Merry Christmas everybody

The following post is just random, and has nothing to do with Christmas.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Noble Excellency Casey the Possible of Heffton St Mallet Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

The Missus

I just wanted to give some quick props to my wife. She's been posting more frequently on her blog and she's just darn funny. Go check it out.

Boulder, CO

I just recently returned from a business trip to Boulder, CO. There are three primary features about Boulder that are most apparent to an easterner such as myself. The first is the obvious and most expected one: the western skyline of enormous foothills to the rockies. The second and more subtle one is the near complete lack of tree cover. While there are evergreens dotting the mountains, and cultivated hardwoods in the city itself, everything else is just desert prairie. As an easterner, I've become accustomed to the privacy and "coziness" provided by trees. I've talked about this before, but I suppose I thought it important enough to say again. The third and final feature, is probably the most overlooked: the prairie dogs. Boulder, for reasons related to its past hippy culture and present ultra-liberalism, has passed a city ordinace banning the execution of prairie dogs. Since there aren't enough eagles, falcons, and hawks in the whole world to suppress them, thier population has exploded. There isn't a square meter of open space near a water source that isn't densely populated with the little buggers.

If I do end up moving to this strange and barren land, I may have to train Ollie to hunt these guys.

Ninjas!

Thesis Update

So I've basically finished all the draft stages of my thesis and now its on to the final edits. I sent out 8 copies of the beast to each of my various reviewers with instructions for them to get edits back to me before thanksgiving. I just got the first edited copy back last Monday, and no others since. I'm being told that they hope to finish by the end of next week. In the meantime, I've been incorporating the comments I did get.

I'm feeling really good about this body of work now, to the point I'm starting to take pride in myself for it. I really can't wait to defend.

Turkey Bowl

The company I work for has a little annual tradition that takes place on this day, every year. I bring you, the Turkey Bowl. Its just a group of us that leaves work a little early and plays football for a couple hours at a local elementary school feild. I think this is the eigth year I've played. This event is literally the only time of year I play football and I get a little better each time I think. It is easily the most exercise I get in a given day each year, and like last year, I am expecting that Chris will have to physiclaly assist me in getting up from chairs all day tomorrow.

The highlights: It rained all day and that kept alot of people away, but we still had five hardcore people per team. I threw two touchdown passes and had one touchdown reception myself. Our team won 8 tds to 7. I'm a superstar.

The day after

Wow. The democrats haven't lost a single seat in either the house or the senate as of yet. Big pickups. If the trend continues the dems will have picked up 42 seats in the house and 6 seats in the senate. As you may know, they are still counting the votes for the senate elections in Montana and Virginia, and Virginia will probably have a recount. Go check it out at my new favorite polling site.

I pity the fool who doesn't vote!

GO VOTE, FOOL!

If you've already voted, go check out my favorite polling site.

Improbability

Sorry again for the long gap in posting. I am so close to finishing my thesis I can almost smell the printer's ink. I'm hoping to be able to submit last drafts (before the final is drafted) to my wider pool of editors by the end of this month, perhaps the first few days of November. So posting will continue to be low at least until then.

Once I truly am done, I think I will try and read Richard Dawkin's new book, "The God Delusion". Here's a taste of his attractive style.

Update: Here's another guy from the same mold.

Apologies

I usually use mornings to write blog posts, but lately my routine has changed a little. You see, I've been busily writing my thesis lately, trying to get it finished, and I've noticed that the process is changing my brain and my personality a little bit. Its handicapping my sense of humor and my desire to socialize, which then leads to subtle insecurities. Fortunately my wife keeps thinking of ways to get me out of the house on weekends so that helps keep me from being a total recluse. Anyway, I've retreated to playing video games to help clear my mind on evenings and weekends. I've noticed that it helps keep my mind flexible, which I really need for all this technical writing, as long as I don't get too addictive about it like I used to. Anyway, the video games have led to me staying up later at night and sleeping in later in the morning, and all that cuts into my blog-writing time. That, coupled with the fact that my mind just isn't trained on thinking, "hey this would make a neat blog post" when the daily random vapid things (DRVT) happen, has resulted in fewer blog posts over the past few weeks. So apologies loyal readers (reader? Joe?).

Oh, and my company has asked everyone in my department to move to our facility in Boulder, CO by November 2007. I'm not sure if it will actually happen or not, but it has certainly added to the general feelings of insecurity I've got rocking lately.

I like skiing but I'd miss trees and ocean.

Newsflash: I think logically.

*Yawn*

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

How Logical Are You?

The weekend

This has been a decent weekend. Last Friday Chris and I went to the mall to get some ideas for Halloween costumes from a specialty store. I think we are going as Mr. and Mrs. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four, you know, cus we're fantastic. Saturday I sat around and watched the Michigan - Notre Dame game because some freinds came over (one of which was a Michigan alum). That was really just our pre-game show for the evening plan; Jon Stewart at Merriweather.

Today I just watched more football. Happy to see the Ravens beat the Raiders. I'm sitting here right now really hoping the Patritos can maintain thier lead over the Jets. Its getting dicey but the Pats are still up by 7.

A good weekend indeed.

Idiocracy

If you don't live in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, or Austin, just put this movie in your netflix queue.

Electoral Vote Predictor

As far as I'm concerned this was the best site for tracking the electoral college during the 2004 election. Now they are back for the 2006 Senate elections and btter than ever.

Atheism

"I'm agnostic about God in the same way that I am agnostic about fairies"

One thing the article didn't crystallize well enough but did discuss is the fact that good moral behavior is its own reward. No belief in God, an afterlife, or the literal Bible is needed. If God and the word of the Bible really were the ultimate source of morality, we'd still be practicing slavery (a practice which the bible goes to great lengths to defend morally).

Because I'm just that way...

If you are using Internet Explorer, I have an interesting little work-safe trick for you to try. Close any other Explorer windows you may have open and then just click here. (Note: this page is only viewable by those running Internet Explorer, any other browser loading it will only render a simple blank screen.)

If you have trouble with that first link, try this one (the first link will work much better though, but this one will load for other browsers).

xkcd

The funniest comic strip I have ever read

For example:

I Love BJ's

(oh, it hurts leaving the jokes unsaid)

So we've started an experiment to shop for certain things at BJ's wholesale club recently. It seems the best things for use to buy there are non-prodcue items and meat. I'm not sure if it bothers me that the meat section is my favorite part of BJ's. I know it made me feel weird the other day when I made the comment, "I love BJ's meat".

The Walk

For no other reason than that my brother in law said I should post a movie on the web somewhere, I give you "The Walk" one of my first productions using the iMovie software. This movie took me exactly 23.7 seconds to make, not including filming time.

Enjoy

Otakon

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend Otakon at the Baltimore Convention Center. My wife, Brother-in-Law and his friend all paid the 60$ registration fee to attend for both Saturday and Sunday. I however couldn't justify the expense. You see, Otakon is an anime convention. While knew this event would be high entertainment for me, I knew it would only be entertaining for an hour or two. That's the way it works when you are expecting to be entertained by the attendees rather than by the convention itself.

The plan was for all four of us to go on Sunday and trade off one of the three passes we had. Serendipitously, we found a discarded pass on the way to the Convention Center so we could all enter together. I was now going by the name "David" written on the pass.

