Jerry Garcia is our Pediatrician

Yesterday I took my daughter to see the doctor. The doctor is a very nice person and wants to help. Unfortunately, "help" in doctor terms is always one of two things: drugs or specialists. My daughter was having some trouble keeping up at school. The doctor's solution? Drugs. Or specialists. Or specialists with drugs. But mostly just drugs.

What my daughter really needs is more parental help. I just changed my job at work and it will give me much greater flexibility to take time off to help her with her schoolwork. That option was not offered by the doctor. Just drugs. As I left, I felt like we had just seen Jerry Garcia.

Problems in school, eh? Well, take some of these! Snort a line of this! Take a toke of that! Pop a few of those! Try this syringe! It's full of good stuff, man!
I opted for the parenting instead.

Foodblogging

Last week, our Nun of the Above posted a recipe for asparagus with a garlic-lemon sauce. It looked delicious, so last Sunday I decided to build a meal around it. I went for my favorite cookbook, Terry Thomspon's Cajun-Creole Cooking and went back to a recipe I tried before, Rib Eye Steaks with Garlic-Mushroom Sauce. I fried some potatoes and onions with garlic in a separate pan as well.

Because I have derived so much pleasure from Ms. Thompson's cookbook over the years, I won't post her recipe, I'll just leave you with that link to her book. Here are some photos to make you hungry.

The steaks are pan fried, not grilled. I did them for 7 minutes on a side. I wish I had done 6. They were a little overdone.

The mushrooms and garlic cloves are browned and then cooked in beef stock and later in burgundy.

Here are the 'shrooms and garlic cloves after adding the burgundy. It reduced to a lovely caramel. Again, I cooked it a little too long and ended up with carmelized mushrooms instead of a more liquid gravy. It was still delicious, though.

Sister Scribbit and family, are you guys ready for dinner?
The cooking music? Why, it was Louis Prima, of course!

Rainy Day Sunset

Sunsets, like children, change dramatically as they get older. Tonight we had some thunder, lightning and rain. By sunset the rain was gone for the most part, leaving scenes like these, shown in the order in which they were taken.

Video Stimulation and Society, Part II

A short while ago I wondered about the long-term effects on society of high levels of video stimulation of society. I've spent some time researching this and have come up with blanks. What I'm sure of is that it is almost universally negative.

Despite occasional studies indicating no correlation between TV and social problems, the vast majority of them show that there are indeed links between TV and video games and problems in individuals. Obesity, violence and attention spans are the most common problems cited. I don't think those can be disputed.

What's missing is a picture of the future where almost all of the population has lived with many hours a day of video stimulation. What does the world look like when almost no one has a long attention span? What kinds of jobs will go begging?

I'm still muddling around with this one.

Trans-Specied Animals

Kukka-Maria has the full story. Hysterical!

Surf Photos Today, Blogging Tomorrow

HI Surf Advisory is da kine.

Unusual Natural Beauty

Today I have some photos of an unusually beautiful specimen from the natural world.


And the daisy's not bad, either!

Actually, the daisy is pretty rare. This is my daisy mom and she's decided to put out a twin flower. Click on any of these images for a larger view.


I've never seen one of these. The flowers are both almost perfectly formed, with the only flaw being right at the point of twinning.



I'll be collecting seeds from her again to grow still more daisies. Last weekend I brought in a load of compost for my barren front yard. This weekend I'll be rototilling it and I've got an area, perhaps several, set aside more beds of daisies, all of which will have come from this one. She and her daughters will take over the world!

Err, well, maybe not the world. Maybe just my flower beds.

Heavy Seas

I was scrounging around YouTube for videos of sailboats rounding Cape Horn when I came across this one.

Bleeeeaaaauuuuugggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Leftovers

It's been too murky around here for me to get a decent sunset shot, so all I have are leftovers. Here's one from the series I took for the Ingraham Bridge Sunset post. In that series, the sky changed so dramatically over about 30 minutes that I thought putting the pictures together in the same post would be jarring. Click on the photo. I think you'll really like the larger version.

WOGlet, Tadpole Style

Joe Katzman and his wife went out of their way to save some drought-endangered amphibians.

The tadpoles... they've hatched out, too, but the heat isn't doing them a lot of favours. My sweetie and I were out walking in our area last week, when we spotted a small roadside ditch filled with water. Sure enough, it was full of tadpoles. This much we knew: unless it rained, soon, they were all going to die. "We have to rescue them" she said.

And of course they did just that.

You go, Joe! Read the whole thing.

Sometimes I find little bits like this one on the blogs, things that are too small for a standard World of Good (WOG), but need to be mentioned and linked. I struggled with a name (Wordlette of Good? World of Goodlet?) and then came up with a brainwave - WOGlet. What do you think of the name?

