Recommended Reading

I just picked up Uncle John's Presents... Book of the Dumb 2, one of this year's releases from the Bathroom Readers Institute. This is a book chock full of Grooisms, guaranteed to make anything you've done seem positively brilliant by comparison. Hey, I may have superglued my pantyhose to my leg, but at least I've never stuck a lit cigarette lighter under my bed with all the flammable box springs and dust bunnies, inadvertently lighting the house I am renting on fire. Suddenly the lobster fork incident doesn't seem so bad.

By the way, I heartily recommend the entire Uncle John series. They're books of 1-5 page articles on pretty much any subject you can imagine. Book of the Dumb 2 is devoted entirely to stupid things people have done, but there are 17 Bathroom Readers (put out each November) that cover a wide variety of general knowledge. There are also volumes devoted entirely to history, famous people living and dead, Texas, science, and the Presidency. And for those of you who, like me, can't wait a year between installments, there is Mental-Floss, a bi-monthly magazine. This month, they discuss the history of the paper clip.

From the Recipe Box

From the Hostess website, here's a recipe for anyone who has ever thought that the one thing that would make a Twinkie better is a bit of booze. The site also has a recipe for making Black Forest cake from Suzy-Qs and a snail and pond scene out of HoHos and caramels. There is such a thing as too much free time.

Must-See Movie

Of course I intend to go see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith this May. If it turns out to be practical, I intend to go to the midnight showing. However, Star Wars is not the only must-see movie of the year. There's also one coming out this summer with penguins leading a zoo jailbreak and hijacking a ship, and as we all know, any movie that prominently features penguins is a must-see. I even sat through that Batman movie they let Tim Burton direct because it had actual live penguins in it, though they turned out to be the only redeeming feature of the film (and I was not fooled for a minute by the little people in penguin suits!). Here's a link to the trailer for my #2 movie pick of the year, Madagascar, the movie that promises to have the best animated penguins since Mary Poppins.

Complaints, Complaints

Salon has a summary of the 36 complaints from the Parents Television Council that the FCC rejected. Several are tasteless, but I wouldn't call them obscene.

10 were solely over the use of the word "dick," and all as insults, not anatomical references. OK, nine "dick" and one "dickhead." In eight of the ten incidents, it was a generic mild insult directed at a particular character, along the lines of "scruffy looking nerf herder." One instance was a play on the fact that "dick" is also slang for "detective." Only one involved a double entendre.

My personal favorite: the complaint about the phrase "invasive vaginal exam," in reference to an actual medical invasive vaginal exam.

Appliance Postscript

Who on Earth decided white was a good color for kitchen appliances? Of all the rooms in a house that should not be white.

Now I've Seen Everything

It's amazing what they're doing with household appliances these days. For instance, an oven/cooktop/fridge in one. I'll let you read that again so it sinks in. Whirlpool makes an oven that doubles as a refrigerator. Tell me there isn't a wasted step in there somewhere. And are you supposed to keep a box of baking soda in your oven now? The principle is that you put your casserole in the fridge/oven in the morning to keep the food all nice and safely chilled until the timer on the oven kicks in and cooks it so it's hot and ready when you get home. So much for hoping for the best, food-poisoning wise, with the time bake setting. Then again, I have a $30 crock pot that also lets me have a hot, home-cooked supper waiting when I get home from a long day. By my count, that saves me $1650.00. On the other hand, there's something to be said for a self-cleaning refrigerator, and that definitely solves the problem of cleaning out a sufficient hole in the fridge to thaw your turkey for Thanksgiving.

Whoops! There Goes Another $80 Billion

Why are we still funding our two wars with emergency appropriations? This is no longer an emergency. This emerged three years ago. We were there at the beginning of this fiscal year; odds are we'll still be there come the end of this fiscal year. The fact that we might need to fork over some cash to pay for it should not be a surprise.

I'm Sorry Dave. I'm Afraid I Can't Do That

Today we spent $50 to learn two very important related lessons about our computer.

Lesson 1
Windows automatically makes three users on the computer during setup: the user you set up with the computer and probably use daily, a guest user, and an administrator. The computer will automatically boot up with the user you created, but there are two others.

Lesson 2
The spyware/adware/virus checker will only check and destroy spyware/adware/viruses on the user you are currently logged in on when you sweep. If you only run them on what boots up when you hit the power button, the guck will either reinstall itself or just hide out.

So even though we diligently sweep our computer weekly, 63 pieces of adware/spyware/etc. were gumming up the works from the Administrator setting, a setting I did not realize we even had. In spite of what they think at work, I'm not really all that great with computers.

The final lesson for everyone, and use it freely since we paid for it: when you clean out your computer (as I'm sure we all do regularly), make sure you scrub all your computer's users.

If you already knew this, please don't make me feel any more stupid than I already do.

This Just In: FCC Grows Spine

So it comes out that there are broadcast decency standards, after all. After the nipple dust-up last year, I wasn't sure, but now I am. The FCC has denied 36 complaints from the Parents Television Council, concerning Friends, The Simpsons, and Gilmore Girls (3 shows I've not watched, so I can't speak to whether they might be objectionable or not), proving that the FCC has broadcast decency standards and some things really do fall within those standards. Turns out that the criteria for being obscene is more stringent than "someone who does nothing but watch TV all day waiting to get offended writes a letter to complain about it and has different people send it to the FCC 25 times." For a while there, I was starting to wonder.

Double Standard

Do you think that, when Merck pharmeceuticals was applying for over-the-counter approval for Mevacor, anyone wanted proof that having a cholesterol-lowering drug available without a prescription would not affect the way people ate? Did they even consider that easily-available cholesterol-lowering regimens might have people eating cheeseburgers dripping with mayonaise with a side of deep-fried pie on a daily basis and saying "Screw a healthy diet! Who needs to watch cholesterol intake? I can just pick up a pack of Mevacor and I'll be fine."

Mevacor had other, bigger, problems that will probably preclude OTC approval. Still, why are some now-prescription drugs subject to the "won't lead to people being more careless about their health" test during their OTC application and others get a pass?

And while we're on the subject of federally-required labelling and double standards, one of the standards for getting a prescription drug approved for OTC sales is that people can understand and follow the instructions on the label. On the other hand, they also require food labels to carry allergen warnings, even on the most obvious allergen-containing products or products where the allergen is clearly listed among the ingredients. Basically, the FDA assumes I am intelligent enough to understand "take one caplet every 8-12 hours...do not take more than 2 caplets in any 8-12 hours or 3 caplets in 24 hours" (actual dosing instructions on Naproxen), but not so intelligent that I understand that my peanut butter may contain peanuts, or my wheat germ may contain wheat, without a bold-type warning. Tell me that makes sense.

Survey sez...

All I intend to say about this article is that I am in no way surprised, just taking a little comfort that it is not unanimous yet.

The Otters Are Coming

This was news to me. Ohio is being overrun by river otters. To be fair, at the moment, Ohio is being overrun by rivers, with or without otters. In spring, the wildlife council will be taking up a proposal to allow trapping of the once-endangered animals that are now toeing the line between "critter" and "vermin." Until then, though, otter-trapping is still illegal, and to that end, the wildlife council has put out this brochure for beaver trappers. Along with the instructions on how to set beaver traps to avoid snaring otters, it includes a quick lesson in how to recognize otter puke. Never know when that's going to be a question on Final Jeopardy.

Phone Home

The penguins are not having a good day. First it was the icebergs blocking the way to the feeding grounds, now they've lost phone service. A communications satellite went missing and cut the link to Scott Base and presumably the nearby Adelie penguin rookery. No word on whether it also affected McMurdo, the American research base also on Ross Island.

The Math Doesn't Lie

If you're one of the many people around me who seem to be having a rough couple weeks, you can take comfort in knowing that math is with you. Someone at Cardiff University has developed a mathematical formula that pinpoints the worst day of the year. Turns out it's next Monday (appropriately, I have a staff meeting that day). So take comfort: we're almost through the worst part of the year, so after next week, it has to get better. Nice to know that the year hits bottom right away so we don't have to waste too much time on the craptacular.

On a related note, we never got the Killer Pointsettia this year. However, the spirit of the Killer Pointsettia has possessed the appliances at the office. Saturday, the fridge went. Since then, the fridge has taken the furnace and the clothes dryer down with it.

A Day For Everything

Happy Penguin Awareness Day. Don't forget there's only 11 days until National Gorilla Suit Day.

The Craw

This may open a big can of worms, but it's been stuck in my craw lately. In connection with a suit that was just heard in front of the Supreme Court, there has been more talk than usual about the role of mitigating circumstances in criminal prosecutions, particularly how evidence of mitigating circumstances might affect the sentence someone gets for committing a crime. I have a real problem stomaching the whole concept of mitigating circumstances (and, in a related note, "hate crimes" but we'll get into that).

