Broken chips, bottom of the bag

Political fallacies

2012-01-25T09:07:00.001-06:00

I keep seeing these posts on Facebook that are supposed to wake up the reader, but actually just offend people and have nothing to do with rational thinking. I suppose it's an election year, and a hotly contested primary, but some of these posts actually turn the truth upside down.

Example: A cartoon shows Jesus talking to a disciple, with the label "Republican Jesus." He is saying something to the effect of "Feed the poor? Of course not. If they don't want to be poor, let them get jobs like anyone else."

Put aside for now the question of whether the poor want to work, or if they can find jobs. The point of the cartoon is that Republicans don't care about the poor, and that they should, if they are at all Christian. (I should point out here that I am not a Republican; I am a Libertarian).

The truth is that according to surveys and tax forms and so forth, rich Republicans donate far more of their own money than do rich Democrats. I suspect that Libertarians donate even more as a percentage of income, but of course nobody researched that. Besides, there are no rich Libertarians who will admit it.

A more important point is that Jesus never advocated socialism. He did not say "Render unto Caesar so that Caesar can feed the poor." He said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's." In other words, pay your taxes to Caesar as he demands, but give your tithe to God, to feed widows and orphans (those who cannot help being poor), and to support the church (or synagogue).

When government feeds the poor, they remove any ability to help or encourage the poor to learn how to feed themselves. It cannot distinguish between those who can't help being poor, and those who are poor because they want free money without anyone telling them how to live their lives. Both are out there in abundance, and anyone who has worked with a charity of any kind knows it from experience.

Further, the more money the government takes from people (rich or not), the less they have to give to charities. So when government increases its expenditures on behalf of the poor, they are not adding to what the poor man can get... they are merely shifting money from the private sector to themselves, and taking a cut off the top while they're at it. In effect they are taking away your right to decide who gets your charity dollars, and telling you whom you may give it to - and it can't be a religious institution because of the 1st amendment. So you have to support their approved charities first, through your taxes, and then you can optionally give a little more if you want to.

So that cartoon is profoundly dishonest and misleading.

Once again, liberty demands that government get the hell out of the way. Let us keep our own earned money, and let us decide whom, if anyone, we will give it to when supporting causes we believe in.

If you believe in anything, if you are passionate about anything, for the love of God don't pass the responsibility to the evil of government. Do it yourself. Calling for the government to do it for you doesn't count. It's the lazy way.

Win 7 antivirus 2012 removal (EASY)

2011-12-14T08:40:00.000-06:00

Win 7 anti-virus is one of those malware things that pretends to be your anti-virus package going off. Most of you, if infected, will immediately realize this, because you know the name of your own anti-virus software package. If you don't, you should. But even knowing it, the thing has taken over your computer, and it's asking for credit card numbers to get rid of it.

It goes off within minutes of infection, popping up all kinds of warnings, many of which are in poor English ("you want remove this threat?"), which would be bad enough, but the worst thing is that it holds your computer hostage by blocking every application you try to launch, telling you that it's infected with something or other, and you can get your computer back by clicking here or here. Don't bother clicking on the buttons, they just take you to a worse place: a convenient input box for your credit card number. The windows that pop up are disguised to look like something from your control panel, but they are not. The X in the upper right corner does close some of the windows, but they pop right back in a minute or so.

You get this virus (which renames itself to match your operating system) by visiting a website infected with their bad javascript in the html, and then works by making a lot of bad entries to your registry. The code can be inserted without the webmaster's permission by a clever hacker if security isn't tight enough at the hosting company, or if the webmaster manages to inadvertently let the code get installed. Security isn't for sissies anymore. But it is often deliberately added to porn sites. Yeah, those nekkid girls aren't so pretty anymore, are they? Bunch of skanks, anyway.

So you go to your other, non-infected computer, and desperately try to find out how to get rid of this thing by Googling the name of the virus. (That's probably how you found this blog - welcome, by the way). You find all kinds of solutions claimed, most of which tell you to buy this or that removal tool for $24.95. Some will give you a long list of registry entries to remove manually, and other files to look for and remove. You go through all that, you reboot your computer and .... it simply reinstalls itself. Crap! All that work for nothing!

Don't panic. And don't send anybody any money.

The solution is actually simple. Go back to a restore point before you got infected.

That's it. No searching for files, no downloading a $24.95 program, no running a deep scan for over an hour with a removal tool only to find it didn't work.

Restart your computer and tap repeatedly on the F8 key before Windows starts to load. Select the Repair option. Repair it by going to a prior restore point, one before the infection. Be patient, the process takes a while. When you reboot, your virus is gone.

Use the computer for an hour or so, normally, just to make sure in your own heart of hearts, that it's really and truly gone. Tomorrow, after you are happy with the way it all works, make a new restore point.

If you don't have any prior restore points? You're screwed. Just reinstall the OS and start replacing the data files from your backups.When you're done, tell the system to do restore points once a month or so. Go to Start, enter "restore point" in the search box, and follow the instructions from there.

You don't have your stuff backed up? Are you kidding me??

Then you have just learned a very valuable, but expensive, lesson. Make regular backups.

Now, to prevent getting such a virus, start using Firefox, and immediately use the add-on "No-Script" - it will block javascript from executing unless you approve the website specifically the first time you visit it. If you don't trust the website, and you can't see what's there without allowing javascript... then their content isn't really all that important, is it?

Don't visit porn sites. Those will usually have bad code. It's put in the site on purpose.That's why they set up the porn site - to infect your computer and maybe fool you into giving them a credit card number to buy phony malware removal tools. If you click on a link from a trusted site to an unknown one, even if it isn't porn, and you don't see what you expected, don't approve javascript for the untrusted site. In fact, it's best if you don't approve javascript for any site that you only visited because of curiosity. Curiosity killed the computer. If you can't stand it, wait a day or so and ask the person who sent you if they got a virus from it.

The really popular sites are usually OK. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube. But be careful about links to external sites. That's where they'll get you.

(Thanks go out to my best buddy Dave, who shares all kinds of cool computer knowledge with me, specifically how to play with restore points, and who has never been wrong about this sort of thing. Thanks, Dave).

Today I am thankful for...

2011-11-24T09:04:00.001-06:00

The turkey is out in the garage in a roaster oven, quietly getting ready to be taken to the assisted living facility where GA's parents are expecting us to arrive, bringing Thanksgiving dinner with us.

So this would be a good time to think about what I am thankful for, while waiting for my turn to go in and wash the prep dishes in the kitchen.

These days, it has become fashionable to be "thankful" to each other, rather than God. The purpose of the holiday was clearly to set aside a day for gratitude to the Creator, but the secular segment of American society has succeeded in doing to Thanksgiving what they have done to Christmas, and they take advantage of the holiday to enjoy the fun parts but excise God from it - a most ungrateful attitude to have. But worship is, after all, supposed to be voluntary, or what use is it?

So the first thing I'm grateful for, in no particular order, is the fact that we are still free in America - not as free as the Founders intended, because so many are willing to empower government with duties they don't want to bother with personally. But still free enough to worship as we please, at least in private - we aren't really allowed to be too public about it, lest somebody see it and be made uncomfortable. They can't really forbid it is the point - we still retain the right of worship and free speech, if we're willing to accept being ridiculed for it. Some places in the world will behead you over it, so a little ridicule can be accepted. Some imply that I'm not a "free thinker." I can deal with that, and I can be perfectly confident that I think freely, other opinions notwithstanding. And I am grateful that they, too, have the same free choice that I do.

I am also thankful for these things...

I was able to retire early, which means I can enjoy not having to go to work every day at an earlier age, when I am able to still enjoy things.

I have a wonderful wife, whom God gave to me at a time when I wondered if I would have no mate.

That same wonderful wife seems to be free of cancer, though we can't be absolutely sure. We have all the assurance we can expect to have in such circumstances, that it is indeed so. I am grateful that God moved us to Houston, against my preference, so that when the cancer was found she was working for the best cancer center in the entire world, and she also had an excellent health plan to pay for it.

I am grateful that my sister has found better health and is enjoying a new hobby, geocaching, which has provided fun and excitement in her own retirement years.

I am grateful that my mother is still around, and of sound mind and body, which is not surprising after a lifetime of walking happily with God.

I am grateful for my daughters, and for the grandchildren they have provided.

I am grateful for the friends I have. They are fine friends, and numerous, and so enjoyable to be around. Dave and Sumi, Cody and Jena, Beau and Charlotte, Phil and Misti, Chaston and Kristina, Carl and Jane, Justin and Ashley, Maria and Maya, James and Marcus, Lois and family... the list goes on and on.

I am grateful that I can still see well enough to read and drive and go geocaching.

I am grateful for my cousins in Louisville, and my aunts and uncles and other family. I am grateful that I was able to go to the Dominican Republic to help start a fledgling drama ministry, and bring back some coffee.

I am grateful for all the traveling I have been able to do, in Europe, in Mexico, all over the USA.

I am also grateful for things that most of us only appreciate when they don't work: refrigerators, air conditioning, TV, the internet - yeah, we could live without them, but they make life so pleasant. Well, maybe not TV, except for movies. :)

I am grateful for my comfortable home.

And I am grateful for all the turkey sandwiches to come. Oh, yeah, baby!

Robbed Twice

2011-11-16T07:31:00.001-06:00

I keep hearing these angry complaints about the corporations.

Mostly, they're accused of being greedy, which they are.

What bothers me most, though, is how most people see this as a failure of capitalism. What they are doing is not capitalism, it's fascism.

Yes, I said fascism. You probably see the word fascism and you think of nazis, kicking down doors and burning jews in a nearby oven. But fascism simply refers to a working relationship between government and business. In the 1930's, fascist governments ran the businesses. It was said of such governments that "they make the trains run on time." But it was also said, correctly, that there was a certain loss of freedom in such an arrangement, and that is the problem.

We need to stop thinking in terms of capitalism allowing the corporations to screw people simply because they don't pay high enough wages. We already have the government setting the minimum wage, and in any case, "unfair" wages aren't really the problem.

Here is the problem. Our government has encouraged all of us to invest our retirement money in IRA's, and similar tax-deferred arrangements. This benefits the corporations in an obvious way - they can more easily attract investment money, and more important, those investments are controlled indirectly, which means the investors who own minor portions of the companies have no real say in how the companies are run. They simply hand over their money and hope for the best.

This allows the CEOs of those companies to collect huge salaries with little or no pressure to actually earn those salaries. The boards who would normally keep that sort of thing in check have no incentive to do so, because most of the investors have no incentive to pay any attention to how the companies are run. For instance, my IRA is spread out over forty or fifty companies. It's a mutual fund. There is no real way for me to influence the policies of the companies I've invested in.

So here's what they do instead of paying me my dividends. They (the corporations) pour money into the campaign funds of politicians who I not only don't want to support, I actually want them out of office. Did you get that? They're taking my money and giving it to politicians I oppose. And it's worth noting that most of those corporations donate to both major parties. You might ask yourself why.

The politicians, in turn, give money back to the companies, in the form of contracts, subsidies, and sometimes out-and-out gifts, only they call them "bail outs" when they just give them the money.

Let's review: the government provides incentives I cannot ignore to invest my money in businesses. The businesses take my money and give it to the politicians I don't even like. Then the politicians use the power of government to take my money by taxation, and give it to the companies. It's a win-win for them, but I get robbed twice.

Now, to make it worse, socialists are camping out at Wall Street and other places where businesses make their homes, and they demand... even more power for government to transfer wealth. I assume that they expect wealth to transfer into their pockets, even though the direction of flow has always been in the other direction. (What was that about the definition of insanity?)

Now, the government has no Constitutional authority to take tax money and give it to private corporations. They just do it, because few of us really care about rule of law and limited government anymore. In fact, the news outlets constantly tell us that such ideas as limited government are "insane." Of course, the news outlets are all owned by... corporations.

The solution here is to make one minor change in election law: make it illegal for corporations to donate any money to a political campaign. Actually, it should be illegal for anybody to donate to a campaign for any candidate he can't actually vote for, and that would include corporations, who aren't really people in any practical sense, and cannot vote.

Yet what we have in our election laws is that citizens, meaning you and I, have a strict limit on how much we can donate to a campaign. We can't even put up a poster or distribute a flyer for our preferred candidate unless we first file paperwork with the FEC. Every time a new law comes out to "take the money out of politics" or "make it more fair," the effect of that law is to further limit the power of the individual and increase the power of the corporations. Millions of dollars go from corporations to the candidates who are in bed with them, but candidates who depend on real people for support can't get news coverage, can't get much money because of contribution limits, and are painted as unelectable because they... um... don't get much money.

With real capitalism, poorly run businesses should be allowed to fail, no matter how big they are. Politicians should never be allowed to give tax money to them for any reason. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to give money to politicians. That would be real election and finance reform, if we could only get it.

What goes around

2011-07-15T11:23:00.008-05:00

Back in my youth, I worked for a steel fabrication company. We made things like heat transfer products, and acid storage tanks, and heat transferring acid storage tanks. It wasn't a career to recommend to the kids on Career Day at high school, but it paid the bills.

One of the people I knew there claimed to be a Sikh priest from India. I won't mention his name, because he was a total asshole. It was a firmly held part of his personal belief system that Jews were at the bottom of the ladder of humanity, and that Christians were one rung up. This sometimes made me a little jealous of the Jews, because it seemed to me that he should have held us Christians in greater contempt than the Jews, as contempt by Mr. Patel was, in my mind, confirmation that I was doing something right. Mr. Patel was management level, and had direct authority over scheduling.

My research on Sikh tells me that it requires a belief in the equality of all humans, and rejects the caste system. Or so a website tells me. So I think he was lying about his priesthood in the first place. Assholes do lie sometimes. But he had us convinced at the time.

His asshole-ness was happily balanced by a man named Madhav Cadambi, who was always a gentleman, always kind, and always welcome at the break table. Madhav served as a life's lesson that we shouldn't judge a people by one bad example. Madhav was in the blueprint and design part of the place.

My job at this steel plant was in Quality Control. Most of the time I wandered around the place with a measuring tape and randomly inspected parts along the manufacturing process to make sure they were within tolerance, and to stop the process if they weren't. These pieces didn't require inspection at each step of the way before moving on, because they were rarely out of tolerance. When the odd piece was too long or too short or the gauge was wrong, it had to start over, but the practice worked well.

But there were some checks that were mandatory. For example, if a piece was supposed to be made from 316 stainless steel rather than 304 stainless steel, it had to be checked for that quality at a certain point before moving along to the next step. My job was to do that. I had a little kit that I used, where I placed a special piece of paper with a chemical on the piece of metal, and then ran a small current of electricity through it. It would turn either blue or pink on the paper, depending on the presence or absence of molybdenum. If 304 SS, it would have to be rejected, because it would not withstand acid corrosion as long. The wrong grade of steel would result in shorter life for the tank or heat exchanger if acid had to go in it or through it. The grade was to be checked again and again, at various stages of manufacture. If and when it passed, I signed a little piece of paper verifying the grade of steel.

One day I was summoned to do this "molly check," as we called it, and I whipped out my little molly kit, and ran the test. And it remained the wrong color, which meant that there was no molybdenum present. Which also meant it was 304 SS, not the required 316. Fail.

But for some reason, management, especially Mr. Patel, really wanted that piece to pass inspection. He wanted it so much that he had me come back and do the test again. It failed again. He had me do it yet again, this time with other management types present. We were all gathered around as I applied the chemicals again, put the current to it, and waited for it to change color.

We stood in the sun. "Wait, wait. I think it's changing." It wasn't changing, and in any case, it has to do it within a certain allotted time, but OK, let's stand around some more. It was beginning to dawn on me that these people wanted me to sign off on the piece whether it passed or not. But I also knew that if I did, they would come back to me if the container opened up and spilled acid on somebody passing by the tank where it was installed. I refused to sign it. The entire project had to be delayed, while they waited for a new sheet of the special gauged 316 SS to be ordered and delivered.

Very soon thereafter, management decided that we had too many people in Quality Control, and so I was transferred to the Shipping Department. Everybody knew why. I was to spend the rest of my time at this place building shipping crates and loading them onto trucks.

And it got worse. Scheduling, controlled by Mr. Patel, somehow managed to make all these products almost but not quite finished, so that they stacked up almost in the way... and then got them all completed on two consecutive days. This meant that the Shipping Department was busting its tail to get everything out for those two days, then pretty much hiding for the rest of the week. This was not a good business model for people who didn't want to provide an excuse for getting fired. All mere coincidence, of course.

So we got those crates built, and the products shipped, and the folks getting them finished unofficially looked out for us and warned us when anyone was approaching from the offices, so we could sit around on the three idle days but keep a few crates ready to build when needed. The system worked. And eventually, the 304 SS product that was supposed to be 316? It was completed and shipped "as is," meaning no new steel was ordered or used. And we in shipping built the crates, as was our job. Out it went.

What was supposed to happen was that the customer would install the product, and use it for years, none the wiser. By the time the darn thing corroded badly enough to be noticed, the warranty would be expired. It wasn't right, but how were they to know? Hey, it's just business.

Shipping that piece was expensive, because it was a wide load and over weight, which meant that it had to have special permits, and move slowly down the highway, with an advance vehicle, and a tail vehicle, and signs that said WIDE LOAD, and sometimes there were police escorts to get it across narrow bridges. You get the picture. Delivery was made, and accepted.

But somebody made a mistake. Somebody in Quality Control, or somebody in Blueprints and Designs - it could have been almost anybody - but certainly not somebody in Shipping. Why, we didn't even have access to the paperwork. Somebody packed the original papers certifying that the piece was made of 304 SS. The papers I had signed, rejecting the product.

Oh, the poop hit the fan that day. But it didn't hit me. I was just doing my job.

Is karma part of the Sikh belief system? I don't know these things. I suppose I could Google it.

(This is a work of fiction. No resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is to be assumed. There, that ought to satisfy the lawyers...)

Vacation in the northern states

2011-07-08T10:53:00.000-05:00

So we had a couple of airline trips coming on Southwest because of their Rapid Rewards program.

And we have this companion pass thing. And a reward weekend from the Avis people.

And we saw this opportunity to get four more states for our geocaching collection. Put it all together, and we found ourselves in Buffalo Wyoming, at the Occidental Hotel, built in 1880,

with one haunted room that you can't actually stay in because it's the library now.

See the cool dinosaur skull? I think that may be the ghost.

We ate dinner in a private dining room - OK, maybe semi-private, but that's private - and I had a bison steak. Here's the view:

It gets better. We stayed on a Thursday night, which happens to be when the musicians meet in the saloon to play blue grass music for a few hours:

See the cool old guy in the middle of the photo? He can play just about any instrument, and play it well. I could have bellied up to the bar except it was crowded, so I saved that for the next day:

Next we made a run to Montana, and got few caches in that state, then hopped over to North Dakota.

There we did some more caching, including some rarely traveled dirt roads. But those caches count, and we had North Dakota. But the real fun was in South Dakota. I really wanted to go there because in Rapid City, where I lived as a mere child a half century ago, there is this magical place called Dinosaur Park. I loved that place, and I wanted to see it again, and incidentally pick up a cache in the shadow of the largest dinosaur.

OK, maybe not in the shadow of it, but within a short stroll. My GPSer was leading me all over the place, since I hadn't bothered to calibrate it after changing batteries, so GA sat on a rock until I could stumble upon GZ (ground zero). While I kept stumbling around, trying not to fall off the cliff, she realized she was sitting within arm's reach of the cache, and logged the find. Brothers.
On the way out, I said goodbye to my favorite dinosaur, the duck bill, which was first found in South Dakota.

From there we went to another site I remembered as a child, the Bad Lands. Here, the erosion has carved fantastic shapes and exposed lots of dino fossils. And of course there are some Earth Caches.

No trip to South Dakota would be complete without a visit to Mt. Rushmore... especially on the weekend of the 4th of July. We were there for a special ceremony, with an F-15 flying over the faces at 9:11 to thumb our noses at the pigs who brought the towers down.

Fathers Day

2011-06-19T06:46:00.001-05:00

In 1945, near the end of World War II, the USA developed a new bomber with the capability to deliver heavy bombs directly to Japan. The Japanese were no longer so smug about their ability to enslave other nations, as bombs began to fall on weapons factories and near prison camps. The USA already had some top secret equipment, including RADAR, and including a bombsite device that provided stunning accuracy.

My dad, Jesse Payne, was on a bombing run from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. He was the navigator. They arrived at their target, the bombardier did his job, but the bomb refused to drop. The bomb bay doors were stuck.

This meant that the crew of the B-29 could set down in Japan and become prisoners of war, or they could crash into the sea in an attempt to return home. There was no way they had enough fuel to return with those heavy bombs.

Fortunately for them, one of the crew was a country boy from Texas, my dear old dad. He stomped on the stuck bomb until he forced it through the doors. They made it back alive and healthy, and my dad lived to see his 80's and raise four children with my mom's help.

Dad is in heaven. Happy Father's Day, Dad!

Trump for President? Are you insane?

2011-04-25T12:47:00.000-05:00

He's not really running, at least not yet. Of course, the candidacy rules are useless, because you can run for president all you want if you don't "declare" your candidacy. But I've started hearing people say that he could straighten out the country, and "run it like a business." People, please - they already "run it like a business" - and the people running it are making money hand over fist. The USA is not a business, it's a Constitutional Republic with democratically elected representation. Its purpose isn't to convert political power into profit, its purpose is to secure the rights of the individual citizen.

But based at least in part on Mr. Trump's persona on his television show, people believe he can turn the country around. Worse, they think he will. Those are two different assumptions, and they are both incorrect.

In the "boardroom" of his TV show, Mr. Trump is in complete control. He is, in the context of each task, an absolute dictator. Of course he looks capable. Everyone around him is kissing his ass, because he is the only one who can say "You're Fired." In the final segment of each show, he appears to be reasonable, listening to opinions and excuses with an open mind - but in truth, by the time the players walk into the set, he knows which team has won, and he knows whom he's going to fire. And it has little to do with who is responsible for losing the task that week.

We are given the strong impression that it's all about responsibility and performance, but it's not. It's about ratings, and who will best keep up the ratings. If he wants the task manager to be fired, that's the easy one. He simply states that the team lost, x is the task manager and therefore responsible. "You're fired!" But if he wants to keep the task manager, he simply manipulates the blaming until everyone is ganging up on the player he wants to fire. All the players are more than willing to point fingers when they can, because just as in real corporate life, you either blame or you get blamed. When the focus is on the correct victim, he lowers the boom, and we see the victim getting in that cab and going home. I hated to do that, but it was the right decision, he says to those still in the boardroom, and they nod in unanimity.

You don't think so? Consider last night. More than on any other task this season, perhaps any season, the task manager was clearly and indisputably at fault for losing. Star, a lawyer with the heart of a predator, a lawyer whose mentor is Johnnie Cochran, had complete control of her task and her team. It was her concept, it was executed by her command, and there was no mutiny. The team did as they were told. There was no way in the land of sanity that it could be blamed on anyone else. Bear in mind that the women's team did the task with five members, while the men were down to three. But when it was almost time to roll the credits, Trump stated that the men's team was very strong, and he wanted the women to have a chance. So he fired Latoya Jackson, and kept the woman who was clearly at fault. You need conflict to have good ratings, you see. And that conflict will continue.

So what he's good at is doing whatever the hell he wants to do while making us think he is being fair and listening to dissent and considering all viewpoints. He misdirects us. This is not the skill of a statesman, it is not the skill of a president who will do what is best for the country. This is the skill of a politician. For the love of God, do we not already have enough politicians? They are lined up like vampires, waiting their turn to bite America's neck.

Trump can't fix what's wrong with this country unless, as in the board room, he is given dictatorial powers. But that's what our problem is in the first place - too much of our government has assumed dictatorial power. Do you really want to elect a man whose life's goals consist proudly of money and power? Really? If so, you would do well to question your own sanity.

60

2011-04-07T00:01:00.319-05:00

Today, I am 60 years old.

That means that 60 years ago today, in an Air Force base hospital in Tarrant county, Texas, my saintly mother popped me out like a fat turkey from an oven. I was born at a very early age, as my favorite high school choir teacher used to say.

It has been a good life. In fact, it has been a truly great life. Not that I plan to die right away, but if I were to die right now, I could not complain that I didn't get enough experience while I was here.

My memories of childhood are very, very dim. (I usually complain about excessive use of the word "very," but now that I'm an old fart I figure I can break the rules a little. I will now allow myself to say "fart" in public, for example.) I remember swinging on a rope and board contraption over what seemed at the time to be a raging river, but which was actually a small creek in Savannah GA. I remember returning again and again to volume five of our encyclopedia, because I was five years old, and because it contained the letter D, which meant that there were pictures of dinosaurs.

(I briefly googled for dinosaur images hoping to find one that had been used in that encyclopedia, but instead I found a photo of John McCain).

I remember a visit to Disneyland, and being confused that the castle in the distance didn't look quite right on that little ride. I didn't understand about miniature scale modeling, and I was so near-sighted that I couldn't really get a firm grip on distance.

I remember walking to school in the snow in South Dakota, and discovering that if the snow wasn't too new, I could actually walk on the surface without leaving prints, if I was careful enough. It was an Air Force school, and the mascot was Jets. They would often make snow jets instead of snowmen out in front of the school. It was in Rapid City, and my greatest joy in those days was the occasional trip to Dinosaur Park, where they put cement dinosaurs up on a nearby hill. You could see the brontosaurus from Rapid City:


The brontosaurus. We didn't call them brachiosaurs back then.

The T Rex. Looks cartoon-ish, doesn't he?

Finally, the stegosaurus. You'll see them better portrayed in Jurassic Park II.

The photos are actually of GA's family with the dinosaurs, because I don't have any of me there. But the point is that the dinosaurs are up there on that hill, and they allowed kids to climb around on them. And I still love them today, though I haven't been back to Rapid City in a half century. (For a followup visit to Dinosaur Park, see this)

There was a point to all this, now what was it? Oh, yes.