Sauerkraut

I'm noshing on a few mouthfulls of sauerkraut. The jar says "best when used by 27 March 2007."

Err, how can you tell? What does sauerkraut do when it goes bad? Become more sauerkraut-y?

The Core

My TiVo decided I needed to watch The Core. Usually I delete the things it says I need to watch, but I decided to take a chance on this one.

The Core is the answer to the question, "What kind of disaster movie would you make if you had ADD?" In the movie, the core of the Earth has stopped spinning, or is slowing down or Look! some lasers to cut through rock and the rocks will blow up and then we can travel through Wow! there's static discharge in the air and huge lightning storms and Rome is getting blasted and there's running and Hey! we just hired this punk kid to hack the Internet and eat Hot Pockets and keep the news of the impending doom from getting out and causing Whales! there's whales following us as we dive into the ocean and they're singing I think it's Zounds! a crash in the magma because of an air pocket ...

Its science is on the order of the 1960s James Mason / Pat Boone movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth. They're going to restart the core spinning by blowing up some huge bombs, but since explosions tend to go in all directions, it's not clear how a massive explosion would start anything spinning instead of just spattering it all over the place.

The effects are moderately good for 2003. The love interest, Hillary Swank, is cute enough if you like butch, hyperambitious women. I don't. As an aside, I've had enough of this kind of heroine. In fact I had had enough before it started. I don't need to see one more woman that's more of a man than the lead actor and more of a woman, too. I half expect to see Maureen Dowd's (author of Are Men Necessary?) name on the credits in movies like this.

After I pilot this earth ship I'll have sex with you and then make partner at the law firm.
I admit I haven't finished the movie yet, but I might be done with it anyway. You don't watch movies like this for the plot. I'm at the spot where they've just crashed their earth ship and you know they'll come up with some clever way to repair it and blow up everything in just the right way. It won't be too clever, since the science is all of the Flash Gordon variety which means it's all deus ex machina anyway.


Come on, fellows, let's save the Earth!
I don't think I'll give it a second review once I'm done. I think I'd rather re-watch the Saints-Eagles playoff game. Now that's a good story!

Working too Hard

I think our Maximum Leader is working too hard. The last couple of nights she has slept at her desk, snoozing in her office furniture next to the PC instead of coming into the bed. There must be some big project she's working on. I wonder what it is.

Our Maximum Leader in her office furniture during the day.

The Bus Boys

I saw these guys about six times in college in the 80s. The best live rock 'n roll show ever. Period.

Hit this link and listen to New Shoes.

If they're playing anywhere nearby, I'm there. Do you think they'll still have 25 cent beers at the clubs?

Global Warming, San Diego Growth

I've posted a few things lately questioning the Global Warming (GW) movement. I'm becoming convinced that they're just a front for the old pro-Soviet socialists among us. Having said that, I'm quite supportive of many of their goals.

Here's a photo of San Diego from space.


This is what San Diego would look like in the absence of humans.


Notice something? There's no water. None. I came to San Diego in 1979. Since that time, the city has repeatedly passed "slow growth" initiatives designed to prevent the place from becoming what you see in the first photo. Time after time, local developers went around, over and through these laws, both in court and at the ballot box in order to build, build, build. Their motivation was greed. They bought the land cheap, developed it and sold it for tons of cash. Each individual development had a tiny impact on the environment, but in the aggregate it was disastrous.

Quality of life has declined and we're just a drought away from massive water rationing. This might be the year considering the low rainfall we've had. The San Diego freeways are a nightmare. I went up to North County yesterday at 2 PM and the I-5 north of Del Mar was already a total parking lot.

How can you have gridlock at 2 PM? What does that tell you about unsustainable development?

You can forget about going to the beach on a weekend. No parking and no space. I took the kids down to La Jolla Shores last summer on a Sunday at 5 PM. When I had done this in the past, I had always had good luck. By that time on Sunday, everyone is heading home to get ready for work on Monday. What did I find? The parking lot was still full and had overflowed blocks away from the beach and when we finally made it to the beach, there were only postage stamp-sized open spots on the sand.

So what choices do we have? Our College of Cardinals has posted a great video promising a look into the people behind GW, but it looks a lot like what the San Diego developers were saying in 1982. There's a local environmentalist newspaper called The San Diego Earth Times that is simply reprinting rubbish from Nancy Pelosi.

We've turned local environmental protection and sustainable growth into a national election issue. I don't think it should be. Frankly, I don't see anything in the GW movement that would have stopped the paving of San Diego. All I see are people who are deranged with idiotic hate for George Bush.

Unfortunately I don't have a good wrap up for this. Maybe something will come to me later.

Update: Our Prelate to the Primates has a post that takes the Hollywood Ecopreeners out to the woodshed.

Jammie Wearing Fool goes after them as well.

