One Last Thought

Even though I'm technically on vacation, I just wanted to say two words: Amon Amarth.

I was hoping I'd find a way to cram two Amon Amarth albums onto my iPod so I could listen to them in Mexico, but no sale. My iPod is full, and every time I try to take something off, the experiment goes totally awry. So I am, unable to download my Amon Amarth albums. Oh, I suppose I could figure out how to do it if I applied myself, but it's getting a little late in the sequence of vacation ops to be figuring stuff like that out today.

But Amon Amarth is pretty good Swedish death metal, nicely heavy but not too brutal. Heavier than Dark Tranquility, more melodic than Dismember, not as atmospheric as Insomnium, not as poppy as In Flames, but pretty good.

http://www.amonamarth.com/

I like the fact that in their photographs they don't look like the usual scrawny folk that inhabit the metal universe - heroin addicts, speek freaks or people who get by on nothing but cigarettes and coffee and existential dread. These are men, chunky specimens who never met a Big Mac they didn't like, men who never pushed back from the table till they were full.

I can hang with that.

Vacation

Time for vacation!

Not a moment too soon either, I'm sure. I haven't been myself at all lately and maybe the trick is to get out of this state and consume pina coladas to excess.

Here's the hotel:

http://www.riu.com/en/hotel-riu-vallarta-mexico.html

I like the fact that it's "3 kilometers from various shops". God knows I hate running out of various in the middle of the night.

Anyway - back in a week, give or take. Ciao!

300 Hours Later

Ever since the movie 300 appeared in theaters I've been tempted to either to go the theater and see it, or buy it on DVD, or in some way devote some small percentage of my relatively scant disposable income on it.

Good thing I didn't, for it blows chunks. It proved to be such a disappointment it made Troy seem pretty good, and words cannot convey just how sad that is.

Let's take care of some business first. Yes, I know it's based on a Frank Miller comic book. Yes, I know it's not supposed to be a serious study of warfare, diplomacy and sociology in Classical Antiquity - and that's a good thing, because it's such a laugh as history it would actually hurt if they intended for it to be taken seriously. So - yes, I know it's a fantasy based on a comic book, and no, I don't expect it to make even the most superficial or cursory of gestures toward historical accuracy.

So we'll leave history and accuracy entirely out of the picture and try the movie on and see how it feels. It feels slow and boring, actually. The movie consists of four parts. The first part is deep, manly shouting and speechifying that makes Henry V seem positively subtle. The second part is stylistic flim-flammery loving rendered in sepia-toned Super-Tedium Slow Motion. The third part is Classical Antiquity's answer to The Matrix, only with Spartans pulling off Neo-like wirefighting moves in Super-Dooper-Tedium Slow Motion (tm). The fourth part is... I forgot. Nipples, I guess. Lots and lots of nipples in this movie. Oh, wait, I remember, meaningless voice-over delivered in Portentious Voice.

Sin City and 300 were both written originally by Frank Miller. Why did I really like Sin City and really dislike 300? Because the characters in Sin City at least seemed like passable simulacrums of real people and I came to care about some of them. The voice-over made sense, the characters, however surreal, at least seemed convincing, and one had the feeling that one was watching a story about people. On the other hand, I didn't give a rat's ass about any of the characters in 300 and didn't care if they lived, died, or ran out of skin bronzer. Sin City was very stylish, but the movie hadn't forgotten that it was the characters that were important. 300 was just stylish, with nothing behind it. It was, basically, about as emotionally involving as an underwear ad.

I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be actually boring, but it is. I'm glad I didn't pay money to see it.

TV Losses

I worry that some time this year I'm going to lose all my favorite TV shows. Not that I have a lot of favorite TV shows, but there are certain ones that I watch. Most Evil, for example, and stuff on DHC, and Chiller. But I worry that it's all going to tumble into the abyss or collapse like a house of cards or be blown away like dust on the wind or otherwise come to metaphorical ruin.

Why?

Vonage.

I read a while back on some business-oriented news story that Vonage is one of the ten companies thought likely to go belly-up in 2008. But we know from watching TV that Vonage commercials represent approximately 33% of all TV commercials that ever existed. Roughly one out of every three commercials I've watched in the last year involved the annoying yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo-hoo music and the Eyebrow Woman.