Here's the scene: 5000 nerds, dorks, loners, geeks, goths, hackers, role-players, gamers, and assorted other shakedowns from the cultural substrata descending upon the convention center, mostly dressed as thier favorite anime characters; Sailor Moon to Hellsing to Gohan to Cloud. Oh ya, quite the fun scene. I'm glad I went. Of course, it wasn't all just for the people watching. I actually did manage to find one exhibit I was genuinely interested in; Red vs. Blue. Technically they classify RvB as "machinma" not anime, but I bought a T-shirt off of them anyway.

Update: My wife's pictures of the event can be found here.

Mizzice in the hizzice

I have recently rekindled my fondness for killing.

Our house has recently been inhabited by a pack of mice. We noticed the first one a few weeks ago, while we were downstairs watching TV. It scurried across the floor from the utility room (where we keep the dog's food) into one of the little woofer holes at the bottom of a stereo speaker next to the TV. Chris started freaking out and I had to grab the speaker and bring it outside in an effort to shake the mouse out. I think I was successful but I wasn't sure, because just at the moment when I thought I saw the mouse shake out, I flinched my head away (it was a violent shake I gave, and I thought the mouse would fly into my face). When I looked back a half-second later, I saw no trace of the mouse anywhere around me, outside or in the speaker. Mission accomplished, or so I thought.

About a week later we see a mouse scurry across the floor as before, except it didn't end up in the speaker, instead in went into a vent built into the side of the hearth for feeding cold flue air. My heart sank thinking that I hadn’t shaken that mouse out the speaker after all. The day after that though, we saw a couple more mice scurry around in single file. Suddenly this situation was promoted from a mouse problem to a mice problem.

The next day our house was filled with peanut butter baited traps. I bought a variety of traps, thinking that if any one mouse got wise by seeing a dead comrade in a particular trap, he might learn to avoid it. I had the traditional snap-traps, a few glue traps, and some new-fangled humane traps that caught them in a little box. By last Friday I had killed or captured five mice in all and I thought I had won. But then, just the other day, we began to hear some noises in the walls upstairs. I think we have just one mouse left and I will remain on the hunt. For one day I will be the glorious victor, and my enemy will be destroyed.

Bias in speed tests

I almost forgot one funny little discovery I made about speedtests. Before I get to that though, let me explain a little abotu speedtests. As the name implies, they are designed to determine the upload and download speeds of whatever internet connection you happen to be using at the moment, usually in the form of some little web applet. I tried them all when testing my new FiOS line out. I'm paying for 15 Mbs down and 2 Mbs up, and I'm told I share my line with no one, so any decent speedtest should reliably show that these are the speeds at which I am connecting. The same logic is true for dial-up and DSL connections, but not cable connections, which are usually shared among many users and line speeds drop as more users logon. Anyway, back to the subject. As I said, I tried many speedtests; Speakeasy's, the dslreports tests, Visualware's, and of course, Verizon's.

So here's the deal, most of the speedtests out there aren't designed to give accurate readings for internet speeds much above what you get with a cable modem (~5 Mbs). This is in fact what I discovered with most of the speedtest sites except for the one from Visualware, which pegged me at 15.1 Mbs down and 1.8 Mbs up, a fair margin of error. The most interesting result came from my FiOS provider themselves, Verizon. According to them, I'm getting a blazing 49 Mbs down and 6.1 Mbs up! That's nearly 35 Mbs extra down and 5 Mbs extra up speed they are giving me for free apparently. That or they are just lying to try and make me feel that much better about this FiOS service? hard to say, but if you don't believe me, I took a screen shot of the output page (but unfortunately, the graphic didn't come out).



I just tried this test again now, and its telling me I'm maxed out on both down and uploads. Methinks a bug lies within.

FiOS: update I

So its been some number of weeks since I had Verizon's fiber optic data and TV service installed in the house. They call it "FiOS" (the installers told me its pronounced "fye - ous"). Anyway now that I've had some weeks to get the hang of it, I thought I'd let people know my thoughts. First, the data part (aka the intarweb) is totally bitchin'. Its hard to get a bead on what my true download and upload speed is though as I get radically different readings from the different speedtests available out there, so I'm not sure what's going on with that. A friend of mine said he'd try some of the same speedtests with his cable connection at some point. Perhaps he could report results in the comments? The only thing about the internet connection is that Verizon is basically Macintosh-computer stoopid. The techs came into the house and took one look at my Airport wireless transmitter and said, "will that work with our system?" Of course it will you dumbasses. Anyway, part of their standard operating procedure is to hook your main connection into a wireless router (I think its Cisco branded) that has 4 ethernet ports on it for connecting to your home computers. That kinda sucked for me because I have this whole nifty printer sharing thing going on with my Airport and I knew the Cisco router had no such funtionality. After doing some more speedtests, I basically just daisy-chained my Airport downstream of the Cisco router so that I effectively now have two wireless networks running off of the same internet connection. So I browse the net with the Cisco router network and when I have to print something from one of the laptops, I just switch networks over to the Airport. Its not an ideal solution, but it will have to do until I figure out a way to get the routers operating on the same network, or find a way to get the Cisco router to do the printer sharing I can do with my Airport.

I haven't yet played online video games with this new connection, but I will soon, maybe in another update. At that time I may also go on and explain what I've learned about wireless connections vs ethernet-wired connections and how that led me to wire every important room in my home with an ethernet jack.

Update II will deal with the TV service, and it will be long (because there is plenty to complain about)

US Constitution: Shot to Death in a No-Knock Raid

Forget Israel, forget Iraq, and forget Afghanistan. The biggest threat to the American way of life is no-knock raids.

FiOS

Today, the Verizon people are installing FiOS data and TV in my home. I'm pretty excited about it, but there were a few things the sales person didn't make very clear to me. First of all, the data all needs to run over ethernet wires. So if you currently have your house nicely wired up with a cable jack and a phone jack in every room, you'll have to run additional ethernet jacks to all those same rooms or go entirely wireless for data. I already do the wireless thing but I like having internet-capable jacks in every room as well, so I will have some work to do. Secondly, the TV signal still runs over the normal cable wires, but a set-top box is required. I fucking hate set-top boxes. I'm not sure I really need it actually as I have a very high tech TV, so I'll have to test that out myself I think.

I may update this later as the day progresses...

I am a 35 year old man

As of last Saturday, July 1. Damn that sounds old doesn't it?

Citizens!

Take the test. (my score: 90%)

Harriet: 1830 - 2006. R. I. P.

Darwin's tortise has died.

My Neighborhood

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance," John Philpot Curran, 1790.

This was the opening sentence of an email I just received from one of my neighbors. I signed up to a mailing list, adminstered by said neighbor, which intends to keep the neighborhood informed of the efforts of a neighborhood action comittee. The comittee was recently formed to block a proposal by a local developer to build 50 some-odd townhouses and a nursing home on the edge of our all-single-family-homes neighborhood. Needless to say, people are pissed off enough to evoke revolutionary slogans from the Irish rebellion. I find that particularly hyberbolic, and by hyperbolic I mean awesome. I can't wait till the parent-teachers association starts urging us residents to arm ourselves.

