The IRS is Watching Us!

How else can you explain that Pooteewheet's Schedule C lists her as "nonpassive spouse"?

LissyJo - A Question About a Statue

LissyJo, do you think Dad paid Denmark to move the statue to your house?

Denmark May Move Famed Mermaid Statue AP - Thu Mar 30, 9:54 AM ET

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - This city's famous Little Mermaid statue may be moved out of the reach of vandals and tourists, a city official said Wednesday.

Army Bans Use of Privately Bought Armor

This wouldn't be so bad...if they actually gave the soldiers other, approved, armor in the first place. They've spent almost enough money on the war to armor everyone over the age of 18 in the United States, and there are still soldiers who have to have it shipped from home or from concerned coworkers. This reminds me of stories about soliders bringing their own Winchester Model 97 "trench sweepers" (link provided courtesy of that site's partnership with Thomson Gale) overseas during the First World War until the Army actually realized the effectiveness and started supplying some of them.

"WASHINGTON - Soldiers will no longer be allowed to wear body armor other than the protective gear issued by the military, Army officials said Thursday, the latest twist in a running battle over the equipment the Pentagon gives its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officials told The Associated Press that the order was prompted by concerns that soldiers or their families were buying inadequate or untested commercial armor from private companies ? including the popular Dragon Skin gear made by California-based Pinnacle Armor." (Yahoo via AP)

Why I Won't be a Nurse or a Doctor...

...because this literally sets my stomach to churning with sympathy pains and extreme revulsion. Not just the picture - go watch the damn video...ugh! There's something really wrong with P.Z. that he finds this so exciting.

"The New England Journal of Medicine sometimes provides great stuff to read over breakfast, like this story of a man who returned from a trip to Hungary with his guts infested with worms, Enterobius vermicularis. OK, so it's not much of a story…but the cool thing is that they provide a movie clip of his colonoscopy, and you can watch the worms writhe. (via Over My Med Body)"

I am back from Houston

Ah...Houston, land of...well, who knows what the hell is in Houston. I spent Sunday through Wednesday either in Houston, Texas, conducting a fishbowl/focus group exercise on customers, or in the air from or to Houston, . I think there are some people in my work group who felt that this was a glamorous assignment - fly to distant lands, meet customers, review their opinions, go to fancy dinners, dance with loose women. Primarily it involved getting on a teeny tiny three row Continental Embraer ERJ-145-XR (pictured here - best part was watching someone from the business unit hit his head on the ceiling - not the luggage storage, the actual ceiling)and flying into Houston and getting to the Hotel Derek (snazzy, as Eryn would say) just in time to check in and fall asleep. Derek is a very nice hotel...except the king size bed is still short enough that my feet hang off the edge of the bed (yes yes I can sleep across the diagonal, but I end up flipping back around and waking up anyway).

Monday morning, up bright and early, have some breakfast at the hotel, travel directly to the focus group (really, just one focus user at a time) area, and watch them through a one-way pane while sitting in a dark room for 12 hours, leaving only to get a burrito and bring it back to eat. Nice office - but the morning pineapple and 7 other people get a little stale after a work day and a half. Back to the hotel - have a quick scotch with beer chaser (best part was a business unit person hearing me refer to two women as older and ask if I had called them whores), then fall asleep.

Up early on Tuesday, check out, 8+ more hours watching users, then brave rush hour to the airport. Sit around for a while because storms have kept the flight crew in NOLA, then get on the way - Minneapolis by just before midnight, home before just after midnight. Get up 6 hours later to go to a regular work day. Ah...the glamour of business travel...I learned a lot, and not just that Hilary Duff is from Houston and that the Houston shopping district uses Lucy Liu as a model for their $8,000 blouses - actual good user feedback about our product. But damn if sitting in a little dark room for 12 hours isn't worse than drinking all day.

I didn't get a picture of me inappropriately touching George Bush, Sr., at the George Bush International Airport (Pooteewheet's probably right - there's either a law against it, or I'd be face to face with an armed Texan), but I did take a very nice picture of me relaxing on a Texan cow chair. Don't have one at your house? They're very comfortable.

Whenever I Wonder if I Was Ever Geekier Than I am Now

Whenever I wonder if I was ever geekier than I am now and worrying that I might be sliding "downhill", I just start browsing my computer until I find something like this:

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO UNLAWFUL CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
FOR FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

Which includes chapters like:

• On The Subject Of A Shapechanging Mother And Child
• The Rack Critical Hit Chart: For Men Only
• On Sex And Sexuality In The Realms
• A Bard's Sexual Spell-Songs
• Sexual Psionic Powers
• Magic Items Your Mom Wouldn't Approve Of (includes a description of Rahasia's Whirlpool Tub Of Love)

It'd be less geeky if I hadn't actually used it once upon a time as a DM.

Confusing Song Lyrics

Eryn called Dan'l today to tell him she'd learned a new word/phrase:

Eryn: ...hard to understand
Dan'l: "You're a tiny kisser?"
Eryn: ...hard to understand
Dan'l: "Tiny kisser?"
Me: "She said 'Titty Twister!'"
Eryn: "Titty twister! Titty twister! Titty twister!"

So very very different than "tiny kisser". Mostly this is good news because Dan'l once attacked me in the front yard of my duplex in Richfield, all because he lost two out of three games in a heated match of bocce ball and failed to procure the coveted Matchbox Airplane of Victory. I retaliated, and the neighbors were treated to what seemed like an hour or so of two grown men trying to rip each other's nipples off in the grass. I suffered what can only be described as second degree bruises, and Katie chastised me the next day for making Dan's nipples bleed. The way I see it, he lost the trophy and a nipple or two...that's just part of the competition. But next time, it'll be two on one. Conner just isn't a factor, the minute someone pinches his nipple, he'll be all, "Scary! scary!" and head for the hills.

