Stupid on wheels

Susie started this one with her tales of vehicular incidents.

1. I quit the band after my junior year when the director decided to be an arse about the part-time job I held to earn money for college (maybe I'll blog that, one day when everyone's really bored).
   
   One Friday night, during my senior year, my folks were out of town. I wasn't supposed to take the Opel* out of town while they were away, but I wanted to go to the football game in a town about 30 miles away to hang out with my band geek buddies. So I went anyway and subsequently locked the keys in the car in the parking lot of Franklin High School.
   
   It was one of those moments when realization dawns just. As. The. Door. Clicks. Shut. NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
   
   45 minutes of creative work with a coat hanger, and I was saved—but it was a fairly panicked 45 minutes.


2. Later in my senior year, I took the Opel to a "disco" that a couple entrepreneurial college students put on at the flea market building every Saturday night. Usually, when I went to the dances, I spent most of my time milling around, scoping the crowd for females with appropriately low standards who might want to dance.
   
   Usually, I danced a couple dances with one or two girl buddies from school and want home without meeting anyone; but on this night, I met the Sheffield sisters, who went to Tompkinsville High School. We had a great time, dancing and flirting, until the dance was ending and one of the girls discovered that their ride had just left.
   
   Once again, I broke the rule about driving the Opel out of town. A knight in shining Opel, I drove the Sheffields down some of the twistiest two-lane roads I've ever seen to their trailer in BFE Monroe County. Then, with my mission accomplished, I headed back home.
   
   To this day, I'm not sure exactly what happened. I know I was in the middle of a sharp right curve. I know I wasn't drinking or speeding. I think I swerved to miss hitting an animal.
   
   The car fishtailed left. I steered into it, but too much. The car fishtailed right, kept going. The passenger side slammed into some fence posts on the driver's side of the road, flipping the car into the air and down a 15-foot embankment. WHAM! It landed on its roof and flopped over onto its wheels.
   
   The engine was ticking from the heat. The turn signal was ticking because I'd hit it. I tried to turn it off but it was bent at a right angle (because I'd hit it) and I had trouble finding it. The windshield had popped out, folded double, and was lying on the hood. I had a few moments of panic when I tried to get out and couldn't. I remembered to unhook the seatbelt and things went more smoothly.
   
   Out of the car, I climbed the embankment to the road and looked around. I was in the middle of nowhere. No sounds. No streetlights. I started walking, hoping to find a farm house where I could use the phone.
   
   When I realized I was walking down the double yellow line, it occurred to me that that this was probably a bad idea and I moved to the shoulder. Finally, I found a house, got the skeptical farmer to let me use his phone, and made the dreaded call to Dad.
   
   Who, to my stunned amazement, was more concerned about me than about the car. Just one of many lessons I learned from the experience, but probably the most important.


3. Before the Opel, Dad had this '62 Chevy II station wagon he bought off a guy from work for $50. The paint scheme was White Oxidization and Rust two-tone. At some point, the previous owner had removed the 3-speed on the column and replaced it with a 4-on-the-floor, which poked up through a chunk of screwed on tin. The guy was into building pro stock drag racing cars, and maybe that explained the glass pack muffler on a six-cylinder rustbucket. We called it The Tin Can.
   
   This is the car Dad drove to work every morning at 6am. He'd go out, the door would slam with a hollow clang, and he'd spent a minute fiddling with the manual choke until the Chevy started. Then he'd rev it for half a minute to keep it running. The old engine didn't have much compression, so he had to feather the throttle and clutch to get the car started up the driveway. But once he got going, the car roared like an old school bus.
   
   The neighbors used to say that they set their clocks by that roar.
   
   When I still had my learner's permit, my folks were out of town, and I located one of the spare keys to The Tin Can and took it for a joy ride. The only manual transmission car I'd driven before was my buddy's Datsun B-210, and this ornery beast was a whole different animal. My short drive across town and back was a real experience, but I got home safely and parked the car.
   
   I think I must not have gotten the car back in exactly the right spot, because in a conversation years later, Dad said he knew I'd taken the car.


4. After I graduated from college, I couldn't find a job in my field. Out of desperate need for some way to make the student loan payments that had started up, I took a job managing an auto body repair shop at a local car dealership. There, I was demeaned by the owners, forced to get up early and work long hours, and was paid so little that I was forced to live at home with my parents.
   
   To salvage my sanity, I would drive about 35 miles to the town where I went to college and spend the occasional weekend with friends who were still in school. After attending a party one Saturday night, I was driving home and realized I'd had too much to drink. I pulled over, parked in the entrance to some farmer's field, and fell asleep.
   
   It would make a better story if I had awakened with the sun coming up and cows peering at me over a fence, but that's not what happened. I slept until about 3am and then drove home without incident.
   


5. I once got up early on a Saturday morning to do some errands. Somewhere between getting in the car and backing out of the garage, I must've gotten distracted by something. The next thing I knew, there was a crash as I backed into the still-closed garage door. The car was okay, but it cost me $500 to replace the garage door and tracks.

I'm sure there are more. I'll add them later, if I think of some.

* When I was in high school, Dad bought this keen butterscotch-colored Opel coupe that looked like the Manta body style (if anyone's keeping track) but wasn't. It had a black, cloth-colored top and a sporty black hood (it came that way). Tan interior, bucket seats... what a great car.

Cause for optimism

Over on The Bee's Knees, the topic of the Myers & Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) came up. While Googling for a description of my ISTJ traits, I stumbled across a web page that put an interesting and positive spin on the normally dour perception of my type.

Over at The Retire Early Home Page there's an analysis of which personality types are most likely to retire early. It's an interesting read.

As an ISTJ, I may not be the life of the party. I may be wound too tight. I may expect too much of others. But by golly, I'm liking my chances of getting out of this cubicle ahead of schedule just a little bit better than I did when I came in this morning!

Call me Pat

St. Patrick's Day came a little early at the TurtleFoo homestead, as commemorated by a ceremonial driving out of snakes.

This little guy—a Western Ribbon Snake, I'm guessing—was lurking along the foundation of the house at around dusk, last evening. I didn't even see him (Or her. I didn't check for bits.) until I'd hit him with the string trimmer, slinging him about two feet.

In the picture, he's intact and was still squirming when I took the picture. Turtle came out to take a look and said she thought he was an ex-reptile, though, so I slung him over the fence into the creek.

Now playing: The Dandy Warhols, Welcome To The Monkey House

Say "cheese"

I don't know what's wrong with people.

I thought I'd witnessed the pinnacle of bad taste the time I heard a guy come into the washroom, sit down in the neighboring stall, and while doing what people do while sitting where he was sitting proceed to call a woman (I assume) on his cell phone to make a dinner date. Being the ornery creature I am, I flushed the (loud, institutional model) American Standard a couple times, and still the guy nattered on, completely unfazed, as if he were sitting in the sun having a latté at some sidewalk café.

The worst, right? Au contraire.

This morning, I was in the men's and after—how can I put this delicately?—some telltale noises from the next stall, I swear I heard the same sound my new camera phone makes when I snap a picture.

I don't want to know. Really.

Meanwhile...

I think I may be in real danger of having my geek card pulled—and rightly so.

One day last year, my aging 700Mhz Win98 computer hiccuped. Blue screen, applications open, corruption... bits everywhere. I worked and worked to sort out the damage and finally got things limping along, but it was never quite right again.

Finally, after some soul searching, I broke down last week and ordered a new machine, which arrived on our doorstep before I got home from work.

"I guess you'll want to get right to work setting it up," Sweetie said, making the safe assumption.

"Nope," I said. "I'm not sure when I'll get to it."

I could hardly believe the words that had just come out of my mouth. There was a time when Sweetie would have been absolutely right. I would have torn into the box and had the thing running with all applications transferred by bedtime.

This time, it just seems like another item on my to-do list. Right after clearing away enough of the junk in my office to find a place to set up the computer.

That said, I'm really looking forward to being able to run the latest/greatest versions of things like Dreamweaver and Adobe Acrobat. I really hadn't realized just how completely pre-XP operating systems had been abandoned until I discovered that even the supporting software for my new PDA wouldn't run on anything less than XP.

Okay... I'm starting to feel a bit more enthusiastic now. And once I've got all my crap treasures transferred from the old computer to the new one, I'm going to reformat the old one and install Linux on it. Now, that should get my geek status reinstated!

