블랙 골드

Oh, I'm sorry...you don't read Korean? Well, it translates as "Black Gold," and here's the South Korean version of the TV show, filmed right here in the Permian Basin.

It's a lot like the TV show, only without any drunk roughnecks or bleeped words. Well, as far as I know.

Tip o'the hard hat to the Permian Basin Petroleum Association

Showing off the neighborhood

If you live in the Permian Basin and watch TV, you've undoubtedly seen the ads for Woodland Park with the crawler announcing the "open house" this Saturday from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm. It's open to the public (of course) and there will be free hot dogs and drinks, plus all the builders will have model homes open for touring.

Here's an aerial view of the development taken last Sunday afternoon; click the image to see a larger version. If you're having trouble getting your bearings, that's A Street roughly bisecting the photo from left to right; a portion of the polo field is in the lower right corner, and Midland Country Club is near the top on the right. Our house is in the lower left portion of the development. If you look closely, you can see MLB working in the yard, wearing a halter top and hot pants. I'm not sure why she insists on doing that, but the neighbors haven't complained*.

I'm all for this, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's provided motivation for the developers to clear the vacant lots of the randomly scattered piles of construction material, pick up the litter along the roadways and around the common areas, and mow the weeds everywhere.

I was considering retrieving my sailboard from storage and putting on an exhibition during the afternoon, but after seeing the main pond from the air, I think I'll pass. The whole thing looks way too much like a human digestive tract to me, and I'm pretty sure that circle thing floating in it was featured in a Sci-Fi Channel movie last month.

OK, that's really just moss. The hot weather combined with the runoff of nutrients from all the new plants makes the stuff literally explode; it's a real challenge to keep it under control. This shouldn't be so much of a problem in the future (he said without a real sense of enthusiasm).

If you're in the market for a new home, or just curious about what's going on out at the end of A Street, stop by on Saturday.

*You cannot even begin to imagine the trouble I'm now in.

Clock Faces

I figure I already have too much junk in the sidebar to accommodate this, but it is pretty cool:

If you'll check this post every day, you'll see that the calendar really works. And my visitor stats will be huge! Or, not as teensy.

It's the Human Calendar®; you can learn more about it here, and grab one of the code variations here. There's even a variation that will run on a Chumby, whatever the heck that is (my new mantra: Intentionally Ignorant).

But, more interesting to me than the human calendar is the Human Clock project, conceived by the same guy. Go to this page, click on "View the Clock," and start playing around with it. You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. The fact that the guy convinced Lance Armstrong to join in validates the concept, I'm sure you'll agree.

I'll be more impressed if the organizer ever gets his clock to display seconds.

And, once again we see that the simple fact that something can be done is quite sufficient justification for actually doing that thing.

Testing...1, 2, 3...Is this thing on?

Another week, another server migration. Kudos to my webhost for taking an unreliable server off the grid, and for warning me that the transition wasn't likely to be seamless.

If you're reading this, then at least one problem has been diagnosed and corrected.

I'm still working on the issue of quality posts around here, but I'm pretty sure I can't blame the host for that one.

"Glove Box Stories" is Back!

Deborah Hendrick crafts original fiction with an authentic Texas accent; you'll be hard-pressed to find better on the web, and it broke my heart when she stopped publishing Glove Box Stories early in 2007. I'm pleased to report that she's returned to publishing, and the resurrected Glove Box Stories is back with a cool new design but the same seductive prose.

Be sure to read Deborah's "I'm back...but here's where I've been" post, and then get caught up on the fascinating folks who inhabit her imagination. But let me warn you – sometimes a pleasant drive ends with a Hill Country buck coming through your windshield, and you never see it coming.

Welcome back, Deborah!

Eel on a Wheel

OK, first let me apologize for the post title. I was attempting to riff off Snakes on a Plane, and obviously grew desperate. I'm still kicking myself (which, by the way, is quite painful, whether you connect or not) for failing to come up with "Snakes on a Plain" for a serpent-related post that I wrote not long after the movie was released; a reader suggested that title.

Now, where were we? Oh, I know. Remember that scene in the excellent Breaking Away where Dave had caught up to the Cinzano cycling team during a road race, and to express their ire at being schooled by an American kid, one of the Italian riders stuck a tire pump through Dave's front wheel, sending him head over heels, ending his race (and his reverence for the foreign racers)? Well, it could have been worse. Those Italians could have been toting snakes!

