Are Penguins an Aphrodesiac or Something?

News story from Reuters today is headlined, "Antarctica Base Gets 16,500 Condoms Before Darkness," and while that would seem like a fairly self-explanatory headline, the reporter does point out that this is a year's supply for McMurdo Base.

Let's do the math. 16,500 divided by 365 works out enough prophylactics for 132 encounters per day, every day, or 264 scientists not watching the penguins on a daily basis. In the winter, that is more than are actually at McMurdo. Even for the summer population of 1,000, that is a lot of pair bonding.

Apparently, being surrounded by an ice shelf and two penguin colonies is better than oysters or powdered rhino horn. I bet the oysters and the rhinos like it better, too.

Maybe It's the Lips?

I may be something of a city girl, inasmuch as I prefer to vacation in facilities where the walls are made of wall, but I am somewhat sanguine in the ways of the meat. While I have never personally slaughtered a chicken, I know where McNuggets come from. Bad example. I don't think anyone, including Ray Kroc, knows where McNuggets come from. Let's just say that I am under no delusions that boneless, skinless chicken breasts sprout in little styrofoam trays at the supermarket. While I promised Emp. Peng. that the Rookery would be a "no livestock" zone (the resident cat lumps often straining the definition of "live," let alone "stock"), I have no compunction about paying someone else to raise my livestock for me. No omnivore does, but in my case, I pay the person directly.

The farmer I get my beef from is branching out into poultry. Yesterday I put dibs on 4 chickens that Kathy tells me will be free range if they ever get up the bird cajones to leave the barn. As part of the dibs-calling process, Kathy walked me through the per-chicken costs ($1.75 to slaughter and de-entrail them, 10 cents for whatever "De-necking" means, etc.). Since these will be custom slaughtered per pre-order, I have options about whether I want my birds whole, split, quartered, or the seven-piece cut.

Hold the phone. Seven pieces? Chickens, like most birds, mastered bilateral symmetry ages ago. Draw a line down the middle of a chicken, and you end up with one of everything on each side. That should leave an even number of chicken parts. We can't figure out what that seventh piece is.

Get out the Ear Floss

Emp. Peng. is a member of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors--NAIFA for short. Tonight, the local group had a wingding at the local theater, with hors d'ouvres and a social hour in the basement of the local theater, then a night of live improv comedy. He had told the theater usher to direct anyone here for the NAIFA event downstairs. About a half hour after the social hour had started, we were wondering why more people were not there. Turns out the usher thought that downstairs was where the theater was holding the NAFTA event.

Waiting Room Observations

Things I noticed while the doctor's office staff sort of forgot I was there this morning:

• The clock on the pencil holder was 11 minutes faster than the clock on the wall
• The sign should have read, "Patients who are in for physicals should wait to provide a urine sample," not "Patients that..." Though it took much restraint, I did not grab one of their Lamasil pens and correct that sign.
• A "healthy seating area" in a doctor's office is slightly less useful than a "non smoking section" in a restaurant. The germs don't know not to hop over two chairs.
  

Blooper Reel

I was video chatting with PengSis, PengBrotherInLaw (who needs a shorter nom de blog) and the fledglings tonight, sitting on my big inflatable exercise ball, when I got a graphic illustration of why it is inadvisable to own both inflatable furniture and cats. One minute, I was sitting there chatting, then Chessie walked behind me. One stealthy claw, a quiet pop! and a much less quiet expletive later, I was on the floor, atop what is now a giant floppy Pac-Man. Unfortunately, I do not have video of the event, but PengSis may be able to elaborate on the visuals. Such is the power of webcams, that they bring your bloopers 3,000 miles so that your siblings can share them, live.

I Told You That You Wouldn't Believe It

Above is a photo of the terminal screen for the Las Vegas Monorail ticketing kiosk. The monorail runs the length of the strip, behind the casinos, and I heartily recommend it as a way to get around. If you look at the right hand column of selections closely, you will notice something odd about the fee structure. Granted, Las Vegas did not get where it is today by attracting visitors who are good at math. Still, how many of those yard-long frozen daiquiri beakers does it take for someone not to notice that, for the price of one 3-day pass, a person could get three 1-day passes and a yard-long beaker of banana daiquiri?

The Dessert You Have To See To Believe

One of the daytime activities at the convention was a cooking demonstration in the Bellagio's million-dollar kitchen studio. The first three courses of lunch were demonstrated and prepared by one of the hotel's main chefs, who, as it turned out, was on his last day working at the Bellagio. The next day, he left to join the catering staff of the Burj-Al-Arab, that sail-shaped hotel in Dubai where suites start at $1,600 a night and are bigger than my first two apartments combined. Appetizers were goatcheese stuffed zucchini blossoms, fennel-pollen-dusted scallops and butternut squash risotto. The salad course was microgreens and flower petals in a citrus-wildflower honey vinaigrette. The main course was free-range petaluma chicken breast stuffed with peas, sauteed pea tendrils and sous-vide white asparagus. The main course was the one I managed to splatter all over my white shirt. Cue the waiter with a napkin and a bottle of Pellegrino ($15 from the hotel honor bar) to blot up the chicken juice--and, before you go there with it, he let me do the actual blotting; he just decanted the mineral water onto the napkin for me. That is the kind of service that almost made up for the hotel's lack of an in-room coffeemaker.

The dessert course, designed and prepared by the pastry chef, is what is photographed above. Back in the 1980s, Kraft foods made a novelty product called Jello 1-2-3. Made properly (easier said than done), it separated out into a gel layer, a creamy layer and a foamy layer as it set. This dessert is much the same concept, except that the layers are created and layered individually and it is not flavored with a Tang taste-alike. The bottom layer is a jello made with hibiscus flowers, with raspberries floating in it. On top of that, there is a coconut cream layer topped with little coconut crunchies. On top of the coconut, there is a foam layer made with lychee puree, and nestled in the lychee foam is a scoop of rose ice cream, which should be one of Baskin Robbins 31 flavors. The thing sticking up on top is a sugar-coated rose petal. It was one of the weirder taste sensation I have ever had, but not in a bad way. Catering did not let us keep the glasses, although we did get a nice souvenir hat, which I did not wear through airport security.

Dolphin Urine Sample

As promised, the saga of my newfound knowledge of collecting a specimen from a dolphin. On our second night in Vegas, the company had arranged a private party at the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, where the animals from Siegfried and Roy's show live when they aren't on stage. Technically, all of the animals live in quarters away from the public areas and take turns spending the day in the exhibit habitat. When there is a private event, the animals stay out a little later and keep their trainers and keepers up to talk to the people. One of the dolphin trainers mentioned that the cetaceans-in-residence take part in research projects, mostly related to dolphin breeding programs, and that researchers from universities often call them up for blood or urine samples for off-site research projects.

This leads to the inevitable pondering: these are marine mammals. How does one go about collecting a urine sample from something that swims around all day? I figured that I was only going to get one shot at finding out, so I asked. As it turns out, one gets a urine sample from a dolphin in much the same way one gets one from a human: get the mammal to pee in a cup. Since one can't exactly send a dolphin into the bathroom with a Dixie cup, the dolphin has to come up onto the shallow platform, tail-first. It then lifts its tail up and the keeper squeezes the necessary specimen out of the dolphin. The photo below has two of the smaller dolphins from the habitat demonstrating the position, face-first instead of tail-first.
You learn something new every day. Today, that something is collecting urine samples from a dolphin. The keeper was a little more circumspect about how they get the dolphins to voluntarily give semen samples, except to say that in dolphins, it is a muscular reaction, rather than the nerve-based reaction it is in humans. This bonus factoid is brought to you by the letters T, M, and I.

Answer to Game #1: How fast can we get from Mandalay Bay to The Venetian?

Las Vegas needs the opposite warning as the one on automotive sideview mirrors. Objects on The Strip are not anywhere near as close as they appear. The Strip is about 4 miles long. On the first day or two, the hotels seem really close together, but after a couple of days hoofing up and down Las Vegas Boulevard, the distances get much farther. On our last day there, I was convinced that the monorail station at Bally's had inched its way into Arizona during the week.

After some quality time walking through Mandalay Bay, located at the southern end of The Strip, we had to get up to The Venetian to make our rendezvous with the gondola rides on the second floor (yes, the indoor canal is upstairs). Google Maps puts the distance between the two hotels at about 2 miles, keeping to the streets. The pedestrian route: take the tram from Mandalay Bay past the Luxor to the Excalibur. Take the skyway from the Excalibur over the 13-lane road over to New York New York, turn right at the Nathan's Hot Dog stand to the skyway over Las Vegas Boulevard to the MGM Grand. Go downstairs, past the lion habitat, through to the back of the casino and pick up the monorail. Ride the monorail to the Harrah's/Imperial Palace station, then walk through to the front of Harrah's and take the sidewalk past Casino Royale to the moving sidewalk over the mini Rialto Bridge into the Venetian. We made that in 35 minutes.