Back when I was a five year old kid, I couldn't even imagine being 60 years old. Old people were a type - you could be fat or skinny, old or young, mean or nice. I was a kid, and the fact that I could someday become old never occurred to me. There was no reason for it to.

In the next couple of decades, I spent my time learning, without really meaning to. It just kind of happened. A lot of it was just satisfying my curiosity, a lot of it was a matter of survival, and a small minority had to do with passing tests at school. The years went by, and my political views changed in all directions, along with my religious views. At some point, I started thinking in terms of principles, rather than what seemed good or made sense at the time.

They don't call the Libertarian Party the "party of principle" for nothing. And once you start taking stands based on actual principle, and you have to define the principle, it becomes awkward and sometimes silly to try to defend things like socialism. I mean, try to articulate and defend an assertion like "nobody should own anything and we should all be forced to share." If "feed the poor" is a principle, follow the reasoning to socialism and see how sloppy your logic has to be. Define your principles, force yourself to test them.

Once you begin holding fast to the principles as you prove them (if you can't prove a principle, it may be bad and you should discard it), it becomes easier to understand what government is: sheer force. You understand that freedom isn't just a pretty word you can use to justify starting a war, but rather a concept that involves responsibility and real independence, and something that nobody talks about: self ownership. You almost have to arrive at the understanding that certain good, desirable things cannot be achieved by simply having a government do something for you. You have to make things happen by your own effort, or by persuading your neighbors to your point of view. If you want to feed the poor, then feed them. Figure out why they are poor. Figure out how to help. But handing your responsibility to the government, letting them force other people to do it, is not the answer - it only gives more power to corrupt people.

Here's a clue: the original Constitution of the United States was about limiting what government could do. The purpose was stated in the document itself, more than once, and the ninth and tenth amendments were added just in case anyone didn't get it on the first reading. There was nothing in the Constitution limiting what we could do until Prohibition was adopted - and it quickly proved to be a huge mistake.

But I digress. I was going somewhere with all this. Something to do with becoming an old man. No worry, I'll remember before I hit the publish button.

It has been humbling to consider what I have learned along the way. You know how I learned that people and relationships are more important than stuff? My house was blown down by a mile wide tornado in April of 1979 in Wichita Falls TX. Granted, I had insurance, so I didn't really find myself with nothing, but if I truly found myself with nothing, I know that I would have a difficult time climbing back to my wealthy status, so that I could cavort in my money vault, sliding down my piles of coins. I am not anxious to be broke again. But I am less afraid now of losing all the material goods, than I was on April 9. And since, after the tornado, I shortly lost my wife to divorce, and came close to losing my two daughters, the comparison wasn't close. It's your loved ones that matter, not your stuff.

Since that time, I was given a replacement wife, a much nicer model, one with common sense and integrity. And together we have explored caves, and cleaned them, and we've enjoyed sitting quietly in them during rest periods when nobody is yelling at us to hurry because we're running out of time. We've been in places underground that most people don't even know about, and couldn't visit even if they did know, no matter how much money they have.

We've been to Mexico, Wales, England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal... and I've been to the Dominican Republic, though it isn't exactly a garden paradise, except for the awesome coffee beans. Sure, anyone could go to those places, but most people don't, except on carefully controlled tours. GA and I have wandered the streets. See if you can find out what mondango is. And have you ever eaten haggis in Scotland? Well, I have.

I've been on stages in several cities, playing various roles in comedies and dramas and melodramas. I've had the thrill of singing to a crowd that was so loud and appreciative that I couldn't even hear my own voice. I've written an award winning play. I've trusted, and been trusted by, more theatre people than I can count. I have friends that I love so much that I would risk dying for them - seriously.

And in my own limited way, I know God. Now... I hesitate to even say that, because there is knowing God and then there is Knowing God. But I think I do. And I hope I don't arrive in front of the Throne of Judgment™ and hear: "Know Me? Are you kidding?" That would be bad.

On your Facebook page, you can type in all sorts of information about yourself. Most of it doesn't show up anywhere, and I have only recently figured out how to see what other people put, other than the basic stuff like your home town and high school (it's the "info" button). But for religion I put that my God is YHWH, and my Lord is his son, Jesus Christ. People make such a big deal about the mystery of the Trinity. Come on people, there is one God, and he is the Father, YHWH is his name and he created all that there is, including you, which proves he has a sense of humor. Jesus is his son, and he has all the authority of God because it was given to him. You obey the son just as you might have obeyed the King in the person of somebody he sent in his place. Holy Spirit is the comforter, who dwells in us by that same delegated authority. (No, the Catholic Church is not the Holy Spirit! I don't even know if they still teach that heresy.) They are three in one, yes, the Trinity, but it does not violate the principle that there is only one God, I don't care what your local muslim may say. Besides, muslims worship Mohammed with more fervor than the average Christian worships Jesus - so if I have three gods, they have at least two.

By the way, to "worship" means to ascribe worthiness to. It is not idolatry.

But there I go again, getting off topic. Where was I?

When I was in high school, I was terrified of girls. They were mysterious and desirable and completely out of reach. I have sometimes said I had a crush on most of them, which I guess isn't exactly true. I did have crushes on most of the women in a capella choir, though. For some reason, the best girls were in choir. It was a moot point, though, because I was scared of them.

I got a scholarship in choir, and could have gone to a college over in north Texas. But I didn't because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to pay for the rest of the tuition, or make ends meet, or whatever. I made too many decisions based on fear. That is probably the single greatest regret I have about my life - that too much of it, too many opportunities, were wasted because I was too afraid to take risks.

I outgrew that in time, and it's a good thing, because so much of what has made my life wonderful could never have happened if I had not learned to accept some risks. Caving? Risky. Getting on stage with a hundred pages of lines memorized? Risky. Opening my heart and caring about people who might very well reject me? Very risky. Most people never do any of those things, and only secretly wish they could.

So I've reached the age of 60, or as I like to put it, level 60 in the Game of Life™ - and no free plays left. My eyes are getting weaker, and my hearing is getting worse, and I run out of breath a little sooner and with less exertion. The caving is pretty much done. It's possible that I've memorized my last play - but you never know.

But I love a lot of people, truly love them, and I like to think that some of them may actually love me back. And that, my friend, is what makes life good. Well, that and home grown tomatoes.

Coming Soon to a World near you

2011-03-29T14:42:00.000-05:00

© March 2011

Something is coming.

It's coming like a T-Rex comes
   to the research trailer on the edge of the cliff.

The lying, thieving raping bastards who run this dying world are calling it.
They dance naked under a full moon,
calling it,
offering to exchange our lives and our future
   and our children's inheritance
   but not their own, if they can help it
   just ours
   for the power they can gain.

and it comes crashing through the trees
snarling and biting
and we don't notice the tree tops getting snapped aside
like so many weeds
because CBS and CNN sing their soothing lullaby
Hush li'l baby, don't you cry,
Mama gonna throw you to the Rex

The world changed when the towers fell into Pearl Harbor in 1929
And it's about to change again.
The beams are going to break
The restraint is going to give way

And it will come
And the image will explain it to us
as we're eaten.

Daylight Savings: end it now!

2011-03-13T09:28:00.000-05:00

Today, once again, we observed the pagan ritual of Daylight Savings Time.

We do this twice a year, forcing the sun to advance in the sky the length of a time zone in the spring, and then forcing it to actually move backwards in the fall. This cannot be good for the sun!

So I did some research. It turns out that NASA and our government are aware of a phenomenon they secretly call "Sun Fatigue," but of course they aren't going to tell us about it. And when this gets out, they will deny deny and deny some more. But here are the photos.

First, the sun just before the government began requiring DST:

Notice the healthy yellow glow coming from our friend, the yellow sun, which gives Superman his powers.

Now notice the sun five years after they began tampering with the Universe itself:

You can see that the yellow has faded, and old sol is a little closer to being a Red Dwarf, and a little closer to imploding from exhaustion, absorbing our Earth in a black hole of utter destruction.

But a couple of years ago, they made it worse, much worse.

DST is now the law a full half of the year, leaving the sun even less time to recover from the enormous strain of going backwards every other half-year. And, because of new TSA regulations requiring the sun to also go through a security scanner every time it reaches a new time zone - after all, it is in our air space - our sun, our faithful friend, the source of our energy, is actually ill.

Just look at the sickly green that is infecting the face of our best friend in space:

Forget about global warming. This is the real danger. Something must be done. Write your congressman now, and demand that our sun be given its freedom once again.

Maddening phone tree systems

2011-03-03T17:50:00.001-06:00

You've navigated through them. We all have. You call a large mega-company, and you press one for English. That's the cliché, but it never stops there. And by the time you get what you want done, you're at least a little irritated.

I've been doing the finances for GA's parents, because they're no longer able. I pay bills for them, take care of address changes, and help them call companies who need to be called. I'm kind of a problem solver for them. Recently, my father-in-law lost his health insurance card sometime during one of our trips to get medical visits done. It's not a terrible problem, because we can always use a recent statement from them to get the numbers required. But he needs something to carry in his wallet, and an 8 x 11 monthly statement isn't the best thing to carry in your wallet.

So I called the insurance company, and began my journey through the labyrinth of their phone tree.

Press "1" for English.

OK.

Do you have a current policy with Mega-Giant Health Insurance Corporation?

Yes.

Please enter the contract number.

I did so.

If you are inquiring about an existing claim, or a potential claim, or a denied claim, press "1".
If you are inquiring about a....

...and on and on, but of course without any option for a live person. Eventually, at about number four, one of the offers had to do with requesting a form. "Aha! I thought. An insurance card might be considered a form. I'll go there." I pressed four.

If you are requesting a form ***, press "1" - if you are requesting a form ***, press "2" - if you are... and so on. None of the options was an insurance card, but one of the options was a blank space for about a second. Should I go for that one? I decided to chance it.

If you are requesting... and they named yet another form and another blank space. So I took a chance. I said to the phone computer, in a clear, firm voice, "I need a replacement insurance card."

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, said the polite computer voice.

I said it again. "I need a replacement insurance card."

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, said the polite computer voice again, with the same tone.

I said, with absolutely no irritation in my voice, "That's because you're an idiot."

And it said, "Would you like to speak to a customer service representative?"

I should have guessed that they would have the program listen for the word "idiot" as a clue to the customer losing his patience. Duly noted. I'll bet this works everywhere.

Things I love

2010-12-27T13:47:00.000-06:00

In no particular order:

Enjoying the company of good friends. They can do the talking if they want to, and I'll listen.

The rich smell of earth carried gently out of the entrance of a cave.

The clean, non-earth smell of a limestone cave with no mud.

A good rehearsal in a production with good, committed actors.

A warm hug that lasts longer than the don't-misunderstand-this limit, because they know I won't misunderstand it.

Picking a perfectly ripened fruit from the garden. This goes for fruits, beans, whatever.

Solving a problem successfully. Computer, printer, you name it.

Getting a phone call from someone I love for no reason.

Long walks on the... well, anywhere. A hiking trail, a beach, a sidewalk.

Children laughing and playing with each other.

Moms and dads playing with their children.

Hearing wives say good things about their husbands.

Being appreciated. Oh, don't we all, though?

Hearing the hedgehog giggle on Frontierville.

Hearing the words "It needs more butter."

Eating in a foreign country. That little ham sandwich bagette thing in Paris tasted better than escargot at home.

Old photos

2010-12-14T20:03:00.001-06:00

Lately I've been on a project.

It's been rewarding, and time consuming, and my eyes are starting to cross.
I've been scanning family slides, dating from the 40's to the 80's. Slides that old look monochrome, either blue or green or yellow, depending on the film used, and you would think that it would be impossible to coax true colors out of them. Sometimes it is impossible, but often you can get amazing results with a little patience.

The first set I tackled was my dearly departed dad's collection. There were slides in there that I had never seen, probably because on those occasions when he set up the projector, he mostly showed the ones that we were most likely to enjoy seeing. But he never threw away anything, and so there were some rejected slides that I am thrilled to discover - though, granted, I probably wouldn't have appreciated them as a ten year old lad.

Take a look at this one:

OK, you can tell that it was shot from an airplane, sure. But where is it? That, my friend, is the city of Tokyo, in 1945, before the end of the war.

Here is one taken in Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands, where he was stationed. Did you know we had bases set up in Alaska during WW2? Well, it made sense. When you hop from island to island on the way to Japan, Alaska is a great place to start.

Anybody know what kind of plane that is? I didn't care back in the day, but now it looks kind of interesting.

Look at these guys trying to stay warm. They were all Air Force buddies of my dad, but of course I didn't care. I didn't know them. I didn't try to stay warm with them. I suspect that one could really learn to appreciate a hot cup of coffee when it's this cold all the time.

Now, here is another one, from 1946, at least I think it is. This was in the rejects box, and I did some serious color correction to bring out the natural colors. I have no idea who these people are, except that they are relatives of some kind. I wasn't even born yet, so I didn't know them until they were grown up. But it doesn't matter. Look at the stuff on the table. Look at the appliances in the background. I think it's a great little photo.

I'm probably not doing as great a job as a professional might, but then I'm giving each slide a lot more individual attention, so who knows?

But now, take a look at this slide, taken in Morocco after the war.

Look at the way the locals are dressed, sure, but notice the guy on the bicycle! I think I saw this movie.

But here is one that I think I remember seeing when I was a kid, but probably when Dad returned from Morocco, and not again, because it was in the reject box. Thing is, at that time, it was strictly forbidden to take pictures of women because - I don't know, but whatever it was, it didn't really hurt anybody, and so he slyly took a shot as he walked down the street in front of the gas station, and he somehow managed to not get beheaded for it. By now, the woman in the photo has been stoned to death for sneezing wrong or something. Or she's died of old age before reaching 50. You know how it is.

Tech Challenge

2010-11-03T17:07:00.001-05:00

I am so proud of what I managed to do this morning.

I have been trying for almost a year to make it possible for GA's laptop computer to send files to our printer. In theory, it's supposed to be easy. She just looks at the network, selects the printer, makes it the default, and off she goes. The instructions published on the MS website say so.

But this is Windows XP fighting with Windows Vista. You see, I have Vista on my desktop in the study, and she has XP on her laptop in the living room. The printer is connected to the router via an ethernet cord, not tied directly to the desktop machine. The Vista machine can see it, and has logged it as the printer with no problems. But the XP machine... nope, can't even see it.

I Googled and Googled, looking for any possible solution, and I found dozens and dozens of people trying to find a solution on various forums. They were given all sorts of suggestions - make sure both the printer and the laptop have a share name with eight characters or less with no spaces, have it look for the location as \\computer\printer substituting the network share names, have it look for the IP address, make sure the IP address of the printer and laptop match the address that the router assigns them (how in blazes would they not? It's the router that assigns this!), install the printer driver on the laptop before trying to see it on the network... the list goes on and on. And nothing works.

Then I dug deep into the help files on the Vista machine looking for this problem. There, I found an article that explains that the XP machine has to have an LLDT installed. It's basically an overlay or hotfix or upgrade that lets the XP machine respond to a Vista inquiry. If you Google that, you'll find several uses of the acronym, but you have to disregard everything that doesn't mean Link Layer Topology Discovery. And you'd better be prepared to do a lot of research, because Microsoft doesn't make this one easy, though it should have been obvious that this was going to be a problem.

Seems that they produced a fix that you could simply run in Service Pack 1 and 2, but if you have Service Pack 3, as most people with XP do by now, it won't work. You'll try it from several different directions using the MS website, but after a while you realize that their website is linking to itself in a circle, and you're going round and round following their crazy instructions.

But at least now I had the information I needed. I knew that I somehow had to get that LLDT installed on the XP machine - I just couldn't do it using Microsoft's instructions.

The solution? Download and save the file they offer for SP1 or 2, ignoring the link for SP3 provided, then find a geeky website that explains exactly how to manually extract the various files from the darn thing. You'll be running the command line from outside Windows, and moving various files to various folders under Windows sys32. And you'd better do it exactly as the geek tells you, which I did. And I'll be darned. It worked. Oh, granted, it still didn't find the printer using XP's printer search function, but it did allow me to enter \\computer\printer (substituting the share names of course) and thus make it work with the laptop.

But I still wonder why the wizards at Microsoft felt that the most up to date version of XP would never be used with a Vista machine in the same home. They were so sure about this that they didn't bother to even give us a way to do this upgrade without finding a geek somewhere to guide us through it. The good news is that it gets us used to finding geeks and ways of getting around the crap they sell us. See "hacking" for more details.
Heh heh.

TV Death

2010-10-24T16:19:00.000-05:00

I was watching a show on the Spike channel today, a series called "1,000 ways to die." Many of them were bizarre, most were good Darwin Award candidates. One really caught my attention.

Assuming they didn't just make these up out of thin air (which is possible), there was a grumpy old Scrooge sitting in his house during the Christmas season, when a group of carolers came to his house to sing for him.

He went to the door with a bowl of fruit, and began throwing apples and oranges at them. They didn't say whether he actually shouted "Bah! Humbug!" at them. As they ran away, a two pound hailstone fell from the sky and hit Scrooge in the head, killing him.

I wonder how I could find out if that really happened. I know at least one of them was likely made up, simply because - well, I'll relate that one.

Two drug dealers get shipwrecked, and are washed up on shore on this island, and are then eaten by cannibals. Now, who was supposed to have reported this incident? Not the drug dealers. Not their business associates. Maybe the cannibals?

At the time I assumed that the idea was to simply list the ways to die, and being eaten by cannibals made the list, so they fabricated a possible scenario. But what about the Scrooge? That would have to be specific. I kind of want it to be true. Ya know?

Bees knees

2010-09-30T15:58:00.000-05:00

I just finished eating a delicious plum that I bought from our local fruit stand (a co-op outfit). It was incredibly sweet, and probably nutritious. It reminded me of the day I bought it, when I saw a halved water melon on the table which was generously feeding about six or seven bees, arranged in a neat circle, as if the bees were having a meeting.

There was a time, when I was a mere lad, that I might have shooshed the bees away from the melon, or at least resented them for alighting on a melon meant for humans.

Not this time. I was glad to see them there. I have since learned that bees are such an important part of our food system that if they go extinct, so do we. We depend so much on their pollinating behavior.

It brought to mind the diseases that are threatening bees, though that isn't as dire as it appeared to be a couple of years ago. But I worry sometimes about the genetic engineering going on these days. They have potatoes that produce their own bt, an organic pesticide used by organic farmers. They produced corn a few years ago that unexpectedly proved deadly to passing monarch butterflies. Sure, they're a little more careful after that wake up call, but when you mess with DNA and such, trying to improve the plant, sometimes you get good results and sometimes you get surprises. They should be especially careful about trying to develop plants that are toxic to insects, seems to me, since insects are also our friends.

I read a book recently (The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan) that compares our current obsession with the Russet Burbank potato - the one that we like to bake and make long pretty french fries from - with the potatoes grown in Ireland in the 1800's. It was the Lumper, a nice potato that they reproduced solely by cutting the pieces and putting them in the ground, thus guaranteeing the same potato, genetically speaking, as all the years before. Meanwhile, a fungus evolved called the Phytophthora infestans which the potato had no resistance to. And since the good people of Ireland were only growing the one kind of potato, the result was a famine. No variety in the gene pool, you see.

I probably shouldn't worry so much, since there's not much I can do about it, and also since these things rarely go as predicted anyway. But I sure appreciated those bees, and I didn't mind at all that they were having their board meeting on that melon.

Of course, it wasn't my melon.

Mission trip to DR part 3

2010-08-06T21:55:00.000-05:00

Dominican Republic mission trip, 2010

more from the journal

7-31-2010 – Saturday

So today was the first rehearsal.

They brought the counseling team up the mountain to Eddie's little church to see our “dress rehearsal.” How often do you have a dress rehearsal as your first rehearsal? Molly took most of the load this time, since she remembered the blocking I gave them as well as I did. Um... probably better.

To my shock and delight, it went quite well. There was some confusion as to when to do certain things, before or after a bit of narration, but many of the kids were off book! And wonder of wonders, they spoke loudly and clearly. Our pig farmer dropped out, so we plugged Trevor (one of our own kids) in his place. That inspired us to use some of us Americanos as the pigs. This delighted everyone.

After siesta, we went back to the church to present some gifts to pastor Eddie and his family, and then we all prayed for him – it was very much like the old days back in the 70's, very Jesus-people-ish.

There was no rehearsal for the rest of the day, because we did Vacation Bible School, and my body chose that moment to start warning me that it had to cool off or else – I had been hot for too long, even though this wasn't as long as it had been the day before. But that's the way grace works, you know – you get just what you need when you need it. So I slipped out of the church and sat down under a tree across the street, where there was a nice breeze as well as a good shade. Several older kids, too old for the VBS session inside, said Hi in English, and came over to sit with me and chat among themselves, leaving me alone but staying with me while two of the boys showed off nearby.

After cooling down, I went back inside to help some kids make owls out of old defective CD's. Don't ask.

That evening, the outing was for “exotic salty snacks” and “exotic juices,” which I politely declined because I was really tired, and besides I wanted to catch up on my journal. As it turns out, this was a trip to the mall in downtown Santiago, which was essentially pseudo-America in Santiago, so that those of us who might be experiencing culture shock, or missing home, could feel like they were back in America for an hour or so. It was a perfect night for me to stay in the dorm and rest, because the last thing I wanted was an American mall to walk around in.

8-1- 2010 – Sunday, performance day and so much more

Sunday morning, we went to another church for morning worship. And again, I loved every minute of it, because worship service for these people is actually worship, rather than a structured routine preaching session like we have at home. They provided a translator for our benefit, and they worked him to death. I followed some of the Spanish in the teaching, and I could tell that the poor guy was completely thrown by some of the words used. I had been a little concerned whether it would be OK for us to bring our water bottles to church, since this was a little more formal than what went on up in the mountain, but everyone assured me it would be OK, and it turns out that everyone else brought them too. Good thing, because it got a little warm in the building.

After lunch, and a chance to take a very short nap in the dorm (as well as shower and change clothes), we went back up to the mountain church. The plan was to have one more rehearsal (the real dress rehearsal), break for supper at Eddie's mother's house, and then come back to the church for the play to be presented. I knew that by this time, my job was over. It was their play now, and I was going to stay out of the way and see what they did with it.

On the walk back down the hill, we experienced that rarest of Dominican cultural events, dualing cantinas. Two cantinas, to our left and to our right as we passed between them, were playing music so that unless you were in one or the other, what you heard was a cacophony of clashing notes. It was oddly surreal, and after passing through it... I wondered if maybe they would turn it down by the time the play began. I wondered if we could present the play in the dark, in the event that God had to pull the plug to stop the sound. When we got back to the church... we had no power. But the cantinas did. I wasn't sure how this was going to work out.

People began arriving, some of whom, I suppose, were church members, and some of whom were the parents of the cast of our play. They stayed outside on the lawn and on the street, patiently waiting. I sat down inside, wondering if the power was going to come back on, wondering if the kids were going to remember their lines, wondering if – if there was going to be enough room in the church, because there were an awful lot of people out there!

Some guys started bring in stacks of white plastic lawn chairs, and setting them up as extra seats for each row, then as extra rows. People started coming in. Somebody was outside trying to fix the “inverter,” whatever that is, as that was apparently the problem with our electricity.

Pastor Eddie decided to go ahead and start us singing and praying in the dark, and it was wonderful. The lights came on briefly, and then went out again.

Eventually, well after the planned curtain time, we had to start the program. Somebody drove a motorcycle around to the side of the church and aimed his headlight into the side door, which was also our stage left entrance. The light was perfect, showing us each face, and Jesus and Peter made their entrance for the beginning of the Servant parable.

The king sat proudly on his throne, passing judgment on Servant #1, the debtor, then forgiving him, then jailing him when he saw him trying to collect a much smaller debt from another servant. Servant number one displayed the perfect smugness, and I was so proud of him for it. The play rolled right along, with no flubbed lines or missed entrances. It was wonderful to see, lit from the side, and so there it was, the third miracle.

The nice lady who had originally been in place to direct the thing was there to see it, and we were surprised to discover that she had sent us the three acts for us to choose one of them, not all three. But we had done all three, and a good time was had by all.

8-2-2010 – Monday

Monday was a day at the beach by comparison.

OK, it was literally a day at the beach. This was recuperation day, where we got to relax under a shade tree listening to the surf, and shop for souvenirs. Life is good.

8-3-2010 – Tuesday, time to go home.

We got up early Tuesday morning to be at the airport in time to go through security and catch our flight, which was delayed by an hour because the pilots had to have more rest according to regulations, not their fault.

When we arrived in Miami, we knew it was going to be close, because we had to go collect our baggage from the carousel, then go through customs, then place the bags in an area for re-loading on the next plane.

All but 13 of us had successfully deposited their bags in the designated spot, and suddenly a stern American Airlines employee forbade us to put any more bags there. Never mind that the bags hadn't been taken away yet. Never mind that there wasn't even anyone there to take them away yet. Never mind that there was no possible reason that we couldn't just leave ours with the rest of them, as if we had been at that point maybe two minutes prior instead of at the present moment. Never mind that we still had time to catch our flight if we could just drop those bags off and continue on our way, as we had been instructed to do. No. Her little stop watch said it was time, so she said “This flight is closed. Go to ticket counter.”

“But -”

“No. closed. Go to ticket counter.” Off we obediently went to the ticket counter, which had a line about thirty people long, and which was not moving at all. We wasted about ten minutes trying to call American Airlines for help with this situation. Finally somebody got somebody's attention, and they led us to another ticket counter to arrange some sort of way to get back to Kentucky. While waiting in line there, we heard the PA system announcing the availability of our seats for stand by passengers.

