September 2003 Archives

You may not realize this, but Halloween is approaching.

For months, Cameron has been telling us he wanted to be a wrecking-ball crane this year, after the smashing success of last year's Hot Wheels car costume. Katy told me that it was my year to create a cardboard miracle, and I really had no idea how I was going to manage it.

Then something good happened. A few weeks ago, we toured the local fire station with one of our neighbors who works there. Suddenly Cameron wants to be a firefighter for Halloween.

I'm saved!

I had a poker game Friday night.

A good time was had by all, and I managed to squeeze $6 out of my guests in spite of a bad lay-down on my part on the last hand of the night.

However, I did not discover my real killing until later, when I was cleaning up. I had started the night with 12 beers, a bag of tortilla chips, and a crock pot full of a concoction lovingly known as "Dog Food Dip."

After many hours of pitched battle and heavy consumption, I discovered that a veritable cornucopia remained: 14 beers, three and a half bags of chips, most of a bag of Hershey's Miniatures, a large tub of mixed nuts, and a bottle of Crown Royal.

How about that?

Get thee over to Mister P's and watch his Mystery Clip of the Week.

And then take a look at these two optical illusions. Good stuff.

This entry is for my California readers. (Yes, I'm going to talk about politics for just a moment. Don't worry, I'll be brief.)

Vote No on the recall on October 7th. This is not the way to run the state government. To vote Yes on the recall is to open a veritable Pandora's Box of political shenanigans.

No on the recall. No. No no no.

Yesterday I needed some brackets. I found what I needed at Home Depot and decided to use the new "self check out" lane, thinking it would be faster.

Yeah. Not so much.

The bar code on the bracket was placed in a way that prevented me from getting it directly over the scanner. So I had to key the 12-digit item SKU into the touchscreen.

The item was correctly identified. But what of the next five brackets? Turns out I had to navigate to the "manual SKU entry" page and enter the code for each bracket individually.

On about bracket number five the cashier meanders over and says "Looks like you know your way around the computer." My good-natured reply was "I should, after having to key in the code for all these brackets one at a time."

Then I made a mistake.

I started offering her some suggestions on how they could make it better. Like a way to enter a quantity. Or prompting you with other items you've already keyed in when you go to manually enter something - you know, "Did you want another of these?" kind of thing. I really was trying to be helpful.

Her eyes quickly glazed over and she wandered away. Oh well.

The moral of the story? Make sure the barcode is on an outside edge of whatever you are purchasing in the self-checkout line at Home Depot. And if it's not, just suffer in silence. They don't want to hear about it.

I don't use the word "hate" much. But I hate cats.

Specifically, I hate the cat that filled my kids' sandbox with crap the other night. I suspect this cat belongs to the new neighbors but in fairness it could be any cat. Whatever cat it is, I hate.

I take some solace from knowing that if said cat is out at night much it will eventually become Coyote Chow, or perhaps Owl Snack.

Stupid cats.

While watching the OU Sooners special teams flatten the UCLA Bruins the other day, I remembered a conversation I had in the office recently.

A coworker was unfamiliar with the origins of the term "Sooner," so I explained that it was what folks who cheated in the Land Rush of 1889 were called. Generally, this cheating took the form of going into Indian Territory "sooner" than the official start time of April 22nd at noon to stake a claim.

This astute coworker paused to consider the tale. After a moment he observed, "So the mascot of the University of Oklahoma is a crook and a thief?"

That about sums it up, folks - especially during Barry Switzer's tenure. Go Big Red!

From the Weatherford Daily News:

Entry forms for Southwestern Oklahoma State University's annual homecoming parade are now available.

SWOSU is celebrating Homecoming weekend on October 24-25. Theme for this year is "Marking Our Bulldog Territory."

You just can't make stuff like that up, folks.

Or is it... Brad versus himself? Stupid ants.

If you live in Southern California, you know what I'm talking about. This time of year, the little buggers start moving into the house looking for water.

We have found that Grants Kills Ants stakes work pretty well inside - but there is a catch. I really want to smash every ant I see, but for the bait to be effective, you have to let the ants find the stakes, identify them as food, and start carrying off the bait to feed the colony. If it's really working, the bait will be swarming with ants for a couple days, and then they all die and don't come back. But I want to smash! Must... restrain... index finger of death...

Admittedly it's not quite as dramatic a situation as the one Leiningen* faces, but it's about as close as I'm likely to get in my suburban utopia.

* Cool short story we read in Mrs. Seifried's 7th-grade English class. Also the basis for the 1954 movie The Naked Jungle, starring Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker.

I haven't read a lot of nonfiction in the past, but this summer I snuck a few things in with the old-school science fiction. Here's a rundown of some of the stuff I've read lately:

It's Not About The Bike: My Journey Back To Life by Lance Armstrong. This was a good read. Following Lance as he discovers he has cancer, and the subsequent fight, recovery, and return to cycling is pretty compelling.

I will say this: Reading the book illustrated how highly Lance thinks of himself. (Very highly, indeed.) Even when he does try to inject a little modesty, he does an unconvincing job of it. I suppose that a healthy ego comes with the territory when you are a world-class athlete, but it gets to be a bit much at times. I'm still a fan, but now I think it's more of Lance the Cyclist, and less so of Lance the Person.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I think this book suffered from the buildup it received from my sister Anne. With a subtitle of "Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," I was expecting, well, some adventures. What I got was a series of loosely connected anecdotes about working in professional kitchens, told out of sequence and spanning some 25 years, with advice on ordering food in restaurants stuck inbetween. Oh, and a story about visiting Tokyo thrown in for no apparent reason except maybe to pad the final word count.