Leave me Alone, I'm Watching my [Korean] Stories

Here's a story about Korean soaps ("hallyu," or the "Korean wave") and their growing audience that is interesting to me because I have a Korean adoptee sister, I read the blog of a Korean adoptee (who recently moved to Hawaii where Korean soaps are ultra-hip), and I also read the blog of a blogger of Japanese ancestry, and apparently that's enough to tie you to this article: "Gerrie Nakamura and Nora Muramoto, who are of Japanese ancestry, are truly Korean drama queens."

I find it interesting that those who watch the Korean soaps extoll the virtue of Korean cinematic arts as more "wholesome" (than U.S. television). I have to assume this means they're referring only to television and that they've never watched Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Series. Sympathy for Mr. Vengence and Oldboy are perhaps two of the most violent, twisted movies I've ever watched. Which probably means there's a very interesting cultural study that can be done regarding the dichotomy of Korean cinema versus Korean television and why there might be two extremes. Then again, maybe Park is just a psychotic and needs a good therapist.

I have to admit, the idea of ending a soap after a dozen or so episodes is a breakthrough that U.S. soaps should follow, and I think it's in part why 24 and Lost are popular, because each season is like a mini soap - limited in scope and, in some respects, insular of story line within the season (just with overlap).

A Poem (Because All Blogs Must Have One)

I spoke too soon

I spoke too soon. According to Race, the laptop expert at the Geek Squard, moisture can hang around on the boards for weeks, or longer, until it feels the desire to destroy your computer. In the case of my juiced laptop, the period in question was about 36 hours. It now has a dead power board that will cost $300-$400 to replace (have to order a new one from the manufacturer and have it delivered), not including the labor for installation (I'll install anything on a desktop - but laptops are trickier). I should have known something horrible was on it's way to bite me in the ass - I've never gotten my yearly bonus without a $1200 bill for car repairs, water heater, etc., and this year I tried to dump it on the house loan before it could get sucked up by fate. Fate obviously understood my trickery and took offense.

A Few Videos

Boing Boing and Wonkette had a few videos worth watching if you're interested and not on a slow connection (or if you're very patient, like me):

I'm pretty sure the lesions and crazy skin rashes would be enough to get me to the doctor, even without insurance - but then I've seen the Walt Disney Studios VD video before, so I know the dangers of Syphilis and Gonorrhea and that shame, ignorance and fear are just their tools (16 minutes - 1973). And that eucalyptus cure works, but only for koala bears (link from Boing Boing).

A strange commercial about women in bathrooms that smacks of what women often accuse men of engaging in - just get it over, whip it out, and see who has the biggest one so we can just all go home.

Pierce Bush, G.W.'s nephew, apparently high or suffering from a lack of sleep and too much caffeine, defending his uncle's policies. What a tool. You can read a text review of his interview over at World O' Crap.

And this isn't a video, but it's from Boing Boing and it's unnervingly disturbing, particularly as I was just watching the new Doctor Who on Friday night Sci Fi and they were playing a Britney song on the Wurlitzer (which a stretched out human 5 billion years in the future was sure was what humans used to call an iPod). A statue of Britney Spears giving birth, complete with crowning head - ewwww! That's just nasty - hope you're all reading right before bedtime.

So Much for Live Blogging from Liberally Drinking

...because if the trend toward arresting drunks in bars for public intoxication spreads from San Antonio, Texas, to up here, it might put a crimp in all those lubricated tongues. And doesn't this practice really put a crimp in exceptions to Texas's open container law? Or is the assumption you're drinking on the bus by yourself?

If I am on a chartered bus with a hired driver, can I legally drink alcohol on the bus?
Drinking alcohol in the passenger area of a vehicle designed to transport passengers for compensation is allowed under Texas law. Buses, limousines, and taxis fall under this clause. Also, passengers in motor homes and trailer homes are exempt as well.

By the way, is "infiltration" really necessary? Can't the police just walk in and find more than one person to arrest? I can generally find two or three in any bar I enter.

The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication

Girl Gangs

I was watching a bit of Girl Gangs on A&E while playing Dora the Explorer the Board Game and Dora Dominos, and commercials during the show included one for Cabbage Patch Dolls and another for wet wipes that showed a dad dancing with his little girl, her feet on his. Obviously I am the target audience for Girl Gangs - dads who want their little girls not to grow up to be in a gang, wear too much make up, remove their eyebrows, date abusers and do bad rap because they don't have to know how to sing to do bad rap and it's an alternative to bad poetry. I hate it when they have my number.

And speaking of dads, Klund, you can not be cool for listening to Franz Ferdinand on your iPod if David Spade uses them as the commercial theme music for his crappy e-tainment show on Comedy Central.

Cave of the Mounds

Is it just me, or is there something very wrong about the logo for Wisconsin's Cave of the Mounds?

My Laptop Takes the Company Wellness Challenge

It's not enough that I'm taking the company wellness challenge myself and am working dilligently to increase my intake of fruits and vegetables to at least five servings a day, but I have to involve everyone else. Last night I involved our laptop computer, deftly pouring part of a glass of diet Splash directly into the intakes and blower holes on the back. What followed was frantic cleaning, extensive drying holes down, and several hours of worrying that the automatic shutoff everytime it booted was a sign that I'd drenched the boards (memory and disk were obviously safe).

A day later it seems to be operating fine - no smell of burning juice, no programs that seem scrambled, no deadly explosions (per the operating manual, which warns me never to start it after a drenching because it could be dangerous to my person), but I'm guessing it didn't see the same benefit from vitamin C and A that I do. Maybe, like me, it would prefer beer (hey, Summit Maibock season is here!).

Chubby Bunny...Chubby Bunny...

Remember how I said I liked to try and guess whether an urban legend was true or false? Well, I got the one about a child dying from playing Chubby Bunny wrong. Someone has actually died from stuffing lots of marshmallows in their mouth...go figure. In Boy Scouts they taught us all to do the Heimlich, so this wouldn't have happened unless we were shoving the marshmallows in the other Scout's mouth.