Now playing: The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli

Smoke gets in your eyes

As I headed out for work this morning, I caught a whiff of smoke. My first thought was "leaves", followed by a flickering montage of images from my early childhood. Back then, it was perfectly acceptable to rake the year's crop of fallen leaves into piles and then burn them—although I can't imagine my memory has that right. Folks must've at least put them in the 50-gallon drums that everyone used for burning trash back then.

"The fires scorched more than 663,000 acres — more than 1,000 square miles or about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island..."

(CBS) GROOM, Texas

That's not what I was smelling, obviously. Not in the scraped-clean-of-trees, multi-laned concrete streeted suburb of Allen. I'm pretty sure I was smelling the misfortune of fellow Texans suffering through the wildfires burning in the panhandle. At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to be philosophical before my second cup of coffee, it reminded me of how we're all connected.

I gave my lawn its first mowing of the season on Friday evening, and I'm still sore from trimming and edging on Saturday. By Sunday, the very-green grass had grown with such enthusiasm that it's looking like it needs to be mown again—especially after the heavy rains that came during the night.

And yet, this morning I smell smoke. Hundreds of miles away, the ground and foliage are so dry and there's so much land burning that I can smell it here, in my cubicle, inside a sealed building.

Weekend Update

As bad as the weekend was for the folks suffering through wildfires, it was great for me. With my physical therapist's permission, I did a bit of riding on my road bike just to see if the combination of anti-inflammatory drugs, PT, and a higher stem have ameliorated my neck pain. Saturday morning, I went out with a leisurely-paced novice group for a little under 25 miles. The pain had kicked in by about 18 miles, but it wasn't unbearable and I seemed bounce back more quickly once I finished the ride. Not great, but an improvement.

Then yesterday, I participated in a group riding clinic subsidized by the PBA and conducted by the notorious "Bikin' Mike" Keel. For close to two hours, Mike shared with the group his philosophies and experience gained from 30+ years of cycling. It brought into sharp relief the disparity between the right way to ride in a group and the way the group dynamic actually plays out during most club rides.

Which is why it was all the more interesting when Mike shared with us that he'd be doing ride leader training for the Plano club in the near future. This is A Good Thing™, I think.

Anyway, once the lecture had concluded we all unloaded our bikes. Grinning in perverse anticipation of the five miles of 23 mph southerly headwinds (with 30 mph gusts) we'd face, we formed up a double line and prepared to ride to "The Crit Site" where we'd practice paceline techniques.

"The Crit Site", as it's known to area cyclists, is actually a commercial development that never quite got off the ground. With its smooth, wide concrete streets and unobscured field of view, it has become a popular site for bike racing criteriums. In our case, it was a perfect place to get used to drafting a foot or two off another rider's rear wheel without having to worry about watching for vehicular traffic (because there is none). Yesterday's winds provided an added instructional bonus, because we could really tell when we were in the "sweet spot" of the draft. And, because we were riding on a loop, we got to experience how different drafting positions work better depending on which direction the wind is coming from.

On the ride back to the cars, we were stopped at a traffic light and I took a look around. Neat lettering painted across the inside of two large shop windows read "CROISS   ANTS".

"You hear a lot about ants in Texas," I thought aloud, "but mostly just fire ants. What's a croiss ant?"

"I think they're French," the spry older gentleman next to me suggested.

"Hmm. Doesn't croiss mean cross in French?" I asked, disingenuously misspelling croix.

Mrs. Malaprop would have been so proud.

"Maybe they're some sort of army ants," I continued, warming to the subject. "Ants Templar. But you'd think the Ants Templar would be pretty aggressive. Why haven't I had to wage war on them in my yard?"

"It's obvious," I heard from behind me. "They're French."

(If you're still waiting for the punch line, I hope you have a comfortable chair.)

Now playing: Cowboy Junkies, Black Eyed Man

Get a rope

Over on Random Walk, Bret gets the nod for most timely link of the day.

No longer will I be forced to rage impotently against the pitiless and malevolent spirit of the 21^st Century workplace. Now I can rage against Robert Propst, inventor of the cubicle—for all the good it will do me, since said instrument of not-good karma up and died in 2000.

It's not just me. Immediately after reading Bret's post, I shared the link to the article with some of my fellow cubicle dwellers. They had already rounded up torches and pitchforks by the time I got to the part of the article that mentions Propst is escaped to the great beyond, and it was a tricky business breaking that news without becoming the alternate target of this techie lynch mob.

When Pigs Fly

Bret's comments about unlikely musical pairings reminded me of a CD I heard about from an old Fidonet acquaintance. It's called When Pigs Fly and features such delightfully twisted gems as Lesley Gore singing AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", Herman's Hermits doing "White Wedding", and The Connells covering "Insane In The Brain".

The concept is pretty far out there, but some of the covers actually aren't bad. Except... well, let's just say that hearing the Jackie Chan/Ani DiFranco cover of "Unforgettable" may give you an entirely new insight into the matter of William Hung's recording contract and, perhaps, make you bleed from the eyes.

Randomness

It cracks me up to read some of the comments around these parts. Contrary to popular myth, it's not just the guys who seem obsessed with talking about gas and nose nuggets.

A distinction worth noting: Farting on cue is entertainment. Farting on queue is biological warfare.

Borrowing a page from Fred's playbook, I was checking out the search terms that are bringing people to my blog:

• colon smells
• bohemia sunshower
• coke and asparagus flush
• drunk wife tool
  

Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Now playing: Live, V

And now, a word from my colon

As anyone who's read this blog for more than a few days will be painfully aware, some of my fellow cubicle dwellers can't seem to adapt their noise levels to the more communal environment in which we now live.

But today has been my turn. Since shortly before lunch time, my on-board plumbing has alternated between moaning like the tortured soul of Jacob Marley's ghost and singing like a pod of whales. Loudly. It's been spouting off like a drunken redneck after that 10^th round with José Cuervo.

I know they can hear it, because giggle puss over there was snorting herself silly a little while ago.

C'mon, say something about having to listen to my bodily functions, I thought. I just dare ya.

Ah, revenge is indeed sweet. Especially since this isn't happening during church, for once.

Sing... sing a song

I love to sing, and I suppose there's always been a part of me that dreamt of singing in front of a bunch of people and fantasized that I was good enough at it that they enjoyed the experience.

With or without two-for-one Jell-o shots.

That's probably why I've finally embraced American Idol as one of my guilty pleasures—along with Desperate Housewives, which I watch with Sweetie under the pretense of keeping her company.

I didn't want to like the show. For the first season I succeeded in dismissing it along with such tripe as The Bachelor and Beauty and the Geek; but over time, I caught myself stopping for longer and longer periods when I stumbled upon it while flipping channels. I finally had to admit to myself that I was interested in whether or not the goofy-looking guy with the great voice would triumph over the one with the dreamy eyes and the perfect hair. Among the women, would tone triumph over t— eh... a pleasing aspect?

After all, if I'd been born about 20 years later than I was, with a better set of pipes, and with a more prominent ego, that could be me up there.

Sweetie and I like to watch the performances and then compare notes. I'm usually the one who takes issue with the singers who can't seem to pick a key, so my evaluations are most often in line with Randy Jackson's. Sweetie is more apt to comment on a performer's charisma and appearance and be less critical of blown notes or song choice. She's a better judge of pop idol quality and tends to line up with Paula or Simon.

We spend a lot of time discussing who we like best and why, but one contestant we both agree on this season is Chris, the bald, soul-patched rocker. Last night, Ryan Seacrest announced before a commercial break that Chris would be singing a song by Fuel.

"Gotta be 'Hemorrhage'," I said.

"Do they have any other songs?" Sweetie asked.

"Yeah, but nothing I can remember. Anyway, 'Hemorrhage' is perfect for this guy."

We sat and watched the GEICO gecko while waiting for Chris's performance.

"You realize he's going to nail this, right? That's gonna suck."

Sweetie looked puzzled.

"Why?"

"Well, after he nails it I'm never going to be able to bring myself to sing it at karaoke again. I'll have to retire that from my repertoire."

Yes, that's right. I'm one of those people.

