"Got nothing" Wednesday

Creepy Money

Whatever you do, don't show this to Julie. She's just not in the mood.

Neither am I, for that matter, unless you want to use hundred dollar bills.

It gives the investment vehicles known as SPDRs a whole new meaning.

Tip o'the hat to Dan Pollock's Site of the Day (and whatever you do, don't read his monkey stories. Don't do it. I've warned you. It's not my responsibility.)

Ancient Media Weekend

We spent a quiet, mostly un-busy Memorial Day weekend at home. Caught a movie, did a couple of bike rides (including one Monday morning on a parallel route for our own version of Rolling Thunder...it's pretty cool being passed by more than 300 motorcycles, most of whom waved or honked at the sight of our bike, which was longer than most of them), went to our usual Saturday evening dance class (learned a killer tango step..."killer" is the proper word because you don't want to be anywhere near us when we try to pull it off), worked the TV broadcast at church Sunday morning, and took food to a family in our Sunday School class whose mother/grandmother passed away earlier that morning.

Amongst all of that we also partook of some old-school media. On Saturday afternoon, I plugged in a 1995 episode of The X-Files ("Humbug," if you must know; remember it?), one of a dozen or so we have on that flash-in-the-pan medium of laserdisc, the video equivalent of 8-track tape, only much higher quality. In fact, I continue to believe that laserdisc video is superior to any non-HD DVD I've seen.

And interspersed through the entire weekend I endeavored to digitize a half dozen LPs my wife had bought at an estate sale the weekend before. They were old ballroom dance albums (a couple by Arthur Murray and the rest by artists and on a label I'd never heard of, including Billy Mays and his orchestra; I thought he only pitched cleaning products on TV).

I used Sound Studio to record the LPs via my laptop, then ran the resulting AIFF file through SoundSoap to minimize the pops, reduced the turntable rumble, and add some low end frequency punch. I then returned to Sound Studio to break the enhanced AIFF into its component tracks, which were imported into iTunes for the addition of meta data and consolidation into a playlist, which was then loaded onto an iPod. The culmination was that Monday night, I routed a ripped tango on the iPod through the stereo and we did a little ripping ourselves.

Killer weekend...just killer.

Confluence

This explains just about everything.

Night Storm

Wallace has been displaying some great photos of thunderheads over the past couple of weeks, but his have all been taken during daylight. Tonight, we're being treated to a natural fireworks show off to the east, and I managed to assemble my camera and tripod and grab one halfway decent photo.

I used a shutter speed of 10 seconds for my Digital Rebel XT, with a digital film speed of ISO 100 and an aperture value of 5.0. The photo was taken about 90 minutes after sunset, but the top of the thunderhead was tall enough to still catch the tiniest bit of illumination. You can see the lightning near the bottom of the photo.

The remote control comes in very handy for these long exposures. I haven't done enough night photography to know what I'm doing, however; most of the series wasn't focused very well (autofocus is useless in this kind of setting). And, yes, I did do a little touch-up in Photoshop, in case you're wondering. But the result looks very much the way the storm looked in real life.

Now, if only we'd get some of these storms over us instead of out on the horizon...

Never Forget

Funny Movies

Update: Gwynne's got Bravo's the entire list posted over at The Shallow End, along with her observations. I agree with her assessment...many of the selections are downright puzzling, as are the omissions.

The Bravo Channel has been running a countdown of its "100 Funniest Movies" list, presenting that list in a series of shows that spotlight 25 at a time. Or maybe fifty, although that makes for a very short series. Anyway, we caught last night's segment that covered numbers 25 through 1.

I considered live-blogging the show, but was too lazy to get out of the recliner and retrieve the laptop. My wife had her laptop going in the neighboring recliner but she was too busy studying the inside of her eyelids to fool with the show. I figured I could re-create the list via a website but Bravo is apparently going to milk this thing for as long as it can, because its list has defied my best googling efforts. (OK, I gave up after following two links. This isn't cancer research, you know.)

Their list does differ significantly from the AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs series, in that if Bravo tapped anything prior to 1960, I certainly didn't see it in whatever it was I was watching. Bravo's list was also more current, including such recent movies as The Wedding Crasher, The Incredibles, and Napoleon Dynamite. AFI's list was concocted in 2000.

The one thing I do remember is that Bravo picked Animal House as the #1 funniest movie (it made it only to #36 on AFI's list). I wouldn't disagree that that movie is one of the funniest of all time, but I don't know that I'd rank it at the very top of my personal list.

It's funny (ha!), but picking the funniest movies is harder than picking the best. I mean, almost everyone agrees that The Godfather is at least in the top three best movies ever made. Perhaps the quality of a story and the telling of it is easier to agree on than what's funny, the latter being somehow more subjective.

Fortunately for you, I happen to be the Ultimate Arbiter for What's Really REALLY Funny, and here's my top ten list (but in no particular order; I couldn't get my own self to agree with me about those details).

• A Christmas Story


• The Blues Brothers


• The Princess Bride


• Shaun of the Dead


• Beetlejuice


• Father of the Bride


• Young Frankenstein


• Soapdish


• The Gods Must Be Crazy


• A Fish Called Wanda

Honorable Mention (because "Top 14" just doesn't have the same cachet):

• My Big Fat Greek Wedding


• Groundhog Day


• Caddyshack


• 1941

Award for Special Merit (because "Top 15" just seems like overreaching):

• Napoleon Dynamite

Feel free to try to argue with my selections, you Silly English Pig Dog™ but you better be funny...

For your weekend reading pleasure

I suspect that not all of you are aware of Norman Geras's Normblog, and its extensive collection of interviews with a wide variety of bloggers. Many of them are fascinating, and if you've spent much time in the blogosphere you'll recognize a lot of the names of the interviewees.

At the very least, be sure to read Norm's interviews with Patti Niehoff (whose White Pebble is one of the Gazette's Neighborhood blogs), Scott Ott, the best satirist in the 'sphere, doing his thing over at ScrappleFace, and Manolo the Shoeblogger, whose Manolo's Shoe Blog will covers far more than fashionable, expensive, and terribly uncomfortable footwear.

Update: And although Scott Ott is a brilliant satirist, he can also be much, much more. Be sure to read his Memorial Day tribute.

Why I'm No Longer Interested in Pro Football

The sports section in this morning's local newspaper carries a section entitled "NFL News & Notes." It consists of four stories, with the following headlines:

• Vikings plead guilty in boat party case


• Bears' Manning pleads not guilty to L.A. assault


• Former Redskins star sentenced for cocaine distribution


• Report says [Cleveland Browns'] Droughns threw wife out door

I'm getting old. I can remember when offseason football reports involved trades and speculation about the upcoming season. Now we get the program guide for next week's episodes of "Law and Order."

"X3" => Cool Cubed

We caught the last matinee of X-Men: The Last Stand (aka X3). I'm hard-pressed to write a review that's not filled with spoilers, because the movie cries out to be treated as a continuation of the story and not simply as a standalone production. But I don't want to spoil anything so I'll just say that if you're an X-Man fan, this will truly be The Two Towers of the trilogy...easily the best and most interesting.

Some very random observations -- again, no spoilers:

• Kelsey Grammer as Beast is a welcome addition to the cast of characters, and was one of my wife's favorites (although at one point in the movie she leaned over and whispered, "he reminds me of Abraham Lincoln," and I almost cracked up.


• This one's got a high body count, and to paraphrase a movie quote I used a week ago, "they're gonna need some more X-Men."


• Much to the delight of teen-aged boys everywhere, we get an eyeful of Mystique without her, um, mystique.


• Famke Janssen didn't just have a bad hair day...she had a bad hair shoot. She also frequently appeared to be channeling Linda Blair.


• Along those same lines, while everyone else seemed to have gotten old since the last movie, Halle Berry is stuck in a time warp, and that's not a bad thing. Nosiree, not at all.


• Speaking of comic books brought to the big screen, the most interesting trailer of the evening was for Ghost Rider, starring Nicholas Cage and due out next February. MLB thinks Cage is too old for the role, but I say that you're never too old to have a flaming skull. But, you know, that's just me.