Another miracle. There were thirteen seats available on a flight to Atlanta, where we could then board another flight to Louisville. The pretty lady with perfect posture at the counter began processing the passports and tickets. Slowly. Very slowly. By the time ten of us were ready to go, the other three seats were gone. So our ten began the dash to the next gate, while they figured out something else for the other three.

We were now split three ways, and somebody said this was a record, though two way splits had occurred in the past. So we got to Atlanta, and now we had to change to Delta, which meant that we had to present the tickets from American Airlines to be converted to Delta boarding passes. One by one, we got them done, and I was the last one in line. He said, as he handed me my pass, “OK, you're good to g--- wait a minute.”

A pause. “What? What's wrong?”

“The person at AA didn't put the ticket number on this. I can't let you board.”

I stared at him as if he had crab claws coming out his nose.

I alerted some of the rest of the team, who immediately started praying. Potentially, we could set a record, with a four way split. With me being all alone in the bowels of the airport system.

“Well what do I have to do? I have to get home.”

“I can't let you board.”

The team continued praying. Then the man said, “there's one other thing I can try, but I don't think it's going to work.” He started clicking keys again. It worked. He printed me my boarding pass.

As we boarded, I handed that pass to the Delta ticket taker dude, who said “Enjoy your flight – wait a minute.”

“No, no NO!”

He took my pass and went back to his screen, clicked on the keyboard, and finally said “OK, you're good to go.”

All this because one airline employee was a slave to her stop watch. The name of that airline, again, was American Airlines.

Just sayin. :)

We got back to Louisville at more or less the same time, that is on the same evening. It was one of the most wonderful weeks of my life. I wouldn't trade a moment of it, not one hot sweltering moment.

Mission trip to DR part 2

2010-08-06T19:34:00.001-05:00

Dominican Republic mission trip, 2010

...more from the journal

7-29-2010 – Thursday

Today we started actual classes for the drama effort in the Iglesia Cristiana up on the mountain. We used my water bottle for a prop, asking the kids to use it in a way that they normally would not. We got results such as keys, a phone, a microphone, and a hair dryer, all creative ideas. We broke for siesta and walked past the first of two cantinas and up the road to pastor Eddie's mother's house. She fixed a massive meal of delicious chicken, rice, beans, shredded cabbage, avocado, eggplant and a fruit mix with mango, pineapple and some things I'm not entirely sure how to identify, but which tasted wonderful. Later, we walked further up the hill to Eddie's uncle's house. He invited us in through his house to see the view from the backyard, where we could see Moca in one direction and Santiago in the other. He has a parrot, too, which is trained to laugh, and which is delightful in spite of the fact that he bites. You just have to keep clear is all.

For the afternoon session, I had the kids read some lines, and made them say “Rejoice with me” as if they meant it – you know, acting. They all did, until the last guy in the line, and he delivered it perfectly deadpan. I tried him a few more times, encouraging him to say it as he normally would to his friends, and he was still deadpan. His friends assured me that that was indeed the way he would say it to them. That's OK – we had some non-speaking roles. I really love these people.

On the way back, in the van, (big) Bobby began playing with David, and we all laughed so hard on the rest of the trip that my eyes still burn from the tears. David is a wonderful fellow who smiles with his whole face, and who does some wonderful Laurel and Hardy impressions, my personal favorite. It's so beautiful to see him with his sister Jessica, to see the love their family shares.

Tonight is ice cream night, so I look forward to the evening outing, to see what flavors we can buy from the ice cream shop. But first we have dinner in a few minutes, so the journal gets stored away for the time being.

7-30-2010 – Friday

Ice cream night was excellent. We went to Bon, which is supposed to have some character above the O so that we pronounce it boan, but I don't remember what it was. No matter, the ice cream was good. They did not list the flavors on the wall anywhere, so you just had to sort of know what they had, except that our escort knew and confirmed my hopes that they served rum raisin. You see, that is my favorite flavor of ice cream, and while it's really good in the USA, you go anywhere in the hispanic world, and you will taste the most wonderful ice cream in the world if you think to ask for rum raisin.

Anyway, today we blocked the play. I will be honest and tell you that this was easily the hardest day I had while in the DR, because we used the siesta time after eating to have the casting committee meet (Dawn, Sarah, Molly and yours truly, plus Wendi because she speaks English and knows who the kids are), and we spent the entire time getting it done, with no real chance to wind down. We filled the most difficult, least flexible roles first, then plugged in the ones that could, in some alternate universe, have been female - because, predictably, we had more female actors than male, and who knows? Maybe the King's personal finance officer could have been a girl.

Amazingly, we matched each of the 24 kids to a role in the play (with nobody being relegated to third shepherd from the left, you understand) though not all had speaking roles. Each person was at the very least a non-speaking accountant who flipped a page and had to actually “act.” None of the kids had to take dual roles. It was perfect. There's your first miracle.

About halfway through the first act, I realized that it was going to take a second miracle to get the blocking done by 4:30, so we could finish up and get down the mountain, so that the kids could go home and study their lines and commit to memory what they were supposed to do. We were rotating them through, so that while Molly and I (Molly is awesome, translating my confused direction into Spanish) were working on one act, the kids in the other two acts were in the back of the room working on costumes, while others on the team were outside creating scene panels to serve as our set. Dawn was working the costume department. Molly and I were sort of double teaming them – I would give some direction, and she would translate, and then when the kids had questions, she would translate that back for me. It was order within chaos, with chaos being the more visible. We finished blocking Act I, sent our actors away to take their turns with costumes, and gathered our actors for Act II – and discovered that a couple or so had disappeared for whatever reason. One couldn't be there Sunday, another couldn't for some other reason. After crossing them off the cast list, and considering who to load down with a dual role, they came back, upset that they couldn't have a role, so we re-instated them. As I said before, we had exactly one role for each kid, a miracle.

So, by the third act, Molly and I were getting seriously tired. I was trying to follow her Spanish (and that of the kids) and not doing too badly, considering the noise coming from the costume department on the other end of the room. We were getting the idea across to them pretty well, and the kids were doing their best, and I didn't even take time to check my watch.

And we made it to the end of the Prodigal Son parable, which was Act III, at 4:32. I was astounded, pronounced it an official miracle, and went outside to get some fresh air, and maybe, just maybe, some shade. I did not collapse, and neither did Molly, and so I told the kids to review their scripts, lines and blocking before they went to bed – and I had no idea if they would really do it.

Empanadas and “the monument” were the outing for the evening. I looked forward to them both, as I had used the monument as a starting point when searching for geocaches, hoping to score yet another country for my profile. There are no caches in the area, however, so I left my GPS unit home. At the monument, we had an impromptu talent show, some very silly but harmless stuff such as backward flips and funny impressions.

The empanada stand is run by one little old man, who could not be expected to handle the rush of business that we would represent with our rather large group. So by prior arrangement, two of our drivers/escorts got behind the counter, took our orders, and later our money. He had us adopt creative fake names for this exercise. Ginger became Spice Girl, I was el Jipo, Caleb was the Mad Raccoon. Fun stuff. This made it easier for them to keep track of us.

Then back to the dorm for “devo,” the name for “devotion time,” which I personally loved, with praise and worship singing, courtesy of Patrick and his magic guitar.

Mission trip to DR part 1

2010-08-06T17:56:00.001-05:00

Dominican Republic mission trip, 2010

I recently had the exciting privilege of working with a missions team in the Dominican Republic, helping to establish a drama ministry for a tiny church up in the mountains. What follows are excerpts from my journal while there, in three parts.

7-28-2010 - Wednesday

Today we visited “the Hole.” The island here is volcanic in origin, and there is an extinct caldera within the city of Santiago. It was used as a garbage dump for years, and still is, though no longer with government approval. But you know how it is, when people get into a habit – garbage still finds its way into the caldera, in significant quantities, regardless of how many people currently live there, and regardless of a general disapproval. About 800 families live in the hole, with an average size of five, so about 4,000 people manage a life among open sewers, with garbage floating merrily in the creek/river that flows through it. The de facto government of the Hole is one or more drug dealers, and that gives you an idea of the main source of employment in such a situation. The drug dealer who rules the area approves of what is done for the children by GO ministries, and "has their back," so to speak. And before you react with horror that a drug dealer is a governing body, consider that in many countries around the world, corrupt governments actually interfere with charity efforts, and steal goods before they can make it to the intended recipients. I'm not saying that the government of the Dominican Republic is such a government – obviously they are not. But many in Africa are, so keep perspective.

GO ministries has built a small (by our standards) church, actually a two-story building with a chapel upstairs and a feeding center downstairs. Six days a week, they feed the children who live in the Hole – the day we visited, they feasted on rice with a spoonful of beans on the top and a small piece of chicken on the side. That's actually a nutritious, generous meal, and in my opinion, a good tasting one. These children ate joyfully and gratefully, and we were allowed to bring the color-coded bowls of food to them. Different colored bowls signified the size of portions, slightly more for the older, larger children, and the kids know which color to accept.

After lunch, as we took a tour of the area, children asked to be picked up, hugged, smiled at, and generally – well, loved. That's kind of what we all want, isn't it? We were more than glad to do that; they are beautiful children, with alert, shiny eyes and huge smiles.

Supplies for building the chapel/feeding center had to be brought down into the caldera by wheelbarrow – just what was needed for one day, because it would disappear overnight otherwise.

Most of the conditions here I expected. Toilet paper goes in a wastebasket, not into the ceramic throne, because the plumbing simply won't handle it. Don't drink the tap water, don't even get it on your toothbrush – just as in Mexico. Drink lots of water to replace what is leaving your body via perspiration, long before you're aware of a thirst reflex, lest you dehydrate. In fact, today, one of the teenagers did indeed forget to drink enough water, began throwing up, and required an IV. Hey, it happens.

So far, no culture shock for this old man. But the Hole was a whole new experience for me.

I'm making an effort to learn names, and remember things like who I talked to this morning about the scene panels. The week is young, and so I got the first such test completely, and embarrassingly, wrong. Of all people, it was Patrick who had been showing me the drawings, and I should have remembered him if only because he is Sarah's husband. But there you are. In my defense, consider that some of the names I'm supposed to keep track of go like this: Dan, Danna, Don, Dawn, Dennis, Denise.... and that's just the D's for goodness sake. :)

The people in this group are very friendly as well as tolerant of my weirdness, and I could see them becoming good friends if I lived near them. I also like the sense of humor that runs through the group like a lifeline – when the rooster next door woke us up way before dawn, some suggested that we go next door and buy it, and donate it to the ministry.

Tomorrow we begin the drama camp. That will be.. um... Thursday. So we cut some fabric for making costumes, and started working on props, and this afternoon I had a “Gare” moment, when Sarah showed me a shawl and asked if that would work for the woman in the lost coin parable. Of course it would, but it was so like the many times we had costume “parades” for Gare, our director at Backdoor theatre back in Wichita Falls. It began to sink in that I was really directing this play and taking a measure of responsibility for it. And I began to wonder if I was going to disappoint these people who are counting on me to shape it. When we finish casting the play, I think I had better make an opportunity to tell them about the concept of the “audience of one” whom they'll be performing for. (That's “God,” for those of you who are friends of mine but outside the Faith).

What I wish other drivers knew

2010-07-20T11:20:00.002-05:00

You've heard about the TFM's. This isn't about them.

This is about your standard, government issue morons (GIM's). This is about the things they used to teach us back in high school drivers education, when you had to take a drivers test with a DPS officer in the seat beside you. Back when there was pressure. Back when they made sure you understood some basic concepts, even if you were going to forget them soon, in the excitement of having wheels to ride around town in, looking cool in your five year old Chevy.

This blog was inspired the other day by a few GIMs on Highway 6 in Fort Bend county. Maybe a couple of them on highway 288, Brazoria county. It doesn't matter - the point is that GA and I saw other drivers doing things that were dangerous and yet didn't really gain them any appreciable advantage, and it got me thinking about... why. And I realized this could be a public service. Why, if only three drivers see something they've been doing, and stop doing it, the world will be a better place.

So here are some things I wish other drivers would not do, in no particular order.

Weaving in Traffic. The most commonly enforced law is "speeding." That's not because it's the most dangerous thing you can do (unless you're doing 120 mph or something). It's what you have to do that allows you to speed, that's so dangerous. Sure, it's the easiest ticket to give out, so it's a great source of revenue, but let's face it: if the highway is nearly empty, and the curves are banked, and your tires are good, you can roar along at 80 mph and usually get by with it. (Of course, I never do). But often the highway you're using has lots of other people on it, so that to go 80 mph in a 65 zone, you have to weave in and out of the traffic. And every time you change lanes, you're risking a collision because you didn't quite clear the car in the other lane, or maybe the other guy is in your blind spot. And no matter how careful he is, sometimes he can just decide to change lanes at the same moment you do. More importantly, when you weave, you are passing people on the right - which is dangerous in itself.

Passing on the Right. When you do this, you necessarily put yourself in the blind spot of the car you're passing. There is a moment when you are completely invisible to him. Suppose he decides to pull over on the shoulder. Or change lanes. He is perfectly within his rights to do so, and if he cannot see you in the instant he decides to do that, there will be an accident. And it will be your fault.

Tailgating. Oh, most drivers know this is a dangerous thing to do, but there is the occasional driver (usually female - sorry, girls) who doesn't understand the Law of Inertia. That law states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. More to the point, if your car is moving at 70 mph, it will tend to keep moving at 70 mph, and will fight your brakes to do that. If the car in front of you encounters any problem and has to even slow down, you could be in trouble. You are putting both of you in danger, because now he cannot safely slow down or stop should the need arise - he is now quite uncomfortable, because he knows that if something does go wrong, anything at all, he is going to have to make a split second decision whether to be hit from behind or avoid the problem in front. Be assured that he is not smiling upon you as you ride on his bumper. He is rather saying very rude things about you and possibly your mother.

Back in Drivers Ed they told you to put a car length between you and the car in front of you for every 10 mph you're moving, for exactly this reason. The theory is that if you're going 70 mph, it will take you 7 car lengths to be able to slow down your car enough to avoid a serious accident, after allowing for your reaction time and the time it takes your brakes to overcome the inertia of the car using the friction of the brake pads and the friction of your tires on the pavement. In practice, nobody does that, but to put it so that anyone can understand it, if your car is 3 feet behind the other one, and he has to slam on his brakes, you will hit him before you can even move your foot to the brake pedal. And inertia doesn't just apply to your car, though it sort of feels that way to your perception - you, too, are moving at 70 mph, and when your car suddenly slows to zero because of the crushing impact, your body is still traveling. It will only slow when it encounters your seat belt at that same 70 mph! It will hurt. If you have your arms braced on your steering wheel, which is likely, they may be broken.
I used to have a diesel rabbit back in the day. When somebody tailgated me, I pushed the pedal all the way down, because then my car spewed a cloud of black smoke on the moron behind me. Very satisfying.

Failing to slow down on a gravel road. Here's a news flash. When you see a sign that says "Slow down to prevent damage to windshields," they don't mean to prevent damage to your windshield. They're talking about the other cars, which are being pelted with the rocks your car is throwing if you go more than 20 mph on a gravel road. When you are driving on a newly graveled road, SLOW DOWN!

Dinging the other car in a parking lot. When you open your door in a parking lot, please don't just fling the door open as if there is nothing else in its arc. Open it slowly, and be mindful of the possibility of making a dent in somebody's door. It really isn't that much trouble.

Leaving your shopping cart right where it is. Come on, people. Just look around and see the places they've reserved for the carts. Nobody is asking you to roll it all the way back to the store, but I see people leaving a cart right on the line so that two spaces are blocked, when there is a return aisle less than ten steps away. This is especially bad here in the Houston area. OK, if you have a baby in the car seat, you don't want to leave him to push the cart very far from the car, and we all understand that. But ten paces? Come on.

Texting while driving. People, this is an insane thing to do. It is impossible to focus on the traffic around you, or stay in your lane, or maintain a consistent speed, or be aware of hazards - in short, to drive safely - if your attention is on the next letter your thumb needs to press so you can send your "LOL C U @ lunch" text. Do NOT do this. If you do, you deserve the accident you are going to have, and I hereby declare you to be a certified moron.

Stopping past the white line at an intersection. Back in the day, my driving instructor called this "running over a pedestrian." Sure, you don't actually run over a pedestrian when you stop over the white line, we hope, but what you are doing is parking your car on the crosswalk so that pedestrians have to step out into traffic to cross the road. You gain nothing by pulling your car into that area at a red light, unless you're in the right lane hoping to make a free right turn. Which brings me to the one thing that makes me want to get out of the car and knock on a car window...

Pulling up to be even with the car in the other lane for no @#%&^!! reason. OK, I'm planning to turn right after stopping at the red light. I stop at the white line. The other car does, too. I look both ways, and there are no pedestrians approaching. So I pull up to the second white line to see if it is clear on the left. When I do... the car to my left pulls up, too, though he cannot go until the light turns green. I sigh in frustration, and pull up a little more to see around him (he will usually be in a huge SUV). He pulls up to match me. Now I can pull up no further, and I cannot see if it's clear to go. So I have to sit there and wait for the green light, all because this moron in a huge gas guzzling SUV with three "My Kid is an Honor Student" bumper stickers is... yup, talking on his cell phone and letting his subconscious do the driving.

So think about it. Do you do any of these things? Are you a danger to yourself and to others? Please drive safely, because I love you and want you to be able to come to my funeral when I die of old age.

UTB - Rich men in heaven?

2010-07-05T10:39:00.005-05:00

There is a well known concept in scripture, spoken by Jesus himself, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven.

Now this tends to give the Bible student pause, because it's not really a parable, but more of a statement. So people have tried to explain this away in sermons and studies and Sunday School lessons, as best they can. It's a hard one.

One explanation is that the eye of the needle is actually the name of one of the gates entering Jerusalem. It's a rather small gate, so that a camel must kneel to get through it. Now that carries a good lesson in itself, because it means that the rich man must also kneel to get into heaven. But there are a couple of problems with this interpretation. One problem is that I can find no reliable source that says that one of the gates is named the eye of the needle. The other is that it makes the "rich man" element irrelevant, because all of us must kneel in that sense - the sense that we must submit to Christ and become spiritually humble, whether rich or poor. We're all in the same boat, there. Oh, you could argue that rich men will find it harder to humble themselves and kneel, but it doesn't really wash. It has more to do with pride than with wealth. So I can't accept this idea.

Another explanation: Jesus was saying that it is impossible for rich men to get into heaven. There is one very large problem with this interpretation. And happily, this problem also leads to the correct understanding of the verse.

"Rich" is a relative term. I first understood this on a trip to Mexico back in my younger days. My friends and I came across a man sitting on a horse. His family was with him, and they were all living in a shelter in the forest (yeah, we were caving). The horse was not his; he worked on the land, and his employer provided the horse. He was very nice, and in our conversation with him he mentioned that we were "rich."

"Oh, we aren't rich," we replied, and he smiled and said "You're here, aren't you?" And he was right. If we could afford to travel in our leisure time and visit caves in Mexico, then by his standards, we were indeed quite rich.

I pondered this concept for days afterward, and realized that "rich" is completely relative, like hot or cold. Richer than who, poorer than who else? To me, the doctor or dentist is rich. To him, the politicians are rich. To them, the successful actors in Hollywood are rich. To them... and so on.

I was considered rich by anyone who could not afford a car less than five years old, because I had a car that new. That person in turn is considered rich by someone who can't even afford the used car. Next down the ladder is the person who can't even afford the gas for it if he had that car. Then you have the homeless. Though that guy, living in a cardboard box, thinks he's at the very bottom of the food chain, he might be considered rich in the eyes of the child in India who picks over the garbage heaps trying to find food to eat.

So... who is rich, in the objective, absolute sense?

Well... there are now, and there have been for many centuries, a group of people, a class of people, who are so rich that they can't spend their money, or give it away, in quantities large enough to make any difference in their lifestyles. They have international wealth, they own banks, they are banks. No, I'm not going to address conspiracy theories or the Bildergergers, or the secret Federal Reserve people. But you and I know that there are international bankers who control most governments in the world. They control elections all over the world. Not conspiratorially, necessarily... but they do.

It was once said that controlling armies is not as powerful as controlling purse strings. There is truth in that. Much truth. And those people have some mighty big purses.

These people own our politicians partly by making money available to them for campaigning, but mostly by controlling what is said in the mass media. They own the newspapers, they own the TV networks, they own it all. You've seen it: somebody who would take his oath of office seriously is made to look like a fool the minute he gets any traction with the voters. Totally incompetent morons are made to look dignified. Scandals are simply ignored. And each of those politicians knows that his career, his wealth, his "power" can disappear overnight if he fails to please the people who can make or break him.

These rich - let's say Rich™ in order to distinguish from the merely rich - these Rich™ men have kept the wars of the world going, so that those countries will have no choice but to borrow from them the money needed to buy weapons and finance their defense. They buy the weapons from who? The Rich™ of course. So money is made from war, by selling better and better weapons, and earning interest on the loans made to buy those weapons. The research for designing those new weapons? We pay for it. People die, and die, and die - and poverty is kept as the natural state of things - in order to make the Rich™ richer.

They pour nasties into the rivers and spew poisons into the air to make themselves more money, then they tell you to vote for their political party - either one - to put a stop to it. When you do, nothing stops. They provoke hatred for the USA by setting a foreign policy in place that interferes with other nations and peoples, keeps vicious dictators and regimes in place, violates our own Constitution, and all to force a situation where they have a better environment to do "business" - and they leave us to pay for it in blood and a bloated military budget. They give us two parties to choose from, one promising war, the other peace, but what we get is what they want, every time. They don't just own the banks, they own us.

With every day that goes by, our system of limited self government becomes less limited and more out of reach of our control. The Constitutional Republic that was originally given to us by God becomes more godless with every legislative session.

In return we get jobs. We get taxes. We get enough to keep us satisfied, so we won't rise up. We stay asleep.

I'm not saying all this to inspire you to rise up, or vote differently. You won't anyway. I'm saying it to lead to this: if you were God, filled with love and mercy for your children, and you were now about to hand out justice with that mercy... would you let the Rich™ into heaven?

It is, indeed, harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

UtB: the warning - flee if you will

2010-07-02T11:29:00.007-05:00

I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I couldn't decide whether to create a whole new blog for it or not. I've decided to blend it in with this one, and leave it to you, the reader to skip the posts with this topic.

The danger is that some of you may be so intolerant as to abandon this entire blog (or me personally) for taking a direction that offends you. So I'm going to trust you to be at least open minded enough to stay with me, but to just avoid the posts with UtB in the headline.

So from time to time, I will take that risk, and if you leave me, that's OK. I won't leave you... I will still read your posts as I have before.

So... the topic is Understanding the Bible, or UtB. Now, if you are intractably opposed to Christianity, monotheism, Biblical literalism or any branch of Gospel doctrine - read no further in this post, but please read the other posts just to make me feel good. If you believe that Fundamentalists are a scourge unto the earth - though I am personally not a fundamentalist in the normally understood sense - then you can stick around if you want to, but you've been warned.

Not that you have to share my beliefs to be reading this. But it would help if you are at least sort of agnostic. Or maybe firmly in the camp of atheism, but tolerant of others' spirituality. Thing is, you won't get squat out of any of this if you don't at least have some curiosity about what's actually in the Bible, other than the stuff they tell you in Sunday School.

Bottom line: don't give me any grief about what I say here if it's just "You Christians are idiots, and only fools can fall for that crap." If you want to point out something I missed in my reasoning, sure, go for it. But I'm not doing this so I can argue with you.

My guidelines for understanding scripture are fairly simple.

I start with the assumption that all scripture is true in its originally written context, either literally or metaphorically. By that, I mean that scribal errors happen, and holes in the papyrus happen, and translation is often woefully inadequate. Here are some examples:

Scribal errors: There are two history books in the Old Testament which Chronicle the history of some Kings of Israel, covering the same information. The numbers do not exactly agree. It is as if the equivalent of a decimal point had been shifted. But to me, the exact number of men in an army is not all that important.
Holes: There is a letter in the New Testament in which a sentence makes no sense at all in its context (1 Peter 3:19). The narrative seems to jump to a bizarre utterance and then go back to the topic at hand. Reading it literally, the writer, in the middle of discussing something normally and intelligently, suddenly suggests that Jesus went to hell to preach to the dead and give them another chance (in conflict with the plain meaning of other passages), in a way that jars the reader if he's paying any attention to what he's reading. But if two adjacent words in the original language were to have added a letter to the end of one word, and another letter to the beginning of the next word, it would suddenly make sense, and the flow of the narrative would be normal. This suggests to me that there was a hole in the paper.
Translation inadequacies: The English word "love," tragically for our understanding, is forced to take on duties for the Greek words philos, eros, and agape, which mean respectively "close, loving friendship" and "sexual or romantic love," and "sacrificial unconditional love." Most of the New Testament is translated from Greek, which is an astoundingly rich language, with many terms that simply do not translate easily. This comes into play when trying to choke down the Revelation of the Apocalypse, as an example.

I also make the radical assumption that since the Word of God is truth, either metaphorically or literally, that when I see a contradiction between two passages in the Bible, it is because I don't yet understand one or both of the passages.

I also make the assumption that my five senses, as flawed as they are, are given to me as a set of tools to make sense of the world. If what I experience in my world conflicts with the Word of God, then I have misunderstood the word of God, and I reconsider what I thought was the truth in it. Note that I do not reject the word itself - I reject my flawed understanding of it.

These assumptions have served me well. Remember that logic is a tool, and requires that you begin with some assumptions that you consider to be reliable. If your assumptions prove false, then logic requires that you abandon them rather than following a chain of reason based on bad data.

And it's OK to make leaps of logic, and consider theories that you cannot prove, and follow them to a conclusion of some kind. The important thing to remember is that if you base your conclusions on them, they are not necessarily true either. You have to keep in mind which things are assumed, which are proven, and which are merely hypothetical. This is not always easy to do. What is possible, what is proven, what is likely, what is unlikely? Confuse these and your logic will take you to nonsense. (Nonsense can be fun, and often is, but you can't plan your life around it, and you can't find truth in it. If you do find truth in nonsense, then it isn't really nonsense by definition).

