The One I Forgot To Title

This is a purely self-indulgent diary entry - but then, aren't they all? I have (hopefully) more interesting stuff in the pipeline, but I am, after all, so very lazy.

This is just an update on share ratios, as discussed a couple of entries back. Now I've really got to stop seeding some of the obsolete items, because I'm in desperate need of hard drive space. A few of these haven't shifted a single byte of data in weeks, so I'm going to nuke the files. Before I do, though, here's a list of my current seeding ratios for several torrents:

Ubuntu Studio 13.04                56.02
World English Audio Bible       46.04
AVLinux 6.01b                         37.73
AVLinux 6.0                             17.23
Ubuntu Studio 12.10                10.79
Gentoo Live 20121221              2.71
LibreOffice 3.6.4 installer           1.83
Deep Purple 2012 concert         0.54
LibreOffice 3.6.4 Help files         0.41
Paul McCartney 2013 concert   0.52

 These torrents represent a total of over 375 GB of data I've uploaded. I may not be able to code anything more complex than a Forge card, but this is one small way I can contribute to open source software.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of one of my co-workers dressed as a cowgirl. I don't know why either. She promised me severe bodily harm if this photo got distributed, so let's not tell her.

Reading Log: A Farewell To Ebert

I had already intended to write this entry well before Roger Ebert passed away. When he died, I figured that was the perfect time to finally get it written up and posted as something of a tribute. Several weeks stretching into months later, here it is. Such is my sense of time.

This entry is a Reading Log because the shelf full of books I've purchased and read but not yet written about includes a copy of Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2004. I don't know where or when I got it. Probably a library book sale several years ago. I've been putting adhesive labels with my name and date of purchase inside every book I've bought for quite some time now, and it doesn't have one. I also don't remember when I read it. I know that shelf includes books that I read at least as far back as early 2009.

So, yeah, I'm pretty far behind on Reading Logs.

I bought this book for two reasons. I like movies, and more importantly, I like books that are divided into lots of independent sections, so that they can be picked up and flipped open to a random page, read for a minute or two, then put down again. I read at a lot of times when most people don't. While eating, while brushing my teeth, while drying off after a shower, etc. Novels don't lend themselves to such segmented attention. Magazines, encyclopedia-style reference books, and anything with the words "bathroom reader" in the title work much better.

I have a few of Roger Ebert's books. Besides the Movie Yearbook 2004, I have the 1985 and 1991 editions of his Movie Home Companion, and a copy of The Great Movies. I read the 2004 book the same as all the others. I started by looking up my favourite movies, then some of my least favourite, then just by random reading. Each one also got at least one complete read-through.

I took particular interest in The Great Movies, reading through it and considering whether I wanted to see each of them (assuming I hadn't already). I did the same a while back with IMDB's top 100 rated movies. Those lists led me to a few films I was very glad to have watched (e.g., Network, Seven Samurai, Taxi Driver) and a few that made me want the three hours of my life back (e.g., Apocalypse Now - if you place any value on your limited time in this life, don't waste a moment of it on the extended "redux" edition).

On that note, it's a cultural wonder that we live in a time when pretty much any movie ever released (and a few that weren't) is available to me virtually immediately. It's a far cry from the days when I'd read about some obscure horror film in Fangoria and have to either scour independent video rental stores for it (chains were always a waste of time), mail-order it at exorbitant cost, or resign myself to doing without.

If it sets you at ease, feel free to assume that by availability I'm referring to such modernities as Netflix, video-on-demand, and hundreds of cable channels that cater to every taste. The facts that my fibre-op connection can pull down 700 megs of data in no time flat (9.5 MB/second sustained!) and that I've modded my Wii to include a video player that can stream files across my wireless network may have nothing to do with it.

I always enjoyed watching or reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews. I started watching him and Gene Siskel on PBS many years ago. They were on late Sunday nights, sometime either before or after Monty Python. I started watching just for the chance to see movie clips and previews, a rare treat in those days when the Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore's eye. Before long I hoped every episode that Gene and Roger would argue, and finally started paying attention to the reviews themselves.

I'm usually not interested in whether a reviewer actually likes whatever it is they're reviewing. The key is why they did or didn't like it. The body of the review is far more important  than their final verdict, be it expressed in stars, points on a scale, or thumbs. It's always possible that a reviewer may have a general dislike of a genre or style that the reader will enjoy.

A former co-worker and I used to discuss movies, using one another's opinions as a guideline whether to see a given film. If he liked it, that was reason for me to avoid it, and vice versa. We reached this conclusion when I told him although I had liked 28 Weeks Later overall, I hated the incredibly stupid scene when a low-flying helicopter's blade was used as a zombie-decapitating weapon. His response: "That part sounds awesome!" At that moment, we both knew we had no common ground.

As for Ebert himself, I enjoyed his writing. The man definitely knew and loved film, and spoke with a great deal of authority in that realm. As a philosopher and theologian he made a great movie reviewer, but we'll come back to that. His website, which has lived on in his absence, was and is an excellent resource. I just went there to get affirmation of my suspicion that the movie adaptation of World War Z is an artless, souless chunk of commercially safe garbage, and was not disappointed. My favourite part of the site was always Movie Answer Man, which Ebert stopped doing over a year before his death and which seems to have died with him.

I don't think I would have liked Roger Ebert much on a personal level, and I'm quite sure he wouldn't have liked me, which does not reflect poorly on him. I found him arrogant, both when speaking of film, where he was an authority, and everything else, where he was not. He regularly condemned philosophical or religious certainty with absolute certainty, never seeming to notice the irony of that all-too-common position.

He was a good writer, though, and no matter how much I disagreed with his positions, the expression was consistently thought-provoking and worth reading. He would even engage his critics in the comments sections, not with shouting but with discussion of ideas. That's rare, and his loss brings the Internet's average level of discourse down a notch or three.

He had other very admirable qualities. He clearly loved his wife, and faced the adversities toward the end of his life with amazing dignity, grace, and humour.

I've read a lot of Ebert's writing, and the one non-movie article that best encapsulates what I've said about him is one written toward the end of his life: "How I am a Roman Catholic", in which he explains at length that, contrary to his claim, he wasn't. The quotations that follow come from that article.

Ebert liked the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church, and did a good job of internalizing some of the social and moral lessons that the nuns taught him in childhood. Some of those social lessons are dubious. I don't see where the Bible (as opposed to the Catholic church - feel free to mentally add "Roman" in front of "Catholic" for the remainder of this article) endorses labour unions. In fact, Matthew 20:1-15 undermines the rhetoric I've endured from labour unions to which I've been forced to belong (union shops where if you want to work, you have to sign the card). I'm rooting for right-to-work legislation in Canada. In Orwellian fashion, Canadian unions argue that such a law would infringe on the right of workers to organize, when in fact it would only give them the right not to.

But I digress. Back to Ebert's article.

So Ebert liked some aspects of the Roman Catholic church. He had the courage to profess an essentially pro-life position on abortion ("My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born."), but through some cognitive dissonance refused to admit it and follow through ("I support freedom of choice."). At other times he resorted to the standard squishy if-you-don't-like-abortion-don't-have-one position. One could reply, using precisely the same logic, that if you don't like abortionists being shot, then don't shoot them.

A textbook cafeteria Catholic, though, he rejected the position of the Church when it became personally convenient or trendy, notably on matters of sexual ethics ("Is homosexuality a sin? ... My feeling is that love between consenting adults is admirable. The commandment about not coveting thy neighbor's wife had more to do with concepts of property in Old Testament times...").

However, his original premise of explaining his Catholic status goes out the window near the end: "I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God."

Um.

You simply don't get to call yourself a Catholic, or any other sort of Christian (of which Catholics are a subset), or any other sort of theist (of which Christians are a subset), if you cannot affirm a positive belief in God. Atheism or agnosticism place you outside these particular camps.

At this point, if this blog had more than five readers on a good day, I'd anticipate a reply in the comments accusing me of being "judgmental" (or maybe "judgemental"), probably quoting Matthew 7:1 out of context, thereby completely missing the point Jesus was making.

Observing that a person is not Catholic if they don't believe in God is no more judgmental than observing that a person is not a vegetarian if they have steak for supper twice a week. Enjoying the rituals and traditions doesn't make someone Catholic, any more than enjoying wearing white coats would make them a doctor. The word "Catholic" actually means something, and like any title, it comes with costs, responsibilities, and certain minimum requirements.