One More Thing About the Hat

This never happened to Indiana Jones, but I am having some difficulty adjusting to the blind spot just above my head. Wednesday afternoon, we were meandering through the carnival midway at Excalibur. Because I did not see it, I smacked my head into a six foot tall stuffed penguin hanging from the ceiling. That's the sort of thing an intrepid archaeologist and/or Vegas tourist should see before it whacks them on the skull (crystal or otherwise).

Yes, I am bored waiting for my plane and the airport has free wi-fi.

Gratuitious Vacation Plug

If anyone finds themselves in Las Vegas, I highly recommend the buffet at Mandalay Bay. Lunch is $20 a head, but that is a particularly good value considering that I don't think I will be able to eat for at least a week. The lunch spread we got had carving stations with prime rib, pork tenderloin, turkey breast and salmon, a full sushi spread, a selection of pizza and pastas, veal osso bucco, burrito bar, five kinds of potatoes, salad bar and a dessert selection second only to the dessert I will describe when I get home and get the photos of it off the camera and onto the computer. That dessert fell into the category of "No one will believe this if we don't have pictures." Other things in that category: "Menopause: The Musical" and the fee structure on the Las Vegas monorail.

Pengy and the TSA Checkpoint of Doom

I'm blogging this at gate A10 in McCarran Airport, fresh out of airport security, which has managed, yet again, to provide more entertainment than security. This time, it was particularly good.

Even with the ozone layer intact, this penguin sunburns easily, so I have been in search of a nice travel sun hat for a while. Emp. Peng. found one for me at an establishment called "Hattitude" at the mall inside the Planet Hollywood casino (for those who haven't done the Strip, most of the hotel/casinos also have a mall similar to the local mall back home, except instead of an Orange Julius, these malls have Daiquiri bars that sell Sloshed Puppies in yard-long beakers). This particular sun hat is a wide brimmed brown felt fedora with grosgrain satin hatband. While the hat is billed as "collapsible," the guy at Hattitude recommended I not test that too much by packing it in my luggage. This brings me to why I was wearing an Indiana Jones fedora through the TSA checkpoint.

As anyone who has experienced the thrill ride that is airport security lately can attest, it would go a lot faster if we just all agreed to do it naked. Nonetheless, we still remove shoes, hats, glasses, jackets, jewelry, laptops, water bottles and all detachable cybernetic implants, place them in little bins, and reassemble ourselves on the other side. This time, after I got myself put back together and my glasses on, I was looking for Emp. Peng., who got routed to a different metal detector. Suddenly, I heard the unmistakable strains of the Indiana Jones theme coming from two metal detectors over. Out of the guys manning the x-ray machine, who were pointing me out to their co-security-personnel. I might feel better about airport security if they had been watching their own line.

More Coming Attractions:

Look for games of "Which of these people are being paid to look pretty?" and "Which of these people are dead, and which are just sloshed?" Although I cannot share the game, we also played "How fast can we get from Mandalay Bay to The Venetian?"

Tomorrow, the penguins will be migratory. After that, I will give a full recount of the fun we have been having this week.

Coming Attractions

Emp. Peng. and I attended an private party at the mini zoo in the Mirage where the animals from the Sigfried and Roy show live. I will explain when I get back to the Rookery how it is that I found out how one gets a urine sample from a dolphin.

I Want...

the Lawnbott lawn-mowing robot. Finally, someone has made a lawn-mowing robot capable of mowing the 2-acre lot that the Rookery sits on. Technology-wise, it is roughly what you would get if the Roomba and Magic Bullet hand blender got together after hours. Did I mention it is a freakin' autonomous lawn-mowing ROBOT? You program it for when you want it to mow, then forget about it. The lawn gets mowed without you.

The issue with lawn-mowing robots has been battery life. Up to now, none have had what it takes to do 2 acres. Some get taxed on a decent sized city lot. Let's face it: if you have a patch of grass the size of a breath mint, you don't need a robot to do your mowing. Five minutes and a pair of manicure scissors would do the trick. Me, I spend 3 to 4 hours a week just mowing. That doesn't count any quality time with the weed whacker, either. With gas prices going the way they are, a $4,000 lawn mower might be worth it just because it is electric. The autonomy would just be a bonus.

This is Why I Love The Big Bang Theory

Here is a clip from last week's episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Nerdvana Annhilation.


The full 8:33 is hilarious, but the relevant portion to my personal enjoyment is the first 34 seconds, when Sheldon is explaining why his sandwich is "an unmitigated disaster." I, too, have to have my cheese adjacent to my bread to create a moisture barrier. The "simple solution" Sheldon devises around 4:40 is something I would come up with, too, although I would never execute it since I get vertigo standing on tippy-toe.

Bizarre Penguin News

If you ever thought having your leg humped by a terrier was bad, check out what scientists from the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria witnessed at a colony of King penguins. A 100 kg fur seal attempted for 45 minutes to (ahem) non-consensually mate with a 15 kg King penguin. The seal was unsuccessful, and the penguin appears to be OK. WARNING: the article contains somewhat graphic descriptions of the event--caveat clicker.

PSA

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day...and me without a comic book shop nearby.

New Content on The Right ----->

And yes, the thing about ant baits does come from personal experience. The warm weather (which is supposed to come to an abrupt halt tonight) has brought the annual inward migration of the sugar ants. Following the logic of The Lobster Hypothesis, the ants seem to be figuring out these ant baits are bad news and learning to avoid them more each year, usually by infesting places not amenable to the instructions on the bait packs. Putting the baits against a wall does not do a lot of good if the ants are nowhere near a wall.

I really am long overdue giving a giant Tip o' The Beak to Emp. Peng. He puts up with an amazing amount of weirdness from me. More than occasionally, I turn The Rookery into an amateur science lab, and he lets out nary a peep about my experiments. When I was testing the effectiveness of cinnamon on ants, he walked in on me dusting cinnamon over half the kitchen counter around the coffeemaker, and did not even blink. Nor did he blink at my controlled experiment testing the hypothesis that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar (not true--at least with fruit flies). He did not question why I was drilling holes in the bottom of our old paper shredder bin (it makes a nice planter). I even organized the pantry in ascending order by processing level and he went along with it. When I started turning the back quarter of The Rookery's lot into a one-penguin agrarian operation, his only request was "no livestock." He doesn't (seem to) mind that a component of our home decor is made of duct tape or that the bottom crisper drawer is a holding pen for soon-to-be-compost. I could go on, but you get the picture. He deserves more than a Tip o' The Beak, really, for putting up with the mad scientist in his castle.

Talk About CYA

The following is an actual excerpt of the End User License Agreement for the 30-day free trial of Apple's iWork software that I downloaded this morning (caps in the original):

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

First, let me say that, should I ever be on life support, I sure as heck hope that I'm not being kept alive by a 30 day free trial of ANYTHING. If I am, I would rather it be Apple than a Microsoft product, though. Nobody wants a whole new, literal, meaning to Blue Screen Of Death. I would also hope our nuclear facilities and air traffic control would have sprung for the full install version of any program that is keeping reactors from melting down or planes from colliding midair. And while I am not an expert in aircraft navigation, if presentation software plays a key role in getting me from Point A to Point B, I may have to reconsider air travel entirely. It could explain all the lost luggage, though.

Answer of the Day

Where prune juice comes from. In sum: rehydrate prunes, cook the bejeebers out of them, strain off the bejeebers and other solids, and presto! Prune juice.

Oh, How I Want To Title This Post "Jackass Cousteau"

Not meaning disrespect to Jacques Cousteau, inventor of SCUBA gear, but when the Penguin News of the Day is about an African penguin (aka "jackass penguin," for the sound they make, not any inherent personality disorder) wearing a wetsuit, that is the sort of title that pretty much begs to be written. Yup. You read that right. Penguin in a wetsuit. Why, you may ask, was a penguin in a wetsuit? His butt was balding.

Tip o' the beak to PengSis for the news tip.

Question of the Day

If prunes are dried plums, where do they get prune juice?

Penguin Quote of the Day

From a Q-and-A article in Slate, for Earth Day:

...oil companies and other big corporations run ads on TV saying how green and forward-thinking they have become. Is this sincere, or opportunistic? How can big industries be persuaded to become genuinely green?

Bill McKibben: The more penguins in the ad, the worse they're raping the planet.

Non-Exploding Penguin on the Telly

It's just gone 8 p.m., and time for the penguin on top of your television set to...fly?


And just how do the penguins do it?


And a final penguin clip for those who are completely baffled by the title of this post:

You can ignore the first two minutes.

Stop Me Before I Plant Again!