I waited until things dried up a bit before going for a ride this afternoon, and while cruising the streets of a new undeveloped neighborhood about a mile from our house, I came across this four-foot-long bull snake stretched across the asphalt. I braked in front of him and snapped a couple of photos with my phone, at which point he grew tired of the hoopla and resumed his journey. My bike's front wheel posed no obstacle for him.

I can't see a darned thing on my phone's viewfinder in bright sunlight, so I pointed and shot hoping that I was somewhere in the neighborhood as the snake slithered through the spokes. As luck would have it, of the half dozen shots I took, the most interesting one also turned out the best.

Meteorological Musings

We've been held captive this week to the meteorological equivalent of the dry heaves: uncomfortable and futile. Each evening (or early morning), we're brushed by the the edges of thunderstorms on their way to deliver rain to other places, providing us with brutal winds and stampeding tumbleweeds, and just enough moisture to waterspot windows and turn the dirt they deposited into a dull ochre paste on the porch.

But this morning – ah, this morning! – is different. The past hour was filled with a steady rainfall, one that came straight down rather than coming in sideways. We got the best of the thunderstorm, without hail, high winds, or even power surges or blackouts.

Being the fortunate soul I am, I was able to abandon my workplace and relocate to the front porch to observe the neighborhood under these unusual conditions. As thunder echoed in the distance, I watched a cottontail rabbit make its way across the vacant lot, followed by a pair of blue quail, silly in their self-importance. The barn swallows from next door were engaged in their morning commute, flying at slow speeds and at eye level back and forth in front of me. I became aware of the percussion of raindrops hitting various surfaces: a steady dull patter of the stream from the roof onto the cedar mulch in our flower beds, the sharper tat tat tat as the drops bounced off the fanned fronds of the small palm tree, and – best of all – the plop of drops into the stream running vigorously down the gutter, affirming that we'd gotten enough rain to make a difference, at least for today.

Today's the first day of summer. Or is it? I can never remember whether it's the 20th or the 21st, and in light of previous discussions on these pages about the pervasive effect of the internet, I'm choosing to remain intentionally ignorant. Rainy West Texas mornings will do that to a person. I hope you'll join me.

Random Thursday

Scattershooting* while pondering what kind of hangovers Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Justin Leonard, and the rest of the mortals on the PGA Tour are enduring this morning after what must have been a huge celebration last night following Tiger's announcement that he'll miss the rest of the season due to knee surgery. Likewise for the PGA and TV network officials who surely drank themselves into oblivion, albeit for a different reason: despair over what will likely be a huge drop in broadcast ratings for upcoming tournaments.

• My wife had the best line following the revelation that Tiger played the US Open on a torn ACL and with a double stress fracture: Rocco Mediate must feel even worse now, knowing that he was beaten by a guy with one leg!


• Speaking of Tiger Woods, and building on yesterday's post about the impact of the Net on the way we think, New York Times syndicated columnist David Brooks has an excellent piece about the golfer's otherworldly ability to focus. To more fully appreciate this skill (gift?), read Christine Rosen's essay, The Myth of Multitasking" (hat tip to Nicholas Carr).


• A local woman was quoted in this morning's newspaper about the importance of Juneteenth: More so than the Fourth of July, that's something we should never forget. Given the highly-charged emotional implications of that sentiment, I wonder why the newspaper chose to make it the pull-quote for the article? Or, did I just answer my own question?


• Did you catch the premier of Black Gold last night? Neither did I. Tru-TV is on a higher tier channel lineup, and isn't included in our subscription. That's a shame, because I'd love to blog about it, given that it's shot in our backyard and features people we run into every day. I'm hopeful that other local bloggers aren't as chintzy with their cable budgets and will provide recaps of the episodes. Update: According to George (whom I knew I could count on!), "Black Gold" episodes will be re-broadcast on TNT. Last night's premier will be re-run tonight at 9:00.


• I'm on the mailing list for news releases for a software company called Akvis. The company makes image processing software, and I've tested some of it in the past. Anyway, I received their latest release this morning in which they announce the relocation of their corporate headquarters from Russia to Canada. I was amused by some of the statements in the release.
  • The company changes its corporate style after moving its head office to Vancouver, BC, Canada. - Translation: We'll be drinking less vodka and more Big Rock.
  • AKVIS establishes presence on the North American continent and opens direct access to the wide North American software market. - So, the location of a software company's HQ is a major decision in deciding whether to buy its products?
  • ...while dipping into the highly qualified Canadian labor market will undoubtedly improve manufacturing quality. There's probably a way to be less flattering to the Russian labor force, but I'm at a loss to think of it.
  • To underline the importance of the move, AKVIS changes its visual identity and accepts a brand-new logo. - We may be moving to North America, but we're still using ESLers to write our press releases.