My 10 favorite karaoke songs

1. Dwight Yoakum, "Fast As You"
2. Fuel, "Hemorrhage"
3. Matchbox 20, "Long Day"
4. The Wallflowers, "Sleepwalker"
   
5. Garth Brooks, "If Tomorrow Never Comes"
   
6. Roxy Music, "Love Is The Drug"
7. Cherry Poppin' Daddies, "Zoot Suit Riot"
8. Stealers Wheel, "Stuck In The Middle With You"
   
9. Elton John, "Wake Up Wendy"
10. Vertical Horizon, "Everything You Want"

Chris nailed his performance, by the way. With "Hemorrhage" off the list, I guess I'll just have to take a run at Travis Tritt's "Here's A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)".

Now playing: Yes, Relayer

Falling apart

You hear all the time how, after a period of time together, pets and their owners start to resemble one another. Sweetie swears that I'm starting to look like furry dependant the elder; I think I have more in common with my '97 Civic: Cracked windshield, leaking fluids, squeaks and rattles galore. Needs to be traded in and replaced with something newer, faster, and sexier but just won't give up and die.

"And you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill."

–Little Feat, "Old Folks Boogie"

I'm not looking for sympathy at all, but there are times when I can really relate to that old (there's that word again) Rolling Stones line, "What a drag it is getting old."

Yesterday was kind of like that. There I was, sitting on the table with my 24-year-old internal image of myself, being poked and pulled and prodded, and being told, in essence, that all the disks in my neck are shot. Dried out, scrunched together, grinding against one another like an arthritic 65-year-old's.

My driver's license says I'm 5'9", but somewhere along the line I've shrunk to more like 5'7" (and a half). I guess I know why.

"We can try stretching exercises to open up the spine," the PT was telling me, "but the fact is that your range of movement is diminished, and your posture when you're riding your road bike is pretty much the worst position for your neck problems."

The ghost of Old Yeller passed through the room and left the hair standing on my worn-out neck.

Arliss Coates: Why did you shoot Rosemary?
Travis Coates: She was sick.
Arliss Coates: Well, you were sick. How come we didn't shoot you?
Travis Coates: That was different.

"...cortisone injections?"

"What?" Great. Now my mind was wandering off.

"Have you had any cortisone injections? In your neck?"

"Actually, I was sort of hoping the PT would work and I wouldn't have to."

Arliss, go fetch the rifle.

For me, the bottom line is that no one gets out alive, and in the grand scheme of things I'm unbelievably lucky.

I watch some of my friends with MS having to accept help sometimes just to feed themselves without slinging their food all over the walls. I see Sweetie's frustration every time she has to go the long way around to get into some building that's only grudgingly ADA compliant. There are people out there who didn't survive their cancers. There are people so depressed that they can't drag themselves from the sofa to the kitchen for a drink of water.

When I was a teenager, I developed this notion that I would die when I was 40 years old. I don't mean the general sense that, dude, that's, like, really old. I just had this premonition that 2000 was when I'd check out for good.

I didn't, and now I kind of feel like I'm living on my bonus life. I try to count my blessings and move on, doing my best to work with what God has given me and do it without too much complaint.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to replace the piece of wire that's holding my tailpipe on.

Random misfire

On another blog I was visiting this morning, I noticed the topic "Layers of the Onion". My first thought: "Kinky. Talk about making whoopie that would bring tears to your eyes."

I really should seek help.

Weekend update

This one's been a keeper on a number of levels, not the least of which being that I'm not sick any more.

1. I vacuumed the house (as promised), including using the attachments on the baseboards. For the bonus round, I donned the hazmat suit and put the smackdown scrubdown on the shower.
2. Schlepped out in the rain with Sweetie to finally rework our cellular plan and replace those six year old boat anchor phones we've been using. I don't need the blasted thing to play Bach's fugue in D minor as a personalized ring for when Sweetie calls. Having the ability to snap pictures with the phone while on a bike ride and beam them home to my wife would be cool, but we can't justify the expense of it just now. Still... the point is that we've got the phones for it now.
3. Trainer? We don't need no steenking trainer. It was 60 flipping degrees out today! I hopped on Ol' Stumpy and rode out to Allen Station to watch the kids practicing roller hockey, then back for about 14.5 miles round trip. I didn't push the pace, but I felt pretty darned good considering I was flat on my back all last weekend and hadn't even done a trainer ride in 20 days. BONUS: I'm starting physical therapy tomorrow, so I'm hoping that will work out and I'll be able to start logging some serious miles again.
4. Ever since I got into cycling a few years ago, I've been hearing how Breaking Away is sort of de rigeur, but I only got around to watching it today. It was fun, and cheesy, and weird seeing Dennis Quaid and Daniel Stern as babies. Not as entertaining as The Triplets of Belleville, for my money, but I'm weird that way.
   
5. All quiet on the volunteer webmaster front. I guess all the players rained in yesterday and out playing in the sun today.

In other words, I had a great weekend.

On the down side, I saw on the news this morning that the Dena Schlosser trial has ended in a mistrial. Oh, I thought. I guess someone couldn't just couldn't be persuaded that Schlosser was guilty. But no. The two holdouts were the guilty votes. Amazing.

There is no doubt in my mind that there's a place for the insanity defense, but not when the insanity is self inflicted.

If you go off your meds and you start having crazy thoughts, don't seek help, and then end up murdering your children, I put you in the same class as the person who goes out, gets blind drunk, and then kills the same children with his car on the drive home. Both can argue that they weren't in their right mind, and that's true; but how did they get that way? The drunk chose to drink and drive. The insane woman went off her meds and started seeing demons in her baby girl.

It's the same thing to me, which is why I'll never have to worry that I might be selected to sit on the jury for a trial such as this one.

Random misfires

Misfire the first

So I happened to glance at my header image and the phrase "bird on a wireframe" popped into my head.

Now why didn't I think of that?

I mean... I did think of that, but why didn't I think of that when I was trying to think of a name for the blog?

(The question is rhetorical, incidentally.)

Misfire the second

So I'm sitting here in my crappy little cubicle, debugging a wad of brittle C++ code that's broken because of someone else's inattention to detail. Time passes. I'm neck deep in the stuff and haven't even noticed that I've gone from 6:45 and my second cup of coffee to lunch time in the blink of an eye.

And then it hits me: the smell of burnt popcorn, wafting across the prairie dog colony like one of those phantasmal hands that emerge from cartoon pies and hook the nostrils of unwary characters with their wispy fingers. Like an olfactory alarm clock, same time every day.

My snoot has been awakened now, and I'm aware of other scents. Someone else in the area has turned loose into the common atmosphere something that strikes me as a cross between beef stew and a dead fish. I have the momentary sense that I've been transported to a movie theater full of field tripping third graders, several of whom have just succumbed to flu season and upchucked their lunches.

Maybe today would be a good day to take my Fritos and my baloney and Swiss sandwich to the break room to eat.

Now playing: Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band, The Mountain

Wanted: mental flotsam

I've been back to the blog several times over the past few days and even contemplated writing something.

But here's the thing: my schtick (or what I think is my schtick) is plucking random bits of cognitive flotsam from the stream of consciousness and writing about them in a wordy, mouthy, playfully cynical manner. Which is great, when those things come along; not so great when they don't.

Right now, my stream of consciousness is a mere trickle.

Is this the result of mental drought conditions? No. At least, I don't think so.

I suspect a certain passive-aggressive beaver has been at work upstream, damming my cerebral streamlet with chunks of PHP code cemented with expiring domain registrations. I could snipe and grouse about that, or I could talk about the new PDA Sweetie bought me so I could keep track of all my doctor/physical therapy appointments. I could talk about how frequently I'm not riding my bike. I could ruminate on how all the daily details and demands have been spinning my head lately.

Let's face it: that stuff's just not even particularly interesting to me, much less the blogosphere.

[mode: randomize]

And for the record, it turns out my pop is fascinated by curling, too. When I mentioned this to Sweetie, she pursed her lips and nodded knowingly, as if to say The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I should be so lucky as to turn out half the man—half the husband—my father is.

[mode: randomize]

I did hear this great joke the other day, but it's a little on the bawdy side so cover the small ones' eyes.

A man walks into his bedroom with a sheep under his arm and says, "Darling, this is the pig I have sex with when you have a headache."

His girlfriend is lying in bed and replies, "I think you'll find that's a sheep, you idiot."

The man says, "I think you'll find I wasn't talking to you."

Now playing: Def Leppard, High 'n' Dry

A couple quarts low

I couldn't remember what percentage of the human body is supposed to be made up of water, so I looked it up. 50-60%. Higher for men.

