nanotech

Nanotech
2005-06-17— Posted by: allegra

I scan eurekalert.org mostly for good news about science, as the tone is irrepressibly upbeat. (Makes the donors and funders and sponsors and overseers and taxpayers happy). So I finally saw some nanotech news that made -me- happy; as far as I can tell somebody’s come up with a modelling tool that actually works for custom building nanocrystals without which we can’t have littler processors.

It works, as far as I can understand it, which is nae far at all, by being able to predict the dielectric of a nanocrystal based on its size, surface area and the base material. Anyway, I am going to follow the careers of the gentlemen who ran the labs and the computational horsepower and the software because I suspect that they and intelligent backers are going to be able to commercialize something within 4 – 7 years. And the pictures were purty! What a sap I am!!

Have a lovely evening all.

I shouldn’t have had that hamburger for lunch.

I really wish I could talk about work, but the interesting customer interaction all ended well and a BIg BEEG shout out to Debbie D for her amazing catch.

I don’t really want to say goodbye, I’m just stooging around in the doorway.

Paul has gone flying with Dan P.

The kids have disappeared into Angel’s bosom. Keith brought home the second Volume of League of Extraordinarary Gentlemen and frankly it’s nowhere near as good as the first one.

With respect to media I may say that the prospect of Batman Begins beguiles and Serenity makes me smile in anticipation.

And I’ve gotta get back to Jeff’s place. I wish to sail to that country …

crypto cat

Crypto Cat
2005-06-16— Posted by: allegra

There’s a kid’s page for the NSA! Isn’t that cool? This is Crypto Cat. I can’t make this crap up.

Did you know that the mere presence of encryption software on your computer indicates criminal intent in the state of Minnesota? And did you know that within this past week, the first gay military wedding and the first gay divorce took place in Canada? Man, that would be a great thing to have on your resume, the wedding photographer at the first gay military wedding. If it was the first one in the world somebody would have said so, so now I’m trying to figure out where the first gay military wedding was. Swedes! I betcha it was those Swedes!

Did you know that Belgians have one of the highest rates of consumption of child pornography in the world? I would have thought with all that beer and chocolate they would have better things to do with their time.

Katie has a provincial exam in social studies on June 21st, wish her luck… and Keith graduates tomorrow. Sigh.

Paul is back, and being exceedingly Paul like.

Heron feather

just go there
2005-06-15— Posted by: allegra

http://cgee.hamline.edu/see/goldsworthy/see_an_andy.html <—– don’t bother, it no longer works

Heron feather
2005-06-15— Posted by: allegra

My new coworker Patricia presented me with a heron fledgling feather yesterday morning, which I thought was an amazing sign – great way to start the day. (In a white sateen jewellery box! which I returned, of course.) As I contemplated the intersecting avalanche that is my work I also regarded the ovoid feather, which is soft as down, funny that, and mostly white with pale brown tips, about two centimetres long.

A long time ago, when the gods were young and frisky and I weighed much less, there was a rule, or a standard, or somesuch, about what the name sign at your desk was supposed to look like. My boss, a man of much subtlety, vision and humour, responded to this challenge very well; but I’m not going to say how.

What *I* did was read the standard and then see how many deviations I could put in before somebody said anything. Now the really weird thing about me is that not only do standard rules not really cover me, nobody seems to notice when I flout them… this is all part of this thing that’s going on with my middle age, when I am more and more invisible (but not inaudible, as I affirmed recently). So the first thing I did was go home and print the name tag in Rainbow Colours on the inkjet. In a non standard font. Okay. So I’m contemplating the sign, tapping my teeth with my pen, and thinking, it’s just not GARISH enough, and then a former boss gave me a prezzie. A coaster that said, *when you come to the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on*, which was appropriate under the circumstances, and now sits next my bed and prevents beer from dripping condensation on things. The wrapping paper was EXTREMELY cool and changes color depending on the light. So I cut it out and put it above and below my name on my sign. That still didn’t have that enoughness feeling. So I brought in a totem pole that my 25 years dead grandpa carved – it’s about 20 centimetres tall – and stuck it on top of the divided end of my pod. Of course it wouldn’t stay put so I had to scotchtape it down, but the point of this whole tedious anecdote is that I taped the heron feather to the back of my grandpa’s totem pole which sits atop of my non-standard sign, and so, as of yesterday, my sign is perfect. I have hit the enoughness line. And nobody says a thing, because I’m invisible. It’s all good. I suppose at some point I should take a picture.

so here is the rest of the month

enough sleep
2005-06-14— Posted by: allegra

Cousin Gerald sent me this picture, culled from Elsewhere. Looks like Oklahoma to me! I was walking with the kids when I lived in Etobicoke – they would have been four and six respectively – and the sky went like this. When the sky goes green, it’s time to make tracks to the storm cellar. That same day a tornado came right through the complex within metres of my building and then went out onto the water and turned into a water spout as tall as a six story building. I didn’t see it because I was cowering in my bed with the kids, but the noise was as advertised in the movies, deafening.

Lovely anecdote from a cow irker yesterday. I mentioned that I had seen Training Day, and he said, “So did I. At work.”

So I said, say what?

Yeah, when he was working someplace else he got a meeting request to ‘review a training video’. So he and a bunch of his cow irkers all herded into a room and after about two seconds, everybody in the meeting room sat up and went, hey THIS isn’t a training video! To which the meeting organizer calmly replied, sure it is. And they sat an’ watched it. How come cool stuff like this never happens at MY work??? Although there has been a persistent rumour that we’re going to do that with another cinematic high point, (had to cut this work reference).

(Had to cut this work reference but it led perfectly into the next sentence). I missed my calling, it’s like I’m some extremely perverse form of dominatrix, a specialist’s specialist. If you want a torrent of genteel abuse in the form of literate emails, I’m your girl. Woman, whatever. (Okay, had to delete this work reference as well.)

Nana’s wisdom
2005-06-14— Posted by: allegra

If you are female and over the age of 15, you will like this link, and if you are my mother you will laugh out loud at least once. The rest of you…. Oi, mess off!

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/scripture/nana.htm

Killing the Buddha is a site for people that aren’t raaaahhlly cool with the notion of organized religion. Found this site following links on nmazca.com which is STILL one of the best blogs around even if Mr. Damon doesn’t post very often. I dunno, new gf or what?

Spoke to Paul earlier. He sounds wonderful.

Fraser Institute on Teen Unemployment
2005-06-14— Posted by: allegra

At a macro-level, the best means to reducing youth unemployment include a strong macroeconomic climate — which improves employment prospects for everyone — and a flexible labour market, which opens the doors to more employment opportunities. Since young workers are the hardest hit by the adverse effects of a rigid labour market, it is only by the elimination of provincial minimum wage laws, the repeal of closed shop union privileges, and cuts to payroll taxes that employment prospects for young workers will improve, according to the report. ”

Allegra sez:

Gracious. The employment prospects for young workers will only improve if we boot organized labour in the ass, hand money back to the owners of the business and kill the minimum wage law. I don’t have a problem with door number two, but the rest of the raping and pillaging can’t count me in as a fangirl. The problem with killing the minimum wage law is what it does to the societal perception of what (and when it is appropriate) to steal. If I don’t get what I think is minimal, I will steal. Then you will put me in jail and pay for me twice, once in the loss of my productive labour for the culture, and once to keep my sorry ass fed and free of HIV. Ha Ha. So once again the problem with the Fraser Institute recommendations is that you can feel calm and correct about them until you have to deal with the fallout from being on the receiving end of their implementation. These guys just don’t know a damned thing about lube, you know what I mean? And if you work with materials, as well as people, you KNOW that cost reduction is not the answer to every problem.

Reducing the size of government, depending on the goals to be achieved, is not always intelligent either, and I’m a goddamned anarchist and would prefer we were smart enough and distributed enough that we (us, the people who live here) could deal with most circumstances locally and leave governance of furrin parts to the people who live THERE, while avoiding having any level of government sprawl on us like we were throw cushions. I know, aren’t I a simplistic moron to so conceive of the future? My mamma, she slappa me upSIDEa da head if I say dat.

Sigh.

