When Indigo Children Grow Up

This crossed my desk this morning, from CNN. A graduate of Monroe College in NY is suing the college (for the return of all tuition moneys) because she graduated in April and has not yet gotten a job, and blames the school for not finding her a job. The Office of Career Advancement (basically, the same help center that every college has to assist with job searches and resume writing), didn't do enough for her, she contends. Since she's still unemployed after she graduated with an oh-so-impresive GPA of 2.7 (please add as much sarcasm as you can to that sentence).

As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe's career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.

"They're supposed to say, 'I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right -- can you interview this person?' They're not doing that," she said.

"They're supposed to say..." Really? In what alternate universe? Did your school call employers for you to set up interviews? I don't think so. I think Miss Thompson needs to rethink her assessment that employers are clamoring for graduates like her. Sorry, honey, you highly over-rate your attractiveness to employers.

Don't you love the part about good attendance? Like this is grade school and she'll get a nice plaque at the end of the year? And she contends that the school offered more help and support to students with higher grade point averages. I especially liked the part where she accused the school of favoring students with 4.0GPA's. Oh, yes, I'm sure they were hired first because the school made extra effort to showcase them to employers, rather than employers preferentially hiring those with higher GPA's. Of course that's the problem.

Her complaint adds, "The office of career advancement information technology counselor did not make sure their Monroe e-recruiting clients call their graduates that recently finished college for an interview to get a job placement. They have not tried hard enough to help me."

Yes, because it's someone else's job to get her full-time employment. Apparently she hasn't considered the possibility that the e-recruiting companies took a look at her resume and her academic history and passed. I never realized that the school was supposed to MAKE local companies give interviews to recent graduates. Does this woman actually think that the school was supposed to force businesses to interview her? To call anyone? Wow, wouldn't that be nice? Graduate and the school is responsible for making sure you get the job you want? Where is that guarantee in the small print?

The very idea that you'd SUE a school because you can't get a job is so ridiculous and mockable that I initially thought it was a joke. But now, Miss I'm-So-Speshul really does seem to think it's someone else's fault that she isn't employed. It's not like the school lied about accreditation or misled her as to the job market. They didn't prevent her from taking certain classes or refuse to assist her. She got the same education and opportunity that every other student did. They did nothing wrong at all, although she seems to think that they supposed to grease her way into a new job automatically. Because she's so special, I guess. That sense of entitlement is boggling.

Is she so stupid that she doesn't realize that there are, literally, thousands of people out there who are more qualified than she is? She's even outranked by most of her graduating class, for pete's sake, not to mention the people out there with actual business experience. In this economy, no one is guaranteed a job, certainly not a self-entitled c-student.

Perhaps she should have paid more attention in class and gotten better grades so she was actually attractive to the empooyers that are out there. Although, if this is her attitude, even with a perfect gpa she might not be terribly attractive to an employer. I know I wouldn't want to hire someone who expected the world on a platter.

I hope, I really, really hope, that she is smacked down hard and publicly over this. She's an entitled idiot and should be dismissed as such.

[Oh, and the Indigo Children reference in the title? Here's Wiki's take on it]

A Bit Late to the Party

Glenn Beck today exposed the Cash for Clunkers scheme to force your submission to allow the Govt. to basically set a VIRUS on your computer so that they can access all files on your computer at any time and turn those files over to the "authorities" and any one else they choose.

Years of exposés on government warrantless wiretapping and TIPS, and "Cash For Cars" is what gets the conservatives to cry foul? Are they kidding? Seriously, this is starting to read like an Onion article.

Coming just a bit late to the party, aren't they?

Paging Becky and Tim!

No, I really don't know any Becky and Tim, but someone sent me this link yesterday and I just had to pass it on.

Enter as evidence: one Craiglist entry (if you're not familiar with Craigslist, it's basically a huge on-line flea market/swap meet). Becky (of Becky and Tim) is offering "blank" Wedding Invitations.

But apparently, she is not quite clear on the concept of "blank".

These are probably not going to work if your name is not Becky and you are not marrying a person named Tim. That might limit your possible purchasing pool quite a bit.

Read the email exchange from the blog post, though. It's a hoot!

More Word Fun

I often laugh that the Adorable Husband thinks that punctuation is optional (he argues, of course, that it is not optional, but that he just writes a few lines and then think he should add something, anything, and so throws a comma or semi-colon on there).

Anyway, this little quiz has some bizarre punctuation marks - try it!

Stress Relief

This is what happens when I have an afternoon surfing the web while waiting for files to convert.

Having a bad day? Need a way to shake off that stress?

Peluches

Be patient - the main flash page takes a bit to load (they are apparently very proud of their fade-in logo). Turn on your sound.

Scroll over the cute little fluffy stuffed animals.

Feeling less stressed now? It certainly helped me!

Harder than it looks

Did you ever think about all the little words that you utter and read every day? We talk about a college graduate knowing about 20,000 words, and the average person using perhaps 4-5,000 during the course of normal interaction. College professors and avid readers and writers use perhaps 30,000. Shakespeare used 60,000. But, he was a huge show off.

But what are the top 100? This quiz was surprisingly hard. List the top 100 English words (picked by their frequency of use) in five minutes.

I got 47 the first time around, although I'm sure it ignored some of my entries!

Desperate Refusal of Reality

A recent poll (and take that for what its worth, of course) noted that less than half of Republicans polled believe that Obama is an American citizen. They assert that the current president is illegitimate.

This is the idiotic 'birther' conspiracy - apparently a bunch of IQ-challenged mouth-breathers are so upset at the idea that a bi-racial man is president that they are desperately trying to convince everyone that the current president wasn't actually born in Hawaii, but in Kenya and the Obama family has been conspiring to hide this fact for the last 47 years. The tin-foil hat brigade is demanding a birth certificate, and when that was provided, declared it fake and went on demanding "proof". At one point, some of them tried to argue that Hawaii wasn't a state when Obama was born there, and when that failed, they claimed he was born in Kenya, and then they tried to argue that his mother's second marriage invalidated his citizenship.

These people are IDIOTS. They are an embarassment to anyone with an IQ higher than 70.

They are ignorant of the constitution, ignorant of the laws governing citizenship, and so blindingly racist and stupid that they defy description. It's embarassing.

The GOP needs to get control of the wacko wing of their party and get them to shut the hell up, or they are going to lose any semblance of respectability they have. Cater to the idiots and people will think you are on eo

Computational Knowledge

And yet another COOL thing. Ask it a question ("meaning of life", "airspeed of an african swallow") or type in a mathematical formula ("integral of 1/sqrt(x*x + 1) dx" and click 'show steps', for example. Type in a date...I've spent the last hour trying to think of esoteric questions.

Wolfram/Alpha

Cool Tree Identifier

Yes, I'm spending an afternoon randomly surfing the web while I convert Mp3s to iPod audiobook format.

Here's a very interesting site by the Arbor Day Foundation - Tree Identifier. A guided Q&A to find out what kind of tree you're looking at. Cool!

How NOT to Design a webpage

This is NSFW (due to sound), and be ready to hit the mute button and close a loud popup window. But....wow. This is one of the most atrocious web pages I've ever seen.

http://hosanna1.com/

You've been warned! (and she apparently runs a web design service, too. Oh, my)

What's the Plus for?

I'm sure some of you will think we're horrible people, but laughter sometimes is the best way to deal with a crisis. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

As we were driving to the vet's last week, we started talking about euthanasia in the car, and how a doctor friend of The Adorable Husband's had just had their vet out to the house to euthanize their dog. Being a doctor he was curious about things, and discovered that the drug combination used is called 'TotallyLethal' -- well, another is 'Bluethenasia', so let's not be too hard on the poor marketing people, shall we?

But that's not enough. It's not just 'TotallyLethal"...it's TotallyLethal PLUS.

What on earth is the PLUS for? What possible effect of this drug is not covered by 'totally lethal'? Really? Marketing has gone a little overboard on this one, I think.

"I know!" I said, "It's the special Anti-Zombie Formula. That's the PLUS!"

