Roll out the Barrels...of Bloggers

There are three major blogging conventions going on this weekend. I am at none of them.

Tiffany from If I Were Queen of the World is at the BlogHer convention, the annual meetup for bloggers of the female persuasion, which is being held in San Francisco. She is traveling in the company of Missy from Australia, who blogs at Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch. You can follow along on their adventures on their blogs, or get more frequent updates from Tiffany's Twitter thing.

From BlogHer's mission statement:

Founded in February 2005 as a labor of love by three bloggers, BlogHer's mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, via annual conferences, a Web network (http://www.blogher.com), and an advertising network of more than 2,200 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates (http://blogherads.com). BlogHer Inc. is owned by three co-founders and has backing from Venrock (http://venrock.com).

(Tiffany's site is using an emergency backup template, since someone hacked her original site at around the time she was leaving for BlogHer and took it down. She's been able to get it up and running again, but a lot of the customizations are gone.)

Austin, Texas is playing host to two diametrically opposed blogger conventions this weekend, as I first learned from this report on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. On the Left, Liberal (or Progressive) bloggers are gathered at Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos.) From their website:

Netroots Nation amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate. Within that campus, we strengthen community, inspire action and serve as an incubator for progressive ideas that challenge the status quo and ultimately affect change in the public sphere.

Across town, Conservative bloggers are meeting at the euphemistically-named Defending the American Dream Summit, sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which appears to be primarily an anti-environmentalism group . From their "About" page:

Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP Foundation) is committed to educating citizens about economic policy and a return of the federal government to its constitutional limits. AFP Foundation’s educational programs and analyses help policymakers, the media, and individual citizens understand why policies that promote the American enterprise system are the best method to ensuring prosperity for all Americans. To that end, AFP Foundation supports:

● Cutting taxes and government spending in order to halt the encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens and pointing out evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse.
● Removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship and opportunity
● Restoring fairness to our judicial system by stemming the tide toward “over-criminalization” of economic activity spurred by over-active attorneys general.

I wonder how effective these summits are at increasing the connectivity of the blogospere and improving the overall quality of the global conversation? Or do they just degenerate into a bunch of drunken bloggers and their friends singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a variety of keys? Not that there's anything wrong with that...


Title Reference: Mark from Wilkes-Barre Online answered the question "What do you call a group of bloggers?" in the title to this post. Because every blogger, boy or girl, Liberal or Conservative, is just another monkey with a typewriter.

Tangerine Moon

Tonight is the Full Moon. And more than that: because of the geometry of the Moon's orbit, tonight is the lowest Full Moon - the lowest possible, I believe.

This means that tonight's Moon will never rise high above the Southern horizon. With mid-summer moisture in the air and lots of smoke particles from the wildfires out West suspended in the atmosphere, this means that the Moon is robed in an orange haze tonight as its light tries to pierce the thick layers of the atmosphere and get to my eyes - or in this case, the lens of my Nikon Coolpix L4.

The Moon, July 18, 2008, 10:28 PM

Dull as it was, the light was still overwhelming to the imager in ISO-speed format, when the lens remains open long enough to let what the camera judges to be an adequate amount of light fall on the charge-coupled device that records the image. So I had to do my usual trick of putting the camera in Sports mode. This results in a lower-resolution image taken at a faster shutter speed.

To get the image I needed to rest the camera on a stable platform. But the Moon was just so ridiculously low, my usual platforms - car roofs and the arms of Adirondack chairs - would not work. So I had to resort to extreme measures, and rest the miniature tabletop tripod on the ground. Good thing the grass isn't high enough to block the lens.

Hazy Moon and unidentified star

If you missed it, it's not too late. The Moon will be very low in the South for the next few nights, though you'll have to stay up later and later to see it!

Lolly, lick a lolly!

I'm sure there's something else I should be writing about, but I just too tired to think right now.

This damned song has been caught in my head for over a week. I'm glad I looked it up, because it turns out I'm not the only one. Plus, the video is far more bizarre than I remember.

"Lolly, Lick a Lolly" from The Electric Company



If you imagine this music playing at half-speed, it seems almost majestic.

Keep in mind, this show was from the early to mid 1970's, and was targeted towards kids who had outgrown Sesame Street but were still open to educational television programs. The people who made it weren't stupid or naive. American society was just starting to recover from all the things that were the 1960's, and these people had been through them. Of course they knew how strange and suggestive this video was, but they did it anyway.

For some reason this song reminds me of the sections I think of as "The Processional" from the instrumental "The Brazilian" from the 1986 Genesis album Invisible Touch - starting, for example, at the 1:12 mark.



Now that I've written this, maybe this song will GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HEAD!

Songs about surprising things: Tasmin Archer, "Sleeping Satellite"

Tasmin Archer, "Sleeping Satellite":

I blame you for the moonlit sky
and the dream that died
with the Eagle's flight

I blame you for the moonlit nights
when I wonder why
are the Seas still dry?

The lyrics to this song aren't exactly subtle. But most people hear it as a song of a romance gone wrong - not as a criticism of the abandonment of the manned lunar exploration program. Which is what it is.

Did we fly to the Moon too soon?
Did we squander the chance?
In the rush of the race
the reason we chase is lost in romance?
And still we try
to justify the waste for a taste of man's
greatest adventure...

I mean, really. But it was not until years after this song had been off the charts that my sister pointed out to me what was being said here.