• X3 has a few welcome comedic touches in an otherwise fairly dark and tense plot. Wolverine even gets to crack a joke.


• Oh, and if you're a diehard X-Man fan, be sure to sit all the way through the credits, because...well, you'll see. If you're not a big fan, it probably won't matter.

Ant Rating:

Technorati tag: X-Men: The Last Stand | X3

Astonished Head's Terrific Trike Trek

I've been checking in on progress every week or so, but Scott's post marked the first official notice that Mr. Astonished Head (aka Ian Wood) has begun his high-tech trike trek across America.

He's riding from right to left, as you glare at Canada, and it should take him until late summer/early fall to arrive in the great northwest. This is one adventure that looks worth following, whether you're in love with the concept (I'm not, particularly) or the trike (which is one of those cool Aussie jobs) or just enjoy observations well-writ.

Shots Fired in Capitol Garage?

Update: Well, since things are turning out OK, why not have a little more fun with this...

No cause for alarm; it's just Dick Cheney.

[Just trying to pre-empt the Lenos and Lettermans of the world. You can envision the mad scribblings of the writing teams even as we, um, speak.]

Technorati tag: Shots Fired

Fire Ant Theatre: Whiner's Edition

Oh-kay, enough already. Here's something to tide you over until Monday.

The double dactyl ("DD") is one of my favorite types of poetry. The rules that govern the crafting of a DD are as seemingly complicated and arbitrary as a five year old's imaginary card game, but the results roll pleasingly off the brain (or the tongue).

Besides containing the rather heavenly phrase "the voiced labial fricative," the above-linked page contains many examples of DDs and links to many more. Among those links is one to a series of DDs by Jan D. Hodge (gender undetermined, although some claim that proper DDs are best left to the male of the species, in that only men can generate the right mixture of comedy and obscenity that typifies the poetic genre; I'll leave that debate to the anthropologists in the crowd). M. Hodge offers examples of DDs which take on Shakespeare and nursery rhymes (and which yield little to no obscenity, if that's a concern), including this one:

It's only fair to note that my attention to DDs was inspired by fellow Texas blogger Cowtown Pattie, by way of this post from December, 2004. Further, I suggest that you visit the first link in this post and study those rules one more time, as I feel a new Gazette contest in the making.

FATCR: A Special Announcement

For those of you who eagerly look forward to Fridays and the next edition of Fire Ant Theater's Classical Readings, I offer an apology, as well as a suggestion that you seek out a good therapist for you surely have deep-seated issues.

This week's edition of FATCR will appear next Monday, as we observe Memorial Day.

Horseshoe's New Website Underwhelms

Update: I've been reminded that the management and marketing of the Horseshoe was award to Dooley Management, in that great west Texas *ahem* city of Glen Rose. At least Dooley's website has photos.

Last January I was invited by a local ad agency to join it in submitting a proposal for the marketing of the new county "multipurpose facility," known as the Horseshoe. My contribution was, of course, the design and construction of the facility's website. Based on the guidelines provided by the county I submitted a bid, which was then integrated into the overall proposal submitted by the agency.

After several months of hearing nothing, I assumed that a competing proposal had won the bid. I wasn't particularly disappointed; while the project would have been a good addition to my portfolio, there are certain challenges to working for government, and I'm not lacking for business at this point. Still, my curiosity was aroused each time I passed the Horseshoe, wondering who got the job and what the results would be.

I noticed on Wednesday evening that the Horseshoe's marquee is inviting folks to visit its new website at www.midlandhorseshoe.com and I finally remembered to do that this morning.

Well.

OK, here's the good news. The site loads quickly and is easy to navigate*.

However, I think it fails to adequately represent what presumably will be marketed as a first-class facility. I'm still amazed that people will build multi-million dollar complexes and then think that 1990s-vintage websites are adequate to provide an increasingly important online image for those projects.

The site was apparently constructed by the county's IT staff, and while I commend them for not using FrontPage, I hope at some point they'll learn to (a) use CSS and (b) stop using things like font tags. However, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and posit that this perhaps is simply the first draft of a website that will eventually (and quickly?) evolve into something that matches the facility itself. Perhaps visitors will someday even be able to see a photo of the buildings.

I don't fault the county for trying to save some money, but I wonder if that's really what it's accomplished. And without trying to secondguess their decision, I'd like to point out that for less than $1,000 the county could have had a site like this.

*Don't confuse "easy to navigate" with "usable," however. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent but I admit to being completely stumped by the organization of the Horseshoe's Event Calendar, which seems to be presented in either a completely random sequence, or employs a sorting scheme that I'm too dense to understand.

Technorati tag: Midland County Horseshoe

Book Review: "The Lost Blogs"

I so wanted to love Paul Davidson's The Lost Blogs: From Jesus to Jim Morrison. After all, it's billed as a hilarious book containing hypothetical posts from blogs written by historically significant people who lived well before the medium was invented. It's a great idea. Unfortunately, like rice pudding, a little goes a long way (and I like rice pudding).

Davidson came up with blog entries for about 200 people, ranging from Joan of Arc to Jimmy Hoffa, and from Bonnie & Clyde to Bruce Lee. Some of them are, indeed, hilarious (e.g. Freud's self-analysis followed by readers' comments and his not-so-mellow reaction to them; L. Ron Hubbard's musings about the laughable idea of creating an entire religion based on themes from a sci-fi novel), but more often the posts routinely fall into the category of "here's someone famous blogging about a situation they face and we know how it turns out but isn't it amusing to see how they were conflicted and clueless about it." And, unfortunately, it's not amusing...just repetitive.

Sure, we can try to laugh about how Mo's dad used to poke him in the eyes with his fingers and how he swore he'd never do that to anyone when he grew up, and there might be some humor in Davy Crockett's attempts to find a meaningful phrase to commemorate what he was experiencing at the Alamo ("Be Mindful of the Mission" being one alternative), but after a while the historical blogging premise simply becomes too lame to carry a whole book.

But, you know what the final straw was for me? Each "post" begins with "From:" in which the URL of the fictitious blog is presented, and the reader is allowed to determine the identity of the blogger based on this address (e.g. "http://www.thecarpentryblog.com/~jesus/"). It adds a touch of realism, and some of them are cute. But then I saw the URL for a post from Chairman Mao (http://www.mao_zedong.ch/blog/) and from Bruce Lee (http://www.bruce_lee.ch/blog/) and immediately the book lost credibility. If you're going to write a book about blogging and try to give it enough authenticity to set up the humor, then you really ought to know that the Top Level Domain for China is not .ch -- which belongs, albeit inexplicably, to Switzerland -- but .cn! I mean, he gets .uk and .fr and .gr (Socrates) and even .gov (for Benedict Arnold), but missing China's TLD is a disappointing oversight.

Anyway, much as it pains me to say it, I can't recommend this book (and it figures, since I've got two copies of it), at least not to those who take their blogging seriously (even if their posts aren't). It was a nice try, but it would have worked better as a thirty page graphic novel.

Disclosure: This book was provided to me for review purposes by the publisher, Time Warner Book Group. I'm trying not to read anything into the fact that it actually sent me two copies.

Technorati tags: Paul Davidson | The Lost Blogs

Cover Art Contest

Final Update: We have a winner, and a Midlander to boot: Sherry correctly identified the cover as The Rolling Stones' "Child of the Moon." This is actually the jacket from a 45 rpm single, and is the flip side of the better known "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Congratulations to Sherry, who will be disappointed to learn that I actually have very modest dreams in terms of fame and fortune.

[Did I mention that our first dog was a chewer?]

Update #2: The cover grows clearer, even as the guesses get muddier.

Update #1: I'm feeling generous (we just got a brief rainshower) so I've uncovered some more squares.

The outcry over the absence of a Gazette cover art contest has been deafening, and who am I to resist a force of nature? You know the drill. Be the first to provide the correct artist and title of the record that the following cover belongs to, and win fame and fortune beyond my wildest dreams. Of course, every now and then, I'll uncover more of the artwork, if you're stumped.

Oh, and Wallace...it's not "A Hard Day's Night."