We almost had to pull over, we were laughing so hard (and I still chuckle a little thinking about it). Yup. Totally Lethal, now with No More Zombies!

Very wrong, I know. Very inappropriate and I'm sure everyone thinks we're heartless and horrible. But we both loved Uulaq a lot, and laughter seemed a much better way to go, you know?

Beat Poet?

If you haven't see this, sit down - finish your drink (swallow!) and watch. Whoever thought to get Shatner to read this was inspired.

MediaMonkey

I have a boatload of music and audiobooks and other media on my computer, and I've been using RealPlayer to manage things and load music and books on my various iPods.

Why, you might ask, do I not use iTunes? I find it completely non-intuitive in the way it organizes things, difficult to browse, too geared towards "buying stuff", and quite slow when dealing with thousands of files. Nothing against Apple, of course - just that this particular application doesn't fit what I need.

Realplayer hasn't been particularly friendly lately, either. It is slow, has developed a recent tendency to crash my machine and lock things up, and maintaining the tags and information about the files is difficult and time-consuming. Move something (like organizing files or renaming a directory) and it suddenly is not accessible in RealPlayer and needs to be re-fetched and re-organised. I'm not exactly UN-happy with it, but not really happya, either.

Based on a few recommendations from the Invisible People online, I downloaded a demo of MediaMonkey, which manages audio files and ipods and a bunch of other mp3 players. I bought a license for the software within an hour! It's fabulous - fast, intuitively organized, automatically monitors files for changes, and has scripting support that lets me batch-update the tags and files to keep things neat and organized. Scripting! Woo-hoo!

It automatically identifies files that aren't correctly labelled, manages lyrics and cover art, supports playlists and podcasts...I'm seriously impressed. There is a free versoin, of course (which does not support file monitoring and some of the other advanced options), but a license is 20 bucks, and well worth it, in my opinion.

I've spent the last few evenings going through all my mp3 files and downloaded Audible books (it doesn't actually support the Audible format without a plug in) and renaming, re-tagging, and reorganizing things. It's a compulsive organizer's dream!

"Free" Stuff

A poster on the TT forum asked why fire trucks show up when you call an ambulance (because they are usually closer and can begin treatment before the paramedics show up in the ambulance, btw), which morphed into a discussion of the different types of fire and ambulance service - many people live in areas where fire protection and ambulance service are "fee-based" offerings. You pay a subscription fee each year to assure that you will get that ambulance when you need it.

A few people tried to assert that if you aren't a "member", you won't get the service and the fire truck won't show up when you have a fire. That's not true, of course, you just need to agree to pay the bills before they'll do anything.

Everyone bemoaned the the cost of joining the service and then someone came up with, "I live in a rural area, but my ambulance and fire are free. I don't subscribe to anything."

No. Your fire service and ambulance service are not "free". You are paying for them via taxes (usually a levy on property taxes). You just don't get a bill for the service. Government services are not "free" - roads and Medicare and the CIA and whatever else...we do pay for these things with taxes. Government money is not "free" money.

But there is apparently a contingent of people who do think that some things are "free" - and marketing has glommed on to the idea. Take for example, US Fidelity Auto Repair Insurance. Have you seen the ads? It's an insurance offering that pays for car repairs when your car is past its warranty period. Have an old car? Buy this in insurance an never pay for repairs again!

"Bob and Joe", intones the commercial, showing two men sitting in a repair shop, "own the same make, model and year of car." A make andmodel that apparently needs a new transmission or something. "Bob" paid almost three thousand dollars for a new repair...and "Joe", according ot the ad, "didn't pay a penny!"

Oh, yes, he did. In fact, he probably paid more than 3K for his repair since he's been paying a monthly premium for the insurance for umpty-years until he needed it. He just didn't see a bill for this particular incident. Do people forget that? I can't believe anyone falls for this sort of scam insurance. I suppose people figure they will "beat the system" nd be the ones who pay in a teeny amount and then have a huge claim -- but it's just like gambling....and the player rarely wins.

I just cringe every time I see the ad - because I know that someone, somewhere, will think this is the best thing ever and will save them thousands of dollars. Do the math, people! Do the math!

Uulaq

I've said it a dozen times here on the blog, but dogs really do need to live as long as we do.

We euthanized Uulaq tonight. She was steadily declining, and it was time.

She was such a sweetie.

Quote mines and making shit up

Bus campaigns, billboard campaigns - atheist organizations put up "there might not be a god, don't worry about it" and similar sentiments, and theists respond with a campaign of their own with religious quotes. Fine - I doubt the issue is going to be decided based on what is on the bus in front of you in traffic, but hey, no complaints here.

Well, no, that's not true. I will complain -- because the theists are putting up quotes that are entirely made up, and attributing them to famous, recognizeable people (notably the founding fathers). The group admits to ust making them up out of whole cloth because apparently it's ok to lie for Jesus.

From Tampa Bay:

The billboards showcase quotes from early American leaders like John Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Most of the quotes portray a national need for Christian governance.

Others carry the same message but with fictional attribution, as with one billboard citing George Washington for the quote, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

“I don’t believe there’s a document in Washington’s handwriting that has those words in that specific form,” Kemple said. “However, if you look at Washington’s quotes, including his farewell address, about the place of religion in the political sphere, there’s no question he could have said those exact words.”

I could even forgive the quote mining (taking short quotes entirely out of context to try to prove a point). Misuse of quotes is pretty common in apologetics. Of course, in this case, the founding fathers being "quoted" are being portrayed as Christian when all available historical fact points to them being, at best, deists. But that, too, is not something that is going to be resolved by billboard. The strong anti-separation sentiments by this group, though, cross the line.

I object to the blatant lying. If you want to put up quotes by theists that support your position, then do the legwork and go out and find some actual quotes. Don't lie and then blush charmingly and argue that "he could have said it", as if that excuses the made-up quotes. If you can't show that he DID say it, don't attribute your own personal belief to George Washington, mmmkay? Otherwise, just present the quotes as your own opinion. That would be, at least, honest.

Great way to sway people to your side, theists. Everyone likes to be lied to, don't they?

Teaching to the Test

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- (AP) -- The Florida Department of Education says students at 12 school districts, including Miami-Dade and Broward, showed signs of ``template writing'' on the state's standardized writing test.

The department sent the districts letters identifying schools where students responded with similar phrasing in their essays on the 2009 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Examples include phrases like, ``I ran as fast as wildfire.''

The department says teaching to memorize and use such phrases distorts the writing process and makes the test more of a ``fill in the blanks'' type exercise.

Wait a second. Teachers, threatened with termination if they do not successfully get their students to pass a standardized test, are teaching standardized answers?

Oh, no one could have thought that could happen, could they? Color me surprised. Not.

Teaching 'to the test', anyone? Is this a foreign concept? Doh!

Don't get me wrong - given the situation, I don't think the teachers failed here, nor the students. The policy of punishing teachers and schools for failing to meet testing goals (while not necessarily giving them the tools and resources to meet them) is clearly at fault. If you make my job dependent on whether students got A's on their tests...well, you can be damned sure that is going to a primary curriculum task - and yet the PTB are surprised that it means students are simply regurgitating memorized phrases in a specific pattern?

Slow spiral down

Uulaq is old. Really old, for an Akita -- I think the chart at the vet logs her as somewhere around 100 in human years. She's been slowly failing over the last few months; horrible arthritis in her knees and hips, blindness, doesn't want to eat, sleeps all the time. We've got her on tons of pain-killers for her back and hips (an amount that would allow a ballerina to dance on broken feet, I think, and should render Uulaq a drooling heap in the corner) and despite it, she still has problems walking. Oh, she'll still wag to go on a walk, but she can barely make it to the end of the sidewalk behind our house, and spends half the next day recovering.

It's time. She's not having any fun at all. She is spending more and more time nervous and anxious because she can't see, unsure of where to walk in the house, avoiding the other dogs because they bump her, even slightly, and she falls down. The Adorable Husband called and we have an appointment at the vet on Thursday.

Dogs really should live as long as we do, dammit. Even neurotic, weird beasties.

Take That, Fiendish Device!