I Love the Iditarod

The Iditarod sled dog race has been going on recently. I think it might even have concluded. I'll confess I don't know. In any case, I love it. I mean, I really love it. It's dogs doing what they were built to do.

Drag heavy objects through the snow while being whipped.

Them.

Me.
Any questions?

I Think Therefore I Yam

Our Nun of the Above has given me this handsome award as a Thinking Blogger.


Believe you me, she ain't just whistling Dixie. You bet I'm a thinker. Just look at this.

Me, thinking.
Thanks, Sister Scribbit!

Proper Leaping Technique

Many cats these days are practicing unsafe leaping. This leads to injuries and embarrassment as they slam into ceilings and walls or overshoot the kitchen countertop and fall to the floor on the other side, dragging the toaster down on top of them. As a public service, our Maximum Leader will now demonstrate proper leaping technique.

First, check above you. Ceiling fans can be particularly dangerous, so be sure to look for whirling blades. A casual glance is not enough. Those spinning propellers can injure a cat.

Check to each side for objects moving towards you. You want to watch for toddlers and dogs in particular. If you're leaping onto a small area, such as a lap, any deflection in flight can have disastrous consequences.

Now quickly leap before the situation changes!
It's easy once you get the hang of it. Practice it a few times when the house is quiet. We recommend doing it at 2 AM. To improve your accuracy, try landing on noisy objects such as paper bags or hollow cardboard boxes. In the silence of the night, the sound will give you excellent feedback on your performance.

Happy leaping!

To get your full-on feline ya-yas, visit this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

Frustrated with YouTube

I've been playing around with videos and YouTube lately and I'm pulling my hair out right now about it. Everything I upload ends up with the video and audio out of sync. That's OK if the movie is a coffee can with rocks rolling around in it like my DIY rock tumbler, but if it's a snippet of Gene Kelly or The Monkees, it doesn't work at all.

I thought I had the problem solved last night when I learned how to set limits on my videos' data rates. I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 as my editing software. I encode my files as Quicktime using the MPEG 4 encoder. It seems to work best. Anyway, for my experiment, I turned the data rate down to 200K/sec. That cut the file size way down so I figured I was on my way. I uploaded the video and it took until this morning for YouTube to digest it to the point where I could watch it.

No go. The only thing I can think of now is to unlink the audio and video in Premiere and then deliberately advance the audio a half second so that when YouTube distorts it, the audio will be in sync. What a pain! That can't be the right thing to do. I've seen plenty of videos there where the audio and video are in synch. It can't be that everyone else is having to do this, too.

After doing some research, I get this tidbit from DV Forums.

Issue:

YouTube recommends fixing audio sync problems by converting .mov files to .avi or .wmv before uploading, and using MP3 for audio. However, FCP doesn't give me those options. So with After Effects I used Cinepak to output an .avi file, but it looked horrible, even at 80 MB! My 6 MB .mov clip looked a lot better.

Response:

Does FCP let you advance the audio by 1/3sec? In my Vegas, I just ungroup the thing and drag the video back (delay).

Here's what YouTube has to say:

Out-of-sync sound is usually the result of using an audio codec that our system doesn't support. We're always adding new ones, but if this happens to your video, you can try re-encoding it with a different audio compression. We recommend MP3 audio for best results.

Mine is not compressed at all. How can you not be able to work with uncompressed audio?

What a kluge! This stinks. There's no excuse for this at all. Audio-video sync has been worked on since The Jazz Singer. There are lots of known solutions. This is pathetic.

Maybe Sentencing is too Harsh

Something I've always wondered about...

Have you ever heard news reports about some ghastly criminal getting multiple sentences for his crimes? Like some guy that gets a life sentence plus another one of 10 years in jail? I've always wondered what it would be like to be the guy's cellmate for the last ten years.

Would you be happy for the quiet and the extra room, or would the smell really get to you?

I Don't Trust the Global Warming Movement Any More

At first I was skeptical about Global Warming (GW). Then the mathematician in me saw that too many record high temperatures are occurring in the 2000s to have them be uniformly distributed, ergo the Earth must be warming. Then I assumed that the GW movement was more or less on solid ground. I don't believe that any more. Two issues have convinced me that it is a political movement.

First, the ecological alligator closest to us is China. They are positively raping the environment and much of their industrial waste, particularly that which is in their rivers, is afflicting the rest of the world. When you see environmental demonstrations and marches, do you see any pictures of the Chinese leadership with devil's horns? Do you hear any speeches demanding that the UN take action about China? No. What you do hear is that President Bush is evil. GW is just a stick to beat President Bush.

Secondly, if CO2 was the cause of globabl warming, then how come in previous global warming eras, before industrialization, we didn't see a feedback loop leading to more warming? That is, as the ocean gets warmer, it releases more CO2. That should cause more warming, right? Wrong. It didn't.