So what happens when Vonage goes under and a third of the advertising income for my favorite TV shows evaporates? I doubt that Billy Mays and that Sham-Wow guy, even working together, could sop up that much dead air, so obviously most TV channels would go off the air because there's simply not be enough money to keep the CEO in gold bathroom fixtures and cheroots on the one hand, and buy programming on the other.

So, goodbye, Most Evil, it was good knowing you.

More??

Oh my goodness, more words I have no use for!

Intel: Unless you work for the CIA, the NRO, the DIA or some other agency that actually collects or interprets intelligence, please stop saying "intel" as it makes you sound like a creepy outsider trying to be an insider, like overly-enthusiastic football fans who play-call for their favorite team - "43 ride left, you morons!" Especially stop saying "The intel was there!" in reference to the decision to invade Iraq. If the intel (sic) really was there, where did it go? Do you allege that it also was transported to Syria?

In fact, please stop talking like Tom Clancy period. That means not saying things like "ops" or "specops" or "kill chain" or "operator", or using acronyms like FEBA or MOUT unless you really know what they mean.

Cultures: This one's popular in yogurt circles, where it's a stand-in for bacteria. We've been conditioned to automatically think of bacteria as bad, so the yogurt people have to use a different word. So why don't we all? "Medieval Europe was nearly depopulated by yersinia pestis cultures..."

Massive: Massive means that something has a large mass. I recently read a news story about a "massive sinkhole". Since a sinkhole by definition has no mass, um.... But I'm as guilty as anyone, because I occasionally speak of "massive headaches" or things that are "massively funny". Just because I have no use for this word doesn't mean that I don't use it...

Diss: "So-and-so dissed me!" A) Who cares? B) Oh, grow up and stop being such a baby. C) Diss is short for disrespect, which is a goddamned noun, not a verb. Remember what Stephen King once said: "F*** gerunds!" That's good advice.

On: NASA has developed a tendency to say "on orbit" instead of "in orbit". I even heard one woman, an otherwise brilliant mind, say that she couldn't really comment on the mission (Stardust, as I recall) until she had the data "on lab". WTF? Wouldn't the data be useful in the lab? I'm not sure who in NASA mandated this change, which has all the hallmarks of smarmy management-speake, but astronomers say it right and NASA does not.

Favorite Video

Lately (as in since about last Friday) I've been in a somewhat curatorial mood and I keep asking myself what music, videos, images or whatever I would put in a time capsule. What it is, really, is a more cultured and refined way of "picking my favorite shit", but it amounts to the same thing.

Above is a still from my favorite video of all time, footage from the launch of Apollo 6. I could cite all sorts of gosh-wow statistics and dredge up no end of cultural BS to defend this as my favorite video of all time, but I don't have to. It's how watching the video makes me feel that makes it import. It amazes me to this day that we, mere human beings, pulled this off, that we could master such incredible forces and bend them to our will and, at least for a while, be masters of the universe. This one video captures everything that I think is good about America, and none of what is bad. And it's also indescribably beautiful.

Here's a link to three excellent videos:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8114761251072204210

The first video shows the jettisoning of the Saturn first stage, known to its friends as the S-IC. A great many things are going on at the same time. First, a set of retro-rockets are pulling the spent stage away from the rest of the booster. Meantime, another set of solid-fuel ullage rockets are settling the propellants in the tanks of the second stage, to which the camera is attached. Also, the five J-2 engines in the second stage are going through their start sequence. You can briefly see a ghostly exhaust plume around the engines as they start, but once they're up and running, their exhaust is completely transparent, though you can sometimes see it wash over the jettisoned first stage.

The second video happens more or less immediately after the first video clip, and shows the interstage ring falling away. This was a structural ring that separated the first and second stages, and which incidentally included the second-stage ullage rockets. Once the second stage's J-2 engines are running, there's no need to keep it, so the IU triggers some explosive bolts and the ring falls away. Bear in mind that the ring is 33 feet in diameter and 11 feet tall, and it clears the nozzles of the J-2s with only a bare minimum of room to spare. Also watch for the ring to take a furious scorching as it impinges on the exhaust plume of the J-2 engines - they don't look like they're running, but they are. You can get a feel for how hard the booster is accelerating by watching how fast the interstage ring falls away - it's moving out indeed. This is all happening at an altitude of about 240,000 feet, and somewhere under the vague black smudge of the S-IC's smoke trail lies Florida.

