I'm not about to waste a good blog title on this

It's nearly 10:00 and I should get to bed soon. I've got a good topic for a blog post, something all timely and relevant and consistent with a theme that I've been running lately, and an excellent title to go with it. Trouble is, I don't have the time to write about it tonight, or at least to write enough about it to do it justice. (Heck, I could convey the whole story in two sentences, but what's the fun of that?)

Also, I don't have pictures of the subjects of this post yet. I have a late-afternoon meeting at work tomorrow (showing some love to the night shift, yo), and as the subjects of this post have put in an appearance at about 7:00 each evening the past two days, I think I can count on them showing up at least one more time. At least. I'll have to remember to take my camera with me in the car tomorrow.

Rrrrrrrrrrr...on the other hand, it's supposed to rain tomorrow. That may mess things up a bit. We'll see.

(Intrigued? Annoyed? Feeling jerked around? Tune in tomorrow to see if there's a big payoff, or if I just lose interest and don't get around to writing yet another promised post!)

Note to self regarding cherry trees

Do not wait until the day before Mother's Day to drape the plastic netting over the cherry trees. Seriously. Do it as soon as the blossoms have been pollinated, maybe a week or so after they have first opened. Birds love cherries, and don't mind too much if they're not anywhere near ripe.

About two weeks ago I saw that the blossoms were falling off my cherry trees and I noticed the swellings that were the first signs of fruit forming. By last week these had become green, pea-sized fruit. I noticed that there seemed to be fewer of these than I had expected, but I just figured that I had misremembered the number of swellings the week before.

This week I got out the netting, including the one package I just bought last week. I spread it out carefully and then used an extendable pole to lift it over the top of one of my two dwarf cherry trees. Then I cinched it at the bottom with a piece of rope. In the process I managed to break off several cherry clusters, but I could see dozens more that were now safe from hungry birds. Still, it seemed like there were even fewer fruits than there had been last week.

Then I moved on to the other tree. Spread the net, lifted it, realized that this tree is just too tall, and a 14' x 14' piece of netting just isn't going to get the job done. So I decided to wrap the net around the sides of the tree and cinch it at the bottom and as close to the top as I could get, leaving the fruit in the branches above the net as a sacrificial offering to the birds.

On closer inspection, I realised that there was no fruit on the tree. Anywhere.

Well, that was almost true. I did find a single cherry left on one of the middle branches. I got an orange mesh bag from tangerines, fed the branch through the opening to the bag and the opening I had made on the other end to get at the tangerines, carefully positioned it around the lone fruit, and closed it up with twist ties. Maybe, just maybe, I'll get to eat one cherry from this tree.

So. Next April 1st I begin a budwatch on my cherry trees. And once they have blossomed, the nets go on.

A letter to the editor on a very important topic

For months I have kept my silence and tried to give this issue a fair hearing. But the time for patience is over.

"The Family Tree", one of the latest additions to the Citzens' Voice comics pages, is just not funny.

The characters are pompous, smug, obnoxious, hypocritical, and occasionally vile and offensive. And badly-drawn, too.

I'm an avid fan of the funny pages, and I know how precious this space is. Please consider replacing "The Family Tree" with a better and funnier comic strip - for example, "My Cage", "Baldo", "La Cucaracha", "Heart of the City", "Mutts", "Sherman's Lagoon", or "Slylock Fox".

Thank you!

YouTube Weekend: Dirty Vegas, Days Go By

This is a great video for a good dance song.It slips in and out of the song a few times to tell the story of a man who comes to the same spot on the same day every year and dances from sunrise to sunset, dances to bring back the girl he lost so many years ago. The pan that begins at about 1:19 always gives me goosebumps.

When this song was out in 2002/2003 it was everywhere. The video was in heavy rotation on MTV; the song was used in a car commercial. I seem to recall a parody of it used as a promo for the Video Music Awards (or was it the MTV Movie Awards) in which Chris Kattan was edited in as the Dancing Man. He danced horrendously, and the subtitled comments of the onlookers were replaced with things like "Oh, my God, is he doing the Robot?" "I think that's the Worm." "Now he's doing the Cabbage Patch!"

This song was out when many members of my department were leaving the company for a competitor. One of our graphics designers left, and we joked about how one of his friends mourned his departure.

He left one day. He said he was going for coffee. He said "wait here, I'll be right back."

And so Ed waits. Waits in that same spot every day. Waits from 8:00 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. With breaks for coffee. And lunch. And to use the bathroom. And to have a smoke.

Eventually Ed left too. Most of us left the department, one way or another. There are only a few of us left in that department now. I'm not one of them.

Days go by and still I think about you...