The basic concept of the judicial system is that it should be fair. If justice isn't fair, we've got nothing (and yes I know there are problems). The fundamental principle of fairness is that everyone is treated the same, so two people who do the same thing should get the same sanction or reward. The reasons that a person does what he does has no bearing on the effect the action has on society, so the motives should not affect the consequences to that person. As an example, let's just say that two people each kill someone. One of the murderers has a low IQ, and one is of average intelligence (assuming both have been found competent). If mental ability is considered as a mitigating circumstance, the fact of the one person's low IQ may lead to a shorter sentence. Now, both committed the same crime; what is the logic of one being denied more freedom because he is smarter than the other guy? If the low-IQ person did not know that killing someone was wrong, that's all the more reason to impress upon him the lesson that it is. After the fact isn't the optimal time to start inculcating this, but if we haven't started before, we have to start sometime.

My biggest problem with mitigating circumstances is that they are rarely unique. More people than we want to think are abused as children. There are a lot of people who have mental illnesses or mental retardation (or whatever we're calling that today). Most of these people manage to lead, if not productive lives, at least non-destructive lives. In the case before the Supreme Court, one of the issues was that counsel failed to present evidence of a neglectful childhood in a bad neighborhood, or the man's diagnosis of schizophrenia. Utter hooey. How many schizophrenics are there who don't stab a person then light them on fire? My guess would be lots. Same with people who have tough childhoods. Jiminy crackers, most people have tough childhoods--some more so than others, but childhood is a tough time (for that matter, adulthood is no walk in the park either). Yet somehow most people manage to follow the rules.

From the "How Stupid Do You Have to Be" File

Pop quiz: you're on a top-rated nationally-televised TV show and win $1.1 million dollars, and are further paid $300,000 to co-host a radio program. Do you:
A. bask in the media attention that your winning makes and report the prize money on line 21 of your federal income tax return for that year as "other income."
B. Bask in the media attention and assume that no one at the IRS watches CBS or reads the news since they all live under rocks and can't get over-the-airwaves broadcasts of Survivor.

If you answered A, you agree with the Internal Revenue Service. If you answered B, you would have done what Richard Hatch, the winner of the first Survivor, did. As if it were not frightening enough that you would do something that a man who ate rats on national television did, you would also be facing 10 years in jail and a half million dollars in fines. For those of you keeping score at home, yes, this is how they got Al Capone. The principle is the same: if you can't nail him for sparking this whole Reality TV thing, nail him on tax evasion.

Good News

They've agreed to sell us the house. Barring a bad home inspection (and for everyone who's asked, yes, we've had every intention from the start of getting a thorough home inspection) or something unforeseen going awry with converting our mortgage preapproval into actual funds, the house is ours. Bad news: can't move in until mid-April, which may create a small employment gap.

Sure Beats Green Cheese

Seems Saturn's moon Titan has the consistency of creme brulee: soft and spongy topped with a thin, crispy crust. This, of course, leads me to contemplate other planet/dessert analogies.

Mercury: Swizzle sticks or rock candy
Earth: Caramel-filled cream puff
Io (one of Jupiter's moons): Cherries jubilee
Europa: Creamsicle
Pluto: Snow cone

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who expressed concern about my recent stretch of being smited. Things are looking much better now. Apparently whoever is in charge of the smiting has moved on.

Toil and Trouble

The last about week and a half has been a real doozie for me. Since my office's annual Christmas-to-New Year's hiatus ended, it seems like it has been one thing after another. No one big thing happened, but the accumulation of small and medium-sized circumstances has been wearying. By Monday night, I figured my run of crap had to be ending soon since these things can't go on forever. The cosmos had to be running out of things to throw at me--after all, it was starting to dip into the plot of a Seinfeld episode (they're funnier when they aren't happening to you).

Then I got the boil. At that point, I had to step away from the cranky, bummed out mood I'd been wallowing in for a week and laugh. Boils are just so cliche. Everything else I've been dealing with, then to develop the sixth plague? That's just phoning it in.

Speaking of plagues, I had to give you this link because I wouldn't have believed myself if I hadn't seen them: 10 Plague Plushies. I stumbled across it when I was looking for the plague number for boils.

More Statuary

So George W. Bush may be taking the Oath of Office behind Freedom's back, but he'll be facing down Peace when he does it. Peace, located in the traffic circle of Pennsylvania Avenue and First Street NW, across the lawn from the West Front of the Capitol, isn't as obvious as the 7 1/2-ton Freedom atop the Capitol dome. The Naval Monument, also known as the Peace Monument, depicts "Grief weeping on the shoulder of History, for her sailors lost at sea." Grief and History face away from the Capitol building, but on the base of the 44-foot monument, on the side of the base that faces the West Front of the Capitol is Peace.

Freedom may be looking away, but Peace is watching.

Behind Her Back

Every US President since Ronald Reagan has chosen to take the Oath of Office on the West Front of the US Capitol. According to the Capitol tour, this is more or less a pragmatic decision, as the West Front has more room for spectators than the East Portico, which is the formal ceremonial entrance to the building. However, the decision has a probably-unintended consequence that seems particularly salient these days. If you're going to put a statue on the dome of a building like the Capitol, you have to choose a direction for it to face, and the obvious choice is for the statue to face the formal front. Thus, the Statue of Freedom faces the East Portico, away from the West Front.

Next week, George W. Bush will take the Presidential Oath of Office behind Freedom's back.

I Couldn't Make This Up

Researchers have now trained rats to tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese. No, I'm not making that up. Well, actually it's not the same rat who can tell whether someone is speaking Dutch or Japanese. Different groups of rats were taught to respond to either Dutch or Japanese, and the Dutch-trained rats did not respond to Japanese and vice versa. To answer the obvious question of why anyone would train rats to recognize the difference between Dutch and Japanese, this is trying to track down what parts of language processing are uniquely human; I'm reasonably certain these researchers are not working on breeding a rodent translator.

Parents: This one seems ready-made for science projects. Pick up a bunch of rats and a tape deck and you're all set.

All Better

Fixed the typos in the last couple entries. Damn spell check. It's been a really off week, and it shows in the blogging. The details of the crapfest that is my week don't make very interesting reading, but I will say that the capper was having to fork over $90 today to have the Toyota service department tell me my car was almost out of gas. I love my Prius except for the digital gas gauge that is unreliable at best. Sometimes 5 bars out of 10 is a half tank left, sometimes it is a quarter. Apparently, this time 2 bars out of 10 was "empty." In my defense, my gas gauge had 2 bars left, which is often nearly a quarter tank, and if the WARNING! light hadn't come on when I tried to leave work, I was going to go straight to the gas station a half mile down the road.

Googlebomb

I've not been keeping a very close watch on the confirmation of cabinet appointees, so other than checking the progress on the headlines, I'm not as well acquainted with the Gonzales-for-Attorney-General story as I probably should be. As near as I can tell, we're looking to replace Scary-After-He-Got-The-Job-But-Pretty-Much-Just-Kooky-Before John Ashcroft with Scary-Even-Before-He-Has-The-Job-Which-Might-Be-A-Stepping-Stone-To-The-Supreme-Court Alberto Gonzales. Even with my limited following of the case, I'm seeing this as an overall bad idea that somehow is going to come to pass anyway. Some days, the whole political process seems to just go through the looking glass.

That said, I'm as eager to exploit the quirks of technology as the next person, and Google's technology is ripe for the pickings. The entire concept of Google searches is that it is completely automated, based on the number of links to a page from a given phrase. The more people link to a certain page using certain words, the more relevant the Googlebots think that site is to that phrase. For instance, I would make a link with the phrase "Monterey Bay Penguin Cam," like so, that leads you to the webcam in the Monterey Bay Zoo penguinarium. The Googlebots chalk that link up as one more vote for that site being relevant to the phrase "Monterey Bay Penguin Cam." Now, if you were to go to Google's homepage and do a search for "Monterey Bay Penguin Cam," you're more likely to come up with that site (don't bother, it's already the top site). Now, the Achilles heel of this plan is that the Googlebots assume I will direct you to the webcam in the Monterey Bay Zoo penguinarium with that link and not, for instance, a site on how to grow mulch at home or even the penguin cam at another zoo. Googlebombs exploit that Achilles heel to make a statement by having a whole bunch of people, usually bloggers, use the same phrase to link to the same site. The latest Googlebomb is the attempt to highlight Alberto Gonzales' history with regards to the legality of torturing detainees by making this White House site appear when someone searches for "Tortured logic." That's my contribution right there.