The third video is from the top of the second stage looking forward, when the third stage and the attached Apollo spacecraft separates. Look for three large plumes radiating outward from the base of the third stage. These are the exhaust plumes of the three ullage rockets that are involved in the start sequence of the single J-2 in the third stage. After a few seconds there is a wash of white vapor, then the J-2 engine starts and the exhaust becomes invisible. What looks like a single blue-white light is actually a view straight up the throat of the running J-2.

So there it is. My vote for the greatest video of all time.

Thanks for your time.

I was taught - oh, how many misadventures have begun with those three words? But I was taught that the advent of phonetic writing was a major leap for human civilization. That is, when a script that captured phonetic values replaced hieroglyphs that captured much more complex ideas.

The rise of set of standard phonetic alphabets and writing systems were major milestones in human civilization, such as the widespread use of hieratic script in Egypt in legal and administrative documents, leaving hieroglyphs mainly for the monumental architecture.

Can you even begin to imagine the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire conducting business with a writing system based on pictograms or hieroglyphs? I can't. I can scarcely believe that they got by with their wretched numeral system as it is. Quick, what's MCMLXII minus XLII? I don't know either. (If the Romans had had a telephone system, "911" would be IXII. "Gaius Septimius! I seem to have gotten my nuts wedged in an olive press. Please call IXII, would you?")

We then added puctuation and capitalization, which are basically typesetting conventions designed to make written text easier to read, and we reached a point where we could, using but 26 phonetic symbols and a handful of punctuation marks, write literally everything that could be expressed in the English language. Everything, from the Song of Songs to Humor in Uniform, could be written with the same symbols. What made one piece of writing better than another was the grace, skill and taste of the author, not the fineness of his ability to carve hieroglyphs into limestone.

Now we're starting to back away from this elegance. Punctuation and capitalization are slowly dying out. We're starting to use non-phonetic symbols almost as though they were hieroglyphs. Who among us hasn't seen (and been chilled by) things like "c u l8r"? "L8r" is like a hieroglyph, not a word. It's a specific symbol that conveys a fairly complex meaning, but it isn't a phonetic spelling of anything. "Later" is a word; "l8r" is a hieroglyph.

Is this bad? Does it matter if people say "l8r" when texting one another or twittering or sending email? Will civilization really collapse?

Not immediately, no, but it still worries me.

It strikes me that the main discernable difference between human intelligence and non-human intelligence is that humans can write things down - to compile a body of ex libris knowledge that will persist for as long as the books persist, whether anyone remembers them or not. I don't have to remember much about Young's Modulus because I can consult a book that stores that information with perfect accuracy forever. Compare this to the presumed intellectual capacity of dolphins or whales, who may (or may not) be capable of sophisticated abstract reasoning and communication, but can't record information to save their lives. You could argue that ants do a better job of that than dolphins do; ants lay down scent trails so their tiny little brains don't have to remember so much navigational information.

Thus it seems sad to me that we as a civilization seem so eager to abandon anything like "good writing" in our quest for hipness or convenience. We take the one thing that most distinguishes us from animals - writing - and we debase it.

It's not the end of the world, but I don't like it.

What would the novel of the future look like?

foshizzle he sed l8r w/dat grl i got 2 go n8 sed y r u here she...

You'll pardon me, breathless techno-elite, but I just don't see this as an improvement.

King's Wonders

I recently read a column on ET that amounted to Stephen King's top 25 rock and roll songs. Though it's obvious that his and my musical tastes don't intersect, it was still an interesting read, and head and shoulders above the usual crap that one finds on that website, which has taken to offering us such spelling disasters as "hawt" and "toot suite", as though the rise of mangled Textglish is a good thing.

I'm no good at picking my top 25 anythings. I make a list of a hundred songs or movies and start to pare them down and I just can't do it. It's easier for me to pick 25 things I really don't like, or to prefer one thing over another. I prefer U2 to REM, for example, but I couldn't tell you what my favorite U2 song is. I prefer the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, but I couldn't begin to guess my favorite Beatles song. I prefer Insomnium to Carpathian Forest, but the Carpathian Forest song "A Forest" is pretty darn good, so where does it lie on the favorites scale?