It started innocently enough. I just wanted to replace a plum tree that is turning out to be more trouble than it is worth. A quick jaunt through my favorite online nursery came up with a suitable replacement plum, and a "$50 off any order of $25 or more" promo. Since my tree was $27.50, it would actually save me a couple of bucks to add $22.50 more to my cart.

This is dangerous. A bull in a china shop has nothing on a Pengy let loose in the nursery catalog with $22.50, especially since the unplantable area out back is getting plowed some time in the next couple of weeks, leaving me with a quarter acre of fresh ground to play with. OK, let me revise my previous statement. A bull in a china shop has nothing on a Pengy let loose in the nursery catalog with $22.50 and a quarter acre of good south exposure to fill up. In addition to the tree I was planning on getting, I am now expecting an elderberry bush and two purple trilliums.

For those playing along with the home game, that brings The Rookery's orchard up to:
3 apple trees
2 sweet cherries
1 sour cherry
1 peach
2 plums (the bad one is getting a reprieve until I decide whether to cut it down entirely)
1 elderberry
3 grapevines
3 blueberries
3 types of blackberries (~10 plants)
3 types of raspberries (~6 plants)
7 pots of strawberries, with two in-ground patches planned for installation next year

That is just the fruits. Let's not get started on the vegetables.

In the News

Charlton Heston, dead at age 84. The entire internet makes the same joke.

Look to Your Right ---->

Sharp-eyed regular readers may have noticed a couple of new elements in my sidebar. If you did not, don't worry. I just added them 10 minutes ago, so don't go hurrying off just yet to schedule an appointment with the opthamologist. First, check out the new links. In an effort to bring some fundage into the Rookery, I have recently started writing for Helium.com and eHow.com. Both are repositories for brief articles on a range of subjects, and my goal is to write on as many of those subjects as possible. At the moment, I seem to be gravitating toward domestic topics, but I am looking at some topics that will get me out of the kitchen and maybe even out of the house.

I will be keeping the links in the sidebar up to date with my latest postings to those sites, and a couple of other sites I have my sights set on, too. If you like what you see here, or liked my short-lived secondary blog, Household Hacks (which I have officially declared defunct, sorry), check out what I am writing for those other sites. Click early and often, as I plan to add to my library of articles on both sites frequently.

A Word About the Headlines

This morning's New York Times carried an article, In Massachusetts, Universal Coverage Strains Care. It is worth a read, especially for anyone who is putting a lot of weight behind a candidate's stance on health care reform this election cycle. For those not in to link clicking, the gist of the article is that Massachusetts is finding itself in a bit of a pickle after mandating health insurance for residents last year. Seems that these folks who are now compelled to fork over premiums for health insurance have this strange notion that they are entitled to see a doctor. Unfortunately, in the rush to eliminate the uninsured, someone forgot to check to make sure there were enough GPs to go around once everyone would be insured. Turns out, there are not. Oops. Bit of an oversight there. The article starts with the anecdotal evidence of a Massachusetts doctor who is taking new patients, as long as those patients can wait 14 months for a checkup. For the patient, that is a year's worth of premiums just to be on a wait ing list for a doctor.

This highlights one of the things that skeeves me about the current political discourse. While I am happy as a clam that the nation is discussing health care, we seem to be conflating "universal health insurance" with "universal health care." As Massachusetts is discovering, the hard way, those two are not interchangeable. Mandating universal health insurance is easy. A few signatures, and you're there. Actually providing universal health care is much more difficult. In addition to signatures, you need trained medical professionals, on the ground and available to the entire population, including the parts of the population that live in the kinds of places I affectionately call "the nation's groin boil." Without doctors who have open appointment slots where the patients are, it doesn't matter how terrific an insurance plan is; the patients will still not have access to health care.

Since You Asked (Well, Maybe Not You, But Someone)

When people find out I am in Mensa, one of the first questions they usually ask is, "What do Mensans talk about?" When I first joined an online Mensa discussion group, I got sucked in to a conversation that somehow segued into being about koala poop. Currently, and I am proud to say I started this one, there is a minor side discussion going on the subject of "If robots who were bound by Asimov's First Law of Robotics (A robot cannot harm a human, or through inaction cause a human being to come to harm) ran the U.S. economy, would they have bailed out Bear Stearns?" There is also a lively discussion on who writes the number 7 with a slash through it.

Find out how to join Mensa here.

Speaking of Naptime

A sampler of things I learned from PengSis and the Fledglings' visit:

1. Naptime is related less to how much sleep the Fledglings need than to the grownups' need to have them napping, and occasionally to the grownups' need to nap.
2. Don't let something as trivial as a lack of ducks keep you from feeding the ducks.
3. Consult a physician to determine if you are healthy enough to start a game of "ski jump off the banister" that involves you running up and down stairs carrying one or more Fledgling. If the doctor says you are healthy enough for this kind of game, consult a psychiatrist, because whatever the doctor says, you are not well.
4. The rules of sibling fights have changed now that your older sibling is the parent. If you must laugh at this (and you must), it is only polite to excuse yourself to another room.
5. Fledglings do not require full disclosure. It is perfectly legitimate to point out how Mommy and her sister are sharing, without mentioning that it took three decades to get to this point.
   
6. The two year old plays the trombone better than I do.
   
7. I still don't want any of my own. Rentals are far superior. You can return the rentals after 3 days, and you get to keep the playdough.

Three Days Ago's Political Thought, A Bit Late

Slate beat me to the punch posting it, but not in thinking that, once your campaign runs ads positioning you as the best candidate to answer the red phone at 3 a.m., you are no longer allowed to claim that any mistakes you make (or misspeakings, as the case may be) came about because you missed nap time.

Marmota Watch '08 is ON!

We have first sighting of the local woodchuck, with PengSis witnessing. Bring on the marmota!

Envelope Irony

The mail today brought an envelope emblazoned on the flap with "You can't put a price on reliable communication." Inside, my phone bill, so obviously someone managed to put a price on it.

Doctor WooHoo

It's the first day of spring, the snow is mostly melted, I saw the first bunny of the year tonight, and I discovered that I can buy Jelly Babies at a local supermarket instead of having to order them from Britain when I'm in the mood for a Doctor Who geekapalooza. It has been a good day.

Swamp Cooler

Thanks to the near-constant rains coinciding with the melting of 2 feet of snow, The Rookery now sits on 2.17 acres of swamp. Temporary swamp, I hope, but swamp nonetheless. Every step is a grand adventure to guess whether a foot will go SLARP! in bog or SPLASH! in a pseudopond.

Then, around 5:30 this evening, it started snowing again. Happy spring.

Daisy, Daisy...

Arthur C. Clarke has died.

Just This Once, Because It Is Sooooo Wrong

I would not normally post a mildly NSFW link here, but I had to make an exception for this product (link goes to the online catalog for Condomania, which contains no nudity, but does include some candid user reviews of products, and a photo in the banner may well ruin rubber duckies for you forever...you have been warned). Although I applaud the makers of the bear-shaped honey jars for finding a new market for their product, this particular use is just plain wrong. Not wrong in the way that most of the Not Safe For Work part of the internet is wrong, but a honey bear full of (ahem) personal moisturizer just should not be.

First 100 Days

Yesterday marked my 100th consecutive day of dragging my penguinesque physique to the treadmill. Between that and rather loosely following guidelines from the Mayo Clinic's weight management website, I have lost the 3 Chinstrap penguins (that's 27 pounds for those who don't measure mass in penguin equivalents) and am 3 pounds from losing an entire King penguin and my driver's license information being correct again.

Definitely the Communication Age

When we had the backup generator installed at the Rookery, one of the priorities--below keeping the running water and heat going, but still on the list--was maintaining our ability to use the computers, since so much of our lives and communication goes through them. The "communication" part of that is handled through Embarq's DSL, the only option for high-speed internet we have here at the Rookery. That means that when the phones went dead last night, so did our internet connectivity. As I explained to the ever-helpful (and, at 4 a.m., prompt--I must remember to call customer service in the middle of the night more often) Embarq guy, I could live without having the phone up for a bit, but I was not looking forward to being disconnected from the internet.

Something I Discovered at 4 a.m.

I would make a terrible astronaut. Not because I get airsick if I get more than four feet from the ground. From what I hear, motion sickness is fairly common among astronauts, although NASA is keeping its lips zipped as to the physics of tossing one's cookies in microgravity.

At half past three this morning, I awoke to the sound of the generator kicking on. We've had a quarter inch of ice over everything since yesterday, so the only surprise was that it had taken this long for us to lose power. After a quick reconnaissance around the house to check for a downed wire, I picked up the phone to call the power company to report the problem.

There was no dial tone. Not even on the BatPhone which doesn't require a separate AC feed. On Apollo 8, the astronauts orbited the moon and became the first humans to be out of communication with the entire planet. Me, I was feeling uncomfortably isolated just having the land line knocked out, even though I had a cell phone in hand and other human beings just next door.