Busy Weekend

Last weekend blew by for me as Chris and I were much more active than usual (correction, I was much more active than usual). A couple of weeks ago, we broke down and decided to pay for a membership to the Columbia Association pools. The town has several indoor and outdoor community pools scattered around, but access to them comes with a relatively steep price tag (I think each of us has to make some 15 visits before the membership seems worth the money). Anyway, we bought our passes and last Friday decided to try them out for the first time. We walked over to our local outdoor pool and were happy to learn that that night was to be the first of the summer with an extended hours schedule (open till 8 pm). On the downside, the place was friggin' mobbed with kids, upwards of 50 of them. We were a little intimidated but regardless, we slipped into one corner of the pool and marinated for a little while. Just as we were getting comfortable with the whole spastic scene. All the kids started getting out of the pool. Within five minutes the pool was empty but for Chris and I and one other adult. The kids were congregating behind the diving board in a tight cluster but not really doing anything yet, just screaming and laughing and wating... for something. Chris and I began to get fairly nervous at this spontaneous behavior. Kids are pretty normal when they are acting like a wild mob, but when the runts start organizing it is way creepier. We weren't too far away from the other dude in the pool so Chris asked him what all the organization was about. He told us that all the local swim teams were having a pep rally tonight, and almost on cue, the runts started chanting thier fight songs.

"Here We Go Light-ning, HERE WE GO!"

Chris and I's attitude suddenly turned a 180 from being totally freaked out to being highly amused.

Genetically Engineered, Hypoallergenic Pets

I stumbled across this spoof site today which claims to be hawking bioengineered pets which are, "Allergen Free, Child Safe, Low Maintainence, Life Perfected". It seems to me that the authors of this site think the idea of a hypoallergenic, bioengineered pet is so crazy as to be absurdly humorous. The last laugh is on them of course, as a real company came up with the idea in 1995 and is actively working on developing such a thing. They plan to start with dander-free cats.

Global Warming

I just read an article covering some of the anti-Kyoto protocol scientists out there. Thier leader seems to be this guy called Tim Patterson who claims that "over [the past 135 million years], the geologic record shows essentially no correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature." He instead believes that it's "galactic cosmic ray intensity [which] correlates quite well with the Earth's temperature variations." (Veizer and Shaviv)

While the comsic ray correlation might be real (I haven't read the paper), I doubt it's mutally exclusive with a carbon dioxide correlation. Most importantly though, I'm having serious trouble corroborating Tim Patterson's belief that global temperature and carbon dioxide levels have not been correlated over the last 135 million years with this data from NOAA:



For the past 650 thousand years, that seems like a pretty strong correlation to me, but I'm no climatologist. I'd like to see the carbon dioxide data for the same time frame Tim Patterson discusses. I just read the wikipedia article.

Ah, here we go, here's someone who has critiqued the Veizer study far better than I could.

The Beard is Dead; Long Live the Beard!

I shaved it. I couldn't just let it go without a little fanfare however, so I tried some alternate facial hairstyles along the way. Click the image to see a Flickr slideshow.

Happy Endings Everyone

Today is Mark of the Beast Day!

666

Here's some links to other sites on the topic:

Wikipedia thinks it has something to do with Nero Ceasar.

Pharyngula needs a half million more hits today to cause armegeddon.

Technorati has a list of more than 666 sites tagged with the sum of the squares of the first seven prime numbers.

Lastly, USA Today has noticed that 30 year mortgage rates have risen to 6.66%, softening demand for new mortgage applications.

Trap

I finally made it out to the trap range today and shot some clays. It was awesome. I also learned that, despite my natural talent at skeet shooting, I suck at trap shooting. They are completely different sports. I will need some practice at it.

Memorial Day Weekend

This year was a boring one. Chris and I basically just worked this weekend. Everyone was somewhere else. I just got off a chat with my friend Sarah who was with the rest of my friends in Chicago at Pete and Molly's wedding (except for Joe and Robin who were away with Robin's Family in Detriot). I really regret that we couldn't go to that affair. Sarah made it sound like we really missed some fun. It would have been neat to meet Pete and Molly's folks as well. Such is life.

Weekend at the Beach

Chris and I took last Friday and Monday off to have a mini-vaction at the Beach this weekend. Chris' cousin has a beach house in Fenwick that he likes to share with us when it would be vacant otherwise, so we took the opportunity.

Anyway, it was Ollie's first time seeing the ocean. Dogs learn by doing, and this weekend Ollie's lesson was, "do not drink seawater". On our first day there we took him for an extended walk in the surf. He liked it enough but was freaked out everytime the water touched his feet. Once a wave began to recede though, he would chase it with his head down, taking little gulps of water along the way. Knowing how dehydrated he had become, we let him drink copious amounts of fresh water once we got back to the house. About ten minutes later, he went into a fit of vomiting. The first two spasms were all just water with a few milkbone chunks. The last two spasms were different. They were pancake-sized, mostly a consistent texture, beige in color, and they appeared to dry very quickly. Closer examination revealed these curious fluids to be beach sand. Presumably it was mixed in with the frothy sewater he had been drinking from the receding waves all day.



I can only imagine how odd it must feel to be carrying around a belly full of sand. Can you imagine how funny it was to watch a dog vomit sand?

update 5/28: click the pic above to see the rest of our beach photos.

New Weapons for Sexual Revolutionaries

Check it out, they now have a birth control pill for men and a new aphrodisiac drug that actually works on the part of your brain that makes you horny. It apprently works especially well for women.

I Lean to the Left

I just took the world's most terribly worded blogthings poll to find out that I now lean to the left in two ways.

Your Political Profile:

Overall: 40% Conservative, 60% Liberal

Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

I Write, therefore, I Sit on My Ass Alot.

I'm taking time off from work sporadically so I can finish writing my thesis for my Ph.D. If you have visions of me sitting around my house, happily typing away at a laptop while dressed in PJs and sipping tea, you'd be wrong. No, I get to burn my precious vacation time in my office at work. You see, all of the data I will use in my thesis is stored on the severs here at work, and so the book must be written at work for the most part.

Blech.

New Gadget

Chris went out and bought us a new snapshot camera yesterday, a Sony DSC T5. We finally got annoyed with our old digital camera's inability to take candid shots. You always want to get that quick shot of people smiling naturally, before they realize you are pointing a camera at them, but the camera itself needs to have the shutter button held down for maybe 2 whole seconds before it takes the shot. Two seconds is a really long time. When summing the shutter lag speed of one shot and five shots, it wins out as the festest digital camera available today. It takes one shot in 0.14 seconds and five consecutive shots in 4.78.

We are pretty happy with it so far.

Mexican Politicians are Smarter than as Stupid as American Politicians

Mexico has just passed a bill decriminalizing the possession of "personal-use" quantities of all recreational drugs.

5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin or 500 milligrams of cocaine, 2.2 pounds of peyote, 2 pills of ecstasy, MDA, LSD and methamphatime were all mentioned.

This is golden opportunity to prove to the world that decriminalization is far more intelligent a policy than prohibition, but I'm scared shitless that it is going to get fucked up by any of a number of mechanisms.

First of all, our government can't be happy about this, and I'm sure they will do whatever they can to make sure the Mexican president doesn't sign the bill in to law, and if the president does sign it into law, the US will try to put pressure on Mexico to have the law repealed. We'll need to keep our eyes open to be sure we know what the US government is doing on this front and be sure we apply pressure as needed, to ensure Mexico's new bill becomes a law and stays that way.

Second of all, American drug tourism to Mexico is going to increase, for certain. I fear that a few people are going to go down there and flip out on meth and start acting like irresponsible assholes, annoying just enough of the voting Mexican population to re-instate prohibition. This golden opportunity could easily be abused and squandered, and if it is, it will set the decriminalization movement in this country back by decades. All the DEA and the ONDCP (office of national drug control policy) will have to say is, "decriminalzation in America? Are you crazy, don't you know what happened in Mexico?" And they will largely be right.