Research Into Personality

I thought this snippet from The Blotter this morning was exceptionally amusing:

A study from the Journal of Research Into Personality by Jack and Jeanne Block tracked 100 kids from their 1960s nursery school days to the present and found the whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults, while the confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

Huh...who'da thunk, "insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics".

Chicago 2006

I had a longer lapse in my posting because Pooteewheet, Eryn, my friend Kyle, and I all loaded into our little car and drove to Chicago for a four day weekend. The trip originated because another friend of mine had casually dropped a message in my email, not even sure it was my email, that he was having a gaming weekend in Joliet. Both Kyle and I, and even Pooteewheet, had gamed with him and his friends back when he was my age and his kids were Eryn's age. Now his kids are graduated and married and he's a grandfather and the kids are playing games with him and his friends. We hadn't seen them for something like fourteen years, so it seemed about time, even if I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons since it was in a previous set of books. We decided we'd play for one day while Pooteewheet and Eryn went to visit Pooteewheet's sister, and use the rest of the days to do some touristy Chicago fun.

So we drove in all day on Friday, taking a break at the Dells to have breakfast/lunch at Denny's. Not the corporate chain, but the small town restaurant that predates the chain that serves a much better omelet. In the evening, we made it past the first Illinois toll road, despite Illinois' attempts to convince us it wasn't possible to ever get through the backed up trafic, doubled back on the advice of a kindly old man at the oasis, then shot south and east to Joliet. It seemed like we spent forever looking for Lou Malnati's Pizza that evening, but it was a pretty good slice of pizza and fulfilled our mission to have some Chicago deep dish. Had we known we'd be eating deep dish for dinner the following evening as well, we might have chosen something else.

We stayed at the Hotel 6 and Joliet which, as we entered, had a woman waiting for a man who pulled up and then paid for their room in cash. It's so romantic when spouses play act.

So Saturday was gaming and went as gaming always does - just a lot of shooting the breeze and catching up. But we did find out Bob volunteers at the Shedd Aquarium, which is where we were going on Sunday, so he called in some complimentary tickets for us and gave us a free parking pass. Gold. However, he greatly confused us when he noted that he had a girlfriend named Nickel the Turtle. At first I thought she might be another volunteer at the Shedd, but she turned out to be an actual turtle in the tank where scuba volunteers maintain their licenses. The Shedd Aquarium is a nice aquarium - lots of animals, and the dolphin tank is amazing. It's so big that you can't see the dolphins on the other side of the tank until they get closer or flip to their white underbellies. Nothing at all like the Minnesota Zoo.

By the way, Bob, if you're reading, the truck stop is not the best place for breakfast in your neighborhood. It's the Route 30 Pancake House, about three miles past the Motel 6. It seems to be run by a Greek family and the menu is extensive, delicious, and includes things like gyros omelets and Hawaiian omelets. I strongly recommend trying it - it was much better than Diamand's.

Back to the Shedd. Eryn was interested in this snake, which is sort of creepy all bundled up there behind her.


I had my picture taken inappropriately touching a giant fish that Amazonians used to hunt to feed their families, but which are now worth too much not to sell instead.


This is more inappropriate fish statue touching. This statue is actually called "Man With Fish", although with me there, it's more like Men With Fish.


Our real reason for going to Chicago was to eat. We stayed in a Hotel 6 to live on the cheap so that we could lay out more for dinner. In particular, we went to try some Chicago sushi restaurants. On Sunday night we went to Kamehachi, close to downtown. Kyle had an oyster shooter. It looked pretty nasty, but he assured me it was good. I stuck with the saki instead. Kamehachi has a nice sampler of sakis. They'll give you three in decent-sized glasses to drink with your meal and you can have the quality or not-as-quality series. The sushi itself was a little on the pricey side, but very good, with some good rolls and even a few styles of white tuna, which seems to be hard to find in Minnesota. Kyle encouraged the waitress to subject him to something new and she brought him a fairly spicey roll and a fish cut from tuna cheeks...an $8 cut - yikes. But cheaper than than $4500 suite you can get on Michigan Ave. in Chicago...so everything just has to be put in perspective.


On Monday we went to the Museum of Science and Industry. It's basically the Minnesota Science Museum if you hopped it up on steroids. There were so many things to see and only about 5 hours to see them. I think we may have covered about 30% of the place. LissyJo will be disappointed to know we didn't get as far as the prenatal development displays. But I did take a look at the anatomical slices. They sliced up two people - one lengthwise, one widthwise - and put the 1" slices between glass. It was rather morbid, but fascinating, to see all the organs and muscles, and even eyelashes. Until you got to the sphincter - that was mostly just nasty. We saw train displays, airplane displays, circus displays, robot displays, genetics displays, castle displays...even the bathroom seemed like a display. There seemed to be over fifty stalls all around the outside and another fifty urinals in the center - it was hard to picture the crowd at the museum when all those would be needed.

Here's Kyle, Pooteewheet and Eryn playing with what's basically a very big EyeGames.


This is Pooteewheet putting her screaming face on a statue at the Enterprise exhibit. Not the Star Trek sort of Enterprise - the industry and marketing kind. Fortunately there weren't too many kids around as this is sort of scary in an Orwellian way. Eryn loved this part of the museum because there was a climbing wall with a soft map that was meant to show how business was like climbing a wall, and video games where the point was mainly to point and click to demonstrate running a business.


There was also a full sized submarine. When they said they had the U-505 there, I pictured it just sort of sitting next to the museum and rusting away, not completely enclosed in a reinforced sub pen within the museum building. The tour was too short, at least compared to the one I had with my Dad in Sydney, Australia, but it was still interesting to walk around it and through it and see all the details about how it had been captured and subsquently moved to Chicago.