That's One Fast Computer

The laptop made the trip from Anchorage, Alaska to my front door in just under 24 hours. after having spent the day tweaking the settings, I can confidently say this is one sweet computer, and worth most of the month I went laptopless waiting for the situation to resolve.

We have an Apple desktop, two Apple laptops, four iPods and an iPhone, so the Rookery was firmly pro-Apple before this all started. The experience has not soured us one bit.

Two Random Inputs

Lewis Black has a great bit on thoughts that you have to get out of your head quickly, lest they make your brain explode. For example, the tidbit he overheard, "If it hadn't been for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college." Today, as we went into our polling place to vote in the primary, we heard a woman wearing Betty Boop pajama bottoms exclaim to the toddler she was carrying, "If I knew they were doing the voting, I wouldn't have worn these silly pants." Nope, I don't get it either (either the statement or the general principle of jammy bottoms being leave-the-house clothes). Understanding or not, though, I think I feel something leaking out my ears.

Lucky for me and my goal of keeping my prefrontal cortex internal, at the gas station a short while later, I looked up and saw the license plate "ATARDIS." While that pleases my inner geek, I can think of a lot of vehicles that license plate would work better on than a beige Ford Windstar. There are less TARDIS-like vehicles in the world, but not many.

Fast Boat From China

Apple has shipped the new laptop. Judging by the parcel tracking, I'm definitely getting it factory-fresh.

Now that's iService

We have received an update on the status of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. You may recall that we last saw the General (aka Emp. Peng.'s old Apple laptop) having been sent back to Apple's service department for the third time to try to fix a problem. To be fair, they actually fixed the problem the first time, but they created a secondary problem, and fixing that created a tertiary problem. A week after we sent it in with the tertiary problem, we got a call from Stuart over at Apple's customer service. I still can't get over what he said: "The part we need for the repair is not shipping on a schedule we can anticipate at this time." Seriously, those were his exact words. Rather than wait for a part that may or may not ship in our lifetimes, Apple has decided it would be more expedient to just ship us an entirely new computer. So that dent in the casing that annoyed the guano out of Emp. Peng. will be taken care of.

As if the saga could get any more interesting, here is where it takes a turn for the "Day-yamn!" Apple no longer makes the Powerbook G4, so they are sending us "the closest thing we have." Take the specs of the computer we sent them, multiply by 3, and that is approximately the closest thing they could come up with without going under any of the specs of the original. On the scale of We Landed A Man On The Moon With The Computing Power In A Digital Watch, the old computer got us to Pluto and the replacement computer can warp us halfway to Alpha Centauri. What's more, the Pluto computer showed every moment of its 3 years of use, and we'll be getting a brand spanking new replacement that costs $1,100 more now than the old one cost before we put those years of hard use on it.

I'll really hand it to Apple customer service. They definitely know how to go above and beyond in making a problem right.

Another Way Political Rallies are Like Comic Con

I have gone on elsewhere on this blog about how the media depictions of Comic Con skewed heavily toward the minute percentage of folks in costume. Turns out it's not just the Comic Con. At the Obama rally, near the entry door, a guy with a camera was collecting video bites of people saying what, specifically, they like about Obama. Having had 2 hours with nothing to do but try to fight off hypothermia, I had made a reasonably detailed survey of the people surrounding us in line. We had a group of 3 middle aged African American women, a pair of Swiss tourists with their American host, two white suburban-type two-kid families, and a flock of college students. Most of us were dressed for the weather (or slightly, regrettably below the weather), with heavy coats and winter hats over sweaters and slacks.

So who does the guy manning the video camera pull out to give a video bite? Points to everyone who guessed "The boisterous college kid with The Blues Brothers wardrobe." Who needs the opinion of any of the sea of normal folks in scarves and mittens when you've got a guy in a dark suit and fedora?

Political Musing, Addendum to Part II

The line inching its way around a complete city block attracted petition mongers like flies to a meadow muffin. One of the ones being circulated was something in favor of universal single-payer health insurance. While that system may have several arguments going in its favor, the continuation of Emp. Peng.'s livelihood is not one of them. The signature gatherer had obviously been briefed on responses to typical objections to the proposed system. "I sell health insurance policies for a living. Universal single-payer health insurance effectively puts me out of a job" was not one her briefers anticipated. After an entertaining back-and-forth (my favorite part of which was her assertion that "it's the president of your company who is making all the money" to which my frostbitten brain couldn't stop my mouth from blurting out, "he is the president of his company!"), Emp. Peng. finally, as firmly and diplomatically as possible, suggested that maybe we weren't the right audience for her, and she gave up.

I'll be right there in line to say that our current system of paying for health care is in need of some fairly drastic improvements. However, one aspect I have never seen addressed by any of the reform proposals is that the flip side of a bloated bureaucracy is that it provides jobs.

Political Musing, Part II

We waited two hours in penguin-friendly temperatures, working our way through a line that snaked completely around the block and almost back to the building entrance again, to get in to the Barack Obama rally. The line three times longer than the event you are in line for is similar to Comic-Con, but Comic-Con has costumed babes and heat, two things in short supply in Akron in February. T-shirt vendors and petition mongers plied the line, although I think the smart money would have been on a Barack-accino concession. By the time we got (back) to the entrance, I would have sat through a presentation for Mosquito Acres Timeshares and Free-Range Gator Ranch if that was what it took to get out of the cold. I might have even welcomed the kind of hot air I'm used to getting when politicians speak (when you can't feel your face, heat is heat).

We got neither. He cracked jokes. He detailed his policies. He inspired. Those are three things I am not accustomed to politicians doing at all, let alone all at once. I've laughed at politicians plenty, but this is the first time I've laughed with one.

As Teal'c says in the pilot episode of Stargate SG-1, "Many have said that. You are the first I believe could do it." We hear the message of change every 4 years. He is the first I believe could do it.

Analog Technology To The Rescue

In Antarctica, it is late summer, but here, it is tax season, and we here at the Rookery ran into a little quandary. Emp. Peng. owned stock in a company that got bought out in 2007, so the new owners bought back all the stock as part of the purchase agreement. On the bright side, we got most of the credit card debt paid off. On the slightly dimmer side, the buyback triggered a lovely little thing called Capital Gains, but no one seemed to have records of the stock's purchase price 12 years ago. That is a rather vital bit of information when trying to calculate how much the capital gains were and thus how much capital gains tax we would be hit with.

We are of the internet generation, and we are accustomed to being one Google search away from anything and everything we might ever want to know, and a lot we would prefer not to know. There are plenty of orifices on the internet, but we found a hole. No one seemed to have information on what this particular stock was selling for on January 30, 1996. Now, there are plenty of places where one can look up historical price quotes on stocks, but none of them had information on this now-defunct stock. One site promised to be able to find stock prices for any stock, defunct or not, but they wanted $15 per lookup. Emp. Peng. even tried going the offline route and calling the corporate investor relations, but since the corporation was bought out and the investor relations folks were for the new corporate owners, they were somewhat less than helpful. We spent the better part of a week trying to hunt down a single elusive tidbit of information in this digital age.

Tip o' the beak to SuperDad, who, when alerted to our plight, suggested that we just look it up in the Wall Street Journal at our local public library's newspaper archives. After a week of mining the internet, we found the pertinent information in roughly a minute and a half in analog format. We probably could have shaved at least a minute and 20 seconds off that time if either one of us could have remembered how the blazes to work a microfiche reader. I am still fighting the urge to kick myself.

In a delicious bit of timing, our analog salvation comes 4 days after the cell phone companies started turning off their analog phone networks. The coincidence would have been even more tasty had the company whose buyout triggered this whole fiasco been one of those cell phone companies. It is a cell phone carrier, but won't be starting to cut off its analog network for another 5 weeks.

Political Musing

Emp. Peng. and I are planning to cross another thing off our "To Do Before I Die" lists: attend a political rally. Barack Obama is going to be in Akron, about an hour from us, on Saturday afternoon, and we're going to try to get in to the event. It should be interesting. I've never been in the same room as a presidential candidate before, and it will be interesting to see if Obama is as good in person as he is on video clips. I find Obama's speechifying to be quite compelling, to the point that I find myself trying very hard not to be enthralled. As a rule, I find it important to keep one's wits about oneself when listening to politicians. Committing to a political candidate while drunk on charisma is just not a good idea.

Third Time's the iCharm?

About a year ago, Emp. Peng.'s laptop, an Apple Powerbook G4, started having an odd issue whereby the battery seemed to disregard charge levels between about 85% and 2%. As soon as it ran into the low 80 percents, the battery monitor dropped down to nothing and the computer went into Lack of Power Freak Out Mode, which consists mainly of shutting down in the middle of whatever it happened to be doing. Once attached to an AC power source, it shot straight back up to whatever level it had plummeted from. Needless to say, this was an untenable situation, which Apple suggested could be remedied by a new battery. This did sort of solve the problem for about a year. It will become important later that the new battery, although it is completely compatible with the laptop, is not an Apple-branded part.