There are many reasons why I am not Catholic, most of which have to do with the elevation of human traditions to the level of doctrine. That said, even if I grew up in and still attended a Catholic church, I would understand that I do not get to apply the label to myself. I am not Catholic, and cannot be so unless I accept Catholic doctrine and teaching. The only reason to cling to an undeserved label or title is to cheapen and weaken said title, to damage its brand value.

Nancy Pelosi is a superb case in point, hiding behind the skirts of falsely claimed Catholicism while proclaiming abortion "sacred ground". And not just any abortion, although she likes 'em all, but late-term abortion, which makes even many pro-abortionists uncomfortable. The woman is either completely deluded, or deliberately slandering Catholicism.

But I digress. Back to Ebert.

He was a good writer and a fine film critic. I still read "his" website, but not nearly as often. Eventually I expect it'll become a website that I used to read.


Bonus fun fact: Blogger's spell checker sometimes flags the words "movie" and "movies" (but bafflingly, not always), which means there's a lot of red on my screen as I type this.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something else my wife cooked and ate during her Year of Shrinking, during which she shed just shy of 100 pounds. I don't know why she photographed this, but there it was on the memory card.

Perfectly Ordinary Shirt Day

I'll put my hatred of bullying, and contempt for the bullies themselves, up against anyone's. I have a visceral reaction to any abuse of power or authority.

This holds true whether we're talking about bullies on the playground, or anywhere else in life. Members of Parliament who intimate that objecting to their proposal implies you're in league with child pornographers, thuggish cops whose first interaction with a distraught foreigner is to taser him to death, teachers who run screeching to the police to arrest a man because his four-year-old daughter draws a picture of a gun, or people who think it's OK to kill babies in the name of convenience, and hey, it's not like they can fight back - they're all cut from the same cloth as playground tyrants, and I want them all knocked off their high horses. Hard.

However, as much as I deplore bullying in all its forms, I won't conform for the sake of an empty gesture.

Tomorrow is Pink Shirt Day, intended to demonstrate opposition to bullying. There will probably be millions of people, including lots of them at my son's school and my workplace, wearing pink shirts under the delusion that a momentary meaningless gesture of solidarity will dispel the satisfaction that bullies get from exercising brute force. Their intentions are good, but on Thursday they'll be dressing normally and the Nelsons of the world will resume business as usual.

This display will do nothing to dissuade bullies, mainly because bullies aren't very smart. If they were, they'd be far more frightened of possible consequences of their behaviour, like the school shooting currently playing out in Ohio. Interestingly, earlier today I saw reports saying that the (alleged...) shooter was a favourite target for his school's bullies. Those seem to have now been scrubbed offline.

That's the sole upside of school shootings: the hope that somewhere a bully will furrow their unibrow and wonder whether that little spaz they torment might do the same to them if pushed too far, and back off. I'd rather they back off out of personal growth, but in the interim fear will do. And no, that tiny upside doesn't mitigate the tragic downside.

Anti-bullying has entered the fashionable mainstream. That's only because now it's politically useful to some people to call attention to some of the victims. Kids have always been picked on by other kids. Some can take it, some can't (which is not meant to denigrate those who can't, because they shouldn't have to). The awkward kids, shy kids, tall kids, short kids, fat kids, smart kids, homely kids, and yes, those kids who don't conform to the mainstream stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, as the case may be, have always gotten picked on. The worst thing a kid can be in the eyes of other kids is different. And everybody tisked and muttered about how that shouldn't be, but it went on more or less unabated for millenia.

But now it's intolerable and the greatest scourge of our society because of the fashionable (take that as a pun if you like) victims.

"It gets better" is a message for all kids, not just those in trendy subcultures.

As for me, I will not be wearing a pink shirt tomorrow, partly because I don't own one but more because I'm largely immune to peer pressure. This is closely related to my near-total lack of social skills and inability to understand normal human interaction.

This immunity has some downsides. Sometimes it's wise to go with the herd, because there be tigers in the other direction. On the other hand, not caring (or often, even realizing) what everyone else is doing lets you skip over a lot of nonsense in life. I rather like it when I look at the magazines in the supermarket checkout aisle and don't recognize any of the people on the covers.

I'm actually hoping that one of our office cheerleaders calls me out tomorrow for not wanting to play this latest reindeer game. If and when they do, I'm going to make a loud spectacle out of asking them why they're singling me out for negative attention just because I don't conform to their expectations. I'll grow increasingly (mock-) distraught as I proclaim how much they're hurting my feelings by picking on me for dressing differently from them.

Then I'll abruptly shut off the histrionics and thank them, because I feed on irony. Their lack of self-awareness is like manna to me, the sweet nectar of paradise. I may lapse into a Montgomery Burns impression for this stage of the bit.

"But Z-Dog," you may interject at this point, "if you do this to some poor unsuspecting sap, won't that make you, kind of, well... a bully?"

To which I reply, "Don't call me Z-Dog. You sound like an idiot." Also, "Yes."

The best answer to bullying, unfortunately, is a bigger bully. We live in a fallen world, wherein every last member of the dominant species is corrupted by sin. The best of us isn't very good. The best we can ever hope for is that the bully at the top of the food chain is benevolent. This is why I'm quite content with America being the dominant world power for the last few decades. Yes, she occasionally throws her weight around, but virtually always with good intentions and often to good ends.

In summation, I hate bullying (but not the bullies themselves, a crucial distinction) of any sort as much as anyone, but I'm not interested in meaningless gestures that consist largely of leveraging peer pressure to force conformity, itself a concept dear to every bully's heart. I'll stick with knocking the feet out from under bullies at every opportunity, and encouraging others to do the same.

And I don't wait until the victims are a politically correct group.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of round Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger dolls that look like they could be wadded into balls for easy storage. I call them Poohkemon.

Reading Log: Outliers

I have several rather large stacks - well, more like an amorphous pile at this point - of books that I've finished reading but haven't written about. I had intended this blog to act as a reading log, among other things. Not writing about books that I finish doesn't contribute much to that goal.

As an insignificant token gesture toward rectifying that, here's a book that I borrowed, and which I'd like to return: Outliers: The True Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell.

This one is borrowed from the local library. I've already kept it past its due date, and renewed it, and am fast approaching its new due date. I had read it well before the first due date rolled around, but held onto it in faint hopes of writing this entry.

There's a library very close to my workplace. So close, in fact, that I can spend my lunch breaks there, and most days I do. I have a set prioritization sequence. Each day I read the newspapers (including any from past days that I haven't read yet), then any new periodicals of any interest to me whatsoever, then scan the new arrivals shelves for anything that looks interesting, then finally work my way down a shelf, in Dewey Decimal System order, at least skimming each book. I keep notes on that last method, so I can remember the shelf and book where I last left off; most days, I don't make it past the new arrivals, so I rarely resort to this method.

I'm usually content to read a new book for a few minutes to get the idea, maybe returning to it another day if it's still there. Outliers has been the only book so far for which my ten-minute skim wasn't enough. I signed it out so that I could finish it at my leisure (which took two or three days).

This books starts strong, with a chapter on a phenomenon that fascinated me: the tendency for elite athletes to have been born in the early months of the year. The author provides a few lists of professional sports team rosters, and it's immediately obvious that the players are far likelier to have been born between January and March than at any other time. Then he explains why.

It's one of those things that's so obvious, you wonder why we hadn't seen it all along: at first, in any group activity, children are grouped by age, and there has to be a cutoff. Whether we're talking about junior sports teams, school, or almost anything else, all the kids born before an arbitrary date go into group A, and all the ones born on that date or later go into group B or wait until next year. It quickly becomes apparent that some of the kids in each group are more talented than others. Those more talented kids get more attention, more opportunities, better coaching, more practice time, whatever. It's only normal to encourage and nurture talent. The less proficient kids fall by the wayside. They may get relegated to the backup team, put into a less challenging curriculum, held back for remedial work, etc.

However the truth is that those "more talented" kids may not be prodigies at all. They may just be older.