Arguably lower after a day like I had yesterday.

But I'm back and feeling much better. Sitting under the afghan my mom made some 27 years ago for me to take to college, steadily sipping diluted Gatorade, and watching as die Schweizer make the Canadian hockey team work for it. There's a winter storm warning for our area today, which means all those tall, tall Dallas overpasses will turn into ice chutes. What a perfect excuse to take it easy, watch some winter sports, rehydrate, and recuperate.

I want to return to the subject of curling for a moment. By the time Sweetie rolled in after an all day networking boot camp, I'd already watched the American women's curling team lose, taken a couple naps, and watched the women's hockey team lose to Sweden.

"What are you watching?" she asked. "Curling??"

"Yeah," I croaked.

I'd lost my voice sometime during the day.

"What a stupid game."

"What? No! It's fascinating," I said. "It's the perfect geek sport."

"Riiight..."

"No, really. Look, you've got all these very delicate laws of physics in play with the mass and velocity of the stone and the friction of the ice. You've got the physical conditioning of the madly sweeping sweepers and the strength and flexibility of the... of... the guy who slides the stones. Then there's the strategy of chess and the geometry of billiards."

Sweetie glanced at the TV and thought about this for a moment while watching the stone make its way slowly down the sheet of ice toward the "house".

"That's not a sport. It's an activity."

"Leave me alone. I'm sick."

Okay, I get the message already

After being awake for much of the night, listening to ominous gurgling noises and making short, quick trips to the next room, I get the message: too much code, not enough blog. Or maybe it's just a virus. Either way, I find myself lying on the sofa with the nurse cat on my feet, the laptop and an afghan on my lap, and women's Olympic curling on the tube.

"Why," you might ask, "would you waste your time watching curling?"

I might answer that it's one of those weird sports everyone makes fun of and no one understands. I might observe that I neither understood nor had any interest in hockey until after I'd taken the time to watch a few games. But the truth is that it's on because I can pretty much get up and... leave the room at a moment's notice and not really worry that I'm going to miss something important.

Long time gone

I see from a few of the comments that a few of you might be feeling abandoned. I've been checking in on you daily, but here's the thing: when I'm in full-on code troll mode, my head gets so—

[gurgle]

Erm. Excuse me for a moment.

A short time later..

Dear God, let it stop. Much more of this and I'll be as dehydrated as a strip of foo jerky.

Anyway. As I was saying, my head gets so full of conditionals and loops and ways to plug security holes that the side of the brain that I blog from doesn't get many CPU cycles to use in being creative. I get so wrapped up in the puzzle of whatever I'm working on that I don't notice the strange, interesting, and/or irritating things going on around me. My often-inspiring commute or walk from the parking garage to my workplace could include exploding fuel trucks or ninja power rangers, and I probably wouldn't notice.

I did post on Valentine's Day. It was a pretty funny one, I thought; but ultimately, I decided it was perhaps a bit too adult compared to the relatively restrained tone I've established here, to date. So I canned it.

That doesn't mean I didn't smirk every time someone wished someone else a "Happy VD". There's just something about "Valentine's Day" sharing a set of monogrammed towels and washcloths with... well, you know.

And...

...in case anyone's interested, the volunteer webwork is going well. The panicked e-mails have slowed to a trickle. I've shored up some places in the code that were vulnerable to ne'er do wells with too much time and too little ethics. My employers are easily impressed, but they are impressed, and that's a good side of things to be on, every now and then.

Happy VD

Am I the only one who's ever abbreviated (initialized? acronymized?) "Valentine's Day" and noticed that it shares a set of monogrammed towels and washcloths with "venereal disease"?

That's not what this post is about. However, in a blinding flash of synchronicity, it turns out that what prompted it also begins with the letter "V".

Yesterday, I was preparing to launch another in a long string of e-mails to the head honcho of the group for whom I've been doing all this web work. We were putting the finishing touches on a document I'd added to the site, and I was asking him if he thought it needed some additional verbiage to clarify a point.

Wait. Is it "verbiage", or "verbage"? I can't remember.

Off to Merriam-Webster Online (which, in itself, is a tempting topical tangent waiting to happen... but I'll resist).

So, I arrive at MWO, and the proprietors have my word in stock. Sometimes they don't, or it's a special word that requires a subscription, but today I find my word and my word is, in fact, "verbiage". And then I notice it:


Is it just me, or does Ads by Google's choice of sponsors seem just a little out of place on our venerable dictionary publisher's page?

Thank God I wasn't looking up "valentine" at the time. I might have been psychologically scarred.

Mysteries and mayhem

I knew there was a reason I liked this Bret character (besides the whole Kansas/Dixie Dregs business).

It appears he gets almost as worked up about idiots behind the wheel as I do, and his ideas regarding punitive, post-DMV driver eduction would make him a worthy write-in gubernatorial candidate. A treasure of the state, even.

I actually contemplated thinking about possibly beginning this very post yesterday. I didn't, as I've been more occupied poking my pro bono web site project's content providers with a digital stick, hoping to note some sign of life. The panicked e-mails impressing on me the importance that we "get this done" have stopped, now that I actually have the ability to do something about them, but I keep poking in the hopes that they're "just restin'".

Shagged out from a prolonged squawk, perhaps.*

Where was I? Oh yes: idiot drivers.

Illustration the First: To Serve and Protect

On my commute to work yesterday morning, I was girding my loins for the usual post-High-Five fire drill. I could tell the horses were edgy, sensing trouble ahead, but the trouble didn't start 'til the men were in bed a white Crown Victoria came bullying its way up the righthand lane, tailgaiting so closely that several dinkier cars pulled on to the shoulder to let it by. When it came even with my hood, it decided it wanted over and just came on.

No blinker. No Texas Turn Signal.** Just half a cup of coffee's worth of my reflexes between me and some personal interaction with my auto insurance adjuster.

From there, it the proceeded directly across two more lanes of heavy traffic in the space of about 10 seconds.

Maybe I'm living in the past, but that hardly seems like appropriate behavior for a police cruiser running without lights or siren or apparent goal except to avoid having to wait in line with everyone else. I have great respect for our officers of the law and the difficult job they do, but it's this sort of thing that will make it that much tougher to feel ashamed the next time one of them pulls me over—claiming I was exceeding the speed limit in a school zone even though the lights weren't flashing—and tickets me to make quota.

Illustration the Next: Take My Car... Please!

Earlier in the drive, some clown cut in front of a car two lanes over and slammed on his brakes. The car behind managed to avoid hitting him, but my pulse quickened just a bit in empathic outrage.

Ah, I thought. The smell of road rage and testosterone in the morning.

Sure, it was just a ratty old Sentra (or something similarly battered and smoking), but this twit was acting like... like... well, like a Hummer driver.

Then he (or she) whipped back out into the lane he'd just come from and did it to another car. And then another. No hits, but not for lack of trying.

I tried to guess what this idiot was trying to do, but the only possibilities that came to mind were that he was really tired of that piece of junk, or that someone had convinced him he could strike it rich by getting some rich Plano-ite to rear end him.

Which ring did Dante reserve for aggressively stupid people? You know, the ones who would have departed the gene pool ages ago, were it not for liability avoidance stickers.

"Do not place head under mower deck while mower is in operation."

"Avoid driving drill bit into eyes or chest cavity."

Those sorts of things.

And now... the mystery

Last week, while walking from the parking garage into my office building,*** I approached a line of cabs (minivans, actually) along the curb. In the space between the front of one and the rear of the next, I could see a man on his hands and knees, forehead to the pavement. My first thought was that he was examining the undercarriage of his cab. Then I wondered if maybe he was in some distress, as he seemed to be sort of rocking.

Then, as I came alongside, I noticed that he'd taken off his work boots and placed them neatly behind him. I also noticed that he was kneeling not on the pavement but on a very nice, ornately decorated rug, and that's when it clicked.

He was praying.

I wasn't quite sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it weirded me out, partially because this isn't something I'm used to seeing and partially because of the association Islam holds with terrorism, these days. On the other, I felt a bit deficient.

After all, when was I ever so devout that anyone might find me on my knees next to a curb at 6:30am, giving praise to my God?

Now playing: Mazzy Star, She Hangs Brightly


* Someone recently sent me a link to a South Park homage to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch. I found it amusing, but it is by the folks who do South Park, so caveat lector.