I can also imagine that the ONDCP and the DEA will be finding sneaky ways to encourage certain annoying, irresponsible, American assholes to go to Mexico to use drugs, just to piss off Mexican voters. Those of us who are anti-prohibition in this country need to organize a massive public education project aimed at Americans thinking about going to Mexico to use drugs. we need to make it clear to Americans that they need to respect this new Mexican law and be responsible drug users, as you would be if you were a guest in any of your friends' homes.

As I said, I'm scared that this will get screwed up. Mexico has done a very bold and special thing, and the world will be looking to them to see how thier experiment turns out. Let's make sure it turns out for the best.

Update:

Fox news has the total quatities allowable for the newly decriminalized drugs. This is a good step for Mexico, but in real-world terms, these are tiny amounts, even for personal use.

— opium (raw, to be smoked) 5 grams
— heroin, 25 mg
— marijuana 5 grams
— cocaine 500 mg
— LSD .015 mg
— MDA 200 mg
— MDMA (Ecstasy) 200 mg
— mescaline: 1 g
— peyote: 1 kg
— psilocybin (concentrate, pure, active ingredient) 100 mg
— hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm): 250 mg
— amphetamines: 100 mg
— dexamphetamines: 40 mg
— Phencyclidine (PCP, or Angel Dust) 7 mg
— methamphetamines: 200 mg
— Nalbuphine (synthetic opiate): 10 mg

Update2: Under US pressure, Mexican President reverses position, now says will not sign bill into law.

Oil Prices

There's been a bunch of talk about oil prices lately. Demand for oil is going up and supply is not. People hear about the oil companies' record profits and they wonder why these companies don't pass some of the windfall on to consumers, thus lowering fuel prices. So-called economists get on the air and dogmatically spout out "supply and demand" as if that actually explains the situtation to 95% of the public who hasn't taken an economics class.

Having had some real world experience with this just from working in industry, here's how the mechanics of supply and demand work in this particular situtation.

Supply of oil is flat. Maybe it's because we haven't built any oil refineries, or maybe it's becasue the wells in Saudi Arabia are drying up, or maybe it's because we haven't opened up Alaska to drilling, or maybe it's because we still burn a shitload of oil for electricity production rather than using nuclear, or maybe all of those things, I don't know. But I am accepting it as a fact that supply of oil is not growing. Demand however is growing, and when a flat supply meets a growing demand, one of two things can happen. Either you do nothing, allowing shortages to occur leaving millions of people stranded, waiting in gas lines, or you figure out a way to slow down demand for your product enough so that it is in line with supply.

Let's see, what is the best way to decrease demand for a product? Could you lower its quality? Gasoline standards are very tight, and so no, you couldn't lower quality, there are laws against that. Could you spur competition to increase supply? Yes, and in fact, that is happening to an extent with alternative fuels and new nuclear plant construction. But that is a long term fix, and is useless for short term increases in demand (like the current summer driving season). The last option available to you then, is to raise prices. Making the same product more expensive lowers demand for that product, forcing people not to use it as much, but also preventing shortages of the product.

Its almost like the oil companies can't help but make a huge profit.

Holy Crap

State Legislators to initiate impeachment proceedings versus Bush

Mike Teavee

Is it just me, or does this techno DJ bear more than a passing resemblance to Mike Teavee from the recent re-make of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?


A certain DJ


Mike Teavee

Mike Teavee is realy into video games and thinks that "candy" is waste of time (get it?)

You decide.

(Chris insisted that I point out she noticed this creepy similarity first)

Orange Core

Everyone go check out the skinny on the world's coolest new band, Orange Core.

Feeling Lazy

I have this huge list of things I've given myself to do today, but I all I feel like doing is laying on the couch and watching birds come to the feeder.

The List:

-stop by work and make sure the thing I set up friday is still running.
-install a hybrid cable/telephone jack in the bedroom, buy extension cord
-spread fertilizer on the back lawn
-set up the new dsl modem
-scrub off some more of the graffiti that Verizon left on my driveway last month, when they were laying FiOS lines
-install the shelves I made for the new bookcase
-find HDMI adaptor for DVR-to-TV HDMI cable.

It's a tough life I live, isn't it?

CD of the Month

"Are You Ready" by Theory in Motion.

Bad-ass, bassy, slow breaks. No divas, just breaks.

Update 4/14/06: Just so everyone knows, it was my whiny friend Joe who introduced this CD to me.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to my wife Chris and our friend Jen. I'm really liking this pattern we've adopted of a big social every few weeks. We need to keep it going!

PS: To those who haven't seen me in a while, note the red-bearded guy in some of the pix who looks just like me.

I have a secret

I'm almost ashamed to admit it. It started a few years ago and I haven't been able to stop since. Usually I do it on weekends, but sometimes you'll see me at it after work, or sometimes before, hell I've even skipped work on occasion to do it.

I love lawncare.

Really. I get worked up about spreading grass-seed and fertilizer, raking leaves and checking the soil pH. I fucking love it, but I'm afriad to talk about it, with anyone. Everytime I try, I notice that people get that, "this guy is a nutjob" look on thier face. Well I'm tired of hiding it, dammit! I just wish it was something I could actually talk about in casual conversation, instead of hiding it. I'm seriously considering buying a pick-up or an SUV so I can take my lawncare to the next level. That translates to cutting down trees and renting industrial landscaping gear.

I love my lawn and I want the world to know!

I can't believe its Thursday already

This week blew by. I got back from the Jamboree on Sunday at around 10 AM Eastern, slept all day, had dinner, slept all night, went to work Monday, and then *poof* it was Thursday. I meant to blog a little more during the week but somehow my heart just wasn't in it.

Better late than never I suppose. So, the conference picked up nicely on the last day, and I wasn't so tired and cranky anymore. After the conference ended, it was time to start my extra-curriculars. I had made plans to hang out with some friends both Friday night and Saturday day. Before that could begin though, I had to drive from Walnut Creek to Pacifica, a drive that should really only take about an hour (it was 7 pm on Friday night). Unfortunately I got a little confused about the difference between I-580 and I-80, and ended up going north along the east side of the bay, rather than going over the Oakland Bay Bridge like I should have been doing. When I realized my mistake, I turned my head to look back at the Bay Bridge and noticed that a) it was packed with traffic and b) said traffic was parked. After quick glance at my map, I thought it might take less time to go all the way north, cut over to Marin county and then go South over the Golden Gate bridge, cut through San Fran and then end up in Pacifica that way. That was a mistake. The short story is that it took me about 3 hours to get to Pacifica, which wasn't even my final destination for the night.

Anyway, so I get to my friend Kira's apartment in Pacifica and in minutes we are back out the door to drive to my other friend Garrett's in Santa Cruz, another hour south. Briefly, Kira has a nice place in a complex. Its a breezy studio apartment with an unobstructed view of the ocean through the large sliding glass doors that lead to her deck. Pacifica has a repuation for being cloudy and foggy most of the year, and the coast there is all rocky cliffs, no real beaches that I could see. It doesn't matter though, because in my book any view of the ocean is an incredible view. Its the kind of view that should just make you feel good and humble every day you wake up to look at it.