And Monday was another night of Sushi, this time at Tsuki, which was considerably fancier, although actually a little less expensive and in an easier neighborhood to park (up by Lincoln Park - we actually found on-street parking). Not that it matters how fancy a place is if you're there around 4:30 p.m., as you're likely to be the only ones in the restaurant (there were kids at both restaurants on the nights we were there - bringing them in early before rush). Kyle tried another oyster shooter and liked the presentation better (below - oyster shell on the side). However, he also tried Oni - sea urchin - and looked as though he might heave. The rolls weren't as good. But the Green Tea ice cream was so good Eryn got her first ice cream headache. The steak Pooteewheet had was delicious for non-sushi folk. And the duck sushi...yep, duck sushi, lightly seared and smoked and laid on rice with some wasabi...was mouth wateringly amazing. Absolutely worth the trip for that alone. Kyle was skeptical about the quail egg on the wasabi tabiko, but enjoyed it after he was eating it. So overall, it was a positive dining experience.



Eryn is starting to get pretty handy with her chopsticks. You can barely see the plastic clip under her fingers to make them into big tweesers, but the night before she was eating her food with no clip and still managing fairly well. She's a big fan of soy sauce.


Monday night we left Chicago and spent seven hours straight driving back to the cities. If we could have avoided the seven lane toll area that routed into 3 lanes on the other side of the toll booths, it would have been 40 minutes faster, but we still managed to get home a bit earlier than I thought we would. Nice thing about owning a Ford Focus with 35 mpg or so is that you only need about a tank and a half to go the whole way, so you don't have to waste time stopping to refuel the car and yourself, if you can stay awake.

Folksey Family Jazz

I might be a little light on posts for a few days, in case you're worried about a fix of what I'm up to, I'll leave some pictures that you can come back to over and over again to console yourself in my short term absence.

This one is mostly for Grandma Ellen. Eryn got her new clothes and loves them - she immediately disrobed, rerobed, and then wouldn't even let us wash them or take them off. She wore them right to bed on the first night as pajamas and had a royal fit when Pooteewheet tried to change her diaper, thinking that meant they'd be swapped for pajamas. The hat was her own idea.


Eryn found my clarinet. Actually, I found it for her after we heard her playing her recorder in her room. I played that thing for hours a day for many years - band, high school pep band, and college pep band at R.P.I. which was truly a geeky pep band, but a hell of a good time. Playing while R.P.I. shut Harvard out in hockey on their home turf is a fond memory of mine. The Harvard pep band literally played classical music to rouse their fans out of their slump while we, in turn, relied on sheer volume and obnoxiousness. Unlike Eryn, I was not wearing a diaper while I played.


And me! Post several days of the flu without shaving me. I think I look just a little wild and scary with my scar, Mexican pullover, balding and graying top, and protobeard with the gray spots on each side of my chin. It's even more frightening if you click it and make it 20% bigger. I hear this self-photo thing is all the rage with the kids on MySpace, but I'm not cool enough to get an account there. They'll let me have one - I'm just not cool enough to take the time.

Hump Day Ho Down

Well, I'm past the flu. After my third day of serious illness yesterday, I went to work today, sweated a little, but generally felt unaffected, even chipper and revitalized after a four day weekend. Unfortunately, sitting at home all day does give me much to write about unless it's the scifi anthology I was reading or how I squished a hydra head in God of War - neither endevour of which I finished.

I do think this article about Walmart is interesting (Washington Post via Kevin Drum via Three Way News), particularly because I had this argument with a friend at work today about how Walmart had it's own magnitude of obnoxiousness I wasn't willing to patronize. This just helps itemize some of the reasons (MPR had a good bit on the other day about how the American consumer's overriding desire for cheap over all else coupled with the rise of Walmart may have actually kick started offshoring and definitely accelerated it).

Star Tribune...conservative op-ed rag ? At least by a ratio of 33:19 (The Rake via MNSpeak). Isn't that the verse I always see on cards at football games? Wait...no...only 21 chapters in St. John, but there is a 19:33, "But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was not dead already, the brake not his legs".

Finally, do not read this book, "The Devil: A Biography" by Peter Stanford. I almost never quit a book halfway through - I think you can count the times on one hand - even when it sucks and is still heading rapidly downhill, like Steakley's Vampire$ (I'm sorry if you liked Vampire$, but it's just bad writing). Stanford's book isn't poorly written, it's just uninformative and unfathomly boring - I can't believe he spent 120 pages (where I quit) without telling me anything that I'd be willing to take away, particularly when there's so much that can be done with the subject, as is obvious with Bernard McGinn's Antichrist (Amazon). Stanford just went on and on like a Master's student trying to get enough on paper to qualify for a thesis without actually doing any research. Who knows, maybe the second 120 pages are the most erudite prose ever put to paper. Maybe those pages are top to bottom facts that can only be found there. But prefacing them with those first 120 pages dooms them to being forever ignored.

While sick and asleep for over ten hours I had a dream about a stop sign. In this dream I destroyed the stop sign by kicking it, beating it, hitting it with a bat, shooting it, driving over it, exploding it, and applying various other forms of destruction. My dreams usually don't mean much at all, so I'm guessing I'm really pissed at a stop sign. I know my Dad is really pissed at a sign in Tucson, so maybe they're genetic dreams.

Finally, I just ate a pink grapefruit and my fingers smell like a joint - that's weird. Then again, maybe not, at least according to Answers.com, "Sweet Tooth #3, a fourth generation, third backcross to Sweet Pink Grapefruit mother". And to top it off, it makes Pooteewheet seem six years younger (the grapefruit that is).

Shoveling in a Winter Wonderland

So....was I the person who said "Spring has almost sprung" in Minnesota? Maybe that was a little premature.



I should have known life was going to get cold and white when I came down with a horrible case of the flu last night - chills so bad that I thought I was going to pull a muscle I was shivering so hard. There hasn't been a major snowstorm this season that wasn't immediately preceeded by me getting violently ill. That'd be fine if I could sit inside and rest and be miserable in peace, but there's just no getting around the fact that unless your organs are falling out, you have to go shovel so emergency services can at least reach you. It's problematic to be sweating before you even put your jacket on to go outside.

