LeRoy Done It

Okay. LeRoy is a magnificent animal, for a twerp. On our hike he made one new friend and scared a cat. The new friend is Elmo and belongs to a guy with a long leash and no taste. The guy walks along one side of the walkway and his dog Elmo on the other and the leash between them sweeps the path. Clever guy, Elmo's owner. I'm coming by on my bike soon and will charge the cordon. I'll probably end up where I did the last time I dared a car driver. On my face among my bicycle parts blaming the barnstormer for it all. So I'm impatient. His SUV outweighed me by 3,000 pounds. Couldn't he be cool? Since my flight over the handlebars I've healed, and it took some doing. But my bike cables and a few other moving parts of the machine are scraped and frayed. How come machines can't learn to heal like the rest of us? Even LeRoy can do this. Please explain the gap between people and machines in less than 100 words. Post here. Thanks.

Whazzup?

Where does the time go? I was in August and now I'm in December and you've been waiting for me to say something clever. Won't happen, most likely. But I want you to know I feel bad about leaving you out in the rain like this. I intend to be a better blogger real soon. You can count on it. The problem is that I started up several different blogs at the same time and paid none of them proper attention. All this is to declare a new policy. My dog LeRoy is panting at my side and wants to go for a walk. So I'll honor his place in the line and get back to you soon. Thanks for your patience.

Swallowtail Caterpillar on Duty

In July we planted parsely in a strawberry jug hoping caterpillars and then butterflies would come and visit, and they did. This is a two-inch long swallowtail caterpillar, who had about ten brothers or sisters or whatever and they ate our parsely up, which is what it was there for anyway. We saw a few of the swallowtails themselves. (They're black with yellow ornaments and look like Stealth fighters only smaller.) We're happy to have them as guests, and when my camera is working again and a swallowtail visits us, I'll snap a photo and put it here for you to enjoy. Until then, this is a pretty nifty caterpillar, in my book.

Farewell to Brookfarm

This is the New Hampshire house that Dick built seventeen years ago. With Carol's help, and a few subcontractors. We gave up this castle in the boonies around June/July 2006 and moved to South Carolina. See other pic. Brookfarm sits in the center of NH, 1200 feet above sea level on 37 acres of registered tree farm (specimens of maple, oak, birch and white pine not Xmas trees). A ten-acre pond lies in the valley 400' beneath the house, accessed by a mile or so of winding tote road groomed for easy culling of the woods. There we harvested firewood and occasionally valuable crop trees. In these woods lived moose, deer, black bear, bobcats as well as feral tomcats, squirrels, racoons, spiny hedgehogs, seven-striped chipmunks, voles, not to mention all the flora that go with a mature, mixed-hardwood and softwood New England forest. Farewell Brookfarm. May you do as well without us.

New York Times Plays Cheap and Shabby

If you go to the NYTimes website (http://www.nytimes.com) and spend a few minutes browsing the front page you may choose to look at an article, only to find that part of an ad flashes out and descends on the text you are trying to read. Is it distracting? No, it's downright frightening. It's more like having someone burst a paper bag in your face. A water-balloon whammy, is what it is.

For example MotorollaQ, whatever that means, has a blackberry that gives you the raspberries. A PDA swells up, hops out of the ad's frame, and descends on the article itself to virtually fill up the screen before you. Is this journalism? If it is, the NYTimes can look forward to an even shorter future than its managers anticipate.

I subscribe to a NYTimes special service called Times Select, in order to get at "restricted" OpEd pieces and Times columnists' offerings. It's too late for me. I spent my $49.95 to find out this year whether the service was worth that much money. I can plainly tell you that the NYTimes has not only violated good taste. It has also dropped its commitment to inform the public in non-sensational ways. They have, in short, gone crass. For a nickel or a dime.

As a result of this insult to the readership, I recommend not reading the NYTimes on the Web. Pick another paper till that one descends into bad taste too. Then pick another and another. Eventually some newspaper will make a stand (the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun?), and make a profit from it.

In the meantime, I wish the publisher of the NYTimes many sleepless nights, till he/she straightens out a tasteless, demeaning rag and restores it to the integrity the paper lost on its imagined way to bankruptcy court.

Losing Fidel

I don’t think about national concerns, unless I’m prodded by the newspaper. Maybe to make this blog current I should comment on newspaper clippings, the way Fidel Castro does in six or eight hour harangues before the people of Cuba.

There will be less of that from now on, of course. He’s just undergone surgery for a bleeding stomach and his kid brother Raul at 75 is exercising the powers of president. Folks in Miami are packing their bags already, hoping to return to Cuba under a new government when Castro dies. A good number of Miamians want their homes back. The folks now living in those homes in Cuba fear the return of expatriates, since the only homes some current residents know belong to those expats with the packed bags.

It’s hard to choose sides in a quarrel like this. Maybe all the folks who have homes now should stay where they are, either in Miami or Havana, and quit planning to repossess stuff that belonged essentially to forbears. Maybe that sounds harsh, but it does avoid needlessly putting folks on the streets.

The folks who went to Miami have had US residence and a great number of services provided them. The folks who stayed in Havana have known poverty and hunger and perhaps paid for their suffering big time.

My sympathy is on the side of those who stayed in Cuba. The folks who went to Miami have had the privilege of voting as a bloc to elect Republican presidents, and by confusing the electoral process, given us in effect the war in Iraq. They hoped the war would be waged against Castro's Cuba. George’s aim was a little off.

Zeus Done It. Cronus' Kid.