Less than 24 hours from the purchase and initial trial of the citronella-spray anti-bark collar...the weasels (I am strongly suspecting Berit, of course) pulled it down off the counter and chewed it up. Chewed the collar strap off the sprayer, chewed the brackets off the sprayer, left tooth-marks all over it.

Apparently, they didn't like it much, you think?

It still does work, though, so we used velcro and a creative rubber-band connector to attach it to the slightly-chewed strap. I can just imagine the beasties, though -"I've got it! Die, dastardly spraying thing! Ah-hah! You shall never work again, fiendish device! Bwaaahah!"

Too smart for their own good, the beastiea are.

Too Smart for Us

So, in an attempt to keep Berit from barking at everything, we finally succumbed and bought one of those citronella spray collars. It's sound-activated, and when she barks loudly, it spritzes a rather strong-smelling citronella mist up into her face. It's harmless, just startling, and it should hopefully (with much positive reinforcement) stop her from barking all the time at every single person that passes on the sidewalk behind the house.

We filled it up, tested it in the kitchen (blow into the microphone and it sprays) then called Berit over and fitted it on her and we all went out in the backyard to see if it would work.

First, we were out there half an hour and not one person went by the house. Usually, it's Grand Central Station back there between 7 and 9. Nada. Our neighbors out back (Greta and not-Greta) weren't outside, Willie didn't bark next door. No one. Hmph.

Then, two women walking by. Ah-hah! Someone to test this on. Berit always barks at walkers if they are talking. The dogs run to the fence...and do not bark. At all. Wha?

Moments later..a bicyclist! A worthy target for frenzied barking! One tiny, pathetic little woof, more of a mmmmrooo and nothing. They just ran along the fence and popped up to watch the cycle curiously. Something is quite wrong.

I'm beginning to think that she read the instruction manual when we weren't looking. She knows what will happen and she isn't going to bark at all!

It finally took a woman walking two dogs to get a real bark out of the beastie. She barked....ssssssst! and that just about set her back on her butt. Huh? What happened? Another bark, another spritz, and she's standing in the yard staring around suspiciously. We're all, "good girl! good quiet! good Berit!" and she is quite sure, I can tell, that we had something to do with it. We are eyeballed suspiciously, but she runs down to her normal barking position in the back corner...and doesn't bark.

This might work. We'll need to make sure she has it on every single time she's outside for a while (which might be hard, since as soon as Rowan sees the collar and weird box-thing on it, he is trying to chew it off -I imagine we'll go through at least one collar strap. We were a little nervous that she'd just figure, "oh. that's sort of annoying, but I shall bark anyway! Hah!", as some stubborn breeds are known to do.

Apparently she's a sensitive, delicate flower.

Doggie Denistry

Well, other than the smoking hole in my credit card, Rowan is just fine - he had root canal last week to repair a broken tooth and several other chipped teeth. Two plus hours of anesthesia and he's got one stubby, rounded off fang, but no problems at all.

I can't believe that they do root canals, crowns, and -- get this -- braces on dogs. Although to be fair, it was a much better option than pulling the tooth.

Now if we can just get Uulaq's meds balanced right so she feels better. We are starting to discuss what we should do -- she's just not having a good time anymore, we don't think. She's mostly blind, she's got terrible arthritis in her hips and back and has trouble keeping steady when she's walking, she is slowly losing weight and she's spending nearly all of her time sleeping. The Adorable Husband can still spark her interest by taking her for a (short) walk, but she's definitely on that slow, downhill slide.

Bah. Dogs should live as long as we do.

Meaningless or Meaningful

A group is lobbying to engrave a bunch of religious phrases on the US Capitol Visitor's Center, and their arguments are pretty flimsy. IN addition to suggestiong that it will cost more to fight the lawsuits than to just acquiesce and write religious slogans on public buildings, they dredge up the old "freedom of religion, not freedom from religion" argument, which they only seem to use when it's THEIR religion they want to display or give benefit to.

I find it extremely inappropriate to put religious phrases on secular buildings. Whiile I might not like religious decorations in public squares at holidays, they are transient and reflect the celebration of the season. But continuing to add christian imagery (and make no mistake, these groups are not lobbying to put "Hail, Baal!" on the building, or "Praise Allah" anywhere in Washington DC) to public buildings is attempting to give a specific religion primacy. 'In god we trust' is not referring to Quezlcoatl, I'm sure.

No one has ever suggested that people cannot practice whatever religion they want (as long as they break no other laws)- we only speak up when they want to force everyone else to give special recognition to their particular brand of religion. Criticism is not oppression, and suggesting that perhaps not everyone agrees with you is not persecution.

But here's where I get a bit confused:

"Put 'In God We Trust' on visitor's center, and be quiet already"

Let's start by pointing out the First Amendment doesn't grant freedom "from" religion, just freedom "of" religion. It doesn't ban religion, it provides freedom for all so that one denomination doesn't dominate or become the official state religion. Whether you practice a religion or not is up to people's preferences.

My irony meter just pinged. Yes, that's right. You can practice however you want, but you aren't allowed to coerce the rest of us into accepting, believing or following their dogma. And yet, anyone who disagrees with publicly funding and supporting expressions of specific faith is "the need-to-be-offended type" or an atheist or agnostic who obviously hates America and all it stands for.

But it's a meaninless social construct, they argue. It's a rote phrase stripped of its religious meaning. It's cultural. We should put it everywhere! Those people who are trying to prevent the project are just killjoys and are over-reacting!

No one is forced to worship because they saw the motto on a $20 bill. Or because they recited the Pledge of Allegiance. It's pretty innocuous.

You know what? You can't have it both ways. Either religious slogans on money, on buildings, are harmless, innocuous phrases wihtout meaning, and we shouldn't get all upset about it, or they are so important that if someone criticizes them they are hateful (atheists) and obviously want to destroy civilization.

This can't be good

For all the fans of the Twilight novels ("Twi-fans", apparently)...there's going to be a graphic novel! Ooh! Swoon!

Really, I'm rather horrified (and overly amused) at the idea (the books are cover-to-cover Mary Sue drivel with a heavy helping of weird-stalker vibes and tween girl angst that is at once hilarious and creepy). The little illustrated article about the new offering had me giggling at the fan versions that have already surfaced..with some odd and sometimes bizarre fan-illustrations. Just scroll through the slide show without giggling, I dare you. I double-dog dare you.

But it was the comments that had me snorting out loud.

"I never thought Stephenie would allow this--I am so happy! My husband might actually let me frame some of these for the walls being a graphic novel nerd himself."

"I am THRILLED to see Twilight being brought to this form. I think the animation should be true to the book as that is the original story we have all fallen in love with."

Can't you just hear the sparkly squeals of joy?

New Client

Eek - I should have posted this earlier in the week (so I'm pre-dating it, sorry).

Started at a new client this week -- well, back to an old client, sort of. I'm doing some work for the other division of the client I rolled off of in March and leaving several months of testing behind on my internal project at work.

I'ts nice - I know the people, they specifically asked for me to return, and I will be working from home again until some time in November, at least. Woot!

I love my job!

PA Notes

I've been looking for any excuse to have a quick giggle lately, and I got such a kick out of PassiveAggressiveNotes.com -- we've all seen those oh-so-snarky notes and someone has gone to the trouble to collect them.

It's a hoot.

Mock me now

Yes, just mock me. I am taking Rowan in to a dentist to possibly have a root canal done this week.

Rowan, if you are new here, is a DOG. He cracked off part of one of his lower fangs, and our regular vet said that we can either have it pulled out or consult with a specialist to see if might need a root canal to ensure that he doesn't get an abcess in the tooth. They might simply pull the tooth, but if we can avoid that and save the tooth, well, we'll do a root canal. I think it depends on whether enough of the tooth remains that it can be smoothed out and sealed properly.

Yes, root canal for dogs. When I expressed surprise that they did such a thing, the receptionist assured me that they also do braces. On dogs.

OK, I might be on the far end of weird dog owners, but even I wouldn't consider braces for my dog. That's just weird.

Tiny CIties and Pirates!

