasn't even divorced, and I was going months at a time without spending whole days with my kids. So I instituted Dad and Kid days, and now every month I get to go out with each kid for an afternoon or evening.
Anyway, this time my daughter and I went out on Sunday. We saw "Last Holiday," a remake of the 1950's movie of the same name, with Queen Latifah as Georgia Byrd to Alec Guinness' George. It was a charming, banal, and perfectly harmless picture that I can easily recommend to anyone. Very sweet. Nice footage of the Czech Republic in wintertime, although I suspect it would have been prettier in the spring. And it included the toothsome Alicia Witt, which was a pleasant perq. She likes animals, did you know?.
Anyway, after the movie we decided to stop off at the Mall of America (MOA) so she could pick up some gloves that she wanted. As we entered our ears were assaulted by the screech of bad rock music. Looking down into the atrium, we saw five guys in Navy uniforms posturing on stage in a thin cloud of artificial smoke.
It was the U.S. Navy Recruitment Rock and Roll band.
As we circumnavigated the mega-mall insearch of my daughter's gloves, each of eight Mall atriums was occupied by recruiters of one or another branch of the military (except the Merchant Marine - they don't seem to have very good marketing, as evidenced by their apparent lack of a website in 2006).
I couldn't get over the Navy Rock and Rollers, though. How relevant is it to show that? How honest? I suspect the dozen guys involved in the band are the only twelve people in the Navy who will spend their enlistment playing bad rock music. Everbody else will be scrubbing toilets like my father did. It's one thing to recruit for the Marines by showing scenes of knights in armor slashing with swords - I doubt any recruits expect to be suited up in steel plate.
Across from the Navy Rock Band was an inflatable model of the Space Shuttle standing two stories high.
What is the point of these images? Does anyone join the Navy to play rock and roll? Has an ordinary noncom EVER become an astronaut? Scientists, officers, pilots and engineers yes, but a noncom? I suppose it's possible.
I guess I remember my father's descriptions of the navy - endless weeks scrubbing toilets or occupying the brig. The Navy never did managed to break my father to the yoke.
And finally, I'm not sure how effective the Navy Rock Band is supposed to be as a recruiting tool. My daughter glanced at them for a second and snorted, "They look like dorks."
I think it was the caps.
Well we've survived another January. February is not so bad - it's only three days shorter, but those three days are psychologically important. No matter how dreadful the weather, the thought is "Hah! Do your worst.. you only last 28 days!"
According to the local press this has been the warmest winter in 160 years, which doesn't surprise me in the least. Local weatherpixie Paul Douglas labelled this month "Juneuary," a worthy title.
The other day someone exclaimed about how 'wonderful' the weather has been, and I said, "I dunno, it makes me a little nervous. I mean, if the sun rose at 1:30 a.m. would you exclaim about what a nice sunny day it is?" Then I realized that there actually are places on the planet where the sun rises at 1:30 a.m., but my point had been made. Whatever it was.
Further signs of Global Warming in the Twin Cities, where the St. Paul Winter Carnival is once again issuing delusionally upbeat assessments of the survival prospects for the ice scuptures. In past years, we had an Ice Palace, this year we'll be lucky to be able to chill a Coca-Cola.
Contradicting their own upbeat public assessments, the Winter Carnival issued a clue that helped four teenagers find the Winter Carnival medallion today. The clue read:
On a whim you may take a swim
Or go in and out of the woods
Twixt high and low, we hope there’s snow
To cover up the goods
As it turned out, there wasn't, and the kids found the medallion encased in an artificial block of ice. Temperatures today are already at 46 degrees - that's twice the average high of 26 F, and one degree short of the 47 F record set 114 years ago. If we hit the expected high of 48 it will be an all-time high.
But remember, there's no such thing as Global Climate Change!
This is April weather around here, and it's not just a little warm snap. Temperatures have been very, very high for the past month. I've been monitoring the water level in my basement sump since before Christmas. Usually the sump is dry until the March thaw, but its been consistently full of water this year, indicating that the soil never froze and in fact that snow has been consistently melting. I'll be interested to see what the rest of the winter and spring are like. Usually the melt and flow of groundwater makes the basement amazingly chilly in the springtime. This year, I'm not sure that I'll feel anything.
One big problem with these warm winters is that the pests don't die off. Usually in the winter pests and even molds get frozen out by severe cold. This year the weather has barely dipped a toe below zero. Hopefully that won't encourage the growth of the beetles carrying Dutch Elm - my consistent nightmare has been needing to take down the mighty elm in our back yard. We had it treated last year, but still...
I had considered biking to work today, and now I wish I had. I went for a walk at lunch, and while there were no topless PETA protesters this time the weather was much more conducive to the activity. In fact I have no doubt there will be girls out sunbathing in front of the University sororities.
Or not. Usually they used to do that in defiance of the weather. But this year, what's to defy?
I dunno - but this weather gives me the willies! Who know's what's next?