Garrett also lives right on the beach in a studio apartment, but he's a block or two away from the water on ground level, with no real water view that I noticed. All the windows in his place are small, so if there was a view to be had, it was hard to notice at night. Nearly as soon as I got there I had some crazy allergy attack that made my eyeball all itchy and swollen, so we left to pick up some claritin and a bite to eat from a local hipster diner with gender-ambiguous restrooms. I was amused when Garrett started up a conversation with our waitress about how he wasn't vegan anymore because he ate pastries once a week now. The waitress herself admitted to being a mere vegetarian by welcoming Garrett to the land of vegetarians. The whole exchange was pretty Calarious (get it? I combined the words "California" and "Hilarious" there to imply a brand of comedy particular to that state. I'm funny right? Please tell me I'm funny)

Ahem, so, anyway, my eyeball calmed down in response to the claritin and we went back to Garrett's place. We hung out and listened to some music, and talked and talked. Garrett had some bongos that were moderately fun to just hang on to, even if I didn't pretend I could play them. He also started noodling around on his guitar for a while, all during our three-way chat fest. We ended up staying awake till about 4 in the morning before Kira and I took off and crashed at her place around 5 AM or so.

I peeled myself off Kira's couch at maybe 10 AM and called my buddy Claus to let him know I'd be at his place in South San Francisco by 1 PM, after I had some breakfast. Kira made some killer vegan-style pancakes. I'm normally pretty fucking snotty about the whole vegan/vegetarian thing, but really these pancakes were delicious. I shoud emphasize that when I say it, I mean "delicious" in the real, "buttermilk batter with blueberries and a side of bacon" sense of the word, not the fake, "it's impolite to insult the cook when the meal is free" sense of the the word. Yum, pancakes.

Claus is a friend of mine from days past at my company. He used to have a science-related job before he earned his MBA part-time, nights. Now he's a muckity-muck business type at Genentech. I've always liked Claus. He used to be a hyper-smart, crazy, womanizing, fast-car driving, Danish ex-pat. Now that he's married with a six-month old son, he's merely a hyper-smart, crazy, fast-car driving, Danish ex-pat. Claus and I didn't do much Sunday and I fear I wasn't my social best again, this time as a result of stretching myself too thin with lack of sleep. I had a good day regardless. Claus took us for a trip along Skyline Drive, through the redwoods to Alice's restaurant where we each had "The BMW burger" and a beer. After that, we went to the Stanford campus and just poked around. I had never been to Stanford before. The architechture is an attractive, consistent blend of Spanish buildings of yellow brick walls and terra-cotta roofs with British stylings of statues and coat-of-arms. Claus took me on a few Sunday errands before we got back home and had pizza for dinner. Three hours later I was on the red-eye back home.

The End.

Jamboree, Jamboring

The Jamboree is starting to wear a little thin on me. For some reason, I opted not to do my ususal jet-lag beating ritual (stay up late, and take a melatonin just before bed). So I've been completely zoning out around 4pm each day so far. The lectures don't end until 6pm so I'm not really paying any attention. Then of course, dinners are usually social affairs, and I'm just not my witty best, so I'm coming off like a dud and going to bed early. This kind of anti-social behavior is making me feel a little insecure and overall is making this conference pretty damn boring. The earlier lectures are fine and interesting and I try to contribute if I can, but after 4pm (7pm EST) I'm just no good anymore.

I miss my wife Chris too.

Going West, Again

I'm flying out to the California bay area again to go annotate a genome. This will be the second genome I have had the pleasure of annotating, so I know what to expect and I expect to enjoy myself. For some reason, they don't call these affairs "conferences" or even "workshops" they call them "Jamborees". So when someone asks me where I'm off to, I say, "a genome annotation jamboree." WhooooHoooo! All I can say is that there had better be greased pig races, moonshine, and kissing-booth girls this time around.

Tom Cruise is a Jackass

For the moment, please ignore the fact that I have become a total celebrity gossip whore while you read this article from The Superficial about how Tom Cruise managed to get Wednesday's episode of South Park pulled off the air. This is the same episode that prompted another Scientologist hypocrite, Issac Hayes, aka "Chef" to quit the show after it made fun of other religions for years.

Now I should be clear, being non-religious, I'm no huge fan of South Park either, particularly since the episode where it was implied that "[people who don't practice religion] just go around spewing a bunch of crap out of their mouths." That same South Park episode ripped on Catholics pretty good too, but in the end the story they were telling settled on a view that there are good Catholics and bad Catholics, but all non-religious people just spew crap. Having said that though, I should elaborate and say that I'm no anti-religion zealot either. I simply believe very strongly in the simple rights and freedoms of religion and speech. Which brings me back to Scientology and Tom Cruise. South Park has a right to put on thier show and Tom cruise has a right to be a Scientologist. For some reason though, Tom Cruise is so threatened by parody he has to use his financial muscle to stop it. I suggest that everyone retaliate in kind against this asshole and take his "bankable" movie-star quality away by boycotting every movie he has ever made and will make. Don't go see Mission Impossible 3 this summer, don't rent War of the Worlds from Blockbuster or Netflicks, don't even dress up like his charater from Risky Business for Halloween.

Update: From Variety.com

Update 2: Catch the South Park Scientology episode here.

What you thought you knew about 9/11 is wrong.

Tell Everyone You Know.

Note: The linked video is a full-length documentary movie. I suggest you just use the "download" link, and let it do that for a while. Come back to it when its done, with some hot tea and a primed mind.

Update: Some very credible people are catching on too.

Apple Store

Hell yes. Apple is apparently opening a store at my town's mall, just a short five minute drive from my home.

Life just got a little better.

Black White

So last night I watched this new show on FX called "Black. White"

I really liked it and will try watch the whole series. There is this one character on it though, a white guy named "Bruno" who is a "soft racist" idiot. He would probably break my nose for characterizing him as a "soft racist" but I think its an accurate tag. He thinks that the racism black people experience is all in thier minds and that if they don't enter the world with the pre-conceived notion that they will be discriminted against, they will find that life isn't as hard as they claim it is and will be much happier.

While there may be a little something to this (Bruno's black counterpart Brian, does come off at times seeming a little too paranoid about the subtleties of body language), I couldn't really blame Brian for being occasioanlly oversensitive about race in this country. I can't say how many genuinely racist encounters I'd have to endure before I started getting over-sensitive about it too.

I don't like the white family they picked for this only because I think they (primarily the adults, Bruno and Rose) went into it without any realistic ideas about what to expect. They are obviously trying way too hard to come off as an "enlightened" white couple, all the while insinuating that black people are imagining racisist discrimination. If Bruno and Rose weren't so deluded I think they would be expecting thier white to black switch to be much less fun than it might be for the blacks to go out as whites. Instead, Bruno and Rose are being totally fake and are pretending like they'd like to live the rest of thier life as "beautiful black people" instead of just being who they are. In this sense the black family is much more real. As soon as Brian and Renee (the black adults) saw each other in thier white make-up, Brian swoops in for some affection and Renee, half-kidding, rejects him saying, "you're not my type." While yes, it is racist for Renee to imply that she can't be attracted to her husband as a white guy, at least her reaction was real, which I can respect much more than the well intentioned, but sickly-sweet fakery of Bruno and Rose.

So far, in the first episode, we saw only one genuine example of naked racism from some random fucktard patron at a bar at which Brian got a bartending job. There also was a very conflicted kid who acknowledged that he sometimes has trouble reconciling the racist environment he was brought up in with what his adult mind knew to be morally wrong, but I'm not sure if that qualifies as an example of racism so much as personal growth. Anyway, it has me wondering if they are going to show any strong examples of "reverse racism" in later episoodes. I'll stay tuned.

One last thing about Rose and Bruno. I grew up in the lilly-white Northeast. I had never even had the opportunity to have so much as a conversation with someone black until I entered college. Needless to say, I was exceptionally ignorant about race, even into my adult years. Not willfully so, in fact I was very aware of and motivated to shed my ignorance. Fortunately I had a friend my first year in college, Scott, who was patient enough to put up with me, but clever enough to effectively educate me about race issues, without alienating me by beating me over the head with them.