Here's the irony of the whole concept of Googlebombing: It distorts the results of a Google search, and you can't effectively googlebomb without blogs, yet Google owns one of the more popular blogging services. Another thing goes through the looking glass.

Objection Overruled, but Heard

Well, the challenge to Ohio's Presidential vote managed to go forward. Nothing changed, and the vote was certified, but at least the Congress was forced to go through the motions of pretending to acknowledge that a few things might have gone awry with our wonderful democracy. Senator Barbara Boxer of California ended up being the one who allowed the objection to be heard. The Reuters story is here.

I never really expected either of the Ohio senators, the ones I wrote to last night, to be the ones who stood up to support the objections. Most of the time I write to my legislators, I do it knowing full well they're not going to do what I want. In this political climate, getting a legislator to change an established position on an issue falls on the difficulty meter somewhere near splitting the atom with a ginsu knife. Since these legislators will not likely change their minds, it sometimes feels good to remind them their constituents have a variety of positions. At the very least, it makes me feel better.

So It's Going to Be One of Those

We'll skip the part where I had to chip a quarter-inch layer of ice off my car to come to work this morning and what happened once I got there, and go straight to the part where I was trying to order more 1098T forms fromt the IRS and after being on musical hold for 10 minutes, the IRS hung up on me. That's just the latest in what promises to be a craptastic day.

Set your TiVo and Call Your Senator

Set your TiVo to C-Span. Tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, a joint session of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate will convene to receive and consider the Electoral College votes in the recent Presidential election. At that meeting, Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) intends to stand and object to the vote count in Ohio, based on several irregularities he outlines in this Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee (sure, it's 102 pages long, but the investigation found a lot of problems). However, due to the vagaries of the rules for Congressmen addressing the Senate, one senator out of a hundred must agree to give him the floor. Now, last election, no Senator agreed to do this for any of the many Representatives who wished to object to the Florida vote.

We have less than 14 hours to press one senator--again, it only takes one--into agreeing to let Representative Conyers be heard. Fortunately, we live in the electronic age, and every Senator has a convenient web form for fielding comments from constituents. Contact your senator is as easy as 1-2-3-4-5-6:
1. Go to www. senate.gov
2. Select your state from the drop-down menu
3. Click on a Senator's name
4. Find the "Contact" link on his/her website
5. Fill out the web form with your name, address, phone number, email, and comment
6. Click "Submit Form"
7 (Bonus Step). Repeat Steps 3-6 for your other Senator

Here's the text of the letter I sent to my two Senators. Please feel free to use it as inspiration, but Senate Staffers can sniff out a form letter, so when you write, please use your own words.

Dear Senators Voinovich and DeWine,
It has come to my attention that Thursday at 1:00 p.m., Representative John Conyers of Michigan will stand before you in the Senate and object to the vote count in Ohio, requesting that each and every ballot cast in Ohio in the last Presidential election be counted. According to the rules of your body, he requires the support of only one Senator for this objection to be heard.
I urge you to agree to allow him to have the floor. The idea of having every vote in an election is the foundation of American democracy, and Representative Conyers will come before you to advance that ideal. He must be allowed to speak. Is the idea of having every vote count so dangerous that the very discussion of it must be squelched?
For the sake of the credibility of the entire American government both at home and abroad, please be the one to stand up and permit Representative Conyers to speak Thursday.
Thank you.

You can read Michael Moore's open letter on the subject here. If we all get together and inundate our Senators with requests for this to be heard, maybe we can yet salvage the spirit of democracy in our republic. If we can get it straight here, then maybe there's a chance in certain other parts of the world where we are trying to instill democracy with a fair election. I seem to recall somewhere is doing that at the end of this month.

Irrelevant Gloating

Looks like I was right. We're watching the director's commentaries on the original Star Wars trilogies, and I was right. In this entry, I postulated that Darth Vader does not kill Obi-Wan Kenobi at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope, and that the reason Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anaken disappear while other Jedi do not is that Obi-Wan and company don't actually die. Rather, they choose that moment to become one with the Force. In the audio commentaries to A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas makes a point of saying that Obi-Wan does not die--going so far as to backpedal and correct himself when he talks about "Obi-Wan's death"--and he mentions that a theme in the prequel trilogy deals with ascending to the Force. I'll add to my theory that Qui-Gon can be heard but not seen after his death because, though he was killed in battle, much is made that Qui-Gon is more in tune with the Living Force than most other Jedi, so my guess is he is sort of partially ascendant even before he dies.

So there. I was right. So the Jedi disappearing thing is not one of the vital questions of human existence, but nonetheless, I got it right. In four and a half more months when Revenge of the Sith comes out, everyone is going to know, so I don't have much more time to revel in having figured it out myself before everyone else knows what I know now.

Bad Start

Kelly Freas and Will Eisner in the space of three days. This is not starting out to be a good year for comic book artists, particularly in the area of remaining alive.

Crochet Chaos

My grandmother taught me to crochet starting, at my recollection, when I was about 5 or 6. She can do wonders with a skein of yarn. I still have an afghan, a pillow doll, and (I'm not making this up) a purse that folds out into a bassinet for a kewpie doll, complete with matching doll afghan, all of which she lovingly crocheted by hand. This is even more impressive when you consider that my grandmother has 10 grandchildren and what she made for me, she made nine more times over for my cousins.

I never picked up nearly that much skill with a crochet hook. I recall attempting a potholder that turned out to be less square-shaped and more resembling an irregular trapezoid with a lopsided rectangle attached. I can make hollow balls suitable for cat toys, but that's about as far as it goes. While many things I try to crochet tend to double as visual aids for discussions of entropy, they're nothing compared to Dr. Hinke Osinga's crochet pattern modeling actual chaos, created by a computer as an inadvertent byproduct of her studies of a set of math equations describing natural chaotic systems.

A Bear's Natural Habitat: A Studebaker

A Bear's Natural Habitat
Originally uploaded by Penguin Perspectives.

If you've seen The Muppet Movie, this should look familiar. That is Fozzie Bear's actual natural habitat, now ensconced in the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Indiana.

They had to use a Studebaker for that movie. "A Bear's Natural Habitat..." is just not funny with other car makes. Try it: Ford, Oldsmobile, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Kia, Huyndai--Studebaker is the only one that works. OK, Huyndai is kind of funny, but still not as funny as Studebaker.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year's and best wishes for 2005. I've already learned my first lesson: never buy nonalcoholic Spumante. Near-champagne may be near many things, but champagne is not one of them. I don't like the taste of alcohol, so I thought I would try Sutter Home Fre Spumante. Bad idea. It does not have "luscious fruity flavors balanced by zesty acidity" as the website advertises. The closest thing to flavor it has is a vague hint of watered down something, but after half a bottle, I still couldn't get enough flavor molecules to figure out just what was watered down. Next time I try to go for fizzy and festive, I'll go back to the sparkling apple cider.

South Bend Report, Part 3

No Studebaker pilgrimage to South Bend, Indiana, would be complete without dinner at Tippecanoe Place, a steak house that now occupies Tippecanoe, aka chez Studebaker, a 4-story, 40-room mansion built for Clement Studebaker, who later slipped on the grand staircase and died. Any of the 20 fireplaces in the mansion is impressive, but the one in the foyer is surpassed only by the one in Citizen Kane that you could parallel park a Studebaker in. We dined in the library and managed, unlike Clem, to go down the staircase and live.

Nowadays, you can get credit cards with pretty much anything on them. One of ours is the Star Wars Galactic Rewards card (spend $5000 and we can get a pez dispenser), and that happened to be the one we used for dinner. Throughout the whole meal, our waitress gave the distinct impression of being on a triple-dose of Prozac. This woman was mellow in the extreme, right up until she took our bill. When she opened the folder with the card and bill, we heard our overly-mellow waitress shout, "Darth Vader! Cool!" all the way from the hallway. You can also get the card with Yoda.

South Bend Report, Part 2

I promised to tell you all about the chocolate spies. I should explain right now that the South Bend Chocolate Company makes chocolates. Not chocolate. Chocolates. They buy the raw materials, including bulk blocks of chocolate, and make them into all manner of bite-sized confections and fun-shaped bars. They have nothing to do with turning the cacao beans into what we know as chocolate, though the free tour explains how this is done.