I picked up a new computer game last week. I find most computer games to be sort of brainless, aimless relaxation time - a way to turn off the brain from thinking about work or other problems, and just drift for a couple of hours.

Yes, I know it makes me a huge geeky nerd. I'm certainly past the age where I should be considered "a gamer", I guess, but I enjoy them.

At any rate, the game is Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery, which is a city-building strategy game with pirates! It's fascinating and I have lost a number of hours to this time-sucker over the weekend. Setting up cities, building roads, sending ships off to trade good and fighting off pirates - its

Fascinating. And geeky. But highly recommended!

Waiting for the other Shoe

If you've watched the news at any point in the last week, it's been filled with Michael Jackson retrospectives, heath-care debates, the governer of South Carolina digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole every time he holds a press conference, and, just for some comic relief, Sarah Palin quit.

Because she needs to focus on other things, she says. Because she doesn't want to be a lame duck and be ineffective in Alaska, and apparently she oesn't like not getting her way. It's pretty common, she says, and we're just being mean (and being threatened with lawsuits) in criticizing her rambling, incoherent and hastily-put-together speech.

And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.

While I'd love for any media pundit to actually ask the question, "Sure, yeah, you betcha. Name a few." I know it won't happen. That would be just mean, you know.

So someone else did the research. Let's assume that she is referring to just Governers for the moment - so..."countless others" have resigned to follow a 'higher calling'. Well, let's see.

In the last 50 years only 33 governors have resigned:

• 15 resigned in order to accept a presidential appointment
• 11 resigned because they were elected or appointed to Congress or VP
• 3 resigned due to scandal
• 2 resigned after being tried and convicted of felonies
• 1 due to illness
• 1 resigned in order to prepare his fourth run at the presidency

Notice a pattern here? No one resigned because they were a lame duck or unpopular or not getting their way or even being investigated. Apparently, she's planning ahead for one of these reasons, right? Because I cannot see how quitting in the middle of her term is a positive act at this point. But I'm not a True Believer. Can someone explain this? I can't imagine a valid run for president (or any other national office) after conclusively proving that you simply can't handle the pressure or the job and have to quit.

Can anyone find numbers on congressional resignations? I can find yearly summaries, but nothing overall.

The TV is off at our house. If I see one more Michael Jackson piece or tribute concert or discussions about getting tickets (tickets?) to the funeral...ugh.

Bang!

Oh, the joys of having a pet who is terrified of fireworks, and a neighborhood full of teenage kids who set of bottle rockets and fireworks at all hours. Nothing like being woken up a half-dozen times by a frantically barking dog who can hear fireworks miles away.

We hid in the basement and watched WALL*E during the worst of it - the thunderstorms early seem to have lessened the number of fireworks displays.

I don't think we've actually SEEN fireworks in a couple of years. Sigh.

Signs of things to come

see more dog and puppy pictures
This made me giggle uncontrollably.

I haven't posted anything in weeks, I know. It's been busy!

Tough guys

Ok, we all know that hockey is a pretty rough sport (even though they are trying to make it more "family friendly"), and that Stanley Cup Playoffs tend to be just that much more physically brutal. Players do their best to hide injuries and "play through" for that opportunity to skate around with Lord Stanley's cup.

Players routinely are out on the ice with sprains, bruises, stitches, and even broken bones. They don't miss games - it's an overload of testosterone that keeps them going through the pain. So when Red Wing Nicklas Lindstrom missed some playoff games (for the first time in his career), you just know it had to be something awful.

Awful? You decide. He was in surgery instead of in Game 4 because he had been speared in the testicles by an opposing player.

I don't even HAVE those parts and I cringed in sympathy.

I think that level of ...dedication? insanity? makes him the "winner".

Catching up

Oy, it's hard to go back to work after vacation. Brain doesn't work right, and I just want to go back to wandering aimlessly and eating out all the time. Sigh.

It's been really hectic, so I haven't posted in ages. Sorry about that.

Our primary thing this week is that we finally figured out the reason for Uulaq's demented weirdness -- she's been barking all the time, very anxious, picking fights, doesn't want to go outside..we discovered yesterday that she's pretty much blind.

We knew she was having some issues with night vision, and some blurring in her lenses due to age, but we had no idea it was this bad. She gets around ok, and other than being tentative about the stairs, doesn't seem to have any problems in the house. But she's startling easily, and gets freaked out by fast motion or the other dogs. When our vet shined light in her eyes, she had almost no pupil reaction - in a dark room and very bright light, there was a tiny bit, but it's like she's just seeing light and dark right now. Poor doglet.

She apparently can get around ok by smell, but if the routine is interuppted, she flips out a bit because she can't keep track of things. She had started to bark at the bottom of the stairs sometimes at night before coming up (before we left for vacation) and we figured it was probably taht she wasn't seeing them too well and wanted us to get up and turn lights on. I can only imagine that the stairs are just a black hole. It also explains her frequent snapping at Rowan - suddnely, he's just there and she can't see him properly.

We're not sure what caused this (beyond age), so we'll keep an eye on things and test her for glaucoma and retinal problems as we go forward.

Home again, home again

We're home!

Tired, jet-lagged, sunburned (yes, sunburned!), but we had a fabulous time!

More when my brain gets past the 'booting....27%" mark. Oy, going back to work is painful.

Winding down

Ah-hah! Edinburgh finally --the last week and a half have seen us roving along the west coast and back in the Borders, finding lots of castles and trying to avoid the sheep.

It's almost the end of our vacation, and we're beginning to drag a bit. Our vacations are not usually very relaxing -- more like "get up at 7 and go go go until dinner at 7". And then crash like rocks, of course. We end up walking all over the place and I still contend that anything worth seeing in Scotland is UPHILL, so by the end of the day, I'm ready to just lay down and sleep wherever I happen to end up. Seriously, we'll need a vacation to recuperate from our vacation!

We arrived in Edinburgh yesterday afternoon, and I can only reinforce the mantra of "don't drive in Edinburgh" if you don't have to. Oy! Road construction and one-way streets and the rather random parking make it awfully hard to navigate if you aren't familiar with the area.

It's a lovely city, though. We're in a great hotel on the outskirts of town and will head in tomorrow to stay at the Witchery by the castle - -should be fun!

We had a slow morning today - got up late, had late breakfast, basically sat around until 11 when our laundry is supposed to be done. It's rather nice. I'm reading the guidebook to see what's what in the city, we're trying to decide when to do the Mary King's Close tour, and we are considering one of the open-top get-on-get-off busses to get around to the major sights. We have almost three days in Edinburgh this time, so we're not going to rush too much! (or so she says, having not yet seen the Old Town).

And we're back off into the world! See everyone in a few days!

Roman Camp or ringfort?

As we were careening around the curvy roads to our B&B for the night, the light was just perfect and we saw the outlines of this huge ringfort on the hillside near Peebles.

We think it's Lyne Fort, but we're not entirely sure. I'll have to track it down when we return. It's enormous, and we were glad that we saw it when we did--the next morning, in direct sunlight, it didn't look like anything at all. We'd have shot on by without a second look.

Technology marvels

Another lovely sunny day - the forecast says rain, but the blue sky certainly doesn't agree. We stayed in Stirling last night, about a five minute walk from the old town, and maybe fifteen to the castle (all uphill, of course!) We walked into town last night and again this morning, just to enjoy the weather. Stirling is a lovely town, and the castle is fabulous. When we were here ten years ago, they were restoring the "great hall" in the courtyard, it was finally opened about two years later. it was interesting to see the finished product now, ten years on. It's really spectacular - and they are tackling the "royal apartment" now, to make them look and feel like they would have in the 16th century. We couldn't get in to see the work in progress, of course, but it was a great trip this morning.

We drove the Tower Trail in Stirlingshire and finally headed down to the Falkirk Wheel -- the huge rotating boat lift - -raising boats from the Forth and Clyde canal up over a hundred feet to the Union Canal. It's quite a balancing act, with counter-rotating barge "bins" that are rotated around a huge axle, like a giant ferris wheel. Quite cool!