So bear with me, don't worry about agreeing with me, and feel free to contradict me as long as you're respectful about it.

The first installment of UtB may not follow immediately. That will give you time to insulate yourselves against the horrors of anything I might say.

Red Tacos for a Blue Lady

2010-06-24T21:19:00.005-05:00

I still do not miss Wichita Falls. I miss Backdoor Theatre, of course, but not the city.
But the Falls does have some things to offer, about two to be exact, which most people don't even know about. The theatre, of course, that is the single most worthwhile thing in that place, as under-supported as it may be.

The other one is Casa Mañana, downtown. I just read on Facebook that they had a fire, and so it's temporarily closed, and that is tragic. When GA and I are in WF at the same time, we always try to go to the Casa for their delicious red tacos. Don't try Googling it, because the closest you'll get is the old Freddy's on Iowa Park Road, which is closed. But you can read some comments about it here.

If you ever have an opportunity to have lunch or dinner in that wicked, drug ridden city, you must go by Casa Mañana, and order something- anything - that includes at least one red taco. When it is served to you, check the table for a little squeeze bottle with a red liquid inside. That is the red sauce. Put a dollop on one bite of the taco, and prepare to be enthralled. If you like it, put it on the whole darn thing.

Back in the day, they served them swimming in that sauce, and that is why they are called red tacos. Now that they let you put your own sauce on it, to taste, they come to your table not so red. The shell of the taco is between hard and soft, kind of thick, crunchy and flexible.

I'm not sure what's in the sauce, but I think I can taste wine, and maybe some catalina dressing. No matter, it's delicious. And you can't get it anywhere in the world except in the City that Faith Built. (They don't use that motto anymore... now it's the City of Meth Labs or something). You can find something close in Monterrey, Mexico, or in a couple of border towns, but it won't be exactly the same. Besides, the drug crime in Mexico is even worse than in Wichita Falls.

The tortilla chips are awesome, too. Pay a little extra, and order the queso. Mix a little of the salsa they bring to you, and dip those chips for a taste treat.

And it's healthy, too. OK, I'm lying on that part, but there are some pleasures that are worth destruction of your arteries. Oh, and don't ask to see the health permits. Consider this to be an adventure, and don't worry about the ambiance. It may look like a pig sty, but trust me, you've eaten in some fancy schmancy restaurants that are actually less clean.

Now I'm starting to miss that awful place. Meaning the awful city, not the Casa.

Poe little me

2010-04-19T15:27:00.009-05:00

These days I don't do much caving. I'm not really too old to do it, but it is harder than it used to be. I'm glad I have a new interest to augment it - not replace it just yet - and it's good that it takes me to such interesting places.

Geocaching doesn't cost much after the initial investment, buying a GPS unit. And if you have an iPhone, you can even get an app that will do what your GPS would have done, only better. Well, better in the sense that you don't have to have a computer with you to find nearby caches.

As a direct result of geocaching, I have seen an oak tree on the gulf coast that is over a thousand years old. I never knew such a thing existed in Texas - and even if I had, I likely wouldn't have traveled all that way just to see it.

Most recently, I had turned down a chance to travel to Baltimore MD with GA, until I began preparing her a list of caches near where she would be staying on her business trip. When I realized that there was a cache just outside the cemetery where Edgar Allen Poe was buried, I changed my mind.

I timed it in such a way that this cache would be my 200th, a milestone cache, so it appears that way on my profile. GA and I visited the site, scored the cache, and then I recited (well, I read) Eldorado while seated next to his grave.

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old-
This knight so bold-
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow-
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be-
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

Or something like that.

There is a church built over many of the graves in this cemetery, because somebody passed a silly law requiring that cemeteries must have some sort of church on the premises. No, I didn't crawl under the church to see the tombstones better.

Life is good.

Imagine analyzed

2010-04-16T17:19:00.004-05:00

Warning! Controversy ahead!

I'm going to start out by saying that I am a fan of John Lennon. I love the man. I love his music, and I love the music of the Beatles, and I think that Mr. Lennon was a very honest, sincere man. I don't think he ever knowingly lied to himself or to us in his music. That said...

Many, if not most people, will tell you that Imagine was his signature song, the best he ever wrote. I am telling you it is not. I can think of several that are more profound and better written: In My Life, Nowhere Man, Strawberry Fields, and The Word all come easily to mind - and yes, I know that The Word was a sly dig at Christianity. It was nevertheless better written than Imagine by leaps and bounds. If we examined his catalog, I am certain that we could find a dozen more songs that stand above Imagine.

In the three decades since he released this song, I have heard dozens of people singing it reverently as if it were a profound work of art. It is not. It is bullshit set to music.

Let's look at the lyrics, and pay attention to their actual meaning, rather than the image (image is the root word of imagine).

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Seriously? Let's imagine there is no afterlife at all. We die and we become worm food. We cease to exist. When mom or dad passed away, they were gone for good, and we will never see them again. Same with our children. We all just... die. Do you really want this?

Even if there is no heaven, and those of us who believe in it are completely, tragically wrong - and I do not believe that we are wrong about that - what possible good does it do to dismiss that belief? Are we to imagine a world where we are to fear death, with no hope of anything on the other side? Please.

Imagine all the people
Living for today

I know lots of people who live for today, not bothering to plan for tomorrow. They are short-sighted fools, they are quickly impoverished and they become burdens to their families and to society. They live a sad, ignorant existence. Not that we should only live for tomorrow, mind you. Wise people live for today and for tomorrow, planning for both, and holding on to memories of the past. But to "live for today" -as advised by this song - is a huge mistake. Please, my friends, enjoy today, but live for both today and tomorrow.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for...

No countries? OK, let's imagine that. It's what we started out with. The whole point of a country, or nation, or tribe, is that we can pool our resources and talents and cooperate for the common good and for defense. No countries? I have imagined it, and I don't like it. Now, lots and lots of countries, all with governments that are sharply limited in their power, restricted to preventing fraud or theft... that I can happily imagine. Yes, most of our dying is because of governments, kings and presidents and religious leaders... if and when they gain too much power. But if you have no countries at all, no governments at all, somebody will form one, and it will not be for the benefit of all. We are cursed with the power mad among us, and that is human nature, and so the more countries the better, all small and limited. So... let's go with Imagine no kings or powerful governments.

Now the next line:

...and no religion too

is accidentally correct. What he meant was no belief systems asking us to kill each other to advance the cause, but since most of us don't realize that "religion" - at least when organized - is not at all the same thing as spirituality, or relationship with the Creator, I still question his lyric. Religion does usually get in the way of the connection between God and his created beings on earth, and it is often a powerful tool when used to manipulate, as was done by the religious leaders who crucified Christ (and I don't mean the Jews themselves), and today by those who mislead in the world of Islam (and I don't mean the deceived in that religion, but the deceivers), and by popes and crusaders bent on commanding armies in the name of God.

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

OK. Peace would be great. But try going unarmed to achieve it. See where you get.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

My friend, even if we all somehow agreed in the principles of this song, we would still be enslaved by our very nature. Get a roomful of people to agree that they don't need a leader. See how long they can go without one appearing anyway. I don't care how sincere they are in cooperating without one. Someone should try this for college credit.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

We don't have to imagine this. It's been tried over and over. It's called communism (or its less forceful cousin socialism), and it always results in the same thing: dependence and poverty. If you own nothing, and neither do your neighbors, then there is no point in hoping somebody will share - which they won't, because they will be fighting for every scrap of bread they can get for their hungry children. You want to see greed and hunger, man, just eliminate the concept of private property. You will have it in abundance. See Cuba. See North Korea. See Russia immediately after the revolution. See any country anywhere that abolishes property rights. You cannot have freedom without independence, and you cannot be independent without the right to own property.

Now the music is beautiful, I agree. Mr. Lennon was and is a legend. But this song is crap.

I find more sense in I Am the Walrus. Seriously. But he got that one backwards, too.

Vegas

2010-04-08T08:36:00.005-05:00

Facebook has now improved the photo uploading feature.
This, of course, means it no longer works.
That's OK, I'll put the photo here, and then see if Facebook will let me link to it
Here we go:

Here is what I would have liked to use as my new profile picture, taken at the Improv at Harrah's. You should know that "Improv" refers to the name of the venue, not to any improvisation you might expect. We saw three very funny comedians, including a guy who used to be on Family Ties back in the day. I never once watched that show, so I didn't recognize him, but there you are.

Mud fiction

2010-02-11T14:52:00.002-06:00

Lisa crouched behind the dead tree at the edge of the pool. She wiped mud from her face, just the mud that was too near her eyes. The rest provided good disguise. The growl echoed again, somehow hiding its direction from her ears, sounding as if it came from behind, from the front, and from both sides.

It was an evil, angry growl, but she had had enough of fear. She was defiantly still, waiting for the animal or person or thing to show itself, to grow confident enough to attack.

The growling stopped. Lisa knew that it was now considering an assault. Threats always stopped just before action. She gripped her knife, and prepared for the moment sure to come.

The frog sprang from its tiny mudhole lair, baring its fangs, and shrieking its bloodlust - and almost got its teeth into Lisa's neck. Fortunately, she was faster, always faster, and in the midst of its jump, caught it by the throat with her left hand. She tightened her thumb and finger into a small noose, choking the evil amphibian as it hissed and threatened death.

She twisted it into two pieces, silencing its hunger forever - and ate it raw. She kept the legs to sell to the next restaurant, or camp, or traveler - but devoured the rest with satisfaction. She took a long breath of the stifling, hot night air, and rinsed her hands in the swamp water - then stood up, and looked around in the dark for a limb with which to climb out of the bog. Finding none, she dug her fingers into the slightly dryer, firmer soil above the water line, and made her way to the gravelly trail.

She heard music in the distance. She made sure her knife was well hidden, and strolled happily to find whatever camp might offer an opportunity for... gain.

The moon sagged behind another cloud, and even the mosquitoes seemed afraid to get too near.

Guns

2010-01-06T18:26:00.001-06:00

This from an article in the Washington Times:

"An important detail that is neglected in news coverage is that all the multiple-victim public shootings in America - crimes in which more than three people were killed - happened where legal concealed handguns are banned. The Wytheville post office is such a gun-free zone, not to mention that the felon who committed the crime was banned from possessing a firearm anywhere. The Oklahoma City attack was stopped because the man who stopped it could carry a concealed handgun."

Read the entire article here.

Über-Tacky

2009-12-16T06:54:00.000-06:00

GA and I went to our favorite little tacky seafood restaurant last night. They brought tacky to a whole new level.

The ad you can't quite see, just above the tattoo parlor ad, is for a DWI attorney.
I tell you, this is fine dining.

Cruise 2009 part 4 (Days at Sea)

2009-12-05T09:55:00.000-06:00

As much fun as the ports of call are, the best part of a transatlantic cruise is the long stretch of sailing on the open seas with no land in sight, and nothing to get off the ship for.

And the best part of a typical day at sea is the formal or semi-formal dining - in this case, on deck three in the Romeo and Juliet dining room:

harB waits for the lovely hostess to come put the napkin in his lap. Photo by Wm.

It's a chance to be pampered, in a way that you cannot remotely expect back at home, no matter how attentive your spouse may try to be. After being seated, the lovely hostess comes by and places your napkin in your lap for you. That's the only reason for the first plate to be there - to hold that little napkin in place in anticipation of your arrival. The ladies are then presented with formal little menus, so they can choose an appetizer or two, and the main course as well. (Dessert comes later). Men get their menus soon after.

Appetizers can be anything from salads to cold fruit soups to escargot. Yes, I said snails, drenched in garlic butter. And yes, it's delicious - but kids, don't try this at home.

Anneline, our attentive and skilled server, made sure that every meal we had in that room was better than the one before. We made sure that harB took it easy at dessert time, but you know how hard it is for him to resist a good chocolate.

A triple chocolate dessert, with dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate all on the same tray. Photo by GA.

Between meals, there are endless activities, scattered among the various rooms and decks on the ship. Here is harB, watching the fun from the arms of one of the decorations on the hallway into the Pyramid Lounge, where many of the best activities are held:

Photo by Wm

Some of my favorite activities are:

Karaoke - this is done in a lounge set aside for just that, complete with its own bar, several TV monitors so you can see the words whichever way you want to face, and plenty of songs to choose from. On special occasions, they even have a live band to play behind you. Try that in a bowling alley.
Trivia - I didn't even try to do that this cruise, because some of those players take it too seriously. They will argue and fight over the precise meaning of the question or answer in the attempt to score one more crappy keychain.
Seminars - I mentioned before that they had a guy teaching about digital photography, but there was also a former Los Angeles District Attorney, who gave us the inside scoop on such cases as the Manson murders, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Marilyn Monroe case, and others. This was way interesting, and very informative, since he was able to show us evidence that he wasn't allowed to introduce into trials and press conferences. As a result of one of these seminars, I am now convinced that Norma Jean was not only murdered, but that it was done on behalf of the Kennedy family. Just my opinion, of course.
Ice shows - Great skaters from all over the world show off on the ice rink in one of the lower decks. Jennifer from Russia was especially amazing. These shows were so popular that they had to issue tickets given out early in the morning.
Theatre entertainment - these included Broadway style revues, singers, and a very good hypnotist. The broadway style shows were better than any I have ever seen, which may have something to do with the size of the ship and the number of passengers.

And I have to tell you about the hypnotist. Now, I'm not going to take a position on whether hypnotism is fake or just a show or if it's real. I don't know. But this guy was good. His main show was very entertaining, and he's billed as the world's fastest hypnotist. Apparently, he's well-known in England, though he was new to me.

He got about forty volunteers from the audience, started to work on them, and I suppose he was looking for some subtle sign telling him if they were going to go under faster or at all, or if they were going to try to fake him out. He got rid of any who had been drinking immediately, and then pulled those who weren't going to be fast enough, and kept the best eight or so. Other than the speed at which he got the show going, I guess it was pretty standard stuff... except that he arranged an unscheduled, midnight performance for those who were young enough to stay awake that late. This one was an "adult" performance, with no kids allowed. Now this one was definitely not your normal hypmotize show. I won't go into details, but it was bizarre and incredibly funny.

Now I find that I cannot remember his name. I wonder if he... no, surely not.

Bottom line: if you want the best value for your vacation dollar, I recommend a repositioning cruise with Royal Caribbean cruise lines, and extend the vacation with a couple of days in a hotel at the other end of the cruise. You can't go wrong with Spain or England.

Thank you for reading these blogs, assuming you stayed with me this far. Leave a comment and let me know if you liked it.

Cruise 2009 part 3 (Spain and Portugal)

2009-11-29T12:05:00.020-06:00

The next two ports of call were in Vigo, Spain, and in Funchal, Portugal. We got geocaches in both of them.

Vigo

We had read on Cruise Critic that Vigo is such an "uninteresting place"... which cinched it for us. We knew without a doubt that this was going to be a great place to visit. We actually had three caches loaded into the GPS unit, but the map I printed for us had a somewhat larger scale than I realized, so we settled for just one of them, once we had climbed to the top of the hill (3/4 of a mile as the crow flies), scored the cache, and seen the beautiful historic castle with its lovely landscaping. I can see now why so few people from the cruise ships come up here, especially since they're mostly geriatrics, unlike GA and me. We're still young and spry.

Every once in a while you can get a really neat photo that just has that nice composition and subject matter. After logging the cache, we kept going up the hill and discovered this castle in Castro Park, which nobody had mentioned in the literature, but which made the climb worthwhile. As we got our first view, we saw this:

Man with dog overlooking the bay from the castle in Vigo. Photo by Wm

I don't care who you are or if you like the photo. Well, to be honest, I do care if you like the photo, because I like it. It's a nice photo. So if you don't like it, leave this blog right now and go watch your TV set, loser.

Now this one isn't quite as nice, because of the nasty graffiti, but I like the door, anyway. GA likes doors, and I think sometimes they make good pictures. We can pretend that the graffiti is historic, probably put there by the Spanish Inquisition.

Wm posing at a door in a Spanish castle in Vigo. Photo by GA.

You know, I'm reminded of one session of a seminar that I attended on the cruise. Some British guy was teaching us about digital photography, and he was trying to explain to us about the difference between photographs and art. Now, I will say that this guy took some very nice photos, and that I would consider them to be good art as well, but he was trying to tell us that a photograph is just a record of something you saw, while with art, you have to do something extra to it to make it art. But then he showed us a photo of a lake, which was beautiful, and he tried to claim that since he composed it with the reflection, that made it art - not realizing that he had just trashed his own definition. So I'm back with my original assumption about the subject: art is whatever the artist says it is, and it's entirely subjective, and entirely dependent on what the photographer intended.

This, for instance:

Bench overlooking pool, photo by Wm

That's a beautiful photograph. I didn't really intend it to be art, but I did intend to make it as pleasing as possible to the eye while capturing the reality of it all. But I could just as easily tell you that the empty bench is symbolic of the emptiness of the human condition, and it would be art. But who cares? It's both art and a nice photograph - unless I decide to enter it into a contest, in which case that bench holds the very meaning of life. Which, ahem, it does.

Now this, on the other hand, is indisputably art, because the stairs are a statement on man's climb toward greatness, safety, beauty, and spiritual renewal:

Stairs, photo (I mean art) by Wm

Part of the way back down to sea level, we stopped at Jackie's Cafetería. Here was yet another reason to strike out on our own, rather than follow the footsteps of other tourists from the ship. We were the only non-locals eating there, and with yours truly speaking only a little español, and our waiter speaking only a little inglés, we somehow managed to strike a deal as to lunch. GA had cabbage soup, as it turned out, and I had the hake platter. Both were delicious. For dessert, how could we not have flan con nata, washed down with espresso? Take my word for it that this was the best flan I have ever tasted in my short but eventful life.

After a lovely day of touring castles and practicing arty stuff, we eventually had to go back down to the lowlands, where we found this lovely sculpture, which is art, so that the photo is merely a record of existing art, and not art itself - except that I added something, so maybe it's art after all:

harB sitting in the lap of Jules Verne. Photo by Wm

Now why would Jules Verne be depicted here sitting on a giant squid? Because, dear readers, he favorably mentioned Vigo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and is therefore beloved of all Vigans. The lesson is that if you ever write a book, mention some obscure little town somewhere, and they will make a statue of you, and hippos will climb on it some day.

Now this next one was absolutely intended to be art, as the sun set behind our cruise ship, and the sea life teemed:

The sun sets in Vigo. Photo by Wm

Funchal

In Funchal, we had three more possible geocaches, but really only intended to get two of them, the third requiring a cable car journey at some expense, and therefore to be used as backup in the event that we failed to find either of the first two. One of these was the Funchal Walkabout, which was very inefficient, strictly in terms of effort to get one little cache - but which was to serve as our tour guide, as it is a multi-cache, taking us to several interesting sites in Funchal, with puzzles to solve at each stage. And the other cache happened to be close to stage three of the multi-cache, so off we went.

Now most of these sites won't be listed on Wikipedia, but that's the point. When caching, you get to see things that are interesting, but which are not on an official tourist guide. Take this interesting little statue on a hidden street:

Statue hidden among buildings in Funchal, photo by Wm

All I can tell you is that each stage had something nice enough to visit. How about this door? I like doors, and they can make interesting photographs, or dare I say it... art? Yes, art. Why not?

Spanish door, behind which the Spanish Inquisition may have tortured a heretic centuries ago. Photo by Wm.

Or try this:

Wm on the Vagrant. Photo by GA.

Know what that is? That, my friends, is stage eight, with the final clue to the real cache. It is also the Vagrant, a yacht once owned by the Beatles. In this photo, I am standing on a spot on the yacht where it is virtually certain that all four of the Fab Four stepped at one time or another. I am therefore blessed among men, for I have trod where Ringo hath trod. (Cue choir music here).
Would I have found this historic vessel had I not been pursuing this cache? Possibly. Just possibly. But nobody else from the Independence knew about it. Pity them.

Still not convinced? OK, remember that second geocache I mentioned, that we picked up after the third stage of the multi-cache? It was placed near a restaurant. This restaurant, the Muralha (which means "the wall") had outdoor seating, and seemed to be as charming as anything you could want. So we ate there after completing the cache:

Wm holding his wine while gazing at his lady in admiration. Photo by GA

We enjoyed battered scabbard, with fried bananas, and it was the best nom noms you can imagine. It was such a sweet, exquisite fish, and it went so well with a local wine that I can't even describe the sheer gastronomic pleasure. I still feel a little faint, just trying to describe it.

Here is what the fish actually looks like:

Photo stolen from Wikipedia

OK, not so appetizing before cooking, but it sure tastes good on a plate.

And finally, here is a photo of the view from the final goal of that multi-cache, a lovely garden area overlooking our cruise ship, as it awaited our return:

The Independence of the Seas, docked in Funchal. Photo by Wm.

Next: the Days at Sea

Cruise 2009 part 2 (France)

2009-11-25T13:45:00.004-06:00

We began the actual cruise on November 23rd. GA arranged for us to get to the ship from London by taking a limo service - well, actually a "private car service," using a van. This was actually cheaper than taking the cruise shuttle, because we shared it with three other cruisers, thus splitting it five ways. An added bonus was that the driver stopped at a grocery store on the way, so we could buy our liquid supplies, but mostly so we could buy me some McVities cookies, in the ginger nut and shortbread varieties.

Boarding wasn't bad at all, even with the fact that the Independence is a huge beast cramming 3800 passengers into its vast belly. The lines were long, but they moved quickly, and we were all processed efficiently.

We knew our cabin wouldn't be ready this early, but the Windjammer was open - that's the dining area where you can get just about anything from the buffet. On a previous cruise, we had made friends with some people on Cruise Critic, and it was great to see them in person. This time, for whatever reason, there were very few people we hit it off with on that discussion board. There were a few, mind you, but not so many - and they were hard to find on such a huge ship.

We made a brief tour of the ship, as best we could, bearing in mind that on a ship this size, you can't see everything with a brief stroll. There are three formal dining areas on the beast, on decks three through five, named "Romeo and Juliet," "MacBeth," and "King Lear" respectively. Of course, we were careful to refer to the one on deck four as the "Scottish Play dining room."

GA snickering at the name of the dining room on deck four. Photo by Wm

GA surprised me with a balcony on our cabin - a little more expensive, yes, but it certainly made the cruise even more pleasant, especially since a view of the sea is such a long hike from the inner cabins, and since they were usually crowded, with the chairs already taken most of the time.

The first full day of the cruise, we docked on the coast of France, and took the bus excursion to Paris. There, we saw the Eiffel Tower (of course) as well as dozens of sites in Paris seen from our bus windows, including the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Champs Elyseese. At the tower, we were allowed to wander around on our own for a few hours, so we logged three geocaches, all within sight of the Eiffel Tower.

Wm, GA, and harB near the Eiffel Tower. Photo by unknown tourist.

The third of these caches was the Liberty Flame, a virtual cache, which means you get credit for it not by signing a physical log, but by taking a photo of yourself holding the GPS in front of it. This was not only the cache farthest from our home coordinates, but was also the farthest point we had ever been from our own front porch, since it was the farthest east of the bus waiting for us. 5,040 miles from home is a long way - this could be hard to beat. Everything after this on the cruise would be heading westward, toward home sweet home.

GA and harB at the Liberty Flame. Photo by Wm

While trying to discreetly log La passerelle avec une vue superbe, a woman came up to us to show us what appeared to be a gold ring which she had found. It was actually a brass ring, and she was trying to get us to accept it and then give her money as a reward. Several other folks on the bus later told us they had been approached with the same scam, but by different people.

The bus trip was a blast, partly because we were seated near that rare commodity, a British lady with a sense of humor. Our tour guide had been trying to tell us the history of France's involvement in WWII, and since we were a bus full of Americans and Brits, she was kind of stammering through it and trying to justify the fact that the French had given up without firing a shot and had simply let the Germans in to rule them. "Don't mention the war," said our British friend, reminding us all of that famous Fawlty Towers episode. Laughter broke out in the rear of the bus, and I'm sure the guide wondered what was so funny.

We had intended to find a little sidewalk café where we could have bread and wine and a rude waiter, but there weren't any cafés close enough to the tower to do that, so we had a delicious panini from a local vendor, and ate it while sitting on a park bench. Life is good.

Of course, life isn't perfect. Public toilets are not easy to find in Paris, but there was fortunately one placed very near the tower, but it was so busy that there was a traffic director stationed at the bottom of the stairs saying "one man," or "two women," whichever became available. Of course he said it in French, so it was "un homme" or some such. Hey, I don't speaka de French.

The architecture is beautiful in Paris, and the only problem I saw with it was that horrible, ugly glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. I cannot believe they have that eyesore in front of such a beautiful building.

The next day, the ship docked at another port in France, this time for our excursion to the American Cemetery, just above Omaha Beach. This was a solemn occasion. On the way back, our guide pointed out the cemetery where they buried the German soldiers. It was marked by a giant black cross, and we were told that the families of these soldiers were required to pay the burial expenses.

But the American Cemetery is treated with respect by the French, well cared for, and protected by French soldiers. It made me feel good.

Grave markers at the American Cemetery in France. Photo by Wm.

Next: Spain and Portugal

Cruise 2009 part 1 (England)

2009-11-22T22:28:00.013-06:00

If you're going to take a cruise, you might as well make the most of it. I think we did.
We took the transatlantic repositioning cruise with Royal Caribbean, but this time we did it from east to west, flying in to Heathrow in London, three days early, so we could enjoy London as well as the cruise.