"...absence of the warm surface Gulf Stream could result in northern Europe being 6 to 8°C colder than during interglacial times (i.e. at present)"
Turning invisible happened naturally. It's not as if I was particularly opaque in the first place, so losing my shadow hardly rated notice. I was too early into the computer field to be of interest, and I never had any fashion sense, so I largely escaped the radar when I was younger.
And then I got married, and then I got old, and then I got kinda pudgy, and before I knew it, I had vanished entirely.
I first noticed that I was turning invisible when I worked at the U of MN in the early Nineties. In my early Thirties, the college women had started to fade backwards into 'girls,' and the only time that I seemed noticeable was when somebody's computer needed fixing. I recall in particular a colleague with whom I had a perfectly cordial relationship. She was an attractive enough young woman, and I thought nothing of it, until one day I saw her with a guy in whom she was interested.
He was your classic man-about-campus: tall, muscular, thick neck and short hair. Her whole posture radiated interest - there were practically sparks leaping between her and him. He, on the other hand, was apparently oblivious to this interest - staring off into the distance while they spoke, even as she quivvered for his attention like a puppy at the Thanksgiving table. Maybe it was a ploy, but my own history suggests that in my youth I, too, was as oblivious to intense interest as was he at this time. And what dawned on me as I looked at her look at him was, "She doesn't even register that I exist."
And it was true. While she was cordial enough and friendly and pleasant to work with, I suspect that had I stopped appearing at work at any point, she would not have noticed my absence. I was a cipher to her, just "some guy at work."
So I was turning invisible already.
Yesterday I commented that I was not part of the marketing demographic for the Sony portable computers. Advertised with hip-hugger jeans, pastel colors, and butt tattoos, this was a product marketed at a much younger audience.
Further confirmation of my growing invisibleness was offered by Yahoo. The other day I was checking my Yahoo Mail for the latest plea from the widow of African dictator Mobutu Sese-Seko for assistance in washing the blood off her husband's money. (How does this woman get ALL my e-mail addresses?) Then I saw a little icon that said "Create your Avatar" or something like that.
Curious, and easily distracted, I poked around at the feature, which allows one to create a cartoonish version of oneself to be displayed online. Several brand-name items of clothing are provided to wear, as well as a variety of hairstyles, skin tones, and backgrounds. After clicking through a few settings I became bored, and returned to the task of sending my bank account information to Mrs. Sese-Seko.
The next day while chatting over Yahoo Messenger, a friend said "What's this stupid icon?" Since my icon is, or was, a picture of an albatross, I asked what he was talking about. "It's a cartoon of some guy."
Ah. Unbeknownst to me, the Yahoo Avatar apparently over-wrote my cunning albatross picture under Yahoo Messenger.
So I figured I could either get rid of the new Avatar, or at least make it look enough like me that a viewer might not need to wonder what it was supposed to be. I headed back to the Yahoo Avatar section to explore the problem, and soon found myself sucked into the process once again. I found suitable glasses, a jacket and a hat, and an interesting setting. I was all set, except for one item: a beard.
If you didn't already know, I have a beard. It's not merely a convenient tool for creating a chin where none earlier existed, but due to some quirk of genetics I have to shave twice a day if I want to go without one. Being much too lazy to attend to personal grooming more than once a day (if that!) I grew a beard in my early Twenties and have had one ever since. The one time I shaved it off, my daughter literally didn't recognize me: when she did, she angrily prohibited me from ever doing anything like that again.
So I searched around for a beard. Failing to find one, I searched the help files, to no avail. Finally, I wrote to the Yahoo help e-mail address, expecting to send my bits off into the void. Instead, I got he first of a series of very quick responses, for which I must offer Yahoo full props. Heavily edited, but with actual quotes, here's the exchange:
"How do I do facial hair?" (Me)
"I'm sorry, but I'm not really clear on what you're trying to do." (Yahoo)
"Beards. Moustaches. Goatees. Things like that."
"At the moment, the feature you are requesting is not available. Your suggestion will be added to the 'want' list."
I kind of sat back at that one. I mean, I've written these kinds of little programs, a zillion years ago when I was in school and had time for such nonsense. With a few simple constraints (i.e. "do you really want your icon to have a beard, ma'am?") it's almost trivial to write.
What kind of mindset could put this much creative effort into these cartoony little Avatars without even considering facial hair? They've got twenty different hairstyles from "bald" to "shaggy," a hundred different shirts and pants, even a dozen hats. But no facial hair? Who could overlook that?
And then it dawned on me: facial hair is not included, because this marketing effort isn't aimed at people who can grow beards. It's probably not even written by people who can grow beards.
Clearly it's not complete yet. After all, one of the preview images shows a fellow with a 'soul patch' even though you can't set up an Avatar with a soul patch. (Interestingly, Merriam-Webster's online dictionary did not know the term: count on the free, public-domain, all-volunteer Wikipedia to have the full info). So I suppose sometime down the line - when their voices have changed, or when the makers of Propecia™ need to find a new place to advertise, they'll finally get around to adding beards. And right after that wrinkles, gray hair, saggy boobs and bellies, and walkers.