Have we lost what it takes to advance?
Have we peaked too soon?
If the world is so green
then why does it scream under a blue Moon?
We wonder why
if the Earth's sacrificed for the price of its
greatest treasure?

So what possessed Tasmin Archer to put these thoughts to music? Most people don't realize that the point of the space race wasn't about space, or putting dogs or monkeys or people in space, or even landing on the Moon. It was about us showing them damned Russkies that we could launch a missile and put a payload any damn place we pleased - even on the goddamn Moon! Take that, Ivan! Maybe the next one will be right in the middle of yer commie Red Square!

And when we shoot for the stars
- what a giant step! -
have we got what it takes
to carry the weight of this concept?
Or pass it by?
Like a shot in the dark miss the mark with a
sense of adventure?

And once we showed 'em it could be done, it was pretty much all over. Oh, sure, we did it again and again, but in the end the final Apollo missions generated about as much interest as a rerun of a third-rate movie of the week. Been there, done that, got the moon rocks and the jar of Tang.

I blame you for the moonlit sky
and the dream that died
with the Eagle's flight

I blame you for the moonlit nights
when I wonder why
are the Seas still dry?

So what happens next? We hear a lot of talk about new missions to the Moon, and Mars, and beyond. But what's driving that? Who is the current officeholder trying to impress with all that? And will there be any follow-through in the years to come?

Who knows? We'll see.

Don't blame this sleeping satellite...

Milkshakes, and the drinking thereof

Me: I drink your milkshake!
My friends' four-year-old-daughter: I drink your milkshake!
Me: I drink YOUR milkshake!
Her: I EAT your milkshake!
Me: If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw that reaches acrosssssssss the room...
Her: That's not a straw, that's your finger!

...which would have been an excellent retort in There Will Be Blood.



As America is entering the early stages of the coming Resource Wars, increasing attention is being paid to the availability of alternative energy supplies. Many parts of Northeastern Pennsylvania contain a geological formation called the Marcellus Shale which has generated a lot of interest since it may contain deposits of natural gas. Companies are seeking to enter into lease agreements with landowners for the right to extract any natural gas found on their property. I think anyone thinking of entering into one of these agreements would be well-advised to watch There Will Be Blood first.

Heck, maybe someday I'll even watch it.

Parodies:
There Will Be Milkshakes


There Will Be Pokémon


Saturday Night Live: I Drink Your Milkshake (with special guest star Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, another movie I haven't seen):


(In case I manage to make that disappear again, the site where I hound this video is here.)

All a-Twitter

I went to visit some friends in the Poconos this weekend, for the first time in several months. I had a great time there. When I got back I went online to do my obligatory daily blog post, and then did my obligatory blog checks. (These are obligations only to myself, but obligations nonetheless.)

While on Charon Henning's Odd Angel Studios something in the fine print on her sidebar caught my attention. It was her Twitter display:

On the road at a truck stop outside Wilkes-Barre. If I had known I would have contacted you Databoy! Perhaps on our way back? - 05:49 PM July 09, 2008 from web

Arrgh! Charon and Alexander had blown through the area, on the way to a Renaissance Fair or some such event, and I had missed them! But now, thanks to her Twitter updates, I knew I had missed them!

Twitter is a cool idea for those people for whom it is somewhat applicable. It is a way of giving a moment-by-moment instantaneous account of your life - which is nice if you're, say, Tiffany, travelling to BlogHer, meeting Aussie superblogger* Missy at the airport. So the last few entries on Tiffany's Twitter go something like this:

supertiff I have secured a very pricey margarita to accompany me while a wait 4 missy to get through customs. about 6 hours ago

supertiff Has missy been flagged as a terrorist? Still waiting at the airport. about 5 hours ago

supertiff Man, i wish i could blog right now. Why has no one bought me a laptop? about 4 hours ago

supertiff And still waiting. I think they're taking her to gitmo. about 4 hours ago

supertiff Missy finally made it. We're back @fcm's, drinking wine. Can see ggbridge from the window! 11 minutes ago

But for others of us, or for those same people in other circumstances, it would be an agonizingly dull exercise.

Driving to work. 14 hours ago

Working. 13 hours ago

Driving home. 5 hours ago

Eating dinner. 3 hours ago

Updating my Twitter while posting a blog entry. 2 minutes ago

...which is pretty much what my blog sounds like most days! Good thing I don't send text messages on my cell phone, or things could be a lot worse.



*What makes her a superblogger? I dunno, I just like the sound of "Aussie superblogger."

How do you say it?

Phil Plait posted a tongue-in-cheek entry on Bad Astronomy about the proper pronunciation of the word "kilometer."* This put me in mind of an article I read in the September 1999 issue of Astronomy magazine - apparently "The Art of Skyspeak" by Bob Berman. Or maybe not. Bob Berman is something of a populist when it comes to astronomy, the very opposite of a snob, and this article was very snobbish when it came to the proper pronunciations of stars like Vega and Betelgeuse. As I said on Phil Plait's site and on this entry on AstroGuyz.com, I don't really care how people pronounce these things, as long as they're talking about 'em! Besides, I doubt anybody gets all the details on pronouncing ancient Arabic words exactly right.

This also got me thinking about some other stuff. When I was at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences back in 1984, our Organic Chemistry professor (I forget his name) would always stress to us the importance of "woRshing" our glassware at the end of the lab. It was the first time I had ever heard the word pronounced "woRsh" (emphasis on the hard yet nonexistent "R"), but not the last. I assumed this was a regional pronunciation, possibly from Pittsburgh, but I have a local friend who says the same thing, even in the context of "WoRshington". I also have friends in New Jersey who speak of buying cabinets with "draws" in them (what we know as "drawers"), and local friends who laugh at me when I speak of washing "clothes" instead of "cloes".