An electronic legacy of crap

My mom isn't as computer-savvy as most, and also doesn't want to suddenly find herself losing hours of her life siting in front of the computer. So every few weeks she asks me to check her e-mail for her, to sort out the important stuff from the phishing scams and Nigerian e-mails and whatnot. And inevitably, there are a ton of e-mails, many of them from a handful of people she knows who have e-mail. And of those, most of what they have sent is crap.

Chain letters. Forwarded jokes that weren't funny a million years ago when they were started. Forwarded hoaxes and political claptrap and good-luck prayers and angels and Jesus Over the World Trade Center and candles and children's school assignments that never existed. (DON'T ASK, JUST PLAY!) And hidden in this river of crap, occasional important bits.

I have a relative who died years ago. He had a computer, with e-mail. And every day he would forward about a dozen jokes to my mom, jokes that she never had time to read - and I doubt he did, either. When he died I archived all of his e-mail as a way of preserving his memory. And when I reviewed it, I realized there was nothing of him there. Just a big pile of forwarded crap.

Of course, it's not just my mom's generation. I'm on MySpace, and for the longest time I had a policy of friends-only as Friends. I would only Friend you if I knew you somehow, through the Internet or face-to-face. A little while back I decided to loosen up, and started approving as friends people who didn't seem to be just scammers like the dozen or so porno models who ask to be my Friend each day. Some of them have been interesting. But some of them are just compulsive bulletin-senders, sending out survey after survey after pointless survey. I've come to ignore my bulletins, mostly, which may mean that I'm missing out on some legitimate stuff that my real friends are sending. Maybe I should just block bulletins from the obsessive/compulsives. Maybe I should unfriend them altogether.

If you were hit by a speeding forklift tomorrow, what kind of marks will you have left on the world? Some people have children, and that's their legacy. Some people create art or music or poetry, or have a story to tell and make sure it gets told. Some people do nothing more than touch others by listening. Others help and heal and teach. For all these things they will be remembered, too.

The person who died left several legacies. Children, music, teaching, service to his community. But as far as I know, nothing in writing. No letters or e-mails that will allow us to hear his voice again. Nothing but a big pile of forwarded jokes. An electronic legacy of crap.

Menaced

What kind of world are we living in where a man is not free to mow his own back yard without being menaced, harassed, and threatened?

Yes. The bees are back.

I stopped at the house today after a long drive from work. I was exhausted, and wanted to simply pass out on the bed. I did that for a while, but eventually roused myself. I changed into my lawnmowing gear, pulled out my reel mower from under my digging board on my back porch, and got to work.

I started with the brick walkway between the house and the grapevine. In the years since my grandmother lived in the house this has been allowed to get overgrown. The bricks saw the light of day for the first time in over a decade when I cut down the grass two years ago. Then I moved to the north side of the house, where I have the TV antenna with the snapped-off mast, and then around to the front. Then along the south side - which, like the north, is just a strip of grass barely three feet wide between the house and the slate sidewalk which runs around it. Then back to the back yard, to make quick work of the grass around the grapevines. Then on to the money part of the lawn, the large rectangle that constitutes half of the property. A quick jog along the southern edge, turn around, jog back along the same strip, and -

DUCK! Here come the bees!

The bees are living in my garage, shed, whatever you want to call it. They have staked out a territory: the garage and everywhere within five to ten feet of it. Stay outside of this zone and they will merely observe you, staying at an altitude of about ten feet but always following your movements. Come closer and they will actively menace you, zooming overhead, or dropping to eye level and bobbing up and down, or hovering behind you and just above your head. Come closer still and they will threaten you, diving at you or - in the most impressive threat display I have seen so far - drop to eye level and slowly approach you with their stingers curled around under their bodies, pointing directly at you, saying in no uncertain terms I am coming for you, do you want some of this?

(This was when I was finishing off the lawn around the garage, trying to get as close to the garage as I could without being attacked. Inexplicably, the bee became distracted during its approach and flew around the side of the garage, allowing me to make my last few passes and get the hell out of there.)

I've decided to live with the bees, partly because I don't believe in killing unnecessarily, partly because I recognize the valuable role that bees play as pollinators, especially now that honeybees have pretty much vanished from the scene locally, but mostly because exterminators cost money, money I just don't have right now.

I don't know what sort of bees they are. I assumed they were bumblebees, because they have the right coloration and are about the size of my thumb. Mark Cour from Wilkes-Barre Online thinks they're Carpenter Bees, which would be very bad news for my garage, although they may have been living there for many years before I bought the house. As Mark is the expert in this matter, I will defer to his judgement. Just as long as they don't sting me, I'm not too particular as to species.

Maybe they'll be happier once I set out the dozens of sunflowers I've got in seed starters right now. Or maybe they'll just decide that their territory has been expanded to include my entire yard!

