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.