Anyway, the point is, I can relate to where Bruno and Rose are coming from. Again, Bruno and Rose are clearly operting from a position of the best intentions, but they are ignorant. I watch this show and cringe nearly every time this Bruno guy opens his mouth. Its actually fairly painful to watch, but I find it entertaining regardless. I feel the same way about Michael, the office manager character played by Steve Carell in the NBC show, "The Office."

The Fox

This morning I started my routine the same way I always do. I get the kettle boiling, pour some water for my tea and oatmeal, put them on the arm of our living room easy chair (which faces the front glass doors) and sit down with the laptop to read the blogs and newspapers.

Just as I got settled in I lifted my head and looked out the glass doors to see one of our neighborhood foxes, trotting down the middle of our road, in front of my house. I jumped up to get a better look at him and caled Chris over too. The little canine trotted all the way down to the end of the cul-de-sac before he disappeared in some thickets.

I wish I had a camera in my hand at that moment. I've only seen the foxes around here in the dark hours of the morning. Its unusual to see them in daylight.

If I see him again, what should I name him?

The Simpsons

Hell Yes.

Walter Cronkite

I understand he's a man the boomers trusted. Hopefully they still do enough to factor his opinions into they way they vote.

Classical Liberalism

After the short burst of comments I got in a post on intelligent design, I resolved to post less on political/ideological topics. I like the traffic provocative posts generate, but I enjoy keeping this blog vapidly shallow even more.

Today however, I really wanted to post a link to this article which really spoke to me. I think I'm going to have to read up on some cold war non-fiction in the near future, as well as learn some things about this guy Locke. What do you all think of this article in light of current events?

PS: Its snowing again.

My Heart Burns for Alcohol, Caffeine, and Milk

I've mentioned before that I have had chronic, intense heartburn, for the better part of a year now. I'm only about 15 pounds heavier than I ought to be, so I think its mostly just an age thing. I despise the thought of being dependent on zantac or similar daily heartburn meds, just to be able to eat without feeling pain. So I sleuthed out the root causes of my heartburn and eliminated them from my diet. The sleuthing was the easy part. It turns out that it is was simply the usual suspects, alcohol, caffeine and dairy. The really hard part was quitting all of those things (strangely, I found caffeine to be more difficult to let go of than alcohol). I've gone almost three weeks now and the only hearburn I've felt has all been correlated with mild dehydration.

Now I'm not making any promises to let go of any of these things permanently. I can still take small doses of dairy, and I like having a drink when a social scene calls for it. I don't mind having to take an occasional zantac before going out, and as long as I keep the dairy low I think I'll be OK. It seems that the caffeine was the worst culprit anyway, I can't even have decaf coffee or tea because even those things had enough caffeine to give me raging heartburn. I've also started jogging and eating less, just to get rid of those 15 extra pounds, just for good measure.

Lifestyle changes are really fucking difficult.

Sunday Snowday

We got 21 inches of snow last night. This is what our backyard looked like when we woke up this morning.



We took a whole bunch more pictures during the day, some of which are up at the wife's page, click on the picture above to go there.

The first order of business was to get our snow gear on and play with Ollie out in the back yard.



I mean, we always knew our dog had balls, but this is out of control.



Chris and I tried to make a few snow angels, but with Ollie helping us, they didn't quite turn out to be picture-worthy works of art. Eventually we finished shoveling the driveway, which was exhausting, at around 11 AM. I opted to cook us both omlettes for brunch and then we went for a walk, trudging through the bike paths.



The only regret of course, is that this didn't happen last Thursday night. Our road is still unplowed though, and there is no way that either my wife's VW Beetle of my Honda Civic could drive over the snow to the main road, so with any luck, we'll be stranded tomorrow.

Steven King

This is where Steven King and his family lives. I have never read a novel by Mr. King, but I used to live in a two room apartment down the street from him back in 1993. I ran into Steven once at a gas station that didn't have swipe-card pumps yet, so people still had to go inside to pay for gas. Besides the cashier, he and I were the only two people inside the station. He was driving some kind of sports car, but I didn't know enough about cars to tell you what it was exactly. He smelled like wood smoke at the time.

For the Record

Some of you may have noticed an annoying little habit of mine. I tend to post first-drafts of everything I write here, and then edit posts only when I eventually get around to reading what I've written. The last post about the deer is a good case in point as it was a particularly bad and hurried first-draft, with lots of errors (now mostly fixed). I rather enjoy the idea that there might be people who actually read this blog from time to time, and this habit of mine can't be helping you. So from now on I resolve to only publish writings that have been proofed at least once. Please return to your normal routine.

When Nature Fights Back

I almost forgot to mention yesterday's most interesting-part-of-my-day story. When I came into work Monday, one of the first conversations I overheard was something about clearing all the deer out of the building. By the sounds of the conversation it was meant to be humorous, but based in fact, and not just a joke. So I asked around and sure enough, at some time between 4AM and 7Am Saturday morning, a young stag had broken into the building at which I work.

The structure itself is long and single-story. Its divided up into four distinct sections we refer to as suites A through D. All of the windowed offices are at ground level, and in most suites, the windows go from floor (or ground if you are on the outside) to ceiling. Presumably this buck was wandering around on the company lawn when it saw its own reflection in the dark windows. Assuming a challenger had arrived on its turf, it charged directly at its foe, head down. Of course, this particular buck had very recently molted its antlers (it is winter after all), and so it hit its window-opponent with its bare forehead. The double-paned window shattered and the deer careened onward into an office in Suite A, cutting itself up very badly in the process. Consequently, the regulatory affairs director's office was quickly trashed as the deer bucked and bled all over the office. Fortunately the door was open, so the buck proceeded into the main lobby of Suite A where it continued to track blood all over the carpets and eventually into the taste testing room we use for, well, taste-testing things. Here it decided to shake some of the blood off of its hide (thereby distributing it all over the ceiling tiles and walls), and lie down for a rest.

At around 7AM, someone came by the company to get some weekend work done. They saw the smashed window in the front of the building and presumed the worst. The cops arrived shortly therafter and entered the building through the smashed window. Upon seeing the blood everywhere, guns were drawn. They eventually followed the blood to the taste testing room where they were relieved to see a dying deer rising up on wobbly legs. As animal control doesn't work weekends in this county, the cops had a new problem, getting the deer out of the building. They managed to coax it out of the taste testing room, but they could not get it to move out of the Suite A lobby. The poor deer just kept circling the desks in the middle of the lobby, spilling more and more blood. Finally one of the cops manged to grab the deer by the head and wrestle its weak body through the nearest door. Once outside, it was euthanized with a 9mm bullet.

By the time I arrived on the scene on Monday to survey the damage, the facilities coordinator had managed to tear up most of the sections of carpet and ceiling tiles where the blood had been spattered, and had disinfected the walls. The whole suite smelled like a veterinarin's office. The entryway leading to the door that the cops had dragged the deer through was the only part of the building that still retained a strong musky odor of angry, wounded buck.

None of the damage will interrupt the normal workday for anyone, despite how bitterly our facilities manager complains about it (he seems to hate his job no matter what comes up) and it will only cost a minor sum for repair. However, with all the development and new buildings around this town, I can't help but feel like this was nature's lame attempt at thrashing us back. A hurricaine would have been a more effective choice I think.