Anyway, if you find your way to the Fraser Institute on line you can look marvelling upon their works. Tastes like self-reliance pimping for the dreams of the rich. But I don’t owe anybody anything, do I? If my ancestors were blithely unaware that their tea and rubber and sugar were being pulled from the flesh and bone of indigenous peoples across the planet, I can do that too. It’s my traditional way of life, what do you mean I can’t pursue it? And too bad, because my ancestors handed money to somebody, so anybody with a grievance about this should just pipe down. Money fixes everything. Strip it of its sarcasm and it just seems uncomfortably close to the truth, with those happy folks at the Fraser Institute.

Yuck. Anyway, earlier in the article they talk about how there is a youth unemployment problem, but only among the kids who are too stupid to get an education, so who cares, and that’s the school system’s fault anyway. That’s another rant. And nowhere whispered …more money for education… what we need is STANDARDS, and that’s yet another other rant. And the youth unemployment rate hasn’t increased over time, so they say, now I’m going to have to look. So on one hand they say there’s no problem, except with stupid kids, and who cares, and on the other all the youth employment issues would go away if we loop back to paragraph 2? With a boot boot here, and a boot boot there? I wish John were here. He’s so much better at eviscerating thinktankspeak than I’ll ever be, it’s like watching the master at work.

enough sleep
2005-06-14— Posted by: allegra

this absolutely GHASTLY POEM HAS BEEN DELETED AND THANK CHRISTOS REDENTOR YOU LUCKY SWINE

enough sleep
2005-06-13— Posted by: allegra

Training Day and part of the Incredibles.

All in all, a fabulous weekend, an uneventful trip home, and here’s Katie wearing the blue hoodie G’ma knit for her. Briefly saw Mary, Shauna (Katherine stayed home, ha ha, our darling daughters!), Lexi, Lexi’s Rob (who HELIjetted over to Victoria from Vancouver, are you pea green with envy?), my folks and my darling grandmother who BAKED ME MY FAVOURITE CAKE, which is dark chocolate with vanilla butter icing. And vanished. And my parents gave me Amaretto Cheesecake to take home. So my first words upon entering my domicile were Katie, you awake? There’s cheesecake! which is one of those things that helps a teenager achieve consciousness with a minimum of fuss. And the house! All the dishes were done, the cat litter changed, the counters wiped, the floors all vacuumed. It was recognizably my house, and recognizably cleaner and tidier than when I left. Then an assemblage of brilliant people composing a part of Peggy’s household appeared and Pokey treated Tom like furniture… unabashedly and repeatedly. At one point – Ben and I saw – Tom and Peggy were sitting side by side on the stairs. Pokey placed his right paw on Tom’s shoulder and his left paw on Peggy’s shoulder and then heaved himself over them, leaving them with startled and amused expressions on their faces.

Pokey has avoided the attentions of cars and coyotes now that he is being let free to go and is a much happier cat than he used to be. (We’ve seen coyotes less than two blocks from the house, again.)

Keith said something very wise last night. When told not to be too honest in interviews, he soberly replied “Being honest will get me hired by the right people”. This in response to news that Katie may be working as early as next week at a fast food joint. Keith is feeling like his job search isn’t doing very well, but I reminded him that she was taken into a place that was hiring by a friend of hers who already works there, which kind of got her a leg up. And Keith refuses to work fast food, so far.

MORE MEDIA
2005-06-12— Posted by: allegra

Lessee now. Cooked dinner last night, pork chomps, salad and cauliflower with cheese sauce. Other than that had a very nice day of doing absobloodynothing. Movies viewed included Van Helsing, which I enjoyed rather more than I should have, and I just adored the guy who played Dracula, and Huge AAAK!man wasn’t uglified either, can that man wear a hat, and did anybody notice that Van Helsing couldn’t have been made without the Rocky Horror Picture Show first? and the day of viewing also included a repeat of Hero, a repeat of Prisoner of Azkaban (that is a very entertaining move, and the next movie will have Emma/Hermione in a ball gown, hubba hubba), and Down by Law (which I thoroughly enjoyed), Garden State (which is a weird weird movie but Natalie Portman is amazing in it), the 2004 Dawn of the Dead which I actually enjoyed and was in response to Jeff pleading with me, just ONE zombie movie, one eentsy meentsy zombie movie, and some weird crap on tv including athletic young men permanently damaging their organs of generation while disporting themselves on dirt bikes with dirty great jumping ramps. Oh, and I forgot to mention Girl with a Pearl Earring. Scarlett Johannson rocks.

I managed to avoid beer after 8 pm yesterday and so had a fairly good night of sleep.

I am publicly going on record as saying that I think Alan Rickman as Snape is hotter than a two dollar pistol. Anyone who knows me already knows I’m crazy and the rest of you can start sharpening your knives and assembling the war canoes.

I am also reading a bio of James Cook, just in case that last reference escaped relevence.

Today I have to bathe, as I am expecting to see my parents, and being primates of the first order, they would be horrified if I am not shiny clean. So I’m off the shower….. you can all thank God now. I like being a guy. I need to do this more often.

Being a guy
2005-06-11— Posted by: allegra

Wish i had a pic of my brother’s coffee table. Andrew, Jeff’s roommate, surveyed it and said, “He used to have seven.”

Remotes, that is.”

Now he only has five.

Above his work desk there’s a small whiteboard. I ignore all the small stuff – even though it’s all apparently in English I can’t understand word one – in favour of a beegass sidebar in black.

DON’T MULTITASK

DVD PROCESSING!!!!

Words to live by, indeed.

For who among us has not multitasked beyond the capacity of our systems, personal and social and mechanical, to bear.

There are two sets of family calendars up in Jeff’s house. The paternal one is in the computer room, the maternal one is in the kitchen. In the computer room is a big metal folder holder. It is jammed, but not disastrous. I can see maps to real and imaginary places. I can see early versions of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. I can see the CD insert for Total Air War. Are you getting excited yet? There are 30 countem at least 30 movies sitting on big screen DVD heaven out in the living room that I haven’t seen and want to. Daunting, isn’t it. Yesterday’s festive blowout consisted of Lost in Translation, followed by Radiohead’s Amnesiac followed by ALL of the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, followed by Vanilla Sky. I was mought near dying at that point and Andrew fetched me a glass of water, thank you, and then I nagged Keith into going to sleep (he was going to pull a war gaming all nighter) and we all crashed about 12:30. Now let’s see if I can get the boys to put on something I want to see. And now the best part of posting at a strange computer… finding a pic off the hard drive, cropping whatever, and posting.

Aha. Mossman? Great name for a superhero. Pic is of Mossman. I believe this is a character from City of Heroes, but nobody has specifically told me so.

I’ll be back from the multiverse in a while and post again once I find out where my bro stashes his pix.

enough sleep
2005-06-10— Posted by: allegra

I have to move along as I am expected in Victoria at 12:30 this afternoon. Katie bailed on the trip to Victoria but she promised to do cat care.

I’m mildly annoyed, but only mildly. Now I have to figure out how to shlep all this stuff without the car.

There was a Serenity preview and I missed getting tickets, calice. Pic is another of Katie’s from her trip down to the railway tracks.

Adorable food
2005-06-10— Posted by: allegra

Um. Cousin Gerald sent this. This is a cake. You could eat this, if it wasn’t pixellated. He sent about ten cakes, but this is what screechedpost ME post ME loudest. The reason I like it is because it is eXACtly, and I mean eXACtly like the kind of a purse that would be carried by a Nick Park heroine. Wendolene!! you forgot your purse!

Rob of Nine tells me I missed something funny at the all staff meeting today. Let us meditate, children, on the utter lack of conviction with which I report this.

I have been having a customer interaction for the last week which is very funny and very bizarre. It’s so compelling that I am picking up my work email – I don’t want to miss any of this delicious saga. Because of my company’s privacy policy, which oddly enough I respect, I can’t cross post it, but gosh darn, I’d give my eyeteeth and my left ovary to do so. A conversation this bizarre should be shared with the world. Anyway, I’m sure he’s a very nice man in person, and if he called me a name in his first response to my attempt to help him, I’m sure it was because he was having a bad day.