DAY ONE:
We arrived at noon in London, but remember that that's 6:00 am Texas time. One must find a way of dealing with jet lag when one is a jet setter, and our method was to check into the hotel, and take a four hour nap. That left us sleepy, so we could go to sleep properly by England time, yet not exhaust ourselves into a brain fried state. Once awake, we went down to the lobby to buy a Coke and a Dr Pepper - yes, they have those there, being at least semi-civilized. We returned to the room and our smuggled munchies and had a quiet dinner of almonds and soft drinks and crackers. Why didn't we go have a proper English meal downstairs? Because, dear friends, we hadn't taken the time to shower yet, and besides, the exchange rate is such that a six dollar meal in the USA is the equivalent of a ten dollar meal in England - not that I was going to worry about the exchange rate, since I intended to have a good time worthy of the expense of flying all the way to London.
So then we went to bed at the proper time - not sundown, because in England in the winter, the sun sets at about 4:00, or 1600 as they express it. We slept about ten hours, and in the morning we were all set for British time.

DAY TWO:
We skipped breakfast for some reason, mostly because we weren't really hungry, and we walked to The Plough after getting some advice on how to use public transport in London. The Plough is both a pub and a bus stop. It cost £2 (pounds sterling) for each of us to ride the bus to the nearest tube station, where we invested in two one-day passes for public transportation, which let us wave a little ticket around or feed it into a turnstile thingy whenever we wanted to ride a train or a bus (thus saving the £2 for the return trip on the bus). It took us a little figuring at first, but then it became sort of clear. So from the Plough, we took the 222 to Hounslough West, where we took the train to Piccadilly Circus - which isn't really a circus, with clowns and stuff, but kind of a neighborhood or shopping district. After climbing out of the tube station to the busy sidewalk above, we discovered that the GPS didn't work among the tall buildings in London, because it couldn't see the sky. Come to think of it, neither could we. We had meant to mark a waypoint on the GPS so we could find our way back, but we had to settle for breadcrumbs.
So we wandered down the street, dropping our bread crumbs, until we saw a promising looking alley, which contained a sandwich shop callled "Piggy's." It's a little different in London; you order, you eat, and then you pay, even in a sandwich shop. If you tip at all - and Brits are notoriously bad tippers - you tip no more than 10%, no matter how good the service. The sandwiches were delicious, but the salt and vinegar chips weren't really strong enough to suit me. In Texas, they almost blow your nose for you, but I guess in England they're more subtle.
It was fortuitously the first day of Christmas shopping in London. Imagine that: we didn't bump into Ebenezer Scrooge or any crippled orphans, but where else would you want to be when doing your Christmas shopping? Lights were strung over the streets, and the sidewalks were crowded to near-capacity. We weren't sure which side of the sidewalk was appropriate, because after all, they drive on the wrong side of the road in England, but then in America there is no set side of the sidewalk for directions of walking, either. It turned out that the direction of travel is entirely random. In fact, you can be walking with the crowd on the right side, and then after crossing the street, they will have reversed it so you have to walk on the left! If you don't think that makes for a lot of bumping and excuse-me-ing, think again.
We found ourselves shopping at Selfridge's, which apparently is mentioned in some Christmas movie or another, and which may have been GA's objective in the first place. In any case, they have a men's room on the second floor, and a women's room on the fourth, so it's a good thing we went shopping, if you know what I mean. We bought a nice little roll of orange candies for me, mostly because it was made with chiles, and I always love a good chile candy.
Getting back on the train was a little more interesting than coming downtown, because it was kind of like rush hour for people getting off work, and because it was, after all, the first day of the shopping season. So we got crammed into the train, and stood up until we got back to Hounslough West station, and then found a bus stop to catch good old 222.
The first 222 that came by was full. They let off a half dozen people, but didn't even open the doors for anybody to get on, which I guess made sense, as there really wasn't even standing room. No problem, we'll just wait for the next bus.
It was almost full, too, but they let on a few and then closed the doors before we could get on. OK... GA suggested that we needed to be a bit more aggressive about staying close to the front for boarding.
The third bus didn't even open its doors.
It started raining, and getting colder. We were sharing the stop with about two dozen folks, mostly Indians and Muslim women wearing burkhas.
The fourth bus was full, too. Now, the other routes all had room, and people were getting on them with no problem, but 222 seemed to be greatly under served. Then too, all the other routes had those cool British double deckers, with double capacity. Ours was your standard government issue one story buses.
Now, there is a lane reserved briefly for the bus stop as you drive by one. Only buses are allowed in it. But after the fourth bus left, here came a taxi who was in a hurry, and so he veered into the bus lane to get around the traffic which was stopped for about a block, waiting to get through the intersection. He wasn't there legally, so he had to make it fast, of course, so he wouldn't get caught - and as he flew by our little bus stop he hit the puddle which had formed as a result of the nice, new rain, thereby splashing most of us waiting for yet another 222 to come by. We almost saw it in slow motion, all of us gasping in unison, all of us knowing our world was about to get a lot colder and wetter, all of us knowing it was too late to get out of the way, because we were packed like little British sardines trying to stay dry under the shelter.
Nobody complained except us, so I guess they're used to it by now. In Texas, that taxi driver might have his taxi shoved up his street, if you get my drift.
The fifth bus had room, sort of, so GA and I were hanging onto the straps with one hand and our shopping bags with the other. The bus made a sudden halt (probably to avoid a taxi), and all of us standing were thrown forward into each other, almost into laps had it not been for the straps not breaking. I made the mistake of using humor to make things more comfortable, as I would have in Texas. "Well, I guess we're all good friends now!" No response at all. Brits are so stuffy, sometimes.
We made it back to the Plough, and then to the hotel, where we had "proper" fish and chips, which means that it wasn't wrapped in a newspaper, but served on an actual plate. This was explained to us by a British couple there, who suggested Boddingtons, a particular beer which was on tap, and which I bought, just in case maybe I might actually like it for a change - but I didn't, though I will admit it came closer to being drinkable than most American beers. So I had wine, and gave the beer to GA.

DAY THREE: Today, the plan was to go visit Kew Gardens. I particularly wanted to do that, since I so enjoy the Mary Hopkin song about it, but I also happen to like plants and gardens, especially British gardens. So we made the short hike back to the Plough, caught the 222, much less crowded this time, and this time made a different connection on the tube, and then another bus to Kew Gardens. That's pretty much the key to getting around in London - get that pass, and take a bus to the train, and then take the train to the next bus, which takes you where you want to be.
We bought our tickets in the rain, but we had our umbrellas, and the plan was to go straight for one of the snack shops, but immediately after we bought our tickets, a storm blew in, which means that the rain falls sideways and comes at you like wet little bullets. So we got to the nearest shelter, and spent the time letting GA decide what she was going to buy for Christmas presents before we went home. After a while the rain was only coming down at a sharp angle, rather than straight sideways, which we figured was good enough, so we began our little tour. It's a beautiful place, with one lane roads taking the visitor from one section to the next, so we aimed generally toward the White Peaks Café, where we enjoyed delicious ham sandwiches with butter and English mustard, washed down with fermented lemonade. I told GA that as soon as were finished with lunch, the rain would stop, the sun would come out, and we would have a perfect day. And since the day had started out wet and miserable, the crowds would be thin, too. As it happens, I was right. Actually, God had done that for us many times, such as at the panda exhibit at the Atlanta Zoo, and I have gotten used to the pattern. God is, after all, in charge of the weather, not Harry Potter, even in London.
Knowing we were going to Kew Gardens, we had already gotten the coordinates for a virtual cache in Kew Gardens, conveniently loaded into the GPS. This was going to be our next objective, and it would be our first cache in Europe, and for the time being the furthest from our home. All we had to do is either take a photo of ourselves with our GPS, or else answer two questions posted on the geocaching website.
We did both, just to make sure:

Photo by GA

When I turned on our new camera, which is a video camera that also takes still shots, I got a message about a low battery. I kind of panicked, and I took less video than I had planned, because I wanted to get at least the best stuff in the garden. Turns out later that it's a false alarm, and may be just part of the booting up process, because there was actually plenty of juice left in the battery. Later, I discovered that that false warning is an even greater annoyance than I at first understood, mainly because if you press the record button before that warning goes away, it doesn't count - which means you think you're recording some great, Oscar-winning video of a place you'll never see again, but you're actually about to get a two second clip of your scene after you think you've stopped the camera, just before you close the thing and then it stops - usually as you're saying something like "that's going to look great when we get home," as you swing down to a lovely view of the sidewalk and your shoes.
We saw some wonderful plants at Kew Gardens, including the Sago Palm specimens, which can be purchased at our local fruit stand for $15, Texan, though you have to plant it yourself.
Yes, I also took actual photographs, which did, in fact, turn out:

GA standing among the lovely flowers of Kew Gardens. Photo by Wm

Wm standing by a picturesque brick wall in Kew Gardens. Photo by GA.

harB admiring the lovely statuary in Kew Gardens. Photo by Wm.

Next: France, including Paris and the American Cemetery above Omaha Beach.

A Halloween Story

2009-10-30T14:50:00.003-05:00

“Crap”

by William Payne.

Lisa opened her browser, and clicked on the Facebook icon.

She sipped on the coffee on the coaster to her left. It wasn't a real coaster, just a failed CD, that didn't work when it had been burned, but it kept the hot coffee from discoloring the desk. It was a cheap desk, anyway, and a cheaper CD. The coffee was good – not as good as hazelnut cinnamon, but better than Folger's.

She scrolled quickly down the updates, reading some of them and ignoring others. There was Annie again, the person she had added to her friends list just so she could have a bigger Mafia in Mafia Wars, but she had never gotten around to “hiding” Annie's updates. Sometimes they were interesting, mostly crazy, and that always made things more fun. She wondered what it would be like to have a friend like Annie. Most of her real life friends were predictable. Fun, but predictable.

She added her own update, to replace the old one from yesterday.

“I think I'll go as a pimple for Halloween,” she wrote. “I'll paint myself red and hold a mouthful of mayonnaise.” That ought to entertain everyone, even if it is an old joke.

Next, she looked at the upper right corner, where there were three Mafia Wars gifts waiting, plus several invitations to apps – applications, in Facebook language – that she had no interest in.

But as she hit the ignore icons, one after the other, she saw one that sounded interesting.

Annie has sent you a free tombstone in the Real Life Horror game. [Accept], [Ignore].

Lisa had tried the Vampire game before, found it boring and a little silly, but she thought this sounded kind of fun. And after all, it was almost Halloween. And Annie's crazy, so this won't be some boring dog-walking game, or pie baking game, knowing her.

She accepted the tombstone, and then gave the app permission to install on her account.

Welcome to Real Life Horror. Select your character name and class.

“OK. I'll be Lisa, just because I like the name,” she said. She chose “female” from the simple menu, and considered whether to be mortal, vampire, ghost or monster. Mortal, she decided.

An instant message popped up on the lower right of her screen.

- Hey. It was Jan, a friend she had met in a class a few years back.

- Hey.Wassup?

- I got tickets to the haunted house the theatre is doing. Want to come? Tomorrow night.

- Sure.

- Gr8, TTYL.

Jan would be fun at a haunted house. She was always acting so fearless, but she screamed the loudest when something scary came out of the dark.

“OK, mortal I shall be, and we'll go with the default avatar. No, let's at least change the hair.” She took another sip of coffee, while the app did something that just seemed to waste time.

Level 1, said the message at the top of the screen, and then a graphic of a haunted house appeared. The house was surrounded by silhouettes of dead trees, and a yellow full moon was placed just behind the house. OK, let's see what we're supposed to do. She moved the mouse around the screen, looking for a link to click on. Maybe the door or window? She clicked on the door. Nothing. Must not be finished loading, she thought.

Someone knocked on the door, the real one on her real house, and Lisa jumped in her chair a little, and almost dropped the mouse on the floor.

“I don't know who you are, out there, but you're wrong, just wrong!” she muttered, and laughed, on her way to the door.

She opened the door, and there was nobody there. “Not funny,” she said, to whomever was probably hiding behind a bush, just out of sight. She closed the door. “At least they didn't leave a bag of flaming dog crap on the porch. Moron.”

She went back to her computer, and now the door to the house was open, and a small message box had appeared: Go in.

She clicked on the Go In box and the view zoomed up to the door and into the house. Now she was looking at a room in the house, with cobwebs and dusty furniture, and a new message box: Choose one: kitchen, dining room, pantry, basement, backyard. “This is going to work like those old text games, isn't it?” she asked no one in particular. Those used to be fun back in the day.

She chose kitchen. The scene changed to a clean, well-lit kitchen, with sharp knives lying around. A wooden cutting board was placed on the counter, next to two of the largest, shiniest knives. A pool of red liquid was dripping from the cutting board to the clean surface of the counter.

“Nice graphics, anyway. Now what?” she asked, and waited for another menu to appear. None came. “Maybe I'm supposed to find something to click on now,” she said, and moved the mouse around. Nothing again.

Another IM appeared in the lower right. It was Annie.

-You there?

-Yes.

-Did you install that app I invited you to?

-Yes.

She waited for a response, but none came.

-Do I need to do something? I don't really understand this thing.

Still no answer.

A menu appeared in the kitchen: Choose one: Pick up knife, Look under cutting board, or...

The kitchen became dark.

...find the fuse box and replace the fuse.

“Oh, this is going to be more fun than I thought,” she said, and considered her options. Whatever she did, she might be better off holding the knife, in case something jumped out at her. She selected pick up knife.

The knife lifted above the cutting board, as if held by a ghost. She selected look under cutting board.

The board tilted, and a large rat jumped out, as a scary shriek came from the speakers. The knife dropped to the floor immediately. As the sound of the knife clattering on the floor sounded, she heard a more realistic sound of something hitting the floor in her own, very real, kitchen.

A chill went down her spine. What in the world...?

She got up from her chair slowly. She stopped at the door to the hallway, and wondered if she should call somebody before going into the kitchen.

Silence from the rest of the house. Silence from the computer.

Instead of the kitchen, she went to the front door. Still locked. She wouldn't have left it unlocked. Not in this city. Good grief, she wasn't stupid.

She had to check the kitchen anyway, even if it was obvious that nobody... no, what are you thinking, girl? Anyone who came in could have locked the door behind them.

Brother. Check the kitchen.

Nobody in the kitchen. But there was a knife on the floor.

Crap!

And it wasn't one of hers. At least she didn't think so. She didn't exactly have a matched set.

Crap crap crap!

What now? Should she call 911? It's probably nothing. Probably. Should she call a friend? Yes, call a friend. Where's the phone? In her purse. Back in the study. Of course.

She looked around the kitchen quickly, to see if she could see any other signs of something being wrong. There was nowhere for anyone to hide. The pantry was way too small to hide in, way too shallow. She could barely fit her canned goods in, and some of the boxes – OK, keep your eyes open and get back to the study and get the phone. She listened carefully, maybe she could hear somebody breathing, but no, and now she could hear the wind blowing outside. Had it been blowing before? She got back to the study, opened her purse, and got the phone. It was turned off. I didn't turn it off, did I? What the freaking blazes...?Lisa, get a grip!

She turned it on, and it seemed to take forever to boot up. When it finally did, there were only two bars. There should have been four. No... now there was only one. She chose Chaston to call. He was big, and he was the type to be eager to come to a damsel's aid when needed. She scrolled to his name, and pressed the green “call” key.

Nothing.

There were no bars now. None.

Double crap!

What should she do? OK, first thing, stay rational. Don't panic. Think this out.

She didn't really know for sure that anyone was in the house. The thing to do is... Ah, cheese! What am I thinking? I have a by golly gee whiz bang loaded gun here!

...Except it's in the bedroom, down the hall the other way. OK. Get the gun, and then go around the house checking each room, one at a time. This could be nothing, just me getting jumpy the night before Halloween.

She listened. No sound but her own breathing. She went to the kitchen again, to make sure it was empty. OK... the knife. She should get the knife. Better than nothing. She picked it up, and walked silently down the hall, and opened the bedroom door. Nobody there. Nobody behind her in the hall, either. What about the closet?

No, back up a little. Check the utility room. Nowhere to hide in there, and this would make sure that nobody was following her and slipping past her. She opened the door, and it was empty. She closed the door again.

OK, into the bedroom, check the bathroom, then the closet.

Nothing was in the bathroom. So...it's the closet or nothing. If the closet is empty, I'm safe and I just imagined all this, and nobody has to know. Good thing I didn't call 911. Bad phone service can be a blessing. So... the closet. OK. The closet.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She held the knife firmly in her right hand, slowly and quietly gripped the closet door with her left. She held her breath. She yanked the door open.

Nobody in there either.

Oh, beans. Get a grip. See? Nothing to worry about here.

OK, where did the knife come from? She couldn't remember any recent guests bringing a knife. What was going on here? The knife wasn't familiar, but - she mostly had a collection of dishes and stuff, décor was Early Garage Sale.

She took several deep breaths and went back to her study, and looked at the screen again. The IM box had a conversation in it.

-You there?

-Yes.

-Did you install that app I invited you to?

-Yes.

-Do I need to do something? I don't really understand this thing.

-Don't.

-Don't what??

-Don't install it. It's bad.

-I already did. I'm enjoying it so far.

-Stop playing it. Delete the app. Now.

- Nah, I'm gonna play it.

She had not typed those words. Some hacker? She touched the keyboard, intending to ask Annie what was going on, what the blazes was going on, and...

Words appeared on the screen, but they weren't what she was typing.

- I'm not going to delete this. It's fun.

A new box appeared in the game window: Calm down, Lisa! You aren't hurt yet, are you? Choose: kill the rat, feed the rat, leave the kitchen.

As if her heart hadn't been pounding enough before, it beat faster. I don't like this. Should I play it? OK, it's just a silly game...

She chose Leave the kitchen. It seemed better than doing anything with the rat, which stared angrily at her from underneath the cutting board on the screen. Its eyes blinked from time to time, but otherwise it stayed still.

Go where, Lisa? Living room, bedroom, backyard?

Outside. She wanted to get on with it, get out of this stupid haunted house and finish this stupid game. The wind outside seemed to blow harder.

She clicked on the word backyard. And she immediately heard a loud shriek through the study window, out in the backyard. She swallowed. Nuts!This is nuts!

She checked the phone again. Still no bars. No signal at all. She tried to call anyway. Nothing.

A new message box appeared on the screen: You have to go outside now. It's the rules.

“Yeah? What if I don't?”

The screen said simply, the game gets worse if you don't.

Her chest hurt. Was the game listening to her? No. All these words made perfect sense without considering anything she had said. Why was she so jumpy? This comes from living alone too long.

She remembered the gun in the bedroom.

The next message was And don't bring your gun. If you do, you will lose the game because you cheated. It will be very bad if you lose. Don't lose.

It didn't say anything about the knife, though.

Oh, come on – it's just a game!

Well, yeah, but I guess it would be unsafe to carry a gun around when I'm this jumpy. I could end up shooting some cat, or even a kid. Or something.

With the knife firmly gripped, she went to the back door, which she always kept locked, and removed the deadbolt. She opened the door. The wind was blowing, and cold, and leaves were flying across the yard, it felt wrong. Something felt wrong. What?

Crap. Calm the blazes down, Lisa.

She stepped outside, and waited for something to happen. She didn't know if she would be able to actually stab anything if it attacked her, but she got ready to try, because what if....?

The porch light went out. Her world became dark and black for a moment, and when her eyes adjusted, she could see a completely different yard than she knew as her own. There were stones in rows. Gravestones. She looked behind her. Her house was gone. In its place was an old, two-story shack. A loose shutter was banging in the wind. She heard a noise, turned back to the yard, and saw the rat running to hide behind one of the stones. But now it wasn't a cartoon rat, it was a real one, a huge one. She heard another noise, and turned again, holding the knife in her shaking hands. Someone was coming out the door. She stepped back.

“Lisa?” said the figure in the dark.

Lisa wasn't sure if she wanted to see any better than she could in the dim moonlight. She wasn't sure if she should answer. She wasn't sure about anything at all.

“Come with me, Lisa. I know the way back. We have to go. Now.”

“Who are you? Who are you? Tell me now!”

“I'm Annie. Let's go.”

“Annie? From Facebook? Are you kidding me?”

“Yes, but let's go.”

“Crap! What is going on here? Where are we?”

“We're in a very bad game. We have to go. Now.”

“Can I trust you?”

“Now! We have to go now!”

“OK! Crap!” And they ran back into the house.

A very tall, very angry looking man in tattered clothes stood at the other end of the kitchen, blocking the door. They stopped, but almost collided with him.

“Let us through,” said Annie. “You have to let us through. You know this.”

“Crap crap CRAP!” said Lisa.

The man, who smelled very, very bad, as Lisa could now tell, whispered, “Stop saying 'crap,' Lisa. It makes you sound childish.”

Oh, crap, he knows my name? How does he know my name?

“Don't think it, either,” said the man. “I can hear your thinking. You think very stupidly.”

“I said let us through!”

Instead of moving aside, he lifted a meat cleaver. He lifted it slowly. It reflected the moonlight. It was surprisingly clean, given the filthy clothes the man was wearing. Lisa could see a narrow edge of freshly sharpened steel.

“Let us through.” Annie was not as loud, and she was shaking now, though not as badly as Lisa.

The man hurled the cleaver at the floor between their feet. It sank into the board almost all the way to its handle with a thunk! It was loud. Much louder than Lisa thought it should sound, maybe as loud as those theater sound effects – amplified, almost. She could feel the shock of its impact through the floor, and felt the sound in her chest. Dust fell from the walls to her side. More dust drifted down from the ceiling. The dust felt more than just dirty.

“Let us through.” Annie said it again, but sounded weak now.

The man nodded, smiled, and stepped aside.

“Well, go ahead and go,” breathed the man, rasping voicelessly. “I won't lift a finger.” He pointed at the cleaver in the floor, and on one side of it were four fingers, bleeding from their severed ends. He lifted his other hand. It had small bloody stumps instead of fingers. He began laughing and wheezing. Annie ran through the door, with Lisa close behind.

The front door wouldn't open.

“Annie?”

Annie stared at the door. She didn't move.

“What do we do, Annie?”

Annie didn't move. Lisa listened carefully. Annie didn't breathe. There was no wind outside. The world seemed to have gone silent. It seemed to have gone completely still.

She reached to Annie, but her hand passed through as if Annie were less than smoke.

“Annie?” she whimpered. “Annie? What do I do now?”

She looked back to the kitchen.

No sound. But there was a faint glow, or maybe it was just the moonlight. But it seemed like an artificial light.

She stepped closer to the kitchen. The cleaver was still in the floor, next to the fingers. The man no longer had a smell. He was motionless. He didn't even breathe, but Annie had no intention of touching him to see if he would move.

The glow was coming from outside the open door to the back yard.

She looked back again at Annie. No motion.

If anything was going on, it would be at the backyard, where the glow was. She went to the door, looked outside. Maybe there was a way out.

And there it was. Silent. Motionless. Suspended in the air, glowing, perpetually marking time, busy and yet not really busy. An hourglass. A Microsoft Windows hourglass icon, in the middle of the sky, waiting for some event. Waiting for something to happen, locked in an eternal, digital loop.

She looked back at Annie. Motionless. Silent.

There was no escape key. There was no mouse to move.

There was no reset button.

There was no tomorrow.

There would never be Halloween again. Not for Lisa.

“Crap,” she said, and sat on the ground. “Crap, crap and double crap.” The silence was going to be deafening.

Rain

2009-10-21T16:30:00.003-05:00

The rain falls softly here, sometimes. No thunder, no lightning, no hurricanes. Just a little wind comes to whisper through the trees on the other side of the wooden fence, in the thin forest between us and the highway.

It comes down hard enough for a while to run off the roof into the rain barrel, and the sound is pleasant, like a waterfall in a cave, but no echo. Then you can't hear it at all - just a silent settling of a mist, enough to make you turn your head if you wear glasses. The trees still sway, but very slowly.

You can hear a little brook sound across the street, where the street run off goes into the gutter. All the air conditioners go silent because the rain made it cool for the day.

My favorite days are those in the winter, with gray skies, and still air, and silence, if the dogs are quiet and nobody's fighting.

But this will do until then.

Washington state

2009-10-11T14:27:00.012-05:00

I just had the most wonderful week visiting the state of Washington.
We made a point of finding a few caches on the way. This one was a virtual, at a historic gas station made to look like a teapot:

But the most fun was in Seattle, where I spent a lot of time at the Seattle Center, site of the World's Fair in 1962. Here is the Peace Garden:

This is situated almost directly under the Space Needle, and I suppose if it weren't for the glass windows preventing it, people could have spit on me down below. They might have hit me, or they might have hit the numerous homeless people. These homeless people are, as the name of the park implies, very peaceful. They peacefully ask for money because they just got their duffel bag stolen, or they need money for their father's spleen operation, or for a bus ticket home so they can escape their life of drugs/prostitution/whatnot.

Something you have to do in Seattle is go to the Pike street market, where they throw fish around and yell at each other. It was a little crowded the day we went - not because of the homeless people, which are actually entertaining at the market, but because we managed to coincide our visit with that of a cruise ship, but we still enjoyed the time we spent. We ate at a nice little Greek restaurant several levels below and off the obvious trails to avoid the crowds - very good lamb, plus some things I can't pronounce much less spell. Here are the fish being thrown:

Then, back to the Science center to pay admission to the Experimental Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, which is also under the shadow of the Space Needle. Paying admission is a good thing because it gets you clear of the homeless people plying their trade. Here's the Space Needle, in all its glory:

...and once inside, you can see things like the original costumes worn in Blade Runner, and the original Captain's station in the Starship Enterprise - not the Captain Picard one, but the one that William Shatner parked his butt in. I saw a First Edition of Have Space Suit Will Travel, which is the first Science Fiction novel I ever read. Use the provided link to see a picture of the cover of that first edition.

One fun thing to do is the Seattle Underground Tour. It takes about 90 minutes and 15 bucks, and the first half hour is a very cheesy history lesson given by (in our case) a relatively attractive young lady, before they turn you over to a somewhat less skilled and personable tour guide. It's worthwhile mostly because you finally understand why Seattle is built so funny. Apparently, it has to do with the fact that the sewage system was unworkable with the way the hills dumped the crap on the low lying areas next to the ocean, where the brothels and opium dens were.