But, the driveway was shoveled, pending the big snowplow dump at the end of the drive, and I even went so far as to help Steve and Ty shovel a neighbor's driveway. Ty agreed to shovel for $10, perhaps not realizing that it might take several hours if the shovel is bigger than you are. The endorphins seemed to mitigate some of the illness, but it came back later, exacerbated by a diet of caffeinated coffee and red delicious apple.

Now I feel extremely silly for not biking to work on Friday, because it looks as through there won't be another chance for a while.

If you're worried about what Minnesota weather is up to in the long run, the Strib has an article predicting that by 2095 (via MNSpeak) we'll be just like southern Wisconsin is now, but it's by that liberal Union of Concerned Scientists, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. They're probably just trying to convince Wisconsinites (and everyone 200 miles south of the current blue state line) that liberalness is like the weather and moving their way, so in 2095 they'll be blue state.

Burning Day

Yesterday I read Glenn Grant's short story "Burning Day". It's got a Matrixy feel to it as it takes place in a world where the lines between humans, robots and cybrids are becoming increasingly blurred. At one point, the cop in the story consults a mainframe and it seems like a nice summary of what I think my company would like to accomplish. Mean Mr. Mustard might even be working on Cruncher-lite:

The system's real designation is some unmemorable acronym, but everyone
simply calls it Cruncher, because that's what it does. A mass of neural
nets bathed in liquid nitrogen, Cruncher has been eating vast datbases for over
half a century, sucking the marrow out of every legally available network and
nexus, masticating unthinkable volumes of unconnected factlets, developing an
acute taste for complex hidden relationships. Out of enormous volumes of
dross, Cruncher digests a few suprisingly useful little sense-packets.

Breezy, and Heidi and Emily Are Dirty Whores

When we were considering names for our children, Pooteewheet really liked the names Emily and Abby. For a boy, she preferred Dark. Yep, Dark...we fully intended to give birth to the Anti-Christ. I, on the other hand, prefer ethnically Celtic sounding names like Margaret and Catherine, ensuring our child would have a name like a Catholic school girl. For a boy I liked Dafydd (a Welsh variant of David), which I was assured would mean burdening the child with the moniker Daffy at school. But I've heard that song about a boy named Sue, and it would have just made him stronger after he got a chance to beat the crap out of me later in life. After all, I lived through "Scott on the Pot" and wearing my Scout uniform to school, so Dafydd wouldn't have killed him.

We had a little girl and we decided against Emily just because so many Emilys were currently loose in the world. In retrospect, that was an excellent idea, because while Eryn and I were at the park on Friday, I discovered something shocking on the bridge: Breezy, & Heidi and Emily are dirty whores. I'm pretty sure I didn't want to be answering the question, "Daddy, why does that say Emily's a whore?" for my little girl. And she already reads - she reads a lot and can sound out many words she doesn't know - so I know I'd have been asked the question.



I'd like to spray paint the bar on the bridge at the park so the graffiti is gone, but every time I think about it, I picture being shot by a local policeman just because I'm standing in the park with a dangerous spray can. Or they'll look me up on their computer after catching me, see that I run an extremist web site, and I'll be whisked away for several years of questioning about how my spray can made it into the country despite tight port monitoring. Perhaps the best bet is just to get a letter from the city telling me I can spray paint it and then do it in broad daylight. You may think I'm paranoid, but I was once forced to talk to the Wright County police for an extended period about sacrificing a horse in a town park because it was called in by a neighbor (it was a Native American-style Boy Scout ceremony. No horses were hurt in the production).

If you made it this far, here's a picture of Eryn taking advantage of the local park and enjoying the fact that it was warm enough not to wear a coat. Spring has almost sprung in Minnesota!

A Beatles Moment and One Other Weird Aside

Do you think Rocky Raccoon's girl Lil/Nancy ran off with another guy because somewhere in the Black Mining Hills of South Dakota he knocked her up and she had to leave for Minnesota to get an abortion? That carrying permit didn't do him much good either. Seems like a fairly anti-conservative song, but then again, it was Lennon.

I was interviewing a programmer on Friday, the fresh out of college sort hauled in by my company to do a round of interviews with several groups - i.e. there's a really good chance we'd like to hire you, we just have to see where you'd fit best (we didn't mention our new microcubes to him - after all, if we get him into one, he might not realize there are larger versions). He did a lot of hand gesturing, and on the back of his right hand was a fairly serious scar. So every few minutes my questioning train was mentally interrupted by the thought, "He knows about Fight Club." Of course I didn't ask him about it, the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club. Well...and there's not enough room to have fight club in my new cube, we'd have to move it down the hall.

Extremism - Mark Kennedy Style

I noticed this post by Smartie over at The Power Liberal discussing Mark Kennedy's people's assertion that we should be concerned about Amy Klobuchar because she advertises on extremist websites and that she knows they're extremist because her ad came down after just a week. The website I help build and run also does time-expiring advertisements...and announcements, and postings, and quizzes, and assignments, and about a dozen other features that have expiration code behind them. I guess that makes just about every law professor in the U.S. an extremist which, come to think of it, probably isn't an assertion Kennedy's camp would deny.

This is just an exemplary example of harnessing people's non-understanding of how the web works to rally their indignation. There's nothing finer than playing off your constituents' ignorance, rather than educating them to be better and more-informed voters.

The Wege has a lengthier bit up about the whole incident, about the third bit down on his page, and I like his statement:

More lies from people who apparently can't tell their elephants from their asses. Kos runs a moderate to liberal site that is pro-military, pro-balanced budget, pro-America. Markos is military veteran who calls it like he sees it.

Of course, you can also get the skinny from the horse's own mouth if you like, over at Kos, along with his opinion of who the real extremists are and some links to donate Amy some money and/or some time.