I just want to help him. He’s sure helped me. I tell the story, and people say: Jumping Jimmy CHRIS’mas, I’m glad I don’t have your job; so he’s made a lot of people happy, by being rude. Isn’t it weird how a sense of humor can turn crap into diamonds? That or a really tight sphincter. Anyway, Brother James, I’m thinking of you. You know man, I can’t forward it to you. Dude, I so want to. You would whiz yourself. Days later you would giggle involuntarily and then have to stifle it.

Shazbat! Look at the time. I have to heave myself into my maternal role and look fondly on my son while he tries to hit his classmates. Er, that is, watch the last 15 minutes of karate class at the Nikkei. Just so.

enough sleep
2005-06-10— Posted by: allegra

How can I type when my head just caved in? Anyway, here’s some Shrek trivia.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/trivia

Benedict the 16th speaks about Jewry
2005-06-10— Posted by: allegra

In the years following the Council, – sez Benedict XVI -my predecessors Pope Paul VI and, in a particular way, Pope John Paul II, took significant steps towards improving relations with the Jewish people. It is my intention to continue on this path. The history of relations between our two communities has been complex and often painful, yet I am convinced that the spiritual patrimony treasured by Christian and Jews… will lead to a future of hope.

Benedict added that it was important for both sides not to forget the past, stressing the need for a *continued reflection on the profound historical, moral and theological questions* raised by the Holocaust.

Nicely said, although how you’d get the Israel and the Diaspora to “forget” about the Holocaust under any circumstances – you know “quit bringing up that old tired Holocaust stuff, have a drink, live a little” – I have no idea.

Pic is of his name predecessor, Pope Benny 15. He was a neo modernist who herded all the canon law between two covers around the time of WWI.

enough sleep
2005-06-09— Posted by: allegra

Ah yes. When I’m on holiday, this is very funny

It’s 5 in the morning, and I’ve been up for an hour. The cough sirop wore off and Paul was making fussy noises, so I decided to go look at what had happened to the world while I was asleep. I discovered that if you’re an American citizen and you carry a bloody chainsaw into the country from Canada, they won’t even check to see if you have any outstanding warrants. But if this guy had had, say, a tan…. Not that I’m impugning the competence or work ethic of US Border guards. I’m not going to post a link to the picture of the guy, now accused of cutting somebody’s head off. It is the single most disturbing head shot I have ever seen in my life. You know how people say stupid things like “He had eyes like marbles?” Brrr.

My favourite overheard in the office comes to me from Toronto, by way of the Gman…. “Has anybody seen my copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? I think I left it in the photocopier…”

cute kitties
2005-06-09— Posted by: allegra

These fishing cats were born in the Minnesota Zoo early last month. Their furbears hailed from SE Asia and they do like to fish out of streams. They are endangered, so the zoo is pretty happy about successfully breeding them. They look like they have interesting personalities.

more pigs
2005-06-09— Posted by: allegra

And this is what you get when you have four pigs. Aren’t they adorable? These pix are for my mother, who very much likes pigs.

Pigs and more pigs
2005-06-09— Posted by: allegra

These are from richsoil.com.

Hm…
2005-06-08— Posted by: allegra

Pic is from Courtenay, by way of my double first cousin in common law, once removed, Carly. That means that I live with her double first cousin once removed. A double first cousin is what happens when a man marries a woman, whose brother marries her husband’s sister, and both couples have children. The children are double first cousins. This concludes my efforts to educate anybody about genealogy today.

Keith graduates on June 17th. Paul and I and Keith are going. Katie is looking hard for a job and experiencing unhappiness in the process. I really appreciate that.

Went into the office for a meeting and actually had a good time. I am obviously markedly insane and you should speak softly to me if you meet me.

I screamed so loud this morning that Paul assumed I had hacked off a limb. What actually happened was that I reached for the wooden cutting board and an insect crawled out from underneath it onto my hand. It turned out to be some sort of pyramid moth (gray until it starts flying and then you get brilliant orange underwings) which crawled onto the stove top looking pensive and then went, o dear o dear as it realized it was sitting next to a red hot stove element. It flew someplace cooler and obligingly crawled onto the inside of a glass – with no coaxing, it was like it was reading my mind – and stayed stuck there until I got it outside, at which point it flew at about 20kph into the walnut tree in the back yard. Moths have furry little feet and I wasn’t expecting it so I screamed like Jill St. John in some forgettable 70’s movie.

It’s raining again. Katie thinks it’s going to be a hot summer, but I think it’s going to rain a lot this summer, and I’m happy about that, because every year I think to myself “Is THIS the year a homeless person sets fire to Stanley Park?” and other such cheerful thoughts.

Alan Greenspan says that the bond market appears to be signalling a downturn. Say whut, Alan? The debt load of the United States is enough to scare you, finally? Your predecessor is predicting doom and gloom?

Tam-Tam sent me an interesting article about using compressed C02 to drive oil to wellheads that are otherwise dry. It’s a promising technology and it’s being developed in Canada. I wonder if the Saudis are going to try it; right now they are using water, and that’s actually making things worse.

Of course, if we could figure out how to get methane out of klathrates in the bottoms of the oceans, we’d have enough energy for another 500 years even at current rates of consumption; I imagine that’s one of the things the Japanese are working on. And we’ll always have coal. On the basis of current research, it’s beginning to look as if without human intervention we’d actually be in an ice age right now, so coal is not a bad thing… if you don’t mind asthma and lung cancer along with your industrial civilization. We’ve certainly got enough coal in BC to last us a long long time. Everything will be fine… who needs salmon?

A Japanese research consortium is going to try to dig a hole more than six miles into the crust. It’s gotta be about oil, but it didn’t get mentioned in the article. Or maybe it’s about geothermal. Anyway, I remember reading the article and thinking, at this rate, press agents will outnumber human beings at a factor of two to one within a scant few years; you have to read between the lines for everything.

Anyway, I’m not scared about the end of oil anymore. It’s a childish nightmare. Makes a lot more sense to be worried about a nuclear war. That’s actually a lot more likely, and there are still 10 ‘enemy nukes’ out there for every major city in North America. So, for the next few months I will research everything I can about nuclear war (which really really scared me when I was a kid) until I get bored with that. Then I think I’ll work on communicable diseases. And of course, oil or no oil, nukes or no nukes, the economy IS going to collapse. Don’t see much to stop that. Happy Wednesday, everyone!

tags
2005-06-08— Posted by: allegra

Katie took 70 pictures of tags down by the tracks today. Here’s one of them.

enough sleep
2005-06-07— Posted by: allegra

I don’t imagine even my mother cares about my physical state at the moment, so I’ll skip that part and go on to something cheerful, like why climbing a tree to get away from a bear is a bad idea, why Bolivian peasants don’t like their president, why the obesity epidemic is going to be short lived (if it really exists) and why the sea is boiling hot. The pigs having wings bit I am still struggling with.

The sea is only boiling hot in a few places by the way. It’s not boiling hot all the way through.

I have to go to a meeting at work today. Everybody who hears about it thinks that I am crazy, which makes me irritable. I should have thought the evidence for this was heretofore overwhelming, and there is nothing one can add to the pile of evidence to make this ‘more true’.

In fact, everything right now makes me irritable. Maybe I’ll just write it off to hormones.

More moss patrol yesterday. Paul cleaned it up thank goodness. I really didn’t want to convey it to the compost.

An unidentified dead bird appeared under the back stairs yesterday morning. I think it was a member of the thrush family, but unless it’s something really dramatic like a curlew, all dead birds pretty much look the same to me. I don’t think the cats got it as it was intact. I suspect it ran into something. Or maybe it died of West Nile and we should have run off to the public health types with it. In my current fragile condition if I caught West Nile I’d likely croak; my insurance will pay for quite a party so the prospect is cheering rather than otherwise. Which reminds me, I should try to finish my list of funeral music.

Walked with Katie over to Peggy’s last night to drop off Brooke’s copy of the first season of Angel. Desperately needed the exercise and it was a pleasant visit and a pleasant evening, although a bit chilly on the way back. There are a number of things in the neighbourhood I want pictures of; I may get round to taking pictures today.

Katie definitely wants to take some pix of the graffitti in the tunnel by Edmonds Station and there’s also some really cool graffitti up by Canada Way and Edmonds close to the Steel Temple Tattoo parlor.