Random Thursday

But first...the next edition of FATCR will see a return to its roots, assuming I can figure out what they are.

• Here's what I love: someone who blogs for the sheer joy of writing. No explanations, no apologies, no distractions. Is it fiction? Is it biography? Don't ruin it by wondering, because if nothing else, it's universal. Go see Deborah's Glove Box Stories over at SanLeon.net and say howdy to yet another excellent Texas writer.


• I forgot to share this last week, but during a morning bike ride I was fortunate to glance over at a movement in the field off to my right and spot a burrowing owl (aka "prairie owl") landing atop the mound of dirt marking his burrow. Without getting too mystical, I'd just say that spotting one of those little critters -- which aren't exactly rare in these parts, but one might go years without seeing one -- can do wonders for your spirit.


• I don't have a camera phone, and haven't really even had the urge to get one, but that may change now that higher resolution models are on their way. According to this report in today's Wall Street Journal, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and other unnamed manufacturers plan a U.S. release of camera-equipped phones in the three-megapixel range. Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung already have two-megapixel phones on the market, and reports are that the image quality is quite good. Of course, megapixels are one thing; lens quality is quite another. I assume that the latter is getting better even as the former continues to increase.


• And, finally, the Burning Question of the Day©: Do dogs have dominant legs? I've observed that when Abbye and I come to a curb and I give her the "up" command, she generally first lifts her right front paw. Does this mean that she's right-footed? And what about hind legs? Is there a dominant back leg? (The answer to the latter question is possibly easier to answer for male dogs, IYKWIM.) Somebody needs to research this and get back with me, as I don't want to buy Abbye the wrong set of golf clubs.

By the way, I've just uncovered a bit more of the cover art presented in yesterday's contest.

The Man With Few Brains

Via everyone else in the blogosphere:

Your Brain is 60% Female, 40% Male

Note: Artist's depiction. This is really not my brain. My real brain is not radioactive. As far as I know. Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female. You are both sensitive and savvy. Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed, which can be terribly annoying to almost everyone else. But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve, which can be a huge benefit in the event CPR is required. However, we suggest that you invest in a hat as the sight of your exposed brain is really gross, and will possibly dissuade anyone from performing CPR if you need it.

I have absolutely nothing to add.

Teens Lack Financial Perspicaciousness? Like that's a shock...

The Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy was created in 1995 with the goal of ensuring that "basic personal financial management skills are attained during the K-12 educational experience." The Coalition had discovered what many of us suspected all along: the average student who graduates from high school lacks basic skills in the management of personal financial affairs.

The organization administers a biennial test to assess the level of financial literacy among American students. The 2006 test was given to almost 6,000 12th graders in 37 states, and the results released in April showed a very slight increase in scores over the 2004 test. Still, the average score for the 30 question test was just 52.4% (vs 52.3% in the previous exam).

I thought it might be interesting to look at the handful of questions where fewer than 40% of the test-takers knew the correct answers. I've extracted them from the complete test results, which are available via this PDF document. I've provided the correct answer in the blank line below each question; just click and drag over the blank line to reveal it.

Many savings programs are protected by the Federal government against loss. Which of the following is not?

a. A bond issued by one of the 50 States
b. A U. S. Treasury Bond
c. A U. S. Savings Bond
d. A certificate of deposit at the bank

Only 28.6% answered correctly (a); 49.3% answered (d)

Doug must borrow $12,000 to complete his college education. Which of the following would NOT be likely to reduce the finance charge rate?

a. If his parents took out an additional mortgage on their house for the loan.
b. If the loan was insured by the Federal Government.
c. If he went to a state college rather than a private college.
d. If his parents cosigned the loan.

Only 30.4% answered correctly (c); 32.9% answered (a)

If you had a savings account at a bank, which of the following would be correct concerning the interest that you would earn on this account?

a. Sales tax may be charged on the interest that you earn.
b. You cannot earn interest until you pass your 18th birthday.
c. Earnings from savings account interest may not be taxed.
d. Income tax may be charged on the interest if your income is high enough.

Only 22.7% answered correctly (d); 50.9% answered (c)

Retirement income paid by a company is called:

a.Rents and profits
b. Social Security
c. 401k
d. Pension

Only 37.7% answered correctly (d); 32.9% answered (c) and 25.9% answered (b)

If your credit card is stolen and the thief runs up a total debt of $1,000, but you notify the issuer of the card as soon as you discover it is missing, what is the maximum amount that you can be forced to pay according to Federal law?

a. nothing
b. $50
c. >$500
d. $1000

Only 15.1% answered correctly (b); 55.8% answered (a)

Kelly and Pete just had a baby. They received money as baby gifts and want to put it away for the baby's education. Which of the following tends to have the highest growth over periods of time as long as 18 years?

a. A U.S. Govt. savings bond
b. A savings account
c. A checking account
d. Stocks

Only 14.2% answered correctly (d); 44.8% answered (a)

I tend not to get too exercised over this perceived shortfall in "financial literacy." I'm pretty sure I was clueless even as a high school senior about many of these topics, either deferring to my parents for advice and direction, or deeming them irrelevant to my more immediate needs. On the other hand, I gained the knowledge I needed in college, and that's not an option or a choice for many kids.

I am surprised by certain things, like the abyssmal failure to understand that the liability for a stolen or lost credit card is not zero. This is a bit scary, given how many teens nowadays have their own credit cards.

The linked PDF has a section at the end where scores are broken down by demographic indicators. It's interesting to note how certain expectations by the students about their futures correlate with their financial acuity. For example, when asked about the type of work they intended to when they finished school (whatever that means), the group that picked "manual labor" scored only 41.0% on the test while the group that picked "professional worker" scored 54.9%, a seemingly significant difference that also raises questions of cause and effect, i.e. which came first, their career aspirations or their inability to grasp -- or lack of interest in -- basic personal finance?

Technorati tags: Jump$tart Coalition | Personal Financial Skills

Moving Right Along

It appears that Midlanders won't see relief anytime soon from our inefficient traffic control systems. According to this article in today's Midland Reporter Telegram, the cost of upgrading the system which controls traffic signal synchronization is almost twice what was expected.

The extra cost presumably comes from getting a hack-resistant system, which is probably a good thing.

This is an area where Midland is embarrassingly behind the times, and it's a more significant issue than at least one city councilman seems to understand:

No one is really going to notice the fact that it no longer takes 20 minutes to drive five miles from the mall to downtown? No one will notice that they no longer hit six consecutive red lights heading south on Midkiff Road (assuming they drive the speed limit)? No one will notice that it's possible to drive the six blocks through downtown in less than five minutes? Bill's metaphor is colorful, but inaccurate; I think he underestimates the perceptiveness of his constituency, and the level of annoyance that the current situation engenders.

There aren't a lot of "hot-button" issues that affect my voting preferences in local races...but traffic light synchronization is definitely one of them.

Dip your toe in the Blogathon pool?

Blogathon 2006 is the last Saturday in July. I'm still planning to participate, although the details haven't all been worked out. In the meantime, if you've got some interest in the event but aren't ready to dive in as a 24-hour poster, you should consider volunteering to help as a monitor. Here's the call for help from the event organizer:

The essence of the job is to (1) make sure that the bloggers assigned to you are meeting their commitment of posting at least every 30 minutes, and (2) offering encouragement and support to them throughout the event. It's a very helpful role and one that sounds like a lot of fun, without the pressure of having to actually do the 'thon. Plus, you and the other monitors get to select some participants for awards after the event.

There is some potential downside. Some of the blogathon sites support causes that you might not personally find acceptable, and some use some, well, edgy content to generate pledges (apparently under the "ends justify the means" philosophy). I don't know how much flexibility the event organizers will grant if you're assigned a site that you find offensive.

But, the biggest risk is that you might have to monitor the Gazette!

Technorati tag: Blogathon

Much Obliged

Got a lull in the action -- I know, I'll blog!

I spent a couple of hours this morning at church, conducting interviews of people wanting financial assistance for luxury items like electricity and gas bills. We did what we could with the $1K that was allotted to us for the day. If we'd known that the woman asking for a big rent check was going to be a no-show (how does that happen?), we could have been more help to a couple of folks. As it was, we had to send them along to other agencies to seek the balance of what they needed to make it through another month.