The Fog

Pooteewheet and I watched The Fog last night. It was boring. Unendingly boring. I remember being terrified of the original John Carpenter movie when I was kid (1980!) as it was probably the first horror movie I really watched (if you don't count Soylent Green, which scared the crap out of me). But the remake pulled itself down to a PG-13 to catch the teeny-bopper crowd, and the "horror" seemed to consist of being thrown through windows or other panes of glass. Seriously, everyone in the movie that died was repeatedly thrown through a plate of glass - a boat window, a building window, a museum display case... Didn't the filmmakers find it a bit strange when reviewing their writing that every fifth page included the stage instruction "throw [character] through window"? Why is that scary? And why, if you have an evil fog from the ocean, presumably full of creepy crawlies, feathered lobsters, choking seaweed, and that salty stuff that can drown you, do you kill everyone by throwing them through plates of glass?

To top it off, the people they kill and/or try to kill are for the most part not even descendents of the people who shafted the ghosts/zombies (in the original they were more like zombies, in this one they were more like ghosts). And when they're done exacting their revenge on mostly non-evil descendants, they steal the lead's girlfriend by turning her into a ghost (she seems to be a reincarnation of the ghost captain's wife) and then just going away. What? The ancestors of the town burnt a ship full of lepers alive and stole all their treasure and all the fog/ghosts want is for the captain to get his hoochie mama back?

Bad writing, bad film editing, just bad.

A New Couple...

Tall Brad and I were discussing my designation of him as Brary at work in another post and pondered what other people would make good merged-named couples (Brad remarked on a Daily Show where Jon Stewart had noted that a nifty merged-name was a sign of a good relationship). My favorite that we came up with....Felicity Huffman and Horatio Sanz.

FOIA Request

So, a while ago I posted about how Dan'l should quit paying his phone bill to see if the government was watching him. Now, according to Eyeteeth, he can just ask them directly at FOIARequest.org. I'm sure just asking about whether you're suspicious makes you suspicious, so maybe if you file a request you have to file one twelve months later to see if the first one landed you on a wiretap.

I don't harbor any illusions that I'm on a wiretap, although perhaps peripherally through Dan'l. And of course my new status on the Anti-Strib liberal blogroll (I've been identified as an other!) might bring me to someone's conservative attention.

Late Night Rodent Tails

I was riding my trainer in the computer room tonight, when I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. At first I wrote it off to flicker from the bombardment in Band of Brothers - but the more I thought about it, the more suspicious it seemed. When the mouse came around the end of the computer hutch and blatantly stared me down before scurrying back under cover, my suspicions were confirmed. I finished my ride, and then called for Pooteewheet to bring me a shoe or some other heavy mouse-stunning object.

She complied, and we discussed the shoe for a while before she brought me around to her way of thinking (she's still traumatized by my hair brushing of a vole at the duplex many years ago)...Eryn's puke bucket. Eryn was ill today, so I had the satisfaction of knowing the mouse was going to be trapped in a used puke bucket - then again, maybe they think that's delicious. I put various found objects in front of all the cracks and crevices leading out of the room and Pooteewheet staffed the broom while I staffed the bucket. We chased the mouse back and forth and back and forth trying to corner it somewhere that wasn't full of wires (wireless is for whipper snappers), until it finally ran under the second computer desk and promptly vanished. Fearing that the mouse had made it into the closet somehow, I slowly pulled everything out until it was spotless. Net result - no mouse.

Then I realized that the old Windows 98 machine was slightly askew...sure enough, there he was, moseying around under the lower card. Unwilling to slam a bucket against the machine, I shooed him out and we resumed the chase.



Several minutes later...he was our prisoner. Unfortunately for him, his tail was stuck between the cardboard and the puke bucket, but he probably found it preferable to a shoeing. Note that I did not pin his tail under the lip of the bucket merely to enhance blog excitement, though I did take advantage of the situation.



After that I took him outside and backed over him with the car. No no...I didn't, I didn't. Only a psychotic backs over a mouse with a car. We took him out back...way out back, and let him lose in some leaves not too far from the neighbor's wood pile. I might feel bad about inflicting a mouse on my neighbor if it weren't for the fact that the woodpile has been there for years - it's probably where the mouse came from in the first place. Anyway - here's proof we set him free...because we love him. And if returns, he's ours forever. I'm not sweating from chasing a mouse, by the way - that's from riding for 45 minutes.



As an added bonus - here's a close up of the mouse in flight, giving each and every one of you a mousey moon. Note the crimp in his tail where it was under the edge of the bucket. Don't pity him, it's a battle scar he'll carry proudly to show the other mice his brush with death.

Capital V Rhymes With P and that Stands for Penis...

Hopefully you've seen The Music Man, or that title makes no sense whatsoever. The Revealer has a link up to an article at the Washington Post, Delivering the Conservative Line on Monologues. The following paragraph alone is enough to mark you as looney in my system:

Stuart grew up in a liberal Connecticut family, but in her sophomore year, she attended a debate that included conservative commentator Ann Coulter and came away enthralled. Soon she had joined the College Republicans.

But then she goes here:

During winter break of her senior year, she retyped "The Vagina Monologues,"
replacing every use of the word "vagina" with "penis," and called the result
"The Penis Monologues."

...and you know there's something deeply wrong with her that has nothing to do with needing a conservative message in her life. I don't think this is an issue of a liberal girl hearing the conservative call and being moved to a new way of thinking. I think this is just a story about a troubled college girl who isn't spending enough time with her books to actually understand the world and who found safety in hooking up with people who think for her.

"If you had an understanding of the play, the vagina becomes the least significant thing," Ensler says.