Visited a few roman remains, and a few crumbly tower houses ("oooh! Look! a crumbly one!" was the sign to STOP NOW so i could hike out to take pictures. ) We usually end up walking a half mile or so out to some of the ruins, usualy without really knowing if they are there or not. It's always an adventure!

We're going to follow the Antonine wall (really, the Antonine Ditch, nowadays) a bit tomorrow, and may decide to go stay in Glasgow for a while. For the moment, the rain -- which arrived at dinner time -- has driven us indoors and we're going to crash. More Dots tomorrow!

Things I have never seen before

Well, despite our misgivings, we took the advice of the hotel clerk to try the mexican restaurant just down the street. Sancho Pancho. We were thinking, "Mexican food in Scotland?This is going to be...ah...interesting."

Oh, we were so right.

Chips and salsa. Ok, seems normal so far. Wait...the salsa has cucumbers in it. And it's sort of sweet, rather like italian salad dressing. Still, pretty tasty. Mark doesn't do salsa at all, so I ate the little bowl by myself. The chips are tortilla triangles, but entirely unsalted.

Ordered a beef-and-bean burrito, the house speciality, called 'the famous wet burrito', which implied that it was smothered with sauce, which is what the description said "ground beef, refried beans, tomatoes, lettuce covered in our sauce...". Mark ordered just a regular beef burrito.

His was fairly normal - chunks of beef, red and green pepper, and lettuce. He asked for no tomato. Pretty good so far. The "sour cream" is obviously someting different here in Scotland;it's almost sweet, not tangy like I'm used to

My burrito, however, is a Serious Surprise. I have never in my life had a burrito in any sort of mexican restaurant that included lima beans and carrots and PEAS.

LIMA BEANS. In a beef burrito. And little half-cherry-tomatoes. And P-E-A-S. Peas!

I pretty much collapsed in fizzy laughter just down the street from the restaurant and mark had to drag me back to the hotel. i should add that this point that the burrito tasted pretty good - not too spicy, but quite good.

Lima beans. I may now have seen everything.

Still Alive!

Finding WiFi has been harder than it should be -- even the couple of B&Bs that we picked that advertise "free wifi" simply wouldn't let us connect properly. We still can get email and everything -- Mark's iphone does that over the phone connection, if nothing else is available -- but it does mean we aren't getting any updates posted.

Since we got back from the Orkney's, we headed back down the coast to Aberdeenshire and wandered around looking at castles, fabulous old houses, and lovely scenics. We stayed in Deeside for two days and are working our way back to the west coast and eventually to Mull.

The weather has been stunningly gorgeous - sunny, warm, perfect. This morning dawned with fog that burned off by 10am and the rest of the day was perfect. No one is going to believe that we went to Scotland for our vacation - we'll come back tanned!

Why is that chicken wearing pants?

Just to prove that Mark and I share the same brain, we were driving up to Wick and passed by a house with chickens in the yard, including this huge rooster.

We turned to each other in the car and said - in unison - "why is that chicken wearing pants?"

We got a couple of days worth of giggles over it, and on our way back down the coast, we actually stopped at the house and took pictures of the chicken. We met the people there, who raise chickens, ducks, geese, and have a pony trekking business. They thought we were insane, of course, but we did try to explain about the chicken and the pants.

I don't think that helped.

The chicken is German, of course. They bought the eggs off eBay. After hearing this, we spent the rest of the day talking about Leiderhosen chickens..... Yes, we are strange. Very, very strange.

Orkney

Posting a bit late, but we went up to the Orkney Islands and wandered around the neolithic and viking remains on the islands (as well as the much more modern stuff at Scapa Flow and the Churchill Barriers.

Absolutely glorious! Well, rainy a bit, and the wind was ferocious, but the islands are gorgeous and well worth the ferry ride out. We visited Skara Brae, Maes Howe, Mine Howe, a couple of stone circles, and the viking-built St Magnus Chapel (among other things). Gorgeous!

We took the car over on the ferry. A lot of the guidebooks recommend renting a car on the main island to save the cost, but since we're living out of the car, really, we didn't want to schlep our stuff that much.

WIND and more WIND

We have only sporadic internet connectivity (if the hotel/B&B has wireless, we can connect), otherwise, we're only using Mark's iPhone to check things, and trying to be very careful of the amount of data (we have an international plan for data in Scotland for only 100 m of data, which is not much, when you consider how big most websites are).

Anyway, we're at the Craigellachie Hotel, which is famous for its Quaitch bar with 700+ whiskys. (not with an E, that's not Scotch!) While we can't get cellphone reception in the room (stone walls, you know), the public rooms have wifi. Tada! Lovely old hotel - our room is tiny, but the food here is fantastic, and they are in the middle of teh Speyside area for distilleries. We sat in the bar last night with a lovely couple from Germany and two women from South Africa and had a "regional scotch tasting" that the barman put on for us - a whisky from each region of Scotland. It was great!

We ended up spending two days in Northumberland - the time got away from us and we took a whole extra day to see Hadrian's wall and the roman forts along the frontier. The first day, we tried to get to Lindesfarne (and missed the tide - you can only get to the island when the tide is very low) and then visited the major castles that we were given as "must sees" - Bamburgh and Alnwick (pronounced ann-ick, figure that one out). We were too late to Alnwick, so instead saw Dunsanburgh, a huge ruin waaaaay out on the coast - requiring a several-mile hike in blustery winds to even get to the site. Gorgeous, but woah, the wind.

Our evening (including home-cooked meal) was at Rye Hill Farm in Hexham. Piglets were born overnight, and all I could think of was that I love he bacon here and shouldn't think too much about it. Oy! We were up bright and early to head out to The Wall . The morning started out quite nice; blue sky, a little wind, but lovely.

It was not to last. We were the only people at Corbridge Roman settlement, and got to walk the ruins by ourselves for an hour or so, poking among the granaries and temples and houses. It started to drizzle a little by the time we got to Chesters fort, and our last stop (Housesteads) was pouring rain and windy. Ugh. We had hoped to walk along the wall for a short segment from Homesteads to Bodisfort, but we realized that it was too olate and we had to head north or miss our reservation for the Whisky Festival in Speyside. So -- up up up to th e northen part of Scotland (a five hour drive) to arrive her ein time for dinner (which was great) and whisky tasting with our new friends until 1am.

Today, Thursday, we went to two distillery tours (Glen Moray and the Macallan) and visited the ruined cathedral in Elgin and a number of otther ruined castles, including Auchindoun, which is a mile + hike through sheep fields to even SEE the castle, and another trek up hill to get to the ruins. It was so unbelievably windy that i t was hard to stay upright sometimes, and we were awfully glad to get back to the relative quiet of the car.

Tomorrow, a few more distilleries, the cooperage, and then off to Culloden and the forts along the coast. Hopefully the sunny weather holds and the wind dies down enough to have a conversation outside of the car!

Beautiful, beautiful - having a great time!

Scotland is NOT closed

Having a FABULOUS time in SUNNY Scotland -- I'm already sunburned, go figure. We're down in the borders and plan on heading into Northumberland a bit today to see Hadrian's Wall and drive along the coast (based on the extremely earnest suggestions of a lovely English couple we met yesterday while climing the ruined tower at Greenowe. We have to be back up in Speyside by Wednesday night, so we're taking a day or so to go south first.

Our flight was uneventful (oh, yeah, for business class seats -- slept most of the way over, after a lovely meal and champagne) and while we were delayed quite a bit in London on our way over to Edinburgh, we still got to Traquair House by seven, and had plenty of time to go in for dinner before crashingl ike big crashy things.

Traquair House is wonderful -- they're not really a hotel, it's just three rooms they let out and the housekeeper, Helen, handles all the details. Great room in the newer part of the house -- which still dates from 1745 or so -- and we had a fabulous breakfast (including haggis, which is surprisingly good, if you don't think about it too much) and "clootie dumpling" - a sort of fried fruitcake.

Yesterday we drove around the border abbeys -- Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh, and Kelso, and stopped off to see Abbotsford (Sir Walter Scott's home) in time to see them clearing out the fake snow from a movie shoot! It was kind of weird -- they were vacucuming up the fake snow and moving the modern furniture out of the rooms.