Some graffittista in New York put a copyright on his tag. How brilliant! As the graffitti from many years ago in Toronto put it, “Our City, Our Walls!” My personal favourite remains the note under the bridge on the way out of town in Montreal, that you could only see from the train, headed west, “Visualize Industrial Collapse.” My second favourite, from the Post Office wall on Spadina, “My love is like heroin, she cannot miss a vein.” Have a Velvet Underground kind of day!!!!

enough sleep
2005-06-06— Posted by: allegra

CNN.com has a whole bunch of tornado pix posted to their site right now. There is one in particular of a white twister with a rainbow that I recommend but the whole gallery is so cool… check it out if you can.

enough sleep
2005-06-06— Posted by: allegra

Drivable fuel cell car – road test

Well, it’s 4 am or thereabouts. I did some research on Sigrid Undset, the gal what wrote Kristin Lavransdatter, and she wrote more than 20 books and lots of articles, went to work full time at 16 (and hated it) to support her mother; her archaeologist dad died of some lingering disease of the central nervous system when she was 11; she met her future husband in Rome (and might have been born there) and once the divorce was final took him and his two kids on – one of whom was developmentally delayed – and had three more, one of whom was developmentally delayed. She fled Norway ahead of the Nazis (her work was banned by the Nazis) with one son, another son having died in the defence of Norway, and ended up in the US and died in 1949.

She never supported votes for women. Her works have been criticized by toeliner feminists since then because she believed and wrote that motherhood is the highest calling of women. Methinks that anybody whose books are still selling, who is disdained by feminists and loathed by Nazis can’t be all bad. My only objection to her works is her harsh depiction of Catholicism. I mean, it’s nice to have a notion of right and wrong, but you don’t make God look better by mashing people into the ground.

Her depictions of the emotions around childrearing are the best I’ve ever seen – although the net effect is that I am anxious to lay my hands on a more recent translation, which exists if Amazon isn’t giving me a bum steer. Reading Kristin Lavransdatter in this translation is a lot like wading through the thickest parts of Tolkien’s prose, and UNLIKE Dunnett, there’s no frikkin genealogy, so the aunt’s cousin’s whatsits pile up pretty fast.

I think she was a proto fan, though! She had a house built that was like a medieval Norwegian house, wore wadmoll – probably that she made herself – and knew everything there was to know about plants.

Danged if I can find instructions to make wadmoll easily though. I’m looking for one that starts, “First you catch a sheep…”

Wadmoll is going to make a comeback! Betcha it’s scratchy, though.

Beer Glorious Beer
2005-06-06— Posted by: allegra

I just went to pick up my current fave beers (St. Ambroise Blonde and Robson Street Hefeweizen) at the Liquor Store that’s open on Sunday, how civilized (only goddamned thing the Liberals did in their last stint in office that I can wholeheartedly concur with) and when the guy in the line up ahead of me refused his receipt the checkout staffer said, “Well it ain’t tax deductible.”

I looked at her, smirking, and then said, “And then I woke up.” We both had a good laugh.

I just exchanged an email with Rob of Nine; he recently sampled a WA state microbrew called “Moose Drool”. As I said, I am turning artistic shades of green, but that might be the coughing.

My lungs
2005-06-05— Posted by: allegra

Here is a very interesting microphotograph of my bronchial tubes. Actually I wish I knew where this pic was taken; it isn’t every day you watch a lava flow eat a parking lot. Both of these photos cadged from Fark, and why not. David Jordan of AP took the original photo, of which this is a portion.

Finished Kristin Lavransdatter bucketing tears. Her estranged husband is killed in front of her, a bunch of her boys die, she goes off to a nunnery, catches plague and dies. Man, they just don’t write books like they used to.

Nice Kitty
2005-06-05— Posted by: allegra

This is Gidget. She is training guide dogs not to run after every cat they see. She lives in Australia, where Cane Toads are a nuisance.

Nice Kitty
2005-06-05— Posted by: allegra

This is Gidget. She is training guide dogs not to run after every cat they see. She lives in Australia, where Cane Toads are a nuisance.

enough sleep
2005-06-04— Posted by: allegra

Must post b8st8rding fast as Katie is anxious to get out of here and buy conditioner. (as well as do the rest of the usual Sat’day shop.) Halfway through Kristin Lavransdatter. I’m OBviously really enjoying it. It’s interesting how the story doesn’t just focus on Kristin but also on her parents’ passing strange relationship and various other people, including the religious types. A week of vacation, including hanging out at my brother’s house and having a media overload. Yeah yeah yeah.

Cousin Lexi says that Herons are Noisy. This is not the kind of thing you’d notice unless you were living next to a heron rookery, but they make lots of noise in the nesting season. You’ll hardly ever hear the noise a heron makes the rest of the time (a harsh, guttural croak – we call it a ‘gark’ around here). But living next to them is cool and Lexi says she’s never actually seen herons fly while looking DOWN on them (she’s up on the 15455th floor of some building in the west end). They are big beasties.

Keith is off at Mando lessons.

I’m still coughing and coughing, but I don’t actually feel too bad….more fighting with vegetation today…. but later.

Grrrr and vroom.
2005-06-04— Posted by: allegra

I’m choked. Katie did a fabulous job of cutting three inches off my untidy mop o’ hair last night and NOT A SINGLE PERSON AT WORK NOTICED OR COMMENTED. Personally I think it’s the best haircut I’ve had in years – I told her what to do and she did it.

Got Kristin Lavransdatter parts 1 2 and 3 and so I know what I’ll be up to tonight!

The boys at work had a show and shine of their bikes today. I will forebear comment except to say, tsk tsk, riding around the company parking lot with no helmets. The liability! The liability!

Oh what am I saying, they all looked hot! Okay, except for one of them, and I’m not saying which. Anyway, hopefully the weather will clear as they meet up with their counterparts across the line. Good evening all!

enough sleep
2005-06-03— Posted by: allegra

I am coughing up blood! Haven’t done that for years. Anyway, in keeping with my Calvinist forebears’ wishes I am going to go to work ANYWAY. I kind of have to, because calling in sick on a gorgeous Friday before a weeks’ vacation is usually considered suspicious. The stupid thing is I feel fine when I am not coughing, and I think I’m actually on the mend. I slept okay last night, but that might because I doubled up on 5-HTP and Benylin. Man, I lay down and started playing solitaire on my Palm Pilot and the next thing I knew the crows were squawking outside my window and it was morning again.

Not much to report. Kids are fine, I’ve dodged moss patrol two days running, and although my day today will be jam packed with meetings and incident, I’ve got a week off, although I volunteered to come in for a meeting on Tuesday. Never seen a meeting invite quite like the one I saw for this one. The meeting invite included a directive to turn off your Blackberries when you came into the meeting room. I was thinking, hey, they didn’t mention the three kneelings and the three knockings. (That’s for when you go see the Tsar… you have to kneel three times and knock your forehead on the ground three times. A Dunnett reference, sorry.)

Anyway I really shouldn’t talk about work. Jobs growth in the US is weak and everybody is in debt up to their eyeballs. I know I keep poking at this subject, but I’m more and more convinced that it’s the level of US personal and government debt that’s going to pull the first deuce out of the house of cards. Whenever things get icky the “gold and silver is the best” dudes start lecturing us about the intrinsic value of gold and silver, and I think, hm. But I don’t believe it. Social organization around food production doesn’t require gold.

Zow.
2005-06-02— Posted by: allegra

Make sure you aren’t drinking anything.

http://www.alivewithlove.com/cyclists.html

walk the dog
2005-06-02— Posted by: allegra

I’m glad my married life isn’t this exciting.

What I don’t understand was why the cops kept making her put her clothes back on. Drunken young woman drives boyfriend’s truck into pond because he doesn’t want her to go to the casino…. sigh.

My cold is now bad enough that my husband is saying things like “You’re not going to work like that?” making me sound like I’m dripping with syphilitic sores or something. I’ll be fine once I have a cup of tea. I don’t really feel that bad.

I am on vacation next week, although some might say it’s hard to tell the difference. Paul is making noises about going off to see buddies in Ontario, and I have no objection.

My mother is happy I’m posting links now. I’m unhappy that now I have to go through and check for broken links, and get emails from people telling me to take links out, which is what happened the last time. Sigh.