Weekend in New York

I spent this past weekend in New York City. My buddy Joe had a birthday on Friday and his girlfriend Robin had planned to bring him up there to celebrate. What she didn't tell him was the part about how Robin was going to have Chris and I come along. So Robin had to make up some excuse about why they were stopping by our house before they got on the road to New York. When he got here of course, we had to inform Joe that our bags were packed so we could join him on the trip. He seemed pleased. Of course, being male, I imagined him thinking to himself, "dammit, now Robin and I won't be able to fuck for a whole weekend, and no birthday anal sex."

I was pretty tired as I was up too late cleaning the house so our dog/house sitter didn't have to live in the same filth we normally do. On top of that, I took my motion sickness pills too soon before getting in the back seat of Robin's car. It didn't take very long before I turned green and everyone suggested I switch seats with Joe so I could ride in front. I felt bad about that, but not as bad as they would have felt after I puked all over everyone. We made good time to New York and collapsed in our room at the Marriot Marquis. We stayed at the Marquis because Chris' sister Lisa is employed there (as a conference manager I think), so we got the family and friends rate.

We had 3 PM tickets for the MoMa which had a few pieces done by Pixar as the latest transitory exhibit. The MoMa is a damn inspiring place. It made me want to finally get those blank canvases, that I've had sitting in the closet for a year now, all painted and dirty.

Anyway, after the MoMa it was time for dinner, but before that, we discovered that Lisa had been really cool and had ordered an "amenity" for us - a bottle of wine and a cheese plate delived to the room. It wasn't long after we snarfed that shit down before we left. Robin had our weekend pretty efficiently planned out, and dinner was no exception. Apparently one has to make reservations two months in advance to get a table at the Union Square Cafe. The place publishes thier own award-winning cookbook. They have managed to put together an award-winning wine list as well. Many of the wines in their wine list were 20 years old, as an homage to the restaurant's 20th anniversary. I was still feeling run-down from the drive and lack of sleep, and was a bit spacey, so I wasn't my conversational best, but dinner was awesome. I had oysters for an appetizer, the tuna steak with wasabi mashed potatos for the entree, and baked Alaska for dessert. Did I mention that dinner was awesome?

Sleep came quickly after we got back to the hotel. Our plans for Saturday were open-ended, which was good because Joe caught a migraine headache and basically had to spend the rest of the day in the hotel room with the lights out. So Robin, Chris and I went out and got breakfast at a place called HK in Hell's Kitchen (get it?). The Eggs Benedict was really good. Chris and Robin started getting all girly-talky so I decided it was time to detach by catching a movie. I went and saw "Underworld: Evolution" only because I saw the original Underworld and surprisingly enjoyed it. I shouldn't have pushed my luck. Actually, it wasn't a total loss as there was a full-nude scene with the female lead, Kate Beckinsale. The scene left much to be desired, probably because of this, but still, a fully nude Kate Beckinsale was worth at leat 40% of the admission price.

After the movie I stumbled onto an internet cafe, but only had time to check my email and a few news pages before I ran back to the hotel. It was raining pretty hard now. I made it back to the hotel and found that the women had returned from shopping and Joe had joined the neurologically-able.

Saturday evening was to be Robin's coup de grace to Joe's birthday weekend. Joe, like most American nerds, can quote most of the lines from most of the works done by Monty Python. Tonight we had tickets to Spamalot. In case you haven't already heard, Spamalot is an Eric Idle-written, Broadway adaptation of "The Holy Grail" with bits of "Life of Brian" and other Monty Python works thrown into musical mix with some hot-as-hell showgirls and a A-list cast. Funny as hell, especially when you already know most of the punchlines (isn't it weird how the more times you watch a comedy, the better it gets?)

And that was just about it. The next morning we had some trouble with the elevator (Marriot Marquis, why have such a high-tech elevator queueing system if it takes 15 minutes to get one?), but we finally made it down from the 33rd floor and out into the city. After another breakfast at HK, a short observation of the Chinese New Year celebration in Chinatown, and a quick stop at Ferrara's in Little Italy, we were back on the road home. We got back in time to get comfortable, order some subs, and watch the Superbowl. Ever since the Patriots dropped out the playoffs I've been feeling a bit lost at sea, so I was only vaguely rooting for the Seahawks (actually, I was just rooting against the Steelers), so it didn't really matter that I passed out after Robin and Joe left during half-time. And oh ya, Mick Jagger, will you please just shut the fuck up already? What the hell was ABC thinking?

Listen

When I was a 17-years-old, my hearing was much better than it is now. I was also a new car driver. Sometimes, at the end of a long drive, after I'd pull up into the driveway or some parking space, I'd shut the car off and sit there for a while, just listening. The novelty has worn off a little, but I still try it from time to time.

Maybe it seems weird but I encourage you to try it sometime too. A car throws off so much white noise while you drive. You get used to it and it gets filtered out, but if you give yourself a second to remember what quiet sounds like right after shutting off the car, you'll notice a subtlely dramatic effect. Just turn off the car, and stay still. Don't let your clothes or your keys or anything make any noise.

The car starts to creak as it cools, a jet flies overhead with its bass hiss, nearby highways hum, a bird or two whistles some distance away. I think its a pretty nifty moment. Maybe this is part of why people say "I'm sensitive" ...that, or they think I'm a closet homosexual.

Napoleon Halcyon Alfmeier

I would like to introduce someone very special to me, Napoleon Halcyon Alfmeier.



Much like his days on St. Helena Island, the emperor spends most of his time surveying his tiny domain in silent contemplation. In comparison to his former days, his majesty leads a difficult life. The rational visciousness often displayed in his heyday during the capture of Venice and the Eygptian campaign are revealed only in moments of amusement, but still thrive.



One day he will again have an army and he will lead it in glorious victory. But at the moment, there are squirrels to be chased from the kingdom, after a nap.

Quiet

Chris has started class again (for her master's degree) so its very quiet here Wednesday nights. She's also joined a choir, so its pretty quiet at home on Thursday nights too. I encourange anyone to come over and hang with me on Wednesdays and Thursdays. We can order pizza and drink beer and play video games. Perhaps I will hire strippers if I'm feeling cheeky.

The Flu

I rose from sleep early this morning to the dulcet tones of my wife vomiting angry gobs of dinner into the toilet. Ah yes, flu season is upon us. I asked her if she was going to be OK and received a soft and pathetic response, "uuuh-hunh."

Satisfied that I had done my husbandly duty, I made a move back to bed. That was when I first noticed the funny feeling in my guts.

So from about 2 AM onward to sunrise, I took to the other bathroom (thank fortune for having two bathrooms) and began to imitate the sounds of my wife, chord for butyric-acid-smelling chord.

I just now have finished sipping about two teaspoons of ginger ale, marking the first moment in this eventful night when liquid has actually gone into one of my body holes.

I think we are going to live.

I, Goose Hunter

I went goose hunting for the first time in my life yesterday. It was wicked fun.

I had to wake up around 3:45 AM so I could make it over the Bay Bridge to Kent County, MD by 5:45 AM. I was pretty tired as I simply could not force myself to sleep before 10 PM the previous night. Anyway, I got to my friend Mike's house and we immediately set out for the farm we were hunting. We arrived at a little pond on the farm property where two side-by-side blinds had been built. Several hunters in high-quality, full-camo gear were setting up dozens of goose decoys in and around the water. In addition to the yellow lab owned by Mike's friend Chuck, there was going to be 9 or 10 of us hunting, of which three were part of a family that had driven down from north of Philly. A goose hunting license permits 2 geese per person, so if it turned out to be a good day, we'd have maybe 20 geese to bring home.