What I can do is list my top 25 songs on my iPod as measured by play count:

1. Corporeal Jigsore Quandary Carcass
2. The Gale Insomnium
3. Zodijackyl Light Dark Tranquility
4. Mortal Share Insomnium
5. Daughter of the Moon Insomnium
6. Still Moving Sinews Dark Tranquility
7. Keep On Rotting in the Free World Carcass
8. Jesus Tod Burzum
9. At the Fathomless Depths Dissection
10. Jotun In Flames
11. Funeral Fog Mayhem
12. In the Groves of Death Insomnium
13, Shattered by Broken Dreams Avenged Sevenfold
14. Why Me? Planet P
15. Big Log Viktor Krauss
16. A Forest Carpathian Forest
17. Justifiable Homicide Dismember
18. I troldskog fareb vild Ulver
19. I Ran A Flock of Seagulls
20. Dance With You Bowling for Soup
21. Rock the Vote Carcass
22. Freezing Moon Mayhem
23. Incarnated Solvent Abuse Carcass
24. Scythe, Rage and Roses Dark Tranquility
25. Dunkelheit Burzum

This isn't really terribly accurate because I've never reset my play counts and certain bands, notably Dark Tranquility and Carcass, score high on the mainly because of longevity, while a lot of the stuff I listen to today isn't on the list because it's too new. But, in terms of frequency, there's my Top 25. It troubles me.

Predictions for 2013

John McCain recently released his predictions of what the world will look like in 2013, after his first term as President. You can read his predictions here:

http://news.aol.com/elections/story/_a/mccain-lays-out-vision-for-first-term/20080515065909990001?icid=1615988631x1202436453x1200304557

His predictions fall into two general categories: the laudable but unlikely, and the dangerously deluded. For example, the idea that we'll be a lot further down the road toward energy independence by 2013 is laudable but unlikely. It takes longer than four years to build a nuclear power plant, and lobbyists and "industry experts" will see to it that nothing damaging to oil company profits will ever be deployed on a large scale.

On the dangerously deluded front, we have his "League of Democracies" that takes over from the "failed" United Nations and goes on to punish Sudan and other Blue Meanies for genocide and whatnot. The "League of Democracies" sounds a lot like the "Anglo-Saxon Old Boy's Club" to me, in effect the G8 pretending to be a political rather than economic entity. I confess I'm frustrated by the inability of the UN to do anything meaningful in places like Darfur, but I don't think neo-colonialism is the answer either. So I think fixing the UN is the right answer, not bending NATO's mission statement until it snaps.

But the kicker is the idea that in four years Iraq will be a "functional democracy" racked by violence that is sporadic and occasional. And how does McCain plan on doing this without maintaining a garrison of about a million US troops in the country? Because that's the only thing that's going to really stop the sectarian civil war, and even then it doesn't stop it, it merely puts it into suspended animation. Remember that this has been going on in one way or another since at least the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, and arouses in the pious of both sides the most intense passions. McCain thinks that he can change all that in four years? I am, as they say, dubious. I once said that partition was the only option that realistically offered the chance of a real end to the violence, and I still believe that.

So here are my predictions for 2013:

1. We'll still be paying mountainous sums for oil and gasoline because despite the best intentions and the best brains, we'll still be shackled to petro-dictatorships and oil company executives.

2. Iraq will either still be in a state of marginally suppressed civil war, or will have finally partitioned.

3. The UN will continue to be better at passing resolutions and wagging forefingers than at solving problems, and the problems in Darfur will be just as bad as they are today.

4. If McCain wins, there will most likely be smoking bomb craters in Iran, and all chances of a peaceful rapprochement with Iran, and Shia Islam in general, will go up in smoke.

5. You-know-who will still be hiding in the tribal region in Pakistan, but since he's now a marginal player in the jihad (useful as a symbol and rallying point, but not the operational nexus any more) it doesn't matter one way or the other.

6. The Suns will still not have won a championship.

Superior Humor

Now this made me laugh:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/42365

But on a somewhat related note, I need someone to back me up. Are the "Personal of the Day" ads on The Onion website supposed to be so pretentious they're funny, or am I sensing a joke where there is in fact only sad reality?

More Phrases I Got No Use Fer

It struck me that I'd left quite a few phrases I really can't stand out of my last blog posting about pernicious, annoying figures of speech. Strictly out of a sense of exaggerated comprehensiveness, I wish to add a few to the list.

Dish: AOL abounds with this travesty, where people dish about celebrities, diets, sports figures and other pop cultural gleefus. Yet nobody ever seems to dish a vegetable, and heaven forbid that there should be a meat dish.