Today I caught a bit of an NPR report about a tiny community somewhere in the Appalachian South that was entirely dependent on Federal subsidies for growing tobacco. When these subsidies went away, the community was faced with an economic crisis: no one had any work skills that didn't involve tobacco agriculture. The bottom line is, the community got itself online and learned all about computers and the Internet.

My problem with this report comes at the end, when the woman doing most of the talking to the NPR reporter refers to "BRAW-bah" (second "a" pronounced like "pants") connections. Sorry, hon; you haven't even owned this word for five years. That's hardly long enough for you to slur your pronunciation. It's "broadband".

So are there any pronunciations that drive you up the wall? Others that you're willing to live with? And where do you draw the line?



*If it seems like I'm citing Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy a lot lately, maybe it's because it's one of the few blogs I link to that's getting updated regularly. There are others. Gort is automatically putting up a daily post even while he's on vacation (which makes me suddenly wish he had a post scheduled that said "OMG, can you believe the stupidity that came out of Dubya's mouth today?! ROFL!" - which would probably apply whatever day it appeared.) The Comics Curmudgeon continues at full speed, though I am now several billion comments behind and could never possibly catch up.

Winners and losers

There's something about life that favors the daring, the risk-takers. It's something that's been built into humanity and other species by selective breeding down through the ages. It's certainly not the only mating strategy driver out there, but it is something that comes into play in both individual relationships and society as a whole. Timidity has its place, and sometimes even its own rewards, but a willingness to take a risk is much more often celebrated and admired.

I've written before about a personal theory of the role luck plays in evolution, and the way evolution selects for luck: there are certain apparently vestigial organs that seem to serve no other purpose in humans than to kill us if they become diseased (like the appendix) or damaged (like the spleen). In both cases there appears to be some evolutionary value involved: if susceptibility to diseases that affect organs like the appendix is the sort of thing that is likely to be passed on to offspring, deaths from conditions like appendicitis will tend to reduce the passage of these genes on to future offspring. Similarly, if an organ like the spleen can be damaged by dangerous and excessive risk-taking, then deaths due to damaged spleens eliminate those individuals likely to engage in patterns of behavior that result in damaged spleens, reducing the likelihood that they will pass on any such genetic or behavioral proclivities to their offspring.

I believe these theories fall into the category known by respectable scientists as "crackpot." But maybe not.

Someone removed himself from the gene pool this weekend. A 19-year-old was skateboarding in a parking lot at a school about 500 feet from where I'm sitting, a parking lot with "NO TRESPASSING" and "NO SKATEBOARDING" signs. There were not, however, any "NO HOLDING ONTO THE BACK OF A CAR WHILE RIDING ON A SKATEBOARD WITHOUT ANY SAFETY EQUIPMENT" signs, but if there were he would have ignored those, too, since that is what he was doing when he sustained a traumatic head injury last Friday afternoon. Heroic efforts were made on his behalf. A LifeFlight helicopter made the all-too-frequent hop from the airport in Avoca to the Nanticoke baseball field. But he died anyway.

I want to be snarky. I want to say "Well, he'll never do that again." But people knew this guy, and cared about him. And he's dead now. I guess that's always the case. Well, almost always.

Life rewards risk-takers. Women swoon over daring, adventurous males. TV shows earn huge revenue showing people doing stupid, dangerous things.

And every once in a while, somebody rolls snake eyes and comes up a loser.

YouTube Weekend: U2, "Night and Day"

I spent too much time in the sun today. This whole week, really. Wednesday afternoon mowing my lawn across town, Thursday and Friday afternoons mowing my mom's lawn and weedwhacking, this morning pulling weeds and transplanting tomatoes at my mom's, this afternoon planting tomatoes and sunflowers at my house, spreading mulch on everything, using up the water from the rain barrels, and finally filling and putting out the hummingbird feeder. So now I'm cooked, literally. Red enough in parts. Good thing my Farmer's Tan (and baseball cap) kept me from getting too burned.

I managed to not get a haircut today, so I'll carry around this shaggy mane for a while yet. I don't think the heat is going away anytime soon. If I had more confidence in the longevity of the electric clippers we have here, I might shave it all off again myself, for the first time since August 1998. Hmmm...once a decade isn't so bad...

YouTube Weekend time: I'm an old U2 fan from the early days, back when Bono was Bono Vox and only diehard fans knew his secret identity as Paul Hewson. This song feature's all of Mr. Hewson's vocal acrobatics. It's from the Cole Porter tribute/AIDS benefit album Red, Hot + Blue. When I first saw this video on the TV special connected with the benefit, it was introduced by Kyle MacLachlan, who started out doing something bizarre involving bird calls somehow related to a Cole Porter song.

I love the way everyone else in the band looks bored and disgusted. I'm wondering if any of them actually played the music in the song: the music all sounds synthesized, and the drums sound looped. (Until 2:33, then we actually see them playing their instruments instead of just holding them, and then it actually sounds like The Edge's guitar work.) There's also a great part (from 1:37 to 2:20) where Bono, standing next to Adam Clayton, steps forward to sing a verse, then steps back, then steps forward again to sing the next, almost as if to say "Oh, there's more? I forgot." Still, none of the attitude seems ad-libbed. I'm not sure what they - or director Wim Wenders - were getting at. In any case, I really like this song, and this version of it.