Some of the advice is logical, like "don't order fish on Tuesday, because the restaurant hasn't gotten any fresh fish since last Thursday." Makes sense, but is it true outside Mr. Bourdain's New York City? Who knows?

He also spends a lot of time telling you how crazy he is, that he is a pirate, a rock star, and that you (no matter who you are) could not do what he does. The pirate business comes up over and over. Whatever, Blackbeard. Where's my steak?

All in all, I enjoyed The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman a great deal more.

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer. I realize I'm a little late getting to the party on this book, which chronicles the ill-fated Mt. Everest expeditions of 1996, but I'm glad I got around to it. This book grabbed me, and hard. I plowed through it in two days.

I have to admit I had never given much thought to the technical problems of getting a human being to a point 29,028 feet above sea level. The lack of oxygen in the air doesn't just affect your muscles, it affects your ability to think. And it kills brain cells even faster than a Flying W homebrew.

After reading about the ordeal Krakauer passed through to get down from the summit, I cannot imagine what would possess a sane person to put themselves in such a situation. If anybody I knew and cared about was considering a trip to Everest I would do everything in my power to dissuade them from going - starting with making them read this book.

Each of the chapters opens with an excerpt from some other adventure book or expedition journal, and one of them really resonated with me. Thomas Hornbein, who summited Everest in 1963 via a never-before-attempted route, wrote the following in his account of that trip:

There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.

I suppose you don't have to be on Mt. Everest to feel that way.

This was a great book and I recommend it heartily - although it's bestseller status in 1997 probably means you've already read it.

I took some time off last week so we could take our last camping trip of the summer, to Kings Canyon. We had a great time.

I think we've set the stage for more family camping adventures in the years to come. We took some good (1-2 mile) hikes and saw deer, fish, and bats (!). We saw 2000-year-old Sequoia trees. The kids and I "went fishing" - translated, that means "Claire and Cam played in the mud while I cast their rods into the river occasionally." Around the camp, the kids helped build campfires, ate roasted marshmallows, gathered sticks, acorns, and bird feathers (some with bits of bird still attached - gross!) and used the hammock as a big double-wide uberswing.

But best of all, both kids were very well behaved on the five hour drive to and from camp. And that made it a very good trip indeed.

Donating blood is good.

Exercising is also good.

However, exercising the morning after donating blood is not so good.

You may realize, say, halfway through your morning run, that the lack of blood cells to carry oxygen to your muscles affects your stamina somewhat.

Yesterday's Foxtrot was hilarious.

Hilarious, I tell you.

I finally watched Failure Is Not An Option, the History Channel special on NASA's Mission Control, last night on the TiVo.

Man.

Those were some Engineers with a capital E. I am in awe of what they did and how they did it. I cannot imagine that anything I ever do professionally will stack up to that.

I thought the show was pretty well put together. I especially enjoyed the recounting of two speeches given by Gene Kranz, one of the flight controllers for the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. (I wish I had transcribed them because I can't find the text anywhere on the internet, amazingly.) The second one, a speech he gave as the Apollo 11 Lunar Module left the Control Module to land on the moon, is right up there with Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V if you ask me. As a service to my lazy readers, I provide the ending of this famous speech here:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Indeed, I held my engineering degree cheap whilst they spake of Mission Control in the late 60's and early 70's.

There was some funny stuff too. At one point they asked the flight controllers if they had ever worn pocket protectors. All but one denied ever owning such a thing. As they made these denials, pictures of each of them with a pocket protector were shown on-screen. One guy came clean but still tried to get some lipstick on the pig - "Oh yeah, I had one of those things. But mine was leather." Nice.

As in, "I Got"

While you wait for me to come up with fresh content, here's Beloit College's Class of 2007 Mindset List to make you feel old.

If you want more twaddle to read, I suggest you check out my old grade school buddy Joel's new weblog. Joel has yet to come up with a clever name for his weblog. I have recommended "Joelapalooza" - perhaps you should click on over there and leave him a comment endorsing this choice.

We spent the last week trying to help get the U.S. economy back on track.

That's right, we spent loads of cash. I stalled for as long as I could, but Katy finally got her Honda Odyssey. The process of buying a car can be so bizarre.

Katy spent a good chunk of last week working the phones, wheeling and dealing with "Internet sales" people from all over Los Angeles. On Saturday morning she located the color she wanted combined with a price we liked at the dealer in Bakersfield, so we drove up and bought it. In the end I think she got us a pretty good deal. How do I know it's a good deal? Because our local Honda dealer first refused to acknowledge that any dealer could possibly sell the car at that price, and then basically hung up on her.

Let's be clear - I'm not against car dealers making a profit, but I don't think it needs to be an obscene profit.

Anyway, I don't buy a car every day - but I made an even rarer purchase last week. That's right, I finally broke down and bought a new television.

The last television I bought was a 19" Magnavox I used as a monitor for my then-new computer. I was fifteen. That television died in the early 90's, and since then we've been using a hand-me-down from my in-laws. When I took it out of the cabinet last week I saw that it had been manufactured in 1983. So my "new" television was 20 years old.

That's kind of scary when you consider that I make a living as a broadcast television engineer.