Writer’s group last night was aMAZing. Lots and lots of discussions about mental health and social isolation. Picked up Katie from New West (her non bf lives in front of what used to be St. Mary’s Hospital) so she could involve herself in this strange condition called ‘sleep’. Didn’t see Keith at all yesterday except briefly at breakfast; he was asleep when we got home, like a sensible individual.

No moss patrol last night. Darn.

Pic is of a Poodle named Pluto who decided to become bipedal and can keep it up for over half a kilometer. Credit Mainichi Shimbun. I have to admit snapping a pic at a crosswalk was a deft touch0.

enough sleep
2005-06-01— Posted by: allegra

Milagros Cerron is intellectually normal, so her parents will get to ask their little mermaid someday, was it worth it. And being intellectually normal, she will probably say yes.

Last night I dreamed a toddler was mauled to death by a pit bull in my front yard and I didn’t help because I was too frightened. The owner messed off and so did the dog, dragging its leash. I could hear screaming down the block. I was pretty disturbed. That was around 5:30 am; I got up and did dishes to try to calm down.

More moss patrol and fig trimming last night. Three wheelbarrows of moss. Good Lord, when will it end? And the worst thing is that even if it rains all day, it clears up enough in the evening that I don’t have any excuse not to work on it, so I am finding the weather unusually trying.

Mama has declared she can’t follow my links, so here’s a couple, one funny and one decidedly not. It’s Heifer so Windy

Above noted being a pic of a very well behaved British Tornado.

First step in the book burning… I am SO inclined to go out and purchase these books, just because a bunch of academic no talents – look at the list of judges! – says they are harmful. Nobody is frikkin going to tell me what I can read, calice. (Oh, and by the way, calice in Brazilian Portuguese means exactly what it does in French, the chalice of mass, BUT it’s also a homonym for SHUT UP Cali se. So when I use calice in future, it will be with that in mind as well). Let the book burnings begin

As you read through the list, did you notice that it’s mostly dead white guys? Sheesh.

A miracle and some other things

obviously photoshopped
2005-05-31— Posted by: allegra

But amusing nonetheless. You’d never see four bears together like this UNLESS there’s a very very big pile of food in front of them.

Getting to Makkah
2005-05-31— Posted by: allegra

Makkah is, as most of us know, a hard place to get into if you aren’t Muslim. Or is it? I checked with my co-worker, and apparently if you’re Ahmadi, Ismaili or Druse AND you make the mistake of letting the authorities know you are before you go, you can be refused entrance. These are sects of Islam considered apostate. I consider the Ahmadis to be like the Mennonites of the Muslim world, and the Ismailis to be pretty amazing; like the Jews, they have made a contribution to civilization that is disproportionate to their numbers. I know nothing about the Druse except that they are a minority in a minority wherever they live. Anyway the rules are applied so haphazardly that it’s hard to tell when it’s bureaucrats being crabby or real rules; and of course if you’re somebody’s relative you’re more likely to get passed in.

The other thing he told me is that Makkah is not off limits to non-Muslims. If you are a member of a construction crew for the ongoing infrastructure upgrades in Makkah, the authorities don’t care if you’re Muslim or not. As long as you don’t do anything actively stupid or disrespectful, and you get a long list, I’m sure, of what those activities might be, it isn’t an issue.

Floating mat of condoms
2005-05-31— Posted by: allegra

Whitley Streiber, well known whack job, has a note on his website about a mat of condoms floating around the Pacific that’s SO BIG you could land an airplane on it. Uh huh. I looked it up on the internet, and the first reference to it dates back to, get this, 1996, ha ha, and is on a website of dubious soundness when it comes to the information gold standard. So Streiber’s site referring to it as a possible catastrophe and then providing a link to purchase a book on catastrophes is just another example of how, when it comes to making money, maybe he isn’t a whack job; maybe he’s just a relentless opportunist with a well rounded millennial shtick. Carl Sagan is still dead, but if he was alive, he’d be shaking my head that I’m even looking at Streiber’s site.

Gardening with Pokey
2005-05-31— Posted by: allegra

Pokey continues to enjoy his freedom in an entertaining way. He used the utility pole in the left front corner of the property as a scratching post vigorously for the best part of five minutes yesterday. I told him he was a most excellent kitty and watched him wait for John; he was restlessly patrolling the front edge of the property waiting for his dinner to get home. All the while a crow was sitting on the utility line about two meters from the pole.

Pokey quite visibly came to the decision that this ongoing scolding (the crow went on and bloody on about it) had to stop; then he sprang up about a third the height of the pole, at which point the crow went Holy Crap and flew off. Good Pokey! I assured him. And went back to moss patrol. Another two wheelbarrow loads of moss, and I trimmed back the hawthorne and the rhodo in the front yard as well as top dressing a couple of parts of the front beds. Man, 40 litres of gardening soil is NOTHing. If we’re going to level this hellish lawn I’m going to need many cubic metres of dirt. And the back compost bin, which is like 4 cubic metres, is jammed to the gunwhales with the moss so far. Dunno what to do about it.

It is now too late in the season to do anything about the grapes, we’re just going to have to live with it until next year.

Neglected to mention that I found a pupa, which looked like a carved, oiled wooden peg, in the back yard while raking moss (what else) the other day. It was the same day I took all the pictures but I didn’t take a picture of it – closest I could find on the internet is posted here. It was so close to hatching that it MOVED in my hand when I picked it up, a totally science fiction moment during which I startled but didn’t drop it. I set it aside so other people could look at it but when I went to look for it yesterday morning it looked as though some enterprising crow had gotten to it. It was, given its size, very likely something I didn’t want in my garden anyway.

A sacrifice to science
2005-05-31— Posted by: allegra

Milagros Cerron is a year old, just. She has a condition she shares with a handful of other children across this planet, partly because her condition is rare and partly because the ones born with it don’t often get this far. Her name in English could be rendered Miracle Hill. Her irregularity makes her like a cross between a chicken and a mermaid; her legs and feet are fused. She faces 15 years of surgery to get her legs apart and her plumbing working through the correct number of taps. She’s running on the equivalent of half a kidney and has had a *lot* of urinary tract infections. Now she faces the first surgery, to separate her feet from her heels to about halfway up her calf. The parents aren’t talking to the media, and I think they are being wise.

Let us meditate on the life of Milagros. Oh my father, who has served the law all his life; oh my mother, who has served the nurturance of being likewise. Keep my mind steady while I think about this.

I have a number of reactions to a birth defect of this severity, and they don’t always play nice in the sandbox.

I think, what would I do if it were my child? And I think, I’d fight, but to a point. If I could see nothing in her quality of life but one painful operation after another, during which she’d be subject to GHAStly systemic infections and organ shutdowns and be the nexus of… Hey, let’s see. A media circus? The personal torment of my entire family? Human medical experimentation of an imperfect but well-intentioned kind?

So let me get this straight. I’m supposed to support the continued existence, in a state of suffering, of my child, despite the costs, so doctors have a child to operate on…. to practice new techniques on?

This is a painful dilemma, unless, of course, you take a Deist view of the situation, and agree to ‘prolong life’ and ‘trust God’s will’ as part of your contract with your exacting deity. Then you have no choice, and a lot of people will support you in your most commendable action for religious and ethical reasons. Embarrassing to mention, but there are bits of me, scattered here and there, which take this view, which will be trading slaps with the previous view pretty fast if they don’t conclude a truce, or at least get distracted with ice cream.

The allocation of resources question could be raised, and just as swiftly dispensed with. Is this set of surgeries the best allocation of resources? On the other hand why bring up the notion of scarcity when life is so plentiful? (Bazillions of surgeries, flare up/die down media glare until she dies, money in the system diverted to save the one when the many are unvaccinated, waste and pomp, harumph harumph.) I figure my opinion aside, the people who live in Peru have laws which reflect their national character, and so I leave it to the people of Peru to deal with any legal, medical or financial implications, and that means allocation of resources. I imagine the Catholic Church has the religious aspect pretty much in a holy headlock. I would not contribute money towards keeping her alive; if the parents decide to sell the story and the state picks up the medical tab, I am not sure my contribution would be required and it would be insulting, like they can’t look after their own. I didn’t see anything about fundraising efforts.