It's unbelievably green here, and the sun has been out for two days. Lovely!

Today (Sunday) we went to Smailholm Tower, wandered through Floors Castle (wow!), tried to see Mellerstain House (we were about ten minutes too late) and then wandered around looking for "dots on the map" with various levels of success. We drove into a couple of farmyards, ended up on gravel and dirt paths, and made some harrowing u-turns, but we had a great time. We did bash the car a bit - scraped the pain on the wheel-wheel when a truck slid into our lane by a foot or so and Mark tried to avoid hitting it. The shrubbery and hedgerows along the side of the road have an annoying tendency to suddenly turn to a STONE WALL with only a few inches clearance! EEK!

All in all, driving on the left has been uneventful and we're zipping along like everyoe else. And the GPS with Scotland maps? Worth EVERY PENNY. Cheap at twice the price!

Off to our B&B for the night - The Lodge at Carfraemills, for dinner and, I'm sure, sleeping like rocks.

I'm missing something...

Ok, I'm a little worried. Everything that I piled up to pack fit into the LandsEnd bag that I use as luggage the first time. I even got the extra pair of shoes in there. And the two coats.

I must have forgotten something really important...like pants. I can't believe it all went in there. I thought I had waaaay too much in the pile for clothes and stuff. Six pairs of pants. Eight shirts. Two pairs of shoes. A fleece. A raincoat. Underwear and socks in abundance. Shampoo. Toothpaste.

And the bag is not that big - it actually qualifies as a carry-on (although we don't carry it on, it's just too heavy to schlep around). Eep! I'm sure something is missing.

I have a list, we've checked it. All I can say is, there is no way all those clothes are going to fit back into the bag after I've worn them and washed them a few times.

Looong week

I spent last week in Las Vegas. My dad was in the ICU, on a ventilator, because of a very serious case of pneumonia. He's doing better -- he's in a rehab unit now, and will be doing physical, respiratory, and occupational therapy for the next few weeks, to get him back on his feet.

Feeling Naked

I've worn glasses for what? 20 years? and I am so used to them that I really don't even notice that I have them on anymore.

But boy, do I notice when I don't have them on. Let me explain.

It rained last week -- almost 3" of rain in two days -- and after walking outside I was once again reminded how annoying it is to have glasses in the rain. It's a pain in the butt. Unless they design windshield wipers for glasses, they make it impossible to just walk around and see things.

So, I think to myself, a-hah! Contacts would solve the problem! I haven't worn contacts in 15 years (since I moved to the semi-arid climate of Colorado and realized that they stuck to my eyeballs like velcro (not comfortable!). But - I've been here for years and I'm used to the dryness now. Off to the eye doctor!

They have daily contacts now -- you wear them one day and then toss them. No cleaning solution, no mucking about with the lenses every night. And they are so much more comfortable! Lens technology has come a long way since I tried them the first time. I have a five day trial of lenses and I'm relearning how to get them in and all that jazz. So far, so good.

Of course, I feel positively NAKED without my glasses on. I keep pushing up my invisible glasses (and poking myself in the eye on more than one occassion). I will still wear glasses most of the time - the contacts are just for backup, really.

It's amazing how much you get used to wearing glasses and how weird it feels to not have them!

TILT

Things that I came across today while surfing: the 2009 Honda Gold Wing, the giant 1.8L double-Barcalounger highway touring motorcycle, is now available with an airbag. 

a) I can't figure out how on earth that is going to work and b) I can't imagine that's it's a good idea. 

Not quite a space station

Well, Stephen Colbert must be a bit let down today. He didn't get the new module on the space station named after him (despite a huge write in campaign!). However, they did name the latest treadmill:

Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill. [C.O.L.B.E.R.T.]

It's nice that NASA has a sense of humor!

Traquair House

I finally made reservations for our first couple of nights in Scotland. We don't normally have reservations during the trip, but it's awful nice to be able to have a place to head to when the plane lands and you are all jet-lagged and wrung out and just want to find a bed. So, I usually try to have one or two nights in one place to get our bearings, so to speak.

I found Traquair House, which looks to be absolutely fabulous!


It's billed as the oldest occupied house in Scotland, and has huge gardens and all sorts of fun stuff going on. We're staying in the Blue Room. I love this sort of place -- usually we stay in pretty standard B&Bs, but there are a couple of places that are worth a splurge.

My neighbor asked me if we were packed yet (we leave in two weeks). Hah! We've thought about it, does that count? We have a list of the variety of technical gadgets we need, and a vague idea that we should, you know, pack clothes...I'll probably be packing the day before, like I usually do. Eek!

Corporate Tax Cuts

I've been hearing snippets of coverage about the "tea protests" over taxes today, which seem to be primarily organized and coordinated by the major right-wing players (certainly not "grassroots" efforts, by any means) and I'm just a bit confused as to what they are really protesting. We all hate paying taxes, but almost all of the people planning to 'teabag' (and boy, they really should have looked that one up before adopting it as a moniker!) are those specifically getting the benefit of the proposed tax cuts. Protesting government budgets? I can't see why they are all up in arms now (except that the Republicans apparently don't like being the minority party). Where was the outrage in the last eight years? I just don't understand how anyone can try to use the old hack "tax and spend" as a criticism. Are they irony impaired?

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.

Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent

[From dailykos]

I'm as ticked as the next guy about my tax dollars paying for AIG executive bonuses. I don't think the American car industry is worth bailing out, really (although I do understand the economic reasons for doing so). I'm angry that I've paid thousands of dollars to fund a war that I absolutely did not support (although again, I do see the need to make sure our troops are properly armed and protected). If that was the core of this protest, I could understand the ire. But it's not, as far as I can tell.

I simply cannot see what sort of "message" the faux tea party group intends to give. Are they protesting tax hikes? tax cuts? general rates? what is taxed? Obama? Democrats in general? The weather? It's getting all sorts of breathless coverage on the radio and Fox News, about how it could be the start of a "new rebellion"...really? You picked now to try to protest taxes? Now? When things are actually going to be better for most people? (Yeah, I'm expecting my taxes to go up, by the way. I'm not in any way agreeing with this group. As a matter of fact, the people that I know who are actually going to have higher taxes in the next few years are not complaining at all. It's all the people who aren't in that tax bracket who are raising a ruckus. Go figure.)

They certainly aren't looking back and criticizing the actions of previous administrations (both D and R), they have co-opted an image from history and don't seem to have grasped the real implication : the Boston Tea party was a reaction to corporate taxes, and the practice of a "foreign" government levying taxes on colonial trade. It is more of a commentary on business than anything to do with tax rates. IN fact, the Boston Tea Party was ultimately precipitated by a massive corporate tax cut.

In 1773, the British East India Company, was in serious financial straits. One solution was to bail out the corporation by offering it a government loan. But instead, at the urging of the East India Company's powerful lobbyists and supported by King George III, Parliament passed the Tea Act which almost entirely eliminated the duty -- the tax -- on British tea exported by the East India Company to the American colonies. The actual subtitle of the Tea Act:

"An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licences to the East India Company to export tea duty-free."

The rationale was that lower taxes meant lower prices, which meant the East India Company would sell a lot more tea. In other words, the British government's solution to the East India Company's financial crisis was, in effect, a tax cut. The tax cut was viewed by the colonies as tyranny against smaller merchants whose business would be severely undercut.

So, "Tea Parties" are the conservative revival of the Boston Tea Party, in which "Sons of Liberty" disguised as Native Americans raided a British ship and dumped crates of tea into Boston Harbor to protest British 'rebates' of taxes to the East India Company. Today's revolutionaries are protesting the new federal budget, or the stimulus plan, or, possibly the very idea that Democrats get to decide how the government spends money, instead of those fiscally responsible small-government Republicans who brought us the biggest deficit in American history.

Makes sense now?

I have cute shoes!

I was very upset when Ecco stopped making my walking shoes -- heading off on vacation, it's time to buy a new pair and break them in...no luck. I tried eBay, every google search I could think of, no luck. So off to the shoe store to find something else. I hate shopping. But, the Adorable Husband dragged me off to Brown's before dinner and made me look.