Officing: I think the best thing I can say here is to echo something Stephen King wrote in the novella The Body: "F*** gerunds!" I couldn't have said it better myself.

Miley: Who the hell is Miley, and why is she suddenly all over the news like leeches on an unwary swimming?

Baby Bump: In the old days (defined as "when I was a kid") people didn't have baby bumps. They "showed". I think I like that better, because baby bump has a certain in-your-face aggressiveness, as though if you don't share the belief that Angelina's pregnancy is the most wonderful thing ever, Baby Gap is going to send thugs to your house to break your tumbs.

Dimpie: I used to know someone, a self-professed "military buff", who among other things used to wear t-shirts with nuclear-armed cruise missiles silkscreened on them. During the invasion of Iraq he talked about dimpies all the time - pounding them dimpies, hitting the dimpies. So I asked him if he knew what a dimpie really was, and he said it was a generic slang term for a target (in the same sense that pilots sometimes use the word "shack" to refer to dropping ordnance, though I don't know why). It's actually DMPI, Desired Mean Point of Impact, you jackass.

Unprofessional: Any time you disagree with anything that anyone does, you can label it "unprofessional" and there is no appeal. "Oh, well, the forklift operator thought I was being unprofessional; that's an open and shut judgment, darn tooting."

Snarky: I used to like this word, but it's wearing out its welcome with me. Practically everyone I run into (or read about) describes themselves as snarky, and they use it as though being snarky is a good thing. They intend for it to mean wittily satirical, but according to my dictionary, it also means rude and disrespectful. I think in the future I'll strive for being wittily satirical, but not snarky.

Kicks Ass: You see this all the time in metal circles. This band kicks ass, that band kicks ass, the other band left no ass unkicked. Let's be honest, not all metal kicks ass. Some metal kicks shins. Some metal bites the bag. Some metal just stinks. So let's come up with a new generic review term, shall we? Oh my God! I just went and saw Tungsten Barbecue and they totally contused my liver! Like, totally!

Uh Huh

I've been tinkering with the idea of buying the Dethklok album, featuring music as heard (and in some cases seen) on the cartoon Metalocalypse. I'd have bought it already but my iPod is plumb full and I can't bear to part with anything that's on it, so I maybe have to wait to buy it until after I get an 8-gig Nano (I currently have a 2-gig Nano with a horribly defaced screen and a giant smear of hardened super glue on the back).

Metal purists seem not to see the humor (and the music) in the cartoon. They either don't see it as the satire that it is, or they think they're being made fun of in some exceedingly cerebral way that they don't really understand, or they think the cartoon plays into metal stereotypes. With a title like Metalocalypse, what were they expecting?

The short version of the show is that the death metal band Dethklok is the most powerful cultural force on the planet and the ninth largest economy in the world. Various governments have come together to try to stop Dethklok, which they regard as a bona fide threat to national security and world peace. But at the same time, the five members of Dethklok are apathetic, entirely oblivious to the gruesome slaughter that seems to always follow them everywhere, and quite naive about the way the world works (except for Pickles, the drummer, who at least knows what a supermarket is).

The music is pretty good, but not in large doses. There isn't enough variation from song to song to make me want to listen to the album from end to end, but as long as I can pick and choose, I like it. I particularly like "Go Into The Water" and "Birthday Dethday", though it's hard not to like "Murmaider" because of the scene where the general looks at the record producer's face and gasps "Good lord, man, what did they do to you?" And the producer snarls "It's called metal, dumbass!" Highly unfortunate, though, that "Sewn Back Together Wrong" never made it onto the album.

Stylistically, it's more or less old-school death metal, not quite as grindy as early Carcass and not as muddy as a lot of Florida stuff. It's a bit like Descanting the Insalubrious but thrashier, and with weird whisper-growled vocals that are quite unlike anything else I've heard. The problem is that my iPod is full, and will part with music I already have on it only after whining. So what can I part with? I never developed a full-blooded taste for Carnage, and I rarely listen to Ulver because I really can't stand that one ambient number where they recorded the guy running around in a field, but I do like the last song on the album - "Bergtatt", if you must know.

Anyway. I think that's about enough time wasted on a satirical cartoon about a death metal band that doesn't exist.

Correction

A while back I offered an inaccurate translation of the Latin phrase Mors Principium Est.

It actually means "Death is the Beginning."