U2, "Night And Day":

Nkechi

Of all of us who made up the 80 of '84, Nkechi was the one I found the most interesting.

Others smoldered with obvious scientific talent; a few had been tapped by the D.o.D. to work on special projects in the coming year. Everybody in the group was well above average intelligence, near the upper percentiles of any such measurement. Our games of Trivial Pursuit were something to see. Many of us were exhilarated to be in the company of 79 other people we could relate to completely, to be able to express ourselves without the constant self-censoring we needed to do to get along in our High Schools. Some people were more socially awkward than others, but there was not a dullard in the bunch.

But Nkechi stood out. She carried with her more than just the superior intelligence which was common to our group, more than just all the beauty that could be stuffed into the body of a sixteen-year-old girl. She had a grace, a charm, an elegance, an exuberance. She was more wildly alive than most of us, and more expressive by far; she clearly embraced both the artistic and the scientific, the creative and the analytical. I made sure I got her phone number before we split up in August of 1984.

I spoke to her once afterwards, later that Summer or maybe in the following school year. I don't think she was at our reunion in the Summer of 1985, the only reunion we have had as far as I know. I thought about her from time to time but never put my people-finding skills to work finding her, not until a few years ago when I chanced upon her name about three layers down on a multiply-forwarded e-mail that had been sent to me by a major new client, finalizing their specifications. Her name was there as a name only, no e-mail address attached. I mentioned her in one of our getting-to-know-you conference calls, but the lead person at the other end thought it was very unlikely that she would have been at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984 - the person she knew of by that name would have only been about seventeen. "Sixteen, actually," I replied, but let it go. The climate was not conducive to pursuing it further.

I tried looking her up online, the first time I had ever thought to do this. This was three or four years ago. I didn't find many definite hits, though it did look like she had provided a voice for a video game. Not much to go on. Was she perhaps a video game designer?

The other day, inspired by the events described here, I decided to look her up again. I found her Facebook site. I looked further.

Bingo.

Yes, it's her. I've verified her identity several different ways. She has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, but it looks like after that she pursued studies in more artistic fields. It looks like she's based out of San Francisco now, which is a hell of a lot farther away than her old hometown of Philadelphia.

I still haven't gotten in touch with her. She has a bunch of ways of getting in touch with her, but I haven't done any of them yet. What would I say? I suppose I could start with "Hello."

Here are some links to her site. I'll leave you with some videos of Nkechi performing.

NKECHI
http://www.nkechi.com/

Nkechi's blog

Videos from her site:

"In Its Entirety"


Jam: "We Beauty"


So I wonder what the rest of the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences Class of 1984 is up to?

Little Tin Gods

OK, I just mowed half the lawn, with a conference call thrown in halfway through, and I think I breathed in a lot of pollen, so I'm not operating at full power here. Detailed information about the friend I rediscovered after so many years will have to wait a bit.

So in the meantime, I'm just gonna repurpose an email exchange I had with Michelle from mhryvnak.net/blog.

Gort and I have been updating NEPA Blogs lately after several months of relative inactivity. Michelle has been suggesting blogs and whatnot. As election season rolls around, a few politically-minded folks may decide to try to put a positive spin on their candidate online. Well, there's one place they shouldn't try that...

Subject: I thought this was a pretty interesting article...

Not necessarily a NEPA related article, but it still could apply here if anything thinks about doing it.

Whack-ipedia: No campaigning allowed at site, candidate finds
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5wiki.6496634jul10,0,316108.story?track=rss

Michelle

My response:

Yeah, I love Wikipedia's "bias" rule. I suppose entries on September 11 have to give equal space to the "controlled explosion from within" theory. Articles on terrorism must say something nice about terrorists for every bad thing they say about them. Wikipedia is a silly little site patrolled by dozens of little tin gods.*

I have no great love for Wikipedia. Sure, I reference it all the time because it's there, and more importantly because it often provides a useful jumping-off point for serious investigations into topics. But I find its pseudo-scholarly, faux-authoritative tone exasperating. Its "bias" rule is applied, like many of its rules, in an almost completely arbitrary fashion. It's funny to find an entry about a topic you're familiar with and then watch it evolve over time from something generally informative and correct to something almost completely detached from reality, presented in a tone that suggests it was written by a deranged ivory-tower academician rather than, as is more likely the case, a 13-year-old kid with a lot of computing firepower but no real knowledge of the subject.

This reminded me of something else:

Speaking of little tin gods...

I was following links to sources of information about the js3250.dll bug on Firefox - still my #1 traffic generator! - and I came across this forum thread.

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=169096

Basically...

Person A says "To fix this, do X." (X = "set a fresh copy of js3250.dll to 'read-only.'"

Person B responds with "How do I do X?"

The moderator comes on and says, "Person B, you must start a new thread if you want to ask how to do X."

Person C comes along and says, "Oh, person B, it's easy to do X. Just do this and this and you're done."

Moderator comes on and chews out Person C for being defiant and violating the rules of the forum by challenging a moderator's decree.

Pathetic. "Yes, I could answer your question, but you're standing in the wrong line. You need to be in that line over there to ask that question."

What fun.