** Wherein the driver, usually in some outlandishly large truck or truck-like vehicle, indicates his/her intention to take your place on the road by crowding the dividing line between his/her vehicle and yours. No directional indicator may be used, because to do so would constitute a display of weakness or respect. Or sentience, perhaps.

*** This three-minute walk sure does provide a lot of blog fodder, doesn't it?

Come on Daisy...

"...don't drown me this time
Now the sparks are gonna fly
'cause I'm turned on again
burnin' up the future"
-Catherine Wheel, "Sparks Are Gonna Fly"

I know: how random.

It's Bret's fault, though. His recent up-bringing of Kansas and Dixie Dregs had me digging through The Doghouse* last night, populating my CD wallet with all sorts of music I hadn't listened to in a while.

And now I am.

[thought mode: randomize]

Imagine my surprise upon finding I'd been tagged with a meme by Bill (a.k.a., Mr. Food) over on Twelve Two Two Fondue.

Four jobs I’ve had

1. Dish washer/floor maintenance specialist at a hospital
2. Delivery driver for a drugstore
3. Manager of a body repair shop at a car dealership
4. Computer programmer
   

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Monty Python's Holy Grail
2. Dances With Wolves
3. The Iron Giant
4. The 5^th Element
   

Four Places I have Lived

1. Massillon, Ohio
2. Glasgow, Kentucky
3. Dallas, Texas
4. Allen, Texas
   

Four TV Shows I Love

1. House, M.D.
2. Family Guy
3. Various chopper/hot rod building shows on Discovery
4. Modern Marvels
   

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

1. Orlando, Florida
2. San Antonio, Texas
3. Um... I guess I really don't travel much
4. That, or I just can't remember where I've been
   

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. Szechuan Chicken
2. Deep
3. Cheeseburger and fries
4. Um... I guess I'm not really a connoisseur.
   

Four Sites I visit Daily

1. bikejournal.com
2. Twelve Two Two Fondue
3. Random Walk
4. My Gobhole
   

Four Places I’d Rather be Now

1. In my bed
2. On my bike
3. In an office
4. In my granduncle's kitchen, shooting the breeze and sampling his latest batch of homebrew beer.
   

Five People I am Tagging

Guess I'll give this part a miss, since I'm pretty sure this meme has been going the rounds, recently.


* "The Doghouse" is what my mother-in-law calls the largeish bonus closet off our family room, where the stairwell would have been if we'd built the house as a two-story. Mom's implication was that this is where I'd make my bed on those occasions that I was in trouble with Sweetie, but we ended up lining the entire 6'x10' back wall with shelves. About half of this space is taken up by my collection of compact discs.

King Mullethead

All right, you bunch of posers. Look upon the king of all bad mullets. What do I win?


In my defense, this was around '93. I had spent a good deal of the late '80s working for a company that had a very strict dress code, and I grew the hair when I changed jobs just because I could.

It's out of my system.

P.S.

Amazing. All I have to do is post a picture of myself looking goofy, and everyone comes out of the woodwork. From the number and nature of some of your comments I get the feeling that further explanation is required.

Bret probably hit the nail on the head when he suggested this 'do was a result of my love for the prog-rock band Kansas. I don't think I was consciously trying to emulate anyone specifically (has Phil Eheart had hair plugs, do you think?), but I've always loved music. Rock music. A lot of it Progressive Rock like that produced by bands like ELP, Yes, Marillion, and Kansas.

Of course it's reasonably painful to look back at the '80s and see the clothes and the hair styles we wore, but that's what was cool back then. Unfortunately, as I said, my employer at that time wouldn't have any of it so I may have been just a bit late for the party when I started growing my hair in 1990.

I played a lot of air guitar/air microphone, back in the day when I had my own apartment and no one except the neighbors to object if I gave my Klipsch KG-4s a workout. The long hair was something I always identified with rockers, so it was probably natural for a nerd with insufficient vocal range and no aptitude for the guitar to try a shortcut to coolness.

I wore an earring, too. Left ear, for those who keep up with such things.

Anne notes that I looked proud of the mullet in the picture above. Maybe, but I'd never heard it described as a mullet at that time, much less in a derogatory tone. My expression was intended as one of seriousness and cool, not pride of coiffure. I had just started dating a woman (pre-Sweetie) who wanted a photograph of me, so I set up the camera on a tripod and did this self portrait.

She dug the hair, by the way, which may go part of the way toward explaining why that relationship was a bad idea. I firmly believe that having to live through that one was God's way of preparing me so that I'd recognize that Sweetie was The One, when she came along.

But that's a whole 'nother story.

I used to wear my hair in a ponytail a lot of the time, but did I ever braid it? Yes, once. When I decided I was tired of fooling with all that hair and that all the gray in it went counter to the bad boy image I was trying to achieve, I went to my stylist and asked her to cut it off. She had always liked my hair, because of all the natural wave, and decided she had to braid it before chopping it off.

Nearly 10 years later, I'm still trying to find a use for the thing. Maybe a chain pull for a ceiling fan.

The fruits of productivity

Well, they ain't blog entries. That's for sure.

I got volunteered for some volunteer work on a web site for a loose confederation with no money and even less notion of How Those Darned Web Thingies Work. The official webmaster fades in and out of the picture at his own discretion, leaving me to find back doors into the database so that I can help these folks get the content up to date for this year's event.

So, basically, I've spent nearly every free minute of the past three days knocking together code to do the same thing I could have done in half an hour, if only the webführer could be induced to provide me with the information I need to log in to the site's database.

But I digress.

I stumbled into the bee's knees' blog and tried but failed to resist my OCD compulsion to answer her meme. She asked, "What kind of foo [not me; this one] would you be?"

• Car: '60 Ford Falcon. Old, cheap, dependable, and a little on the small side. Oh, and my brakes squeal.
• Book: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Movie: Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.
• Weather: Partly cloudy with scattered frog showers.
• Drink: Shiner Bock
• Ice Cream Flavor: Something with nuts. Butter pecan, let's say. (It has been posited that the nuts are a reference to my mental state. The reasoning is somewhat more organic, however.)
  
• Song or Genre of Music: Insurgent country (i.e., "a little bit country; a little bit rock 'n' roll").
• Shoe: Sneaker. Or maybe a one of those slippers that looks like Godzilla.
• Website: Oxford English Dictionary
• Food: Chicken biscuit.

Yes, yes... I realize that passing this off as new material is cheating. But look at it this way: it was either this or another rant about working in a prairie dog colony.

Now playing: Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger. (I'm feelin' outshined)

Restless

About 2:30 this morning, I found myself standing alone in the middle of a street in the suburbs. The eerie silence was broken only by the occasional sound of a semi howling down a distant road and, except for the one I'd just left, all the clean, new, plain-as-shirt-cardboard homes on the street were dark and still, just beyond the glow of scattered street lights.

It was chilly and damp, so I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and began walking briskly in the general direction of where I hoped to find my car. How difficult could it be? All I had to do was find the one that wasn't an SUV or a minivan.

I spotted my aging Honda almost immediately and jogged toward it, my footfalls echoing loudly in the stillness. My keys jangled harshly as I unlocked the door and climbed into the driver's seat. I turned the key in the ignition and was assaulted by a blast of rock music.

Damned radio gremlins.

Before I knew it, I was sitting across a table from Sweetie at a place called Pothaito having breakfast. As we shoveled stir fry and scalloped potatoes into our mouths, we entertained ourselves by taking in the decor, which was an eclectic mix of '40s greasy spoon and Asian bordello. Weary, work-booted truck drivers sat on padded stools, looking on as the cooks banged pots and pans and jabbered at one another in some unintelligible argot.

I speared half a dozen potato slices with a chopstick and was about to comment on all this when Sweetie reached across the table, grabbed me by the shoulders, and started shaking me.

"Quick! Get him into the bathroom!" she was saying.

"What?"

"Get him off the bed! He's throwing up."

The sickly fluorescents of the Pothaito gave way to the darkness of my own bedroom, my own wife, and one of the furry dependents in the throes of some serious reverse peristalsis.


Blasted hairballs...

Heritage collage: New House

Since my earlier casual attempt at making a digital collage was met with some interest, I thought I'd post up this slightly more ambitious effort.

Its primary thematic element is the scan of a photocopy of the plat of a home my great-grandparents bought in 1928. I gave it a blue tint in the attempt to get back to what I thought the original blueprint might have looked like.