So what gives? Why the fussing about the US and our SUVs increasing the sea level by a few inches in a decade or two, but nothing at all about China completely wrecking the environment right now? Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest answer that fits the facts is probably the right one.

The GW movement is a political movement and has very little to do with the environment.

Reconnaissance in Farce

The intrepid explorer pauses briefly to peek over some small hills...


...only to find a (flashless) camera!

For more furry fun, visit this week's Friday Ark.

What are the Long Term Effects of Constant Video Stimulation?

My kids and all of their friends have access to several channels of TV designed just for them, broadcast 24/7. They have vast libraries of video games at their disposal. They have iPods with tens of thousands of songs to listen to at all times.

What's the effect of all of this? Hmmm. I think it's something to be researched and blogged.

My bet is that the stimulation itself is not nearly so bad as the replacement of other activites with idleness. My son recently asked for stories from my childhood the other day. My buddies and I were pyromaniacs. We learned how to make gunpowder, made our own rockets, experimented with all manner of chemistry and plenty of other things. In the process we learned how to research things, patience in the development of our devices and a bit of planning.

Other kids in our neighborhood were into making their own go karts. They learned all kinds of mechanical skills. Where is that now? When was the last time you saw a bunch of boys taking an old lawnmower apart to get at the engine?

Hmmm.

Update: It occurred to me today that this might be the unspoken reason that kids are being overscheduled these days. Organized activities are one of only two reliable antidotes to te constant availability of video stiumlation. The other is enforcement of draconian limitations on access to these things. That leads to battles with the kids. It's easier just to overschedule them and keep them busy.

Orchids in Alaska, Mr. Bond

Okay, even in the scenes that got cut, Hugo Drax definitely never said this. But he would have, had he paid a visit to our Nun of the Above's blog post featuring a photo of a stellar orchid she has blooming.

Check it out.

The Latest in Hood Ornaments

Our Poet Laureate has all the hip styles. Check it out.

A Bit of Historical Revisionism

I'm growing to loathe my daughter's 4th grade social studies book, Our Golden State by James Banks, et al. In their glossary, here's their definition of the Cold War.

Cold War - The belief that the United States would be in a war with the Soviet Union.

I don't even know where to start.

HI Surf Advisory

A friend at work runs the HI Surf Advisory website. Fantastic stuff. I'm stealing one of his photos before I ask. Hope you don't mind, Neal!

Insomnia on the Wrong Side of Midnight

So last night I go to bed and my body decides that it wants to live like a petulant teenager and fight sleep. Midnight rolls around and I'm still sitting there, reading, dozing on and off, but no real sleep. Argh! When it's like that I can't even get up, get some coffee and read and blog.

The Coolest Man Whoever Lived - Gene Kelly

I'm not big into musicals. I prefer Jackie Chan movies or science fiction or silly comedies like Airplane or even recorded NFL games. However, listening to Lileks talk about the movie It's Always Fair Weather on the air with our Patriarch of the Airwaves, I got the itch to try it out. It came up on AMC and I TiVo'ed it. That's when I decided that Gene Kelly was the definition of cool.

Gene's mom forced him to take dancing lessons as a child when what he really wanted to do was play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He would get beat up on the way home from school by the other boys who called him a sissy. When you see him in the movies, he's anything but a sissy. In contrast to Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly was built like the athlete he was.

Talking about the contrast between them, he said, "When I arrived in Hollywood, I was twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox. But if I put on a white tails and tux like Astaire, I still looked like a truck driver... I looked better in a sweatshirt and loafers anyway. It wasn't elegant, but it was me."

It took about half of It's Always Fair Weather for me to realize that everything he did was dance. Every movement was fluid and graceful and strong and purposeful. I'm in the middle of An American in Paris right now, but snagged this little bit out of the introduction to show you what I mean.

I replayed this scene several times and then showed it to my son to appreciate the choreography put into such a simple event. The guy is just cool and confident in every move.

I'll admit I don't watch all of his movies. I typically fast forward over some of the musical numbers. My TiVo has decided that since I like Gene Kelly movies, I must like all manner of musicals, so I'm constantly fighting with it to delete them as fast as they show up. In fact, I wonder if it thinks I'm insane with the eclectic collection of things I watch. Oh well.

One more biographical note about Gene Kelly. After his second wife died of cancer and left him with two children, he repeatedly turned down movie roles to be a dad instead. That's a strong man in my book. That's cool.

Climate Change?

Yes. Man-made? Maybe not. Visit our Abbess of the Priory of Small Princesses and see more.

Lenten Fridays Mean Tuna

Since this is Lent, we eat fish on Fridays here within the Feline Theocracy. That means our Maximum Leader got tuna. Yum! Since we are also conservationists, we preserved the remainder as leftovers and she got the rest today. Yum yum!

Next Friday I plan on videotaping her reaction and feasting and posting it to you tube. You can never have too much Maximum Leader.