We took the Inside Scoop tour of the South Bend Chocolate Company. If you ever get to South Bend, do the Inside Scoop tour, not the free tour (you want the free tour, click here and save driving to Indiana). With the Inside Scoop tour, you get a caramel cashew turtle roughly the size of your standard box turtle, you get to dip your own chocolate spoon, and you get to see the chocolate enrobing machine (cooler than it sounds). When you add in the 10% discount on the chocolates from the gift shop, we actually saved money by paying the $4 tour admission. Our tour group included two middle-aged men we decided were Chocolate Spies, sent by a rival chocolate company to check out SBCC's operations. They kept asking technical questions that were clearly beyond the scope of what the tour guide could be reasonably be expected to answer, like how often they remelt the chocolate to temper it, how they avoid chocolate bloom, and whether they use marble slabs or just steel to spread out the caramels and meltaway centers for slicing. You may think these would be legitimate questions, if a bit technical, to ask on a tour of a chocolate factory, but these guys were just acting sneaky. They had all but no interest in what they saw on the tour. All they wanted to know was what wasn't on the tour because they are trade secrets--things like exactly how the drum agitates to get the chocolate-covered peanuts evenly covered with chocolate.

South Bend Report, Part 1

We spent today in South Bend, Indiana and no, we did not go to see Notre Dame. I saw something so much better than a university best known for something wholly unrelated to academics. Today, I saw a bear's natural habitat. The Studebaker Museum in South Bend has one of the two 1951 Studebaker Champions used in The Muppet Movie, subject of Fozzie Bear's memorable line "A bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker," complete with the remnants of the whacked-out paint job courtesy of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. I'm pretty sure the one I saw today is the one from the second picture in that link. It was the one that was chopped up so that a little person could sit in the trunk and drive the car by way of a camera mounted in the bullet nose, and was used for the wide shots where you see the whole car actually driving with a poly-cotton bear at the wheel. This, incidentally, was one of the main reasons they used a '51 Champion.

Amazing, the power the Muppets have. Fozzie's Studebaker sits probably 30 feet from the Studebaker carriage that Abraham Lincoln took to Ford's Theater on the night he was shot, and I still thought Fozzie's Champion was the neatest thing there.

We also toured the South Bend Chocolate Company and I've now found another job I definitely do not want to have. You know how, in your box of chocolates, each different flavor of creamy filling has a different swirl on the top? Seems that, although some chocolate manufacturers provide you with a decoder ring for figuring out the difference between a raspberry creamy filling (yummy) and an orange creamy filling (ick) before you have to spit one out into your bare hand, the reason for the different swirls is not so you don't accidentally bite into something nasty (again, whose idea was it to put orange creamy filling into perfectly good chocolate?). The real reason they code the chocolates with the swirls is so they know what they're putting into the box when they pack them, given that they can't take a bite out of each one to know if they're packing buttercream-filled or chocolate-filled confections. Which is where my new Job I Do Not Want To Have comes in. The swirls do not get there on their own. Nope, there is a guy whose job, for eight hours a day, is to stand there and manually swirl each chocolate as it comes out of the chocolate-covering machine. He has a set of doohickies that look like bent paperclips and all he does is tap each candy as it rolls by to put the right swirl pattern on the top to match the flavor of creamy filling that went in. I saw it with my own eyes. The guy spends all day just tapping chocolates. And you thought they were just being nice to you with that map.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you all about the Chocolate Spies and Tippicanoe.

Sign of the Times

Baby Boomers must be aging. This year, Vioxx ousted naked women as the most common subject for junk email, at least according to AOL, who provides one of my three email addresses. Channeling spam is far easier than trying to avoid it entirely.

Quick Question

When did they start packing eggs in 8-packs? I was at the grocery store looking for my usual half dozen eggs, and lo and behold all they had was dozen, dozen and a half, and eight.

Foxy Lady

If you've never considered defecting from Microsoft Internet Explorer, you really ought to give it a thought. Believe it or not, there are alternatives. I myself have become a convert to Firefox, the web browser from Mozilla. Firefox is what Netscape became when Netscape decided to throw open the software codes for whoever wanted to take a look and do something more with it. You might think that since any malicious code-writer can look at the code and find its weaknesses, Firefox might be more prone to things like viruses and worms, but in reality it is just the opposite. With so many more eyes looking at the code, Firefox is more secure since more people are finding and fixing problems.

In addition to several technical advantages that make Firefox less buggy and more secure than Internet Explorer, Firefox has features that make web browsing easier for the run-of-the-mill web surfer. My favorite is Tabbed Browsing. In Internet Explorer, if you want more than one website open at a time--for instance, if you're comparison shopping or blogging about something on another website--you have to have each site open in a different window and toggle between them on your taskbar at the bottom of the screen. With Firefox's tabbed browsing, you can keep all the sites open in a single window, each with its own conveniently labeled tab. On paper, toggling between windows and toggling between tabs may not seem all that different, but believe me, the tabs are a lot easier to deal with.

The other great interface advantage Firefox has over Internet Explorer is there is a Google Search built right into the toolbar so you can Google something from anywhere on the web. I've only been using Firefox for a few weeks now, so I haven't found all of the great features yet. Did I mention that Firefox runs faster than Internet Explorer? Or that the popup blocker actually works? Or that when you switch over, it will import all of your bookmarks from Internet Explorer so you don't have to redo them manually?

Click here to learn more about Firefox or download the free Firefox software. Yes, I said free.

Stupid Warning Labels

Went out and bought myself a DustBuster today. Included in the full page of warnings are cautions agains using it to pick up toxic substances, flammables, combustibles, or burning or smoking materials (and, one imagines, if you must pick up flammables or burning materials, don't pick them up at the same time). I've done some really dumb things with appliances in my day, one of which actually ignited the crumbs in the bottom of the toaster, but how dumb do you have to be to vacuum up something flammable with an electric appliance?

I have to walk you through my favorite warning, though. "Do not put any object into unit openings..." which seems sensible except that it comes with a crevice attachment and squeegee designed specifically to be placed in unit openings. The bullet point goes on to say "...keep openings free of dust, lint, hair, and anything that might reduce air flow." Hello! I just bought a freakin' Dust Buster. I think I might bust some dust, lint, or hair with at least one of the openings.

Unwrapped

Here's a New York Times Op-ed that perfectly captures our first experience with out Robosapien, which we are enjoying now that we got it out of the dang-nab-razzafrazza-sunofa box. In essence, we the end consumers are the ultimate losers as manufacturers try to strike a balance between having the products attractively displayed in their packages and keeping said products from being filched. More and more now, that balance appears to be achieved by having an industrial welder permanently attach the product to the box.

Take the Robosapien for instance. If you managed to avoid seeing one in the box (and please tell me how you did that), here's how it goes: they're in a plastic-fronted box the shape of Superman's crest, probably around 18 inches wide at the widest and about 18 inches tall. His remote is suspended behind him. Looks like it should be simple enough to remove. Ha. As soon as we broke through the invisible titanium-reinforced cellophane tape at the top to open the box, we found we were actually looking at a box inside a box. The bottom and sides, to which Robosapien is attached, are their own cardboard entity that, owing to the shape of the box, do not just slide out. Once we shredded the outer box and liberated the inner box and Robosapien, it turns out the toy is trussed up like a rump roast. Nine plastic-coated (scissorproof) wire ties hold it to the box, and one holds the remote in place. These wire ties are twisted into knots that I am certain are not in the Boy Scout manual, with the ends clipped close to the mass of twist coming out the back of the box, making it a task unto itself to even find where to start untying, let alone actually untie it. One of these tie-knot combos would have foiled any would-be shoplifter, but there were ten of them. As I was trying to untwist the ties, I was actually marveling, kid you not, that someone could program a machine to twist these ties up like this, yet so many of the world's problems remain unsolved. Just imagine where the world would be if our resources went somewhere useful.

As they say on the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie commercials, but wait, there's more. Six of the knotted-up wire ties were devoted to affixing Robosapien's feet to the bottom of the box. Not only would three per foot be overkill for any sort of legitimate packaging need, they were threaded through channels in the feet that are designed specifically for that purpose, though not designed wide enough for us the legitimate purchaser to thread the wires, crimped from being knotted up, back through and out.

In spite of all that, we are having fun with our Robosapien. I will issue a warning to anyone who is the new owner of one, though. Ours shipped in the "on" position, so it powered on the minute I put the fourth battery in--while it was still prone on my lap. I nearly needed dry shorts.

Santa Claus is Comin' To Town

And once again, NORAD is tracking him, marking the 50th Santa Tracking Season for the North American Air Defense. Click here for the official NORAD Santa Tracking Map, and links. You can also download videos of Santa's previous stops from that site. The video for the Himalayas, where NORAD has Santa as I write this, includes a very clever plug for kids to eat their vegetables. Those guys are sneaky. They also slip some geography lessons in there.