The Moon and Mercury, May 6, 2008

If you were clouded out or forgot to check for the conjunction of Mercury with a very young Moon tonight - well, don't worry. I've got you covered!

Mercury to the lower left of the Moon, 8:35 PM on May 6, 2008. Note the clouds rolling in. The seeing did not look especially promising as a large bank of clouds rolled in shortly after sunset. This was just a few minutes after I had managed to spot Mercury - and shortly afterwards, it was lost in thick clouds.
The Moon and Mercury, May 6 2008, 9:08 PM. After playing hide-and-seek in the clouds for what felt like hours but was more like a half hour, the Moon and the innermost planet had set below the line of houses across the street. I had to abandon my traditional photo spot, a mini-tripod set up atop a car in our driveway, and retreat to higher ground - namely, a swing set on a small hill in the back yard. I set the tripod up so it straddled the crossbeam of the swing set and clicked a photo of the Moon every minute or so as a train of clouds passed below it. I was hoping I would catch Mercury in one of the photos, and sure enough I did. Though I had a hell of a time finding it: I had to switch each image to negative and then blow up the area to the lower left of the Moon, looking for a dark smudge against the white negative sky. One - and only one - photo had this feature, but it was barely visible when I switched back to positive mode. I had to crank the contrast waaaaaay up to get the image above.

So, there you go. If you missed the opportunity to see Mercury tonight, you have a few days left to see it - though good luck finding it without the Moon nearby as a convenient pointer!

Does anybody know somebody...

...who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody whose cousin's sister-in-law's best friend's uncle's buddy's niece is on the staff of Oprah?

Whim is putting her story into book form, and frankly, publicizing Whim's story might just be Oprah Winfrey's entire reason for existence. What happened to Whim - and how Whim has soldiered through it all - is the sort of thing that Oprah could easily devote an entire show to.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, start here and work your way through using the links on the sidebar.* Just be sure to have a few hours you can spend reading. If you're like me - and a lot of other people apparently are, in this respect at least - you'll find yourself reading Whim's entire story from beginning to end.

Maybe at some point somebody on Oprah Winfrey's staff will do just that. And Oprah will make sure the whole world knows Whim's story.


*Oh, hell. Here are her posts, in order. This was swiped from her sidebar:

from The Babblings of a Whimsical-Brainpan :

The Fire

1. Night of the Fire
2. Fire Pics
3. Medical
4. Medical (cont.)
5. Medical Pics
6. The Trial
7. My Mind
8. Speeches
9. Loose Ends

See Mercury this week!

On May 6th the very thin crescent of the Moon, low in the Western twilight after sunset, will be your guide to seeing the elusive planet Mercury!

Mercury is the innermost planet in the Solar System and orbits the Sun in a breathtaking 88 days - it loops around more than four times in the time it takes our planet to go around once. Yet Mercury is still damned hard to see. That's because it never strays far from the Sun in our sky, so most of the time it is low in twilight just after sunset and just after sunrise. Then there is the geometry of our own planet's orbit and axial tilt to take into account; the orbit of Mercury appears to be tilted at different angles at different times of the year, meaning that much of the time when Mercury is at its greatest distance from the Sun, it's still very close to the horizon - just well off to the left or right of the Sun. Except at certain times of the year. This week is one of those times!

Sky and Telescope has a nice article on this week's skyshow. And of course, Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler (a.k.a. Jack Horkheimer, Star Gazer since the advent of search engines) has a show all about it. (See here for the script and here for the illustrations.)

The evening of Tuesday, May 6th is the big show, with the sliver-thin Moon passing just above and to the right of Mercury. But if you miss it that night, you still have a few more days to catch the speedy innermost planet before it passes out of the range of best visibility. By May 12 it will be at a higher position in the sky, but also much dimmer as it goes from a "waning gibbous" phase to a "last quarter" phase (see the diagram at Sky and Telescope.) And after that it begins a plunge into the evening twilight, and it will be a while before we can see Mercury again!


Also see this post on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/05/04/mercury-and-the-moon/

Weekend wrap-up

Well, I missed a post yesterday, for the first time in a very long time. But that's OK. Besides, I had an excuse. Well, a series of excuses.

The day started off bright and early getting ready for my aunt's funeral. We were at the funeral home at 8:30. The funeral home services started at just after 9:00. I did dozens of those back in grade school when I was an altar boy. That was back when there were more practicing Catholics in town, and more old parishioners dying, and there were still local Catholic schools from which a pool of altar boys could be recruited, and who would get the occasional weekday morning off to serve a funeral, or who would get dragged out of bed for a dreaded Saturday funeral. There were no altar boys in attendance yesterday.