I totally scored on the cutest shoes evah!



They make me look like a cabbage patch doll, of course, with little round feet, but they are the most comfortable shoes I've worn in ages -- Keen's, model Briggs. They didn't have the red ones, or I'd have bought those. I still may look for them online.

Hah! Success!

We don't need a gardener

This -- this stumpy shredded shrub -- is actually a huge, robust, and very hearty Dr Huey rose. In the summer, it is an 8-foot tall monster of a rose bush. We cut it back to about 5' tall in the winter and it just goes like gangbusters in the spring.


The puppies, however, decided that it needed to be shorter and have systematically gnawed off all the canes close to the ground, dragged them off into the yard and chewed on them.

These are very thorny rose bushes. I can't imagine that it's pleasant, and yet they keep doing it. Every single shrub and tree in the yard - except this one -- is behind protective fencing to keep the weasels away from it. Last year they chewed the bark off the oak tree (it's fine!) and started to eat the burning bushes, I have no idea what the allure is. They're just weird.

Another word to add...

Poronkusema — Finnish: the distance equal to how far a reindeer can travel without a comfort break.

Maybe you're intepreting it wrong

Per Jim Dobson:

[W]e made a lot of progress through the Eighties but then we turned into the Nineties and the internet came along and a new president came along and all of that went away and now we are absolutely awash in evil. And we are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?

It's probably not fair to pick on someone purely on semantics (but I think Dobson is an idiot, so I don't feel too bad about it), but how can he believe both that "the country is awash in evil" and that "God is in control"? Unless he also believes that God himself wants the country to be "awash in evil" and is actively promoting this outcome?

Maybe he's just ignoring the obvious?

Fashion?

I've posted before that I don't get the low-rider pants, I don't get men./boys wearing their pants buckled under their asses, I don't get the whole 'giant pants' phenomenon. I must be hopelessly un-fashionable.

These, though, these bkini jeans, might just be the topper. Just think! Jeans that are designed to show your underwear to its fullest advantage (in fact, they have built-in underwear, apparently. This is ...cool? ) These are going to look good on about four people on the planet...and frightening on the thousands of others who wear them anyway. Eek.

And the model has a tramp stamp.I guess they are marketing this to the right group...

Supah-dog!

I can't figure out if this means Berit has really, really good hips, or really, really bad ones. But she often does her SuperDog imitation and sleeps like this!

Amazing Photoshop galleries

I may never be able to view a photo again and not wonder if it's real or photoshopped. Some of the examples in this gallery are absolutely amazing (weird, too).

Worth1000.com.

I'm lucky if I can adjust the white balance on photos, and possibly get rid of stray power lines or dust motes - I can't imagine being able to create these images. Wow.

Snort

Okay, okay, I do read LOLcats and LOLdogs. I refuse to succumb to the weird LOLspk or whatever they call it, but i have to admit that a lot of the pictures make me laugh.

This one made me snort in a very unladylike fashion.

Instant Gratification Girl

Only three and a half weeks until we leave for Scotland -- the entire month of May spent driving roughly counter-clockwise around the country, with the first ten days spent up at the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival (where we have tickets for some special tours and tastings, and a stay at the Craigellachie Hotel -- home of the Quaich bar with 700 different bottles of Scotch).

I can hardly wait!

But, as usual, our gadget-lust has overcome us. We decided early on that we needed a GPS, with maps for Scotland -- it may not cover everything, but being able to navigate in the towns will definitely be helpful. So, a Garmin 270 is on the way. I'll be able to use it in my car when we get back, of course -- I've been wanting a GPS for the car for ages.

We also upgraded the camera for this trip to a Nikon D300 and a new, faster VR lens. Part of what we love about traveling is the pictures, so more pixels is gooooood. The D100 is six years old, and technology has definitely changed!

Now, all I need to do is find the walking shoes that I love (they have discontinued them, apparently) and I'm readly to go!

Peeps! Peeps!

It's that time of year again. Peeps are in the stores.

So, some sick, twisted humor relating to peeps: 100 Way to Kill a Peep.

Is it wrong that I laughed at the Overdose?

Finally!

Finally, finally, finally. It's only two and half years late (compared to the earlier travel sites), but I've finally posted the bulk of the trip website for Ireland.

I'd shelved it for months, when work just sucked up all my time, but here it is: travelogue, photos, all sorts of weird and (hopefully interesting) stuff. I'm still trying to wrap up spellchecking, and sometimes the navigation does a loop-de-looop, but let me know what you think!

High Volume Consumers

It's April 1, so I would love to believe that this is a bad April Fool's joke, but I fear that is not the case. Just nine patients (five middle-aged women and five middle-aged men, most with drug and mental issues) accounted for 2,678 visits to Austin, TX emergency .

Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report. The patients went to hospital emergency rooms 2,678 times from 2003 through 2008, said the report from the nonprofit Integrated Care Collaboration, a group of health care providers who care for low-income and uninsured patients.

Obviously there is an underlying problem here that is not medical - it's social. Would these people abuse the emergency room if they had access to appropriate mental care elsewhere? I don't know, but I know that every visit they make to the ER because they need attention or a warm bed or a drug fix costs every other patient, but you can't turn anyone away at the ER, not until you've ensured that they aren't, in fact, seriously ill.

I'll be interested to see what sorts of suggestions the group has to solve the problem.

Color, dahling! Color!

From cuteoverload.com -- this just made me laugh uncontrollably. I can't imagine one of my dogs staying still for this!

Resume basics

How the HR department views your resume VS how a programmer views your resume.

I laughed that it was -15 points for "uses a combination of tabs and spaces to indent sections". It's something that I have actually complained about in a code review.

Apt Summation

I ran across this on Pharyngula today. I think it explains the problem between believers and non-believers perfectly. (This is an actual church sign, not one generated online.)

"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has"

What does that mean? That believers should avoid thinking about their beliefs? Never question them, never consider what they believe? That's a clear advertisement for a closed mind, if I have ever seen one. Can't apply rational thought to religion, oh, no - that would result in...what? Well, probably a few people leaving their belief behind. If you apply reason and logic and rational though to religious belief, it doesn't often remain unchanged.

I don't think I would be capable of living my life like that. I really can't just accept and believe in something without thinking about it, without applying rational thought and a skeptical mind to it. If you tell me something is true, I'm going to ask you why. If you tell me you know the meaning of something, I'm going to ask you how. If you can't give me something concrete to work with, I'm not going to just blindly accept things. And as I learn more and read more and as more information becomes available, I'm going to re-evalute things -- a definite no-no to many religious thinkers.

Unable to resist

The Adorable Husband was unable to resist the lure of fresh powder, and rousted himself out of bed this morning at 5 to to skiing. He said the drive was very slow, with all the snow from yesterday, but the skiing is niiiiiice.

For those NOT in Colorado..

Last week, we had at least one day of 80 degrees. It was GORGEOUS. Perfect days, blue skies, all the lilac bushes and trees are budding out.

Today? We've already got about 6 inches of snow on the ground, and there is a BLIZZARD WARNING for the Denver Metro area until tomorrow. The snow is coming down in buckets.

It's pretty, but it's certainly a big change from last week!

Unclear on the concept

(From Failblog.org)

And the Food, Richard!

This might be the funniest complaint letter I've ever read. I can just imagine this poor passenger, hungry and hugely bored, writing the letter describing the "award winning food".

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in: [see image 2, above]

Read the rest here. I was snorting in a most unladylike fashion.

My Sparkle is Chagrined

The Twilight DVD is released today. Yes, I've read the whole series (and enjoyed it as rather light fluff, fun, but not terribly filling; the helpless-woman-with-too-perfect-stalker themes are a bit too much, of course, but it apparently appeals to the millions of teen girls who have totally immersed themselves in the sparkly vampire genre, but I digress).

Let's be honest, these are not going to win literary awards, but they are readable. But, if you were as annoyed by the too-perfect-isn't-he-beautiful vocabulary, I have a fun blog entry for you: I want to beat Edward Cullen with a Stick. It's great snark.