Guess who Stopped by for a Visit Today

That's right, it was our Missionary to the Frozen Northern Wastelands, Kelly the Little Black Dog's owners.

The people came, but Kelly decided to stay home.
Thanks for coming by, amigo. It's always good to see both of you.

Wreck Diving

For some reason, I've been getting Scuba Diving magazine. I don't dive, but I always wish I'd learned. This month's issue focuses on wreck diving. There were great photos, so I went to YouTube and found this film shot in the Bahamas to share with you. Great stuff!

...some stars and planets in scale

H/T: The marvellous John C. Wright. Our Court Jester turned me on to him and now I want to go read his books. Be prepared to think if you visit his blog!

A Modern Day Miracle

Our Court Jester has the full story.

Rudyard Kipling Predicts the EU

The European Union, in a spasm of environmental concern, has agreed to large reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions.

EU leaders agreed to tough emissions cuts and a binding target to produce 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Hurrah! The EU is riding in to save the day! Er, don't get your hopes up.

...some countries said the targets may be unrealistic and the costs are unknown...(This) reveals a broader problem in EU policy making: The most ambitious plans are consistently coming up short and tough issues are serially sidestepped. A 2000 blueprint to make the EU the world's most competitive economy was scaled back five years later; a planned EU constitution was abandoned in 2005; and EU-led nuclear talks with Iran have largely floundered.

Kipling, writing about a hundred years ago, accurately predicted the behavior of the EU in his Road Song of the Bandar Log from The Jungle Book.

Here we sit in a branchy row,
Thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete, in a minute or two--
Something noble and wise and good,
Done by merely wishing we could.

One way to reach these goals would be simply to have their economies contract by 20%. Hey, look, they've already started!

Sprint is Driving me Crazy!

I just transitioned from Nextel to Sprint. I needed to reduce my costs and go to a service with a larger coverage area. Before I moved, I asked all of my friends about what they used. Everyone had a horror story about a previous cell phone service provider. Unfortunately, they all had had different services, so the end result was that every carrier was hated by someone.

I switched to Sprint because I thought it would be the easiest transition from Nextel. I was wrong. I can't set up my voice mail. I have messages waiting for me, but every time I call my voice mail it tells me I need to set up my mailbox. It asks me to input my desired voice mail code and then press #. I do that and then it asks me to do it again. I do it. It asks again. I do it. It then tells me that it couldn't understand what I typed in and hangs up on me.

Right now I'm on hold with customer service on my FOURTH phone call to them to get this cleared up. It's my freakin' voice mail. It's not complicated. I've given them my passcode three times and they've reset my voice mail three times and after each reset, I call my voice mail and it tells me I need to set up my mailbox. It asks me to input my desired voice mail code and then press #. I do that and then it asks me to do it again. I do it. It asks again. I do it. It then tells me that it couldn't understand what I typed in and hangs up on me.

Aaaaarrrrrgggggghhhh!

Update: Sprint made things better. I exchanged my new phone, one that came free with the service, for the next better model, one that cost $20. It is MUCH better. The salesman had tried to tell me that I wouldn't be happy with the cheap, free phone when I got the thing, but oh no, Mr. Cheapo wouldn't listen.

I'm very happy with the results now.

President Bush is the Worst blah blah blah (Part 2)

From the Financial Facts website:

A report published on Monday says that despite the current economic upswing, the EU is still losing ground vis-à-vis its global competitors...These are some of the findings of a EUROCHAMBRES study comparing EU and US economies in terms of time distance...The current EU level for income was achieved by the US in 1985. Since the first edition of the study, the time gap has increased by 3 years;

In other words, Europeans today have the same standard of living as Americans in 1986. They are 21 years behind us. In the previous study, they were only 18 years behind us. Here's a chart from their article.


The bars represent how far behind us Europe is. If the red bar is longer than the blue bar, they are falling farther behind.

All the red bars are longer than the blue bars.

Anyone for socialized medicine or a European-style welfare state?

H/T: Our College of Cardinals.

President Bush is the Worst President in the History of our Country

From today's Wall Street Journal:

U.S. EMPLOYERS ADDED 97,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls in February as a steep drop in construction payrolls offset strength in the service sector. The unemployment rate fell to 4.5%. The U.S. trade deficit shrank in January.

Will the horror of this madman never end?

Thursday Thirteen, Spending My Loot Edition

I recently received my first $100 check from AdSense. Considering the hours I've logged blogging, my wage worked out to about nine cents an hour. No matter, I'm now flush with cash and it's burning a hole in my pocket. What shall I do with my $100? Here are 13 ideas.

1. Vegetable seeds. This would be the entrepreneurial decision. I can buy seeds for next to nothing and then raise vegetables in my garden that would cost hundreds of dollars to buy in the grocery store. The subsequent post would be, “13 things I will buy with my $500”.