But probably the biggest thrill was seeing the very guitar that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock - the white Fender Stratocaster used to produce the gentle, melodious sounds of the Star Spangled Banner on Yasger's farm, where only 30,000 or so of the former half million concert goers were left to see it, the rest having gone home to their jobs after taxing "the system" with their emergency disaster needs (while reveling in the idea that their lifestyle was sustainable in the real world because they had done it for three days). Here is that guitar, a bit blurry because the lights were reverently dim and I was using my cell phone:

By the way, they don't ask for "spare change" anymore. Now it's 14 bucks for something they need. Inflation has taken its toll.

Highway 287

2009-09-17T13:42:00.002-05:00

Lately, highways have begun to fascinate me. I think it started with the realization that highway 6, just outside my HOA, is the same highway that goes through Copper Breaks State Park and Quanah, TX, and just past one of the first caves I ever entered without paying an admission fee and following a paid tour guide. Here, it has six lanes of slow, busy traffic, but in Quanah, it's a two-lane that doesn't pose much of a threat to the occasional armadillo.

I often make a trip to or from Houston and Wichita Falls. About half the trip is on Interstate 45, which some consider to be one of the worst in the nation, but which I find easy compared to certain stretches of I-35 south of Dallas. The other half is done on hwy 287, which goes right through Wichita Falls, and to the northwest, intersects with hwy 6... in Quanah.

Hwy 287 goes south from Wichita Falls through Fort Worth, Grapeville, Palestine, and Port Arthur. It goes north to Memphis (TX), through the Oklahoma panhandle, on to Denver, and then on into Wyoming, Montana... and eventually on to the Canadian border, though it keeps getting less and less important on the way, so that Google maps doesn't even bother with the number after it leaves Choteau, MT.

It never got the respect that Route 66 got - songs, TV shows, T shirts - but the original R66 was a two lane with no shoulders crossing that romantic desert west, while 287 was a mighty four lane divided highway almost every inch between the gulf coast and Denver.

The lesson is that if you're near the writers in LA or New York, you get attention out the wazoo. Everybody else gets nada, regardless of merit. That's why they call us "fly-over country." Yet, for some reason, we let those overpaid stuffed shirts tell us what we're supposed to think, and how to vote.

It's worth remembering.

Putting the Punk in Punctuality

2009-09-03T10:32:00.003-05:00

There are many things I like about living in the Houston area. There are also things I don't like, such as the common practice of leaving shopping carts where you empty them, even when the cart rack is only ten feet away. One thing I don't like at all around here is the complete lack of punctuality. Whether you're dealing with the cable company, the refrigerator repairman, the plumber, or the pest control company, they never keep their appointments. If they make the appointment for "in the morning," you can expect them at 5:15 pm. If they say 9:30, the earliest they offer, you won't see them before noon.

Is my time worth nothing? ARS called me yesterday and offered me a discount if they could come out and service my air conditioning system. I don't need them, mind you, I just thought it would be a good idea to get it done, so I took them up on their offer and let them give me a time they could come out. They're over an hour late (so far), and they haven't even bothered to call. So I have to put my own errands on hold because I don't know when they're going to show up.

This is the way it's done down here in the Houston area. When my POS Whirlpool refrigerator required repeated servicing (a dozen times or so), they never once showed up on time - or even in the same half-day window.

I'm beginning to wonder if I should bother staying past the first hour. Just let them show up and wonder where I went.

Dialysis R Us

2009-08-28T17:24:00.003-05:00

I'm used to finding all manner of paper and cardboard hanging from my doorknob. It's usually somebody trying to scrounge up business, for a lawn care company, or maybe a maid service.

Today, on my way out of the house to toss one more plastic bottle into the recycle tub out at the curb before the waste management people arrived to make my world a cleaner place, I saw a new one: a slick brown cardboard advertisement hanging from the knob. This one was for home dialysis.

Is this the best way to get new customers for dialysis? Are they trying to be the first to get to me when I suffer from renal failure? Is this kind of like ambulance chasing for your kidneys?

I can just see the dad in the household, coming home from work and pulling the card from the door, reading the ad, and calling up to everyone upstairs in the TV room: "Hey! Anybody up there need any dialysis? They got a special on this week."

"Not today, dear... but put it in the coupon drawer, in case something comes up."

"OK. My pee does smell a little strong lately."

"Want me to call a doctor?"

"Naw. Doctors don't know nothin'. If my eyes turn yeller, we'll know who to call."

I love this place.

Sea World and the greedy dolphin slavemasters

2009-08-03T13:21:00.005-05:00

So we went to San Antonio this Saturday to meet the grandkids for a day of romping in the wet attractions, and to see Shamu.

Going on a Saturday in August is NOT a good idea. While I did enjoy seeing the kiddos, Sea World made me feel less like a customer or visitor than a cash cow.

Even on the best of days, you would have to say that this is a very expensive theme park to visit, but at least you'd have a good time. But they apparently make no effort to avoid over-selling the park. We were first greeted by the kid selling the parking permits: $15 a car, which is ridiculous. But it's their park, so we had to pay it.

We had already bought our tickets online, costing over a hundred bucks for the two of us. Once in the gate, though, we found it so crowded that we could barely turn around. For my part, I was able to ride two roller coasters once each, and I saw the 4D pirate film, and I saw Shamu Rocks Texas. To accomplish the Shamu admission, we had to stand in line in the sun for an hour before they even started letting people in - otherwise we couldn't even get standing room in the back. Georganne didn't even do the roller coasters or the pirate film.

Getting lunch required a wait in line for 45 minutes! And then we had to fight to get a place to sit down and eat.

To add insult to injury, Sea World has taken a hint from Disney and started selling Fast Passes, where you pay extra and you can jump the line ahead of the other people who have already been waiting for their hour, thus making their wait even longer, and Sea World's pockets even fuller. For the record, I find the whole concept of Fast Passes unfair and obscene. After waiting all that time, and finally getting to the ride, when I'm NEXT - oh, sorry sir, these people have a Fast Pass so you'll have to wait for them.

Again, it's their park, so they can run it as they please, but it seems to me that there should be a limit on admissions to prevent overcrowding. There were at least twice as many people in that park than there should have been.

On the plus side, and I always like to be an optimist, the Killer Whales (all of which are named Shamu) are magnificent, smart animals. And the Steel Eel is one screamer of a roller coaster.

And after the day ended, and the sun went down, we had a very pleasant stay at the Holiday Inn Express nearby, which had a Shamu mural on the elevator door.

Galveston

2009-07-20T13:23:00.008-05:00

I guess I never realized how much fun Galveston could be.

The grandkids were here for a week - with their parents, of course, which makes it even more fun - but we saw this ad for Moody Gardens, which has recently reopened after getting drowned by Hurricane Ike.

I mostly wanted to go because of the dinosaur-related stuff. See, they have these pyramids - three of them - and one is an aquarium complex, where you can go down several floors and see replicas of several coral reefs in the world. They've figured out how to reproduce the corals so we can visit living specimens in their natural environment. Well, sort of natural. It's a fake natural, but it's real coral.

Another is kind of a general scientific interest pyramid, which has what I came to see, the dinosaur stuff. They have an Imax movie I've been wanting to see for years: Dinosaurs Alive, in 3D. You better believe I enjoyed that, even if the narrator did say stupid things like "Less than 2% of dinosaur species have been discovered," which is mathematical nonsense, since we're expressing a percentage of an unknown quantity by definition. I don't care - I just love seeing realistic 3D dinosaurs trying to bite me right in front of my face.

My favorite was the third pyramid (in no particular order), the rain forest. Here, you can follow a comfortable path and see specimens of plants from rain forests of the world, including coffee trees, cocoa bean trees, and vanilla orchids. Did you know that vanilla comes from orchids? I sure didn't.

Weird flowers in the rain forest pyramid. Photo by wm

There were colorful birds, turtles and fishies in the pools of the pyramid, and I want to go again so I can wander more slowly.

Birds in Moody Gardens rain-forest pyramid. Photo by wm

After spending the day at Moody Gardens, GA thought it would be a great idea to take the Bolivar ferry off the island. It was a good idea, since the grandkids had never been on one, and as far as I know had never been on the ocean except for the beach. So we went across to Bolivar, then turned right back around and came back to Galveston. It happened to be sunset as we made the crossing, which was perfect timing.

Sunset on the Bolivar ferry. Photo by wm

setting the clock in Midland

2009-07-16T07:27:00.002-05:00

While staying in the Holiday Inn Express in Midland TX recently, we were unable to set the clock. It had a convenient label glued to the top of the clock, explaining in exciting detail how to set the alarm - good thing, too, because it was like finding the Easter Egg on a Sony DVD. You have to hold this button down while pressing the Alarm button, and you have to hold your tongue just right.

But it doesn't do much good to set the alarm if the clock is six and a half hours off. I suppose you could offset the alarm time by that same six and a half hours, but I didn't think of that, because we had already had too many margaritas at Summer Mummers. Besides, we were still shedding popcorn all over their carpet.

Turns out the trick is to find the power button and press it. I'm not sure it was turning it on or off, but it doesn't matter - you press it and the hidden clock button starts responding (it's under the clock). As far as I could tell, nothing was really being turned on or off by pressing the power button, but it somehow affected the clock button. So, to set that button:

Turn the clock over.
Press the power button.
Hold down the clock button and press the hour button. If nothing happens, press the power button again.
Still holding the clock button down, press the minutes button until the time is correct.
Now you can set the alarm, by following the instructions glued to the top of the clock - if they are still there.

As for setting the radio stations, that one is beyond me.

Zen and the meaning of Facebook

2009-06-23T11:06:00.004-05:00

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. Maybe more than I should. Maybe not.

Thing is, I don't consider it a waste of time at all. Relationships are very important to me, and living down here in Houston as I do, I am a long way from the people I care about, in Wichita Falls and in Midland, and in other places.

If and when I visit my friends in those far away lands, the thing I most like to do is to sit and listen to them talk. I don't care if they tell jokes, gossip about the theatre, complain about the theatre, rant about politics - it doesn't matter, because I just love to hear them talk. If they occasionally let me join in for a quick word or comment, so much the better. But that can't happen very often - I can only go visit just so many times in a year.

Facebook gives me a virtual social life. Yes, I'd much rather be there in person with my people, sharing guacamole, hugging them, actually hearing them, smelling their after shave or cologne. But at least online, I can see the posts they offer, one after another, and I can go away and do chores and errands and then come back and see what was said while I was gone.

As for the games... well, if I play one, and you play the same one, and we send each other a cow or a chicken or a mango tree... and if I send you a Mafia Wars getaway car and you send me a .22 pistol (which I don't really need), then the same purpose is served as if we had exchanged actual phsyical gifts - is it not? If you give me a smores maker, does it matter if I need it, does it matter what it cost, does it matter if I ever use it or not, does it matter if I already had six of them in the closet? No, the thought is literally what counts. You thought of me enough to give it to me, and the message was "I see you, I like you and I'm glad you exist," whether there was a card saying it or not. It is the same with a game on Facebook: we play it together, just as we might at a small party, just as we might if you came over to visit with a Scrabble board. Would I rather be in person with you? Of course I would! But virtual, while not to be confused with reality, is truly the next best thing to reality.

If you do or don't play the games, at least I can see what you say, and comment on it, and there is a sort of fellowship to experience. I can see the pictures you upload, and enjoy them, and remember how you look in person, and see Jena's twins holding hands in their car seats, and see Hilary snuggling with her SO, and read about Midland Lisa's mysterious Body Pump activities in Midland, and WF Lisa's family in Wichita Falls, and my favorite cousin in Kentucky when she finds the time to post. I can hear from Maria in Albuquerque, and know that she is OK this week, and I can find out I fought as Beau's or Greg's capo (whatever that is) and snagged $34 from some rival gangster. I can accept a coconut tree or a goat from Allison, whose father I used to sing for when he was a choir director at church and at MSU. I can learn when Jenn's poor bruised body is sore from Lisa's Body Pump torture session. I can learn that I don't know about some of them as much as I thought I did.

And I can let them know when my cat dies, and when I am about to go clean Carlsbad Cavern again, or when I am going to show up at Mummers on the way back through to Houston. Or I can just let them know when I am feeling a little down, and they give me a virtual attaboy to make me feel better.

Yes, the games are inane and silly. Yes, none of you are really, truly here in my little office. Yes, I wish I could be there in your presence, in reality, more often. Yes, I know that my flat panel monitor is no substitute for the sound of your voice. But limping is better than a wheelchair, fuzzy vision is better than blindness, and a virtual hug is better than no hug at all. It may be all electrons and ones and zeros moving across data lines, but it's still love because you're a real person whom I know, somewhere up in WF or over in Midland.

Facebook is right up there with cell phones. It can be annoying in the wrong context, but I sure am glad it's there when I need you to be there.

Now... who needs some zinnias?

A little family history

2009-06-17T14:20:00.005-05:00

I got a copy of this photo while visiting my uncle in Colorado this week:

The parents in the photo are Mr. and Mrs. Smith, my great grandparents. The pretty little girl in the right side of the photo is Mamie, my maternal grandmother.

Now look again at the mom. Her name was Sally Vermillion Smith, and her brother (not in the photo) is by sheer coincidence also named Vermillion, and he lived on a ranch at the base of the Guadalupe mountains back in the day. He is one of the cowboys who saw the bat flight from the cavern looking like smoke, and made several trips to the natural entrance to watch the bats exit the cave close up.

It was he who took Abijah Long to see this phenomenon, and (according to one version of the story), Mr. Long suggested to Mr. Vermillion that there could be some profit made by mining all that guano, but Mr. Vermillion thought it was silly, and so Mr. Long filed the mining claim in his own name.

The other version is that Abijah offered to go to Carlsbad and file the claim on both of their behalf, but then filed it in his own name, thus cheating Vermillion out of his share. This is the version I had always heard, but actually the version above makes more sense to me having heard it - even though Mr. Long's book makes it obvious to anyone familiar with the cave that he never visited beyond the bat cave section until it had paved trails and lighting, contrary to his claims about exploring it - and thus exposing himself as being at least a little dishonest.

But then again, who wouldn't stretch the truth a little when something as famous as Carlsbad is concerned? And besides, the dude hired Jim White, which led to the world knowing about this wonderful cave - so in a way he has a firm place in the cave's history.

Too bad nobody remembers Vermillion's first name. Note to all: write down that oral history.

Noises, off and on and from cats

2009-06-03T16:46:00.006-05:00

When I moved away from Wichita Falls some years ago, I thought I would never be able to do another show at Backdoor theatre again. That's my home theatre, where I learned anything I know about acting or being in a show. In 2004 I moved to Midland TX, where I learned to treasure Midland Community Theatre and the friends I made there. Now I live in the Houston area, and while I won't sell the theatres here short - they do set high standards - it's really hard to do theatre when you have to drive 45 minutes each way for rehearsals because the theatres are so far apart here.

But thanks to my best friend still trapped in the Falls, who allowed me to live in his home for a couple of months for rehearsals and performances, I was able to audition for, and have a role in, the funniest play ever written, Noises Off! (The title is supposed to have an exclamation point, you see).

I did that show twelve years ago, playing Freddy/Phillip, but the part I always wanted more than any other was Lloyd, the director, who speaks such lines as "No, Freddy, we have several minutes left before we open." This time, I got the part I wanted most. But beyond that, I was privileged to work once again with my favorite director, Gare Brundidge, and with my best friend, Dave. The downside was that I had to drive between Houston and Wichita Falls once the show went up. But then, I did some calculating, and I think I actually drove fewer miles doing that than by making the round trip for every rehearsal in Houston.

An added benefit was that Dave served as my personal trainer. When I stood on the stage for the audition, I was offering 235 pounds of mass to the gravity of this planet. I now weigh around 200 pounds, give or take a kilo here or there. Granted, when you perform in Noises Off!, you do get your exercise - I learned that twelve years ago - but most of it was improved diet and my 90+ minute walk each day.

So now I'm back home, and glad to be here, and the Houston heat and humidity is beginning to return. The real heat is actually in July and August, but June is at least warm, though not as warm as Wichita Falls.

******

Our cat, Pearl, is dying.

Some of you know about Pearl, having met her. We named her Pearl because she was born on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and because she is sort of pearl-colored, or cream. You can see by the picture she is one pretty cat -or she was when she was younger and healthier. Age robs cats of all but their inner beauty, too, just like most people. Yes, there are exceptions.

We have been trying to deal with a thyroid tumor (some cream in the ears apparently keeps that in check), impending renal failure (which has been impending for about ten years, and which I suspect we never really had to worry about), and some inconvenient seizures (they had something for that, too), but the last week or so she has quit eating and excreting - that means pooping, for you non-medical types out there. We took her in to see if there was some blockage that could be removed, but it turns out that her lack of appetite has more to do with the fact that she has cancer. How's that for irony? We move here to work for M. D. Anderson, the cancer center, and our cat gets cancer. So now she's on steroids to improve her appetite, and to make her feel generally better, but we are now considering her to be in Home Hospice for kitties - she is dying, and we have to figure out when the right moment is to have her put down. At what point is starvation far enough along to end it all? When is her life no longer worth prolonging? If she were human, the answer would be more clear - you keep people alive as long as you can, as comfortably as you can. But with a cat? A cat who can't even tell you if it hurts? I don't want to make that choice.

We have already decided not to have any more pets. Life without a pet is going to be radically different - beyond the expenses we will be relieved of, from vet bills to food and litter, there will be the things we did or didn't do solely because we had to accommodate the cat. We don't use actual bath mats because cute little Pearl peed on them when we did. We don't use floor mats just inside the front door for the same reason. We carefully check before we open a door to make sure she doesn't get out and get eaten by an alligator. We keep three litter boxes throughout the house to make sure she doesn't have to suffer any inconvenience when she needs to empty her little kitty bladder. Until recently, we couldn't eat without saving some for the cat, especially if chicken or tuna is involved. We are agreed that life without Pearl will be better and more convenient. Yet there is still the fact that we have had that cat for over 17 years, and we expect her to jump on the bed at night time and get in the way, we expect her to follow us into the kitchen and beg for food and get underfoot, we expect her to try to kill us as we go up or down the stairs.

It's going to be a different life. But for now, we have to keep that cat as comfortable and happy as we can, because it's either that or have her put down sooner. And we want to postpone that as long as we can.

Bucket Lists

2009-05-19T16:14:00.002-05:00

First, the one somebody else came up with:

Place an X by all the things you've done and remove the X from the ones you have not, then send it to your friends (including me).

Things you have done during your lifetime:

() Gone on a blind date
() Skipped school
() Watched someone die
(x) Been to Canada
(x) Been to Mexico
(x) Been to Florida
(x) Been to Hawaii
() Been to NYC
(x) Been to Las Vegas
(x) Been on a plane
() Flown a plane
() Been on a helicopter
(x) Been on a motorcycle
()Ridden ATV's
(X) Been lost
() Gone to Washington, DC
(x) Swam in the ocean
(x) Swam with Stingrays
() Cried yourself to sleep
(x) Played cops and robbers
() Recently colored with crayons
(x) Sang Karaoke
(x) Paid for a meal with coins only
() Paid for a huge bill (thousands) in single dollar bills
() Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(x) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't
(x) Made prank phone calls
(x) Done something VERY naughty (your mother would gasp)
(x) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
(x) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
(x) Danced in the rain
(x) Written a letter to Santa Claus
(x) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(x) Watched the sunrise with someone
(x) Hiked a Volcano
(x) Blown bubbles
(x) Gone ice-skating
(x) Gone sledding down a big hill
(x) Gone to the movies
() Been deep sea fishing
(x) Driven across the United States ( alone or not)
() Been in a hot air balloon
() Been sky diving
() Been white water river rafting
() Been bungee jumping
(x) Inner tubing down a slow moving river
() Boating on Lake Powell
() Gone snowmobiling
() Lived in more than one country
(x) Vacationed in another country
(x) Toured Europe
() Ran for your life from NY street thugs
(x) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
(x) Seen a falling star and made a wish
(x) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
(x) Seen the Grand Canyon
() Seen the Statue of Liberty
() Seen the fireworks over Mount Rushmore on the 4th of July
() Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
(x) Been on a cruise
(x) Traveled by train
(x) Traveled by motorcycle
() Been horse back riding
() Ridden on a San Francisco cable car
(x) Been to Disneyland OR Disney World
(x) Truly believe in the power of prayer
(x) Been in a rain forest
(x) Seen whales in the ocean
() Been to Niagara Falls
() Ridden on an elephant
() Swam with dolphins
() Been to the Olympics
() Walked on the Great Wall of China
() Been spinnaker flying
() Been water-skiing
() Been snow-skiing
() Been to Westminster Abbey
() Been to the Louvre
() Swam in the Mediterranean
() Been to a Major League Baseball game
() Been to a National Football League game
() Swam with sharks (knowingly)
() Went Scuba diving
(x) Swam with barracuda
(x) Snorkled
() Been to Alaska
(x) Watched volcano lava up close and personal
() Danced ballroom
() Gave birth to a child
() Paid a fertility clinic for services
() Buried a child
(x) Been married
(x) Been divorced
(x) Been married twice
() Gave birth to a child at home
() Gave birth to a child under water
() Gave birth to a child without pain killers
() Had a c-section
() Has and did, or is, raising more than 2 children
(x) Sent a child through college
() Walked on a glacier
(x) Swam in a lake
(x) Saw a bear up close in nature (no fences)
() Been in, or been to, jail (even if for 1 hour)
() Visited someone in jail
(x) Know someone who has been in jail (longer than a day)
() Been in the movies or TV (extra or actor)
() Met a star (famous person)
() Got an autograph of someone famous
() Lived next to someone famous
() Related to someone famous
(x) Thrown a party (big or small)
(x) Drove way over the speed limit
(x) Argued with a cop
() Gotten out of a big speeding ticket in front of a Judge
(x) Been beaten up
() Beat someone up
(x) Sang on stage
(x) Loved deeply
(x) Grown a garden
(x) Raised animals
(x) Owned a dog or cat
() Home schooled children
() Sat in natural hot springs
() Banked money in the Caymans Islands
() Been a Vegetarian
() Been a strict Vegan (eats NO animal products)
(x) Fought against the IRS (and won)
(x) Been to court
(x) Been stung by a bee
(x) Been face to face with a snake in the wild
() Been bitten by a snake
() Been bitten by a spider
(x) Played a prank on someone
(x) Sued someone
(x) Built a snowman
() Been in a major car accident and lived to tell about it
(x) Been in a small car accident
(x) Had a house built
(x) Built a house (or helped build one)
() Had a cabin built
(x) Been personally in the hospital for any reason
(x) Had a major operation done in the hospital
(x) Had flowers given to you
(x) Given flowers to someone
() Had a professional massage done
() Had a massage on a tropical beach
(x) Have given someone else a full body massage
() Had plastic surgery done
() Had a mud bath from a spa
(x) Owned your own business
(x) Given thousands of dollars to charity
(x) Won a major prize in a contest
(x) Been enrolled in college
() Graduated from college
() Graduated from trade school
() Stitched (sewed) up a cut yourself
(x) Been a teacher
() Watched the professional X-games live
(x) Broken a bone
(x) Been stranded at an airport
(x) Been to a concert of a famous band or group
() Died and brought back to life
() Reported a crime in progress
(x) Participated in Patriotic movements
() Joined the Army
() Joined the Peace Corp
() Hiked the Y
() Hiked Timpanogos Cave
(x) Been to a garage sale
(x) Had your own garage sale
(?) Saved someone from dying (I've donated platelets enough times that I can say that)
(x) Sat around a camp fire
(x) Given a speech in front of a crowd
(x) Joined a cause
() Rode a bike down the board walk on the beach (for miles)
(x) Wrote a book (published or not)
(x) Read a big novel
(x) Kissed on the beach
(x) Started a group
() Been a surrogate mother for someone (carried their child in your womb)
() Lived on an island
(x) Learned a different language
(x) Sent someone love letters in the mail
() Joined a different religion or philosophy
() Sewed an entire piece of clothing (ie. dress or pants)
(x) remodeled a home (one room or entire thing)
(x) planted flowers
() planted an entire yard of grass
(x) Been fishing
(x) Roller bladed
() Been a lifeguard
() Gotten a tattoo (real one)
() Worn a thong bikini (and looked good in it)
(x) Been over weight (more than 10 lbs)
() Worn a bikini after having lots of kids (girls only)
() Danced the Salsa
(x) Worked on the engine of a car
() Put up Christmas lights on your house outside
(x) Played Santa Claus (all dressed up) (or Mrs Claus)
() Made a gourmet meal from scratch
(x) Been married longer than 10 years
() Have twins or triplets
() Coached someone through the birthing process
(x) Sang a child to sleep
() Know how to cook without recipes
(x) Bought a house
(x) Bought more than one house
(x) Played dead and others thought you really were dead
(x) Danced around your living room naked (didn't dance well, of course)
() Thrown a costume party
() Written your name in perm. ink on something you shouldn't have
() Broke into a friends house and cleaned it
(x) Fiddled around with a Ouija board
(x) Shaved your head or got a flat top (baldy or at least super short)
(x) Wrote a rant letter to someone (telling them off)
() TP'ed someones house or room

Now, here's my own list:

Things you have done during your lifetime:

(x) Performed in a play that ran more than five weeks
(x) Hiked more than ten miles in one day
(x) Written a play and seen it performed
(x) Seen the Alhambra in Spain
(x) Had an entire stage all to yourself during a musical
(x) Gotten lost in a cave
(x) Explored an abandoned house
(x) Stood on a tile or floor two thousand years old
(x) Been in the southern hemisphere
(x) Been to a castle (or ruins of a castle) once owned by an ancestor
(x) Sang in a choir in a church more than 750 years old
(x) Walked on a grave dating from the Crusades
(x) Toured the Tower of London
(x) Been under a bat flight
(x) Seen a vampire bat, not in a zoo but in a cave
(x) Eaten food from a street vendor in Mexico
(x) Seen the International Space Station and a comet on the same night
(x) Eaten snails (escargot) with butter
(x) Seen a real live sea turtle, not in a zoo but in the sea or near it
(x) Slept with a candidate for public office
(x) Heard gunfire in your own neighborhood
(x) Seen someone get shot with a gun
(x) Seen a stealth bomber in a hangar, under armed guard
(x) Had dinner with a Scottish man wearing a kilt
(x) Gone swimming in a cave where people had drowned before
(x) Climbed a ledge where people had fallen to their deaths before
(x) Worn pink pajamas in public
(x) Given a eulogy at a funeral
(x) Done a secret act of random, senseless kindness
(x) Appeared in a television commercial
(x) Designed one or more websites
(x) Picked up a hitchhiker on an impulse
(x) Lost more than 30 pounds in one unbroken effort or program
(x) Faced the possibility of dying
(x) Pulled off a tough guy bluff to protect someone else
(x) Hiked in a tropical rain forest, in the rain
(x) Been a designated driver for your friends who were Partying Down™
(x) Pretended to be British and pulled off the ruse
(x) Pretended to be anything you're not and pulled off the ruse
(x) Refused to do something that was socially expected, for moral reasons
(x) Written a letter to a national publication, which was then published

But the real Bucket List is supposed to be the things you want to do before you die, but haven't yet:

() See Rome.
() See Pompeii.
() Walk on a glacier.
() Visit Australia, and actually throw a shrimp on the barbie.
() See a Broadway show, on Broadway
() See the solar eclipse in 2012
() Celebrate the winter solstice on the Yucatan peninsula as the Mayan calendar ends.
() Have a tiny walk on role in a successful movie.
() See a Lillian Gish film in a theatre.
() Eat an avocado from my very own tree.
() Take the tour in Gruta del Palmito and see where I proposed to GA 25 years ago.
() Tour Kew Gardens.
() Give Laura San Giacomo a nice backrub.