Kids can also call Santa's hotline toll-free 1-877-HI-NORAD, or 719-474-2111 if you are in the Colorado local area. For anyone wondering, the hotlines are all staffed by volunteers.

Why, you may ask, do the people who are in charge of aerospace defense in the US and Canada track Santa Claus every Christmas Eve? Seems it was the result of a 50-year-old typo. In 1955, a store in Colorado Springs, Colorado (right near Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD and fictional home of the Stargate Command) printed a phone number for kids to call Santa, except they misprinted the phone number and inadvertently directed the kiddies to call the operations hotline for Commander in Chief of the Continental Air Defense, the predecessor of NORAD. Rather than dash Christmas for the kids, the Colonel got in the game and "found" radar information that tracked Santa. The full story from NORAD can be found here.

Bad Penguin News

Apparently a mystery illness, possibly related to diptheria, is threatening the Yellow-Eyed Penguins, who are already having problems enough on their own. The yellow-eyed penguins are the most endangered penguin species, with worldwide population estimated at 5,000 birds. This illness has taken nearly 80% of this year's hatchlings. Never heard of a yellow-eyed penguin? Here are some photos, with a link to yellow-eyed penguin info.

I'm not making this up

Volunteer firefighters in Helsinki, Finland inadvertently set fire to their sauna. It gets better. The volunteer firefighters, after setting fire to their sauna, could not extinguish the fire.

So, attention everyone in Finland: make sure your extinguishers and fire sprinkler systems are in working order.

Here's the Reuters article.

Reindeer Watch

In the next couple weeks, the International Space Station will be visible over most of the US in the wee hours of the morning. It will look like a fast-moving star low on the horizon--or possibly a souped-up, glowing sleigh with reindeer. To check out times and sky coordinates for your location, click here and find a city near you on the list. There is also an applet for those who aren't near a city on the list but know their latitude, longitude, and elevation. Sighting windows range from less than a minute up to 3 minutes in my neck of the woods, so you'll want to know when and where you're looking.

Usually, I don't say bad things about NASA since I like space flight, but I'll make an exception today. Here is the heading on the list of station sightings for Toledo:

THE FOLLOWING ISS SIGHTINGS ARE POSSIBLE FROM MON DEC 20 TO SAT JAN 32


Good gravy, people! How did we get a man on the moon if NASA itself doesn't notice that there is no January 32? Even if there were, it would be a Tuesday this coming January.

Etiquette Question

I understand that waiting in line at the bank is inevitable. I once had to wait in line at the bank when the only two people there were me and the teller. As a rule, the bank I go to has one teller at the drive-through window, one or two at the counter, and five or six other tellers milling about, for all I know doing legitimate bank teller things. So the question comes, when I get to the front of the line at the bank, where is the appropriate place to look?

I don't want to stare at the tellers because by the time I get to the front of the line, try as I might I can't wipe that "So do you want to take my deposit or what?" look off my face. On the other hand, there is only so long I can feign interest in signs advertising CD interest rates and home equity lines of credit, and I worry that if the security cameras see me staring at my deposit slip for that long, they'll think I'm spell checking the holdup note.

Any ideas?

Santa, Pack Extra Thermal Underwear

I just checked the weather forecast. Saturday is supposed to be low of 0 and high of 7. Fahrenheit. May not be a white Christmas, but it looks to be freakin' cold.

Making Lemonade

August J. Pollak is right. This is a brilliant idea. Planned Parenthood seems to have two constants: a shortage of funding and a surplus of protesters. Ten Planned Parenthood clinics have found an elegant solution to both problems at the same time. They've turned the daily pickets of their clinics into a sort of charity walkathon. Supporters pledge anywhere between 25 cents and $1 per picketer, and are billed monthly based on the number of picketers who show up to march outside the clinic. The mere act of protesting Planned Parenthood raises more money for Planned Parenthood, and well-meaning protesters who bring their kids to protest with them double the donation or more, as the children are counted, too. So far, the program at the Planned Parenthood of Central Texas has raised $18,000 for that clinic's patient assistance program, which helps provide care for patients who cannot pay the full cost of the care they receive.

Planned Parenthood has a bit of a reputation for being the target of protesters, presumably because of some of the services they offer. I myself have been a patient of Planned Parenthood for four years and have never in my life had either a sexually transmitted infection or an unwanted pregnancy (or a wanted one for that matter). Just by reading the newspapers, one might not notice that they also offer comprehensive women's health care, even for women who are not insured or who cannot afford health care. I've been in and out of health insurance these past few years, and the Planned Parenthood of Northwest Ohio clinic has always given me consistent, professional health care, and frankly they keep better tabs on my overall health than my alleged primary care physician. The PA at Planned Parenthood was the one who caught my borderline hypertension and helped me get it under control before it became problematic, and they show more interest in monitoring my meds (not just the Depo they provide) than my primary care physician does.

Their office is in a medical complex along with the kidney dialysis center and a few private physicians' practices, so I've never encountered protesters. I can't imagine having to run a gauntlet of protesters four time a year just so I can get birth control and a Pap Smear. A pelvic exam is annoying enough without people accusing you of being a morally depraved slut. Some of us going into the Planned Parenthood clinics are just responsible married women who realize we have no business having children at this point in our lives.

Person of the Year

So George W. Bush is Time Magazine's Person of the Year. I agree. However, let's be clear: Person of the Year is not an honor accorded to the best person, merely a naming of the most important person, news-wise. Time named Bush Person of the Year, not Employee of the Month.

Previous persons of the year have included Josef Stalin (1939 and 1942), Nikita Kruschev (1957), Adolph Hitler (1938), Ayatollah Khomeni (1979), and Kenneth Starr (1998). In nine years, Time did not even narrow it down more to more than a broad group: the American Fighting Man/Our Troops (1950, 2003), Hungarian Freedom Fighter (1956), U.S. Scientists (1960), Twenty-five and Under (1966), The Middle Americans (1969), American Women (1975), The Peacemakers (1993), and The Whistleblowers (2002).

Hey, twice they named inanimate objects: The computer (1982) and Endangered Earth (1988).

Truffle Trouble

If you spend $52,000 on a fungus, wouldn't you make sure the darned thing didn't rot? A London restaurant bought the most expensive truffle ever, then it went bad in a safe.

Reuters reports here. The said a requiem over the fungus before they buried it.

Here's a number you don't hear much about...

Total US military casualties in Iraq (dead and wounded): 11,148

The more tired we all become of hearing these statistics, the more important it becomes to keep current on them, for if we tune out the cost of war, we won't notice the point where the benefits outweigh those costs.

I was a little surprised to find out that 45.4% of US fatalities are from "blue states," and 52.7% are from "red states." The other 1.9% are from US territories or protectorates, which don't get to be classified as red or blue.

All the numbers come from this website,. which crunches the numbers from the Department of Defense and presents them in nicely readable charts and graphs.

Cat Time

Our kitten Chakaal has taken begging for cat treats to a whole new level. The other cats will sit on my stomach and meow or look expectantly and wait for me to give them some. Chakaal seems to be taking a more proactive approach. Last night, she hopped onto the headboard where we keep a pouch of kitty treats, made a beeline for the treats, grabbed the pouch, and started trying to claw and chew her way in.

Before this latest stunt, she had figured out that, though I may have a treat or two in my hand for her, the real action is in the bag. I would pick one out for her, and she would ignore that one and try to stick her face in the bag to get at the big stash. If this cat gets much smarter, we're all in trouble. Thankfully, the humans of the house still have a reach advantage and opposable thumbs

Spell Check

Forget No Child Left Behind. Let's start with No White House Powerpoint Programmer Left Behind. For the past two days, Bush has been holding a conference at the White House to highlight his economic agenda. Usually, Bush's photo-ops have him surrounded by some sort of slogan, and this one was no different. OK, maybe a little different, since they managed to spell "Mission Accomplished" correctly. Yesterday, George W. Bush did a panel discussion standing behind a television monitor blazing, "Financial Challanges for Today and Tomorrow."

I can't find a photo of it to link to. The official White House website seems to have cropped the offending monitor out of the photo. Here's the link to the Reuters article.

Star Wars

We've spent $80 Billion dollars on this antiballistic missile defense shield, a weapons system that tests so far show that if an enemy calls ahead to tell us the exact time and trajectory of the missile launch, schedules an attack for perfect weather, and lights up the projectile like a Christmas tree, has a 5 in 9 chance of hitting the target. This latest test seems to have shown that we've backslid technologically and can't get the daggum missile out of the daggum silo.

$20 Billion more and we could have just paid off Dr. Evil.

Pop Science Quiz

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has this 10-question quiz to see how well you know your science from your science fiction. I got 9 out of 10. Dang Streptococcus mitis. Who knew?