I apologize for any confusion this may have caused, though honestly I can't imagine any since I imagine I'm about the only one who's ever heard of this band anyway.

But it's curious, isn't it, how words seem to be imbued with more power when they're in Latin? I'm reminded of the scene in the movie Tombstone where Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo are sparring in Latin and Johnny Ringo caresses the butt of his pistol and says Eventus stultorum magister. This means "Experience is the teacher of fools", but somehow Eventus stultorum magister seems cooler.

Fun at the Large Hadron Collider

Heaven knows I'm not a proponent of string theory, based largely on its ad hocicity (is that a word?). What I mean by that is that the "theory" makes no concrete predictions, and even if you can somehow get it to hint at something that is subsequently proved wrong by experiment, the practitioners just say "Oh, well, we'll tweak the parameters of the Calabi-Yau manifolds and select a different one of the 10E2500 possible string theories." (It may not actually be 10E2500 possible string theories - but it's 10Ea_whole_bunch either way.)

I think the phrase "wishful thinking" is more appropriate than "theory", so we should really be talking about "superstring wishful thinking" (superstring theory is, basically, string theory plus supersymmetry, which among other things posits the existence of a supersymmetrical "partner" for every existing particle - none of which have ever been observed, and isn't it awfully convenient their masses are all far too large to be produced in modern particle accelerators? And even more convenient that even when the most powerful collider, the LHC, fails to find them, the math can be tweaked so that they remain tantalizingly out of reach?)

But here's a link to a CNN story about a string theorist who purports to have made actual predictions, predictions that - even better - are testable at the energy limit of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. This is a breath of fresh air from the string theory camp. Predictions? Experiments? Holy shit! If this keeps up, we'll end up doing real science! So maybe I'll stop snickering and pay attention for a change.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/09/physics.nima/index.html

Expressions I Have No Use For

Smokin' Hot: Are we talking about people, or barbecue sauce? Strangely, it doesn't seem nearly as irritating when it's spelled "smoking hot".

Salad Days: I think this means "Back in the days when I was young and happening", but really, what do salads have to do with it? My salad days were yesterday, when I ate a nice taco salad while watching something on TV about dinosaurs.

Grow the Business: It's possible to grow a tumor, and grow a tooth, and grow hair, but I don't think it's possible to grow the business. You might as well try to grow the park bench.

Wordsmith: Why is it that all the guys who think they're serious wordsmiths out there in Corporateland can't write their way out of a brown paper sack? You go ahead on and wordsmith, and leave the writing to people who are good at it.

Go Ahead On: I'm going to go ahead on and sneeze on your sandwich. Thag yoo.

It's All Good: No, it isn't all good. A lot of it is at best fair, and there are parts of it that frankly suck.

Surfing The Web: Oh yes, let's apply the image of a healthy outdoor activity to guys who sit in the dark all night in their underwear with Cheezit crumbs trickling down their chests as they search for smokin' hot porn sites. The best sports scam since the World Series of Poker.

Fashion-Forward: I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I bet it has something to do with "superficial".

Consumers: Hey, I vote; I insist that you call me a citizen before I go ahead on and get mad.

Faceplant: Like eggplant, only lumpier. This used to be called "falling down".

Serious Fun: Besides being a contradiction in terms, it says something about modern life when one needs serious gear, a serious attitude and serious training to have fun. Gee whiz, all I wanted to do was go swimming.

At The End Of The Day: The sun may set on the British Empire these days, but not on this slice of Imperial meaninglessness. Try "ultimately". It's short and refreshing.

Rocks: So-and-so rocks, such-and-such rocks, that rocks, this rocks, but I have rocks in my shoe.

You Go, Girl: Where? Shall I go ahead on and go? But what if I go ahead on and go, only to have someone say "Don't go there, girl"?

What Can I Do You For: The mating call of the used car salesman. Why don't you go ahead on and shampoo my crotch? That rocks, and it's all good.

Smart and Sassy: My theory is that if you have to describe yourself as smart and sassy, you may have self-esteem issues you need to go ahead on and worth through.

I See Dead Cows

Most people probably know that a not entirely uncommon design touch in western front yards is the cow skull. I don't know where the tradition originally started, but now and then in a desert-landscaped front yard you'll see a cow skull, preferably with horns. I guess it's a reminder of the harshness of the environment, or the economic impact of ranching, or the deep marks that cattle ranching left on the culture of the southwest (not so much these days, but powerfully so when I was a kid growing up in Flagstaff).