These groupings by birthdate usually happen at an early age. Five or six years old, at the latest. When grouping those children into age cohorts, you end up with some children in the group being as much as one day short of a full year older than the others. At age five or six, a gap of (effectively) a full year makes a huge difference. The child who is five years, 11 months, and 28 days old will be bigger, stronger, faster, more co-ordinated, more agile, and more intelligent than the child who is five years and 2 days old. They will be "better", by almost any measure, by a significant margin.

That younger child will wind up on the losing end of almost any comparison. Before long, they will be shunted off into the second (loser) division. The "prodigy", whose true main advantage was that they had several extra months of development under their figurative and literal belt, will receive better training, more resources, more opportunities, and ultimately a better outcome.

This is not to say that birthdate is the only predictor of success, that children born at the "right" time never have true natural ability, or that children born at the "wrong" time can't sometimes overcome that through true natural ability or sheer determination. However, it's clearly an important factor.

The only hockey player whose name I could immediately think of when I first read this was Wayne Gretzky. He was born on January 26.

I found this age issue mind-blowing, and I wonder how it could be overcome or, to put it more crassly, perhaps even exploited. The first thing that comes to mind is that a rival children's sports league could be started, with the age cutoff exactly six months off from that used by the current, established league. If you could get this to take hold (and you'd have to follow it up through all the age groups for such a league), I think that within a few years we would discover almost twice as many "prodigies" in the sport. The ones born in January or soon thereafter, and the ones born in July or soon thereafter. How many potential Wayne Gretzkys have gone unnoticed simply because they were a few months less developed?

That's in sports, though, about which I give not the slightest whit. It's just an area where this phenomenon is easily observed. Gladwell - among other sources we'll discuss shortly - assures the reader that statisticians have done proper studies on the matter that demonstrate a clear, strong correlation between high athletic achievement and a birthdate near the entry point cutoff.

I'd be far more interested in overcoming this in the academic world. Many a child has been pigeonholed early on by the bureaucrats in charge of the school system, and proceeded to live down to the expectations placed (or not) upon them. Just one more way in which the public "educational" system fails miserably.

I'm something of a numbers and statistics geek, so when I read about this in Gladwell's book, having never heard of it before, I thought it must be a very obscure phenomenon. Then, shortly thereafter, I read about it on Cracked.com .

I think it's safe to assume that if a research area is being discussed on Cracked (which is sometimes a surprisingly good source of information), it's not exactly a secret anymore. I was just late to the party.

The rest of Gladwell's book is still somewhat interesting, but didn't grip me like that first revelation. He debunks the myth of effortless expertise, by using such examples of Bill Gates and the Beatles. Gates was certainly brilliant, but to suggest that he was an inexperienced natural who mastered computers by sheer intuition is off the mark. He had several opportunities fall into his lap by various means that allowed him to rack up thousands of hours of programming experience at an early age. Where most of us squander our time, young Gates passionately threw himself into a hobby that turned out to have a very practical application later in his life.

As for the Beatles, they honed their craft with months of nights on Hamburg nightclub stages, playing for eight to ten hours a night, seven nights a week, for demanding audiences. They didn't get as good as they became without paying years of dues. By the time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, they had spent more hours onstage than most veteran performers will amass in their entire career.

The books bogs somewhat in the middle, as Gladwell spends far too many pages explaining why Jews became so prominent in the legal profession (no, really, he does). The book is well worth reading overall, but I could understand a reader setting it aside after the chapters on birthdates and "overnight success stories".

Another fascinating section comes when he compares two brilliant physicists, Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was somewhat deranged, even trying at one point to poison an associate for no comprehensible reason, but was put in charge of the Manhattan Project. Langan falls victim to a series of seemingly minor misfortunes, and winds up a footnote. The main differences between them lie in their social skills - Oppenheimer is a master manipulator, although we, as always, pretty this up by calling him "charming", "personable", or "persuasive". As such, his flaws, though at least comparable to those of Langan, are overlooked whereas Langan is allowed to drift into obscurity.

Much of life is a popularity contest.

I also appreciated the theme that raw intelligence ultimately counts for little. There seems to be a point where IQ is simply "high enough", and being any more intelligent past that threshold is insignificant. There is also a large degree to which, as in the case of Oppenheimer and Langan, raw intelligence matters less than "social skills", a euphemism for likability and capability to manipulate.

I appreciated this because I'm a guy whose IQ consistently tests in the top 1/2 of 1% of the population. It's been formally tested a few times over the years, and I've taken a few other informal but supposedly valid tests as well, and every time I've scored in that range. In real life, that counts for the exact midpoint of jack and squat.

I have a nice, nondistinguished, middle-class existence, which suits me fine. However, it's certainly not what anyone, including myself, would have predicted for me back when my elementary school tried to move me up several grades (Mom vetoed it), but settled for letting me take individual advanced classes (grade 5 English when I was in grade 1, high-school English and math in grade 3), or when universities began calling my house when I was still in junior high school. As it turned out, my academic career was solid but nothing special, and my professional life has been similar. My social skills are closer to those of Langan than Oppenheimer, so it could have been much worse, and I have absolutely no complaints about my lot in life. Still, one of my favourite TV shows was Malcolm in the Middle, because of its recurring theme: being intelligent doesn't make you smart.

Back to the book. The question I'm left with is what we can do with this information. By the end of the book we know that grouping children by age conveys a huge advantage on the oldest members of the group. We know that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of experience in anything to become an expert, and there are no shortcuts. We know that sometimes the skills acquired to adapt to adverse circumstances pay off handsomely later, when the circumstances change (the point of the section about Jewish lawyers).

So, do we stop grouping children by age? Do we devote more time to productive or educational activities, which sounds more than a bit obvious, no matter how unlikely? Do we focus more on developing our interpersonal skills? Do we contact our friendly neighbourhood psychics to ask what things will be like in twenty years, so we can start angling into position now?

The only practical action I can see is to try to provide opportunities to others. Part of Gladwell's thesis is that his titular "outliers" may not be so special in and of themselves. They may have been in the right place at the right time or willing to do what needed to be done to advance. However, many of them reached in their positions of prominence due in no small part to the largesse of others. No one really makes it alone. Bill Gates was given time in computer labs in an era when that was a rarity. A club owner decided to give the Beatles, a moderately talented garage band like hundreds of others, a shot as his house band. A blind eye was turned toward Oppenheimer's antisocial tendencies.

Help one another. Give a break to somebody who could use one.

I guess that's as good a moral to the story as any.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my new dog, back when she really was my new dog, in every sense of the word. She's a little over a year old now, and her head alone is now much larger than those boots on the left.

Very-Nearly-Year In Review

This entry is being posted so that I can semi-legitimately say that I didn't go an entire year without posting. This post is not a farewell. It is not an announcement of a return. It just is.

I had no explicit intention of abandoning this blog. I still don't. I never made a conscious decision to stop posting. I still haven't. I just didn't post one day, then didn't post the next day, then it was 2010, then it was late August.

Now, for the last year-or-so. These are more or less random thoughts, barely sketched out.

I'm still in the same job that I've been in since early 2008. Starting that job - or more accurately, leaving my last job, or even more accurately, being informed that my last job was coming to an abrupt and unforeseen end, was part of the catalyst for starting this blog.

The new job I had thought imminent in the summer of 2009 still hasn't happened. It may or may not happen at this point. The prospective new employer took me on some all-expenses-paid training in the summer of 2009, and their hiring is proceeding on schedule, but I haven't gotten called up yet. There's at least one more wave of hiring to go on the project, so hope remains. I'm quite content where I am now, and more than adequately compensated, so I have no complaints no matter what happens, but I'd definitely switch over to this new situation given the opportunity.

Since I haven't changed jobs, I also haven't moved. We're still in the same house, which is now paid off in full, as are all our household's student loans at long long last. The house has also received some much-needed repairs thanks to a contractor who actually showed up and did his job, and a new back step and backyard patio thanks to my father-in-law.

My son is in school and doing fine. I'm not sure that the various school district employees who deal with him are doing quite so well, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. My favourite moment from a parent-teacher meeting was when I ripped into his teacher and a school district drone chaperone for his report card saying they'd like us to hold him back on his reading, because the material he was reading was getting too advanced. They hemmed and hawed and stammered trying to justify this in the meeting; first they were concerned that he might not be intellectually and / or emotionally ready for some of his preferred books (although, to be clear, it's not like we're letting him read a lot of novels on the theme of nihilism), then that his chosen material was so far beyond that of his classmates that they might have trouble relating. The truth is one of two things. Either his advanced reading makes it harder for the teacher, or he's reading material that his teacher and/or the useless suit-clad sycophants from the district office can't understand themselves.