The photograph shows my great-grandparents with my grandfather and two of his siblings. Based on their apparent ages, I'm estimating that the photo was actually taken around 1925, but that was close enough for my purposes.

The folding ruler is one of Sweetie's scrapbooking stickers that I scanned, and the envelope that the journaling is "written" on is just something I had lying around and scanned.

I'm most pleased with the way the watch came out. Several years ago, during a visit with my parents, I got my dad to trot out the box of family treasures that have come into his care over the years. One of these items is my great-grandfather's pocket watch, which he habitually wore on a chain hooked through a button hole of his vest. If you look, you can see it in the photograph.

One by one, I laid the items out on a piece of white cardboard and photographed them as best I could. Some came out better than others, but the lighting wasn't ideal. The short of it is that cleaning up the photo of this watch forced me to reach deep into my bag of photo editing tricks and learn some new ones.

Good dog

Let me regale you with tales of this evening's ride.

It's that or the thumb screw. Your choice.

Yeah... I thought you'd see it my way.

So anyway, I was on my way back from a doctor's appointment this afternoon, moonroof open, sweating in my flannel shirt when it occurred to me that it just wasn't natural to be having such beautiful weather on the 24th day of January. So unnatural was it that I naturally decided I had to have myself a ride after work, and Nabumetone be damned.

The sun was already setting by the time I got under way, so I rode with my blinky going and my headlight on. Apparently, being able to see me infuriated one Escalade driver, who proceeded to get right on my wheel and follow me through the ritzy neighborhood. I kept trying to wave her around, but no luck. Finally, after she'd gotten herself worked up enough, she waited until there was a car coming the opposite direction and laid on the horn. I sort of guessed it was coming and managed not to swerve in front of the oncoming car.

I nearly soiled myself, but finally the jerkweedette had got her post-commute kick-the-dog therapy out of her system and went around.

Silver lining: the adrenaline jolt I got from the encounter with Ms. Bling served me well when I had to evade an ambush by a couple kids who'd gotten bored of shooting at one another with their paintball guns.

But all that is pretty common stuff and not the point of this entry.

Dogs: the cyclist's arch nemesis.

Okay, maybe not the arch nemesis, because they're only doing what comes naturally, unlike aggressive drivers (who are also doing what comes naturally, though not as any consequence of evolution). And pavement cracks, which one might argue are a joint act of God and cities that grant construction contracts to the lowest bidder.

I chose this evening's route to include a bunch of protracted grades and one big hill, which meant that I had to pass along a stretch that I know to be the home turf of a couple vocal but not particularly aggressive dogs. They more or less know me by now and have either figured out that I'm too tough to eat, not worth the effort it would take to run me down (in light of my being too tough to eat), or that I'm really not planning to slip into the house to steal their giant, slobbery rawhide bones. Whatever the reason, we have an understanding.

Tonight, though, there were a couple new pooches on the block: a little one that looked to be somewhere between the size of a chihuahua (chi-hoo-ah-hoo-ah) and a Jack Russell terrier, and a larger one that appeared to have more than a little chow in it. They were chasing one another around the street, then chasing the minivan that nearly chased me off the shoulder trying to avoid them.

Yap, yap, yap... woof, woof, woof. Oh look! Something new to chase!

And then it was on. Within seconds, I felt my heart rate jump into the high 190s as I summoned the torque to try and outrun them. I had Stumpy up to around 20mph, and they were still on my heels like wolves on a sick, elderly buffalo. Daaaaang...

But wait. There's more.

I was rapidly (for me, at least) approaching the corner where my usual dogs live, and I could see them coming out so see what was going on. Then one of them took off toward me like a rocket.

Crap. Caught in a crossfire.

Or so I thought.

Just as I thought I was about to find out if all the things I'd heard about rabies shots were true, the oncoming dog shot past me. I sneaked a look back in my helmet mirror and saw—to my stark, breathless amazement—that it had intercepted the Cujo wanna-bes and stood them down.

Good dog.

The long arm of the law

Driving to work, a gentleman had to swerve to avoid a box that fell out of a truck in front of him.

Seconds later, a policeman pulled him over for reckless driving. Fortunately, another officer had seen the carton in the road. The policemen stopped traffic and recovered the box. It was found to contain large upholstery tacks.

"I'm sorry, sir," the first trooper told the driver, "but I am still going to have to cite you."

Amazed, the driver asked for what.

"Tacks evasion."


(Don't blame me. This one came from my buddy Jimmy, in Ireland.)

Could Pixar be bought out by Disney?

With Disney's distribution deal with Pixar expiring this year, it's a possibility. Why?

Disney is seen to have fallen behind other animators, and its latest cinema releases have failed to set the box office alight

"Disney is perhaps revealing a slight lack of confidence," said Anant Sundaram of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

"If that assessment is true, then it is a somewhat unfortunate admission from a once-great company that fundamentally created and defined this space," the professor said.

Amen.

Full story

Now playing: Catherine Wheel, Ferment.

What's that smell?

As I made my way from the parking structure to my office building this morning, my nose was filled with a pungent aroma. Not floral, not petrochemical. Possibly animal, but also a bit like burning tires. I couldn't quite identify it, but I had the vague notion that in some culture it might be considered food.

Hrm, I thought. I wonder what boiled goat colon smells like.

That set the stage for my next RSM, which had to do with a conversation I had with one of our friends a couple weeks ago.

We'd been having an enjoyable after after-church dinner visit* when the converstion turned suddenly political. Or maybe not suddenly, but I generally make a point not to become involved in such discussions so it probably seemed that way to me, when I finally did.

My friend—we'll call him "Jim" to disguise the fact that his name is actually Bob—had just announced that he was thinking of voting for Carole Keeton Strayhorn, on account of how the current Texas governor, Rick Perry, was divisive, dishonest, and about as useful as dugs on a boar javelina. Strayhorn had promised to lower property taxes and improved Texas schools, which Jim feels are good things.

“We can fix our schools, cut property taxes, reign** in government spending, and crack down on criminals who abuse our children.”

-Carole Keeton Strayhorn

I agreed in principle but noted that I'd recently heard an interview with Strayhorn on a local talk radio station and that I came away rather underwhelmed. Sure, the things she promises to do are things that I'd like to see done, but when the host pressed her for details about how she intends to accomplish them, she fell back on impassioned rhetoric about how strongly she believes in all that's good for Texas and what a low-down skunk Gov. Perry is.

The arguable validity of this opinion aside, it doesn't tell me anything about how Strayhorn intends to make up the difference in school funding if she succeeds in lowering property taxes. And that's what I told Jim.

"Well, Perry isn't doing anything, so what choice is there? It's time to give someone else a chance," he said, the frustration showing in his voice. "I have to vote for Strayhorn."

I understood where he was coming from, of course. No one likes to feel like his vote is going to waste, so it's natural to feel like the choice comes down to the lesser of two or three evils. Jim's not alone in feeling this way.

"So you're just going to roll the dice, even though you may be electing a governor who's even less effectual than the current one?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"Fair enough."

I guess I'm just ornery this way, but if I don't like any of the candidates who actually have a chance of being elected, I go ahead and vote for the one I do like, if there is one. But that's neither here nor there, because I haven't even taken the time to learn if there's anyone besides Strayhorn and Perry running.

I'll tell you one thing, though. I think that there ought to be some sort of consequences to be faced by a politician who bases his/her campaign on promises to do or undo specific things. I was discussing this with Sweetie the other evening, and I think I have the answer.

If a candidate elected into office goes back on his/her campaign promises without making some sort of good faith effort, he/she ought to be compelled to appear as a contestant on Fear Factor.

Let 'em eat boiled goat colon, I say.


* You read that right. It's a three-course evening: dinner after church, and then onward to someone's house for a visit after the dinner. Or "after ((after church) dinner) visit", for my fellow code trolls and math weenies.

** A Freudian slip I find revealing. Maybe she meant rein—but maybe she didn't.


Now playing: Georg Philipp Telemann, Dinner Music Vol. I

The value of time

Now playing: BT, BT_ESCM

What kind of American English do you speak?

One of my many eccentricities is a love for words and dialects of the English language.

I know that's just wrong.

I can't help it.