The funeral procession began the short trip from the funeral home to the church at about 9:45, past the funeral of former Nanticoke mayor Wasil Kobela, which was being held in another funeral home and another church. (There's no shortage of deaths in town. Monsignor Bernie Toloczko died on Friday, and another priest whose name I am obviously spelling wrong - there are no relevant results for a "Father Ferrett" - died just a few days earlier.) We processed into church behind the casket and had a Funeral Mass - which has been called a "Mass of Resurrection" for the past few decades.

(A side note: someday I may write a book called "What Not to Wear to a Funeral." This includes miniskirts, stiletto heels, and the long women's pants that are apparently all the rage now, where the ends of the legs brush the floor on all sides of the foot. Those last two items in particular are inappropriate for a graveside service, for practical reasons. Everybody should have at the very least a single wedding-and-funeral outfit on hand at all times. You should not be dressing to impress, but you also should not look like you just came in from working in the garage or on the farm - unless that it consistent with the wishes of the deceased.)

After the Mass we formed another car procession to the cemetery several miles away. There we had one last ceremony in the cemetery's chapel, after which the pall bearers were asked to stick around to transport the casket to the gravesite. Many of the family members went there too, to say one final goodbye before burial.

After that we had a traditional luncheon. Before going there, my mom asked that I drive us to our family plot, where my grandmother, grandfather, several aunts and uncles, and my stillborn baby brother are buried. My uncle - my mother's last remaining sibling - stopped there too, as did a cousin who has recently moved to the area.

The luncheon broke up around 2:30, and my aunt's family invited everyone up to their house for more food. I demurred, on the grounds that I was stuffed, exhausted, and was planning to head out to a bloggers' gathering in a few hours. Realizing that I would probably have a good time and make a late night of it, I decided that rather than getting up early on Sunday morning I would go to a Saturday evening Mass at 4:00.

After Mass I hung out with a friend in the parking lot for a while. He pointed out that it has been five years since his Mother died. In a few weeks it will be three years since one uncle died, then a few weeks later it will be two years since my other uncle died. A few months after that, at the end of August, it will be three years since my Father died.

From Mass I made my gradual way to the bloggers' gathering. I still don't have the specific location plotted or I might have gotten there a good ten or fifteen minutes faster. As it was my timing was pretty good: I was just walking the half-block from where I parked to the entrance of the bar when I saw Michelle driving up. When I went in I met Gort and Mrs. Gort and several of Gort's friends and regular commentors, and let them know that Michelle was on her way.

The gathering was just us, which was fine, and a lot of fun. I had hoped to see Mark from Wilkes-Barre Online there, but yesterday was his ride-along with the Wilkes-Barre Police. Maybe next time. I'd love to see Jen at one of these gatherings sometime, though her schedule is a bit complex. Father Tom Carten would be a lot of fun, too. Actually, it would be great to get all the locals there sometime.

Ostensibly the reason for our gathering was to watch the Kentucky Derby, though everything I knew about this year's race I had crammed in in the last few days. I knew there was a single female horse in the race. At some point we decided we would interpret the outcome of the race as an omen for the upcoming Presidential election.

Hooboy.

As it was we couldn't hear any of the several TVs that had been tuned to the race, so we had to rely on the onscreen displays to let us know what was going on. One of the sharper-eyed of our number read the leaders' names off the screen. Shortly after the race began it was over, and favorite Big Brown was the winner by quite a bit. "That's a good sign for Obama!" I declared. "I think Michelle calls him 'Big Brown'!" Which caused a moment of confusion until Michelle the blogger realized I was referring to Michelle Obama.

There seemed to be something going on on the track afterwards, but we couldn't tell what exactly. I suggested that the shotgun crews had been sent out to deal with the losers.

Ha-ha. Very funny.

(It wasn't until this morning that I learned that Eight Belles, the lone filly, had come in second - and had broken both of her front ankles within a quarter mile of the finish line and had been euthanized on the spot. Not a good omen for Hillary Clinton.)

After the fifteen songs we had selected on the jukebox had played, we left the bar to go to the Cork restaurant to eat. It is a place aiming for a slightly upscale clientele, though they did not toss our shabby bloggers' asses out onto the street. We spent the rest of the evening there - pinned down slightly longer than we had expected by a brief but intense downpour. Over food and drinks we discussed many of the problems of the world and Northeastern Pennsylvania, but solved none of them - as far as I recall. It was after 11:45 when we finally bid each other adieu and went to our respective vehicles to find our ways home through the rain.

As I drove past the twelve-minutes-to-home point I looked at the time: 11:51 PM. I've missed today's post, I thought. But you know what? That's OK. Maybe I'll just do two tomorrow.