  OK, I'm off to watch the new batch of baby killdeer in the park. They're at a developmental stage equivalent to that of human teenagers, so clumsy that if they were driving, they'd be hitting every dumpster in sight.

  *As always, a debt of gratitude is acknowledged to Blackie Sherrod

  Posted by Eric at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
  
  

Is stupidity the Net effect?

Nicholas Carr has written an interesting essay for Atlantic Monthly with the provocative title, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. Carr claims that his reliance on the Web and search engines in particular has blunted his ability to immerse himself in a lengthy book, to engage in – as he calls it – deep reading. He posits that immediate access to almost every conceivable bit of data, along with the overload of content that accrues to a "wired" lifestyle, is actually changing the way his brain processes information. And he's not sure that the change is a good one.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that he's not alone. Scroll through the posts on his blog and you'll see repeated instances of correspondents documenting how they no longer have the patience for books in treeware form, and how their intellectual pursuits have changed so as to emphasize the end result instead of the process. Just give me the answer; I don't need (or want) the back story.

Journalist Bill Thompson extends this theme with an essay on the BBC News website entitled Changing the Way We Think. He describes the work of a Swiss developmental psychologist who hypothesized two processes that he believed lay behind the development of knowledge in children:

Thompson then uses these processes as a framework for describing why our reliance on the internet is changing the way we create and build our world view.

I find all of this fascinating, and I can't help thinking that the fact that it's even being discussed in such depth is perhaps an indication that the worry is overblown. On the other hand, I have no idea how many of you have actually read this far in my post, so perhaps Carr, et al. have valid points after all.

Adding to the fascination is Thompson's reference to Maryanne Wolf's new book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Wolf argues that "reading is not an innate ability for humans but something we have to learn how to do, and there is no reason why different forms of literacy should not emerge as new technologies do." "Different" isn't necessarily synonymous with "inferior."

More Invaders

The Spring From Hell continues. Mother Nature, knowing full well that I spent almost two hours yesterday cleaning driveways, porches, and windows after Monday night's storm, decided to up the ante and put me in my place. When we awoke this morning, this pile of tumbleweeds was evenly distributed across our front yard, porch, and flowerbeds.

I contemplated placing a quick order with NAO Design, but grudgingly admitted that this approach would likely not endear me to the neighbors. Plus there's that pesky issue of prison time to consider.

On the other hand, there's probably less dirt to clean up in prison.

This wouldn't have been so bad if we'd at least gotten some rain out of the storm.

Oh, did I mention that I'm allergic to tumbleweeds? So, I've got that going for me.

Back Yard Birds

[Getting tired of nature photography? Sorry. But, I'm almost done!]

We went to Fort Stockton on Saturday for Father's Day, and I spent some time sitting on the back porch with my dad watching birds come and go around the backyard birdbath. The show was irresistible and I had to get my camera.

Here's a landing sequence for one of the doves who was a regular visitor:

I was impressed by the way he made a sharp right turn just before landing on the rim of the bath. One doesn't usually think of them as being particularly graceful.

According to our bird book, this is a Lesser Goldfinch. He kept his back to us, making for less interesting photos, but aiding in identification due to the distinctive white markings near his tail.

I could use some help with this next one. A young robin, perhaps?

Here's another oddity. See the dark stripe on the back of the dove's neck? That marking does not appear on any of the examples of dove species in our bird book. The shape of the head and the smooth plumage makes me wonder if this isn't actually a pigeon/dove hybrid. Is such a thing possible?

I'm not a birder, but I do enjoy the cosmetic and behavioral variations of the various species. And I can think of worse ways to while away a hot summer afternoon in West Texas.

Book Review: "The Year of Living Biblically"

A.J. Jacobs's first book, The Know-It-All, chronicled his quest to read the Encyclopedia Brittanica from A-to-Z. Jacobs has now extended his version of literary flagpole-sitting to the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, in which he describes his attempts to adhere to the laws and commandments – Old and New Testament – set forth in the Bible.