When I was a little kid, I once found myself stranded on the throne when I took a dictionary in with me, lost track of time, and found my legs had fallen asleep. As an adult, during a slow period at work, I spent endless hours reading the alt.usage.english newsgroup. Somewhere in the midst of all the biting sarcasm and chest thumping on the part of brainy but insecure academians, I learned a bunch of fascinating but essentially useless things.

The following test was the topic of some discussion in the newsgroup, but since I stumbled across this blog version while "next blogging" I thought I'd share my results. Take a whack at it and see how close you think the test comes to identifying your dialect.

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

20% Dixie

15% Yankee

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Sweetie and I were surprised that my results didn't show me to be less Dixie and more Midwest, but I suppose that's a result of my having lived in the South for more than thirty years. It doesn't mean ah sayound lahk eeyit, but I expect the words I use have changed.

For instance, when I was a kid we always called soft drinks pop. When we moved to the South, everyone called everything Coke.

"Would you like a Coke?" a friend would ask after we'd been out ramping around the neighborhood all afternoon.

"Sure."

"What kind?" he'd ask.

Bear in mind that this scene took place in the early '70s, when there was no Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Classic Coke, Ultra Coke, Golden Age Coke, Asparagus Coke...

There was Coca-Cola. The one, the original. The only difference between one icy cold Coke and another was whether it came in one of those little 10oz. bottles—reputed to be stronger—or not.

But I digress. I was just being offered a Coke.

"Sure," I'd say.

"What kind?"

"What do you mean, 'What kind?'"

"Well," my friend would say, taking a deep breath, "we've got Orange Crush, Dr. Pepper, Sprite..."

Sprite was pronounced "spraaaht".

"...and Coke"

"Oh. Well, I'll just have a Coke, thanks."

"What kind?"

[seethe]

So, in an effort to prevent at least one part of my life from turning into a pale imitation of an Abbott & Costello sketch, I compromised and started referring to soft drinks as sodas. This saved me from being ridiculed by the Southerners for saying pop, while at the same time avoiding the unacceptable level of ambiguity that was a consequence of referring to everything as Coke.

I still say "you guys", though. Just to get under Southerners' skin.

The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia

Pardon my drool

I've been an amateur web page tinkerer almost from the moment I got my first ISP account running in 1995. Along the way, I've picked up a few 'photoshopping' skills (even though I use PaintShop Pro) and have a basic knowledge of CSS2, JavaScript, and PHP gubbins.

This morning, while Googling for some esoteric bit of web tech, I stumbled across the site of Matija Turčin.

I can't read much of the site, because I don't speak Czech or Hungarian or whatever this is. I don't even know whether Matija's male or female (one or the other, probably). What I do know is that the design of his/her site is one of the coolest I've seen in recent memory.

Anyone who's visited my blog within the past month probably groks that I'm a total sucker for old-timey things. I like old books, old pictures, and the sort of distressed, earthy style I see in Sweetie's scrapbooking magazines.

Sadly, my artistic ability doesn't extend much beyond "I know what I like when I see it", so all I can do is look at a design like this and salivate.

Why didn't I think of that?

Every once in a while, my web travels lead me to a truly useful product.

I happened upon this one while Googling in the wake of a posting Bill (a.k.a., "The Grackle Whisperer", "Dances With Grackles", and "Billard") made about his enthusiastic (some would say 'unnatural') rapport with grackles.

Star Wars to become new TV series

Two Star Wars TV series will follow the latest movie in the hit film franchise, director George Lucas has said.

Full story

Now playing: Jerry Lee Lewis: 18 Original Greatest Hits

Honky Tonk Badonkadonk

A new single off Trace Adkins' album Songs About Me goes, in part, like this:

We don't care bout the drinkin'
Barely listen to the band
Our hands, they start a shakin'
When she gets the urge to dance
Drivin' everybody crazy
You think you fell in love
Boys, you better keep your distance
You can look but you can't touch
That honkey tonk badonkadonk
Keepin' perfect rhythm
Make ya wanna swing along
Got it goin' on
Like Donkey Kong
And whoo-wee
Shut my mouth, slap your grandma
There outta be a law
Get the Sheriff on the phone
Lord have mercy, how's she even get them britches on
That honky tonk badonkadonk

Full lyrics

In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that I find this song amusing. It's fun, and I like a badonkadonk as much as the next red-blooded, not-quite-dead-yet male.

But what an odd meeting of cultures.

According to the first entry at Urban Dictionary, badonkadonk means

An ‘ebonic’ expression for an extremely curvaceous female behind. Women who possess this feature usually have a small waist that violently explodes into a round and juicy posterior (e.g., 34c, 24, 38). Other characteristics would be moderately wide hips and a large amount of booty cleavage...

"Her badonkadonk made a brotha pop mad wheelies."

Hank Williams must be spinning in his grave. Sure, there's a bar and, ostensibly, drinking involved. But where's the pickup truck? Where's the faithful canine and the farm being taken by the bank?

It seems the Big & Rich bandwagon jumping has commenced.

My new theme song

Five O'Clock World
The Vogues

Up every mornin' just to keep a job
I gotta fight my way through the hustlin' mob
Sounds of the city poundin' in my brain
While another day goes down the drain

But it's a five o'clock world when the whistle blows
No one owns a piece of my time
And there's a five o'clock me inside my clothes
Thinkin' that the world looks fine, yeah
Holiday, yeah...

Tradin' my time for the pay I get
Livin' on money that I ain't made yet
Gotta keep goin', gotta make my way
While I live for the end of the day

'Cause it's a five o'clock world when the whistle blows
No one owns a piece of my time
And there's a long-haired girl who waits, I know
To ease my troubled mind, yeah
Holiday, yeah...

In the shelter of her arms everything's okay
She talks and the world goes slippin' away
And I know the reason I can still go on
When every other reason is gone

In my five o'clock world she waits for me
Nothin' else matters at all
'Cause everytime my baby smiles at me
I know that it's all worthwhile, yeah
Holiday, yeah...

Sweetie's not long-haired, but other than that... yeah.

Blockbusted

For some time now, Sweetie and I have been watching with interest the decline of an institution. I didn't make note of precisely when it was that Blockbuster started adjusting their return deadlines so that renters had only about a day and a half in which to watch a three-day rental. Even after they largely stopped supporting the VHS and offered many new released only in DVD format, it took us a while to get really irritated.

Finally, we did; and when we did, we switched to Hollywood Video. Hollywood Video had at least as many titles—most available in both VHS and DVD—and their rental periods hearkened back to Blockbuster's good old days.

And then we moved to Allen, a town with no Hollywood Video. Worse still, the local Blockbuster was small, so when the 'no late fees' business came around it meant that we usually had to wait for a couple months after a movie was released in order to find a copy in stock.

After several months of Sweetie's prompting, I signed up for Netflix. After a few weeks of almost having at least one movie waiting to be viewed, Sweetie and I agreed that Blockbuster's business model was in big, big trouble.

Apparently, Edward Jay Epstein agrees. In his interesting analysis at Slate, he expands on what Sweetie and I were sensing:

The other shoe dropped with the emergence of Netflix as a major online competitor for what remained of the rental market. (Blockbuster turned down the opportunity to buy Netflix for a mere $50 million, instead entering a disastrous home-delivery deal with Enron.) Netflix signed up over 3 million subscribers by 2005 by offering DVDs that could be kept as long as renters liked for a monthly fee. To compete, Blockbuster had to do away with its single biggest profit-earner: charging late fees to customers who kept videos past the due date. It also had to invest millions of dollars in a copycat online plan.

Thanks to the way Blockbuster gave VHS the bum's rush, we now have DVD capability in both rooms where we watch movies. Netflix' DVD-only format is no longer any sort of barrier and, as Epstein points out, Blockbuster will not be missed.

And speaking of movies...

...we just watched Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith earlier this week.

George Lucas has taken a lot of flak over the dumbing down of the three prequel movies, and I think a lot of that is justified. Fortunately, I'm able to mostly suspend my disbelief and just wallow in the rich CGI world he has created.

You won't hear me ranting about Jar-Jar Binks (not much more offensive than the bloody Ewoks, really) or the fact that when a spacecraft is shot down and starts listing, people and droids wouldn't really start sliding all over the decks (it's artificial gravity). I won't even rail against the criminally bad dialogue.

Well, not much.

There was one thing that struck me during the movie—okay, two things, if you count the errant piece of popcorn. After his encounter with Master Windu, Palpatine's appearance left me feeling like I'd seen him somewhere before. Finally, I figured out where:


Simon Bar Sinister lives!