I went from there to the Petroleum Club, where I sat in a leather armchair, was attended to by a bevy of waiters with thick accents, and dined on poblano cheese soup and chicken salad chile rellenos, in the company of bank presidents, oil company executives, and gentlemen ranchers who spend more for gasoline in a month than most of those above-mentioned folks spend for housing.

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, not a thing, in my humble opinion. Don't get me wrong -- the contrast was thought-provoking, and even sobering. But I don't think it requires much more response than to consider (1) my own blessings and (2) whether I'm being a good steward of them. It certainly didn't cause me to question whether those aforementioned swells (I'm not a member of the Petroleum Club, by the way, but my Durango does use its share of gasoline) would be judged harshly for being so prosperous while others weren't. In fact, I happened to know that some of those folks also give away more of their money than some of us make in a year.

In fact, the purpose of that lunch was to discuss with a client a new program by which people can set up permanent endowments to benefit our community by providing funds for things like scholarships, assistance to the disabled, and capital for the expansion of social services.

So, the surroundings may change, and the approach may be more, well, peripheral, but benevolence comes in many shapes and from many directions. Whether any of us are doing all that we should be doing is something that's between us and our Creator, and with a sincere question of "are we doing what we need to be doing?" we're probably on our way to assuring that, indeed, we are.

Later...

As in, "catch you..."

This is shaping up to be a week of very little blogging, here at the 'zette, for reasons varied and sundry.

Holy Intruder, Batman!

We were sitting in church this morning listening to a sermon about Enoch, one of at least two people in the Bible who didn't die (can you name one other?). A sudden movement caught my eye, in front, above and to the left of our pew. At first, I thought a small bird had somehow found its way into the room, but as it flew closer I (and the other 250 other people near enough to the action) recognized it as a bat.

Using its unerring sonar, it flew about fifteen feet into the congregation and then made a swift-but-graceful right turn and landed on a man's neck, where it hung briefly on his shirt collar. There was an audible gasp from the congregation, causing the preacher to stumble momentarily as he attempted to process what was going on out there (remember, he's being taped for TV). Helpful congregants quickly brushed the creature from the man's neck and one brave soul grabbed the bat by the scruff of its neck (bats do have neck scruffs, don't they?) and carried it out of the room.

As luck would have it (if I may be so bold as to use that term in conjunction with a worship service), although the man whose neck provided an inexplicably attractive target for the bat turned out to be a visitor to our church -- he was also a former long-time member who was back in town temporarily and thus we didn't have to worry about the impression we made on visitors who show up to check us out only to be attacked by wild and possibly rabid creatures of the night.

The funniest thing happened after the service, however, as I was walking down the hall to Sunday School and struck up a mobile conversation with a woman in our department who had also witnessed the episode. We'll call her Vicki, since that's her name.

"Vicki, what'd you think of excitement in church?" I asked.

She shook her head and smiled. "Those barn swallows just get into everything, don't they?"

I did a kind of double-take and looked to see if she was kidding. She wasn't. "You do know that was a bat and not a barn swallow, don't you?"

"No. It was a barn swallow." (This is the point at which some of you are now channeling Monty Python. Don't deny it.) She added emphasis with a vigorous shake of the head.

"Vicki, you don't honestly think that a barn swallow would land on someone's neck, and then be so easily captured, do you?"

"It. Was. A. Barn. Swallow." I could hear her teeth clench.

A light went on in my feeble mind, and I understood what she was saying. "Ooooh, yeah...I know...I was just kidding. Those silly barn swallows."

If she needs to believe that we've got something other than bats in our belfry in order to re-enter our worship center, that's a game I'm perfectly willing to play along with.

I never did learn the ultimate fate of the poor little bat. If I find out, and it's not too gross, I'll let you know. It's just too bad that the sermon wasn't on the dietary code spelled out in Leviticus 11.

Aggregation Consternation

I just discovered that the Gazette is being included in a new (to me, anyway) aggregation site called austinsnews.net. According to this "note to content providers," the site is in "early beta" and won't be officially live -- whatever that means -- until October. This means that the content, format, and everything else about the site could change before then. I suppose that the site could even cease to exist. Certainly one outcome is that the Gazette's stay on the list could be temporary.

They still have a few kinks to iron out. One of the most glaring is this sentence in the sidebar: That's what we're doing -- telling people about the best blogs, music and citizens content from Nashville. Nashville? That confused me at first, until I hacked the URL and visited nashvillesnew.net and found the same basic layout and approach...only it really is for Nashville. I assume the template simply got copied onto the Austin site.

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. Obviously, we'll welcome any readers who might click over from the site, although I don't expect much traffic for a variety of reasons. And since I provide only excerpts of posts for the Gazette's RSS feeds, it's not as though austinsnews.net will get any benefit from the posts themselves (which, now that I think about it, is laughable to begin with). The thing that bothers me a bit is the copyright notice on each page of the site which implies that anything that appears on the webpage belongs to austinsnews.net, and we all know that's just not true.

Of course, this has been the concern about aggregators all along. They take content created by someone else and, well, aggregate it to presumably make it easier for consumers to find that content. My assumption is that austinsnews.net is not a work of charity...that the creators are interested in making a buck or two (and I'm a big fan of the profit motive). So the question becomes whether those whose content is being included should be concerned about sharing in any profits that our content helps generate. The site's "Note to Content Providers" addresses that...sort of:

So, if I'm reading this correctly, content providers might receive some sort of compensation, but only four per week will actually get anything from the website itself (anything else will come from reader tips).

This gets even more complicated for me, as founder of the Coalition of Unpaid Bloggers, a tongue-in-cheek non-organization that actually fronts a serious position: I do this blogging thing for many reasons, but getting paid -- or attempting to get paid -- is not one of them. What happens in the unlikely event that some of the Gazette's content actually generates some revenue via the aggregation site? (And what if the sun goes dark tomorrow?)

I'm willing to stick with the status quo and see how it plays out. I'm confident that they'll soon come to their senses and find some real content in place of the Gazette's posts. I mean, which part of "Content Free™" do they not understand?

When Brian Met Jen

Update: I smoked her out. Jennifer took the hint and shared the real story of how she met her husband. It's a better story than the one I made up...because it's true! ;-)

We met working summer stock theatre in southern West Virginia.

It was the mid-90s, the most boring part of a decade which will stand out in history only for the way it ended, falling into another century (depending on how you measure such things). Jennifer had just moved to Wheeling, West Virginia for the summer, intent on proving Daddy wrong when he said a Vassar girl had no business working summer stock in the Appalachians. She hated it when Daddy tried to plan out her life for her, as if the eight figure trust fund that kicked in only when and if he said so had any impact on her life.

Anyway, as she pulled the Jag into the parking lot of the little community theater, ready to begin a three-month job (if that was the proper term for a $6.50/hour, 14 hour per day gig) as costuming manager for the three productions the troupe would perform before Labor Day, the first person she laid eyes on was a big galoot atop a ladder correcting the spelling of "Cmoning Soon" on the theater's marquee. There was something about the ease with which the young guy switched the "m" and the "o" that made Jen (as her sorority sisters liked to call her) sit up a little straighter in the Corinthian leather of the Recaro bucket seats Daddy had special ordered for her car.

She soon learned that his name was Brian, and that he was home for the summer, taking a break from playing for Benetton Treviso, a professional basketball club in Italy. Brian led the league in rebounds and fouls, his aggressive style of play a sharp contrast to his gentle nature off the court. The league had sent him back to the States for a cooling off period after a particularly heated encounter with both guards of Benetton's arch-rivals, an encounter that resulted in hospital stays for the two guards and the Italian equivalent of a restraining order for Brian. He quickly agreed that working as a stage hand and helping with set design was an acceptable alternative to a stint in the Venice city jail.

Jen was alternately thrilled and scared by Brian's bad boy rep, and knew that Daddy would be livid when he found out that she was falling in love with the big guy. Who could have foreseen how life would turn out for the pair?