My wife has returned to work, for the first time since before our son was born lo those many years ago. It's a pain. The logistics of childcare and other family responsibilities become exponentially more complicated without one always-available parent to cover home base. She's on a short-term contract, and we're kind of hoping she isn't offered an extension. We certainly don't need the money; she's working because she wanted to try getting back out of the house for a bit, and that experiment may have run its course. I also wanted her to have some more recent experience on her resume in case I drop dead tomorrow and she suddenly gets drafted as the primary breadwinner for the family.

We have a new dog. A female mutt, mostly black lab. I have a definite type (three of my last four dogs matched that description). She's six months old, and got spayed last Thursday. She's long since back to her goofy normal self. At this early stage, she's the best-behaved dog I've ever had, and I've had some very good dogs.

I've subscribed to Macleans magazine, and its arrival in the mailbox is one of the highlights of my week. Usually. For the last few issues my favourite columnist, Mark Steyn, has been notably absent, but the editors claim he'll return shortly. He'd better, for my subscription's sake. Anyway, it's two bucks or so a month tacked onto my cable bill for a weekly news magazine, so it would have been tough to pass up. Plus, although it would be a massive stretch to claim that the overall tone of the magazine is conservative, it's clear that the editors are willing to at least allow conservative voices to be heard, which is near-miraculous for Canadian media.

On to geekier stuff.

My wife and I have gone through sporadic bursts of playing Magic. I also had a brief relapse into playing the Microprose Magic game, released in the 1990s, thanks to a group of wonderful lunatics who have hacked it to add lots of newer cards.

Even that, though, has fallen by the wayside thanks to Forge. Forge has almost everything I want in a Magic program: a huge card selection, adequate single-player AI, and full custom deckbuilding capabilities. I've been playing it way too much, and building way too many decks, for the last few weeks. My wife plays it too. We have two computers set up, and it's not unusual for us to each be on one of them playing Forge. The only things Forge is missing, as far as I'm concerned, are multiplayer and the rest of the cards. Yes, my ideal Magic computer game would include every card that's ever been printed. Whereas the new version of Forge added almost 400 more cards, I get the impression that the developers have the same goal.

I also finally went to Linux. I built a new PC last fall - 2.3GHz quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 1.3 TB of hard drive space. Its name, as longtime readers (if there are any of you left) may have guessed, is Levi. Levi is the most powerful PC I've ever built by a long margin, and I decided it was time to take the plunge. I set it up to dual-boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu Studio, and resolved to stick as exclusively with Ubuntu as much as I could.

I haven't booted Levi into XP in months. Well, with one exception - I tried installing a Windows program that purported to prepare a virtual machine image based on my actual XP installation. You see, I wanted to cheat. The Microprose Magic game doesn't work under Wine (a program that lets you run some Windows software in Linux), and I was going into withdrawal. I planned to set up an XP virtual machine in Ubuntu for that single purpose. However, that little program didn't work, or I did something wrong. I puttered at it a bit, and while doing so stumbled across Forge, which works fine in Linux. I now have pretty much no interest in going back to the Microprose game, or Windows.

I've found a Linux application for everything else I want to do with my computer, with the sole exception of MP3tag, which works fine under Wine. Bye bye, XP. See you when Diablo 3 ships, and probably not before.

I got my son a Wii for Christmas last year. He loves it.

I actually bought it in the early fall, and spent every evening for weeks on end at a workbench in the basement where I'd set up the Wii, hooked to a tiny old TV set. I wasn't playing games (much) - I was modding the holy jumping monkey bugs out of it. By the time he opened it on Christmas morning, it included a media player, MAME and a pile of ROMs, emulators for several other older game systems with huge ROM sets, and an external hard drive with...well, a lot of games preinstalled. Too many, actually - to this day, he's barely scraped the surface, preferring to stick with Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2), Mario Kart, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I sense a theme.

I could say much more about each of these, and many other topics besides. I hear there's even stuff going on in the world outside my house. Maybe I will over the days to come. Maybe not. I really don't know.

For now, I'm stopping here in the interests of getting this up before it's officially the anniversary of my last post, at which point I fear this blog might have turned into a pumpkin if left fallow.


Is anybody still out there?


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the middle shelf, left-hand side, on bookshelf # 1. Once again, spot the theme. For nonexistent bonus points, identify the two books that aren't strictly on-theme.

Quick Notes

Some hither-and-yon ramblings in lieu of a real entry. Things are still hectic.


My son and I went to see Up. It was good, if surprisingly melancholy. He appreciated the floating house and talking dogs. I appreciated the theme that we will all inevitably lose everything and everyone we ever loved. This movie was fun for the whole bipolar family.

Spoiler time. If I had been in charge of the movie, the photo montage over the end credits would have included a shot of the kid (sorry, I forget his name and am far too lazy to look it up) sitting alone in the funeral home, in a throwback to the earlier shot of the old guy (see what I said about the kid a very short time ago) sitting alone at his wife's wake. That shot seemed like an obvious capper to me, and I was disappointed that it wasn't included.

I also liked that Pixar made a movie with virtually no merchandising potential. Nobody is going to want action figures of the old guy or the chubby kid. It's almost as though the Pixar crew were thumbing their collective nose at the Disney machine to which they were tethered. Now that the Pixar/Disney split is imminent, I know which side I'm on. My son and I will probably be at the next Pixar movie. The next Disney movie, not so much.

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While at the theatre for Up, I picked up the free movie magazine in the lobby. Trendy Nitwit Monthly or somesuch. Most of it was of course vacuous fluff. I take perverse pleasure in flipping through it without reading the captions to see how few of the stars-du-summer-blockbuster I recognize. My ratio is down to about one in ten.

Anyway, one article (the movie started late, so I actually read a good chunk of the magazine) caught my interest. Not for a good reason. In an article about an upcoming werewolf movie, this passage appeared (sadly, the link means I now know the actual title of the magazine. I preferred Trendy Nitwit Monthly):

Director Chris Weitz told USA Today the requirements included having Native American or First Nation ancestry, because their characters belong to the Quileute tribe, based in La Push, Washington. “They had to have papers that proved their heritage,” says Weitz.

See the problem? If not, I'll wait.

OK. Anybody who doesn't think there's a problem with that needs to consider the logical outcome of this sort of thinking. I foresee a World War II movie in which the director insists that all Nazi characters be played by actors who are purely Aryan and have the papers to prove it. After all, racial purity is important in filmmaking, right?

When that happens, I don't want to hear any whining from anybody who doesn't acknowledge the problem with demanding racial papers from actors playing Native American werewolves.

Now there's a sentence that has probably never been written before.

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Michael Jackson is still dead. Just throwin' that out there.

Actually, I've got a couple of other notes on the matter.

First up, I feel especially bad for poor old Latoya being tossed into the spotlight again. I think most of us had forgotten about her, which was the best thing for her reputation. It's pretty rough when Janet Jackson is your sister, but you're still considered the trampy one.

Second, Michael is on the cover of every tabloid this week, and most mainstream "news" outlets are still running factoids about him as their top stories. Farrah Fawcett is getting thrown an occasional bone. (Don't snicker at that phrasing. Show some class.) Ed McMahon has been largely forgotten already.

There's a worse omission, though. Where's the love for Karl Malden? The guy was in Patton, for crying out loud! That alone should be worth any number of swimsuit posters, "Hey-Yo"-s, and child molestation allegations.

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Driving things further into the sewer, let's play a round of America's fastest growing quiz sensation, Choose Your Own Punchline! Today's episode is rated For Mature Audiences due to immaturity.


Today I noticed that a co-worker's wristwatch was loose. Having my watch sliding around on my arm like that would drive me crazy. He said, "I lost some weight, and now my watch is loose. I need to readjust the strap sometime."

I replied, "I don't think losing a few pounds should make your forearms shrink that much. That's a loss of muscle tone."

Knowing full well what he was getting into, he said, "Do you have any suggestions how I could build up my wrist muscles?"