When I was a kid I was an interested observer of the goings-on of a major teaching hospital. I remember thinking there are a lot of desperate folk willing to throw themselves under experimental knives. And why shouldn’t they? What is more human than hope? Brief pause while I refrain from taking a cheap shot that had something to do with plastic surgery.

There’s nothing wrong with being simple folk who believe that their prayers and a doctor’s skill will draw down God’s mercy. I must admit a shade of envy towards people who can think that way. It is amazing how, through the testimony of their own lives, people of faith can exert force on the world. Whether God is seen or unseen, looks like a rat or a man, makes cool sounds or is a still small voice within, followers of every path can find a way to shining communion with all that is. Frankly some find communion and dispense lightly with God. Some of us wonder what could be better than injecting heroin… keep your communion, pal. There are a lot of deities, and there’s certainly a roaring trade in interpreting their wishes on subjects of morality, behaviour and shoe wearing.

I know what I’d do. I look back at my ancestresses, who, crying, put down mermaid-tailed babies and walked away into the tall grass. I couldn’t do that, even if part of me says, even after 2,000 years of Christianity and fancy rhetoric, that putting that baby on the ground is the wisest thing to do. I believe it’s okay to be conflicted, but not okay to put that little girl down.

So I finish where I started. If she was mine, I’d fight. When I judged that fighting was no longer humane, I would face the moral responsibility and endure the recriminations of those who didn’t think I fought long or hard enough. I would acknowledge to myself from the very beginning that I would have few options and most would be bad. I would have to trust the doctors to an unprecedented extent. I’d have other issues to deal with as well as the simplest, which is that most of my free time would evaporate and there would likely be catastrophic financial consequences from my daughter’s medical condition – there’s always a drug the government won’t pay for, even though it’s the only thing that will get her through her next infection. I can see worrying a lot and reading medical textbooks. I can see arguing with the doctors if I could witness or attend the surgeries. I can see being considered either an angel or a complete pain in the ass at the hospital depending on who you talked to.

So I wish well to Milagros’ parents, who no doubt are being coached by somebody friendly what to do and not do about the media. I wish the surgeons and the surgical staff clean conditions, steady hands and good light. I offer a brief prayer for the sanity of the senior hospital administrators, who are probably going frikkin’ bananas, right about now. I hope the media behave themselves, and that Milagros pulls through. Who knows? Maybe she will walk for my 60th birthday. In the meantime the doctors will learn plenty, and that’s a good thing, right?

 

 

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirenomelia#Milagros_Cerr%C3%B3n

Wizard of Darkmoon

Wizard/Moon
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

I have been looking forward to the conflation of the Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz since I first heard about, it must be ten years ago. It was a powerfully Oz experience, to be sure, but some of the correspondences between the music and the film are so apposite and bizarre that in the end it’s really hard to dismiss the entire thing as one big spooky coincidence. I enjoyed it.

Nothing much else to report except that Pokey, the big furry orange cat who lives with John downstairs, has been given outdoor rights. John’s had bad luck with both losing cats and outdoor cats getting injured, so he has been loath to let him out; however all of the inadvertent experiments to determine Pokey’s homing instincts in the last couple of years (one reported here) have ended well, and he certainly had a wonderful afternoon figuring out which doors open when you cry at them. He would immediately demand to go out again of course, but having won his freedom, he wanted to ensure it was still there.

Pokey made me screech with laughter yesterday. I was giving the front bed a good water in between stretches of moss patrol (I now have a better technique but it’s still backbreaking work) and there was a sidestream of water coming out with some force from the where the hose joins the tap. Pokey stepped directly into this jet and then cried for about thirty seconds before he discovered that all he had to do to make this untoward experience stop was back away.

John cannot understand why Pokey hasn’t climbed any trees. I suspect it’s because when we let him out on the leash in the old days he managed to hang himself really well a couple of times when one of us turned our backs on him for two seconds. He was never in any danger as his harness had three pressure points but he was sure one unhappy kitty when we fetched him down. (One time he hung himself on a tree right in front of me, it happened so fast; he was up there for about 20 seconds but he never went near that tree again, and we shortened the harness.) However I am sure he will figure out again that trees don’t bite and we’ll have the pleasure of performing the duty of the Pleasantville Fire Department soon.

snap yer dragons
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

Boys ‘n’ Roses
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

I quite like this picture. Note extremely tough minded roses in the foreground.

SCANDAL in the GARDEN
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

It’s bad enough that unidentified critters of varying sizes are constantly having sex in my yard. But when they are this blatant…..

This is the yucca I mentioned earlier
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

I was hoping it would straighten out and it looks like it will.

Gardening
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

Mom, can you help out? Catherine gave me this but I have no idea what it is. It sure likes being crowded in the front bed, though.

Grapes in the sun
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

And to keep it biblical, I follow with a picture of grapes.

Figs
2005-05-30— Posted by: allegra

This represents a substantial fraction of the figs that set on this year.

a stuff

Stuff
2005-05-29— Posted by: allegra

The stuff last night was quite wonderful. As always we went a little insane on the food quantity, but it was nice to sit down with the folks – everybody in the family except John, and Glen and Marilyn – and break in the new barbecue (the old one got left at Tom and Peggy’s because Paul got bored with hauling it back and forth from their place, because it’s too big to go in anything except the van, and blah blah blah).

Katie’s off at the non-boyfriend’s again.

Mike said hey-o let’s beach today but I observed when I awoke after the single worst night’s sleep I’ve had in six months that there was absolutely no blue in the sky and decided to finish reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. Very interesting and very persuasive, although if I read the expression ‘pulse-pounding action’ in a blurb again I’m gonna hurl. Is the word exciting somehow no longer … exciting? I am in complete support of his (through a character) analysis of how the language and metaphors of fear have been altered to serve the political-legal-media complex, but other aspects of the book are disturbing. At one point in his appendix he notes, huffily, that nobody had to tell people to stop using horses when cars came into general usefulness (implication being that nobody will have to tell people to stop using cars when something superior comes along). I remember responding mentally, “And when colonial politics forced Chinese peasants to starve, nobody had to tell them about how they could eat babies to stay alive a week longer.” And I remember the Saudi proverb. “My father rode a camel. I drive an Audi. My son flies a jet plane. His son… will ride a camel.”

Sometimes the ‘better’ isn’t, much. And, worse to relate, sometimes there is no better.

So, Michael Crichton has made a wonderful case for global warming being an example of Lysenko-ism in science, where science is forced to serve political ends rather than being, to paraphrase Feynmann “What we do to figure out when we’re fooling ourselves.” Has he made a case for global climate change being a fraud? No. And now I have an understanding of why Mt. Kilimanjaro is losing its glacier, which I have to admit was troubling me (along with every other friiiiikkkkin thing that troubles me). Crichton, through a character, says it’s caused by deforestation at the base, which affects both air movement and moisture close to the mountain. I will investigate but I bet he’s right.

I have a lay person’s understanding of climate change. I am not NEARLY so worried about climate change as I am about the end of fossil fuels.

Crichton, in his jeremiad about how everybody has always been wrong about the end of the world, seems to be under the impression that technology will save us. I believe with a perfect faith that technology – freed from ideology beyond the simple search for truth and knowledge – could do just that, because whatever your ideology, unless you are freaking nutbar, a sociopath (the ones that aren’t ‘technically’ crazy) or childless, you want your grandchildren to at least have a world to live in (and I’m not slagging childless people, I envy them). But I don’t believe for one New York second that technology will do much else but serve really shopworn and actively dangerous ideologies as we nose our way into the future, and unless LARGE numbers of consumers in first world countries start rearranging their spending habits and their debt habits and their consumption and reallocation of existing entitlements, science will slide into one of three troughs – it will be serving the military – it will be serving large corporations avoiding social & political accountability – and it will be serving fundamentalist ideology (and I’m not going to name religions or political stripes). If it’s possible to have high tech dark ages, we’re smacking into as them fast as they graduate more lawyers than scientists in the US.