Note: This is what happens when a blogger brings up an important subject, then refuses to elaborate on it: other bloggers make stuff up to fill in the blanks. Are you ready to tell us the real story, Jennifer? ;-)

Book Pre-Review: "The Lost Blogs"

Update: This is why book reviews are generally written after the book is read, which sounds dull, I know, but may actually have some kind of strange logic to it. Anyway, I'm twenty pages further along and the book may not be exactly the non-stop laugh riot I made it out to be. Moses blogging the parting of the Red Sea is one thing; Thomas Paine soliciting titles for his papers is a little less than that previously mentioned thing. But it's still funny and I shall persevere. Don't lose heart.

Well, after some kind of snafu, no doubt involving the NSA, the UPS guy drove up and deposited on my porch not one but two copies of The Lost Blogs by Paul Davidson. I suppose the second copy was Time Warner's way of apologizing for not delivering my review copy before the book was published on May 8, thereby preventing me from scooping the entire blogosphere and cementing forever my status as the Golden Child of Reviews of Books about Fictional Blogging. But, hey, that's the way it goes.

Anyway, I'm only seven pages into the book and my advice is simple: drop what you're doing and go to your local bookseller and demand to purchase a copy of this book so that you, too, may snort your favorite beverage all over your lap.

Well, let me back up here a bit. If you're not a blogger, or at least a pretty voracious blog reader, then maybe you won't find the book all that hilarious. Davidson pretty well nails the various personalities that bloggers assume, only he imposes them on actual historical figures (the first six "bloggers" are, in order, Moses, John Wilkes Booth, Babe Ruth, Neil Armstrong, John Lennon, and Napoleon). Although there's some debate as to the actual historicity of John Lennon, but we won't get into that right now.

I'll post a complete review when I finish the book, but I know many of you have been waiting with bated breath since I first revealed my exclusive status for the receipt of the tome. To make it up to you, some lucky Gazette reader may well be the recipient of the second copy as part of a Major Award Package. Details will be blogged.

Technorati tags: The Lost Blogs | Paul Davidson

Whose Jesus?

Todd Agnew's song, My Jesus, is getting a lot of airplay on the Christian radio network K-LOVE, and it contains a few lines that just get all over me.

Those lines are found in the chorus:

First, whenever I hear someone begin a sentence with the words "My Jesus," it raises a red flag, because what often follows would be better expressed as "Here's how I imbue Jesus with my stereotypes, biases, and preconceived notions." I'm not sure any of us have the right to define Jesus for ourselves. He is "I AM," the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and while different aspects of His character and His attributes may take on different significance for different people (and that's just fine), nevertheless, He is Who He is.

...my Jesus would never be accepted in my church...

I'm tempted to ask Todd why he sticks with a church that adheres to such standards. I'm not saying that there aren't congregations who would turn away a dirty, bleeding visitor...but I surely haven't encountered any.

I think He'd prefer Beal St. to the stained glass crowd...

This is the most egregious (if that's not too strong an adjective) line, in that it's not even Scripturally accurate and comes perilously close to the church-bashing that's seems to be so in vogue nowadays. Help me out here if I've overlooked it, but I can't recall in the Bible where Jesus tells us which kind of sinners He prefers to be around.

Sure, Jesus did reserve His harshest condemnation for certain "church folk," but they were the leaders of the organized church -- Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and such -- and their sins, the ones that Jesus just wouldn't stomach, were the complete rejection of Him as Messiah and of the power of the Holy Spirit, and of the active abuse of their positions of authority to lead the people away from the truth (or, more accurately, the Truth). The fact of the matter is that Jesus loves the Church, and His return will be motivated largely by that love.

Of course, I don't know for sure what Todd had in mind when he singled out "the stained glass crowd," but millions of God-fearing, Jesus-loving, ministry-minded Christians attend mainstream churches that have stained glass windows, and I'm pretty sure that they're no more repugnant to Jesus Christ than whoever it is that frequents the unspecified "Beal Street" (Google gives 37,300 results for the search term). Last time I checked, we had all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and perhaps the only legitimate distinction between those on "Beal Street" and those in the "stained glass crowd" is that the latter already are the Bride of Christ and the former need His salvation. (Yeah, I know...not everyone in the church is saved, but everyone in the Church is, by definition.)

I'll close with an admission that song lyrics probably shouldn't be examined this closely, because the poetic license that accompanies them often leaves them open to interpretations far afield from what the author had in mind. And I don't question Todd's sincerity or the purity of his motivations. I'll leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide how to react to these issues. If anything Todd or I has written causes you to think about "your Jesus" and "your church," then this will be worthwhile.

The mike is open.

Sweaty but Smug

One definition of smugness might be noting that the temperature at 2:00 p.m. is 95° (heading for 102) and knowing that you got your bike ride out of the way before 11:00 a.m.

It really is a dry heat today, though...the heat index is a full five degrees lower than the air temperature.

It's a calm, quiet day, with the only sounds in the backyard coming from those birds too foolish to know how hot it is, and the electric meter, which is spinning like something out of an H.G. Wells movie.

Fire Ant Theatre: Classical Readings, Vol. V

Before you assign me to a new level of weirdness for this edition of FATCR, consider this: there will likely be people who listen to it and who can quote the whole thing from memory!

You know who you are.

Movie Quote Quiz

It's been a while since we had a good movie quiz, and I'm not about to change that. But here's a so-so one which will have to do until the real thing comes along. Identify in the comments what movie each of the following famous and not-so- lines come from. The winners will have the letters in their names used in an upcoming post.

1. I'd rather p*** on a spark plug...


2. Would you ask Picasso to sell his guitar?!


3. Hog lumps!


4. Rollin' with th' homies...


5. What hump?


6. You should be dead, but apparently you weren't ready for that either.


7. How much for the women?


8. Joanie, I don't lend my car to anyone with funny eyes.


9. I swallowed a bug!


10. They're gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess.

Blogroll Re-roll

Without sufficient consideration for the time it takes to do such a seemingly trivial task, I've set out to reorganize the Gazette's blogrolls. If you're a Texas blogger and your site has disappeared from the list, please be assured that it will resurface.

Here's why. I'm creating a new list of Texas blogs and also renaming the Midland roll so that it will be more inclusive of West Texas as a whole. Until I get all of this rearranging and setup work finished, the blogs that have been shifted from other categories into the new Texas list won't appear. My sincere apologies.

We now return you to your regular non-programming.

Random Thursday

Programming note: No promises, but tomorrow's edition of FATCR may answer the age-old question of how Monty Python might have turned out had they admitted Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

• When I moved from the corporate world to the world of the self-unemployed home office drone, I gained a new appreciation for housekeeping, as I took on many of the tasks that I had only shared (and pitifully irregularly, at that, I now realize) with my wife, who is still engaged in corporate dronage. And so it is that when someone like Jennifer posts her housework schedule, I take note. But I draw the line at pig wrangling.


• If the programming kiddos at The Sci Fi Channel are half as edgy as they think they are, they won't waste anytime coming up with a Gator Movie Marathon. Quick searches on IMDB.com for "crocodile" and "alligator" turn up plenty of movies that meet SciFi's incredibly high standards for schlock.


• Here's a new twist on the issue of whether employers should turn a blind eye to employees doing a little personal web surfing during working hours. From this week's Wall Street Journal's "Real Time" column:
  
  Bob Murcek writes: A whole different perspective on this is the IRS's. Our internal audit people at work are telling us that the IRS is starting to get really picky about situations where employers give employees anything of value that doesn't show up on a W4 so they can get their cut. Our auditors' understanding is that having time to surf at work is a benefit that has to be tracked by the hour, converted to dollars, and put on employees' W4s!
  
  Well. I wonder, then, why the same philosophy wouldn't require similar tracking for, say, restroom breaks? Uh oh...I hope I didn't give anyone any ideas.


• What's up with Tom Hanks's hair in The DaVinci Code, anyway?


• If you haven't quite grasped the nuances of having a family reunion in today's complicated world, there's help close at hand: just ask The Colonel. He's obviously been nipping at the secret spices, because he suggests that planning for a reunion should begin 18-24 months in advance. 18-24 months? For what? All you need are lawn chairs and deviled eggs. Anything else is gravy...although gravy would be good, too.