*Where does this phrase come from? I know it from an episode of Star Trek, where Dr. McCoy accuses Captain Kirk of behaving like a "little tin god." Wikipedia is, unsurprisingly, of little help; at the moment, it lists three entries on a disambiguation page for "little tin god" : an African dance band, a Don Henley Song, and an episode of Highlander. At this time there's nothing in the discussion section for this phrase, but that may be because someone decided that the discussions weren't following the Wikipedia rules for discussions, and removed them. I've seen that done.

...hmmm. I've found a use of that phrase from 1959, several years before Star Trek came on the air.

The 80 of '84

Twenty-four years ago I was living in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.

Actually I was living in Hamerschlag House on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University, not far from Fred Rogers' maximum-security condo. (I made eye contact with him, once, as he was driving past me on the access road to his place.) For five weeks - was it July 5th through August 5th? - I was one of eighty students selected from the Intermediate Units across the state of Pennsylvania to participate in Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences. This was an intense, grueling, gut-wrenching boot camp for what I might modestly refer to as the best and the brightest science students from across the state. For five weeks we studied Physics, Organic Chemistry, Discrete Mathematics, Lisp, and Genetics Molecular Biology, along with special concentrations selected by each student, as well as labs and free-standing lectures.

I've written about this before, here and here. It was a great time. Hard, but exhilarating. It made me feel that with enough hard work, I could accomplish great things.

I just looked up the names of the 80 of '84 and am really shocked by the number of people who I simply can't recall. Sadly, I haven't kept in touch with any of them, not really. One I contacted in the Summer of 1985; I had had a crush on her, but nothing developed, and she probably didn't even notice.* I got in touch with another in 1988 shortly after the Flight 103 incident, in which several of her classmates were killed - but, fortunately, not her. I ran into another PGSS alum when I was at the University of Delaware in 1989-1990, and found out he was rooming with another PGSS-er - the former boyfriend of the second girl I mentioned.

A few years ago - more than that, in 1996 or 1998 - I was reading one of the two big popular Astronomy magazines, Astronomy or Sky & Telescope (I subscribe to both) and I came across the name of another PGSS '84 alum. Julianne Dalcanton had written an article on "Ghost Galaxies", galaxies so dim that they are nearly impossible to detect. A while back I decided to look her up online, and found her website. But that was about it, until yesterday.

Yesterday I was going through the comments on Phil Plait's "Ghosts in the Light" post and I came across a link to this cartoon.**

It's funny. You should read it. Though if you don't know what the Large Hadron Collider is, or the pseudocontroversy around it, or who Wil Wheaton is, or who Wesley Crusher is, you might be a little lost.

I have the strange and useful ability to read upside-down text at about the same speed that an average reader reads right-side-up text. Which is to say, I see letters forming words which string together into phrases and sentences, rather than the gestalt chunk-at-once reading that I normally do. It's slow, for me, but it's useful. It's also pretty involuntary. So upon seeing the second panel of that cartoon...

I immediately spotted a familiar name. Well, other than Stephen Hawking.

I didn't recognize the other names, but a few minutes of research revealed that several of them co-blog with Julianne at a site called Cosmic Variance. I'll have to add that to my list of regular reads. Maybe eventually add it to the sidebar.

So what have the rest of the 80 of '84 been up to? I have no idea. Some of them, I trust, have gone on to pursue careers in science, and maybe some have entered academia. Others, I am sure, have taken more pedestrian paths - like me.

Heck, next Summer it will have been twenty-five years. Someone may be thinking of a reunion. In that case, I had better start making something of myself, quickly!


*I nearly encountered her again a few years ago, when I saw her name on an e-mail distribution list from a company my company was doing business with. I made some discreet inquiries, but none of the people I spoke with were very helpful. Had that business relationship lasted longer, I probably would have been able to pursue this further...

...but of course, she has a Facebook entry. I need to jump on this bandwagon soon.

** I totally missed the Real Genius reference in the 14th panel. Michelle Meyrink's Jordan is my ideal girl. Well, her and Jane Lane.

Ghost Dancing

Many, many years ago a string of connections online brought me in contact with Issy Reyes, poet, writer, and professor. She used to have several websites, but they all seem to have grown still; one of them is on the verge of being purged. She does appear to have a Facebook, but until I give in and sign up for yet another social networking site, I will not be able to visit her there.

She lives in the Philippines. Early on in our contact I asked her describe for me some local item of folklore, a local monster or something like that. I probably got onto this topic by way of discussing the B'Gunk. This would have been in 1999 or 2000.

What she described to me was utterly horrible: a manananggal, a creature that appeared by day to be a female, but by night her head would detach, dragging her internal organs along, and would fly about looking for human flesh to dine on...

"I know that one!" I replied. "That's a pennangalan!"

Yes, studying the monsters of the Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio has made me wise in the secrets of the world.

A pennangalan is the first "ghost" - referred to as a "Kra-Sue" - seen in this hilarious Sylvania lightbulb commercial from Thailand, lifted from this post on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy:



Meanwhile, over at Francesco Explains It All: I have seen the "globetrotting dancing guy" dozens of times on TV and in references on the Internet, but I've never seen this video before. See if your reaction to Matt Harding's "Dancing" video is anything like what I describe in my comments on Francesco's site.



You can read more about this video here, or if you're very patient and/or very lucky you might just stand a chance of getting through the traffic to see the site wherethehellismatt.com. I'm thinking of going out and buying some Stride Gum as a way of saying "thank you" to them for underwriting Matt Harding's travels.


Title reference: Well, this post is about ghosts and dancing. It really has nothing to do with the Ghost Dance.