Sunrise came up soon after we all got settled in the blinds. Three of the guys were designated spotters and goose callers. Once someone saw some geese flying towards us, eveyone who wasn't a spotter was supposed to hunker down in the blind, cover up with a ceiling of straw and evergreen branches, keep our heads down to prevent the geese from seeing our pale faces, and wait. Once the geese got close enough, the spotters would start going off on thier goose calls like nuts. Actual geese sound pretty ridiculous all on thier own really, but grown men blowing goose-call horns are hilarous. I had to supress my laughter most of this time while I tried instead to focus on the cue for us to shoot. The birds would circle in for a landing as they became more interested in this apparent flock gathered about the pond below. Once the birds were comitted to land in the pond, and were within shotgun range, someone would shout, "Now!" and we'd all pop up through our roofs of straw and spruce and start BLAM BLAM BLAMing away, all in one hopefully fluid motion. Most or all of the geese would fall from the sky and into the pond. As soon as Chuck let her, Stormy the labrador would jump out and fetch the birds from the water. This really great kid named Clinton had some chest waders, so he would walk out into the pond to help Stormy when needed.

The first group of birds to come in were right over our heads and I didn't see them soon enough to aim in for a shot before three or four other guys did. However the second group to come in was just a pair of birds, which landed in the water far to our right. Since I was in the right-hand most blind, me and the guy next to me took a shot at each of them. The one I hit is featured below.


note: the "birds" in the background are actually the decoys

As the day went on, the groups of geese coming in became larger and more frequent. I think I shot one more bird but it was harder to be sure as we were all shooting at the same time and often at the same bird, or at least at the same tight cluster of birds. It was noon by the time we met our limit, so we gathered up the decoys, took some pictures and left. Mike took me to a local game butcher. This in itself was actually very cool. It was basically just a garage with four people working inside. I walked in and put my birds in a bin and made a tag for each, the short guy at the first station grabbed the birds, chopped off thier heads, feet, and wings with an axe, and then rubbed the bodies all over this giant spinning wheel of rubber fingers - the feather-plucking machine. The bruises and scabs all over his popeye forearms gave me the impression he did this all day long. The woman at next station gutted and cleaned the birds in a big sink and I think the guy at the third station was the owner. He did all the fine trimming and packaging all while maintaining a clever stream of chit-chat with everyone waiting for their birds. A fourth guy ran the register and helped out at each station that ran slow. From start to finish, it only took these guys about 5 minutes to transform my dead birds into a cut of meat like you'd see in the supermarket. Defintely worth four bucks each considering it probably would have taken me about an hour or more to just pluck a single bird.

Anyway, one of the geese has been sitting in a pot of salt water and galic in the fridge overnight. I intend to roast it today. I'll let you all know how well it turns out later.

Update: Roasted goose is delicious. It is entirely unlike the dark meat of a turkey like I expected. It is much more like really tender red steak, like filet mignon. I now have a new favorite cut of meat.

Syriana

I just came back from a showing of Syriana. It was very good, I strongly suggest you see it as well. I can't say that it taught me anything I didn't already know, but it did an excellent job of highlighting some of the sharpest points of the GlobalWarOnTerror/Oil/Capitalism/Beaurocracy/Culture nexus. Remember boys and girls, if the supply of a vital resource is in jeopardy, its price rises, they might even call it an "instability premium." Its just the same for oranges during hurricaine seasons as it is for oil from liberated countries. War makes things expensive, peace makes things cheaper.

My favorite quote from the movie, "A country that has 5% of the world's population and 50% of the world's military spending, is a country whose persuasive powers have declined." The implication I extracted from that statement is that such a country needs to be threatening, because it can no longer successfully negotiate fairly.

I should stop there before I get too fired up.

Sydney: Techno-Parrot

So we seem to be getting the anti-biting thing pretty good now. If Sydney bites me enough to hurt while he's perched on my finger, I wobble it around just enough so he becomes unbalanced and raises his head to concentrate on steadying himself. This maneuver seemed intuitive to me, but all the same, I was pleased to later find it described in some parrot books as "the little earthquake."

Sydney and I are warming up to each other well enough, and he seems to like techno, which is a very good development indeed. He seems particularly fond of Garrett James' "Melodies and Memories" mix, which is beginning to grow on me as well (I used to be indifferent towards it). In fact, as I write this, I am listening to Garrett's mix and Sydney is perched contentedly on my shoulder. A moment ago, when I did not have Garrett's mix playing, Sydney was desperately roaming around my body, loooking for some entertainment; burrowing into my collar, nibbling my ears, lips and nose, squawking, etc. I think I prefer birds sedated with minimal techno.

How cool would it be if I could get this parrot to sing techno?

Sydney

This bird seems to think that my ears are made of fudge or gummy-bears or something equally delicious. No blood has been drawn yet, I think he's just working up to it though.

Happy New Year

I have to say, 2006 is shaping up to be a pretty darn good year so far.

Chris and I started the last day of the new year by driving up to exit 3 on the New Jersey Turnpike where we met a Senegal Parrot breeder from which Chris had arranged to buy a bird. New Jersey was horrible as always but this particular spot was chosen only as a geographic half-way point. The exchange took place in the parking lot of a run-down Howard Johnsons. After an extended conversation, Chris hands this woman a large sum of cash in exchange for a shoebox. Unwitting observers were probably waiting for the DEA to jump out of the bushes at any moment. Once in the car, we opened the box to get our first real look at Sydney, the newest member of our family.



We made the trip back home without incident, and in time to get a good nap before Joe and Robin came over for dinner. Robin cooked this amazing apple-cider chicken dish which we all enjoyed. After dinner I got the chance to give Joe a gift I found for him on eBay. Before I go into the gift itself, I need to give you a few disparate facts about my buddy Joe. He's about as white as a caucasian can get and perhaps as a consequence, he has a serious envy of black people. For example, he's said he wishes he were Lawrence Fishburn. For unrelated reasons, he uses the name Septimus for several internet accounts. Lastly, his girlfriend Robin is Jewish, and so I thought that on this 7th night of Hanukkah, I would give Joe the gift of gelt in the form of a Septimus Severus Provincial coin, minted sometime around 200 AD. For those of you who don't know, Septimus Severus happened to be the only black Roman Emperor (originally a General from the conquered lands of North Africa). The multiple irony and significance of giving Joe this gift, in this particular week, made my head swim. Think of it, a coin minted by a black Roman emperor which will appreciate in value, given as gelt on Jewish holiday of Hanukkah to a man with a Jewish girlfriend who also coincientally adopted the same name as the emperor featured on the coin. How cool is that?



PS: I will give a dollar to anyone who can tell me who is featured on the "tails" side of this coin (click on the image to follow the link)

Ok. After dinner it was time to head out to the New Year's Eve Party.

Tom's traditional New Year's Eve party was really fun, in fact, it may have been the best one I can remember. Everyone was drinking the communal spirits and nobody said or did anything regretable, yet the atmosphere stayed edgy and energetic. Chris and I made two new friends, David and Amy, with whom we made a date to go Salsa dancing. Anyway, we left at around 2 AM with Joe and Robin, who crashed in our guest room. I made a big corned beef hash and eggs breakfast for myself and Joe, while Robin made something lighter for herself and Chris. Chatting about the night before, the consensus was that indeed, the party was a hit. The rest of the day has been all about Chris and I playing with our new bird, chatting with friends and family and just relaxing.

Good Times.