Crash

This is what happens when you send one nephew (age 8) out to take snowboard lessons with one uncle (age 40+) for an entire day:


Get up at 6am, drive to Copper Mountain, take a half-day snowboard lesson, and practice the rest of the day. Apparently he was in the car about 10 minutes and then crashed completely and didn't wake up until they pulled into the garage. We're pretty sure he drooled.

Responsibility

Peter wants to learn to snowboard, so the Adorable Husband is taking him up to Copper Mountain for lessons -- by himself. A whole day, just "the boys". After several instructions (including "make sure to feed him") they were off at 7am with boots, snowpants, and a couple of ipods.

Nin is only a little nervous about Peter. She's actually quite nervous that Mark has bitten off more than he can chew with an eight-year-old all day long. Admittedly, we do end up pretty exhausted after a week of hosting them (wow, an 8-year-old kid has a lot of energy), but I'm not worried. They get along great, Mark has to eat at least as often as Peter does, and I'm sure they'll have a lot of fun. Nin is not so sure. I figure the worst case scenario is that they both come home this afternoon and fall asleep immediately.

We spent the day running around looking for a lamp for the living room (which we found!), having lunch, and wandering around home stores. Then we went and had pedicures at the spa. It was a lovely day. We rarely get to spend any time together without Peter, so thank you, Uncle Mark!

1.7 kids

Family sizes have been shrinking steadily for decades - the number of children in an "average" family is less than 2 nowadays in the US. This is definitely borne out by the number of families I know personally with 1 child, some with 2, a rare few with three kids. Most of my friends have two children.

I have to admit that it's become so much the norm that seeing a family with more than 2 kids usually warrants a second glance. It's not often you see a family with four kids out at the mall, or five or more kids in a single family anymore. I'm likely to try to rationalize a couple with four or five kids along as obviously having taken some of the neighbor kids on their outing, too.

I think this is a good thing, by the way. I'm not advocating for zero birth rate, but zero population growth isn't a bad thing. We need to get a better handle on resource usage and eliminate the social problems that overpopulation (usually hand-in-hand with poverty) cause.

But that's not really the topic of this post. With the average household size somewhere less than 3 people, why on earth do television ads regularly show families with three or four kids? Case in point: the Mirena ad I just saw on television. (Actually, this is probably a bad example, in a family of five kids, I surely hope that you are contemplating some sort of birth control!).

The ad says that if you don't want any more children, that you should consider Mirena as your option (it's a new form of IUD). The only thing I can think when I see the ad is, "well, duh! You have five kids, you should have your tubes tied and stop!" I'm sure their actual target customer demographic has one, possibly two kids, so the large family in the ad seems out of sorts. Is it supposed to be a nostaligic nod to larger families? Is it supposed to imply that you don't need this IUD is you don't have a huge family already? Is the "mythical family" still mom, dad, four kids and a dog? It hasn't been like that for almost 50 years.

The big family in the ad is just so incongruous with the message that reliable, easy birth control is accessible that I have to think that the ad-people who came up with it are living under rocks and don't have any clue what real American demographics look like.

Housing Decline

The Chicago Tribune reported that the median price of a home sold in Detroit in Dec 2008 was $7,500.

Seven thousand five hundred. Less than most used cars.

Remember that median is simply the middle number in the series when they are arranged in numeric order, it's not the average price. If only three houses sold, one for 1K, 1 for $7,500, and 1 for $100K then the median is still 7500 -- so it's possible that half a dozen houses sold and most of them were dilapidated crack houses, but still! That's a pretty frightening number.

From Illinois, via Swisspost

I ordered a couple of books through Alibris (wonderful used-bookstore consolidation site), all three shipped from a bookseller in Illinois. Or so I thought.

I was beginning to get a bit worried about the shipment (I ordered a month ago) and they showed up today. I now know why they took so long -- they apparently shipped from Switzerland. I have no idea why (perhaps because the local bookshop didn't really have them?).

They came in a giant white tyvek bag with all sorts of official-looking government tags and plastic locks on it. It was pretty funny.

Wrong again

Why must everyone opposed to stem cell research on religious grounds dredge up the "evolution = eugenics" canard? It's wrong, and makes them sound like manipulative idiots. Eugenics is not part of the "agenda" for non-theists, nor is genocide, murder, or any of the other things that the right-wing talking heads like to spout off about. The eugenics movement was a tragic misuse of the ideas behind genetics -- an idea, by the way, that was supported wholeheartedly by many churches in America (most notably Methodists, who are going to apologize for it) and preached from the pulpit, so let's not pin the entire sordid affair on the "Evil Atheists", shall we?

Almost as bad as the gentleman braying that stem cell research is "killing bay-bees! Killing them!' as if researchers were out poaching them from daycare playgrounds and leaving behind a exsanguinated corpse. Wrong and stupid and misleading, and intended to rile up the people who don't know anything about science or research or stem cells. Oh, but it makes a great sound-bite, I guess.

Science is not evil or good. Evolution is not evil or good, just like gravity is neither evil nor good. There is no moral weight on either side -- it's the use of these ideas that can be applied for good or for evil. Religion is the same way - it can be used for good or evil, depending on who is wielding the righteous sword.

It's getting tiring having to continually point that out.

My father has advanced Parkinsons. Stem cell research probably won't make enough advances to help him, but it might save someone else from having that slow, downward slide.

Solving our Problems with Technology

Every year we have the ...um..negotiations about when to remove the enormous down comforter from the bed and replace it with a lighter quilt. We seem to have two modes: poofy mattress pad, flannel sheets, blanket, down comforter (ie, HOT) and thin mattress pad, flannel sheets, quilt (COOLER).

I tend to get overheated while sleeping, but the Adorable Husband gets cold easily. (I think that's just about opposite of most people) and he wants to keep the down comforter on the bed months after I am pleading to sleep with the windows wide open and just a blanket. We often resort to folding the comforter over him doubled, and I'm fine -- except then there's this enormous mountain of down in the bed that threatens to swallow me whole! Or, he wears several layers of clothes to bed (mock turtleneck and sweatshirt, and sweatpants. Eek!

So I suggested getting a heated mattress pad, so we could use a light quilt and he'd still be warm. He pooh-poohed the idea and assured me that it wasn't going to work.

Hah! We got a dual-control heated pad with preheat, and now he is snoozing comfortably on his side of the bed with the heat set to "toasty" and I have my nice cool side of the bed with just the quilt over both of us. I think we've both slept better in the last two days since we put the thing on the bed, than we have in the last few weeks, what with the warmer temps and down issues.

I will probably never use the heater on my side, but that's fine! If having the bed warmed for a few weeks in the "inbetween" period where we transition from cold-winter-freezing and summer-hot, well, I'm happy!

Solving our problems with technology once again!

Canine Dentistry

We took Uulaq in for her "old dog" checkup this year -- she's nearing 12 and it's time to start checking everything at least once a year to make sure she's doing ok. If she was human, she'd be somewhere well past 90 by now, and she's surprisingly spry.

Upped the dosage of her anti-inflammatories to combat her arthritis, and did all the bloodwoord (which is absolutely normal and fine) and discovered that she has a broken tooth. Cracked a whole third of a molar off and it's just hanging there, wobbling, and has to hurt like hell. We figure she had to have done it chewing on the hard nylabones we have at home. We changed from the original (slightly softer) Nylabones becuase Berit can just bite pieces off of them(!) - she sits and shaves off 1/4" slices and leaves them all over my office. Uulaq just chews on them, but apparently with enough force to actually crack her teeth. Eep!

So, in on Monday for surgery to remove the tooth. That's pretty much the solution for any doggy dentistry, as far as I can tell. Cracked or broken teeth aren't capped or anything, they just pull them out. Maesc had a few small front teeth pulled out when he was older, and Rukh had a dead nerve in one of his fangs, caused by bashing the tooth on something hard. We didn't pull that one, but only because it was still in place and fine.

Hopefully they'll give her some good dog-vicodin - getting teeth pulled hurts. But she should be back to eating regular food in a few days. Poor beastie!