Which brings us to that time again...Choose Your Own Punchline!


(A) "Get a divorce."

-or-

(B) "Stay married a while longer."


As always, your votes will be tabulated by Price-Waterhouse-Cooper! Well, Price and Cooper. Waterhouse is off somewhere building up his wrist muscles.

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Hey, did a U.S. Supreme Court Justice actually say something this revealing while discussing Roe v. Wade?

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

Why, yes. Yes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you don't see the problem here, I can't help you.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the top left shelf of bookshelf # 1. This shelf is a slushpile of stuff that I haven't sorted away in a proper place yet. Highlights include several photo albums / scrapbooks (the last three on the right are full of Beatles clippings), unread books by B.F. Skinner, Ayn Rand, and Richard Matheson (I like to imagine those three hanging out together when they were alive, perhaps at one of those old drive-in burger joints with the waitresses on roller skates), and my beloved three-hole punch. It's under the monkey. No, the other monkey. No, the one in the middle with the Santa hat.

The Return

I had no intention of letting this blog lie fallow for so long. I haven't abandoned it, at least not consciously. Over the past few weeks I've just had a lot on my plate, and frankly all of it took precedence over sitting here typing. Some of it will continue to do so.

I'm bemused to note that my traffic remains pretty consistent whether I post a new entry or not. I'm not sure what to think of that other than "random reinforcement works". I'm pleased, though, that my most popular article of late is one of the serious Bible study entries, Bible Defense: Of Birds And Bats (No Bees). That kind of article is really why I'm doing this. The other entries are fun (frequently more so for me than the reader), but of no real lasting value.

I'm also well aware that my last entry, about the horse being given to the Queen, was subpar. I'm sorely tempted to delete it or completely rewrite it to punch it up. It had some potential, but needed another round or two of polishing. For now, and probably forever, it stands as a testament to what happens when I phone it in.

If I were to re-do it, here are some of the improvements I'd make. There would be a joke about how the Queen was going to get the horse back to England. ("Can you check a horse as baggage? You'd have to do a lot more than just geld it to fit it into the overhead compartment.") The whole "telling the horse about the name change and gelding" section would be revamped ("Umm, Terror.... I have two pieces of bad news."). The reference to events before the horse was gelded would use the term "pre-gelding", which I find inexplicably amusing. And it should have been called "I Hope She Looked In Its Mouth". So, basically, yeah, I'd tear the whole thing down and start over. But onward.


Here's a very short summary of some of what I've been doing over the last few weeks. Some of these may be expanded in future entries. Most probably won't.


I had a job interview, and the new position is looking like a real possibility. I spent a lot of time preparing for it, which seems to have paid off. I passed the initial screening and some tests to get an interview, and after the interview I was asked for some references, which I take as a good sign. That's where it stands now. If I get the job (and accept it, which is a whole other question), I'll be moving, which makes pretty much no difference to this blog. I won't be any more specific about the new job than my current one. That is, it'll just be fodder for occasional True Stories that could take place in any office.


My son had a birthday, with accompanying party. My house grows ever more full of Transformers.


My wife and I are still playing Magic frequently, when she takes a break from reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. She's still playing Thallids almost exclusively. I usually play a black and blue bounce / discard deck, including several cards from the new expansion, Alara Reborn (I got six packs while travelling for the job interview). I love the Cascade mechanic. Deny Reality is a key card in the deck. Magic players - click on that link, and try telling me that card isn't ten pounds of fun in a five pound bag. I still rotate through other decks sometimes, too - we have 19 decks ready to shuffle and play at the moment.


My Bible study series has wrapped up. I miss it already, and may revisit it as an adult Sunday School class in the fall. On the other hand, finishing the series frees up my Wednesday nights and the time I was putting into preparation each week. I'm using some of that time to catch up on, ironically, my Bible reading. I follow the Our Daily Bread devotionals, including the "Bible in a year" reading plan, and I've fallen a wee bit behind so far this year. I'm currently on April 21. I'm catching up slowly but surely, by doing a couple of days' worth at a time. Doing more than that gets counterproductive. Trying to cram too much Bible reading at once leads to poor retention and reflection, thereby defeating the entire purpose. The goal is to internalize Scripture, not to check off chapters on a list like I'm collecting hockey cards.


I've been chasing contractors to come look at my house. I'm not quite sure why people who repair houses for a living don't seem to want my money. I have many stories on this topic for other days. A guy is supposed to be here tomorrow morning for an initial meeting about replacing some water-damaged ceiling. We'll see.


I've been sleeping (not quite enough) and eating (a little too much).


All for now. This was going to be a Quick Notes entry, with several short unrelated thoughts about random things, but turned into something a bit different as I typed. Maybe Quick Notes will be next, maybe not. Oh, and I'm fresh out of Hostage Bunny pictures. I think there will be two more. The second one is going to make Bleeding Heart Barbie (which made me laugh out loud - thanks, RebelAngel!) very, very sad. Know what makes me sad? The fact that this blog isn't the top Google result for "Hostage Bunny". Yet.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my basement. This is after some straightening up.

Quick Notes

It seems like everything I've written on here of late has been epic-length, which contributed to the dearth of entries for April. Time to shake that pattern. Some of these will be jokes, some will be a bit more serious, some will be pure self-indulgent diary entries. Onward.

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My wife and I are playing a lot of Magic again lately. Our current deck count stands at 20 decks built and ready to shuffle and play. Several of them are untuned beyond all the mana bases having been checked to make sure all the cards are playable, but they're all ready to go in a pinch. And that's after I tore two decks apart over the last week ("Odyssey & Grab Bag Green" and "Odyssey & Grab Bag Black"). Since my wife almost always plays the same deck (Thallids), I rotate frequently between all the others.

She's dividing her spare time between that and reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Since she won't be writing any Reading Log entries, that's probably the last you'll hear of them around here.

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I was looking through a German cookbook, and I noticed that every recipe starts the same way. "Step 1: round up all the kosher foods you can find and stuff them in the oven."

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My son is a creature of habit, to put it mildly. I call him obsessive-compulsive, although the more accurate technical term is "rigid". Here's a list of his current fixations.

Breakfast - a waffle. He went through a phase of eating nothing but (toaster) French toast for breakfast for months, and before that it was oatmeal. The waffle must be plain. Don't dare offer him a chocolate chip waffle, and blueberry is right out.

Lunch - A cheese sandwich, non-grilled. He insisted on a grilled cheese sandwich for a long time before that, and a Fluffernutter (peanut butter and viscous marshmallow goop sandwich) for weeks on end before that.

TV - Teletoon Retro is now the only channel that matters. I agree with him wholeheartedly. He's arrived at some insights about Looney Tunes that probably deserve their own entry.

Current play fixations - 3-D jigsaw puzzles, Transformers, and online Flash games. As I write this, he's a few feet away playing something called "Twang".

---

My walk to work takes me along a set of railroad tracks that run parallel to the road. Recently I noticed some odd litter along those tracks. Hundreds of unopened bright yellow artificial sweetener packages were scattered all over the ground, for about fifty feet. Then, in the middle of that, a single, opened, presumably empty Viagra box.

What sort of party went on down there?

---

Actually overheard at work: "I have to try that new exercise equipment at the gym. I don't know what it is or how it works, but Madonna uses it."

Those two sentences encapsulate much of what is wrong with our society.

That lady is in for a surprise when she arrives at the gym to find that this "exercise equipment" is a pair of Dominican baseball players.

---

When I was very young, my family moved and were assigned a new phone number that used to belong to a dentist who had long since retired or moved away or died or something. We would occasionally get calls from people who didn't know this, and my parents (I was too young to answer the phone) would politely explain that this number was no longer the long-closed dentist's office.

Most callers understood that, but there was one guy who was persistent. He kept calling, over and over, trying to book an appointment. My parents would explain that this number now belonged to a young family in a tiny second-floor apartment, but this guy just wouldn't get it.

Finally one day when he called, Dad said, "You're in luck! We just had a cancellation. If you can be here in fifteen minutes, we'll get you right in!" The guy was thrilled, and said he'd be right over.

He never called again.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny being menaced by a guard Hey Bulldog.

Quick Notes

Another assortment of quickies in lieu of a longer, better thought-out entry. I like doing these because they make me feel like Andy Rooney.