How did the Hippie economy work?

Marisa over at Cheatham County Rock Star's Wife raises an interesting question:

It seems to me that becoming a hippie in 2008 is more expensive than living in the mainstream. Now, you can look at this in the long term & think, well, non-sustainable living isn't really cheaper...but that isn't my point. My point is, in the short-term, it seems to be more expensive to eat locally grown food & buy earth-friendly clothing. You can save money on makeup & hair care (of course, if you have a real job you might have to invest in a few grooming products - & again, if you use the "green" stuff it's going to cost you more than the Dollar General store stuff). So, my question is this. Was it more expensive to be a hippie instead of a conformist in the 60's?

I don't really know the answer to this question, but naturally that didn't stop me from chiming in:

That's an interesting question, and one that should be answered before all the people who could answer it personally are gone: how did the economics of being a hippie work out? From what I've read, it seems like there was a lot of begging, borrowing, and stealing going on, as well as a few people who just bought into the culture with their parents' money. (Kinda like Marx and Engels*, but I digress...) I suppose some people made and grew and cooked things and sold them to others with money, but beyond that, I don't know.

When I was a kid in the early 1970s, there was a place in town we called "Hippie Corner" where all the long-haired, dirty, scummy hippie types would hang out, smoking. This was near a bus stop and located right outside of a mental health clinic, so one or both of these factors may have come into play. I never saw anything enviable about hippies and the hippie culture, mainly because of the scuzzy bedraggled types I saw at Hippie Corner.

I remember hearing a Fresh Air interview with someone - it might have been Tom Wolfe, or more likely Robert Stone - where he talked about the days of hippie communal living, and it amounted to: one guy had a big barn, and everybody else lived in it for free...until the day the guy found an unattended candle burning in the hayloft, and he realized that his deadbeat moocher hippie friends were also dangerously stupid, and he kicked them all out. There seemed to be a lot of "sharing" going on, but most of this required that one person first be in a position of "having."

But I don't know. This era from my early youth, and slightly before, has never really interested me, so I've never studied it very closely. Does anybody else know? If so, leave a comment for Risa!


*Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto while sponging off of friend Friedrich Engels' father - a wealthy bourgeoisie capitalist banker.

New images on NEPA Blogs

I finally changed the "Winter" theme on NEPA Blogs. I'm going with something more four seasons-ish, so that if I don't get around to updating the look for a few months people won't assume I've abandoned the site.

If you are a blogger from Northeastern Pennsylvania, or have a blog about Northeastern Pennsylvania, let me know and I'll be sure to link you on NEPA Blogs.

Pineapple Upside-Down cake

This is a specialty of my mom. It's in a lot of demand at family gatherings - including, too often these days, funerals. She's making a few for my cousin's bridal shower tomorrow, and I wanted to throw the recipe up on the Internet for safe keeping.

The base of the recipe is another recipe, the Marigold Glory Cake, which was one of my grandmother's favorites. This is a pretty basic and versatile white cake, great for eating by itself, making layer cakes, or with the addition of other ingredients a whole host of other cakes.

Marigold Glory Cake (from my grandmother)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup vegetable shortening (oleo and part butter)*
1 and 3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 and 1/2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon salt (lesser amount if using butter)
1 and 1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put all ingredients in mixing bowl and mix until smooth.

*My grandmother's note: I prefer to cream sugar and shortening and mix in balance of ingredients alternating flour and milk and ending with flour and baking powder mixture.

To make basic Marigold Glory Cake, pour into greased cake pan and bake in oven for 45-50 minutes.

To make a Maple Walnut Cake, add chopped walnuts and maple flavoring to the batter and bake as above.

To make Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, mix the batter as for Marigold Glory Cake, but prepare the cake pan in this manner:

- Grease the cake pan bottom and sides (I always use the residual butter on the butter wrappers, but you can also use shortening on a paper towel),
- Coat the bottom and sides of the pan with brown sugar.
- Dab with butter (apply pats of butter about one every four square inches.)
- Put cake pan in oven to melt butter.
- Remove cake pan and let cool.
- When cooled, pour one 20 ounce can of crushed pineapple on top of brown sugar.
- Add batter to prepared cake pan.

Bake as for Marigold Glory Cake, above.

When done, immediately turn out onto a cookie sheet or other platform. With enough practice, you'll be able to do this without having the cake tear itself apart!

Independence Day: 199 more days and counting...

Image by Alex Ross

It's Independence Day, and we just passed the 200-day mark on the countdown for George W. Bush to slither out of office. While I would be only too happy to see him get a sendoff appropriate to his historical position, he and his cronies will most likely stride right into corporate front offices where they can reap the rewards of eight years of raping what was once the greatest nation on Earth.

I feel like I'm getting to a breaking point. I think a lot of other people are, too. Things like not getting my old catalytic converter back and then paying eight cents a gallon more for gasoline than the posted price are just the latest straws on this camel's back. My finances are reaching a crisis stage. I just called up my Credit Union account information to see which bills I can pay this weekend and I was greeted with the notice "You have been disqualified from the Courtesy Pay program on 6/30/2008." And I don't even know what that means. I believe that's their overdraft protection plan, which I have never used and never came close to using. So what have I done to get disqualified from this program? Odds are, nothing. Most likely, the program has been discontinued, or revised to be available only to the wealthiest members - to eliminate the likelihood that the nouveau poore will ever use it.