Meanwhile I managed to find one face which, for reasons I cannot explain, has a slight five o'clock shadow. It will have to do for now, although it resembles me about as much as I resemble Rob Reiner. I dunno, maybe that shadow is what passes for a beard with the folks programming these flash candies. It's close enough for now - almost as if my Avatar has a faint, almost-invisible beard.
Meanwhile, pudgy middle-aged bearded white guys remain invisible to the marketing division at Yahoo, and to most of the world.
And I don't want to hear that I actually do resemble Rob Reiner. I'd rather be invisible, thanks.
So I'm in the market for a new laptop, having given my aging Thinkpad T40 to my mother for Christmas. She was delighted, and will not be concerned about the inability of the battery to hold any charge whatsoever, or the fact that it's not only dog-slow, it's double-dog slow.
So once again I find myself shopping. I hate shopping. When shopping I am torn between the desire, on the one hand, to buy something and have done with it, and on the other hand with the desire to spend as little as possible, and on the third had with the desire to get the right product.
Having only two hands, and limited time and money, I have grown to loathe shopping.
But since I must do it, I have a few criteria that I need to balance in order to find my solution.
1) Weight. I'm currently looking at "ultraportables," because I'm tired of lugging around a ball-and-chain. Additionally I'm interested in...
2) Size. In a perfect world, my laptop would be small enough to fit in my pocket, and would, like something from The Jetsons, unfold into usability at the push of a button. Of course, whatever magic solutions may be out there, I at least need a usable...
3) Keyboard. I'm pretty flexible on keyboards, and can adapt to almost anything, but I need something big enough for 'real' typing, not two-thumbing. Chicklets, contact spots, those don't concern me so much, but I need to be able to type on it at full speed.
Those are the primary criteria. I want something that's the right size, with the right sized keyboard, but beyond that I'm pretty flexible. I've looked at a lot of things, including the Alphasmart, the DualCor cPc (which is apparently trying to copy the oQo right down to the logo), and various flavors of Sony Vaio. I'm not sure about the Vaio, though: when they advertise the computer using a tattoo on the small of some teenager's back, I suspect I'm not part of the marketing demographic for that product. And at 5.3 lbs, it is by no means 'light.'
I've even toyed with the idea of jumping over to a Mac Laptop, but there I'm torn. I love the architecture of the nifty Mac OS on top of the nifty Berkeley BSD-unix that takes me back to my days coding on NeXT and Amiga computers. On the other hand, now they have Mac laptops with Intel chips in them. I'm sorry, but there's only so much this old brain can handle - if I'm running MacOS on an Intel chip, and I use Wine to emulate Windows, I'm afraid that some kind of cosmic self-referential loop will be invoked and my laptop will twist in upon itself and vanish with a "pop."
And there's something just plain wrong about spending the extra money to invest in a Mac laptop simply because the company is too obstinate to simply sell Mac OS on a DVD and let one set up a triple-boot Mac/Linux/Windows system - the geek equivalent of dating triplets.
So as you can see, I'm all over the map. Right now my prime candidate is the Lenovo ThinkPad X41, mainly because being an IBM (Lenovo is some kind of mutant offspring of IBM and some other company, as is explained with all the breathless excitement of a family slideshow on their website) it is a very safe, boring, conventional solution. Pulling out the ThinkPad will require no explanations, and will inspire no fascinated questions from strangers. Gone are the days with my (still operational) NEC-PC8201a when I was on the cutting-edge of portable computing in my college classes.
Ah, the chicks really dug me with my 1970's full-face tinted glasses, my highwater slacks, and my pocket protector full of pens. When I pulled out my laptop and started typing, those girls knew they were looking at the future! Not their future in any dating sense of the word, but the future wherein their daughters would get tattoos of laptops on their butts. And you wondered why the national rate of childlessness is on the rise.
I dunno... maybe I'll bust it out of mothballs and start using that instead. The hard part will be finding an audio tape player from which to load the software!
While I'm trying to get my quarter-century-old laptop working again, tell me: what do you think I should buy?
Riding the elevator back from lunch, the doors open to the sound of an explosion.
>WAH-choo!<
A large group climbed aboard, along with a large fellow who paused before entering the elevator to sneeze again.
>WAH-choo!<
These were no timid, apologetic sneezes - these were real he-man, beef-eatin' sneezes. The elevator lobby rang with their power.
Then he climbed into the crowded elevator with the rest of us, asking for the button to be pushed for my floor, dabbing his sniffles with a handkerchief.
Now, in the smaller sense, he was courteous. Two floors later he stepped out when the elevator stopped to sneeze again.
>WAH-CHOO!<
But in a larger sense, what the hell was he doing here? Why would someone with such an awful cold bother coming in to work?
I'm getting too old, or maybe too jaded. It's been a long time since I've been able to care about work enough to come in to work when I'm sick. Or, to put it another way, any legitimate excuse I could give myself to skip work for a day, I'd probably take. This corporate-urgency mindset that businesses use to lash their workers into greater and greater measures of productivity is lost on my burned-out cynicism.
The next time the elevator stopped I got off, one floor lower than my stop. I just didn't want to be sharing air with him if he sneezed when he got off the elevator at our stop.
Sure enough as I climbed the stairs...