• I'm afraid I've got to side with Britney over the latest media-fueled controversy surrounding her parenting skills. How do her critics explain the fact that tens of millions of us (probably including those same critics) managed to achieve adulthood (if not maturity) without car seats, let alone facing the right direction in one?


• What in the world could have convinced $tarbuck$ that combining bananas with coffee is a good thing?


• We'll leave you with this, the Funniest Mother's Day Tribute Video Ever, link courtesy of Julie Neidlinger who, when we last checked, was awaiting some kind of intervention to rescue her from an apparent inability to stop rewinding and rewatching.

Another reason to switch to recumbents

Note: This post is engorged with euphemisms. It's hard to write one that isn't.

The Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS), a "cross-sectional, population-based multidisciplinary survey of health in 1,265 normally aging men (aged 40-70 years) conducted from 1986 to 1989" has provided data for a number of related studies and pronouncements. One of the more controversial was issued by Dr. Irwin Goldstein in 1997 when he declared that the sport of bicycling caused or contributed to bad things like prostate problems, impotence, and infertility. Dr. Goldstein's stance was not well-received in the cycling community, as you might imagine. In fact, the leading cycling magazine devoted a large part of an issue in 1998 to the subject.

The magazine's conclusion was (1) that there was nothing to Dr. Goldstein's claims, but (2) even if there was, the problems occurred in only a small percentage of riders, but (3) even if a lot of people had problems, they could be mitigated, but (4) if you had problems anyway it only proved that you weren't man enough to be riding bicycles. OK, I made most of that up; the magazine actually included the story of one of its editors who was experiencing these problems after a lifetime of riding.

However, Bicycling Magazine continues to grasp at studies refuting the type of claims made by Dr. Goldstein and others.

So, with that context, I wonder about the reaction to the fact that Specialized -- one of the world's largest manufacturers of bicycles and cycling equipment -- has introduced a bicycle saddle with the stated purpose of helping to "prevent erectile dysfunction." In fact, Specialized is running a full page ad (shown at right) in this month's issue of Bicycling Magazine, and you don't even have to read the copy to get an idea of what they're up to. But click on the image just the same, because the copywriters have done yeomen's work in making almost every word suggestive of the benefits of riding on this seat.

In fact, Specialized's ad is followed by four additional pages of very fine print in which its dealers across the country are listed. The company might just be doing its dealerships a favor, but my theory is that they're trying to minimize the possibility that any demand for this saddle will be expressed via online orders rather than by guys showing up at their local bike shops asking for "that bicycle seat that, well, you know...not that I need it, mind you. In fact, it's for a friend. Yeah, that's it; it's for a friend."

Normally, one might judge the potential success of new cycling products by how rapidly they're adopted by the pros. If you see a particular handlebar or wheel in the peloton at the Tour de France, you can be assured that it's first rate (or that a sponsor paid unimaginably large sums to get the riders to use it). But my prediction is that it will be a cold day in hades before you see a guy like Jan Ullrich or Ivan Basso roll to the line on a bike sporting this particular saddle...even if they really need it (and I'm not implying that they do). You might as well brand your forehead with a big red "L."

Regardless, my curiosity is aroused as to why Specialized decided to name this product the "Toupé." Perhaps it's appropriate considering that the word connotes an attempt to cover a shortcoming, but I wouldn't think this would be a big confidence booster for a potential buyer.

Technorati tag: Specialized Toupé Saddle

"It's not nice to mess with the Beatles"

Playlist Magazine has a fascinating -- well, if you're fascinated by trademark law, but who isn't? -- look at the long-running and contentious relationship between Apple Computer and the Beatles' business affairs company, Apple Corps. That relationship garnered the media spotlight again last week as Computer successfully defended itself against a lawsuit brought by Corps alleging misuse of the Apple logo in conjunction with the iTunes Music Store.

The case highlights the challenges arising from evolving technologies, and the importance of having a skilled legal team capable of drawing up contracts that can protect a company's interests even when the threats can't be exactly predicted. The article shows how Apple Computer's inability to do this hurt it in the past, and how Apple Corps' seemingly invincible legal team finally fumbled.

Technorati tags: Apple Computer | Apple Corps

When Hogs Fly

My pal Gregg was unimpressed with the world's most expensive motorcycle. Being an aviator, he tends to think in circles, as in "radial engines," and none of those wimpy Wankels, either. Here's what he's talkin' about:

According to Gregg, those are R-985 aircraft engines, made by Pratt and Whitney. I don't know if they're still being made but at one time, they were found on a bunch of aircraft, both military and civilian. You can pick one up in Tulsa for only $31,000.

I told Gregg that I was equally impressed with his taste in motorcycles, although I think I'd prefer the one with the transverse engine mount. I'd rather not be in the line of fire if one of those pistons ever decided to cut loose. (It appears that the guy in the bottom photo is contemplating that exact scenario.)

Technorati tag: Radial Engine Motorcycle

Not-so-subtle Anti-Bush Media Bias

CNN Headline News* is running a report on a poll conducted following last night's presidential speech about immigration reform. The poll showed that a significant majority of people are now favorably impressed with the president's immigration reform proposals, and that the speech effectively and positively changed the perception of many people regarding Bush's approach to the issue.

But what struck me about the report is the apparent unwillingness by CNN to let any positive news about the administration go unchallenged, as the poll's results were presented with this disclaimer (I'm putting this in quotes, although it's being recalled from memory): "These results do not and cannot reflect the opinion of all Americans, as the poll was limited to those who actually watched last night's speech." I can't recall ever hearing a similar disclaimer on other poll results, particularly those which happen to show dissatisfaction with something the administration is doing.

The irony is that the disclaimer actually has the effect of validating the poll, in that they might as well have said, "these results reflect the opinions of the population of Americans who went to the trouble to become informed about the issues addressed by the poll, and thus is more valid than most of our other polls which are conducted at John Kerry's most recent garden party."

*Why do I watch CNNHN? Because Fox can't seem to understand that I'm not interested in 24/7 coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape indictments, or whatever the flashiest crime du jour happens to be.

Mondays seem to be a universal condition

Julie's Monday didn't get off to a great start; I hope it got better. But I can relate to her plight. I would have posted an "it's Monday and I'm doomed" post, too, if I'd had the energy. Here's how mine started out:

• I stumbled into the kitchen at the usual time (5:30 a.m.) to find that the coffeemaker had undertaken the installation of a new "water feature" in the kitchen, consisting of two limpid caffeinated pools interconnected by a waterfall, with the lower level pool draining into a series of canals (aka the seams between the floor tiles).


• Our walk got cut short this morning by drizzle...not enough to do any good whatsoever in terms of water supply, just enough to annoy Abbye.


• A client dropped off a disk with some website updates, said disk being one of those CD-RWs from Hell that had an adverse reaction to a sunspot in another galaxy and in a fit of pique refused to give up its data. I tried five CD readers on four different computers before admitting defeat. Unfortunately, said client doesn't live here (the disk was couriered in [that sounds so Continental, doesn't it?]), so we'll have to wait for a new disk.


• The weather conditions made a bike ride inadvisable, and I didn't feel up to a run on the treadmill (one advantage I have over Julie), so I settled for putting the bike on the wind trainer and watching a really forgettable DVD during a painfully boring workout. [I admit that this may or may not have anything to do with Monday, but it was just par for the course, IYKWIM.]

OTOH, I did manage to wring a cup of coffee out of the kitchen rug, Abbye got out long enough to take care of some Important Business, I still have clients who occasionally give me money, and I have sufficient leisure time to engage in exercise for its own sake.

But, it still felt like Monday all day long.

George Lucas, are you paying attention?

Because this is more entertaining than two of the last three movies you gave us.

Wave o'the light sabre to Beth

Technorati tag: Aluminum Falcon

Congrats to a Gazette Reader!

We just noticed that regular Gazette commenter, Halliburton employee, and wickedly accurate shotgunner Janie Snelson was named "Board Member of the Year" for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Midland, Texas. With all she's got going on with her various volunteer efforts, I have no idea how she finds time to stop by here, but I'm glad she does.