Coworker Comparison

I've been asked to compare a picture of my coworker, Erik, with a picture of some guy in an advertisement on Boing Boing with a picture of Jeff Miller, Republican wank from Tennessee. I'm certainly willing to believe Erik might be found wearing a Drink Like a Champion Today t-shirt surrounded by a few hotties (after all, he plays bass), but that collar and suit on Jeff would be a serious tell that it wasn't really Erik. If he could round up all these look-alikes, however, he might have a very interesting band.

(clickable to a slightly larger version)

Organ Transplant and Brangolina

I spent the whole day at work waiting for my computer to give an organ transplant to another computer. It gave me the blue screen of death and our tech informed me that it was probably the power source and that it had taken the drive with it as it died. So they yanked the memory, fixed the drive, yanked it, and shoved all those guts into a second machine until they can fix my other one. Why I need the other one back is beyond me as the machines are identical. They'll have to find me first as I'll be moving cubes in the middle of their first aid.

So you'd think I'd have more to write about after sitting around reading all day, but mostly I'm just annoyed with the phrase "Brangolina". Are reporters retarded? That's not cute - it's disgusting. It sounds like a lower intestinal disorder. On my behalf, I never once referred to Tall Brad and any girlfriend of his as a single entity, like Brama...or Brawn...or Brary. That'd just be dumb.

And this post, about the Marines only blocking websites with politics they don't like (original at Wonkette), bugs me. You hear one of these stories every now and then, and then it's proven not to be true, or corrected so quickly it can't be proven. But if it is true, it doesn't show any sort of political strength that you can force people to listen to your opinions, it just shows the weakness of your own opinions that they can't stand versus dissent. And with 72% of soldiers wanting the war to end in 2006, there's more than a bit of dissent.

Finally, I have a new game I like to play, when my computer is working. I've noticed the Snopes/Urban Legends feed in my aggregator only displays the urban legend to be addressed, not whether it's true or false. So I always venture my own, true, false, a bit of both, guess before I actually link over to the story and see if I was right. I recommend it for anyone gullible enough to have found themselves spreading an urban legend - it's good practice.

Not at the Caucus

I'm sure the liberal bloggers I know will be looking at my post and thinking, "I sure hope he was liveblogging from his DFL caucus." No dice. Pooteewheet has a dinner date tonight with her fellow Auggie social workers, and I'm in charge of Eryn. No matter how lenient the DFL is about two year old children at their caucuses, I'm not biting.

Instead, Eryn and I hit Chipotle for a burrito and chips (the definition of daddy-daughter time at the Scooter household) and then wandered over to GameStop to take advantage of the fact that God of War for the Playstation 2 just dropped to $19.99 new and $17.99 used and I can trade it with Kyle later for something he buys. Eryn played some XBox fairy game involving orcs ("no Dad, they're ogres" - no doubt her assertion was inspired by Shrek) and I cashed out the game I went there for as well as some game involving a rabbit and a weasel chainganged together in a testing laboratory full of danger. How can that not be fun?

I'd offer you a bit more, but I've been in recovery since the rental house, and facing the fact that I'm moving into a smaller cube, worrying about my work machine with what seems to be a noisy hard drive, getting shipped to Houston and Chicago (better find my tie and suit pants), more or less geeking out because I'm annoyed about a book I'm reading that I could have written myself two years before the authors wrote it, pondering personal and corporate taxes, and citrus-ing myself to death because my company wellness program says to eat five fruits and vegetables a day and I dislike vegetables that aren't lettuce. Eryn, on the other hand, is relaxing over Mickey Mouse and her very first Ring Pop - guess who's got less stress?

But there's a silver lining in my cloud - my wife bought me my very own copy of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 4, to watch while I bike (after I finish Band of Brothers, so I can give it back to Ming), starring the vocal talents of Sarah Silverman in "Robositter". Ah...the return of the Space Invader-like Mooninites...

Inignot: You and your third dimension.
Frylock: What about it?
Inignot: Oh, nothing, it's cute. We have five. [pause]
Err: Thousand.
Inignot: Yes, five thousand.
Err: Don't question it.
Frylock: Oh, yeah? Well, I only see two.
Inignot: Well, that sounds like a personal problem.

Kirby, Caucuses, Crashing and Cleaning

A massive stroke at 44 and Kirby's gone? Great snarkies! Mean Mr. Mustard is around that age...maybe that knee is starting to look less problematic.

I don't remember seeing this anywhere other than the email Mr. Mustard sent me - but here are the details about G.W.'s bicycle crash during the G8. I think they should have fined him as a lesson for the kiddies - there's no excuse for unsafe riding.

If you intend to be at your DFL Caucus (tomorrow night, 3/7 at 7:00 p.m.) - here's a caucus finder, courtesy of The Power Liberal.

And finally - we are done with all the nasty rental house work. The place is clean. If you estimate the house at about 2500 square feet, and then just multiply by about three for walls and ceilings painted (closets and doors, so not by four), I painted a big chunk of 7500+ square feet. We purchased 15 gallons of ultra pure white paint and 2 gallons of ceiling paint to cover up soot and went through a good portion of it. 150 person hours of cleaning. Ugh. Eryn was going absolutely stir crazy by the time we left. But the renter seemed ecstatic and even a bit impressed with her new, quiet dishwasher, which is much nicer than my own.

On Sunday we told Eryn that we'd take her someplace fun to make up for 15 hours with nothing to do at the rental house, so we ended up at the Mall of America. Where we promptly bumped into my brother. In case you don't believe Minnesota is a small place, on Friday I bumped into someone from my extended business unit and he shared a table with my family over a burrito. Then on Saturday the new renter moved in, whose son plays basketball with the old renter's son and who is friends with someone who lives within a block of me. On Sunday, we saw my brother and his family at the Mall, and then I bumped into Iver from one of the groups at work I often meet with. After I introduced Iver to my family, I turned around and there was Saviz, who works a few rows away from me and will be sitting kitty corner to me after my cube move this weekend. My daughter and his daughter rode the airplane ride together. Then I came home and snuck an old, rusty sprinkler into the open back of Christy's SUV so that she'd mistakenly take it to her new house. Christy also works with me.