Now playing: Cry of Love, Brother

Foo's 2nd Law of Pro Bono Web Development

"The only thing that can delay the progress of a web site maintenance project more than the original designer who refuses to turn over the code is the original designer who agrees to do so but never quite does."

Now playing: Sunny Day Real Estate, The Rising Tide

Toys in the attic

While digging into the history of photography for the masses, it occurred to me that I hadn't seen that old folding camera of Grandpa's since moving into the new house. In a fit of obsessive compulsiveness, down came the ladder to the attic space above the garage and up I went.

I didn't find it right away, of course. If I'd known which box it was in, I probably wouldn't have felt the need to go thumping about like some sort of overgrown roof rat. And it's not as if the effort was wasted. Opening the wrong boxes gave me a mental catalogue of what's in them, which may save me having to go on a tear the next time I think of something I haven't seen in a while.

But I did find it: the Kodak Jiffy V.P. [1935-1942] camera that my grandparents had used to take most of the few photos I have of my mother when she was very young.

A glimpse of the past

I found this old postcard on some web site a while back. I was so intrigued by it that I couldn't resist spending the couple dollars it took to have it delivered to my mailbox.

It's not that the scene is remarkable in and of itself—the photo could have been taken in any of hundreds of small American towns—but it's significant to me because of the many times I rode my bike along this very street when I was a kid. It's significant because, despite its familiarity, this scene with its unpaved street, its new sidewalks, and its young trees seems subtly different than the one I knew.

By the time I was riding along this street, the trees were quite tall, the sidewalks were cracked and uneven, and the street was paved with asphalt.

This card was apparently the last of page of a letter, and the cards were probably stuffed in an envelope and mailed that way. As a result, there's no postage stamp and therefore no postmark to give a clue as to the time period. I spent a bit of time with Andrew J. Morris' Postcard Dating Guide, but the about all I learned is that this postcard was likely from somewhere in the 1907-1930 time period.

The author's use of "Kodak" for camera sounds quaint and makes me think of a time before everyone had one. I wonder what she—I think the signature is an abbreviation of Laura—would have thought about today's digital cameras.

Postscripts:

Bringing forward some of the discussion from visitor comments...

• According to a representative the Glasgow Electric Plant Board, Glasgow had electricity by 1910; however, he points out that the wires in the postcard image are telephone and telegraph wires, not power lines.
• Postcards from the "divided back era" were produced 1907-1915. These are distinguished from earlier cards with divided backs by the printed words "Post Card" and instructions that specified which half was to be used for correspondence and which was for the recipient's address. There's a nice illustrated discussion of the eras here. The North Race postcard is similar in appearance (if not quality) to some of the ones here.
• The stamp box says "domestic one cent; foreign two cent", which at first seems like a helpful bit of information. But not really. According to Andrew Morris, the cost to mail a post card was one cent from 19 May 1898 - 1 Jan 1952, except for two periods—2 Nov 1917 - 1 Jul 1919 and 15 April 1925 - 30 Jun 1928—when it was temporarily raised to two cents.
  
• George Eastman introduced his flexible film "Kodak" camera in 1888. Kodak began producing the popular Brownie cameras around 1900.
  
• Susie made the observation that the postcard's author appears to have been using a dip pen and wondered when the ballpoint pen was invented. According to an article on Wikipedia, the answer is "Laszlo Biro, 1938". Fountain pens began being mass produced in the 1880s. (I actually prefer writing with a good fountain pen over a ballpoint.)

Police Say Cat Called 911

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Police aren't sure how else to explain it. But when an officer walked into an apartment Thursday night to answer a 911 call, an orange-and-tan striped cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor.

The cat's owner, Gary Rosheisen, was on the ground near his bed having fallen out of his wheelchair.

Rosheisen said his cat, Tommy, must have hit the right buttons to call 911.

Full Story

And you thought that all cats do is sleep.

Now that I know what they're capable of, I wonder if I can train the furry dependents to call out for Chinese food.

Sputter... fizz...

Well, that certainly didn't take long.

I got up this morning, gingerly stepped over and around a meandering cat on my way to the bathroom, showered, and dressed. Sweetie's autopilot kicked in, and she dragged herself out of bed to help me make coffee and pack my lunch.

After kissing my wife goodbye and wishing her a nice day, I turned the car toward Dallas.

"Nice," I thought. "Traffic's pretty light this morning. A lot of people must've taken an extra day off from work."

There was a little voice way in the back of my brain trying to get my attention, but I couldn't hear it over the radio.

I made it to the office and parked in my usual spot. The fact that mine was the only car on my level of the parking structure didn't trouble me in the least. There's rarely more than a couple cars when I arrive in the morning, and because of today's light traffic (there's that little voice again, a little louder but perhaps speaking with its mouth full of breakfast) I'd arrived about ten minutes earlier than usual.

On the ground level, I noted the presence of a black Mercedes convertible that's always there, parked across three spaces, when I arrive. I muttered something appropriately inappropriate under my breath, like I always do.

The voice receded.

In the front door with my pass card (normal), up the elevator, into the still-dark maze of cubicles (also normal), and to my desk I went. No one around. My favorite time of the morning. While my workstation was booting, I used the time to visit the men's.

"Don't you think it's a little odd that we didn't really get a New Year's holiday?"

It was the voice.

"What?"

"New Year's Day. It was yesterday. A Sunday?"

"Yeah?"

The voice sighed.

"Look, I know we haven't had our second cup of coffee yet, but work with me. When a holiday falls on the weekend, don't we usually observe it on the following Monday?"

"Um..." I said to the restroom walls. "Oh. Crap."

My first brain fart of the new year.

At least the traffic was light for my drive back to the house.

The Monkey of Darkness

El Mono Diabólico

A few years ago, Sweetie and I took a few extra vacation days around the Thanksgiving holiday to do some sightseeing and visit with friends in San Antonio. This was before The New House, when we were still flush with cash, so we did some price shopping and booked a room at the fairly swank, very historic Wyndham St. Anthony hotel.

Aside from the intriguing sense of age about the place, the thing I remember most about the St. Anthony is the Monkey of Darkness.

When we first arrived at the hotel, we parked the car and then trudged with our bags down the long, ornately-decorated Peacock Alley promenade toward the front desk. Just before the transition between Peacock Alley and the reception area, to the right of the doorway, sits the 5'5" tall Monkey.

Carved from wood and stained a dark reddish brown, the Monkey slouches insouciantly atop an old tree stump. In his right hand, he holds a platter extended toward the visitor as if to offer an hors d'oeuvre or perhaps a wafer-thin mint; but with his left, high above his head, he struggles to maintain his grip on a hungry carrion bird. Open-mouthed and white-eyed, his face is framed by wild hair and a broad brimmed hat.

Why are the Monkey's eyes white? Did the bird snatch them? I doubt it. Monkey looks just a little too relaxed for someone who's just had his eyes plucked out.

Are they rolled back in his head like those of some frothing, demonic psychopath? Is he some kind of undead Monkey? In the movies, undead frequently have cloudy white eyes.

Whatever his story, my pulse and my pace quickened a bit each time I had to walk past the Monkey.

Much lower on the malevolence scale—but no more explicable—were these bug suits we spotted while strolling around downtown San Antonio. The sign says the display has something to do with the world of William Joyce (an author of children's books, according to Google).

I suppose the bug suits must be used to liven things up during readings of Joyce's books. At least, I hope so. The only other explanation I can come up with is that these are accessories for transpestites.

Either way, if this is what the fashionable reader is wearing for story hour, today's kids must be mentally tougher than when I was going to story hour down at the library. These things would have given me nightmares for sure.

Of course, if I'd been able to get my hands on that roach get-up the Hallowe'en I dressed as a nun, I wouldn't have those blasphemy charges on my permanent record.

Happy New Year!

We're not big partyers at the Foo house, so just for my own amusement I'm making this first posting of the year by riding in on one of my neighbors' unsecured wireless access point. Broadcasting the factory default SSID, WEP disabled, no MAC ID filtering.

Yikes.

If there's any good news, it's that he/she doesn't seem to know how to share directories.

I've decided that one of my resolutions for 2006 will be to figure out whose it is and educate him/her before some reprobate does Bad Things to him/her. It's the neighborly thing to do.

Woo hoo!