Heck, even my dad had a cow skull in his yard, but his life was complicated by the fact that neighborhood dogs used to steal his cow skull. He'd find it upside-down and gnawed in some other yard and he'd bring it home, only to have dogs drag if off again (I can only imagine that the dogs in question thought it was the coolest Milk-Bone they'd ever seen). He eventually attached it to a stake with baling wire to confound the pooches.

The point is that though cow skulls are not very common in front yards these days, they aren't entirely unheard-of. But give someone a little slack and they go mad. It's like the people to start out with a single garden gnome and next thing you know they're installing a twenty-foot-tall sheet metal giraffe sculpture in their yard (don't laugh, I know where two such sheet metal giraffes can be had). Give someone a cow skull and a free hand, and next think you know, they build something grisly and weird.

There is a house down the road a piece (about a mile, which qualifies as "a piece"). It's sort of a McMansion thing, much bigger than the other custom homes in the area, and considerably more ornate. And its owner, a man who I imagine has a reputation for stretching questionable ideas painfully out of shape, decided to put cow skulls in his yard. Yes, skulls. And not content with mere skulls, he put whole dead cows in his yard. There's a scatter of spinal columns, ribcages, leg bones and the like; it looks almost exactly like four cows wandered for miles across the parched desert before finally dying in that spot of thirst and hopelessness. It's what Stephen King would come up with if he were a landscaping contractor, except he'd probably drill faux bullets holes in the skulls just for kicks. It's grisy, and it's depressing, like photographs of a dried-up waterhole in some drought-stricken part of Africa.

Unanswered (and, really, unasked) is the question of where one gets that many cow parts. Unanswered (and, again, unasked) is the question of why. But this is America; bad taste is never asked why.

Videoification

Today I take pen in hand (so to speak) to complain about the videoification of the news. I read the newspaper a couple of times a week, but I check the news on news websites at least once a day, often twice or three times. In the old days, news websites would have one or two video reports, but now it seems that about half of all news stories have that dreaded "video" icon next to them.

I prefer to read the news than watch videos of it, and I'll tell you why. First, a written news piece, as superficial and short as it is, is almost always more informative than a video news report. Second, and more importantly, news websites don't make me watch commercials before reading a news story, but they never miss a chance to hit me with commercials on video stories, and often the ads for cereals, batteries and sports drinks are longer than the news articles that follow!

I predict that in the none-too-distant future all news becomes video, not because it's better from an information density point of view, but because it's better for advertisers.

On a largely unrelated note, I also wish to file a protest with NASA about their increasingly annoying habit of replacing real footage of space doings with crappy CGI sequences. A while back I watched the launch of an Atlas V (the New Horizons launch, if I remember correctly, but it could have been the lunar pair) and almost as soon as the booster ignited, they stopped showing the real booster and switched to bad CGI, with cotton-ball clouds of smoke piling up below the rocket in a less than convincing simulation of an exhaust plume. I've seen the same thing with Delta launches, where instead of showing the frankly beautiful footage of the phased jettisoning of the boosters, they show a CGI equivalent.

Why?

Did I miss the memo that all CGI sequences are to be considered better than real-life?

Replacing good video with bad CGI is about as annoying to me as replacing good news text with bad video.

300th

This being my 300th post, I decided to decorate it with a picture I took of the sideways dog. Notice her fetching pink harness, and the fact that she's wearing it sideways. Every time we straighten it out, she rearranges it so it's sideways, so it's obviously more comfortable or fits better that way. We don't even bother any more. If Dawg wants it sideways, she can have it sideways.

Happy 300th post day to me!

Brain Garden

Here's a photograph of an almost fully mature brain in our garden. We've had a good crop of brains this year - certainly more brains than I have a use for. It's actually some kind of fungus, but in the right light and from the right angle they look disturbingly like brains, so much so that I find myself reluctant to touch them.

Note the shredded remains of the honeydew melon plant, nibbled to death by kamikaze squirrels. How come they always want to eat the plants I care about (the honeydew melon) and won't touch the icky things like the brain fungi? Because the world isn't fair.

The Lighter Side Of Laid Off

It turns out this "laid off" business isn't all bad. There's a TV show coming on tonight at 9 PM that I want to watch, which is normally too late at night for me as I have to go to bed early so I can get up at 5:30 AM to get ready for work.