2. Movie tickets. I haven’t been to a move in over a year. I could take the kids to see Amazing Grace. I wish I hadn’t missed Casino Royale. Maybe it’s still playing in some backwater theater somewhere.

3. Socks. Mine are become sacred, errrr “holey”.

4. 4% of a big screen TV. I think that would work out to about 8 square inches of screen. The other 96% of the TV would have to wait another 27,500 hours of blogging.

5. I could have a wild shopping spree at a local used bookstore. Whoohoo!

6. Ingredients for cioppino. Yum! I love cioppino, but it’s sooo expensive to make!

7. A couple of nice steaks from the local meat market to recreate Rib Eye Steaks with Garlic-Mushroom Sauce.

8. A long-handled squeegee for my house’s windows. What’s the point of having a great view if you can’t see it?

9. Coleus for my atrium. Lots and lots of coleus!

10. Hanging baskets for my newly planted spider plant children so they can cascade down the atrium in a cataract of spidery green goodness.

11. A small rock tumbler to polish the stones we pick up in the desert.

12. A subscription to American Girl for my daughter. We let this lapse and she liked it. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a girls’ magazine that focuses on being a girl instead of being a young woman, if you know what I mean.

13. A rock hammer for future rockhounding expeditions.

I had intended to make this a funny post, but it ended up being a pretty serious one. In reflecting as I wrote, I realized how much I've learned to separate money from happiness in the past year and a half. Near the end of the list, I started running out of things I wanted to buy. All of the things I love in life right now, most of which are chronicled on this blog, are free or practically free.

I think I'll stop before this gets too deep. Happy TT, everyone!


View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Ingraham Bridge Sunset

This is my favorite time of the year. This and about six or so months from now, when the sun sets directly behind the Ingraham Street bridge over Mission Bay.


I took about a dozen photos last night at various evolutions of the sunset so I have a whole host to publish later. The colors and lighting kept changing and I felt that putting them all in the same post would be distracting. They are so different from one another that they seem like different days.

Click on the photo for a larger image.

AdSense Payoff!

I got it! It came in the mail today! My first check from Google for my AdSense hits. One hundred smackeroos, baby. And they said this wasn't a worthwhile thing to do. Ha ha, the joke's on them. Why, this mammoth payout works out to about nine cents an hour! Whoohoo!

Glorious

There's no other word for it.

Robotic Beer Launching Refrigerator - The best bloopers are here

Why Cats Can't Manage Weblog Awards

WEBLOG AWARDS!

It's time for the Feline Theocracy to stage its very own Weblog awards series! This is where you submit your blog under various categories and then encourage your friends to come over to The Scratching Post and vote in the comments or on a poll, driving up our links and hit count!

Enter and Win!

Here to announce it is our very own Maximum Leader herself, K T Cat! Take it away, K T.

We will be announcing categories later in this post. What you need to do is submit your URL...

...your URL...your URL...your URRRrrrrrrrrrr...

...rrrrrrrrrrpurrrrrrrrrrrrrpurrrrrrrrrrrrpurrrrrrrrr...

...purrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Um, Maximum Leader? K T? Hmmm. This doesn't seem to be going as well as I had thought. Maybe we had better nix the whole idea. I don't think she spends enough time awake to count the votes.

For the felines that should win all the awards, visit this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

Portrait of a Friend

Nature's Most Perfect Food

Click here to see nature's most perfect food.

Done? Good.

In your heart you knew it all along, didn't you?

America Alone Quote

I'm reading Mark Steyn' America Alone right now and so far, the best quote is this.

Those who call for a Muslim Reformation in the spirit of the Christian Reformation ignore the obvious flaw in that analogy - that Muslims have the advantage of knowing (unlike Luther and Calvin) where reform in Europe ultimately led: the banishment of God to the margins of society.

The causal relationship implied there may or may not be true, but if I live within a religion where the righteous look like this


then I'm not likely to initiate changes that might lead to this


I think you can forget about the core Muslims adapting to us.

The Advertising Battleground of the Future

This weekend I spent some time looking for Iraqi reconstruction videos on YouTube. I couldn't find anything worthwhile. Spirit of America had some, but they need some work. I wrote an open letter to CENTCOM about and followed it up with another post. This morning, I got a real brain wave and searched on "Halliburton" knowing ahead of time what I would find.

Reams and reams of videos blasting Halliburton. If you believe all of the videos, they're poisoning our troops, stealing millions of dollars and, for all I know, devouring live kittens. I didn't have the stomach to wade through more than a few pages of search results.

They're just a business. Among other things, they've found a niche in construction projects in dangerous places. They've got a great competitive edge because they hire lots of ex-military folks who know how to handle themselves in bad places. They can charge a lot because there isn't much competition. The threat of death turns out to be a high barrier to entry.