New Year's Eve, Live with Regis?

Word from the Associated Press is that Regis Philbin will be hosting ABC's New Year's Eve coverage from Times Square, which for longer than I have been alive has been Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, except that Dick Clark had a mild stroke last week.

Grooism of the Day?

I'm getting ready to move in a couple months, which necessitates the hiring of a replacement for me at work. Yesterday, on my day off, they brought in some applicants to test their computer skills, and one of the tests was apparently making mailing labels in MS Word using data in an MS Access database. The database they chose to use for this was the one I created to track the information for every student the school has ever had, which I use for things like address labels, as well as compiling cumulative graduation and placement rates, licensure rates by instructor, enrollment reporting for at least three agencies with three sets of rules for enrollment reporting, and, well, you get the picture. Apparently no one thought to have these applicants work on a copy of my database. No, to see if anyone was exaggerating and did not have the computer skills advertised on their resume, they let them loose on the only existing copy of a database that has taken me all told several months of work to compile and enter.

As with most good Grooisms, you can probably guess where this is going. I left Thursday with 200+ entries. I came to work this morning to find 84.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Researchers at the State University of New York at Stonybrook have a new study coming out showing that guys who want to father children someday may want to reconsider that laptop computer, or at least the use of it on the lap. Click here to read the details, which I must warn you involve the phrases "scrotal hyperthermia" and "sperm perameters."

Mercifully, No Gold Star

Army Specialist Matthew T. Drake is the sole survivor of a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. Though he survived the attack, it left him severely wounded. I'm not privy to the details of his medical condition, but I understand he is in the shape you might expect from someone described as "the only one who got out alive." He's recovering at an Army hospital stateside now, but the recovery is expected to be long. Very long.

His mother is a student at the massage therapy school where I work, and she's gone to be at her son's bedside, along with Matthew's father, as he recovers from his wounds. Her classmates are raising money to help out with the expenses that are not covered by the Army. On January 15, they'll be giving massages for donations to the Matthew T. Drake Fund. If you're not local to get the massage, they'll still take your donations, and I personally guarantee that every cent is going to the fund to pay for Matthew and his family's expenses during his recovery. If you want to chip a few dollars in, drop me a line and I'll put you in touch with the students organizing the fund-raising.

For those who are a little confused by the title, Gold Star Mothers are women who have lost a child in combat.

Must-Read

Every so often, I plug articles over on Salon.com, even though it is a paid subscription site. You can get a one-day pass by watching a short ad. Today, the ad is for Absolut vodka.

If ever there was an article worth sitting through an advertisement for, today's headline from the News and Politics section is it. Click here to read it.

Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford is a 30-year veteran of the military (Coast Guard, Army, and Navy). He was stationed in Samarra, Iraq with the California National Guard 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion last June when he approached his commanding officer with a request for a formal investigation of five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees he had witnessed. According to him and what the article classifies as a "credible witness," he was strapped to a gurney and medevac'd to Germany after a psyciatrist was intimidated into diagnosing him with combat fatigue, and without the proper orders to remove him from the theater. All subsequent psychiatric evaluations have found him perfectly healthy, and he has since been honorably discharged and retired.

As of now, this rests on the word of the man and one witness. There is no guarantee this is true, but if it is even a tiny bit true and unit commanders are actively trying to cover up mistreatment of prisoners, well, that is just a scary proposition.

Tree Time

Click here for your guide to which conifer you want to chop down and mount in your living room.

Ain't Technology Grand?

Live within 10-50 miles of a military base? Can't open your garage door? It might not be a coincidence. Seems that something along the lines of 90% of remote-control garage door openers operate on a frequency -390 megahertz- owned by the U.S. military, but until recently not used by them very often. Note I said "until recently." Now, the military is changing 125 military bases over to radio systems on the 390 mHz frequency. If you're wondering by now why your garage door opener uses a military band, small devices like that are legally permitted to because they not likely to cause interference and jam the military radio signals. However, the feeling is not mutual. Military radio signals are hefty enough to jam garage door openers in the vicinity.

Here's the deal: for around $60, you can replace the parts so your garage door opener operates on a different frequency. For around $120, a technician can do the same thing. For $150-$250, you can replace your entire garage door opener (check the frequency on the new one first!). Or, for free, you can do what I did for years growing up and hop out of the car, unlock the garage door, and heave the door open yourself. The minute or so it takes to do that, you can save by skipping a couple reps on your biceps curls.

Pointsettia Planning

It's that time of year again. I need to start planning where to put this year's Killer Pointsettia. To recap, in previous years, the pointsettia my office receives from Healthy Living News has killed the potted ivy and the copier. We should be getting this year's KP this week or next. I'm open to suggestions as to which piece of office equipment gets axed this year.

Spell Check

Last night, I was on the phone with my sister (Ann O.), and she was telling me about their big plans with the kids for this weekend, which are supposed to be a surpise, so key words were being spelled out. The children are in first grade and kindergarten and nine months old, so that trick still works for the time being. The conversation went something like:

HER: Then we are going to take the T-R-A-I-N to get a Christmas tree and have some-- [long pause]
ME: C-O-C-A
HER: Is that right?
ME: I mean C-O-C-O-A. Wait a minute! Why am I spelling things? I'm on the phone. They can't hear me.

Just your funny moment of the day.

Hey, Blitzen! We Don't Serve Your Kind Here

If Santa Claus is coming to town in Raleigh, he had better find an alternate mode of sleigh propulsion. Reindeer cannot cross state lines into North Carolina this holiday season. Other states with reindeer travel restrictions this season include Tennessee, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Mississippi and Minnesota.

The restrictions on reindeer transport are a means to limit the spread of Mad Reindeer Disease (technically called chronic wasting disease). Here's the full article.

Bit o' This 'n' That

I know, I know. I said I was only neglecting you all for November, and here it is December 3 and I'm still not back to daily posting. There's no excuse for that. So here's the scoop on a few random odds and ends:

Not Rosie Jetson Yet
We purchased a robotic vacuum over Thanksgiving weekend. Anyone who has either lived with me or entered anywhere I am responsible for cleaning will understand why. On or near Tuesday, we will be getting a replacement for our robotic vacuum, since this one tends to vacuum for about 2 feet, then starts flashing its "check brush" light and motoring around randomly without vacuuming for another couple minutes before it just up and quits. I told the customer service phone rep that if I were a robot whose sole purpose was to clean up the humans' messes, I'd be tempermental, too. He put it down to a faulty sensor.

Talking Points
We're preparing for a move at the end of February, from northwest Ohio to somewhere I am told is more central-Ohio-ish. So far, I have given notice to my employer and landlord, and the responses from my boss, coworkers, and property manager have all been, and I quote, "You can't move!" I understand my boss and coworkers, because apparently I am either efficient or have so thoroughly converted the files to my oddball system that no one else can find things. The property manager at my apartment complex, on the other hand, now faces a vacant two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building with no elevator in a complex that, by her own admission, already has no shortage of vacant two bedroom apartments. Sorry, lady. We're not sticking around just so you don't have to find someone else to rent to.

Forget Chewing Gum, I'm Still at Walk
I'm learning how to play Halo. Until now, my video gaming has been pretty much restricted to the million variations of Tetris, the Worms series, and Duck Hunt (death to all 8-bit waterfowl!). What do all these games have in common? You don't have to walk. Worms World Blast lets you wiggle the invertebrates over a 2-D world to gain a better position for hurling the sheep at the enemy worms, but that is pretty much a left-or-right issue. Halo, on the other hand, involves actual 3D movement of a character while you are trying to shoot the enemy aliens. They're pretty safe for now. I can barely figure out how to walk. If I manage to actually shoot an alien or get where I need to go, that's pure coincidence.

Insert Handel Music Here

Six hours, 23 minutes left until the midnight cutoff date. Word count:

50,003!

Permit me to woo-hoo at this point.

I still want to work in a little bit more, part as a cushion, and part because there is still one part that needs some more said. But I made it to 50,000 in a month.

Quicky update

Seven hours until midnight and current word count is 49, 294. I have the cats' automated cat toy going so they won't bother me, and except for a run out for pizza in about a half hour, I'll be glued to the keyboard until I get those other 706 words out. I still have four spots with dicey transitions and two plot points to hammer home, so I should have at least enough to say.

See you again on the other side of 50,000.

NaNoWriMo Update

Current word count: 47,048. One day left, and just under 3,000 words to go. I think I can make it.

What I Did This Weekend...

We went to the Mid-Ohio Con this weekend. Later in the week, after I figure out how to post photos to this site, I will put up the photo someone took the first morning. Stick around. It's worth the wait.