Wait a second - what work? There's no need for me to get up early, therefore no need to go to bed early, therefore no need to have to miss my TV show tonight! It's a gas! And I can have a beer if I want!

Yeah, I know all about the downside of being out of work, and I don't need to be reminded. For now, just let me enjoy this strange sense of freedom on a Sunday night in peace, man.

I'm Relieved

I'm relieved to know that Jamie Lee Curtis isn't having difficulty pooping. No, I'm not relieved. Not at all. Honestly, these Activia commercials are starting to creep me out, just a little. The worst one was the one where two women were having a conversation about "getting back to normal" after eating all that holiday food. One of the women was swaying her hips and grinning and licking her lips and rubbing her midsection and acting for all the world like she just can't wait to get back to the restroom. "This stuff makes me crap like a Clydesdale and I'm in heaven!"

How nice for her. But she should go press a cool damp cloth to her forehead and try to calm down because noboby cares about the nature and frequency of her bowel movements.

Then there's the Benefiber commercial, which argues that the liquid fiber product, in addition to producing Clydesdale-esque boli, also improves one's heart health. Maybe it really does, I don't know. But the woman in the ad is a slender sylph of about twenty; she drifts around in red silk and distributes perky red hearts. Right. She won't have to worry about her heart health in a serious way for another thirty years, and assuming she doesn't smoke, the chances are she'll never have to worry about it. Give me a spokesman I can relate to, like James Gandolfini or Wilford Brimley, being hoisted around the studio on wires, coughing and grunting and sweating and calling people "cheeseballs".

On second thought - the original woman is at least very pretty in red silk. The same cannot be said for my other options.

Another Calamity!

When I was a kid I used to think the cartoons about farmers trying to keep crows, rabbits and other wisecracking miscreants out of their fields were pretty funny. Oh, look at that, the farmer's going to use dynamite to try to get rid of the rabbit, and why, because he nibbles a few leaves?

Not so funny any more.

Our garden's been getting into the swing of things lately. We'd planted a six-foot row of lettuce from seed, and though the lettuce plants weren't ready for harvest yet, they were three or four inches high, very numerous, and hinted strongly at a bumper crop of leafy greens in the near future. But something got in the garden and ate all the lettuce. It didn't nibble a few leaves, it didn't eat one or two plants, it ate them all down to the ground. Stumps are all that are left, and I don't know if they'll come back or not.

What would do such a thing? Quail are my first suspects, but I haven't seen any quail in the garden. But we did see one of those little squirrel dudes climbing up and over the fence that was designed to keep him and his kind out. Could one little squirrel devastate the whole row of lettuce? Not without groaning, but maybe if he had all night, and if his friends and family helped out, maybe. Meantime, our dogs are so obsessed with standing on the steps and begging to be let back in they wouldn't notice a hippopotamus in the garden, and the enormous owl that hunted around here for a while seems to have moved on.

I don't know what's going to happen to the little squirrels. I like them - but I also like lettuce. Squirrels beware.

Being Sick

I hate being sick much more so than I used to. Before my surgery sickness was just sort of irritating pain in the butt, but since my heart attack and surgery, I have to evaluate everything my body does using heart attack litmus paper. "Hold on, you're nauseated, this could be life-threatening so let's evaluate it carefully." It turns out nausea is just nausea, but everything comes with a little whisper of doubt. Is this a heart attack, or just nausea? Is this a stroke, or just vertigo? Is this just heartburn, or do I have a bleeding ulcer?

And I hate that. But I'm better today than I was yesterday, and better yesterday than I was the day before that.

Officially Funny Now

Okay, the clothes have been through the laundry, I've been through the wash myself, and the sun rose this morning as expected, so it's all officially funny now. Not the sort of thing that's a total belly laugh, but the sort of thing where I pinch that long-suffering bit of nose between my eyes, shake my head ruefully, and sort of snort.

Once the symptoms go away, I'll think it's funnier yet (surely there must somewhere be a joke about a spurting Caucasian in a Chinese restaurant).

But my real fear yesterday was that the earth would simply stop turning on its axis and all life would be wiped out as a consequence. And it never does, does it? It just seems like at the time - "Oh, great, this is the last embarrassing spectacle we needed; this is the straw that will break the camel's back and lead to the extermination of life on the planet." Or at least the remainder of my place of chicken chow mein...