Congratulations, Janie. It's folks like you who make west Texas such a great place to live!

Book Review: "Seeing"

I finished José Saramago's Seeing yesterday. This novel, which was published in Portuguese in 2004 but released in an English translation this year, is the follow-up to Blindness, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

The events in Seeing occur four years following the epidemic of blindness that swept the population of the unidentified country introduced in Blindness. The Pulitzer-prize winning author takes you pretty far into the book before any mention of those previous events, and even further before any of the characters from Blindness appear. Once they do appear, however, they become central to the plot and while it's not essential to have read Blindness to comprehend Seeing (no pun intended), it is helpful.

Saramago's writing style is unchanged: no regard for punctuation, sentences that run on for paragraphs, few obvious clues during conversations as to who is speaking...although none of these things, or even all of them collectively make the story difficult to follow. In fact, these literary affectations have the strange consequence of freeing the reader's imagination and allowing her or him to form a kind of partnership with the author.

This is a difficult book to review without revealing too much. I apologize to those who haven't yet read Blindness; my recommendation is not to read Seeing until you do. Seriously. Both books will be more meaningful if you'll read them in the proper sequence.

If you have read Blindness, you should know that on the surface...in the beginning...the two novels have nothing in common other than the author's unusual writing style. Whereas the first book was horrifying and brutal almost from the start, Seeing is light, fanciful, amusing -- even comical at times, in a Marx Brothers' Duck Soup kind of way. It's a more overtly politicial story than its predecessor, with an overarching theme that those in power will do anything to stay in power. You'll be tempted to look for allusions to current governments and politicians in Saramago's fictitious setting; any success you might have in this endeavor will be entirely yours.

I'll leave you with this simple warning about Seeing: it's a literary sucker-punch, and it doesn't end like it begins. If you're interested in following some of the characters you met in Blindness (who may very well have been introduced in even earlier works by the author; I've not read any of his other novels), I assure you that you'll want to read Seeing. What I cannot assure you is how you'll feel after it's all over.

Technorati tags: José Saramago | Blindness | Seeing

Quick trip...

Note to Beth: Snakes are mentioned in this post.

Just got back from a quick trip to Fort Stockton for Mother's Day. The weather today wasn't too bad, but yesterday the temperature hit 105° (41° C); fortunately, due to the low humidity, it felt like only 103. ;-)

We learned this morning that the church where I was baptized and my wife and I were married will observe its 100th anniversary in November. My family has been associated with it for exactly half that time, which is neat to contemplate.

Not a lot of news to report from FS. My brother said that he's already killed five rattlesnakes at their place ten miles outside of town, which is a lot for this time of year. Even more unusual, three of them had no rattles, which is never a good situation.

While we didn't see any snakes, we did see the following critters lounging in the next door neighbor's yard when we pulled up to my parents' house.

This is part of a rafter of wild turkeys that has invaded town, perhaps as a result of the drought. There have been as many as 12-15 of them in the group, but their numbers have been dwindling for reasons one can only imagine.

Hope you had a good Mother's Day, and that it wasn't overly filled with turkeys!

Movie Non-Review: "Poseidon"

I was typing the last sentence of a 300+ word review of Poseidon when IMDB.com locked up Firefox and my post went away. I've no enthusiasm for reconstructing it. Feh.

Short version: It is what it is. If you want a logical plot, character development, and intelligent dialog, rent Schindler's List. If you want a passable TPDS (Theatrical Popcorn Delivery System), you could do worse.

Ant Rating:

Technorati tag: Poseidon

One thing leads to another, Pt II

Don't bother looking for Part I. It does exist, but it's not worth the time. Trust me.

This has been a hectic week, work-wise. Went live with two new sites...picked up a couple of new clients to replace those two vacancies in my workload...dealt with an abundance of time-sucking errands. IOW, life. All that's to say that I've fallen dreadfully behind in my blog reading. Being able to simply follow links for the fun of it is a guilty pleasure in which I've been unable to indulge.

But, thankfully, there are folks who insist that I re-engage. One of those is David, the intrepid and prolific proprietor of the excellent Soccer Dad. He just sent me an email with a link and this cryptic sentence: "(I thought of you when I saw the mathematical one!)." The link was to a post entitled "Limerick Day" on the Almanac of Miscellaneous Merriment, in which a few examples of limericks -- good and bad -- are showcased. And, yes, there is one incorporating a reference to pi, which I assume David was referring to in his email. Boy, you do one lame post about pi and you're forever labeled an egghead. Well, the pi limerick is pretty good, but I like David's contribution in the comments dealing with the theory of relativity better.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. So I then pop over to Soccer Dad where there's a whole slew of good stuff that I missed this week, including this wrap-up of the blogosphere's take on Iranian President and Lunatic for Life Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent letter to President Bush. Again, a number of excellent quotes and links, but if you have time to visit only one of them, this is the one.

I swear, stuff like this is almost enough to make me quit trying to write and just become a full-time reader!

Fire Ant Theatre: Classical Readings, Vol. IV

Years before I knew what a blog was, I was blogging. Sort of. Like probably hundreds of thousands of others, I was writing stories and uploading them to a website for friends and family to read, and for the occasional serendipitious Google-led visitor (only it was Lycos, Infoseek, or WebCrawler back then). I wasn't prolific, but at least I was amateurish...and it's comforting, isn't it, to know that some things never change?

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to give voice to one of those early stories*, all of which have some basis in actual events.

*For the complete list, you could go here...or you could wait to hear if they'll eventually show up as an FATCR.

The "It's All About Me" Meme

The vivacious Rachel tagged me for this meme and I figured it was easier than anything I could do on my own, so here goes:

• I AM left-handed, but I play golf right-handed. If I played golf, that is.
• I WANT a cinnamon roll.
• I WISH I could fly.
• I HATE knowing that it's Thursday and my Tuesday tasks are still unfinished.
• I MISS scuba diving.
• I HEAR that Rome is beautiful this time of year.
• I WONDER how I'll die?
• I REGRET not learning to play the piano.
• I AM NOT who you think I am.
• I DANCE like everyone is watching.
• I CRY more easily than I once did.
• I AM NOT ALWAYS a hipster doofus.
• I MAKE WITH MY HANDS annoying drumming noises when I'm nervous.
• I WRITE because I can't sing.
• I CONFUSE "pan left" with "pan right."
• I NEED two cups of coffee every morning. At least.
• I SHOULD get a clue.
• I START posts while riding my bike.
• I FINISH eating everything on my plate. It's the polite thing to do.
• I TAG Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, James Lileks, and LaShawn Barber. C'mon, guys....don't break this chain, or your cousin's grocer will develop a disconcerting facial tic.

Random Thursday

Random Thursday will commence shortly but first I need to inform you that I've run into some problems with the next installment of Fire Ant Theatre. I'm in desperate need of a Spanish/Klingon dictionary, and it wouldn't hurt if you could direct me to an audio loop of Red Skelton's impersonation of Marilyn Monroe.

Now, where were we?

• I see where some folks are proposing random drug testing for members of Congress, using the logic that if it's advisable for public corporations, why not for public officials? Well, I'm not in favor of this proposal. My fear is that our Congresspersonages will all pass the screenings, and we're then left to ponder the implications that they're doing what they're doing with full possession of their faculties. I'm not sure I can handle the cognitive dissonance.


• We underwent "wellness testing" yesterday, courtesy of MLB's employer. I dislike the term, "wellness." It's one of those new-agey sounding words that isn't very good at its job. "Wellness" is all soft and formless, not nearly as meaningful as the correct word, "health." Anyway. While it's nice that the company pays what is probably a very large sum for each employee and spouse to get this testing done, I have to question some of the methods and results. For example, they had these high-tech cholesterol measurement machines that gave complete readings in five minutes. OK, that's cool. But at the next station, where flexibility, BMI and body fat percentage were computed, the tool for measuring height was a tape measure affixed to the wall, with someone eyeballing where they thought the top of your head matched a marking. My wife gained an inch in height via the process, while I lost one (so I guess we averaged out just fine).