On one point, Crichton was bleakly correct. He says, through a character, that the biggest cause of environmental degradation is poverty. Then the character pops off about how billions of dollars fly around in litigation and taxes and legislation to prevent trivial events from occuring in North America while babies starve and children go blind and women are enslaved and poorly educated indigenous men are handed AK-47s and told to harass the ‘enemy’. (Yes, I’m paraphrasing more than somewhat).

I note that the Political Legal Media complex has been telling first worlders since the end of WWII that we have the RIGHT to be independent, to do what we like and go where we want; that we have the OBLIGATION to find ourselves; that all of the old structures are breaking down and good riddance; and that the most important thing in life is LOOKING GOOD and SPENDING MONEY. So busting up family ties and getting women out of the house when their kids are little to work in the salt mines (discreetly disguised as malls and office towers) and encouraging automobile ownership and getting ‘the biggest house you can afford’ and travel and ox carts full of debt to do it all has done an amazingly effective job of ensuring that everybody is too effing busy to pay attention. And the second you say hey waitaminute the media says “JLo!!!! did she have a bum lift??!!!!” and you settle down with ET and play channel roulette rather than follow the narrative of self improvement, which is HEY WAKE UP what we’re here for…. And I’m not talking Tony Robbins. I’m talking about all that old hard Stoic stuff that is SO dreadfully out of fashion, like not being in debt and not making messes for other people to clean up and to giving attention to cultivating your mind and body, and taking good care of the things and people that are entrusted to you, all that lame ass stuff that no self-respecting hipster gives the time of day to, cause it’s like so old and cranky-tired.

So I recommend the book, State of Fear – it was a good read and thought provoking. But I also recommend a few other things. Quit watching network TV. Spend more time with your family. Make eye contact. If you’re going to drink out of the milk jug, buy your own and label it. Reduce your commuting time if you can. It is better to give two dollars to a homeless person you can see than fifty to a charity that you can’t (and don’t worry about whether you’re ‘encouraging’ them. Between business, government, crappy childrearing, bad education and bad medicine, the homeless will be with us always anyway). Reduce your ecological footprint if you can. Get hobbies that are non-trivial – that produce things you can eat, or wear; or expend energy in ways that build the world. Don’t get into any sport more expensive than soccer. When you have to spend hundreds of dollars to play, thousands to compete and hundreds of thousands to compete internationally, it’s the wrong sport. Try to enjoy your hobbies locally. The only reliable information we have is our DNA, and even that appears to have been dictated by a God with an atrocious stammer. And remember in your most trying moments that in a billion years none of this crap will be remembered, let alone matter.

Is King Fahd dead or not

enough sleep
2005-05-28— Posted by: allegra

Darth gets his secret wish
2005-05-28— Posted by: allegra

Or as has passed into family lore…. “Wave your hands til the music stops, then turn around and bow.” Be prepared to laugh out loud at least once. (Yes, it’s a commercial, but I don’t care, it’s tasteful.)

http://www.treehouseanimation.com/rotb/movies/sso.mov

Don’t know why I like this
2005-05-28— Posted by: allegra

http://www.oreillynet.com/examples/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/05/timelapse.mov

Guy fixed a tripod in the back seat, jammed in a two gig memory card, set the camera to take a pic ever 30 seconds, and then drove for six hours. I have no idea why I like it, but I do.

Schrodinger strikes again
2005-05-28— Posted by: allegra

King Fahd has become like Yasser Arafat. He’s dead, and he isn’t. Official Sa’udi news outlets say he’s clinging to life in a hospital in Riyadh, and unofficial ones say he’s been dead since Wednesday and they don’t want to announce it until the succession is clear. I find it really hard to believe he’s dead; he’s a Wahhabi and Muslim burial customs, which are frankly quite sensible, don’t have much to do with ‘lying in state’. The tradition is, you bury the dead person as fast as you may in a dignified fashion. This sometimes causes a culture clash because in North America six or seven days can go by between the death and the funeral/burial, longer if it’s a notable personage for whom many rich and prominent people must clear their daytimers. I think it much more likely that he’s on life support until the succession is secured. It all depends on how you define death, I suppose. Pic is of the king in happier times.

King Fahd supervised the expansion of the pilgrim facilities at Makkah and Madinah (preferred spelling in all the Sa’udi sites I’ve seen), set up a printing shop for the Quran in Madinah which has churned out 138 million copies of the Quran in 20 years, ensured that pilgrims coming on Haj actually get inoculated against various godawful diseases, and has tried, without much success, to reduce the death toll that is pretty much inevitable when you’re cooking with hot fat in a 400 tent long row and tip the fire over or get into a frenzy and stampede. However, just between 1990 and 1994, 1,700 people died on Haj (not of natural causes), at least according to a disgruntled Muslim Brit named Parveez Syed whose website was a vision of yellow and red.

These numbers jibe pretty well with my recollection. Interestingly, he claims that nobody got a penny in compensation for the dreadful fire in 1997, at which it was alleged that the rent a cops locked everybody into a compound. Between 1.5 and 2.0 million people visit the holy cities every year, with a big influx during the pilgrimage season. Anything to do with the royal family is therefore of concern to the entire Muslim world, because if there are any missteps with respect to how the pilgrimage is run it affects every Muslim on the planet (at least the ones who are allowed to go… my understanding is that there are sects of Muslims barred from attending because they are apostate; I’ll have to check with my coworkers about that one.)

I am about halfway through Rutherfurd’s London, and after the wine of Dunnett it is much like tap water.

In other news, we’re feeding Glen and Marilyn tonight. Glen said he’d bring his famous chuckwagon beans, which I am looking forward to… then we get to argue about what we watch on the big screen. I’m kinda hankering for something mindless.

Kira skipped breakfast; upon viewing the front end of the large mouse she deposited on the back welcome mat, I’m not surprised. Twas a big sucker.

Katie’s off at the non-boyfriend’s place – I am assuming she spent the night, her shoes aren’t here.

Paul looked as chipper as a man may coming off his last night shift and is looking forward to being diurnal again.

Keith’s job hunt continues. He told Katie to go apply at a couple of places but she’s not very happy about her chances. Of course, if she doesn’t apply she can be sure she won’t get it, and it’s a numbers game.

Sushi for dinner last night.

It was Berloody Hot in the house last night, couldn’t stand the weight of the covers.

Started reading the Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach last night and I’m really enjoying it. Both an account of a Buddhist monk who became a diamond merchant and an exegesis of the oldest printed book in the world (woodblock printed starting in the 8thC) which happens to be a Buddhist religious text, it is by turns a fascinating look at the work of the diamond trade and a brutally practical application of Buddhist principles in business. It has certainly got me thinking. (Sometimes dangerous and frequently ineffective, but o well.)

I must make confession…. I prefer the tea Paul bought at Stuporstore to the Darjeeling Extra Amazing Tea, although it does brew up a beautiful colour. Fact is, the 5 bucks a pound stuff that Paul picked up does not go bitter, no matter how long you leave it in the pot, but the fancy Darjeeling can’t be left in longer than about four minutes or it goes bitter like hell. So although I am very happy that Tom U brought me back tea from Darjeeling, I am publicly announcing that I prefer the cheap*ss stuff from the ‘store, and that my philistinic tendencies grow apace.

Rob of Nine has provided a video of Dark Side of the Moon hooked up to Wizard of Oz. This is a cultural experience I have been looking forward to for a while. He also put ‘a bunch of other stuff’ on it, and so I am waiting for Keith to achieve consciousness to watch it.

If I was smart, which I’m not, and motivated, ditto, I’d do yard work before it got too hot. I think I’ll tidy instead.

Hey mome, yes I want to go to the family reunion. Just as long as you know I’m planning to wear tie dyes all the way through. And… do you really want me to give a talk? I’m thinking possibly “In the World but not Of it” as a subject. Family History as Social Medicine is another possible topic. Can’t you just register me and I’ll cough up the money later????

seeing red

Mom, Dad!!!!!
2005-05-27— Posted by: allegra

Squee! http://www.astoundme.com/stencils.html

Mind you, some really good ones are missing.

If you have nothing better to do
2005-05-27— Posted by: allegra

Please email Judi McLeod at letters@canadafreepress.com and ask her what journalism awards she has won. I have cruised all over the internet and can’t find any mention of them. I figured if she was proud of the awards she’d cite them; but she’s not talking. I emailed her on 10th May and she never got back to me. Maybe she doesn’t want to brag. Anyway, I’ve started emailing journalism organizations, because I’m a perimenopausal whackjob with too much spare time, and there’s nothing like a feud to drive up the web traffic.