A couple of weeks ago, the problem resurfaced in earnest, just days before the extended warranty was to run out. Phone tech support--including several types of resets that were obviously configured on paper without regard to human finger configuration--was somewhat less than effective, so we were instructed to take the computer to the nearest Apple Store for attention from their Genius Bar. We live in the armpit of Ohio, and the "nearest" Apple Store is an hour's drive away, but still, we went. This is the laptop, after all.

The alleged Genius (more of a smart-ass), took one look at the non-Apple-Brand battery and refused to entertain the notion that the problem could have originated from anywhere other than a third party power source, even after he was repeatedly informed that the reason the Powerbook had a third party battery to begin with was that the problem had occurred with the Apple brand battery. For all the trouble--and, believe me, we've just gotten started--Mr. Smart Ass Genius is the only rotten spot in this whole apple barrel. Mr. SAG determined that the only solution was for us to purchase another new battery for the laptop, and if the problem persisted (thus proving what we already knew, that it wasn't the battery), we could return the new battery and then he could look further to see what else could be causing our issue. The fact that the Apple Store was out of stock on the appropriate battery was only the first of our reservations about this approach. Gas prices being what they are, schlepping an hour each way to the Apple Store many more times, and we would be better off replacing the computer. We replaced the computer anyway, with a MacBook*. After all, however bad this was turning out with Apple, we had no indication that the situation would be better with another manufacturer. If the Powerbook ever got fixed, I would inherit it to replace my laptop, which I had run so far into the ground that the only reason it wasn't held together by duct tape was the outside chance that the duct tape would ignite from the heat the AC adapter socket was putting out. Instead, I had superglued the case.

To Apple's credit, when we called Tech Support again to say that the problem was not even close to satisfactorily addressed by Mr. SAG, they immediately went into Make Sure The Customer Is Happy Mode and sent a shipping box out for us to mail the computer in for repair. When one must send a computer back to Apple for repair, their standard procedure is to overnight the customer a box with a pre-printed shipping label and four different kinds of foam padding designed to cradle the computer like a bosom in a high-end brassiere. They also include the packing tape to seal the box up--the computer tech support equivalent of a mint on the pillow, to be sure, but it's dang convenient.

The laptop, now known as Generalissimo Francisco Franco since we kept getting reports that it was still dead and awaiting parts, turned out to have a bad logic board. I'm not techie enough to understand why that would cause the particular problem we were having, but Emp. Peng. was elated at the vindication of his hypothesis that it was not a battery issue. In short order, the Generalissimo was shipped back to us. By then, I had been completely laptopless for almost a week and couldn't wait to rip into my new hand-me-down computer. I pulled it out of its protective sleeve, booted it up for an inaugural email check, and discovered I had no internet.

The house still had access, so I called up tech support and explained to them that I was aware that the computer was now out of its extended warranty period, but it was under warranty when it was sent in, and it also had functional wireless internet capabilities then. Now, not so much, and I didn't think it was too much to ask that the computer be returned with something reasonably approximating the same specs it went in with. I also didn't think it was too much that the company that controls the iTunes catalog could have hold music that doesn't bite, but I kept that particular observation to myself.

There was also some confusion regarding half of the RAM being missing, but that turned out to be me having overlooked it in the packing box, where the Apple technicians had helpfully removed the third-party RAM Emp. Peng. had installed. The very helpful product specialist arranged for a second shipping box to be sent. This time, the problem was that the replacement logic board had a bad Airport Card, so the computer couldn't see that it had wireless capability.

Generalissimo Franco just returned to us yet again. Now it has a functional power system, working wireless internet, and a boatload of dead pixels around the top and left sides of the screen. Normally, computer manufacturers don't like to cover dead pixels on laptop monitors, but, as with the wireless issue, we sent it to them with working pixels, and it isn't too much to ask that it be returned in reasonably the same condition. Michael, another one of the Good Apples over in the ranks of Product Specialists, has arranged for a third shipping box to be overnighted to us, to send the computer back again.

If the turnaround time matches the previous two attempts, we should have another installment of What Else Can Go Wrong With This Blasted Computer in about a week. Stay iTuned.

*Note: I had originally indicated this was a MacBook Pro. I am typing this addendum on the aforementioned new laptop and can say with certainty it is a regular MacBook, not a Pro.

Schrodinger's Credit Score

In 1935, to demonstrate a potential issue with one of the more mind-boggling parts of quantum physics, Erwin Schrodinger introduced the world to Schrodinger's Cat. Since I don't want to be responsible for anyone having to clean up exploded brains out of a keyboard, I'll skip over the exact setup of the thought experiment that ends up with a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead. Here's a link if you want to have your head spin. There are many interpretations of what happens with the cat to reconcile the theoretical both-alive-and-deadness of the cat with humanity's experience, gained through several millennia of cat domestication, that a cat can be alive or dead, but not both. One of these interpretations is that observation makes the cat settle into a state of alive or dead, so that looking into the box effectively kills the cat 50% of the time.

Which brings me to our current effort to refinance the mortgage on The Rookery. I'm shopping around for the best terms right now, and a major factor in the relative non-suckiness of the terms of the new mortgage is our credit scores. FICO has those locked up in a box with Schrodinger's Cat, except that in Schrodinger's scenario, there is a 50% chance of the cat being just fine. In order for the mortgage lenders to access our credit scores, they have to make an inquiry; however, making an inquiry puts a minor ding against one of the elements that factors into what that score will be. In the department of non-reassurance, FICO's FAQs say, “If it does [drop], it probably won't drop by much...most credit scores are not affected by multiple inquiries from auto or mortgage lenders within a short period of time."

Anyone for groundhog stew?

Phil saw his shadow this morning, so six more weeks of winter it is. Astronomically speaking, we were in for 6 weeks and 5 days more of this crap regardless of what the marmota had to say on the subject. A warming trend in the weather has put me in better humor about the whole depths of winter thing, so Phil has lucked out. Shadow or not, I don't think we'll have to see whether the magic elixir of groundhog immortality (see bullet point 4) also protects him against meat cleavers.

It's not all frivolous weather prognostication among the marmota, though. Most groundhogs are still hibernating, as a good groundhog ought to be, and a few of those hibernating woodchucks are working to benefit mammals as a whole, without having to rouse at the crack of dawn or dash our hopes for an early end to winter. Groundhogs in a Colorado research lab are helping the human researchers look at both the potential impacts of climate change and possible mechanisms to fight human obesity.

Recommended Penguin Reading

Slate has an article about the world's most popular claymation penguin.

the mischievous Plasticine bird quickly became one of those phenomena, like Nutella or the ban on the death penalty, that everyone in the world seemed to get but us Yanks.

So, How's the Weather Where You Are?

The handy-dandy indoor/outdoor thermometer currently shows an outdoor reading of 4 degrees Fahrenheit. If that media slut of a marmota in Punxsutawney sees his shadow next week, I may snap and try to warm myself with a hearty groundhog stew. No, not Woodrow. He's an innocent marmota, who is currently hibernating under the barn like any sensible animal would be. I don't expect to see him for another couple of months.

Silent Movie Magic

I don't suppose anyone out there knows how the Clara Bow flick Get Your Man ends?

The local theater celebrated 80 years since its opening performance tonight by putting on a fairly reasonable facsimile of the first show. In keeping with the theater's use as a catch-all for stage plays, movies, symphony and orchestral performances, vaudeville, stand-up comedy and, yes, even the Superbowl, the show was a combination of an organ recital on the resident Wurlitzer, barbershop quartet performance, stand-up comedy, a vaudeville routine (if you've never seen a man juggle bowling pins while balancing a bowling ball atop a 6-foot toilet plunger perched on his forehead, all while cuing a 6-year-old holding a cymbal, you're missing out--and that wasn't even the act's finale...that was playing Dream the Impossible Dream on a red balloon), and the movie shown on that first night, Get Your Man, shown with live musical accompaniment on the Wurlitzer. That's really the only way to see silent movies.

According to the theater manager, there is one existing print of that movie on the planet. It is currently located in Germany. IMDB seems to be under the impression that there is also a print filed with the Library of Congress, but that print is missing reels 2 and 3 of the 6-reel flick. Since we saw reels 2 and 3, I think I can safely say we did not see the Library of Congress print. Notwithstanding a couple of moments where it looked like Clara Bow was getting zapped by the Jawas, we saw everything right up to the point that Buddy Rogers, who has had the hots for Clara for the last five reels (who hasn't?), stomped out of the room after finding out that Clara Bow had seduced and agreed to get engaged to the very much older Marquis, so that the Marquis would break the engagement between his daughter and Buddy Rogers, leaving the daughter free to go after her love, Henri, and Buddy Rogers free to go after Clara Bow...who has just engaged herself to the old guy. OK, so there is a slight flaw in the plan. The movie underwent the digital equivalent of a film meltdown before we got to see how she extracts herself from that to find happiness with Buddy Rogers.