• And don't get me started about the body fat measurement. I've never in my life measured more than 14%, and this one -- using some little device that looked suspiciously like a Nintendo game controller -- yielded a reading of 18.9%. The attendant said we could probably subtract five percentage points from the reading, which really adds to the credibility of the process. My question is this: whenever these things make errors, why is it inevitable that the error serves to make things seem worse than they really are?


• It was interesting that they hid the scale in a supply closet, I guess so nobody had to worry about someone else finding out what they weighed. And I wonder, why are we not equally sensitive about our heights (the tape-measure-taped-to-the-wall setup was out in the open)? I mean, weight is relevant only if correlated to height (so what if you need to be 12 feet tall to justify your weight...it's the principle of the matter!), so logically we should be just as sensitive to the idea of others knowing how tall we are. "But," you counter, "everyone can tell how tall you are just by looking at you." Uh, like they can't (and don't) decide for themselves how much you weigh just by looking at you? It's all very strange and human-like.


• Someday, I'd like to have a mountain bike with a Rhino Lining coating the frame.


• And, speaking of non-mountain non-bicycles, ever wonder what the most expensive motorcycle in the world sells for? Try $150,000, which may explain why Jay Leno might be the only guy who has one. Sure, it makes 286 horsepower at the rear wheel, but the neat thing is that you don't have to settle for a rearview mirror, as it comes with a rear mounted camera with LCD color display (plus side mirrors) so you can see what you've just left behind.

Cool little Firefox tip

OK, I lied...I do have something, after all, and even though it's shamelessly "borrowed" from the current issue of MacWorld magazine, it's still something you might find useful.

This is a one trick pony kind of tip, but if you ever find the need to open a page that you just visited in a new tab, there's a shortcut to accomplish this. Command+click* on your browser's forward or back button (whichever leads to the page in question) and that page will display in a new tab.

When I first read this, I thought that it was neat but fairly useless...but I find that I'm starting to use it more and more. Perhaps you'll find it helpful as well.

*Well, that's the key on my Mac's keyboard; I don't know what the equivalent Windows key is called. But I'll bet you can figure it out.

Technorati tag: Firefox

Gwynne's "B" Bop

I got nothin' myself, but Gwynne's got a list of classic B movies over at her joint that's worth looking at and weighing in on.

More WIT

The Washington Improv Theater (aka WIT) has a new entry in the 48 Hour Film Project, and it's pretty dang funny, in a junior high schoolish way (and, really, isn't that the best way?).

If you're on dialup, you might want to try the lo-res version of the seven minute film.

And if you're wondering why we care about WIT, you can get the story (complete with local connection) here.

I understand that the film is as yet untitled, so feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments. Who knows? Molly (the actress in the film) might stop by here and make you an honorary WIT, which beats a Fire Ant coaster any day.

Technorati tags: Washington Improv Theater | 48 Hour Film Project

This Post is Brought to You by the Bodily Function, Sweat

They're predicting a high temperature this afternoon of 98° (that's F; for you C lovers, that's a less impressive 36.7), and as high as 105 in some surrounding towns.

I think this calls for some mental refreshment, and even though our trip to Lake Tahoe in February proved to be ill-fated, the memories are still cool...

MLB at the turnaround point of a snowshoeing hike

Wonder what July will be like around here?

Public Service Announcement

Now that Cox Communications has completed the sale of its west Texas operations to Cebridge (soon to be known by the uninspiring name, "Suddenlink," which conjures up visions of car wrecks), its customers will be forced to change their email addresses.

For those of you who have been using esiegmu -at- cox dot net to send me email, please start using info -at- ericsiegmund dot com, effective immediately (although you can continue to use the old address for forwards of emails warning me about how Madeline Murray O'Hair is going to reach out from the grave and finally succeed in turning all the churches in America into brothels unless I sign an FCC petition). The old address won't go away for a few months, but I figure it's better to try to stay ahead of the curve. Plus, if you have a lot of Midland folks in your address book, you'll undoubtedly be making similar changes for them; just think of me as practice.

Thanks for your patience. In order to prevent this from happening again, I'll do my best to resist the temptation of selling my name to someone else. I can't make any promises, though.

Indie CDs

What do Mic City Sons, Bellybutton, Gods and Monsters, and Iron and Wine have in common? Well, as you've probably intuited (yech...I hate that word) from the post title, they are all indie CDs, but they also comprise 0.39960% of Coverpop's Flash-based interactive Indie Rock compilation.

If you have an hour or so to kill, this is not the page to visit, as you will surely end up doing just that.

Logos and Licenses

I'm sure that everyone has heard by now that Apple successfully staved off a challenge by the Beatles's record label, Apple Corps, to the computer company's use of the the Apple logo on the iTunes Music Store. But that wasn't the day's only resolution of an ongoing dispute involving a trademarked item.

Texas A&M University (my alma mater, and that of MLB, my dad, my brother and an uncle) announced today that it had finalized a licensing agreement to allow the Seattle Seahawks football team to legally use the university's "12th Man" trademark. According to the news release:

The Seahawks organization had essentially thumbed its nose at A&M's polite requests to either discontinue using its trademark or to agree to reasonable licensing terms, so the university took 'em to court. In the process, it caught some flak for making a big deal out of what many apparently thought was a trivial matter. The news release addressed this in a typically spirited fashion:

It should be noted that A&M began using the "12th Man" term in 1922, and registered two trademarks for its use in the 1990s.

I wouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from this, although it does seem to confirm one rather obvious warning to those who would try to take advantage of the normally easygoing Lone Star style. Whatever you do, amigo, don't mess with Texas.

Oh, I think that's trademarked.

Technorati tags: Texas A&M | The 12th Man

The Somnolence of the Cams

I've logged hundreds of hours behind a TV camera in my role as volunteer operator at church, but yesterday's experience during the morning worship service was a new one.

Here's the set up. Normally, we have four cameras, with the signal from each running through a control board which allows the control room to specify which images will appear on-screen at any given time. I've always taken that control panel for granted, never contemplating what might happen if it ever stopped functioning, because, after all, it never had. Until yesterday morning.

Like any well-designed piece of electrical equipment, the board has a fuse meant to protect it from damaging power surges. Yesterday morning, the fuse picked a particularly uncomfortable time for self-emolation, as it did so while my camera was on the air.

That meant that instead of having three other camera shots to choose from, the control room was limited to whatever my lens was pointed toward. And instead of switching shots every 10-15 seconds...I was it.

This wouldn't have been so bad if it had happened during the sermon, when we change shots much less frequently (we've yet to adopt an MTV-style for that part of the service, although I'm sure that's on the horizon). But we were still in the music part of the service and we just happened to have an edgier-than-usual (shall we say?) praise band on the platform. The result was that they were rockin' out and I was doing these slow-motion pans and zooms and pull-outs more appropriate to the Lawrence Welk Show (which, for you kiddos out there, was a dark ages "musical variety show" transmitted via smoke signals and wherein the band played instruments made of mammoth tusks while ladies in evening gowns made from sabre-tooth skins danced a primitive jig known as a "polka.").

The situation lasted only about five minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. Perhaps it needs to be added to an updated map of the levels of hell: "Camera operator forced to do an eternity of slo-mo pans while listening to polkas."

Will Underestimates Memory

I like George Will's columns. He's insightful and articulate (but what nationally syndicated columnist isn't? Art Buchwald doesn't count.) and covers a wide range of topics (his columns on baseball are enjoyable even for a non-fan). But I think he's off base with the admonition in yesterday's column that it's every Americans "civic duty" to see United 93 lest we forget the events of 9/11.

Listen, I apologize that I keep harping on this and as I've said before in this space, I have no doubt that the movie is important -- maybe even critical -- to perhaps millions of Americans, for a variety of reasons. But we don't all fall into that category.

For me, at least, I no more need to see United 93 to remember what happened and what's still at stake in the War on Terror than I needed to see The Passion of the Christ* to remember the sacrifice that I believe Jesus Christ made on my behalf 2,000 years ago.

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that this is the last time I'l