Jacobs is a self-described agnostic, a secular Jew who had almost no exposure to religion, Jewish or otherwise. The only Bible he had when he started was a King James Version which he had somehow acquired from an ex-girlfriend, and which he had never opened. But he was intrigued by the apparent fascination of millions (if not billions) of people through time with what was written in the Bible, and chose this method of trying it on for size, so to speak.

His efforts are, of course, a gimmick...a hook to attract attention (hence my earlier reference to flagpole sitting). He also picked a potential minefield to meander through, given the reverence many of us have for God's Word. (Can you imagine someone taking a shot at the Koran in this fashion, for the purpose of writing a humorous book about the experience?) So, you might be surprised that I recommend reading his book, especially if you are a Christian. Here's why.

In addition to being a well-written and entertaining diary of a man trying to live with one foot in the 21st century and the other in 4,000 B.C., Jacobs's observations and experiences provide much food for contemplation. Most of the following items were probably not even on the author's radar screen as he wrote his book, but that doesn't make them any less valid.

• He reminds us of the Jewish underpinnings of our faith. Through liberal consultation with various religious advisers, Jacobs sheds light on the Jewish traditions surrounding many of the [primarily Old Testament] commands. We also get to see how some modern-day Jews continue to observe the letter of the Law.


• He unwittingly demonstrates the absolute futility of living a life that's "good enough" to please God. Jacobs is quite forthright about his failures in living up to even some of the most seeming simple commandments, and his frustrations are a reminder of the importance of God's grace.


• His attitude nevertheless serves as a valuable reminder of the importance of putting God at the forefront of our thoughts and works. We are called to be holy, even as God is holy. A good place to start is to dwell on His word in all things.

Of course, as interesting – and occasionally hilarious – as it might be to watch someone try to shoehorn ancient Jewish traditions into a modern New York City lifestyle, the ultimate question for Christian readers has to be: what about Jesus?

Jacobs lays out his quandary in clear terms: If I don't accept Christ, can I get anything out of the New Testament at all? What if I follow the oral teaching of Jesus but don't worship his as God? Or is that just a fool's errand?

In the end, Jacobs cannot – will not – acknowledge Jesus Christ as the messiah that his forefathers prophesied about, and the Christian reader will find his stance puzzling and disappointing. How can someone dive into the Bible – a book comprised of revelations inspired by God Himself with the overarching purpose of pointing mankind to the Savior – and still come away a non-believer?

Jacobs states that Ecclesiastes is his favorite book in the Bible, presumably because of its pragmatic wisdom and advice. It's ironic then that in his quest to live according to the truths of the Bible, he is unable to recognize The Truth for which the book was written. That, in the end, made his exercise the ultimate "vanity of vanities."

Sometimes, you get lucky...

You know that sunset I photographed, the one in the previous post? That dust storm coalesced into a thunderstorm, with a pretty dramatic lightning show. And for once in my life, my finger was on the shutter button at the right time:

Click the photo for a larger version.

Gotta love that motor drive on the Canon.

June Sunset

In one direction, a post-apocalyptic sunset:

In the other, the edge of the thunderstorm that's causing it:

We're listening to thunder, but I'll bet all we get is noise and dust.

It's Official...

...we're living in the country.*

I walked out of the office into the living room and found this nasty fellow holding court. He was about 12" inches long and had a bad attitude, flinging himself across the room at my head and bouncing noisily off the wall as I managed to duck out of the way at the last second.

OK, not really. He was about 1 1/2" inches long and wasn't enjoying his stay in our house too much, thanks to Monday's visit from the exterminator.

This is going to be hard for most Midlanders to believe, but this is our first in-home scorpion sighting in our 26 years of living here. Frankly, I could go another 26 years without repeating the experience. Scorpions rank right up there with spiders on my ick list.

What's more worrisome is the prospect of our poor blind dog encountering one.

*We're not really in the country, but you can see it from our front porch.

Google's new favicon rocks the design world

Quick. Open a new tab and do a search using Google. Notice anything different? Of course you do: the familiar uppercase "G" in Google's favicon has been replaced with a lowercase "g," and that change has some folks upset.

The new image is taken from the second "g" in Google's almost universally-recognizable logotype, for reasons best explained here.

To my eye, the new icon looks a bit like a deflating balloon, and flaccidity is probably not a desirable corporate image. On the other hand, it also resembles an infinity symbol, and that's good, right? Like in, "infinite profits"? However, in the end, I find it's a tempest in a teapot. It will take all of five minutes to become adjusted to the new image...if one even notices the change to begin with.