*ding* >>WHA-CHOO!<<
I waited a few moments after the lobby door beeped to let him through, then entered the empty elevator lobby and followed him into my area. As I came through the door, I wondered what was getting on my hand from the doorknob and resolved to wash my hands.
>WHA-CHOO!<
Across the cubicle field I could see his head bob out of sight and return as he sneezed. Did the blue-gray fabric of the nearby cubicles shivver at the blast? It may have been an illusion.
Then he headed into the bathroom. I waited at my desk nearby, not touching much.
>WHA-CHOO!< The sound from the bathroom reminded me of an M-80 firework detonated in a metal dumpster.
Finally he left the bathroom and I could head in nervously to wash my hands. I half expected to see tiles fallen from the wall and shattered on the floor, but everything was in order.
Now, normally I'm no hypochondriac... and six sneezes in five minutes does suggest allergies more than viruses to me. But just to be careful I washed my hands thoroughly, and hip-checked the handicapped button to open the door before returning to my desk.
The sound in the distance could have been another sneeze, or Krakatoa going off once again.
If it's a cold, that's one cold I really don't want to catch!
It was bad enough that I was working late on Friday. It was bad enough I was short of sleep. It was bad enough that the computer room was the size of a closet, as hot as an oven, and crowded with three guys.
No, the worst part was the humming.
The humming from the machinery was one thing - I'm accustomed to that.
And tuneful humming, I could probably have tolerated. Heck, possibly it would even have been cheering.
But no. The Qwest router technician was humming, but he was humming like a machine.
If you've dealt with machinery you might be familiar with harmonics, or cyclic hums. An imbalanced rotor, for example, might give off periodic hums or vibrations as it precesses around its axis.
This guy was humming like that. Like a machine. "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..." pause "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm..." pause "Hmmmmmmmmmmm..." pause "Hmmmmmmmmmmmm..."
Aside from the humming, he was silent. A looming humming figure reminiscent of "Bull" from 'Night Court'.
So here I was, poking around in this hot, stuffy closet when I ought to be home having dinner, and inches away looms this humming, humanoid form. "Hmmmmmmmmmm...." "Hmmmmmmmmm..." I half expected a hatch to open up in his chest and sparks to come flying out.
Anyway I figured out the problem - a problem so laughably simple it made me want to cry - and prepared to leave. Then the client said "Oh, no, you're not leaving yet - I want you to fix this problem with my backups!"
I set right to work at it.
Humming.
So here we are, in the heart of winter. January 20th. If winter is a toilet, January 20th is the bottom of the U-bend in the water trap.
Now, officially we're only one month into three months of winter. But like everything else in this modern, hurry-up world of ours, winter actually starts well before the start of winter. Well, usually.
When I was a lad, wearing an onion on my belt, that being the fashion at the time, winter started in November. I remember riding the school bus home in a raging snowstorm on November 11th during my first year in Minnesota. "Okay," I thought to myself, trying to get a feel for this insane new world to which my parents had consigned us: "11/11 - first major snowfall, check." By Thanksgiving the ice on the lake was thick enough to walk on, and lasted until Easter.
Everyone in Minnesota remembers the Hallowe'en blizzard of 1991, which was faithfully followed by the Thanksgiving blizzard, so as to leave no holiday unsnowed. But most folks don't recall that In 1985 it snowed on September 26th, the day I bought my '83 Mazda 626. That was just wrong, but there it was, winter trying to rush itself again. Soon we'd be building snowmen in August.
So by some measures we're already four months into winter in Minnesota.
But of course, winters haven't been the same, lately. Global warming is causing the winters to get completely wimpy here in the north country. (And, yes, I realize that it's not politically correct to say that global warming exists, much less actually causes anything. That's why I said it that way.) It used to be that winter in Minnesota built character, and separated the men from the boys (we had none of these newfangled 'women' back then, it was just men). Mid-January to mid-February was the worst, and being Minnesotans we celebrated the worst by throwing a carnival out in the snow. I memorized the fact that -40 Fahrenheit and -40 Centigrade were the same temperature because I lived in it, and it was useful for calibrating one's thermometers.
On January 18, 1994, I took the bus to the U of M to work, only to find the doors locked. Locked! That complete pansy, Governor Arne Carlson, had ordered all schools closed due to "extreme cold." I remember thinking, "Extreme? It's only 28 degrees below zero!" I'd weathered worse while living in Bethel, Minnesota after our move from New Jersey.
I recall shoveling out our 70-foot driveway by hand in order that we fulfill my mother's insistence that we go to church, only to have the station wagon clear the tree-line and embed itself atop and within a mighty snow drift that towered over the road. Hitting a drift at 45 MPH drives the snow right up around the engine block, where it freezes into a humongous ice cube. It was at least 100 below zero that day.
But those were storms of the past. Lately the winters are wimpy. No snow, no cold - it's going to be 30 F today instead of 28 below zero. January in the heart of winter is just an endless succession of gray, sunless days of damp humidity - hell, it's almost as if my family DID relocate to England. It's so grim and disheartening, and spring seems like such a distant dream, that one waxes nostalgic for real weather, real storms, real cold.