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I've been quiet lately for two main reasons. First, there's a big project going on at work, and staff were offered two hours of daily voluntary overtime. There weren't many of us who accepted, and even fewer who did more than a handful of days. I've stayed for the extra time almost every day since late January.

You wouldn't think that a mere two hours added to the end of the work day would have such an impact, but it definitely has. I haven't even mustered up the energy to do my tax return yet. Since I'm expecting a sizable refund, that's saying something.

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The second main reason for my radio silence: Gamehouse Sudoku. I normally play level 8, and my average time is about four minutes. I thought that the Automarks would make me lazy and actually atrophy any Sudoku skill I once had, but they only remove some of the grunt work. You still have to do your own thinking, which is the fun part anyway.

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Rebelangel has been posting lots of interesting stuff lately, trying to make up for the days she missed during her recent computer problems, and get back on track for her Blog 365 target. When there's nothing going on here, check over there. (When there is, check over there afterward anyway.) I'd be posting comments on some of her articles if I didn't have so many important video games to play. Maybe once the overtime wraps up (supposedly soon).

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Pastor Derek and Homeschooler's newborn twin boys are still in the hospital. This article has an update and some new pictures. Poor Henry looks so sad in the first and last pictures. He looks like he's far more aware of his discomfort than he should be at this age. Those are spookily wise eyes.

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On to less personal stuff.

The attorney representing child-killer Christopher Pauchay (remember him?) says that he was "surprised by the judge's assessment that Pauchay lacks insight into his behaviour."

Over fifty criminal convictions and decision-making skills that led him to carry his daughters outside in a blizzard to freeze in a snowbank, and his attorney is "surprised" by a suggestion that Pauchay might not think too much about his actions.

Maybe an IQ test should have been administered before the bar exam.

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The pictures I post here should start looking much better. I use Irfanview for most of my digital image manipulation, and recommend it highly. As I demonstrate on a regular basis, I'm not much of a photographer. My shots tend to come out with a yellowish tint. I've played with the colour balancing tools in Irfanview (Image - Enhance Colours), but all I've ever managed was to replace the yellow tint with a red or blue tint.

The other day, just for the heck of it, I clicked the Auto Adjust Colours option in that menu for the first time.

Wow! Never again will I mess around with manual colour balancing. With a single click, that button makes my shots look clear, colourful and vibrant. I'm tempted to repost some of my old shots with that option applied, especially the pictures of my wife's crafts. She does much better work than you would think from looking at my washed-out pictures.

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My local supermarket has Pringles on sale for $1.99 a can. The regular price, plainly visible on the sign announcing the sale, is "2 for $4.00."

I thought this was entertainingly idiotic and/or idiotically entertaining until I thought it over. You may laugh at a savings of a single penny, but think of the big picture: if you bought a million cans, you would save $10,000. When's the last time you had an opportunity to save that kind of money by buying vaguely potato-based snack foods?

I may need to rent a storage space.

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There are currently nine books in my "finished reading this - now write a Reading Log entry" pile. I finished some of them as long ago as last summer. I may not remember much about them now. I've also bought five more books in the last couple of weeks, all of which will join that pile soon enough.

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My MP3 player, which I listen to much of the day at work, has had Bob Dylan's Infidels album on it for a couple of weeks now. Since I normally rotate its contents every day (usually two albums / concerts daily), that means it's holding my interest pretty effectively. I had never heard it before. A friend at work is a big Dylan fan, and after we discussed the three "born again" albums, he brought it in for me. I may write an entry on it in the future. I already have draft notes.

Today's other selection was "Beatle Mash" by "The Liverpool Kids", a no-budget and no-name exploitation released circa 1964 to cash in on Beatlemania. It's not awful, but it's certainly not memorable. Generic early sixties R&B, with one Beatles cover (She Loves You) and one "original" that's such a knockoff of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" that the producers would surely have been sued for plagiarism if the album had been noticed at the time. It's a closer copy than "My Sweet Lord" is of "He's So Fine" - and that's pretty darn close. This album won't be held over.

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In the mid-eighties, the writers of Spider-Man comics did a storyline that tied into the much-maligned Secret Wars II (which rocked my barely-pubescent world, despite being sheer crap in retrospect). The Beyonder turned an entire Manhattan office building, and all its contents, to solid gold.

Hijinks ensued as Spidey had to rescue its occupants and neighbours (a solid gold building apparently cannot support its own weight; I'm sure the writers had engineers check all the math), the Kingpin tried to steal it, and finally the government stepped in to confiscate it and get rid of it (I don't remember how, and I'm not subjecting myself to re-reading a Secret Wars II tie-in).

The writers showed some real economic insight here. It was explained that the sudden ex nihilo introduction of all that gold would destabilize the world metals markets, and ultimately the entire global economy. You can't just suddenly flood the market with a previously scarce commodity without doing far more harm than good. An inflationary spiral, followed quickly by economic chaos and collapse, invariably ensues.

This goes for a government introducing large amounts of previously nonexistent currency into the economy, whether by actually printing bills (remember Germans needing wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread under Hitler's economic stimulus package?), or by giving large amounts of money that only exists as numbers on a screen (most "money" doesn't physically exist anymore, it's all abstract) to... well, anyone.

How sad is it that Spider-Man writers of the mid-eighties were smarter economists than anyone in the Obama administration?


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son doing his absolute best to hold still. Check out that sharply-defined colour!

A True Story From One Of My Jobs

This is a followup to something that I posted on January 29. I actually went through with what I suggested in that entry.

The following is an actual e-mail exchange that took place yesterday between me and one of the administrators of the building where I work. The only editing I've done is to arrange the messages in chronological order, remove the repetitive subject lines, and replace the names of the people involved. "Admin" is the building administrator, and "Me" is… well, me.

---

From: Admin

Sent: February 25, 2009 12:19 PM

To: All Building Occupants

Subject: Fire Alarm

There are gentlemen from (our building service contractors) in the building doing the monthly Fire Alarm and sprinkler testing. If the Fire Alarm bell rings, please just ignore it. I will advise you when the testing has been completed.

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From: Me

Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 12:19 PM

To: Admin

What happens if there's actually a fire in the next few minutes?

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From: Admin

Sent: February 25, 2009 12:24 PM

To: Me

Pray.

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From: Me

Sent: February 25, 2009 12:25 PM

To: Admin

You win.

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Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the train station platform from which my family watched the parade of giant electric fish.

A True Story From One Of My Jobs

One of my jobs involved handling deceased clients. That is, when our organization found out that someone with whom we had dealings had passed away, I was the guy that took care of getting all the loose ends tied up and the client's file closed. I saw a lot of death certificates, and got even more informal notes or phone calls stating that somebody was dead, which meant I had to investigate further.

In a revelation that will surprise no one who either knows me or has read this blog's archives, I frequently encountered things in these duties that I found funny. As I've said before, you can either laugh at life or cry about it, and I made my choice a long time ago.

Today's story came about when I received notification that one of our clients who we hadn't heard from in a while had passed away. Specifically, he was killed by an animal. More specifically, the notification I received said, and I quote because I must, that "he was stampled by a bull."

That's right. "Stampled."

I take this to mean "half stomped, half trampled." I hope that the bull was merciful in deciding which half to stomp and which half to trample, but deep down inside I know he probably wasn't.

Most people who heard about this assumed that the unfortunate fellow was some sort of farmer or rancher. Oddly enough, he was an accountant. The bull came in for help with an audit, and lost his temper when he heard that some of his receipts weren't deductible.

The person who notified us seemed a bit too certain about the cause of death. Was anyone around when it happened? If I were a bull planning to "stample" somebody, I'd try to make sure there were no witnesses. Then when the investigators showed up, if they so much as glanced at me, I'd accuse them of unfair profiling. "Oh, sure. Every time somebody turns up stomped into a puddle in my neighbourhood, and I happen to have a little blood on my hooves, it's the same old story: blame the bull." This is the classic defense strategy known as "playing the bull card."

For a while after we got that notice, whenever one of my colleagues announced that they were going out and added the standard "I'll be back (whenever)", I replied, "Unless, of course, you get stampled by a bull. There's a lot of that going around. It's a full-fledged bull-stampling epidemic. Or half-fledged, at the very least."