If you think you have a better idea, you can become a part of Google's efforts to crowdsource (SitePoint's term, not mine) a new design.

It's interesting to note that the new favicon hasn't yet been universally adopted. Firefox's search box still uses the old image. I guess it will take a while for this to percolate through the entire web.

Give the Gift of Flame

Father's Day is Sunday, and if you're tired of giving the same old ties, after-shave, or Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolets, allow me to suggest something that every man needs to turbo-charge the family cookouts: a flamethrower.

The NAO F542 propane-powered flamethrower represents the pinnacle of fire-shooting consumer devices, ...featuring all-brass finish, carved wooden grips, adjustable aperture, and the ability to cook gourmet meals in under 45 seconds!

I understand it will even sterilize tomatoes.

If Dad is the more active or less pyromaniacal type, NAO's recumbent trike design is interesting, with the ability to lean into turns thanks to a pivoting frame.

The Incredible Shrinking Math Skills

The last few times I've donated blood I've noticed that the interviewer always asks for my height, which I normally give in feet and inches, and he or she pauses for a moment to mentally convert that data into inches for input to the blood bank's computer system. I decided that I would save them the trouble of that small mental calculation, so as I sat down for the interview yesterday, the question was delivered and I confidently replied, "71 inches." The interviewer didn't miss a beat in the input process and we moved on to the more serious questions, like whether I'd ever played Twister with farm animals*.

It wasn't until a few questions down the line that I realized that my answer, however helpful in its phrasing, was, well, wrong. I'd shorted myself a couple of inches [insert your own joke here], as the correct answer was 73**. But by then, I didn't want to try to correct the mistake, fearing that I'd be accused of throwing up a smokescreen to avoid revealing whether I'd ever had illicit relationships with gelatin-based desserts***.

In hindsight, I probably should have chosen accuracy over efficiency, although I'm not sure what my height has to do with my ability to squirt a pint of blood into a plastic bag.

*The answer is "no."
**The correct answer used to be "74," but after a couple of years of grousing about the apparent inability of various nurses to correctly lower that measuring bar onto the top of my head, I grudgingly came to the conclusion that I'm no longer immune to the force of gravity.
***The answer is "no." As far as I know.

Must be family reunion time...

...because cousin Wanda's world famous deviled eggs have made an [ever-so-brief] appearance:

This must have been what I was anticipating yesterday when I labeled my weekly backup DVD "6/6/06."

Concho Resources to buy Henry Petroleum

This will undoubtedly be front page news in the Permian Basin: Concho Resources has entered into agreement to buy the assets of privately-held Henry Petroleum in a deal valued at $565 million.

Henry Petroleum has been a fixture in the local oil business for as long as I can remember, and Jim Henry has become one of the elder statesmen of the industry. It's sad to see the company go, but at least the assets (and people) are going to another locally-managed company.

Verizon + Alltel = Better TV?

If Verizon is successful in its attempt to purchase rival Alltel, the guy most likely to be seen crying is Chad Brokaw, the blue-shirted spokesman in the increasingly lame series of TV ads pitting Chad against the four nerdy losers representing the competition. (What's up with that wizard, anyway? I keep expecting a tie-in with The Hobbit.)

Or, Verizon could continue the series, but have Chad become the slave (ala Seinfeld) of Matthew Brent, the nunchuk-wielding Verizon avatar.

As a current Alltel customer, my take on the combination is that it's one more justification for an iPhone.

What a difference a year makes

Those of us who are shaking our fist at this year's crummy weather and seeking solace in the hope that it's an aberration can take a bit of comfort in an affirmation of that fact by looking at the latest electricity bills from TXU Energy. The one that just arrived by email provided this perspective:

That's a 20% increase in the average high temp, year-over-year.

On the other hand, it's sobering to consider that perhaps the aberration was last year.

Rats.

Random Thursday

Haphazard observations while contemplating the concept of a "cool front" that lowers temps into the upper 90s...

• My nomination for the New TV Series Most Likely To Be Absent Any Socially Redeeming Value While Showcasing Forgettable Hairstyles: CBS's Swingtown. A lot of good things happened in the Seventies (Led Zep and Pink Floyd; Alien and The Godfather; our wedding), but I doubt that any of them will appear on this retro-trash series.