So we slog on, relentlessly plodding from one day to the next, waiting for the other shoe to drop, weather-wise, some bitterly-cold Arctic blast driving a howling blizzard that makes us appreciate the luxury of warm gray cloudiness.
And meanwhile we try to remain sane long enough to see the tulips pushing up out of the mud one more time.
According to preliminary reports, a tape of Osama binLaden has been released warning of impending attacks against the U.S.
Unfortunately since bin Laden didn't issue this warning via a telephone call to someone in the U.S., the Bush Administration is still unaware of this warning. I'm considering phoning someone overseas and telling them about this warning, just to get it into the intelligence system. That way they can issue a Presidential Daily Briefing for the President to ignore.
It continues to boggle my mind that three years after 9/11, the American public re-elected George Bush, despite the fact that Osama binLaden had still not been brought to justice. And does anyone even remember the Anthrax Mailer, whose poison-pen letters were only sent to Democrats? It seems that bin Laden is the modern Emmanuel Goldstein, a bogeyman whose continued existence is crucial to justifying the Administrations fearmongering.
But given the ease with which Karl Rove and the American Heritage Foundation and other professional propanda marketing firms seem to be able to turn Mother Teresa into the Spawn of Satan if they take a mind to, you'd think that they would find it worth the effort to make a new Goldstein in order to cash in on catching the current one. After all, we've caught or killed the Al Qaeda "second in command" about seven times now. In fact, we've caught so many arch-villians, we've had to let some go!
The longer this behavior goes on, the longer the supporters of this Administration continue to deny plain reality in favor of muttered mantras of "Support the President," the more appreciative I become of the power of self-delusion.
I was having kind of a down day until I went out on the Nicollet Mall at lunch and encountered a PETA protest.
A young woman was protesting the mistreatment of animals by sitting on the ground wearing only a pair of panties and holding a sign labelled "All animals have the same parts." Various labels were affixed to her figure, evocative of a steer on a butcher's chart.
Now for the record, I am in favor of any form of nonviolent public protest, particularly one that places undressed women on my path to lunch.
And I had to admire this young lady, who was sitting in 22 degree weather surrounded by crowds of pitiful, pudgy, middle-aged businessmen taking low-quality snapshots with their cellphones. I am considering sending them money to encourage them to hold a much larger protest, sometime this spring when it's warmer.
[UPDATE] Better pix here.
The police eventually arrested her, but very, very slowly. Her male counterpart seemed to have already been confined to the back of a police squad car. At least, there was a man in the back seat with a police jacket draped over his shoulders. As I passed by on my way to lunch, I heard the fellow calling from the back of the car.
"Hey, am I under arrest?"
"No," replied the cop, never taking his gaze off of the dangerous fugitive still sitting on the sidewalk in her panties.
"Can I get out of the car?"
"No."
As I continued down the block, a passel of TV cameramen (yes, all men) passed me, jogging the other way with their huge cameras on their shoulders.
Half an hour later as I approached from lunch it appeared that she was finally being led into the back of a squad car to thaw. At least, the football scrum of camermen shuffled over to the squad car and remanied crowded around it.
And my lunch?
Hot and spicy Thai chicken. With meat.
But in honor of this brave young woman, I was totally ashamed while I ate it, and didn't enjoy it at all.
As the car rotated gently across three lanes of Highway 77, the only thought going through my head was "Oh no, not again."
(By the way, if you look to the right you will see that the artwork has finally been added for my two books at Amazon) ----->>
It was snowing on Monday night when my wife and I left an appointment in Eagan in my 2000 Plymouth Neon. I had previously described the roads as being "like driving on butter," and the situation had only gotten worse in the subsequent hour.
Still, I was careless. We were debating the merits of the Cut-and-Dried video game limitation approach to the Complicated Coupon system as I drove down the entrance ramp onto northbound Highway 77. I was aware of three cars passing us down below on the freeway and one car behind us on the ramp, when I felt the left front wheel go off the road.
It was just a little off the road. The snow had obscured the entrance ramp so that the end of the pavement blended almost invisibly into the gravel, and the left front tire grabbed just a bit of the dirt.
It was enough.
As we reached the end of the ramp I felt the wheels come loose, and the car began to rotate widdershins onto the freeway, continuing its entrance-ramp trajectory in a long diagonal.
I was reminded when this happened of a similar feeling twenty-five years ago. My friends Todd and the late-lamented Steve were with me in my Ford Galaxie 500, a car so large that three men could sit in the front seat without any kind of gay vibe being triggered - which it turned out was a good thing since unbeknownst to all three of us, Todd was gay.
These were in the days before it was okay to be gay: just a few weeks previously I had been lying on someone's living room floor when I found an earring-back in the pile. "Someone's girlfriend lost an earring," I said, handing it to him.
"Oh," he said, "That's Jim's."
I was appalled. His roommate Jim had pierced ears? Was Jim gay? Was my friend gay? The horrors!
