Web Log Archive, July 29th through August 11th, 2007

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

" 'I did this,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done this,' says my pride, remaining inexorable. Eventually, my memory yields."
Nietzsche

Friday, August 10th, 2007

Optimism has not often been better-represented than at the Crandall Canyon Mine in Huntington, Utah this morning: 

"The fact that we have not picked up any sound should not be interpreted as bad news. There could be a number of factors as to why sounds in there might not be picked up and I wouldn't look at it as good or bad news."
Robert Murray (CEO of Murray Energy) who, on April 6th of this year told CNN's Carol Costello that Al Gore is "the shaman of global goofiness and gloom and doom."

"Where it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,
Where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines."  Merle Travis.

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

At left is a photograph of my maternal grandparents, ca. 1915. Mary Nolan and Patrick Kelly emigrated separately to the United States from Ireland and met in New York City. She (~45 years old when this was taken) gave birth to one child (my mom) when she was already 44. 

At right is another photo of Mary when (I'm guessing) she was ~60 years old. A tough old bird, she lived well in to her eighties. Patrick lived only in to his seventies. 

Both photos I received from my big sister Carol during my recent odyssey. And both photos are currently lost in the return mail to Florida but, curiously, both photos are far richer in their digital (scanned) form!

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Avarice has not often been better-represented than at AT&T Park last night: "...her husband disappeared into the scrum, leaving their 4-year-old son to cower with his teddy bear." By accounts, some 'fans' arrived at the game with 'decoy balls' useful, in the event that #756 lands nearby, for scattering competitors when push, quite literally, comes to shove.
"One 15-year-old fan said he was sure that he was the guy with the ball. But he had fallen for the fake ball trick."

What I will never understand is why this stupid ball is worth more than any other stupid ball! It is said that #756 will fetch ~$300K on the 'collector's market'. So that means that somebody smart enough to have $300K is also dumb enough to spend it on a $15 baseball!?! And just what DO these collectors DO with these 'historic items'? Do they sit in a room with them while pleasuring themselves? It takes all kinds!

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Where was I during the transmogrification of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner? I mean, back when I was paying attention (in the mid 70's or so), she was the co-host with hubby Jim Bakker of the PTL (for 'Praise The Lord' or 'People That Love') Club. She and he were pioneering 'televangelists'. It was great, must-see camp television for potheads! Jim was eventually exposed as "a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history" [Jerry Falwell's words] and wound up in the Big House for a stretch. 
Now...how it is that Tammy escaped jail time is not known to me. She divorced Jim in 1992 and remarried the following year. By the early oughties she had been featured in The Eyes of Tammy Faye and was being reconstructed in the media as a serious person with something to say! In 2002, NPR did a feature on her popularity in the gay community and she even appeared on 'reality television' with Ron Jeremy! Glory Gee To Besus!
So, by the time of her macabre appearance on Larry King (on July 19th...a day before her death), she had morphed into a composite of  Mother Theresa and Princess Diana!. Very soon, we'll expect miracles to be reported in her name and, surely, Dope Benedict 2⁴ will offer her up for Sainthood. 

Monday, August 6th, 2007

It was about a three hour, fifteen minute flight from Los Angeles to Houston. I arrived after one AM and my flight down to Harlingen was not until 7:30 AM. Yes, more than a six hour wait and I had to uncheck my bags and keep track of 'em through the wee hours in a cavernous terminal. Yeah, I planned it this way to save a buncha money on airfare. But it was about as grizzly as it sounds. 

Turns out I was wrong about the 'food'. On the the Houston leg, the Southwest flight attendants threw boxes of what are called 'Travel Snacks' at the in-flight captives. I came to reason that the function of these 'snacks' is not so much to assuage hunger as to suppress appetite.
                                  
Here is the back of the box for these snacks:
Note the threat of more air travel! 

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

Today was one of those Mark Twain's 'coldest Winter I ever spent was a Summer' days in the Bay Area and, as if to make the point, the power went out for a few hours in the afternoon. But that was a high point 'cuz it forced me to do something non-electrical (like take a nap...and read, sitting in a chair---outside, for the light).
To boil water for coffee, I had to dig out my single-burner propane stove which I keep for just such occasions. Maggie opted for tea and it seemed to take an unbearably long time for our water to boil. And yeah...while it heated, we talked about that recent study done at MIT where some graduate students proved conclusively that a watched pot does, indeed, boil. It just takes longer. ;-)
So...after my nap, and then coffee outside over a New Yorker article about the 2001 murder of a Seattle-area U.S. Attorney...and how Bush probably did it...it occurred to me, not knowing how long the power would be out, that I maybe oughta buy an extra bottle of propane for the burner...just in case, ya know? 
So I loaded myself into my '81 Chevy (which always stalls at the same red-turning-green light when it's warming up...where  I always manage to be the first car in line at that light when it does...and where the person in back of me always honks before I can restart my wreck) and set off to the nearest Ace Hardware Store. There was a lot of traffic for a Sunday (maybe due to the outage) and I had to park a few blocks away. A hefty, forty-ish blonde woman, heading for the same store, was a half-block ahead of me on the sidewalk but even from that distance (and with my aging eyesight) I could see that she had a circulation problem: her calves and ankles were horribly swollen and bruised. My revulsion at her appearance was not noble and it was not 'fair'. It was only reflexive.
So I found a propane bottle (and gagged at the price: nearly $5!) and went to stand in line and, yes, there were lots of people in line in spite of the fact that all four registers were open. Hearing a voice from the person behind me ("Gee. I've never seen it so crowded!"), I turned to see that I was in line with the poor soul whom I have just described. And she did not endear herself to me when she pointed out that I could buy the same bottle at Target for half the price I was about to pay here. And I did not love her more when she commenced to 'educate' me on the specifics of propane bottles...like how they screw on to stoves and lanterns and all about the pressure-relief valve near the top. She does 'a lot of camping', I learned. It was clear that this woman was lonely...starved for company and I was not proud to observe my part of this interaction. Like nearly everyone else she encounters every day, I was eager to get away from her. For, like nearly everyone else, I am shallow. 