NaNoWriMo Update: 43,057.

Do As I Say...

Social movements really need to check out the credentials of their high-profile advocates. Whatever you may think of the push to strengthen marriage by legally defining it as a union of a man and a woman, I'm not sure this guy should really be considered the go-to guy on strengthening marriage.

He spearheaded the successful effort to put a no-same-sex-marriage amendment into the Ohio state constitution. Granted, he sure does know a lot about marriage between a man and a woman. He's had three of them so far.

NaNoWriMo Update

Word Count: 37,340

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving. I think I finally got the perfect sweet potato/mini marshmallow ratio: five medium-small sweet potatoes and a bag and a half of mini marshmallows. Unfortunately, I neglected to consider pan size and the fact that mini marshmallows expand when heated. Now the inside of my oven is coated with globs of melted mini marshmallows that seem to have instantly fused to the oven surface. I was meaning to run a clean cycle anyway.

NaNoWriMo Update

Word Count: 30,042. Under 20,000 words left. It's all downhill from here. 20,000 words is only about 3,000 words a day from now until the end of the month. I'm planning on binging on the holiday weekend, and who knows? I might end up ahead of schedule. Here's to hoping.

Turkey Tech Support

For all of your poultry-roasting tech support needs, call 1-800-BUTTERBALL or email BBTurkeyCo@aol.com. The Turkey Line is staffed 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Central Time tomorrow and Wednesday, and if you find yourself in a turkey jam (not to be confused with cranberry sauce) on Turkey Day Proper, your salvation will be answering the phones from 6 a.m.-6 p.m. Central Time. Hours through December 25 can be found here. Before you call with any of the following questions check out Turkey FAQs here:

How much turkey should I buy?
Should I buy a fresh or frozen turkey?
What's the best way to thaw a turkey?
How do I safely handle turkey?
What's the proper way to stuff a turkey?
What's the best way to roast a turkey?
What do I need to do to a turkey just before roasting it?
Where does the meat thermometer go?
How do I know when the turkey is done?
How do I store leftover turkey properly?

My answers to those questions are, in order: as much as you need, as long as it's a dead turkey, very carefully, shove a tasty breadlike substance down its neck and up its rear, in the oven, make sure you removed the giblet pack, in the turkey, when the smoke detector goes off, and in your stomach. Butterball provides much more helpful answers, including a Turkey Calculator for that first question.

The FAQ page also has a link to an instructional video on how to thaw a turkey, for those who find their life in not complete without streaming a video of a woman putting a turkey in a refrigerator.

NaNoWriMo Update

Word count: 23,635. Two thirds of the way through the month, and I'm almost at the halfway mark. That does make 13,000 in half the time it took for the first 10,000. If that level of exponential growth continues, I may yet make it.

The excerpt I originally posted to Tesla's Pigeons as the opening is now on Page 8.

Follow the Money...

Yesterday, CNN had a story in their morning entertainment news briefs about some recent acquisitions by the Smithsonian. Well, actually the segment was all about how the Smithsonian has acquired the "puffy shirt" from an episode of Seinfeld. In the last 10 seconds of the story, they offhandedly remarked that the Smithsonian has also been given Kermit the Frog.

If I recall, my immediate reaction to that story was to yell to Elie, who was combing his hair in the bathroom, "The Smithsonian got Kermit, and CNN leads off with Seinfeld's puffy shirt?!?!"

I'm biased given that I never really liked Seinfeld (and I have seen enough episodes to make an informed judgement), whereas I can't fathom anyone not liking the Muppets. Still, when you weigh a prop from one episode of a popular sitcom that ran for nine seasons against the flagship Muppet, who has been a cultural icon since 1955 (or 1969, depending on whether you date him from his first appearance or first appearance where is definitely a frog), I don't think there's really much of a question of which is the most broadly important to American culture. Seinfeld may have had a big audience as a sitcom on NBC in the 90's and a popular following in syndication, but Kermit's appeal runs the gamut from Sesame Street all the way to the very adult humor of The Muppet Show. It's Kermit--do I really need to say anything more?

Dig a little deeper, though, and I found something that makes one think that the relative importance of Kermit and the puffy shirt might not have had much to do with CNN's choice of which Smithsonian acquisition to feature in that segment. From what I can tell judging by the list of affiliate websites of The New Official Homepage of the Muppets (thanks ME for a well timed link to that), Muppet publicity, if not the Muppets themselves, is now controlled by Disney, which is part of the ABC media conglomerate, which is not CNN's parent company. CNN's parent company is AOLTimeWarner, which recently signed a deal with Columbia TriStar (part of Sony) to help promote the forthcoming DVD release of Seinfeld Seasons 1-3. Things start to make sense now.

I'm not naive enough to think that corporate ties don't influence the information we get through various sources, but it is still disheartening to see it happen so blatantly. And to Kermit.

Ethics in the light of DeLay

New rules for the House Republicans. Now, a felony indictment is no reason to lose your leadership position. Used to be that if a Republican in a leadership position--say committee chair or, I don't know, House Majority Leader--got indicted, whether it be state or federal charges, they automatically lost their leadership post. They didn't necessarily lose their job, but the leadership position was definitely out if there was even a legally files suspicion of wrongdoing.

Now, with the new rules, a committee will have 30 legislative days to review an indictment and decide if they should recommend the indictee should step aside. Because, hey, maybe a federal indictment doesn't necessarily mean you aren't fit to lead.

So, why the sudden change of heart and/or ethical standards? Three of DeLays "political associates" have been indicted so far in connection with some alleged campaign finance irregularities. While he himself has not been indicted, he helped create the Political Action Committee involved in the questionable activity. He's also been "rebuked" by the ethics committee for appearing to link donations with legislation, and for improper use of federal aviation authorities to intervene in a state matter. But apparently that is all the product of an overzealous Democrat prosecutor who is out to make a name for himself by taking down the House Majority Leader, and he must be insulated from those sorts of partisan attacks.

Typo

Corrected a typo in the previous entry. Usually my legions of fearless readers will point out my errors--well enough you should, too, given what I do. However, I just noticed that I had written "...insert in the turnkey..." Just another reason why not to trust spellcheckers.

Turkey Countdown

Nine days til turkey day. Time to start cleaning out the fridge to make room for the defrosting bird. I'm cheating this year and only making a turkey breast roast, not the whole bird. I am still making the full spread with stuffing, homemade mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes with the marshmallows on top.

And for those of you who don't like the adventure of scooping steaming stuffing out of your poultry's body cavities, here's your answer: the stuffing cage. It's a metal cage shaped like the inside of a turkey. Simply fill with stuffing, insert up the turkey like a giant breadcrumb suppository, and remove when bird is done. The only flaw I can find: it appears to be one-size-fits-all. I'm not 100% certain, but I'd think that a 24-pound bird might have a larger body cavity than a 10-pounder.

Grooism, Part 2

Thanks for all the suggestions to use acetone nail polish remover to get superglue off skin. Apparently my particular brand of stupid is not uncommon, as the instructions for removing superglue from human flesh are printed right on the tube.

However, this wouldn't be Penguin Perspectives if there weren't a final irony to cap off this whole adventure. I do have nail polish remover, in a bottle under my bathroom sink clearly labelled "Non-Acetone Nail Polish Remover."

NaNoWriMo Update

Word count: 11,006, and I've got the ending worked out. I'll be posting another excerpt this weekend.

Grooism of the Day

Since Mr. Grooism is on hiatus, it falls to me to recount the Grooism of the Day. For those of you just joining us here, a Grooism is defined as "an act so stupid your remaining brain cells attempt suicide out of the sheer embarrassment of being associated with neurons that would let you do that." Paradoxically, it also triggers a biological need to tell people what you've done.

I got a run in my pantyhose at work this morning. I had neither nail polish nor hairspray (for the non-pantyhose-wearers in the audience, nail polish and hairspray are the most common ways to stop a pantyhose run from spreading). However, I did have superglue in the office supply closet, which some part of my brain obviously thought would work pretty much like nail polish for fixing the run. No part of my brain considered that liquid superglue is much runnier than nail polish and wouldn't just stick to the nylons. So, even though the superglue ran right through, I thought was still doing OK by engaging both hands to hold the pantyhose away from the pool of superglue on my leg. Then the phone rang.

If you thought that the stupidest part of this was going to be that I superglued my pantyhose to my leg, you are a rank amateur in the realm of Grooisms. For, you see, once you superglue your undergarments to your body, your first instinct is to try to undo what you have done--by pulling. I found out the hard way that the weak link in the chain of pantyhose-superglue-human skin is human skin. When one yanks at that particular combination, one does not so much remove the pantyhose from the skin as remove the first three layers of skin from the leg, leaving it attached to the pantyhose to chafe at the raw area of flesh for the rest of the workday. On top of all that, I still have a half-dollar sized blob of dried superglue on my leg, and it itches.