You see, back when I was a lad, we all wore onions on our belts, that being the fashion at the time. But men did not have earrings. The only exception was pirates, pirates had earrings. And only Marines had tattoos. That was it. In my day, women wore earrings, and maybe really tough men had tattoos, and everybody else contented themselves with glasses and wristwatches. This modern world we're in now seems as if some tribe of tattooed Pacific Islanders with plates in their lips snuck in during the night and replaced the original population.
I've been waiting for ritual scarring to become the next fashion trend - and I've actually seen it in places - but I'm starting to suspect that what will happen next is that Steve Jobs will come out with an IPod that you carry as a plate in your lip, and everyone will have them. Jessica Simpson will be quoted saying, "Ob yah, beforb de LibpPodb I habd tob cbarrby mby IPBodb ib by HANB!"
Anyway none of us knew Todd was gay that morning in St. Paul as the Galaxie 500 rounded a curve on the I-94 freeway in St. Paul and I felt the wheels break loose from the pavement. One minute the steering wheel was responsive, and the next it turned as if nothing was attached to it.
"Did you guys feel that?" I asked, and then we all noticed the car drifting, widdershins again.
And that was only one of several times I've felt that sensation. Once it was on the Highway 280 exit ramp to terminal road - up the ramp, and swing to the right, except this time when the 'swing' part came up, nothing happened. The car kept going forward, right into the curb where the rim got bent - but held the bead long enough for me to get home before the tire went flat. And then there was the time with Steve in my rear-wheel drive Mazda RX 7 when I discovered that my car had a passing gear, and the rear wheels passed the front wheels.
Then there was the time going down the hill in St. Paul when the brakes just laughed and said "No way," and I ended up stopping the car by flattening a stop sign.
So as the wife and I drifted gently across Highway 77, my only thought was "Oh no, not again."
I did have the presence of mind to think that I ought to try to "steer into the skid," but this time I discovered something interesting. When you're in a gently rotating car on a snowy dark night sliding diagonally across a freeway, it can actually be rather difficult to determine exactly what direction you are going in, to say nothing of trying to figure out which way the wheels are pointing at any given time.
Before I could resolve this question we had rotated almost 180 degrees, and slid with a soft crunch off the left shoulder.
Now, it's clear by the fact that I went sliding across the freeway that I was not driving according to road conditions. Nevertheless, I was heartened that we were going slowly enough that we did not slide all the way into the ditch. The front wheels were still on the gravel and the back end was in the short grass when the car stopped. All that was necessary to resume driving was to wait for the traffic to pass, put the car in first gear, and gently pull back onto the freeway.
"So anyway," I said, picking up the threads of the conversation as we reached a sedate 25 MPH, "I still think that we should..."
"I don't want to talk about this!" my wife exclaimed, astonished, "We could have died!"
"What? That?" I snorted, "That was nothing."
"But there could have been traffic coming, someone could have run into us!" she protested. "When we get home, call your friend Al the lawyer and tell him we want to write up a will!"
For some reason, sliding across northbound Highway 77 while facing south seemed to have upset my wife considerably. I clamped my lips on any further retorts, realizing that she had to deal with our little incident her own way. Somehow "Oh no, not again" didn't seem like it was going to cut it for her.
Maybe 'cause she's a girl, or maybe because, as a better driver, she had spent less time spinning into ditches...
In these oppressive days of Neoconservative ascendancy, nothing seems more timely than Martin Luther King day. Firedoglake has a number of quotes for those who just can't see what all the fuss is about in D.C. these days.
Contributor ReddHedd closes with this quote of her own: "I'm often asked why I started blogging. One reason is that I want my child to grow up in a nation that matches its actions to the soaring hopes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The time came when my silence seemed a betrayal."
(I can't claim such laudable goals - I started blogging because a columnist and a pornstar were doing it, and I figured I could too.)
So in honor of ReddHedd and her dream on Martin Luther King Day the quote for today, never more timely, is
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail.
And if you haven't read it in a year, then it's about time to review Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Nothing is so damning an indictment of the Right Wing than that it assassinates our best and brightest in order to silence them. From Lincoln to the Kennedy brothers, to King, to Rabin, the tactic of these smug, self-righteous, holier-than-thou conservatives is to crawl under a rock with a weapon and deliver death.
And yet the dreams live on, demonstrating that there is no power greater than an idea whose time has come.
Not even death.
At one point I had three Bruegger's Bagel's mugs. I kept one at home, one at work, and one in the car.
Somewhere along the way, I lost two of them. I'm not sure where or how, but of course I lost the ones at work and in the car. So I was down to one mug, which I guarded carefully.
I like the Bruegger's mugs for a number of reasons. I have a little four-cup coffeemaker at home, and a carafe emptied into it perfectly. It kept drinks really hot, for along time. The lid usually stayed on when it was dropped. When I had my Geo Metro, and before that my Ford Escort, the mug was just the right size to wedge between the front seats. I'd had these mugs for ages and the logos had long since worn off.
But today was the end of the line. As I walked to work I failed to lift my foot high enough when stepping onto the sidewalk. My toe caught the edge of the curb and I pitched forward...
...I threw my hands out to catch myself, and the bottom of the Bruegger's mug smashed into the ground.