Plants of happiness

2009-03-29T12:34:00.005-05:00

I'm really enjoying the plants I have in my little house and yard. One of my newest is this orange tree we bought on sale because the nursery had left it out during a freeze, and all the leaves were frosted off. They're coming back to life and looking very nice now:

I'm really pleased with this one, because I thought I had lost it. I had planted this avocado seed, which had sprouted into a little tree about three inches tall, and an unexpected frost seemed to have killed it. But recently, when I went out to pull weeds in preparation for my spring garden, I found that it had survived, and sent up a new shoot:

Notice to the right is a new baby plant that I was trying to replace it with - another seed.

And finally, my little potted ocotillo. Sonya, my caving friend from from the Dallas area, shared a cutting from her ocotillo a few years ago, and I put it in cactus potting soil, and carefully misted it until it could grow some roots. It hadn't leafed out in a while, so I was afraid it was dead this time, but you never know with ocotillo, and it leafed out again to my delight:

I love plants.

Time machine malfunction

2009-03-05T12:57:00.004-06:00

My time machine is messing up... again.

I've oiled and calibrated the flux capacitor three times now, and still it messes up. I wanted to go visit the dinosaurs and get some nice photos, maybe some video, but things keep going wrong.

I set it for the usual 65 million years ago, because that's when they were supposed to start disappearing, give or take a couple of million years - and you know they've got it pinned down to a couple of million years, being the obsessed sticklers for accuracy that they are.

But I showed up in 1956, which happens to be the year I first became fascinated with dinosaurs. Here is the first illustration I saw, in our home encyclopedia, which my parents probably bought from a slick salesman with a thin mustache:

These days, scientists are pretty sure the T Rex didn't stand like that. Here is what they really look like as far as posture. It allows the rex to balance nicely on those huge back legs without getting his tail dirty:

So they're getting closer. But as I said, my time machine keeps messing up. In the last month, I have arrived in Imperial Rome wearing a 1979 leisure suit, I have appeared in some Mayan village wearing something more appropriate to a Rocky Horror Picture Show debut, and I walked into Woodstock in 1969 wearing a business suit.

So when I arrived in 65 million BC, finally, my viking costume was probably close enough to fool the cavemen, as suspicious as they might be. I probably should have tried to look a bit more intimidating, as they might have been less likely to take my camera and use it as a hammer, and I might have come back with a more decent photograph of our friend the T Rex.

I can describe it, though. The second picture above is about right as far as posture and shape, but the color is wrong. The T Rex was jet black with red stripes, running his length and widening for his body, then narrowing again at the tail.

The movies have them all ferocious and scary and aggressive, but they're actually amazingly shy and easily intimidated. They don't fight at all - they're giant, effective scavengers, probably the ancestors to the modern day vulture.

When they feed, they pivot nicely on those huge hips, and the tiny forearms hold the corpse still while the huge jaws and teeth crush the bones and rip out chunks of flesh. The bones and flesh are chewed in mighty gulps, and the Rexes do this in teams of four or five. The locals leave them to their work, because they are doing an important job, environmentally speaking, and because they stink to high heaven, and you would not, repeat not, want to barbecue one of them.

And they don't roar - they have a loud, nasty hiss when they jostle each other for best dinner position, or if they feel threatened.

So no pictures, because I have no intention of having another of my cameras used for grinding corn.

I still love to watch Jurassic Park, accurate or not.

Insanity in political decisions

2009-03-01T09:53:00.003-06:00

Warning: political rant.

When President Obama said he was going to raise taxes on only people who made over 250,000 a year, I figured OK, great, stick it to those rich morons in Hollywood that got this guy elected. But now we're finding out how he's going to do it. And it's brilliant in its insanity.

He's going to limit their charitable deductions! This means that the liberal rich folks won't be hurt at all, because they don't give to charity nearly as much as conservatives and libertarians. If you don't believe me, do the research.

And what does this mean to America? It means that charitable giving will go down, way down. Which in turn means that the government will have to do even more in the way of socialism. But consider this: when the economy collapses (which it will thanks to our president's stimulus package aka drunk sailor spending spree) where are all those homeless going to go? Remember, if you don't have an address, you can't apply for those government checks. And those soup kitchens and charities that kept them alive can no longer count on the large donors they need so badly.

This will in turn further increase dependence on government programs (emergency programs, of course, because this is a crisis), which will further strain the state's ability to take care of us. Socialism isn't perfect, but it's the worst system we can have.

As I predicted, disappointment is on a frantic increase with this administration. If he does even half of what he promised, he will plunge us into national ruin, which will disappoint even the working poor in the country. Taxes will have to be raised drastically on them, the poor, but even more on the middle class, because there lie the numbers you need to get any revenue. You don't understand? Try this...

You can get the same money by either of these two actions: take one million bucks from each of 100 millionaires, or take 100 bucks from each of one million middle class types. Which group are you going to run out of first? Hint: how many millionaires live in your city, and how many working class? Drive around and make an estimate.

Even if you took 100% of the income from all the truly rich, it wouldn't run this country on its current budget for more than a week. The money has to come from you, the working stiff. That's why you need to understand that when they say they're going to make the rich pay their fair share, they really mean you, bucky.

Feel stimulated yet? Between Bush's Bailouts and Obama's Stimulus, we're either going to kiss America as we knew it goodbye, or we'll throw out both parties as we should have done thirty years ago. It can't go on like this anymore. Math, like the moon, is a harsh mistress.

Hey, you in the chattering class

2009-02-10T13:48:00.001-06:00

The Tenth Amendment

2009-02-10T09:25:00.002-06:00

This blog, or at least this particular post in this blog, should be required reading in schools, in state governments, and in both houses of Congress:
Tenth Amendment Rebellion
If you're socially conservative, ignore the fact that the author is a dope-smoking lesbian libertarian hippie-hating Catholic "recovering attorney" who understands economics. This is a good post.
Here is the text of the 10th amendment:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

That really isn't so hard to understand.

Let's break it down, just because the Supreme Court and the United States Congress seems to have been so confused by it for the last sixty or seventy years or so.

If a certain power (or authority to legislate) is not specifically assigned to the federal government, that power belongs to the states or to the people. If the Constitution prohibits a power to the states, it is reserved for the people.

Put another way, The feds can't do stuff unless the Constitution says so. What they've been doing is turn it backwards and say that they can do stuff unless the Constitution directly says it can't. Of course, lately they've been doing stuff that the Constitution directly says they can't, but that's what happens once you assume the power to interpret the law as you see fit from one day to the next - "Living Document" and all that nonsense.

Super Bowl Violence

2009-02-02T12:00:00.004-06:00

I started out a little late watching the Super Bowl, because we waited until almost kickoff to make a trip to the HEB, knowing that it was going to be crowded until then, what with all the parties and cookouts that were being prepared.

When we got home, the game was already about ten minutes under way. But I was in time for the first commercials, which is the only reason I take the time to watch this popular game. The first commercial I saw was for Doritos - and I was appalled. It featured a glass snow globe being hurled into the glass of a vending machine so that the employees could reach in and steal the packs of Doritos. As if that weren't enough, that was followed by someone else hurling the same snowglobe into the crotch of an elderly executive at the company, who collapsed in agony. How clever.

Before the game, I was cheering for the Steelers, mostly because they sort of represent the working class of America. But in the course of the game, I twice saw a huge Pittsburgh Steeler pounding a smaller Cardinal with his fists, long after the play was over, and even though the Cardinal was refusing to hit back. In one of those instances, the player being assaulted had taken off his helmet and was trying to reason with the block of beef who was trying to hurt him. By halftime, I was very much in favor of the Steelers losing by as much as possible. If you can't even practice a little sportsmanship at the Super Bowl, of all games, what does that say about your team?

The violence continued with more commercials. A guy, still in his chair, being thrown out of the fourth floor window because he suggested not buying Budweiser. A woman being covered with pigeons (and you know what pigeons do) because she was using a cell phone. The Jack in the Box guy getting hit by a bus. A woman being insulted and humiliated by a box of cheap flowers - "nobody wants to see you naked" was the final putdown - as her co-workers look on in pity. Meanness was the running theme of this Super Bowl.

Violence aside, the quality of the ads this year was way down. There were no ads that have the potential of starting a campaign - nothing like the Geico gecko, no Budweiser frogs, nothing. We got the usual Clydesdales for old times' sake, I suppose, but nothing really special.

The two best ads of the night were the one for pet adoption (clever and well done), and one for job searches involving a hunting safari chasing down a herd of office chairs. Even those were lame compared to other years. (added: there was also an excellent ad involving a moose in an office).

To put it another way, the NBC promos for upcoming shows were better than anything showing during a football time out. That about says it all.

Donate platelets soon

2009-01-30T18:17:00.002-06:00

Today, GA and I donated platelets down at MD Anderson.
I love to do that, because for some strange reason, I am always able to donate a double product, which means I'm sort of like two donors at once.
If you don't live in Houston, I bet you could still find someplace in your area that would accept your platelets, and you have plenty of extra.
Here's how it works. You sit through an interview answering yes or no to a list of questions, such as "Have you eaten guacamole with anyone in the past eight years who looked like he might have a blood disease?" Well, not exactly like that, but you get the picture.
Then they will stick you to check your blood for iron content and so forth.
Then, assuming your blood is fashionable enough, they lead you to a nice, comfy chair, where a sexy blond fluffs your pillow, and prepares this machine, and then she sticks a needle in your arm. The needle is smaller than the usual blood donor needle, by the way. And if you prefer a redhead, they'll get one for you. Ladies, you can do this too - they'll bring you a guy who looks like your favorite movie star.
Then you sit quietly reading a book for an hour and a half while the machine takes your blood, removes the platelets, then puts it back, over and over. Nothing to it.
When you're done, most places give you a free T shirt, and you go home. And you have just saved several lives, or at least helped save them. If you're at MD Anderson, the platelets go the very next day into the veins of a cancer patient, who would otherwise be in very bad shape, and probably die.
And that night, you sleep very very well, providing you don't think too hard about the sexy blond who stuck you.

Let Us Prey

2009-01-30T08:22:00.001-06:00

from FortBendNow.Com

"A group of about 30 black vultures has been roosting along the Brazos River in Richmond for the past several nights. Early this week they've been observed circling the courthouse, an action about which readers probably should reach their own conclusions."

taquitos

2009-01-24T23:42:00.001-06:00

Now that's good eatin' I tell ya.

Essential vinyl

2009-01-23T17:59:00.007-06:00

The first time I was truly amazed at the way my musical tastes have changed as I got older was when I heard Fried Hocky Boogie by Canned Heat more than two decades after its release. When Napster and Kazaa came on the scene so that we could share our digital music files, I looked for music that I had owned on vinyl back in the day, and there I saw that classic by Canned Heat. It took a while to download, but I finally got it down and I loaded it into Media Player and...

Oh, my aching ears. It sounded so good back then, but hearing it through the filter of history, I couldn't believe it was so bad. Especially the lead guitar, whoever he was - awful!

Rent the Woodstock DVD, and compare Canned Heat to the stellar work of Ten Years After, with Alvin Lee's lightning fingers.

I also find that the Doors don't sound nearly as good as they did back then. The difference isn't nearly so stark as with Canned Heat, but I was thinking about essential albums while on my walk the other day, and I realized that if you buy Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine and something with all the singles they released, you have pretty much everything they did that was listenable. And I long since realized that Jim Morrison's lyrics, which seemed so deep back then, were pure crap. You're never really sure what the blazes he meant by any of it.

Yeah, I know that John Lennon wrote two books that were virtually meaningless, as well as I Am the Walrus, but I'm pretty sure he meant them to be nonsense. Jim Morrison was trying to be profound.

So I'm going to list my Essential vinyl albums here. I make the choices based on the quality of the entire album. Not just stuff that happens to have a monster hit - the whole thing has to have quality from the time the needle hits the groove. And quality of lyrics counts. They're in alphabetical order, to spare me from having to rank them.

The Alan Parsons Project: Turn of a Friendly Card
Art Garfunkel: Angel Clare
Badfinger: Magic Christian Music
The Beatles: Abbey Road, White Album (actually named The Beatles)
Bee Gees: Cucumber Castle
Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman
CCR: Bayou Country
Eagles: On the Border, Hotel California
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
Jethro Tull: Aqualung
Jimi Hendrix: Are You Experienced
Kansas: Left Overture
Kim Hill: (self-titled)
Larry Norman: Only Visiting this Planet
Led Zeppelin I (II almost made it)
Linda Ronstadt: Living in the USA
Paul McCartney and Wings: Band on the Run
Paul Simon: Graceland
Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon
Second Chapter of Acts (with Annie Herring): In the Volume of the Book
Simon and Garfunkel: Bookends, Bridge Over Troubled Water
The Who: Tommy, Who's Next
ZZ Top's First Album (they actually named it that - think positive, I guess)
Zombies: Odyssey and Oracle (briefly renamed Time of the Seasons)

You may disagree about some of my choices, and you may be appalled that I failed to include your picks. Feel free to add a comment adding your own if you want. But don't attack mine - my opinions are my opinions, just like my underwear is my underwear.

Obama: the hope (seriously) he brings me

2009-01-20T11:39:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, I posted the negative view of what could happen with this new president. Today, I would like to address the positive side.

You'll notice I didn't capitalize the word "hope" - that's because I mean it in the literal sense, not in the political slogan sense.

I believe that racism - traditional, institutional racism - has been vanquished in America. This happened long ago, and I saw the evidence of it. Yes, we still have the vestiges, prejudice born of ignorance and stupidity. But we will always have those people, just as we will always have rude people, dishonest people, selfish people, hateful people. But that is just racial prejudice, it is no longer an "-ism." The paradigm shifted long ago.

But humans are motivated by fear. This goes for all of us. I think that much of prejudice is born of fear - I remember most expressions of racism had to do with what people of other races might do to us if they had the chance. That is gone. We still fear crime, but it isn't tied to skin color anymore. We might find ourselves afraid because of what someone is wearing, or how they speak, and so forth - but it is very hard to imagine being afraid of a black man or woman who is dressed nicely and speaks politely, and the same goes for all other races.

But that fear goes both ways. Hundreds of years of very real mistreatment by the white race, including slavery, unequal opportunity in work and housing, and violence. How easy can it be to just forget all without some real evidence that America has changed?

This election of a black man has the potential for providing that evidence. If white America cast enough votes for a black man to elect him, then that says something very clear about prejudice. You simply don't vote for someone if you fear him because of his skin color.

Now, I still have my reservations about whether he will keep his oath of office. This is because beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, no president has acted to preserve or protect the Constitution, as required by his solemn oath. And with Obama's tendency to socialism, I don't have much hope that he will change that tradition of ignoring the obvious meaning of that document except when it serves the party's goals. But you never know. Perhaps God will inspire him to do just that and restore America to its roots.

And that's the meaning of "hope," after all.

The Obauguration

2009-01-19T07:45:00.004-06:00

I am already sick of this new administration, and The One™ hasn't even been sworn in yet.

Is it really necessary for NBC to run stories about the inauguration with inspiring music on the soundtrack? How many times are we going to be told that this signifies the end of racism in America? How many times are we going to be told, in so many subtle ways, that everything is different now, that Obama will change everything, turn this country around, bla bla bla?

Turn what around? The economy? Here's the deal with the economy.

For decades, I can remember economists and commentators warning us that we had to go back to being financially responsible in this country. You can't keep buying on credit, they said, on a national basis anymore than you can in a household. Sooner or later you have to start paying it all back, and longer you put it off, the more it's going to hurt.

After a decade or so of these warnings, which I had heard since a tow headed boy in the 50's, they began warning that we were putting off the payback for our children to deal with - that we were spending our children's future. That would be me they were talking about.

Eventually my generation grew up and took over. And we did the same thing. There were still voices among us, still giving that warning, just as there were with the WW2 generation. Soon they were warning that we were postponing the problem for our children to deal with, and that it was going to be much worse the longer we put off re-payment.

And it has continued until this day. Congress after Congress, president after president of both corrupt parties, spending to keep in office, and letting the Fed print more paper money each time the economy slows down. Let me explain that. It does work to print more money and spend it when the economy slows down. It works just like an injection of amphetamines. But you're supposed to then remove the drugs once the economy kicks in - you allow it to slow back down, rather than let it keep roaring. So the economy has been growing in spurts and leaps, much like the blob in those old horror movies.

And the debt has been growing, too - it's kind of a double whammy, with increased debt and dollars worth less and less. And the generations after mine, generation x or y or whatever Time magazine has been calling them, has been hoping - no, assuming - that they can simply pass the bill on down to their children, just as we passed it down to them.

Well, that monster of a credit card bill is now due. The bill, with a row of zeroes that won't even fit on the page, has been delivered to us all, now, now, now - not next decade, but now. And the Bush administration has been kiting checks, printing more money, borrowing money from China, and generally looking for revenue under the seat cushions.

Now comes Obama, The One™. He, peace be upon him, is going to Change things. We have Hope. With a soundtrack of love and racial equality and little bunny rabbits, he is going to turn this country around. What is he going to do to accomplish that?

Well, he hasn't really given us a lot of details, and the press, the Guardian of our Liberty and our Right to Know, hasn't really asked. In fact, they have ridiculed anyone who has tried to ask in order to make sure he got elected, and they have failed in their duty, but then they have been failing in that duty for a very long time. In the few proposals he has hinted at, and in his campaign rhetoric, it appears to be a simple matter of Income Redistribution, spreading the wealth, "asking" the rich to pay their "fair share" whatever that may be - or else.

But there is a problem with that - a big one. Oh, I know it has been working for the last forty years, but remember that the bill is now due - the Big One. The credit card company from hell is now demanding at least the minimum payment, which I assure you is a hefty amount. The Bush administration has been balancing on the high wire for some time. Let's sit down at the kitchen table with the family and see what our options are.

Raise taxes? We could do that, but the result will be an immediate crashing of the economy, or what's left of it. You may hear the talk about the rich paying more taxes, but the numbers won't support it. There aren't enough rich people out there, so you would have to tax them at nearly 100% to make any difference at all. No, the big bucks from the few won't do it - the numbers only add up when you raise taxes on the many, meaning you and me, the families, the working class. But when they do that, we have to spend less. And that in turn hurts the big corporations, and they have to lay people off, and there you go.

By the way, the real reason for all these bailouts? Those are because the two parties owe favors to the big corporations, and they intend to get theirs before it all falls down for the rest of us. There is no other reason for doing what they have done.

So... borrow more money from other countries? No can do. That barrel has been completely tapped. It's empty and dry, throw it in the alley behind the bar.

Print even more money? He might try that. But every nation that has done that has found itself experiencing hyper-inflation, that curious economic state where you take your grocery money to the store in a wheelbarrow, and try to spend it before it loses its value again. They've done all of that they can afford to do, too.

Stop spending? Obama isn't going to do that if he can help it. But maybe he can't help it. When the credit card company won't raise the ceiling anymore, can't raise it anymore, and when you can't even pay the minimum balance, and nobody will issue you another card.... it's over. You have to stop spending like a drunken fool, and then you have to make payments and get nothing fun in return - just like real people.

He could do what Ron Paul tried to get us to do last year: pull in the military and stop being the world's policeman. Obama will almost certainly have to do that, and if so, we will stop interfering with the internal affairs of other nations simply because we no longer can. Don't be shocked - this is precisely how we won the cold war. The Soviet Union could no longer afford to spend money on its military excursions, and they pulled the troops home. We may have to do the same, and this is very likely what Mr. Obama will do, if only because military spending is such a huge part of our budget. Budget? As if we have been following a "budget."

But in any case, The One will not be able to fulfill all those promises, because the money is gone, and the credit is gone, and the eBay closet is empty. The Bush administration spent it all. I guess they misunderestimated him again, ha ha.

He will either bring the military home and close those foreign bases all over Europe and Asia... or he will institute military rule, and abandon the pretense that we are self governed. If he does the latter, it will be appropriate that he has been compared to Lincoln so often during his campaign, only it won't just be the South that is crushed this time.

I hope he chooses the former. If he does, he may yet have something to brag about after he retires a gray haired old man in eight years.

Staying the Course

2009-01-05T15:53:00.002-06:00

I'm still actually using the BodySolid™ machine in our exercise room. Yeah, you thought we would pay big bucks for it, spend a week putting it together, and then use it for a coat rack, didn't you? Nope, I worked out on it this morning for 30 minutes.

Some days I just walk for 80 minutes, especially now that I discovered I can walk atop the levee just outside our back gate, even though it isn't officially a walking trail, and even though the levee has a little sign way on the west end telling us to stay off it unless we are authorized. The maintenance guys drive on the darn thing, so I think I can walk on it without damaging it. Incidentally, I plan to run for village rep next election. I want to push them to extend the trail down to our neighborhood, and I bet they put the trail right on top of the very same levee that we aren't allowed to walk on without authorization. Maybe someday I will drive my Chevy to the levee, and see if it is dry. But I digress.

Other days I do both. I walk for my 70 minutes, and then spend a little time doing light stuff on the BodySolid™ machine since I'm a sweaty mess anyway.

So this morning, I'm working out on the machine thing, and listening to another Stephen King short story on my current audio book, which happens to be his latest collection, on sale now at your favorite bookstore. Today's story is A Very Tight Place, which started out nicely enough, but then - no, I'd better not tell you. It might ruin the story for you. Let's just say it involves being trapped in a porta potty.

And the situation is described in graphic detail. This poor guy has to find a way to escape his little private privy prison somehow. Will it involve climbing through the obvious escape route?

Read it yourself to find out.

And somehow I think Rate A Bathroom should link to this article, but I suppose that might be silly.

A Real Good Day

2008-12-20T19:08:00.005-06:00

Today was a real good day.

GA and I went to see "White Christmas" at the Theatre Under the Stars, or TUTS, a non-profit but professional theatre. It's one of GA's favorite Christmas movies, so she has wanted to see the stage production ever since she saw it announced when we moved here. It's very nice, and at the end, they have it snow on the entire audience during the finale and final bows. As an extra blessing, the three seats directly between us and the stage were empty - no-shows. So we had a clear view of the entire show.

On the way home, I discovered that hwy 288, which is convenient to our house, makes a direct connection to Interstate 45, which goes north to Dallas. This will mean a shorter, more convenient trip to Wichita Falls when I go to visit family and friends.

We got back to the plantation just in time to swing by the amphitheater to see the living nativity, which turned out to actually be more of a Christmas pageant with live animals, as the actors moved from place to place as the Christmas story from Luke was read, and carols were sung. They had sheep, goats and a very stubborn donkey led around among the angels and heavenly host and wise men and so forth - sorry, no lobster at this production - and this little boy spent the entire performance dancing around and tossing his little shepherd hat up in the air and fetching it, and falling down and rolling in the grass. The donkey, who was constantly fighting Joseph about where he was supposed to be - you know how actors can be - decided to poop right in front of the bales of hay. And here came the little boy, tossing his hat, and rolling around in the grass... and into the donkey poop. He kept right on dancing and tossing his hat.

After the nativity, we drove to some of the wealthier neighborhoods to see how they had decorated, and many of the lights were brightly and tastefully done. One house, though, reminded me of the house in Deck the Halls: not only could you see it from space, I bet people who saw the satellite image were asking which bright spot was Houston.

Sometimes I really like living here.

Brilliant criminals

2008-12-14T18:15:00.004-06:00

Crime is low in our area, especially given that we're near Houston.

But when we do have crime, it's at least entertaining. I have to share the latest one, which was in Missouri City. This guy stole a GPS out of somebody's car. He then sold it to a pawn shop. But before he sold it, he entered his own address to try it out. Yep it took him right to his own house alright.

It also took the police there, because he didn't bother deleting his address before he sold it.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, what a maroon.

you're tagged, maybe

2008-12-12T12:13:00.001-06:00

Here are the directions: Just go to your 6th photo folder on your computer (or external hard drive, or memory card - pick one!), post the 6th photo, and hope you can remember the details to share them. Then tag 5 others.