For years I insisted on getting my cancelled checks back from PNC Bank. This was my mom's idea; she worked in a bank, and she knew that the microfiched copies of checks that were kept in extended storage were rarely legible enough to be used to resolve any disputes that might arise - and in the event of any such conflict where the evidence was in dispute, the decision usually went to the corporate entity, not the small-time account holder. So having the physical cancelled checks was a safety net - not that I ever used it. But it was something I was willing to pay for, even though I would be able to access the images online for free.

Until last year. Then PNC discontinued the cancelled check service. But - GREAT NEWS! I would now be able to access images of my cancelled checks online for the same low monthly fee! So I was now paying the same amount not to receive a service that I had been paying to receive that same service.

It's something like ATM fees. You are charged fees for ATM access - whether they are monthly, annual, or per-use, or all at once, I'm not sure. So you elect to bypass the ATM and go all old-school and conduct your transaction with a teller. For which you pay a fee.

Consumer protection has vanished under the Idiot Bush, and I don't know if things will get any better under President Obama. Obama is already backpedaling on issues he had held very strong positions on when he was doing a state-by-state fight to become the Democratic nominee, and is pandering to the religious right in a way that should be making some of his secular true believers take a step back.

I do believe that the day Obama is elected President - and by all that is good and holy, this country and this world have suffered enough under the domination of soulless Republicans, and we cannot and will not endure another four years of Bush-style crap - things will suddenly and miraculously start to get better. There are well-known and little-understood phenomena of human behavior that will, I trust, come into play on that day, and will sustain us through the next four - eight - years of healing and regrowth.*

Still, I worry that when the True Believers start to see Obama not as a demigod but as a human, and a politician at that, there will be a sudden sense of anger and betrayal that will make the reaction to Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" compromise look like a hiccup.

But then again, all the anger at Bush and his Band of Bastards has not resulted in a serious impeachment effort, or any other attempt to achieve redress of grievances during his time in office. So maybe Obama won't have things so bad. Or maybe he won't have things any worse than, say, Bill Clinton, when the Republicans in Congress abandoned all other responsibilities and turned all of their efforts to removing him from office.

Who knows. I just hope we're all still around to see that day when Bush rides out of town on a helicopter.

I just wish it were a rail.


*For those who, in blogger parlance, just don't "get it", some terms for study and reflection:

• zeitgeist
• paradigm shift
• political honeymoon
  

I AM AN ASS

- Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Act 4, Scene 2

Let's assume for a moment that I did not get completely ripped off yesterday when the people at Monro Muffler told me I needed to get my entire exhaust system replaced, from the catalytic converter to the muffler and tailpipe. Let's assume that the rusted, bulging welds and all the other crap I saw when I was under my car on Tuesday was really as bad as it looked. Let's assume that this wasn't just another case of me being played for a sucker.

I FAILED TO ASK FOR MY OLD PARTS BACK.

Which is your right, unless the law has changed. Most of the time this is so you can see that the things the repair shop replaced were legitimately in need of replacement, and you weren't just being taken for a ride.

In this case it would have been because THE PLATINUM IN THE OLD CATALYTIC CONVERTER WAS PROBABLY WORTH AT LEAST $100.

I was going over the bill this morning and I saw, as I had been warned, that the new catalytic converter was the major part of the charge. I thought back to my first day of work as a DVD press operator, when I learned that one of my fellow DVD press operators had just had the catalytic converter cut out of his truck. His was not an isolated case; there had been a rash of catalytic converter thefts around the same time, and state legislators were talking about cracking down on scrap dealers who bought such things no questions asked. Wow, that must suck to have your catalytic converter stolen, I thought.

Oh, crap came immediately after.

I called the muffler shop as soon as they opened this morning. I asked if I could get my old parts back, especially my old catalytic converter. They told me they had been tossed in "the dumpster", but I was welcome to go look for them. Which I would not be able to do for another eight hours at least.

I didn't bother. I really doubt that, 24 hours later, anything of value in a dumpster that routinely receives scrap platinum would still be there.

Of course, I don't believe that anything as valuable as a catalytic converter really went into a dumpster. If it did, the people who tossed it there are dumber than I am.

So I'm faced with a repair shop where the employees either lie to their customers, or are stupid enough to throw away valuable scrap. Which has now caused me to question if I really needed a new catalytic converter, or if I was just the victim of a one-two punch: essentially paying someone to steal my catalytic converter, and then paying them to install a new one.

There's an old adage in business: Treat a customer well, and they'll tell their friends; treat them badly, and they'll tell everyone. Right now I'm not feeling like I've been treated very well. So I'm telling you about it.

Learn from my mistake. Don't rush into something like this, even if you're in a situation like I was. Be sure that you need a new catalytic converter before you agree to let anyone cut your old one out. And if you do get it replaced, be sure to get the old one back. It's worth money.


Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Give It Away":

Some quick hits

• I did pay a lot for this muffler. Again.



• PSC gas station in West Nanticoke on Route 11: DON'T GO THERE. How can they be selling gas for $3.939/gallon when everyone else is charging $3.999/gallon or more? Read the fine print: $3.939 is the cash price. If you pay with a credit card, like I did, you'll pay $4.019 a gallon. So I've technically paid more than $4.00/gallon for gas, even though I could have paid $3.999/gallon at half a dozen places I drove past - or even less, if I had noticed the fine print. It doesn't make much difference, less than 56 cents on this fill-up, but it's the principle of the thing - especially after I just dropped a week-and-a-half's take-home pay on getting a new exhaust system. So, don't get ripped off. Don't go there.