I was grateful. It was a hard fall, and the mug absorbed a good portion of the impact. Plastic shards flew everywhere. I was stunned for a moment, and as I gathered my wits I watched coffee glugging out of the spout of the mug. Despite an impact hard enough to shatter its outer shell, the interior cup was still intact, and the cap had stayed on.
After a moment I realized that I still had coffee in the mug and tried to straighten it, but the bottom was too broken for the mug to stay upright. So holding it level I slowly and painfully climbed to my feet. My left elbow was in a lot of pain, as was my right wrist, but my right elbow had been saved from damage by the mug. I took a sip. Most of the coffee was still there.
In the office I finished my coffee and regretfully pitched the remains of the shattered mug into the trash.
I'll have to go check, but I don't think Bruegger's has been selling these mugs for a while. They have some absurd deal where you're supposed to pay $100 for a mug and then use it for the rest of the year, free. They claim you'll save all sorts of money and maybe one might, but if I wanted to save money I'd brew the coffee at home.
So no more Bruegger's mugs probably! Too bad!
[Edit]Okay, so it turns out they're still selling the Bruegger's mugs.
I was under the impression that they'd totally replaced the original mugs with the magic $99 free-refill mug. And certainly from a marketing perspective that seemed to be the case. But when I asked at the Brueggers where I get my daily fix, the woman behind the counter disappeared into the back room and returned after some considerable time with a dusty replacement mug.
Still, it's not the same. I'd had the mug that broke this morning since I worked at the University of Minnesota 'way back in 1991. I'd driven up to St. Cloud in winter with that mug wedged steaming between the front seats, down to Albert Lea in summerwith icy tea clattering around inside.
This new mug has yet to accrete a sedimentary layer of dried coffee and memories. Still, it will be interesting to see what builds up. Will I by 2121 be a grandfather yet? Will I still be alive? Will the space aliens have finally shown up and offered me a chance to move to Mrgblx-7? And if I go, will they let me bring the mug?
Time will tell!
It's been 'so far so good' on the parenting-teens front. We're a year-and-a-half in with teens, and really they're a lot of fun. We have had disagreements and challenges, like getting them up to speed on chores and into bed on time, but nothing dreadfully difficult.
And our reward for these efforts has been a couple of really great people. Smart, funny, charming, and interesting.
My boy has really bloomed over the past few months. I don't want to get into the details too deeply because I don't feel comfortable 'telling tales out of school' about our discussions, but I feel okay about describing their character and outcomes in broad terms.
Since entering high school he has seemed to come into himself somehow - not necessarily in any obvious way, but more in a kind of confidence and self assurance - a 'young man' rather than a big kid. He is always ready to offer a thought or an insight, and his ideas an notions are complex and fascinating. He's also really funny, very quick to assemble a joke out of even the most boring constituent elements.
He's introspective and somewhat reserved, so I'm always delighted when I discover some new hidden depth to him. He'll mention something that has been on his mind, and he'll surprise me with his depth of knowledge and the strength of his opinions. And I'm never disappointed in what he has to say - his thoughts show an understanding of many of ilfe's complexities.
We recently had a discussion about high school and how to approach various aspects of it, and he really responded excellently. And he recently faced a challenging personal test of character, and breezed through it with the kind of self-assurance and confidence that goes a long way towards relieving the worries of an anxious parent. He makes me very proud.
My daughter continues to delight and surprise as well. She recently voiced some profound insights about herself, and her self-clarity really surprised me. A lot of adults I know muddle along out of touch with themselves and their personal qualities their entire lives, but she sees herself very clearly.
I've also enjoyed her growing circle of friends. Our neighborhood had only one girl of her age, and the two of them just weren't in synch with each other - but now that she's getting older my daughter has made many friends from more distant neighborhoods. It's very rewarding to see her with so many good friends now.
She has numerous interests, including art, the Sims video game, DDR, and theater, as well as a determination to maintain high scholastic standards, and sometimes I think she lets herself get overtaxed. But of course I'm quite proud of her.
And then there's our youngest - he's not yet a teen, but I'm looking forward to it. Right now he's overcoming the adjustment from grade school to middle school and starting to learn how to manage his time and his studies. And he's in a place where his interests hold all his attention - video games, manga books, Hayao Miyazaki movies. Where the other two are blooming, much to my delight, he remains on the cusp, conveying the sense that the world had better watch out for the person he soon will become.
Then there's the interrelationship of the three to each other and to their parents. Our youngest has the usual relationship with his older brother - hero worship warring with annoyance. And he and our daughter have a special bond that's frankly heartwarming. And the twins relate to each other with a mix of respect and individuation that must be uniquely twinnish. There's a little rivalry, but not a lot - we've worked hard as parents to avoid comparing the kids to each other.
Instead of being a time of clashes and frustration, the teen years have so far been better every day - knock wood! I don't know what the future will bring, but I treasure my time with them these days. It's so hard to realize that the twins are only 3.5 years from potentially moving out on their own. Where did the time go? Sigh.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that you might be living throught the best times of your life. But I try to keep in mind that these years are special and brief. Too soon these kids will grow up and go off and have the adventures of their lives. Their parents will be back home, important but separate, influential but balanced against other interests and opinions. It will be lonely for a while.