OK, There is a Down Side

So, the former, more-penguin-shaped behind would have come in handy today. Seems that losing a couple inches off the rear end means that there is less padding in the landing zone when you slip while clearing the snow off the new asphalt driveway. Also, the decreasing layer of insulating blubber is throwing off internal thermoregulation, unless that is an unlisted side effect of taking a driveway to the noggin*.

*-since certain maternal penguins will worry, I'll assure you in advance that I checked and am reasonably certain I don't have a concussion, just a sore backside.

Life, The Universe and Everything

Today marks the 42nd straight day of me dragging my increasingly-less-penguin-shaped behind onto the treadmill. That's 6 solid weeks of me spending at least 20 minutes walking toward a green wall and, even after somewhere around 70 miles, never quite getting there.

My strategy for sticking with this is simple. I set my workout clothes (never underestimate the importance of this as a piece of exercise equipment)(unless you are a guy) out where I can just roll into them before grabbing my morning coffee. With sneakers laced up, I suck down the coffee and a cup of milk while checking the morning email, then head down the hall to the treadmill. I made a deal with myself that, for the first three weeks, all I had to do was power up the treadmill, poke the button for the easiest pre-set program (1 mile, 20 minutes) then not fall off the back. Show up, one button, and avoid landing on my face--it was that simple, and I usually started before I was alert enough to talk myself out of it. Even before the first three weeks were up, I had ventured off the pre-set and started to do longer and harder sessions. My deal with myself has graduated to doing at least 20 minutes at at least 3.5 mph. Most days, I do more, but it's nice, psychologically, to know that all I have to do is that, and I can do more as I feel like it. Usually, I do. Even today, sore from digging up parts of the yard yesterday, I did 30 minutes between 3.5 and 3.7 mph. That's not much for you performance athletes out there, but it's a big increase over my former "no exercise."

A Penguin Perspectives First

After four years and a few months, Penguin Perspectives is celebrating its first piece of comment spam in Portuguese! Whenever I need to name a random non-English language (happens more often than one might think), I fall back on Portuguese. Imagine my surprise when I found a comment in the Unmoderated Comments section that began, " Gostei muito desse post e seu blog é muito interessante, vou passar por aqui sempre..." The remainder of the message encourages visiting a website, blah, blah. You know the drill. I'm not posting the comment--Portuguese or not, it's still comment spam and I'm not having that here--so if you wanted to make loads of money merely by connecting to the internet...sorry.

Tip of the beak to Babel Fish for providing a translation of both the comment and the page it spammed for so I could double-check my suspicions about the message's spamminess. Not that one needs to do too much checking when a blog written in English gets comments not in English containing a URL. While I can generally recognize a block of written Portuguese, I do not speak it...not even my Four Vital Phrases To Know In Any Language.

Happy New Year!

Here's to a happy, healthy, prosperous arbitrary demarcation of one revolution of our planet around the parent star.

Start Your Reindeer!

Four hours until Norad Tracks Santa 2007 officially kicks off the Santa tracking for the year. I'll probably catch up with the trackers in the morning. All the interesting things are happening when I'm asleep lately, but since I all but hibernate through the winter, that doesn't take much.

Happy Solstice

I'm a little late on the Solstice well-wishing, but only because I was asleep at 1:08 a.m. EST today. Hooray for more daylight! It's all uphill until June.

Just how dumb do shoe saleswomen think I am?

Thanks in part to my new daily walking regimen (more on that some other time), I found myself in need of new daily-wear shoes. Being as I am taller than average, I have correspondingly larger-than-average feet. Being as I am of Swedish heritage, those larger-than-average feet can be called "boat-like." Both of those add up to it being easier for me to find sneakers in the men's department, but that is neither here nor there in this instance. In short order, I had found a pair to replace my worn out ones, and headed to the checkout counter. The saleswoman rang up my purchase, and I swear, actually said, "That will be $24.99. Are you sure that will be all? If you spend $35, you can get $7 off."

Let's gloss over for a moment, as my brain did, the fact that I had actually managed to find a comfortable and not entirely ugly pair of sneakers in under 5 minutes and had settled on purchasing them in almost record time. In fact, my brain was so busy glossing over that tidbit that it failed to catch the next thought, which actually made it out of my mouth, "Spend $10 more to get $7 off? The math just doesn't add up there."

Plea for Fruit Related Help

I have recently developed a taste for grapefruit. However, I failed to concurrently develop an innate knowledge of grapefruit-eating technique, and online instructions to "scoop out the sections with a spoon" are not as helpful as they may seem (for instance, do you scoop from the membrane side or the peel side of the section?). I started off trying to scoop the sections out of a halved grapefruit with a teaspoon. This was almost as effective as using a citrus reamer, so I switched to an iced tea spoon, which is narrower with a shallower bowl. I've managed to work into a technique of forcibly digging out one section, tearing the membrane between the missing section and the adjacent section, then working the spoon around the point of that section and wedging it off the peel. This, too, has given unsatisfactory results, unless one of the unsung benefits of grapefruit juice is as an eyeglass cleaner. Around the time I proved that it is, in fact, anatomically impossible to lick grapefruit juice off one's own elbow, I remembered that there exists a utensil helpfully called a "grapefruit spoon," and I procured a set of two. These do not come with instructions.

So, I am asking for help. I know at least two of my readers have extensive grapefruit eating experience. Does someone want to step up with some detailed instructions?

International Animal News

British trout make a run for the border.

Having realized that, to predators, they are the proverbial fish in a barrel (or just following their natural mating instincts), farm-raised trout in the UK have been photographed leaping out of their farm pond into a narrow culvert supplying the pond with fresh water. From the Big Leap, the trout have a 30-foot swim against the current before they get to the watercress fields on the other side, where apparently there are otters who see the opportunity to get both the fish and salad courses in one fell swoop. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Penguinal Synchronicity

We stopped in the craft store today to pick up one quick item. The second display that greeted us on the way in the store was a wall of these

The image is a tad on the small side, so to save everyone from squinting, it is a decorate-your-own cookie jar, and the one on the box is decorated to say "I (heart) Mom, Love, Janet."

In the words of Sheldon, from The Big Bang Theory, "This is one of those events that people unfamiliar with the law of large numbers would call a coincidence."

Universe to Solar System: Get Bent

Voyager 2 made its way past the solar system's termination shock--the beginning of the end of the solar system--some time back in August, and NASA has finally crunched enough of the numbers to discover that the solar system is bent.

How Geeky Am I?

This is the opening of my new favorite TV show, The Big Bang Theory (and if the WGA and the AMPTP can come to a mutually acceptable agreement, I can subsist on more than 8 episodes of it).



Now, the fact that this is my favorite TV show might make me slightly geeky. Really, watch the show--8:30 p.m. Mondays on CBS. Stepping up on the geek ladder, I TiVo the program. That leads inexorably to using the TiVo's frame-by-frame advancement feature to go through the flashing montage of images, and once I did that, it was just a hop, skip and a jump to indexing them. The full opening sequence is 20 seconds long, 13 seconds once the zoom through the solar system to Earth is done. In those remaining 13 seconds, 108 images flash. I was only completely baffled by 9 of them.

1. Cells undergoing mitosis
2. Two-cell stage zygote
3. micro-organism, type unknown
4. Volcanoes
5. Plant, large palm
6. The emergence onto land
7. Rocky coastline, possibly with seals
8. Dinosaur
9. Stegosaurus and apatosaurus
10. Mammoth
11. Chimpanzee
12. The Neanderthal part of The Evolution of Man
    
13. Stone wheel
14. Cave painting of hunters with deer-like game
15. Stonehenge
16. Moai, aka Easter Island statues
17. Stone carving of face, possibly South American
18. Machu Picchu
19. Olmec statue
20. Mayan pyramid
21. Giza plateau
22. The Sphinx
23. Hindu goddess in high relief
24. Mosaic of face
25. ????
    
26. Statue of Zeus
27. The Parthenon
28. Jesus with crown of thorns
    
29. ????
    
30. Great wall of China
31. Notre Dame de Paris
32. The Taj Mahal
33. The Leaning Tower of Pisa
34. Statue by Michelangelo (maybe the David?)
35. Da Vinci's “Vitruvian Man” (the genitals have been removed)
36. Old map, not sure of where
    
37. Viking Longboat
    
38. Crusader
39. The purchase of Manhattan
40. Joan of Arc
    
41. Napoleon charging
42. Pilgrims landing
43. Boston tea party
44. Great Seal of the United States
45. Declaration of Independence
46. Abraham Lincoln
47. George Washington
48. The Constitution of the United States
49. Presidential portrait of Grant
    
50. General U.S. Grant on horseback
51. ????
    
52. Covered Wagon
53. Photo of a Civil War amputation
54. Locomotive
55. Old West newspaper office
    
56. Man panning gold
57. ????
    
58. ????
59. A Russian cathedral
60. Parade float for Prohibition
61. ????
    