Saturday, August 4th, 2007

On the driving leg of my recent trip, I had just checked in to the Best Western Executive Hotel in Sulphur, Louisiana, booted up my traveling P3, brought up SFGate and...wow! There was the staggering news that veteran Bay Area broadcaster Pete Wilson had died in the middle of an operation to repair his (already artificial) hip. The word was that he had a 'massive heart attack' on the operating table and that even the best-in-the-world surgeons at the Stanford Medical Center were unable to bring him back. An autopsy revealed that one of his coronary arteries was virtually 100% occluded going in and that a second was ~70% blocked. No pre-op test had revealed that he was so severely at risk.
To add to the eerie-ness, his employer, KGO Radio, posted an MP3 of  his final radio spiel...given the day before the fateful (and fatal) operation. Give it a listen. Spooky!

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

"In the spring of 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), wanted to get the word out about his company's latest computer product. But after selecting six hundred West Coast business contacts, he realized that he would never have the time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages over what was then called the Arpanet.
Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used Arpanet to dispatch a single e-mail to all of them?"
Michael Specter, writing in the current issue of The New Yorker about the first piece of 'junk' email.

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007                     The Seventeenth Anniversary of Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait

"The government consists of a gang of men [who] have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them."  
H. L. Mencken, sent to me by Chuck Aronson

To each his sufferings: all are men, 
Condemn’d alike to groan; 
The tender for another’s pain, 
Th’ unfeeling for his own. 
Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,  
Since sorrow never comes too late, 
And happiness too swiftly flies? 
Thought would destroy their paradise! 
No more;—where ignorance is bliss, 
’Tis folly to be wise. 
From Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, by Thomas Gray (1716–1771)

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

The plane was only thirty-five minutes late leaving Oakland but that cut in half the interval between when I arrived in Los Angeles and when I had to board the flight to Houston so if I wanted anything in my gut before morning besides yet one more mini-packet of Southwest Airlines peanuts, I knew I had to move along smartly. And yeah, there is a McDonald's at LAX but, to my surprise, it has a counter not much wider than an ATM and I had to put myself in a long line of people waiting to first be robbed, then poisoned. Efficiency was nowhere in evidence. When my turn came and I had finished gasping at the listed price ($6.99, for the love of Christ!) of a pretend fish fillet sandwich on a hamburger bun, I placed my order, augmenting it with a 'small order of fries' and a 'small chocolate milk shake'. [The counter person didn't bother to call my attention to the undraped reality that this particular McDonald's has only one size of fries (Super-Size) and one size of milkshake (Huge).]  While the 'fish' had already been caught, it had not yet been cooked (well...how were they to know that someone would actually be willing to pay seven bucks for one?). I was made to wait.
By this time, my appetite had been defeated by my anxiety over the prospect of spending the night at this grizzly airport. So I force-fed myself and made it to the gate on time, wondering about those air-sickness bags one can always find "in the pouch in the back of the seat in front of you".

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

When, at last, I did clear security and was permitted to dress, it was not without a feeling that I had gotten away with something: a feeling that I really was up to no good and had simply not been found out! As I ambled (hands-free) to the boarding area, I knew that my arrest was imminent. I would be converged upon by four burlies, handcuffed and led away to a confinement of indeterminate duration. 
Already mindful that airlines no longer serve even the much-maligned 'airline food' of old, I had made and wrapped myself two modest sandwiches to-go but, alas, had left them at home in the frenzy of my departure. Telling myself it would be a wonderful thing to go without dinner (for the first time in my charmed life), I contented myself with a very hot black cup of Starbucks coffee then, just for laughs, surveyed the offerings at the food concessions in the boarding area. There was a 'grilled chicken sandwich' for $8.25 which looked a lot like what my cat had choked up the night before...but not as appetizing. There was also a 'tuna melt' for only $7.50! It was almost as mouth-watering as the plugged toilet in the nearby men's room. The concept of fasting (at least until I got to Los Angeles) grew in its appeal. And hadn't Maggie told me to expect to find a McDonald's at LAX? And, I mean, didn't I know how bad that was gonna be?  

Monday, July 30th, 2007

After parking one of my wrecks at one of Oakland Airport's many 'Park 'n Fly'-type lots, I was loaded onto a cattle car for the trip to the terminal. I hadn't been four feet from a meadow muffin in nearly eight years and so, of course, I had forgotten to put my thirty year-old Swiss Army Knife (worth at least thirty cents) into my checked luggage.
Passengers are now required to strip naked before they are cleared to the boarding gates and, although it's embarrassing (for an old goat like me), it's a small sacrifice to make on the altar of stayin' alive in the skies! A kindly Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer was alert to my oversight, but instead of spiriting me off to a foreign country for a week of water-boarding, he told me I could either part with the weapon or I could put my clothes back on, throw it in what was gonna be my carry-on bag and then check that bag and try to board again...empty handed.
Some airports (like the one in Tampa, Florida) have found a way to profit from ignorant travelers like me. They'll let you use a credit card to mail forbidden items to your destination (or back home). It would have cost about $15 to deal with my knife in that manner.  

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Some folks are touchy, but not sensitive.
Others are sensitive, but not touchy.
Some folks are touchy and sensitive.
Others are not touchy or sensitive.

"The last time I was on the bus we were going to New Jersey and that bus was in an accident, too.
 I'm not going to do another one."
Nancy Richardson

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