But on the upside... GRANDKIDS!
Ah, so happy.
My changes to the website to prevent spam comments and trackbacks is working. I no longer have to go in every day and delete 200 trackbacks for P3-n1Le |mP1@nTs and other such crap. For all I know I've crippled the ability of ANYONE to do a trackback to me, but I don't much care. Until spamming is a capital crime with enforcement by INTERPOL we must do what we can to survive.
In case anyone else wants to password protect their mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi files, here's how you do it. As usual no warranty is express or implied and for all I know your doing this could tear a hole in the spacetime continuum and destroy the universe.
This is on FC4 Linux with Apache, and this goes in the httpd.conf file:
<Location /MT/mt-comments.cgi> AuthType Basic AuthName "Enter username 'comment' with no password, then click the 'Remember My Password' box" AuthUserFile /path/to/password/filename Require valid-user </Location> <Location /MT/mt-tb.cgi> AuthType Basic AuthName "Enter 'comment' with no pw, click 'Remember password'" AuthUserFile /path/to/password/filename Require valid-user </Location> |
To create a password file:
% cd /path/to/password % htpasswd -cb filename comment |
That's it! I don't really know how trackbacks work, so for all I know this will prevent any trackback from working. But I do know that I haven't had a spam since I started using this method, so let's cross our fingers.
Hey, Happy New Year to everybody.
Latest change to the website is that I have attempted to institute an anti-spam barrier to prevent spam comments and trackbacks. Now when you click on comment or trackback, the system ought to present a username/password challenge box instructing you to use the username "comment" with no password.
If you enter "comment" and click on the "Remember password" box, you hopefully won't even have to think about it ever again.
I put this in place in the hope that these robotic spamming programs are not written smart enough to figure out how to set a username. I'm hoping they're simple programs that find wide-open blog servers and simply ignore anything else. We'll see - if this doesn't work I'll have to do something more restrictive. I was certainly getting tired of deleting 200+ casino-trackback links every day!
Aside from website stuff, what's new? New Year's Eve our family friend Debbie came over and we watched the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition from end to end - 11:00 a.m. Saturday until 1:30 a.m. Sunday, with breaks for meals and to toot horns at midnight and stuff.
It was fun watching LOTR all the way through like that. There are all sorts of little themes that one can miss watching the movies separately, and of course without the Extended Editions.
For example, one scene that confused me in the original version of the film was the scene where Aragorn, having fallen over a cliff and floated to shore, is dreaming of his elf girlfriend, Liv Tyler. She floats over him and gives him a ghostly kiss, only to transform into a horse nuzzling his face.
I don't find Liv Tyler that unattractive, so I couldn't figure out why the horse was there, or why it carried Aragorn to safety.
But in the extended edition we learn that Aragorn is also a "horse whisperer," and having calmed this horse in the stables he had ordered it released into the wild. Apparently it had been through too many wars.
So THAT'S why the horse showed up to carry Aragorn away. Of course, they didn't explain why it was still wearing a bridle after being released.
It was also fun spotting the recycled actors.
What else? Finished a perfectly dreadful book, 'Cradle of Saturn' by James Hogan. I usually like Hogan quite a bit, but this book had the feel of a tossoff, something he partially wrote and couldn't be bothered to fully clean up for publication. For example, in a clumsy attempt to display a growing romantic relationship, the book said something like "They spoke for a while of casual things, and it was nice to be able to talk about anything, without worrying about work."
Well... don't tell us what they said, write the dialog! Let the reader experience the story! Sheesh.
But on the other hand as a writer, possibly you put in a paragraph like that with the intention of fleshing out later... only later never comes. When you're a big enough author, your unfinished works can be published and sell on the strength of your prior work.
There was more dreadfulness about it - the labored plot, the excruciatingly clumsy philosophical screeds disguised, ironically enough as dialog, etc. It doesn't bear tremendous exploration. It was all I could do to finish this book, and that's saying something. As my story indicates, I almost always finish a book that I start.
I'm now reading a really good book, Love in the Driest Season by the journalist Neely Tucker. I started reading it last night and ended up staying awake way too late, getting about halfway through.
My wife got it for me because I'm writing a novel based in South Africa and this is set in neighboring Zimbabwe. It is a moving and complelling story of two crazy international journalists who find themselves adopting a grievously ill baby in this southern African nation. But it also illuminates the terrible ways in which the world can go wrong. For Americans, who are used to taking our government and our nation for granted, I think it's good to be exposed to stories set in nations where the government is incompetent and corrupt. We don't think it can happen in America, but as today's Abramoff indictment will illustrate, it already does.
Finally I have been making my way through 'Halo II' on the kids' Xbox. It's an excellent game with high production values, and I find the experience very much like reading a science fiction novel. A science fiction novel where you have to shoot lots of creatures, but a novel nonetheless.
I've been spending too much time watching DVDs, reading books, and playing video games. The holiday season is over, and it's time to get back to work!