62. Lightbulb
63. London Bridge
64. Eiffel Tower
65. Statue of Liberty
66. Four women on farm equipment
67. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
68. ????
    
69. Horse, with a man on some sort of horse-drawn transportation
70. 6 people in an early automobile
71. ????
72. Teddy Roosevelt
73. Biplane
74. Mount Rushmore
75. WWI soldier
76. Einstein
    
77. Group of 6 P-51 Mustangs
78. “E=mc2” on a chalkboard
79. Dribbled paint painting, possibly Jackson Pollack
    
80. Aerial view of a subdivision
81. Wood-paneled soft top convertible, postwar vintage
82. Two people at a jukebox
83. Astronaut on a spacewalk
84. Space Shuttle liftoff
85. Pack of birth control pills
86. Surgeons in a modern operating room
87. Computer chip
88. Bank of magnetic tape computers
89. 3.5 inch floppy
90. ????
    
91. Subway train
92. Hollywood street sign
93. Martin Luther King, Jr. illustration
94. Disco ball
95. Rollerskates
96. Sony Discman
97. Computers with 5.25 drives
98. ????
    
99. Old cellular phone
100. Satellite Dish
101. Guy on a skateboard
102. Berlin Wall
103. Bullet train
     
104. Guy on Snowboard
105. Kids playing with the original Playstation
106. Oil pump
     
107. Digital camera display with a picture of a woman
108. Fireworks

Houseguests: Consider Yourself Warned

This is the Rookery's new toilet paper holder (for those keeping track, this is the third one I've had in the upstairs bathroom). We saw it at the comic book convention today and couldn't resist. I challenge anyone to look at a scary-looking toilet paper dispenser and not think, even for just a fleeting moment, "Well, if I'm going to scare the crap out of people, might as well do it while they're on the pot."

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day and thanks for reading.

Turkey Time Trouble

Thanksgiving is upon us, and I have once again been bitten in the rump roast by the Law of Inverse Thawing: The more time you give a turkey to thaw, the less time it will take. I got a 15 pound bird--because, as counterintuitive as it may be, a 15-pound turkey was cheaper than the 4-pound boneless turkey roast I've been making for years--and set it in the fridge to thaw. Two days later, it's ready. Of course, had I given it only the recommended one-day-per-four-pounds, on Thursday morning, it would still have been a turkey-shaped block of ice.

Today's Lessons

I spent much of today at a leadership/motivation seminar, where I learned three things:

1. Football apparently is rife with lessons in motivation, thus providing me with yet another reason I won't watch football.

2. I'm back to having respect for Colin Powell. Hearing him was one of the reasons I sat through the blatant pitch for $6,000 stock-timing software that paid for the good parts of the seminar. His talk on what leadership means--complete with what may or may not have been veiled references to a decided lack thereof in his former boss when he was Secretary of State--had an interesting take on the subject.

3. White middle-managers from the upper midwest should not, I repeat should not "put your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care." That's not being motivated. That's looking like an idiot.

Portal Cake Recipe

Emp. Peng. and I just finished playing Portal (I solve the puzzles, he controls). At a couple of points in the game, the malevolent computer gives a list of ingredients--presumably for cake, since the running gag of the game is there will be cake at the end. I couldn't resist seeing what happened if you actually made a cake using the in-game recipe. Except it's not exactly a recipe. It's just a list of ingredients and quantities, and even that doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first:

1 (18.25 oz) package chocolate cake mix
1 can prepared coconut frosting
3/4 cups vegetable oil
4 large eggs
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup butter or margarine, softened
2/3 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cups cocoa
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cups water
1 to 2 (6 oz each) vanilla frosting

I stared at the list for a while, trying to make heads or tails of it, before I noticed that the first four ingredients on the list are more or less what you need to make a cake from a boxed mix. The remaining are essentially the ingredients for a chocolate cake from scratch, although most cake recipes have more sugar and leavening agent. It's not a cake recipe. It's two cake recipes: the easy way and the hard way. I've made cake from a mix before, so I decided to disregard the first four ingredients and start making my cake with #5, the chocolate chips. Here's all the ingredients, laid out left-to-right in the order listed in the game:

The game doesn't give any indication of how the cake goes together, so I broke out my trusty Betty Crocker Complete Cookbook for some guidance and started winging it.

1. Preheat oven to 350F, and grease and flour a cake pan. (SPOILER ALERT!)The cake seen at the end of the game (garnished in a way inconsistent with the garnish list provided for the recipe, which contains several elements that are not, technically, edible) is a standard round layer cake, which would use two 8-inch round cake pans. (END SPOILER ALERT) I used a bundt cake pan because it is shaped a little like a portal and I don't get a chance to use my bundt cake pan very often.
2. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
3. Beat the butter with an electric mixer until fluffy.
4. Add the sugar to the butter and beat until it congeals into a single mass.
5. Knock the butter/sugar mass off the beaters and add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.
6. Beat cocoa (unsweetened cocoa powder) and vanilla into egg-sugar-butter mix.
7. Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave and beat the melted chocolate into the batter.
8. Beat in the flour mixture, a little at a time, alternating with a little bit of the water. At this point in the process, it became clear that the recipe as listed does not produce a batter-like consistency. I ended up using about 1 cup water to achieve a consistency that could be poured into a pan. This was the only deviation from the in-game ingredient list.
9. Pour batter into prepared pan(s)
10. Bake at 350F until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. For the Bundt cake pan, this was about 35 minutes.
11. Cool and frost with vanilla frosting

This is what the Portal Cake Recipe yields (that's homemade frosting, which always ends up a tad runny when I make it, but I didn't feel like running to the store for frosting):


The Portal Cake is not particularly sweet, but it is VERY chocolatey and the frosting makes up for the lack of sweetness in the cake. The texture is somewhat dense and chewy, probably because of the small quantity of leavening agents. All in all, though, the recipe (with the additional water) makes quite a delicious cake. The cake is not a lie!

Bradbury Challenge Update

I mentioned in a comment to another post that I'm not doing National Novel Writing Month this year. Instead, I've decided to give the month of November over to a Bradbury Challenge. Ray Bradbury's semi-famous writing schedule is "a story a week." A Bradbury Challenge is to see if you can pull off the same feat. I'm not giving myself a daily word count (the Grand Master does 1,000-2,000 wpd), but I am aiming for one completed short story submitted to a paying market every week for the month of November. Who knows, maybe even beyond that. But we'll start with November.

I submitted the first story to Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine on Monday. It came in around 4,100 words, and I'm fairly happy with it. It was not written entirely within the confines of the month of November, but since this is my thing, I get to make up the rules and I say it's OK, since the first week in November had some October in it, anyway.

I've hashed out the idea for story #2 and started putting words to page yesterday. I think I'm developing a workable schedule for this. Saturday starts the "come up with an idea" phase, which seems to take most of the weekend. By Monday, I have a good idea of what the general gist of the story will be, and Monday and Tuesday are spent hammering out details like the plot, which are passed by my First Reader (Emp. Peng.--I keep this in-house) to screen for things like overall stupidity or the fact that I have just independently come up with the plot of Star Trek III. Wednesday-Friday are the heavy writing days, and by Friday evening, I have a finished draft that goes to my First Reader to point out parts that could use tweaking. Saturday and Sunday, while I'm coming up with the next idea, I do the necessary revisions, pick a market, and run the revisions past Emp. Peng. Monday, after a final spell/grammar check, the story gets sent out. Lather, rinse, repeat. Bradbury has done this since The Great Depression, so a month should be nothing.

Bonus Recommended Reading, for anyone who is now, has been, or will be in a middle school English class: Here's Ray Bradbury himself saying that your English teacher is/was/will be wrong; Fahrenheit 451 is not about government censorship. It's about the declining importance of books in the age of television, and you should note that, in the novel, the government didn't start burning books until the people themselves had eviscerated them and stopped reading on their own.

Bad Headline Writing

From the Associated Press: Abstinence Not Curbing Teen Sex

If You Need Instructions...

I procured a new 2-quart Crock Pot recently. I love my 4-quart one, probably more than someone who considers Creamette's spaghetti a convenience food should, and wanted something smaller for making cheese dip.

Surprisingly, Rival did not put any excessively stupid warnings in the "Important Safeguards" section (except maybe warning #7--why would you use a Crock Pot outdoors?). However, on page 4 of the manual, Rival has deemed it necessary to provide assembly instructions, which I will now reproduce in their entirety:

1. Place stoneware into the heating base.
2. Lower the lid horizontally down onto the stoneware.

If you are reading this, you have obviously not spent the last 40 years living under a rock, so I probably don't need to tell you that a Crock Pot only has three parts, and there is only one configuration where they all fit together. If someone needs assembly instructions for a Crock Pot, it is possible that they shouldn't be using one.