“Zeus is the ruler of the gods and the god of the sky and the god of weather and the sky.
“He was the son of Cronus. But Cronus fearing that one of his children would over through him so he swallowed each of Zeus’s brothers and sisters. So Cronus wife gave him a special herb so he barfed up all of them then, they revolted against him and he died.”

Quote found at

http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0310708/myweb/zeus.htm

This sounds like mayhem. I was looking for someone to blame for the four days of what feels like 110 degree heat lately (> 8/1/2006), and was tired of cussing out the TV weather people, none of whom merit more than a glance. I googled “weather god” and as you see above I got Zeus, and a lot more about Cronus and family. I don’t want to check out the meaning of all the references to he and him in this quote, or consider whether he through up or just barfed. The Net would lose more than it would gain by editing. I’m now happy blaming Zeus. Ready for my best shot? Here 'tis.

Especially for hurricanes, shame on you, Zeus.

Jack Nicholson the Wary Media Mogul

I tried to rent a DVD of Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep and Tom Waits – Kennedy did the screenplay – yet there is nothing out there in range of my budget but a used VHS tape of Ironweed for $12. It’s certainly worth it. But what is it with Jack Nicholson? I could find only four or five examples of his career on DVD, such as a stint on Saturday Night Live. He let Ironweed go to VHS, but he avoids DVD, while Meryl Streep has a list of forty or more DVDs available. I may be reading the lists wrong, or did a dumb search, but it looks like Nicholson boycotted the DVD format. He’s weird enough and wealthy enough to not care. What is going on here?

Ironweed is More Than a Winner

I like the novelist William Kennedy’s style in Ironweed. (He earned a Pulitzer for the book.) The dialogue flows. The backstory creeps forward without warning. Kennedy pulls together Francis and Rudy and Helen and lets them chat and spar, so there are multiple voices exchanging comical shots in dire moments, from the crafty Francis to the demented or dulled Rudy, to the almost disillusioned Helen – a neat trio for reflecting the facets of bums’ survival in the Great Depression. I’d avoid using the word plot to describe what goes on in the first 70 pages because I can’t see where we are going. I’ll let you know more later.

Why the Rant and Damage over Cartoons?

Islam in some places teaches that representations drawn/painted by man are insults to God, who alone creates all things. Man sins when he draws cartoons that depict reality and when he does representational art in any guise. This prejudice is what I at first thought lay behind the riots over Danish publication of cartoons that showed Mohammed on the pages of a newspaper in December.

But I was wrong. A number of Arab world leaders just met in February and conceived a plan to raise the hackles of Muslims and Islamists for a higher purpose, politically. All the talk about democracy around the Arab world lately, appealing to the masses to vote and direct the future of their governments has threatened tyrants and oily fatcats who saw an opportunity in the publication of the cartoons to rile up the very masses who might be freed. The ploy seems to be working at this time. The commoners are killing each other to declare their hatred for folks who draw and those who publish. The irony that violence responds to an artist's expression saddens those who love the arts while it enrages those who think only God should make a tree or show a human.

The winners may be totalitarians who cleverly got the masses riled up enough to demonstrate and kill each other over freedom to express an opinion or create an image.

Adulterated Nouggies

A couple of years ago Hersey's came up with a small nugget of dark chocolate wrapped around an almond. Each morsel was then wrapped separately in golden pseudo-foil, twenty or more were sacked in a plastic bean bag and off they went to market. The candies were delicious. A whole nut lay at the center of the tiny chunk. The stuff must have sold like lemonade in Hades, because of course dark chocolate is good for the heart. And so are almonds. I don't know why in either case, but that's the health scuttlebutt.

A couple of months ago Hersey must have discovered the nut market had forsaken them. Why folks like Hersey should be so slow to catch on in an area they've virtually owned for years I do not know, but the field shifted.

The current Hersey Nugget has dark chocolate wrapped around floor sweepings. The whole nut is gone, gone, gone. Tsk. I'm disappointed. But will I stop buying and eating the delicious little buggers? Of course I won't. Will I stop complaining then? Of course I won't. I'm XXXXXed mad and I'm simply not going to take it anymore. Stick your head out the window, and comment if you are mad too.

Amazon Takes the Cake

Years ago online used booksellers like bibliofind.com pooled the listings of lots of bookstores and helped buyers get used books at low prices with small shipping and handling costs. Only a couple of years ago it seems Amazon bought one or more of these online booksellers and/or offered space to advertise and sell items with a higher fee. For example, the other day I ordered from Amazon a three dollar book and paid an additional $3.49 to ship it to my door. Notice anything odd about this? The handling fee is greater at Amazon than the price of the item. I'm glad to have the book, but there's no question that earlier handling fees are gone forever. Let it be said that many of these centralized used-book listing services still operate at fees closer to the old ones. Go ahead and check out Amazon if you want to know about the market, but then check folks like Alibris.com who may give you a better break, with lower used book prices, a greater variety of editions, and lower handling fees. The bargains are still out there, and certainly not all are at Amazon.

Waiting for Reality to Catch Up

Currently (see dateline) the President is telling the country in his State of the Union 2006 address just what he thinks is important for us to do, or how he plans to lead us into the rest of the 21st century. The blurbs on the news feeds came out an hour or more ago with major points of his address on the State of the Union. In effect he spoke before he spoke by releasing the text of his speech ahead of his speech. Not to be outdone, and simultaneously with the President, the "official" Democrat point of view was posted to the news feeds and it appeared a couple of hours before the POV would show up in real time. Which do you like best? Real time, or "Internet" time? Which mode is out of sync with our needs?