The person was usually long gone before I finished. Sometimes they were already back.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son in Minnie Mouse's fireplace.

Musical Notes: Flying High To Sesame Street

Almost every day, I load up my MP3 player with two albums (or concerts) and listen to them through the day at work. I tend to run in themes - for instance, for several weeks, one of my two albums each day was by Larry Norman. I also expect to go into a Harry Nilsson phase soon, due mainly to having recently obtained the entire Harryties bootleg series .

One of my two albums one day last week was a tribute album called Flying High Again: The World's Greatest Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, released in 2006. It follows the usual pattern for tribute albums in the hard rock / heavy metal genre - most of the songs are credited to a (reasonably) big-name vocalist with a (reasonably) big-name guitarist. For instance, the first track on this album is Mr. Crowley, performed by Tim "Ripper" Owens and Yngwie Malmsteen. Neither is a household name, but if you're a fan of hard rock you've probably heard of both of them.

Also like most of these tribute albums, the majority of the tracks are pretty much karaoke, with the arrangements not straying far from the original recordings. Since all the guitarists are veterans of the shred scene, the music is all perfectly fine but doesn't bring much new to the table. The vocals are where we get some interesting variations.

Most of the vocalists fall into one of two categories: high-pitched screamers the likes of which I thought had become extinct in the late eighties, or acid-gargling snarlers from the hardcore / death metal genre. The opening track shows Ripper Owens to be one of the former. After an intro that sounds carbon-copied from Ozzy's original, he begins the vocal by screaming the opening line an octave higher than Ozzy's version. If you're going to listen to this album at high volume, please extend the courtesy of providing any nearby dogs with earplugs first, and beware of bats showing up to investigate the frequencies.

For the first ten tracks of the album, it's a competent but forgettable karaoke night. It's interesting to hear Lita Ford perform Close My Eyes Forever live as a solo song (with a really lame joke at the start that she seems to regret as soon as she says it), and Dee Snider's rendition of Crazy Train with Jason Bonham on drums, but there's nothing on here that will make anyone forget Ozzy's original versions.

Until we get to the last two tracks, that is. I'm going to discuss them in reverse order.

The album closer, Goodbye To Romance performed by the Alex Skolnick Trio, is by far the greatest departure from the original arrangement, and an odd ending for the album. Knowing Skolnick from his work with Testament and his columns in guitar magazines, I had expected just another karaoke carbon copy. Instead, it's an instrumental jazz version that clocks in at over seven minutes. Skolnick turns on a distortion pedal for the last couple of minutes, but most of the song sounds like it could be played as background music in an upscale cocktail bar.

I don't mean that as an insult - this is lounge music, but it's very well-done lounge music, and fans of easy-listening jazz (I'm not one of them) would probably enjoy it. It seems an anticlimactic way to end such a loud and heavy album, but placing this track anywhere else in the sequence would probably have resulted in most listeners not hearing anything after it. It certainly would have been a disastrously atypical opener. In the final analysis, there was nowhere it could go except at the end.

The most interesting track, though, is number 11: Revelation (Mother Earth), performed by Novembers Doom (whose name sounds to me like a possessive but inexplicably does not include an apostrophe). On the day that I listened to this album, my second selection was a Rutles album. The Novembers Doom track (man, do I ever have a hard time not inserting an apostrophe into their name) was still the funniest thing I heard that day.

The lead vocal - well, most of it, but we'll get to that - is performed by a member of the low, growly death-metal school. However, it doesn't come off quite right in this song. The instrumental intro sounds pretty much like Ozzy's original, slow and soft. Then the vocal comes in, and sounds just like - I assure you I am not making this up - Cookie Monster.

Yes, this album includes an Ozzy track as performed by beloved Sesame Street character Cookie Monster. That alone makes it a must-hear. The vocal is so reminiscent of the beloved Muppet that I was surprised every time the first-person personal pronoun ("I") appeared in the lyrics. It sounded wrong, because everyone knows that Cookie (we're tight, I can call him that) has trouble with his pronouns and always says "me".

Then it gets better.

Around a minute and a half in, a second vocalist joins in. The line "Father of all creation..." is sung by what seems to be another celebrity impersonator. Actually, an impersonator of an impersonator. This second vocalist seems to have a thick eastern European accent. However, he doesn't sound quite like Arnold. Instead, he sounds like an Arnold imitator - Hans and Franz, or perhaps Ranier Wolfcastle.

The song continues for a couple more minutes, with Cookie and Ranier trading lines. To be honest, though, despite playing it several times, I never got to hear most of it because I was laughing too hard. Which got me odd looks from my co-workers, but I'm used to those.

If you're a fan of Ozzy, Sesame Street, or just weird stuff in general, you owe it to yourself to seek out this song. I tried to find somewhere to listen to it online for free, but all I could find (and get to work) were places like Amazon, where I could only get a short preview. That clip allows you to hear Cookie Monster, but ends before the duet with Ranier / Ahh-Nuld begins. More's the pity.

The real punchline came when I read a little bit about the band online. The death metal genre with its attendant snarly vocalists tends to be prevalent in northern European countries. Between Cookie Monster's vocal style and Ranier's accent, I was sure that Novembers Doom (must remember to go back and delete the apostrophe that my fingers refuse to omit on the first pass...) would be from Iceland, Finland, or Some-other-really-cold-place-Land.

They're from Illinois.


This song almost makes me want to embed the audio in this article so all my several visitors could hear at least a few seconds of the wonderful awfulness. However, two things prevent me from doing so.

Number one, I hate it when sites embed multimedia content. It's getting better now that it usually doesn't start up unless you explicitly ask it to by clicking a Play button. However, for most of the Internet's short history, sites that use multimedia content have usually started it automatically, clogging bandwidth, dragging your computer to a halt, and blasting you with something you probably didn't want to hear if your speakers were turned up. It'll take me a long time to warm up to embedded content because I've been thoroughly conditioned to hate it.

Second, I haven't the foggiest idea how.


If you're the criminal sort, there may be legally dubious places online where you could obtain this album for free. However, being a law-abiding blogger, I could never in good conscience suggest that anyone do so.

I could also never recommend that you could use a torrent client, like uTorrent, that allows you to only download the files you want and skip the rest.

Unless of course you live in a country where such things are legal, in which case have at it.


(Disclaimer: nothing on this blog should be taken as legal advice. The guy writing it may not even be a lawyer, for all you know. In the event that you are arrested and/or sued because you chose to do something that this blog said you shouldn't but you thought there was an implied nudge and/or wink, don't come around asking to borrow bail and/or settlement money.)


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the cover of Flying High Again: The World's Greatest Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne - a tribute album that does not actually include a performance of its title track.

A True Story From One Of My Jobs

A few days ago everyone who works in my office got an e-mail from building administration: "If the fire alarm sounds within the next half hour, it will be a false alarm because they are working on it. You do not have to leave the building."

Whenever this happens, I wonder the same thing: what if there's really a fire during that half hour? I've never bothered asking this question to my supervisors. I already know what they'd answer: "Impossible. There are no fires scheduled for today." The sad part is that they wouldn't be joking.


Since that was so short, let's have something else before we go.


Last Monday marked the Chinese New Year, as we began the Year of the Ox. If past experience is any indication, I'll still be writing Year of the Chicken on my cheques for the next couple of weeks.


An old and obvious joke, yes, but the classics never go out of style. Although whenever I write a joke that I could imagine Jay Leno doing on the Tonight Show monologue, I feel dirty somehow, and not in a fun way.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of tourists walking around a whale.

Inauguration Day Hooptedoodle

Just a couple of quick thoughts on the inauguration of Barack Obama, who is doomed to disappoint the millions of people who are so caught up in his cult of personality that they seem to honestly expect him to solve every problem faced by the modern world. God help him (and I mean that literally, I don't toss that phrase around) when they realize he's only human.

First up, CNN sent me these two Breaking News Alert e-mails today, sixteen minutes apart:

-- The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States is under way.

Then....

-- Barack Obama has been sworn in as the nation's 44th president.

OK. It has been known for years that the inauguration of America's 44th president would take place on January 20, 2009. And we've known since early November that Obama would be that president.