• Speaking of retro – but certainly not trash – get a load of this classic cartoon, from 1933: Betty Boop in Snow White (with sidekicks Ko-Ko and Bimbo, and featuring Cab Calloway scatting St. James Infirmary Blues. For background on the restoration of this 'toon, check out the related ASIFA page.


• Signs that you need to skip the day's bicycle ride:
  • You slather on the sunscreen, don the cycling garb and gear, and wheel the bike onto the driveway, only to find a flat rear tire.
  • You sigh, and pull out the spare tube from your bike bag, only to find that it, too, is punctured.
  • You sigh again, and pull out the patch kit, only to find that the cement has dried (what? those things don't last five years?!)
  • You sigh*, resign yourself to riding your other bike to the shop to buy a new tube, only to find that it's now too late to get in a ride before lunch.


• In the history of bicycling, has anyone ever had a flat on the front tire? (You have to be a cyclist to truly appreciate this phenomenon. But a non-cycling analogy is the way a dropped slice of toast always lands jelly side down.)


• Sometimes I think I have the most interesting job in the world, in terms of exposure to a wide variety of esoteric trivia. Case in point: I added a flyer to the West Texas Cowboy Church's website for a horsemanship clinic taking place this weekend. I was puzzled by a phrase** on the flyer – Coggins will be checked at the gate. Turns out that this is a reference to a test for Equine Infectious Anemia, a viral disease afflicting horses for which there is no vaccine or cure. Many equine events now require evidence – in the form of a Coggins test – showing that each horse is free of this disease.

*By now, the "sighing" is rather more vocal, IYKWIM.
**Just because I live in West Texas doesn't mean that I know anything about horsies, other than they'll bite like a sonuvagun if you give them a chance.

Book Review: "Grace (Eventually)"

Anne Lamott continues to exasperate – and, occasionally, infuriate – me. Her latest book, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, takes up where the previous one left off, and you might recall my less than warm review of that one. I had expectations of a kinder, gentler Lamott for this book, based on the pre-release publicity.

And she is. Sort of.

Lamott claims that she no longer hates George W. Bush, and she goes to great lengths to explain the depths of that hatred so we'll understand the miracle that apparently occurred when she found that she could nobly rise above such feelings. In a chapter entitled "Dandelions," she implies that she was able to release some of her hatred by allowing others to take it up:

Despite the assertion that such feelings no longer dominated her every waking moment, her references to the President, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, et al are sprinkled liberally (ha!) through the book, almost as many times as she mentions Jesus. I find that a little disturbing from a Christian author writing about faith.

I started to enumerate the areas where Lamott's beliefs are diametrically opposed to mine, but that serves no useful purpose. Suffice to say that if you lean toward a view of God that emphasizes His grace and forgiveness, and minimizes His call for holiness, then you'll be at home with her theology.

I'm running out of reasons for continuing to buy her books. I can get all the left-leaning, profanity-laced tirades I want from The Daily Kos or the Huffington Post, without adding the explosiveness of shaky religious doctrine to the mix. But it would be unfair not to acknowledge that when Lamott is good, she is very good, and she continues to strike the occasional soul-chord in fundamental ways.

She's never tried to avoid or gloss over her mistakes and shortcomings, and her vulnerability is something I admire. For example...

And this...

Anne Lamott has always been a gifted writer, and one could do worse when picking an author to study for the sheer craftsmanship of the work. But with this third book in a series on faith, the anecdotes are starting to seem repetitious (and some just sort of trail off into obscurity without any apparent point). And that's a shame, because up until now, I could overlook what I believe to be skewed doctrine for the overall uplifting experience of her writing. That's no longer the case. Now that I find that last thing missing, I've no reason to anticipate her future books.

Local Destination Imagination Teams: Global Success

Cindy Hammond sent me the following report on how the local teams did in the recently completed "Destination Imagination" global finals (read this post for the back story):

These smart, creative, and cute kids remind me a lot of myself when I was their age, except for the, um, smart, creative, and cute part.

The only thing that puzzles me is why the 9th grade team chose to hold up a trophy instead of a Fire Ant Gazette coaster. Obviously, these kids still have a few lessons to learn about priorities!

For more about this program, visit the official DI website.

For Kyle

I had leftover pizza for lunch. Three pieces (minus the tips which someone inconsiderately munched off at the conclusion of the dinner where said pizza was first served).

Also, a banana, small yogurt (blueberry), and two cookies.

Update: I should have mentioned that I intended to eat just one cookie, but there was the fact of the missing pizza tips to consider. Lunchtime feng shui is very important.