NaNoWriMo Update

Total word count: 7,617. I'm still determined to make it.

NaNoWriMo

I've posted another excerpt over at my NaNoWriMo blog. Also, I'm trying to decide between about three ways it can end. You can read the options and put your two cents in over at Tesla's Pigeons.

Current word count: 6,767.

That Darn Swiss Army

As if the toothpick, bottle opener, scissors, corkscrew, nail file, and blade weren't useful enough, now you can get a Swiss Army Knife with a USB port (dang things are universal, aren't they?). Specifically, it has either a 64 MB or 128MB flash drive. They've thought of everything, haven't they?

For What It's Worth

A cartogram is a map in which geography distorted to show relative density of something, most often population. They're fun. Not only do they look like you're looking at a funhouse mirror, but they can also be a lot more helpful than standard geographic maps in some instances. For instance:

Click here to see a standard-geography map of the most recent election then click here to see a cartogram of the electoral map, in which state size is weighted for population.

In addition to the above cartograms, Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan worked out a cartogram for county-by-county results and a county-by-county cartogram using shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters per candidate (counties that a candidate won by a larger margin are more blue or red). That last one should be the most interesting. As you can plainly see by going back to this shaded map of counties, there are some really blue counties in the "red states" and some decidedly red counties in the "blue states," but much of the country is more purple than anything.

Turns out that, like so many things about America, it's not as simple as "blue on the edges, red in the middle." Not everyone in (insert state that was for the guy you were against) is a moron for voting for (insert name of guy running against the guy you voted for).

-with thanks to Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman for taking the time to make the cartograms linked to. To read their entire discussion of these cartograms, click here.

The People Have Spoken

I'm declaring an official end to the licking of political wounds here. I'm not asking for "the healing" or some form of associated tripe. I'm just asking to get on with it. As tired as I had become of the pre-election nastiness after several months, I'm tired of this post-election sniveling even more after only four days. Fact is, the guy I wanted more than the other guy wasn't as popular. Our weird little political system boils down to a popularity contest (we can hope that popularity is based on ideas and policy, but there's no requirement that it is), and the person I wasn't pulling for was more popular. Whatever anyone thinks of how he got in the first time, a majority wants to keep him. There may have been some irregularities in the voting, but the Republicans did not beam down 51% of the electorate from Pluto. I may not understand why, but people out there like Bush. Most of them aren't stupid (yes, there are idiots on both sides); they have different priorities than I do and different ways of coming to a decision. Again, there are no regulations how a voter comes to his or her decision. However it happens, it happened, and that's the way it is.

Here's an interesting commentary in Salon (requires paid subscription or 15 seconds of your time to watch an ad) discussing why Kerry supporters were so surprised Bush won. We all get the impression that our guy is going to win because we travel in circles of people who believe like we do. Since we don't have contact people with differing opinions in our daily lives, and tend to stick to reading material that reinforces our views rather than challenging them, we get the impression that everyone must agree with us, which is not the case (on either side--a 3 million vote margin in a country with an overall population of 294 million is enough to give Bush a majority of the vote, but hardly adds up to universal support).

A side note: both sides got nasty these past few months. Larry, I agree that a 12-year-old punching a cardboard Kerry and expressing homicidal urges toward a sitting senator does not reflect well on the character of Bush supporters. On the other hand, in the past couple weeks, I saw at least five defaced Bush-Cheney signs. Nary a defaced Kerry-Edwards sign to be found. Presuming that the defacement was from actual Kerry-Edwards supporters and not the brainchild of someone wanting to portray Kerry-Edwards supporters as childish vandals, that doesn't exactly speak well of them, either.

So You Want to Move to Canada

I don't plan on fleeing Northward myself. Politics aside, I've got too much going here. However, if you're curious to see if Canada would even take you, here's a sample entrance exam. You have to get 67 to pass. I scored 74. Six years of French helped.

Segway

Part of the FAO Schwartz catalog description of the Segway: "Not available for shipment to Texas." Any chance it has anything to do with this picture?

UPSide Down Logic

Maybe I'm being picky. First, we had a few packages disappear off our doorstep, so our UPS driver stopped leaving our packages at the door and started delivering them to the leasing office. Problem was, he/she forgot to leave us a notice that we had a package delivered. Now, he/she has resumed doorstep delivery. As a precaution against the package thefts that started this whole thing, whoever is delivering our packages started leaving them under our doormat. That does hide the small flat packages. However, yesterday, I came home to find my doormat draped neatly over a big honkin' box from Amazon.com. The delivery person seems to have confused a worn pink carpet sample for the Cloak of Invisibility.

In Penguin-Based News

At the grocery store today, I happened to notice a new product: Little Penguin wines, named for the Little Blue penguin native to Australia (coincidentally, where the wines are native to). The fairy penguin wines come in chardonnay, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and shiraz.

The website also contains some penguin amusements you can see by clicking here. The Penguin Party Pics do not, as far as I can tell, contain any pictures of actual penguins. However, I did find the Top 4 Penguin Party Games list and Penguin Personals to be worth at least a chuckle. And you can download a screen saver of penguins stomping grapes over here.

Mark Your Calendars

In March, 2005, the US Postal Service will roll out its commemorative Muppet stamps. Gracing our bills will be Kermit, Fozzy. Sam The Eagle, Miss Piggy, Statler and Waldorf, The Swedish Chef (for personal reasons, my favorite), Animal, Beaker (my second favorite) and Honeydew, Rolf, and Gonzo and Camilla. Get a look at them here.

Elie and Arnold, scroll down in that article until you get to the stamps listed for release in "Late summer or early fall." I think you'll find something there that will interest you.

NaNoWriMo Update, Day 3

Total word count: 2,003. Only 47,997 to go. Click here for the full update and an excerpt from today's output.

My Reaction

I've been searching for a word all day and I think I finally found it. I'm stunned. Cattle-on-the-way-to-the-Big-Mac-factory stunned. I've been wrong in elections before, but never this wrong. As one of the instructors at work today pondered, "Am I really that far out of mainstream?"

I just don't get it. How could this happen? Really, if any of you out there can explain why an actual honest-to-God majority of people decided to vote for George W. Bush, I'm ready to listen. He's the President of my country and I accept him as such, but I would really appreciate some help understanding what about that man and his policies makes 51% of the electorate want him to be in charge.

Report from the Ohio Electoral Front

My vote went off without a hitch. At 3:30 p.m., there wasn't even a line worth mentioning, though they were two poll workers short. My polling place did not have any challengers there--though I have heard other polling places in my area did--so I didn't get hassled about the typo on my registration. I had my cheat sheet with me so I made absolutely sure I voted for the intended person in every race. The whole thing could not have gone smoother.

My polling place uses the optical scan ballots (fill in the oval with a #2 pencil), which of all the types are probably the least error-prone. However, I must say, could they maybe redesign the big ol' box that sucks up the ballots for scanning? That thing looks way too much like a paper shredder. The poll workers assure me it isn't.

Here Goes Nothing...

Today is the day. I have my list of whom and what I plan to vote for, and I'll be stopping by my polling place after work this afternoon to cast the official vote. I'm a bit nervous, though. The courts have been going back and forth over whether Republican challengers can be inside polling places to challenge the validity of voter registrations in Ohio. This morning, I see they're back to "yes." I'm a little concerned that this afternoon I'm going to have to face one of them down to argue for my ballot because some clerk entered my voter registration as "Jane Harriett." Those of you who type this web address frequently (or, alternately, gave birth to me and/or had some part in the naming process) will note that my name is not Jane. Close, but not quite. I thought the rolls had been corrected last time the error was caught at the polling place, so I stupidly neglected to re-register to correct the little problem. They've never given me trouble at my polling place over it before, as the polling place is staffed by kind retired women who understand clerical errors. We'll see if living in a swing state and having voted in the Democratic primary changes that. I hope not.

NaNoWriMo Day 1

The official word count for the day is 1,115. Check Tesla's Pigeons for details.

Happy November

It's midnight here, and National Novel Writing Month has officially begun. Entries here will probably be shorter for the next month while I work toward the NaNoWriMo goal of a 50,000 word novel by 11:59 p.m. November 30. Exerpts of my novel-in-progress will be posted at www.teslaspigeons.blogspot.com. I'll be posting a running tab of my word count here periodically so you all can get on me to finish. 50,000 words in a month works out to 1667 words a day.

I'll try to keep up at least short postings here throughout the month, too, so you all don't feel too neglected.