By what possible measure in any possible universe do the two items I quoted (in their entirety) qualify as Breaking News? I'm expecting one in about nine hours that says "Sun rises on Eastern Seaboard of North America", followed closely by "Canadian temperatures dipped below freezing in January".

If for whatever reason Obama had not been sworn in as scheduled, that would have been Breaking News. Breaking News should always be reserved for unforeseen events. If I'm not surprised by it, then it doesn't qualify. "Long-scheduled and heavily publicized event proceeds exactly as planned" is not, was never, and can never be Breaking News.


Today at work I had to listen to a political conversation between woefully uninformed participants. It's a close-quarters cubicle farm, and I couldn't get my MP3 player's headphones on quickly enough to dodge it.

I actually heard this sentence spoken by someone comparing Obama to Bush: "I don't think Obama's as afraid to do the right thing" (as Bush).

If I had been drinking a beverage, it surely would have come squirting out of my nose. This allegation was so ridiculous that I considered going out to the local coffee shop, getting a drink, coming back in, and asking the speaker to repeat it for the express purpose of producing some nostril cappuccino. I'm sure that hearing someone say that sentence, without sarcasm, would have been just as funny the second time around.

Bush is far from perfect. I hope history will be written by people smart and mature enough to see that he did a good - not outstanding, but good - job. Most of his supposed "disasters" were not his fault. To wit: the economy is not the President's responsibility. Iraq's continuing instability is primarily the responsibility of its own people (whether the terrorists who perpetuate it or the average decent citizens who for whatever reason can't / don't put a stop to it). To blame Bush for Katrina is to suggest that he controls the weather. "Other countries" (read "Islamic theocracies and European socialists") not approving of American policies should taken as a compliment. And so on.

Worse, Bush doesn't get credit for the things that he's done very, very right. I actually saw a commenter on another site earlier today write, in response to the correct observation that Bush policies prevented further domestic terror attacks after 9/11, "The lack of terrorist attacks means nothing; I haven't had any problems with Rhinos in my yard ever since I brought my cat home. Therefore, my cat keeps Rhinos away? No."

I trust I don't need to point out the logical error in that spectacularly arrogant display of nitwittery.

The heck with it. I can't resist dropping a hint: how many rhino attacks do you suppose this person's yard suffered before the cat entered the scene?

Back to the point. Obama may or may not be willing to do what's right. At this point, we just don't know. All we've seen are speeches filled with vapid talk of hope and change, and a whole bunch of "present" votes.

Bush, on the other hand, is practically defined by his determination to do what is right regardless of the consequences to his popularity. His low approval ratings are there precisely because he is willing to make difficult decisions and see them through whether or not they're popular. It's easy, in the short term, to achieve mass popularity. Keep the bread and circuses coming, and promise plenty of free ice cream in the mail, and media sycophants will beat a path to your door. It's much harder to demonstrate the courage of your convictions, and to stand up for what is right even when those around you disagree. Sometimes that's what leadership requires.

I wouldn't argue that George W. Bush was the smartest president ever, or the best by pretty much any measure. However, there is absolutely no question that he is a man of principles, a man of integrity, and completely fearless in standing up for what he believes to be right. To suggest otherwise isn't so much insulting to him, as it is too absurd to even consider.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the "iCoaster" we got our son for Christmas. Regular $90 at Wal-Mart, marked down to $50 when we bought it, and now down to $40. He loves it.

Odd Trip To The Gas Bar

This happened last night, not long after I posted the previous item. I went out to the local gas bar for a fillup. I wound up at the front pump in the lane furthest to the left. There's a curb alongside that lane, which was covered by a few inches of snow. I filled up, went inside and paid.

When I came back out, there was a van sitting across my exit, its nose pointing toward the lane to my right, which was fully occupied at the time. The van was diagonal across my lane, leaving me not quite enough room to get out. No problem, I thought, I was in no hurry. I got in, started my engine, and waited.

After a couple of minutes, the van shifted back and forth a few inches. It was on an incline, and it looked like the driver was driving a standard and moving a bit as he worked the clutch and brake. He shifted the van straight back a couple of feet, but it still wasn't far enough from the left-hand curb for me to get out.

The driver got out and walked over to my car. At this point I was starting to think that maybe he wanted into this lane, despite the fact that the nose of his van was pretty clearly pointed toward the lane on the other side of the pumps. I had already realized that he had no idea - or no concern - that he was blocking me in, but as noted, that didn't bother me.

He was heavyset and considerably older than me, but not a pension candidate yet - probably in his early fifties. Instead of walking to the driver's side of my car and knocking on the window, as I expected, he walked up the passenger side. Then, instead of knocking on the window on that side, he opened the door and got in. His feet were still on the ground outside but he was sitting on the seat, twisting around and leaning in (not so far as to seem threatening) to talk to me.

His tone wasn't friendly or cheerful, as I was expecting, but it wasn't angry either. "Excuse me," he said just a bit sharply, "but I'd like to get some gas here."

"No problem," I replied in a much more pleasant tone than his. "I just don't have room to get out around you. If you want this spot, back up a little so I can get through and it's all yours."

He hesitated, looked out at the gap between his van and the curb, and said, "You can get through there."

No, I couldn't. "There's a curb under that snow, and I'm not putting this car over it. Just move over a couple of feet and we'll be all set."

He paused again, longer this time, and restated: "You've got enough room to get through there."

I wasn't getting angry, and I'm pretty difficult to intimidate through strange or aggressive behaviour. It entertains me, which sometimes unfortunately leads me to encourage it. I was amused, if anything, but keeping an agreeable tone and expression. After all, at this point this was a simple friendly, if inexplicable, misunderstanding. I repeated, "I'm not putting my car over the curb that's under that snow."

He responded so quickly that he cut off my last word. He still didn't make any threatening gestures of any kind, and didn't raise his voice. "You're a f***ing nerd."

I consider myself reasonably verbally adept, but I have to admit that I don't keep a ready retort for that level of witty repartee loaded up and ready to go. I just raised my eyebrows and looked at him for a second, trying not to break into laughter at this outburst from a grown man. I'm not sure how he was interpreting my non-reaction, but he seemed to puff up a bit in triumph and said, "You heard me. You're a f***ing little nerd." He looked very pleased with himself. He then got out of my car, walked back to his van, and backed up out of the way. I pulled out around him and laughed all the way home.

This incident made me realize that I have no idea how to handle random, unprovoked and disproportionate, but essentially harmless hostility. Even thinking about it now, there's nothing that I wish I'd said to him. That's rare for me; I normally want to rescript every conversation I have ten minutes afterward.

A couple of minor ideas occurred to me. For example, shutting my engine off and walking over to the attendant's booth to purchase a snack after he backed up would have been fun. However, most of my ideas wouldn't have been particularly funny, wouldn't have gotten any point across to this guy, and might have provoked him to escalate the situation. I got no indication that he might be violent, but you never know. If I'd deliberately pushed his buttons, he might have decided that his extra hundred pounds over me counted for more than my being fifteen years younger and tried his luck. (He almost certainly would have been right about that.)

I guess this is my question to ponder for today: how do you handle random people who are disproportionately hostile for no apparent reason? Until I think of something better (read: funnier), I'll go with mocking them on the Internet.

Now that I've had a day to contemplate this encounter, I think I realize what's so funny about it. It's not really the inexplicable hostility demonstrated by my visitor (and, boy, what a joy he must be to live with). It's the sheer absurdity of a grown man going out of his way to call another grown man a "nerd."

"Nerd?" Really? That's the best you can do? Come on, at least call me an a**hole. I could respect that. "Nerd" just sounds like we're fourteen and you caught me sitting at your table in the cafeteria. I have a hunch this guy has some unresolved issues from adolescence. His high school sweetheart probably dumped him for a guy who's pulling down six figures now running a software company.

As I presented one of today's many workplace performances of this bit, one of my co-workers pointed out that "nerd" wasn't even appropriate to the situation. Perhaps he was just making an unrelated observation.

My wife said this reminded her of a scene in Footloose (which I've never seen) where somebody calls Kevin Bacon a "pansy", and he responds with incredulity: "Who says 'pansy' anymore?"

Personally, I think "pansy" is a perfectly good thing to call someone if the situation warrants. But then again, apparently I'm a huge nerd.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the stuff my son got for Christmas, arranged differently than the first shot.