This Saddens Me

I'm all in favor of writers getting paid for any and all uses of what they write (big surprise there). So, that part of me totally supports the WGA striking to get a decent deal on new media uses of the TV programs and movies they write. The other part of me wonders why this had to happen during the best new TV season in recent memory. For the first time I can remember, there is more than one new TV show I like in the new Fall lineup. I even went so far as to develop a rabid fangirliness for a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, which was picked up for a full season just before the strike. Now, a day into picketing, my new favorite show has been put on hiatus. So help me, if it doesn't come back off hiatus when the dust settles from this labor dispute, I will weep.

It's that time of year again

So help me, if I hear or read about "an extra hour of daylight" on Halloween one more time...

We've got 10 1/2 hours of daylight today (at least at my latitude), and it will be 10 1/2 hours of daylight no matter how you slice it. The fact that you're awake to see it does not mean that it wasn't there before.

And while we're at it, if we're really serious about messing with the clocks to save energy, we'd be skewing the available daylight as late into the evening hours as possible around this time of year. Arranging the clocks so the sun sets around 11 p.m. would be ideal. That way, we cut back on the number of hours people have those ginormous, energy-hogging Christmas light displays lit.

Today's Dose of Irony

The nudie bar down the street is holding a costume contest for Halloween.

From the Headlines

Bank of America to Eliminate 3,000 Jobs

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any of them are the people who keep calling me to try to get me to tack on new "services" and "insurance" to my credit card account.

Non-Recommended Reading

In light (so to speak) of the wildfires currently incinerating parts of California, time.com has an article up, "Why Californians Don't Leave." I'll save you a few minutes of reading. The article lays the blame on our brains' faulty risk assessment. Apparently, we believe that, even though an obvious hazard for major disaster is right outside our doors, we convince ourselves that disaster will never actually befall us personally. Our neighbors, sure, but not us.

Hooey. The real reason we live in disaster-prone places is that we have to live somewhere.

I was born in California: drought, wildfire and earthquake territory. When I was young, we moved briefly to Washington and lived for a few months within view of a very-recently-erupted (at the time) volcano. I spent most of my growing-up years in Oregon, where I got to experience floods and a very memorable earthquake, plus the periodic warnings that the volcanoes may be waking up. Oh, and the nuclear power plant was just on the other side of the hills, although that got shut down eventually. In college, I moved to Nebraska, where the two basic seasons are "blizzard" and "tornado." Now we live in Ohio, where, in addition to the occasional tornado, I'm back to flooding. Though I haven't experienced it yet, I understand earthquakes are not unheard of.

Nowhere on the planet is completely immune to natural and not-so-natural disasters. Some locations are more prone to more predictable disasters than other locations, but every spot has it's own buffet of potential catastrophe. The reason we choose to live in the paths of wildfire, earthquake, drought, and flood is not that we underestimate the threat; we just have an inertial preference for the devil we know.

All Hail the Emp. Peng.

I upgraded my laptop's operating system to Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon (as a rabid penguinophile, of course I use Linux). I'll blame user stupidity rather than the penguin for the installation problems. Something in the initial download and install failed, leaving me with a computer that would not boot. Worst of all, it was a computer that wouldn't boot and contained all of my recent work. I've learned my lesson and will never go mucking around the operating system without backing up the data again.

I spent the better part of Friday desperate to get the laptop to boot again. I made two live boot disks (for the less geeky readers, a live boot disk allows you to boot the computer from a CD without touching the existing operating system, or in my case, lack of existing operating system). Both of my boot disks failed, owing to human error in the burn process since burning a boot disk is somewhat more complicated than burning a music or data backup CD. I was at the point of considering what I would need to break open the laptop, pull the drive and hitch it to a working computer. As I told one person, "I don't care if the laptop breathes again; I just need my files."

Emp. Peng. to the rescue. He was away overnight for business when this happened, and called 12 hours into my ordeal. Using his new iPhone somewhere near the Appalachians, he found the appropriate Unix command-line code to burn the boot CD properly and walked me through the correct burn process. That got me a functional boot CD, but I still spent the next three hours in a fruitless and increasingly desperate search for my files while Emp. Peng. was on his way home to rescue his penguin in distress.

I should explain that Emp. Peng., computer guru though he may be, doesn't spend a lot of time around Linux. Going Penguin was my thing, and it is so far confined to my laptop here at the Rookery. Emp. Peng. has rarely had the occasion to get into my laptop. Still, when he got home, and found me still distraught over the missing files, he took a crack at my laptop to see if he could track them down. I handed him the laptop that had caused me most of a full day's consternation. Twenty seconds later, he had my files pulled up.

About Colbert

How bad is it that, if Stephen Colbert is serious, I actually would consider voting for a comedy persona above any of the other candidates? Emp. Peng. explains it as, "You know the level of screw if he's screwing with us."

Well, This Explains It

Next time, I'll look before I call something "inexplicable." The graphic designer responsible for the breast cancer penguin has something of a penguin theme going on. In fact, she's got an entire penguin shop of clothes, mugs, bumper stickers and throw pillows with various penguin designs, thus earning the website, www.jgoodedesigns.com, a shameless commerce plug. Shopping for me just got that much easier.

Inexplicable Penguin Promo

Someone posted the above image to a message board I'm on. First, let me say I'm all in favor of penguins, like you didn't know that. I am also generally opposed to cancer of any kind, so anything we can do to save lives and body parts is a good thing. However, I'm left wondering...why a penguin? Penguins are birds, and as such lack what one would traditionally call "breasts"--except for white meat, but that is really more pectoral muscle than breast. Wouldn't a better choice for a breast cancer awareness mascot be, say, anything from the class mammalia? Y'know, something that comes equipped with mammaries?

Today's Entertainment Thought

One of my favorite blogs, News From ME, posits a hypothesis that the home video market exists for the purpose of seeing how many times they can get him to buy the movie Goldfinger (somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 at last count). Time was, the home entertainment industry would at least go to the trouble of developing a new, supposedly superior, media format to get us to re-purchase movies and shows we already owned. Now, they don't even do that. They just slap new "bonus features" on the DVD, use some foil stamping on the box and call it the Ultimate Collector's Edition.

What they don't seem to realize is that the Ultimate Collectors are the people who have been lining up on Tuesdays during the entire run of the series to get the individual seasons of the TV show on the day they come out. Or, for those of us in the boonies where Tuesday releases hit the stores somewhere around the following Thursday, we pre-order from Amazon and tear the package out of the UPS guy's hands before he can finish scanning it. These Ultimate Collector's Editions are really starting to cheese us off.

I have spent six years collecting the complete series of Stargate SG-1 (seasons 1-8 anyway...the series could have done without seasons 9 and 10) on DVD. I have devoted a full two feet of DVD shelf space to this series, since I couldn't wait for the Thinpak edition that would have taken up less than a foot. I don't remember just how much cash is sunk into this collection, but if one buys all 10 seasons individually at list price, that's only 50 cents shy of $500; even Amazon's discounting only brings the total down to $363.50. We can assume my figure is closer to the latter. I camped out at Comic-Con to get a seat (not a good seat, just a seat) at the SG-1 panel. How does MGM reward this kind of fan loyalty? Tomorrow, they are releasing Stargate: SG-1 The Complete Series box set with all 10 seasons plus four disks of bonus features not found on my individually-compiled set, list price of $329.98 (Amazon pre-order $230.99).

I don't know if these TV studios think that the fans are suckers, but I'm certainly starting to feel like one. I spent more to get less--unless you count packaging volume--than fans-come-lately to the series who waited until the show's run ended before they sunk any cash into the DVDs. Fans have begun to realize that buying the first release of a TV show on home video is a sucker's game. The first release will be followed in a few months by a better edition. If we just wait, we'll be able to get even more of the bonus features that make buying DVDs worth it; were it not for the bonus features and removal of the ads, we would just hook up the DVD recorder to the TiVo. Except here is the Catch-22 of the whole thing: if we buy the first iteration, a better one comes out. If we don't buy the first iteration, the studio decides it's not worth releasing the rest of the series at all, so not only do we not get the better edition, we don't even get Season 2 of the crappy edition.

TiVo is in My Head!

The latest commercial for TiVo HD shows off the listings search function with the search term "Penguin."

Whale Tale

California is having some trouble disposing of a dead whale's carcass. They towed it 10 miles offshore about a week ago, and it found its way back. So they've towed it out to sea again.

At least they are remembering a lesson from their neighbors to the north: a half ton of dynamite is NOT a good way to solve this problem. This video never gets old.