And no, I don't want to receive endless screeds about how they hired the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for board members.

My point is, organizations need to be aware of what is out there on the web about them. In any PR campaign, you can't let someone else define you. If lies come out, you need to respond immediately. CENTCOM and Halliburton are still living in the Judy Woodruff world of information distribution. They think they can go on Sunday talk shows, do interviews with magazine journalists or put ads in the local newspaper and counteract all of the bad press. That just isn't true any more.

The top Halliburton video, a trailer for a film called "The War Profiteers" had more than 224,000 hits. How many people will read a one or two sentence quote from the Halliburton exec on page A-13?

Halliburton will make money no matter how many video tantrums people post. The job they do needs to be done and there just isn't anyone else to do it. That having been said, I don't think it's a good idea for a company to allow their reputation to be smeared endlessly without response.

Ford, on the other hand, gets great YouTube play. If you remove the political videos dealing with Harold Ford, Jr., you get things like this.

Totally cool. 68,000+ hits and favorited 314 times. I love it. I want one.

How about your organization? What do they look like on the web?

CENTCOM Idea Follow Up

Last night, after scrounging around YouTube for a while and not finding what I was looking for, I wrote an open letter to CENTCOM asking them to start providing bloggers material to highlight the good things that are going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. There is a ton of it out there. I know, because I work with the guys doing it.

The center-right blogosphere complains endlessly about the bias in the Mainstream Media (MSM). I'm guilty of this as well. Our Patriarch of the Airwaves interviews journalists on his radio show and regularly stumps them with very simple factual questions. It's no secret that they are culturally anti-military. Practically none of them have ever served nor do they have family members who have served. So what? You knew this before you started the war. Deal with it.

Fighting terrorists is a PR campaign. Publicity is their only weapon. As others have noted, the enemy in Iraq is down to blowing up markets. They've failed to make a dent in the US military, they can't stop the Iraqi security forces, so they're reduced to incinerating the local Safeway. In military terms, that's called "losing". The only thing they have left is the MSM. If they can convince the MSM there's a civil war going on, something the MSM desperately wants to believe, then they might be able to convince us that the whole thing is a hopeless mess and we should just get out.

CENTCOM has all the tools necessary to respond to the nightly bodybag scoreboard from the MSM. There are plenty of reconstruction and medical teams throughout the theater. With a handheld video camera and some very crude editing, you could blanket YouTube and other such outlets with candid footage of the progress being made. It's just not that hard.

Spirit of America has posted a couple of videos on YouTube, but none of them seem to have voice overs or translations. Check out the kids in this video. Would you want to leave them to be blown up?

We can't afford to lose. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, the demographics of the world are against us. Our best hope for the future is to spread liberal democracies throughout the Muslim world. If we fail here, we probably won't get another chance. The next fight will be a civil war in a European country where the Islamofascist population has become large enough to try and take over.

Stop complaining about the MSM. You knew they would side with the enemy before you started because they just don't know enough to see what's going on. There are plenty in the new media who get it, but we can't spread the word without a word to spread. If we end up leaving Iraq before we're finished, we have only ourselves to blame.

An Open Letter to CENTCOM

Dear Sirs,

I work with the Marines and Navy and know what great things you're accomplishing in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the Horn of Africa. I know that your mission goes far beyond normal military actions and that you've done wonders to improve the lives of people throughout the region. The whole country should be proud of what you've done.

In the past, I've blogged about what the US Navy did after the tsunami and what Spirit of America is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. On days when I don't have much time for blogging, I'd love to post videos of the civil successes you've got to show. I'd do it for free and would make sure my friends all knew about it.

I just spent an hour on YouTube searching for such things. I found nothing I could use. There's lots of videos of propaganda for the enemy or politicians blathering about mistakes and losses, but nothing showing progress and success. When I visited the CENTCOM website I found a set of PDF newsletters, but nothing I could embed on my blog.

I would bet that others in the blogosphere would love to show them, too. We want to help. Give us the tools.

Update: I found the Pentagon Channel, but that's too overproduced. It doesn't seem to be embeddable, either. Look, we send medical and reconstruction teams out into the field every day. How hard would it be to take a video camera along with you and get some candid footage to share? Meanwhile, there's lots of stuff like this on YouTube.

That won't do. Everyone who likes to watch things get blown up already supports the war. This is the front line of a global conflict. This is no joke. The only way we can lose right now is if we lose our national will and we're well on the way to doing just that. Our primary weapon is no longer the JDAM, but the video camera and the web.

If we end up retreating from Iraq, don't blame the Mainstream Media for giving everyone false impressions. You knew they would side with the enemy before you ever went in. You've got the opportunity to counteract them and you're not using it.

Update 2: I posted a longer update here. I found some Spirit of America videos, but it's still a long way from what we need.