You'd think we all lived in Mayberry.

And, speaking of coworkers, if one of you noticed the rip in the elbow of my shirt today and didn't tell me, you officially suck. I don't wear clothes with holes in them on purpose.

Ave Maria, Zion and Jonestown

It seems the founder of Domino's Pizza is starting his own town: "Abortions, pornography, and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria created by Tom Monaghan, a former marine who was raised by nuns and is the founder of the Domino's Pizza." (City Pages Blotter).

Which makes one wonder how familiar he is with the history of Zion, Illinois.

Zion is a city located in Lake County, Illinois. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 22,866. The city was founded in July of 1901 by Dr. John Alexander Dowie. He also started the Zion Tabernacle of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, which was the only church in town. It was built in the early 1900s and burned down in 1937.

It should be noted that Zion was founded by religious nutcases (the aforementioned Christian Catholic Apostolic Church) who took the Biblical "four-corners" of the earth statement to heart and preached that the earth was flat (see Flat Earth Society).

Perhaps the most famous American flat earther was the late Rev. Wilbur Glenn Voliva, General Overseer of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church of Zion, Illinois. Rev. Voliva was elected mayor of Zion in 1914 and proceeded to turn that little city into his own private theocracy. Following his inauguration he insisted that biblical cosmology be taught in all public schools in Zion to the exclusion of any other concept, particularly modern astronomy. Being a very energetic man, Rev. Voliva established in Zion one of this country's first Christian radio broadcasting stations where he went on the air daily to thunder against what he described as "the Devil's Triplets" -- evolution, higher criticism (of the Bible), and, of course, modern
astronomy. Voliva was not ousted from political office until 1935. Under new, more progressive leadership the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church of Zion lost control, and its strangle hold on government was, after almost 20 years, finally broken. But take heart good people, the geocentrists may be an endangered species, but they are not yet extinct.

For a while, Zion was so zealous in its religiousity that local police would board trains to search for smokers, drinkers, etc., in order to ticket them just for passing through town.

Until 1935 the city was a communal society with a theocratic government...

Dowie wasn't making pizza, but presumably only because he couldn't exploit enough churchgoers to accomplish everything there was to produce.

in 1895, the church established the theocratic community of Zion, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan forty miles (seventy kilometers) north of Chicago. In 1905, Dowie was deposed as leader of the cult by his lieutenant, Wilbur Glenn Voliva. Voliva ruled his some 6000 followers with an iron hand, ruthlessly exploiting their labor in the church-run corporation, Zion Industries.

So, good luck to everyone in Ave Maria - living with a religious zealot in a small, insular community seems not to have such a good track record, but maybe you'll be an exception to the rule. And if he calls you to the town square to share in the communal pizza, just pretend you've never heard of Jonestown.

Lawerly Fun - Overheard in Law School

For those of you who are lawyers, and maybe some of you who aren't but, like me, just work with them, or bump into them at Chipotle when you're out for dinner with your family on the way to rental unit cleaning and invite them to join you, Overheard in Law School (courtesy of Done as a Society - a local law moblog). Almost anyone can appreciate gems such as:

(After a review session for a final exam)
2L: You need to relax. Look how calm I am.
2L #2: You're only calm because you weren't paying attention.

or, if you like your humor more lawyerly than that:

On Trial Strategy...
Trial Advocacy Prof: "Let me tell you what I would do...no...let me tell you what an attorney with a normal ego would do..."

A Valuable Lesson

I have learned a valuable lesson, that if you aspire to be a slum lord of rental housing, your dreams can come true. More importantly, it takes more than a weekend to turn around a five-bedroom (six if you count the "office" - it's got no closet) house that has been studiously grungified. Pooteewheet and I don't claim to be the cleanest folk in the world - we're not conscientious dusters, we don't vaccum daily, even though we have a dog and a cat, and there's a bit of clutter, but we don't leave bodily fluids on the wall, dump our trash in our air ducts/vents, or leave an actual layer of dirt mixed with food and toothpicks on every surface, both horizontal and vertical. But don't take my word for it - go read Pooteewheet's two posts on the subject.

As a matter of fact, after my 30+ hours cleaning, taping, buying supplies, and painting, painting, painting with a brush and roller until my arms ache and my hands have swelling that feels like a sunburn (I can reach the ceiling/wall corner without a step stool, though I have to stretch and lift off my heels, so I get the enviable job of doing the hard-push edging), Pooteewheet has taken pity on me and gone over there herself to steam the rugs, the rugs that had/have so much grime in them that when you go from the basement, which has already been steamed, to the upstairs, which hasn't, there's a noticeable difference in the smell six feet off the floor.

You may wonder, "but didn't you do inspections?" Yes, cursory ones - we'd fix what wasn't working the renter told us about. You can look back in my posts and see me complaining about this and that and how it broke because the cable guy moved it, etc. But we assumed a renter would tell us if there were drips or problems. What I have now come to realize, after a few renters, is that they will only tell you about things that are directly impacting them - i.e. the washer and dryer don't work or there's a lake in the basement. Simple things, like "we've noticed a leak" or "I smell a little gas" are ignored until they escalate into category one concerns, which may be just short of the house actually falling down or exploding. The problem I'm having probably stems from my own personal experiences. I never left an apartment anything other than spotless, even when I had bad landlords who let upstairs toilet water run through my ceiling into my own bathroom, and I always liked it best when they left me alone rather than doing constant inspections. I've always assumed anyone else would have the same attitude, and they do, just minus the leave it clean part.

Ah well, live and learn. We're already applying what we've learned toward the next duplex side we're turning over. It'll have a full month of down time while we busy ourselves with a full overhaul of the carpets, walls, and anything that's been hidden from view that we should have known about. In the meanwhile, if I'm quiet for the next day or two, it's because there's no wireless at the empty house where I'm undoubtedly rolling a bit more paint.