This is the courtyard at the Hotel Ancira in Bustamante, NL, Mexico.
The car is a diesel Oldsmobile, which we drove to Mexico to visit the cave there.
I love that place.

I tag the first five bloggers to see this.
Acknowledge that you were tagged by leaving a comment with the url to your response.

Whoa

2008-12-08T20:56:00.005-06:00

OK, that was weird.

We were watching this movie, The Bucket List, and the credits had just rolled at the end.

The lights went out at 8:37 pm, and then came back on two seconds later, and then our front door blew open.

So if either or both of us dies in our sleep tonight, you'll have a cool story to tell at the funeral.

Life is a box of chocolates, after the coupon

2008-12-08T14:24:00.005-06:00

I just read a short blog about what two of my grandchildren did. Go read it. I'll wait here for you.

Now that's the quality I love in people everywhere - I love it when kids or grownups (but especially kids) do something different and original.

But this blog will intentionally be rambling and random. You know you love it.

This past week I went to visit my best friends in the whole world, back in my old hometown of Wichita Falls. It was a short visit, centered around seeing the play that they are both in, Move Over Mrs. Markham, which is a British farce, only they Americanized it because most of the cast wasn't able to handle the accent. I found it most enjoyable (and it is still playing to sold out audiences), and all the more so since I played Mr. Markham in that play and in that same theatre many years ago, when I still had dark hair.

While there, I met their new outside cat, named Princess, who looks and acts so much like a cat I used to have that I couldn't help but pet it and coo at it.

We watched a movie together (not with the cat, but with the family) - "21," which is about some MIT guys doing a card counting thing in Las Vegas and making tons of money. There is a scene where the professor is explaining to the class about probabilities and how change affects them. So he describes a game show where you're supposed to choose the best door out of three. A student chooses door number 1. Now the professor reminds the class that the odds are 33.3 percent that he has chosen the correct door, but - now the game show host reveals that door number 3 is not the best door, and is therefor out of the equation. Would he like to change his mind?

The student says yes, and now he goes for door number 2, because its probability is now - I forget the percentage, but it is higher than the obvious 50%. And the professor agrees, and praises him, and now wants him to go be a card counter in Vegas. And I'm all like "what???"

I was willing to agree that there are probably some mathematical principles that are way beyond me - I know that there are other dimensions besides the four that are obvious to us - but this was nonsense, or so it seemed to me, and still does.

Suppose you have the same scenario, only this time you have two students participating. One chooses door 1, the other chooses door 2. The game show host takes door 3 out of the equation, as before. Do the two students now switch doors, because each door is now greater than 50% likely to be the correct door? I would love for someone to explain to me how 1 out of 2 can possibly be anything but 50%.

But back to the family of my friends. One of their daughters is almost certain to be a semi-finalist merit scholar or whatever you call that, which doesn't really surprise me because she is so brilliant. Both daughters are, of course, incredibly smart and visually attractive in the bargain.

After the show Thursday night, the plan was to hit the backyard hot tub, so as to enjoy the near freezing temperatures and high winds that Wichita Falls was providing for us. But the female half of the partnership had to back out due to work interfering - honest - and that would have left two guys in the hot tub, and that would have been too... you know. The G word.

It was probably all for the best, since I was getting sleepy already and I had to leave early the next morning for my long drive back to Houston.

I wonder if my life would have been any different if either of my two brothers had been creative enough to want to sell me on a treadmill while playing store?

****

Update... OK, a computer geek in Midland explained it to me, though it wasn't clear in the movie. The game show host can't open your door, whether it's wrong or right. So if you have the correct door already, he has two doors to choose from. If you have the wrong door, however, he can only choose one door to open.

So your choice being wrong or right affects the door he opens, which in turn slightly affects the odds of your door being right.

to guitar or not to guitar

2008-11-20T15:38:00.007-06:00

To guitar or not to guitar, that is the question.

If you have known me for thirty years or more, then you know that I used to play guitar back in the day. I had a fabulous Gibson SG-I, with a perfect fret board and the easiest action you could ask for while playing.

I played in a little Christian rock band very briefly, led by Bill Lee (I wonder if he's still around), and I've forgotten the name of the band. We were actually pretty good - each of us had written a song or two, and this particular one that I wrote had a "heavy" sound, and used the lyrics from a hymn out of the Baptist Hymnal.

This was in 1971 or so, and there was no such thing as a Contemporary Christian bin at the record store, and in fact, most churchy types considered rock music to be of the devil, and to be shunned at all cost. Annie Herring wasn't recording yet, and it would be another few years before we would hear Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music, by Larry Norman. So this was a cutting edge thing to do. I'm not saying we were the first, but I am saying that we were blazing our own trail through the Christian music wilderness.

What happened was that I was singing with a church sponsored youth group at Eden Hills Baptist Church, and we quite innocently had included in our repertoire a popular selection from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar - which was admittedly not even close to being doctrinally correct, though we hadn't really considered that. We were doing popular songs modified to be sort of Christian in nature - for example, I'm a Believer, the Monkees' hit, with a few altered lyrics.

We got invited to some little Assembly of God church which was doing some Sunday afternoon festival, and they wanted us to represent what the youth of today was doing musically. We sang I Don't Know How to Love Him, and one of the southern gospel groups walked out. Walked out! To their credit, they refrained from holding up crosses and trying to cast out our demons, but it was pretty darn rude when you consider that we were invited, paid our own way there, and we were kids for crying out loud. Well, practically kids.

Actually, all but one of them walked out - Bill Lee stayed in, and he apologized for the rest of his group. And later, before their group split up (Bill Lee quit or was fired, who knows), I dropped by one of their rehearsals. There they were, the group who had indignantly walked out on us for singing unapproved music, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes and using profanity like it was the king's English. Except Bill, who spoke softly and could have been in church. My opinion of the gospel music industry was dropping like a rock.

After their group fell apart, Bill thought it would be interesting to form a new group with some of us - me on guitar or bass, and some other people we knew - playing a mix of rock and gospel. Sure, why not? So we formed that little group. A strange thing happened. We were catching on. Churches allowed us to play in their fellowship halls (not the sanctuary, that would have been blasphemy), and we got invited to many youth functions. During one of these functions, a lady asked us if we would be willing to travel to another town. She thought we were pretty good, and if we wanted her to do it, she could arrange for us to play at the high school auditorium in Bellevue, to the southeast of our hometown, Wichita Falls. She would take care of the promotion, the ticket sales, everything. Well... sure, why not?

So we packed up our amplifiers and drove to Bellevue, and set up on the small stage there. On the other side of the curtain was a packed auditorium, probably holding a couple of hundred people. One thing was odd, though - I was expecting to see high school kids, and most of these people were adults. Well, not to worry, they were probably family types.

We opened with the song I had written, because it established so well that we were playing Christian rock. I played bass on that one, because the song depended on a heavy rock line, and I had written it. Only fair.

By the time we finished the song, the auditorium was empty. Well, not empty, there were four or five kids in the front row screaming for more. They were the only ones that hadn't been accompanied by their parents. The other kids had been dragged indignantly from the place by their gospel music loving parents. The promotion had been done, yes, but the posters had all said "gospel music" - the nice lady hadn't known what else to call what it was that we did.

That made twice we had been walked out on by gospel music fans.

After that, I had the blessing and privilege to find a small church that was actually into praise and worship, without all the nonsense. A group formed, named Peniel, and I found myself playing my Gibson SG-I, and we actually played Christian music without caring at all if we ever became popular or successful - we just sang and played and worshiped and it was the best time of my life.

Many of us were Air Force, and so what with transfers and such we parted ways. Many of us are still in touch via the internet, and we are still close friends. No, not just friends, brothers.

I began to lose interest in playing the guitar, and I sold the SG-I, or rather traded it in on a new acoustic guitar that was just coming into use: the Ovation. I still have it (model 1111-4). It's a little harder to play than the SG, because the first fret is kind of hard to get all the way down, as is the case with most acoustics, so an F chord is a bear. And a chord that requires more than three frets is impossible for me - I broke a finger at Amsco steel when I was helping to change a die on the brake press, and it never healed right. So my third finger is so weak that I have to use my fourth finger to make a "down" chord, the sort of bar chorded A. That works OK until I need an A7 or the equivalent, and then I'm in trouble.

And anyway, I'm way way out of practice. I barely remember how to play now.

So up the highway from us is this place that sells guitars and gives lessons. And I'm thinking about trading in my Ovation, which has increased in value and is in near-mint condition, for a new electric guitar and small amplifier. I have heard that they make guitars in 3/4 scale, so I could reach that third fret without stretching too hard. And at least one Ovation of that model has sold for $3000... though it may have been a special edition or something. I find it hard to believe that my little $250 guitar from 1974 could be that prized. On the other hand, if you adjust for inflation... who knows?

That and... and... taking lessons. Actual lessons. I never took lessons in my life. For all I know, I learned it all wrong. And I have the time to practice now, being retired and old and useless.

What should I do?

toast

2008-11-10T10:50:00.002-06:00

I made toast this morning and there was a longhorn image burned onto the toast.
It's a miracle.
I shall now put it on eBay and sell it for a thousand dollars.

Random discoveries

2008-11-09T18:10:00.004-06:00

1) After watching our Woodstock DVD last night, I was reminded of the incredibly ignorant words coming from the stage microphones between sets. The stupidest was when somebody was pointing out the army helicopters which were landing nearby to deploy a medical team to care for those among the half million attending who had gotten sick, or overdosed, or injured somehow. "They're with us this time, man, they're with us!" As if the United States Army had ever been against them. Sure, some officers were likely to make snide comments about hippies in those days, but nobody in an army helicopter would have been deployed against American citizens just because of hair style or choice of music.
There were other stupid comments about how well this was all working - and it is true that it was amazing that that many people could sit together for three days without anyone attacking another or committing violent crimes. But it was also true that the only reason they had water to drink or food to eat was that emergency services were coming to their rescue, bringing food and help in response to what was, in truth, a disaster area.
I was also astounded by the utter lack of talent or skill on the part of Canned Heat. Listen to that guitar solo, and compare it to performances by Ten Years After, The Who, Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana. It's like comparing a little kid playing chopsticks on the piano to the guy in Legend of 1900.
Tickets were $18 in advance for all three days, which is $75 in today's money.
They told the local authorities they expected no more than 50,000 people attending the event.
There were two deaths during the festival: one was a heroin overdose, the other was a guy in a sleeping bag who got run over by a tractor.
Also, the bass player for Jefferson Airplane was one ugly dude.

2) Pringles' Onion Blossom Chips are awesome, assuming you like Onion Blossoms or their many imitators. They taste so much like the onion blossoms that you have to eat a couple, maybe three, before you can get past the shock.

3) Many people who you think are for Obama are not. Many who still are, are going to be very very disappointed in the next four years. He isn't going to be as good as they expect, because he can't really do the things they think he promised to do. And he isn't going to be quite as bad as his detractors expect - unless he turns out to really be the anti-christ, in which case he will be worse instead. This was an election year, and hyperbole was at its usual level for such a time. But you never know.

Hammer and Sickle

2008-11-06T18:32:00.002-06:00

That's the communist flag being waved in celebration of our president-elect, there.

Fear debt and more

2008-10-29T07:55:00.006-05:00

None of these money principles are really new with me, and you have likely heard them before, but these are the ones that I have personally found to be very good advice, and practical for the average bear. Your mileage may vary.

1) Fear debt. It is a vicious killer, and can become your master in less time than you would believe. It's a mathematical thing.

There are only two things that you can justify buying on credit: your house or your car. You can justify buying the house on credit because everybody has to have one, you'd be paying rent if you didn't, and in truth, it's sort of a savings account / retirement plan anyway. At the end of 30 years (or 15 if you're good and can manage it), you have a house that will make it possible to retire.

You can justify the car because you really need it to be able to hold a job, which also is necessary. If you live in a place that offers mass transit, this doesn't apply. But if you live in Albuquerque, which requires a car for survival, you're going to either buy a car or walk.
Most people are math challenged, and don't realize the actual effect of paying interest, or the wonder that is compounding. If you make the entries on a spreadsheet, though, you can see it as it happens. But let's oversimplify just to make it easy. When you buy a $1,000 item on credit for a year, at 18%, you're paying 1180.00 for that item, and you're paying an extra 180 bucks for the privilege of not having to wait for it. But if you save up for it, and earn only 4% on the money while you save, you only pay $960 for it, as if it were on sale. The difference between buying now and buying later is $230! (It's actually much much more, because the interest compounds, but that takes a spreadsheet to demonstrate.)

And it gets worse. When you do it with a credit card (notice that you can't buy a car or house with a credit card), the terms encourage you to not pay off the balance. The debt grows and grows until you are only able to pay the interest. Now you're screwed, because you have to pay money to the bank, and you get nothing for it. Zilch. To get out of this mess, you have to pay back that debt with large portions of your income. And it isn't easy.

Most people learn this the hard way, and if they're lucky they get to start over with an even balance by the time they reach 40 years of age.

So the folks who save their money get a mathematical advantage over those who buy on credit, without even having to work any harder or earn more money.

Once you master the principle of staying out of debt, there are some neat things you can do with a credit card - but if you can't pay off the balance every single time, with room to spare, don't even try them. I won't list them here. I will only tell you that they involve taking advantage of the enticements that the banks offer you, hoping to get you into their lair, but you fool them by paying off the balance each month - wicked, false, trickly hobbitses!

2) Learn the difference between cheap and thrifty.

You can actually lose money by being cheap. OK, sometimes you can't help it; you have to have a car, and so you buy a junker, because it's the best you can do. But if you can afford to buy a car that is dependable, you should do it.

Here's thrifty: you can go to Kroger's and buy the store brand of many items for a third less than the famous, advertised brand. Why not do it? Now, if you get home, and it really isn't as good (sometimes the case), then go back to the famous brand. Here are some things I no longer buy with the official label anymore, because the Kroger's brand is just as good: Miracle Whip, sandwich sliced ham, sour cream, butter (whipped or otherwise), most canned goods including corn, beets, vinegar, Campbell's soups... the list goes on. Some things, though are best done by the experts, such as canned spinach, Wolf brand chili, and Dr Pepper.

Let's assume you have some money available, and you're going to buy... say, a new TV. How much do you watch TV? If you watch it every evening, and it's your main entertainment, then prorate it. The TV will likely last ten years, but at least five. That's a lot of TV watching, so you should be willing to spend a little more and get a good one in the first place. The same goes for that washer and dryer, the refrigerator, your shoes - you should plan on using them for many hours, and so you shouldn't go cheap. Obviously, you don't need to pay for status symbols - buy quality, buy what you will use. Find the best value.

Incidentally, don't be afraid to bargain, especially when buying an expensive item. When we bought our washer and dryer, we got them to knock off a couple hundred bucks on the deal. If you're embarrassed, try this technique. You go in and ask to see the very cheapest thing they have. Look at it, consider it. Ask about it. Go look at the more expensive things, too, and ask about them. Then go back and look at the cheap stuff again. The salesman and his manager will want you to buy the more expensive one, of course, so as soon as he starts explaining the advantages of the better item, ask him if he would consider sweetening the deal if you were to buy the better item. Often, he will go talk to the manager and come back with an incentive. Honest, it can happen.

3) When you buy a house, seriously consider a 15 year mortgage rather than a 30 year mortgage. Not only will you save 15 years worth of interest, the bank will usually offer a much lower rate, perhaps as much as 2 percentage points. If you can't afford the payments on a 15 year mortgage, you are likely buying too much house.

4) Marry somebody who understands this. If you are considering marriage, discuss the principles of debt and thrift. If he or she doesn't immediately and enthusiastically agree with you that debt is of the devil, slow down the romance. Otherwise, you will have to follow the path to near bankruptcy, then climb slowly and painfully out of the pit of financial darkness, all so that your new spouse will learn the hard way what I just explained in this short little blog.

Yelllow roses and gardens

2008-10-26T09:32:00.007-05:00

You may remember the two rose bushes from my hurricane video.

Photo by wm. Hurricane by Ma Nature.

Yesterday, both bushes had grown new leaves and were producing some roses. The yellow roses, however, were numerous and beautiful. GA decided that there were enough that we could take a couple indoors for the kitchen table:

photo by wm, roses by God

I think these are virtually perfect. And what better symbol of Texas than the yellow rose?

We had a tiny yellow rose bush back in Midland, which the new owners have probably killed by now, converting everything to the popular"plain yard" motif. But it was tiny by comparison, and I suppose may have been a miniature variety. I don't know about such things. All I know about roses I learned from Aunt Wynona, namely to cut the roses at a point just above a junction with five leaves. For whatever reason, that practice will result in more blooms. See, she's a flower gardener, while I specialize in veggies.

Monday, I'm going to put in a new garden. I bought some new border bricks at Home Depot, because when I do a garden, it has to double as landscaping, and looks have to take precedence over the practical. Still, I will not have a rectangular plotted, straight rowed conventional garden. It has to be a work of... art.

The current garden still has tomatoes, garlic, cilantro and black eyed peas, all crowded together like a bunch of New Yorkers. The cilantro is just about ready to pick and toss into a salad.

I hate rebate programs

2008-10-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

I hate rebate programs. I hate them for three reasons.

The first reason: when you buy the product, you pay taxes on the entire price, including what you're going to get on the rebate. For example, if you get a rebate of $20 on a $100 product, you pay sales tax on the entire $100, even though you're really only paying $80 for the product.

The second reason: you have to fill out a stupid form, mail it to somebody, and hope it doesn't get lost in the mail. Or get lost in the mail room after it's delivered. Then you have to wait to get your check, hoping it doesn't get lost in the mail, and then you have to go cash it.

The third reason: it's possible to lose the receipt, or lose the rebate form, or even to simply forget to apply for the rebate. (That's likely what the company is hoping for).

It would be simpler for everybody to just take the rebate form at the store, like a coupon, and reduce the price you pay - so you don't forget to apply for it, so you don't pay sales tax on the rebated amount, and so you don't even have to use a stamp and an envelope to ask for the money they promised you.

But do they go for the simpler method? No, of course not. And AT&T found a way to make it even more complicated, more expensive, and even more likely that you'll lose the money in the process. Notice that AT&T has an actual contract with you when you have your rebate coming. They know they're going to be billing you every month, using a numbered account. That means they could simply apply your rebate to your account, and save everybody (including themselves) a lot of time and work. But do they do that? No.

They sell you your phone, charge you the full sales tax, promise you a rebate, and then instead of sending you a simple, easy to cash check in the mail, they send you a debit card. A debit card!

So they go to the trouble and expense of establishing and manufacturing a debit card, with a unique number, tied to an accounting system, which you get in the mail just like the check, and then you have to call a toll free number (probably using your cell phone and costing you minutes) and waste five or ten minutes navigating through a sea of menus, so you can activate it. And your trouble is just beginning.

Say it's for $100. Now you have to keep a log of how much you've spent on it, unless you can find a place where you can spend exactly $100. The instructions say to calculate the difference between your purchase and the amount on the card, pay the balance first, then run the card through, while the clerk is frowning at you, along with the twenty people in line behind you, waiting. I tried it at the grocery store. Neither of us could figure out how to make it work. Neither could the next five people in line, as they frowned impatiently.

You can't use it at the gas pump, at least not pay at the pump. You have to give it to the clerk. But even though it says it's a debit card, you have to instruct the guy in the gas station to run it as a credit purchase, again with a line of people waiting behind you.

So I try the card again, at the grocery store. It says Not Authorized. I go home and call AT&T. They tell me that according to their records, that day I tried to use it at the grocery store? And we couldn't make it work? Well, the next day the grocery store took the money somehow. My card is empty. Now I have to take it up with them.

Remember, all this instead of simply applying $100 to my cell phone bill, as a credit - saving the cost of the card and all this hassle.

I hate rebate programs. And I especially hate rebate programs that involve a stupid, orange debit card instead of a nice, paper check.

Nature's 5.1 surround sound

2008-10-15T10:47:00.005-05:00

It's raining today.
The bad news is that I don't get to go for my walk. So I can't eat candy, or at least I can't eat as much candy.

Not that I just stuff myself with such things, but if you don't burn the calories, you have to limit the intake more. Besides, I eat the sugar free Reese's cups, and low-carb Dove dark chocolate and raspberry things. The Dove things, by the way, are sweetened with sugar alcohols, which means you can't go nuts with them either, unless you need a laxative effect. If you do need a laxative some day , forget the drug store - buy a bag of these babies and go to town.

But I digress. It is raining today, and we're getting thunder with it. Down here in Houston you usually get just rain, with no thunder. Back in Wichita Falls or in Midland, you could usually count on some nice loud thunder for a soundtrack with your rain storm. In Wichita Falls, you could also count on some nice loud tornadoes too, but that's another story.

The 1979 tornado in Wichita Falls, TX

I remember a time when GA and I were hiking in the Smoky Mountains National Park, and when we were lying in our little tent, there was a thunderstorm crossing overhead. It was a wonderful experience - the sound would echo across the sky and reverberate. We just lay there enjoying the sounds for a while before we fell asleep.

I heard from the insurance company about our damage claim on the fence in our backyard. Our deductible is about $2000 so I'm supposed to find a fence company and get an estimate. If they can fix it for less, I won't file a claim, but if it's more I can file the claim. I have no idea what it will cost. If I were the hulk, I could just push it back into place and tamp the dirt down.

The Hulk, about to push my fence back where it belongs

But I'm not the Hulk, I'm more of a Captain Sloth.

And the sun just came out. If the sky turns blue, I will need to go run an errand or two.
Instead of blogging with no real point to make.

The bailout, comrades, welcome the bailout

2008-10-12T10:14:00.001-05:00

Here's the way I see this bailout mess.
Years ago, the government passed legislation encouraging the banks to lend to the poor (rather than "discriminate" against them). The message was that just because somebody is a poor credit risk is no reason to deny them a loan. The lenders jumped right on that, because there is huge money to be made, provided that the government is willing to cover your losses. So they whipped out these balloon mortgages, knowing full well that these buyers were never going to be able to pay those higher payments when the balloon arrives. (A balloon mortgage offers lower interest rates now, but higher ones later on in the payback). The bankers told the buyers that the value of their property would increase by the time the balloon arrives, and so they could easily refinance with a better interest rate. Only that didn't happen, which means that the default rate went through the roof, and the bankers started losing big time. Now remember, they were making it big time before the balloons landed.
It's as if you or I went to Las Vegas to gamble, and if we win, we keep the money, but when we lose, the government covers our losses.
In fact, this has been referred to many times as "privatizing the profit while socializing the debt." This is about as succinct and accurate as you can get.
Those fat bankers are keeping the profits they made when they loaned all that money for balloon mortgages, and making us cover their 'losses' now that the tide has turned. In a free economy, they would be allowed to fail, and more capable, responsible lenders would arise to take their place. There is nothing "free market" about this deal at all. Yet, economics professors are now announcing that this proves that the free market won't work, that the economy must be controlled. What a fraud. An honest analysis would show that government intervention has failed.

Electric plug for an old vacuum cleaner

2008-10-11T10:39:00.003-05:00

We have this old antique vacuum cleaner - a Kirby from the 50's, made of some kind of metal, maybe aluminum, maybe cast iron. No, it's not rusting, and it doesn't weigh much, so it must be aluminum. Or steel. Or gray plastic cleverly made to look like aluminum.

This immortal workhorse of a machine has been efficiently vacuuming our floors for the 25 years we've been married, and for another 25 or 30 or more years before that.

It finally began having problems. It has those old fashioned two prong plugs that you shove into the electric socket, and when plugged in, it would only work if you jiggled the plug just right. My son-in-law showed me that each of the prongs is not really a single blade, but a sort of loop that allows it to make contact and yet compress if the slot is too tight. So he expanded the loop with a screwdriver, and it worked again - for a while.

But apparently, the metal - I guess it's copper or brass or gold - has grown soft in its old age, as have I, and the loops collapse almost instantly. It was time to replace the plug.

I didn't really want to do that. This old vacuum is an antique, and I hated to spoil its authenticity by replacing original equipment with a modern add-on. But if it was going to suck again, it had to be done. So I was off to Home Depot.

There I saw a range of replacement plugs, but none of them were the kind I remembered from my younger days. You remember, you just slipped off the little cardboard cover and loosened the screws and attached the wires, or "conductors" as the English say. I picked out one that had two screws you took out and you just shoved in the wires, or conductors.

I hated the moment, but I had to do the surgery: I severed the old plug from the 15 mile cord extending from the vacuum's handle. I had done the research - I knew that the white wire is neutral, and attaches to the wider of the two blades. I even confirmed this with my son-in-law via my cell phone. I was... ready.

I put the wire - excuse me, conductor - into the slot and turned the screw. The manufacturer's website assured me that that's all you have to do for a tight and easy installation. But as I screwed it in, I screwed it up. The parts inside the plastic twisted into a mess, and the plastic was pushed out of its place, and the wire fell out like promises at election time.

I unscrewed the screws, and tried again. Same thing. I thought maybe I had the wrong holes. There were several, after all, and I searched the website for maybe some little graphic of the wires going into this device. No luck. It was apparently so easy and so self-evident that I could not possibly mess this up. Yet I had.

This is the sort of thing that happens to me every time I try to do plumbing, or electric repair, or car repair. This is why I depend on friends who can do any of those three things. I am pretty good at finding the problem with a computer, and back in the day I could trouble shoot database programs with the best of them. But pipes, cars and electric plugs hate me, and live for the moment they can entice me into a repair job. They are essentially evil. I should have been a Luddite.

Today I will go back to Home Depot or Walmart or whatever is out there, and I will find one of those old fashioned plugs that you just loosen the screw, wrap a half loop of wire around it, and tighten. Anything more complicated is a communist plot.

And that's the shocking truth.