Saturday Funny

A ship was caught in a terrible storm far out at sea. When the captain realized his ship was going sink, he called his crew together. "Who here knows how to pray?" he asked.

"I do," replied a seaman, stepping forward.

"Excellent," said the captain. "You go over there and pray while the rest of us put on our life jackets. We're one short."

H/T: Fr. Dennis Clark

British Health Food

I know I'm late to the party on this one, but I wasn't paying much attention to it until now. Prince Charles recently made disparaging remarks about McDonald's and the nutritional value of their food. Having eaten dreadful, grease-soaked fish and chips in the center of London, I don't think he's got much to talk about.

Laying Around

The best thing to do when you have a cold is just lay around. No one at our house does that better than our Maximum Leader.

First one side...

...and then the other.

What Are You Giving up for Lent?

It had better be something good.

Or else.

The UAW is Pitching in to Help Ford

In today's Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey McCracken has a page one article about how the United Auto Workers union (UAW) is trying to keep the golden goose alive at Ford.

For years, Jerry Sullivan, the head of the largest United Auto Workers local at Ford Motor Co., fought for higher pay, job protections and limits on the work his members had to do.

But in the past year, as Ford teetered financially, the 59-year-old Vietnam veteran has changed course. These days he has urged his members to accept the outsourcing of company factory jobs to lower-paid workers, and to work new shifts without the tens of thousands of dollars in overtime they formerly would have earned.

"Ford is in a desperate situation," sighs the burly, bearded Mr. Sullivan, who has spent 36 years at Ford, the last 10 as president of UAW Local 600 in suburban Dearborn. "If this company goes down, I want to be able to look in the mirror and say I did everything I could."

Emphasis mine. What an attitude. The guy gets it. Elsewhere in the article, there is a graphic showing that US labor costs are over $1,000 per car more than their Japanese competitors'.

It's not all posturing by UAW leadership, either.

In past local negotiations, union leaders rarely gave any ground, and talks often stalled over such matters as getting microwaves installed for employees' use. But this time, recognizing their precarious position, Dearborn members agreed that non-Ford workers earning half their pay could take jobs in the plant such as shuttling car components across the factory floor. Thousands of UAW members accepted changing to four-day, 10-hour shifts that can include weekend days, without collecting overtime. At an engine plant in Lima, Ohio, some union workers have volunteered to manage their brethren, for a 50-cent-an-hour bump in pay. Elsewhere, long-honored seniority rules have been waived and job definitions have been broadened.

The article goes on to say that the unions and the company still have a long way to go, but it's definitely a big move in the right direction to have them both realize how desperate their situation is.

Contrast this to the labor unions in Europe and Airbus. Airbus is getting crushed by Boeing due to massive problems in the development of their new aircraft. Despite government intervention across Europe, Airbus is losing money hand over fist. Their unions, steeped in socialism, refuse to help out as the company tries to cut costs and remain competitive.

Airbus said the changes would reduce the time it took to develop new planes from seven-and-a-half years to six years, improve customer service and aircraft reliability.

Union officials, who were informed of the proposals earlier on Wednesday, expressed anger at the scale of the cuts.

"We totally oppose the closure of any site and we won't accept any firings," said European Metalworkers Federation head Peter Scherrer.

French workers earlier downed tools in protest at the firm's plans to review the future of two of its sites.

Our College of Cardinals has more.

Thank God we've got the UAW and not these idiots.

Nurse KT

Our Maximum Leader is staying right by my side, comforting me through my cold.


This photo is pretty typical of KT. She's not an overtly expressive cat, she's more of a contented one. She doesn't want to sit on your lap and she doesn't harass you for scraps or treats. She just wants to be near you. If you're in the kitchen, she comes in to lay down on the floor in the middle of everything. If I'm asleep, she sleeps pressed against my legs or somewhere farther off on the bed. She doesn't mind being picked up and purrs when she's petted, but left to her own devices this is what she does.

For more comforting kitties, stop by this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

The Cold

I have It. The Cold. The Dreaded Creeping Crud. The Thing That's Been Going Around.

My head hurts, I'm coughing and there's very little sleep to be had. It makes blogging very, very difficult because you can't concentrate enough to compose posts.

It's morning and I don't feel quite bad enough to stay in bed, so we've got our mug of java and the keyboard in front of us. Let's see what's out there to blog about. Let's see if we can do some coldblogging.

Mom in Bloom

Our mother daisy has put out three big, orange blooms. She's the parent to this daughter and another whose photo I know I've posted, but I can't find right now. Mom is at least 4 years old and has managed to survive some bad weather, occasional neglect and thrips. You can see hints of the thrips on the edges of one her flowers. We think the thrips have been driven off, but we're going to blast them with chemicals a few more times just to be sure.



Meanwhile, our orchid of unknown type has 5 blooms out right now.