• Mozilla has apparently not resolved the js3250.dll problem with the release of Firefox 3, judging by my traffic. Oh, well.



• There will not be "two Moons on August 27" this year, or any other year. Nor will this take place on August 28 of this year, which is what my Sitemeter keeps telling me people are searching on. Last year there was actually a cool coincidence around this - the Full Moon was eclipsed in the pre-dawn hours for much of North America, so someone who went to sleep to a bright white Full Moon would have woken up to a big red thing setting in the West that looked a hell of a lot like a Moon-sized version of Mars!



• There are actually some cool things coming up, including a total solar eclipse on August 1 - most of Eurasia will get to see at least a partial eclipse, though the total bit will only be visible in the extreme North - and a lunar eclipse the night of August 16-17 visible everywhere but North America! Plus, Mary of Minersville should be making her appearance soon - assuming nobody has replaced any windows or planted any trees that will ruin the reflections!

Less money, mo' problems

You know, once I take care of something, I'd like it to remain taken care of. That's my philosophy with washing dishes, doing laundry, and mowing my lawn. Unfortunately, the universe tends to disagree with me on that.

Two years and eight months ago I spent rather a lot of money getting my exhaust system replaced. It was a bit of a hack job, even though it was done by my dealer - my Toyota dealer, that is. There's not much call for exhaust systems for 1996 Toyota Tercels these days, so they had to get something close and cut and weld it until it fit. I was warned that what they had put on there was not the highest-quality stuff you could get - but since I only expected to keep my car for a few more months back then, I was OK with that.

Hah.

About three weeks ago my car started to make a noise. Sort of a growl, low and mean. Usually Tercels are very quiet cars. When my old Tercel stared to make a noise like that, it meant the engine was just about out of oil and was only a few minutes from dying. I checked the oil, and sure enough it was low - which is not surprising, as I have been losing oil fast enough that I am now checking the level at every time I get gas, at least three times every two weeks. But that wasn't it. I added a quart of oil and the noise remained.

It got louder as time passed. I imagined a small rust hole had appeared somewhere in the muffler and was gradually getting bigger. I found ways of working around it; I found "sweet spots" where I could hold my accelerator and make the noise go away. I started to debate the cost and benefits of repairing this car again to the cost and benefits of getting a new car.

There wasn't much to debate there. I'd like to get a new car, though I had hoped by the time my car was this old there would already be second-generation alternative-fuel vehicles being mass-produced. That's not true yet, though the rising cost of oil is steering people towards the first-generation alternatives. Still, I'm barely getting by with my current financial situation - truth be told, I'm not even doing that. I simply cannot afford a car payment at this time.

This morning the noise coming from my car abruptly changed. It became louder, more desperate, harder to ignore, more jaw-rattling. I got to work and started to go through the phone book looking for muffler shops.

The first one was no good - they only stay open until 5:00, and the guy had no idea how to check to see if they had mufflers available for my car. The second place seemed better - they were open until 7:30, and said they had the muffler available. They arranged a "free evaluation" for me today at 5:30. That was fine, but I would rather have just scheduled a repair appointment.

My car roared most of the way to the muffler shop. I was able to define sweet spots everywhere, usually just a notch or so below whatever speed I was doing. The car roared on uphill climbs and on foot-off-the-pedal decelerations, but purred at 52 if I was doing 55, and so on.

I made it there and they took me in in a few minutes. The kid who drove my car in seemed to enjoy the sound - he even did a little VROOM VROOM as he pulled onto the lift. People would pay good money to make their cars sound like that, I thought.

He lifted up the car and looked at in from below. It was the first time in 12 years I have seen the car from that angle, and it looked a lot better than I imagined. But the exhaust system didn't look so good. After a few minutes of inspection he called me out to show me the rust-covered welds all along the exhaust system. Then he took me back to show me the muffler.

"See, there's your problem right there," I said as he showed me the exhaust pipe, which was completely detached from the muffler. "The muffler no longer comes into play."

So. I have a creeping feeling I could just get the muffler replaced for half the price they are quoting me, but that would connect a good muffler to a dying exhaust system. Would I want to do this? But by replacing the whole shebang, I am committing myself to hold onto this car for a while longer.

Michelle offers her condolences. I'm thinking of getting the words "GHETTO LEXUS" across the top of my windshield.

Funny thing is, it's not just me. My sister had some repair work planned for her car this weekend - she is coming in from out of state, and was able to get a much lower quoted price on the extensive costs for her repairs at a dealer not far from here. Thing is, when my mom called the dealer today about an unrelated matter (see below) and inquired about my sister's car, she was met with a wall of befuddlement. The parts had never been ordered. Nobody seemed to know what she was talking about. When my sister called to get to the bottom of it, they claimed they had no record of her appointment or her quote - and when they re-quoted the work, it was now 80% more expensive! She has now arranged to get the work done somewhere else. It's still expensive, sure - but only 50% more expensive than what these people had originally quoted.

My brother may have wrecked the engine on his truck hauling landscaping materials this weekend. His truck is old, even older than my Tercel, though it has fewer miles on it.

Yesterday my mom's Check Engine light came on. She's due for an inspection, anyway.

All during the crappiest economy any of us have seen in a loooong time - since my mom was a little girl during the Depression and the years of war rationing, I suppose.


Title reference: "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems" by The Notorious B.I.G., Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, and Mase. This was popular during my dance hall days at Tink's.