The latest thing on the canadafreepress.com site that had me sitting up is a lovely screed about somebody filing a class action suit (in New Westminster, natch) on behalf of the people of Canada against the banks for loaning out money they can’t account for or trace to an actual owner. This means that they are ‘creating money’ which is ‘ultra vires’. Actually what they are doing is creating credit, which roughly translated means “I believe”. The differences between banks and churches are numerous, but the whole faith thing is definitely a bridge between two staid chunks of architecture…..

I think the expression ‘Best of British Luck’ applies in this case. It’s like a 12 year old taking on a squad of Navy Seals with a plastic fork and an attitude. pOp, what do YOU think? Check the site – which, incidentally, you will find accords with many of your attitudes, being in part a collection of crabby jeremiads against the Liberals etc etc. I was glad to find out about lecornichon.qc.ca through that site anyway. As John always says, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, or in this case a pickle.

weird dream and nuclearity
2005-05-27— Posted by: allegra

Last night I dreamed I had done something to displease Paul, I have no idea what, and his response was to pull out a handgun, and without changing expression from a mask of contempt, chase me out of the house and shoot me on our front lawn.

I awoke with the uneasy feeling that I should probably do the dishes. I comforted myself by saying that the dream isn’t about Paul, it’s about me; at least I believe that he wouldn’t let me suffer for long. Dreams sure are weird.

My new coworker has loaned me Rutherfurd’s lengthy tome “London” but I’ve been too lazy to crack it open so far. More to the point, she has a beat up and beloved copy of the entire Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which I’ve mean meaning to read in excess of 30 years and is supposed to be the best thing that was out there pre Dunnett, (Mary Renault fans will hate me)AND won the Nobel prize for literature back in 1928. Patricia has told me that she will loan it to me, but I have to cough up a dragon’s egg or somesuch as security. She told me it’s out of print, but it isn’t. Penguin re-issued it. It says something about the book that in the entire time I’ve been haunting used book stores I’ve seen one volume precisely once and it was at a crushing price.

Arnold Schwartzenegger had a hole dug in the middle of the road so he could look like he was helping to fill a pothole, and he uses the products of campaign donor companies in political ads. All of this sh”te was predicted in science fiction damned near 40 years ago. You voted for an actor, now you’re upset about being collateral damage in a photo-op? Boo hoo.

I have included a picture of a natural nuclear reactor which is upwind of where human beings evolved and which was active 1.7 million years ago.

No connection? Check this out…

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005240262,00.html

Mother, you will recall I have been advancing this as a theory for a while. It’s not like I trust scientists or anything, but if the Chernobyl observations are a) accurate and b) there’s a causal relationship, and I’m not claiming either of these things, then it makes an interesting thought experiment….Where do humans come from, and what kicked the evolution up a notch? As Keith pondered, “Are we alREADy mutant freaks?” Dunno, but I look at the way North Carolina is represented on the web these days and I have to wonder (thinking of bestiality and cross burning stories, in particular).

I am seeing red
2005-05-27— Posted by: allegra

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050526/NEWS01/505260481

With all due respect, what the hell was this judge thinking? I hope the local Unitarians picket the living sh*t out of this guy. And the Wiccans, the ACLU, and the Americans for the Separation of Church and State. If he tried pulling this crap with two Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon parents he’d be pilloried. Good Goddess. Or as Wonkette noted, Blessed Be-yotch!

another beaut from le cornichon

Another beaut from Le Cornichon
2005-05-26— Posted by: allegra

Somebody REALLY knows how to photoshlep.

Gardening
2005-05-26— Posted by: allegra

Yeah, not doing too bad these days. Did more yardwork after work yesterday – the moss raking activity will be another month, I fear – and then went for a walk with Katie and John. John is so civilized; he asked if it was a girls only walk or if he could tag along. I left it up to Katie as I didn’t really have a preference. We talked of many things, or rather, they did; I didn’t have enough breath coming back from Dinosaur Rock to do much more than grunt at appropriate intervals. Then Katie and I had a lovely long talk after lights out.

Discovered, in my cruise around the yard, that three of the four yucca filamentosae have set on flowers, but the third one, out front, somehow got ‘stuck’ and the flower stalk got all scrunched up inside itself. I freed it from the crud adhering to it from the last year but I fear it will now get sunburnt and die back. I will be watching anxiously. So I’ll probably only get one inflorescence in the front yard and one in the back. As I moved the sixth rakeful of moss into the back compost bin, I began to wonder about the place where Unca Dave and Paul dumped all the dirt that came out of ripping out the front bed last year (I had tulips and squill coming out at random in the yard next to the compost bin, it was quite funny). Hostas? Some other shade loving critters? The hosta Peggy gave to me at the same time I got the birch, which by rights should have died because I essentially dumped it out of the pot into the front corner of the yard under the walnut tree without even digging a hole for it, is doing magnificently, and the holly growing up next to it – birds planted it, I assume – after a couple of rough years is about a foot tall and looking pretty smug.

Years and years ago Catherine gave me a plant – I have no idea what it is, it’s native – and it has finally gotten big enough to set on wonderful magenta flowers. It seems to be happy in the front bed under the hawthorne tree. Which reminds me, I should trim the hawthorne a little, it’s looking somewhat untidy.

The yard looks better than it has in ages. There’s no garbage or brush lying anywhere (it got quite disgusting), and with all the rain and the lawncare it’s looking quite lush. Paul and I briefly contemplated taking down the cherry tree in the side yard abutting the alley but that will probably be in the five year plan, along with the dreaded replacement of the fence we just repainted. Well, it wasn’t a fix, we were just buying time until we had the money and energy for the post hole digging.

The baby birch tree in the front yard is growing at a stupendous rate – it’s nearly doubled in size since I got it at a church plant sale a couple of falls ago. The schizanthus (sp?) my mother gave me is now so overgrown I will have to dig it out, but I am entirely crappy at stuff like that. And I don’t want to touch the front peony, which is crowding the schizawhooie, which after SIX BLOODY YEARS set on a single bud. So did the middle one. Somebody is going to have to educate me about peonies – the first two years in the house the displays were quite showy.

Tom L has indicated that when the rhubarb leaves die back, he wants to separate out the plant and take some. It’s quite the nicest rhubarb, and that last pie was spectacular if I do say so, and the plant must be twenty years old so it should be able to withstand some amendment.

Paul and I looked at arbours in two different places on Victoria Day Monday and I just didn’t feel like spending 250 bucks on anything, no matter how pretty it was. I was thinking 100 bucks for materials and doing it myself, but it’s rapidly becoming an issue; if I don’t get something up there soon it will be the same story as last year; the grapes will be on the ground and we won’t get a crop off at all, and they are damned nice seeded grapes. The vine must be fifty years old; Tom was startled how thick the trunk was.

The figs are SO BIG it defies belief. Up until this point we’d been doing it Paul’s way and topping & trimming the figs so that their nasty leaves – and dried fig leaves gum up works very well, thanks – didn’t get into the garage eaves. This year we did it Keith’s way – he trimmed off everything that was growing sideways as he couldn’t stand getting poked and prodded every time he ran a lawn mower past. As a result the parts of the trees that really catch the sun, sensing that there wasn’t going to be another chance, set on what must be at least three hundred figs, the largest of which is damned near eating size although nowhere near ripe. It’s not even the beginning of June!

I’m disappointed with the plum tree. Like the cherry it seems to have dropped all the fruit it set on; given how delicious the plums were last year (remember me rhapsodizing about plum duff?) this is very saddening, and we shall have to Do Something.

Mummy, do you remember the rose bush you savagely ripp’d from the front bed? The one that was all diseased and disgusting and set on three mingy buds and then looked like the horticultural equivalent of an absinthe addicted vagrant? You didn’t get all of it. Last year, a single stalk of non bud producing rose came up. You said this was root stock and I thought, ah, no blooms. Once again, my laziness has been my saving grace. I was too intimidated by the thorns and too admiring of the little plant’s enterprise to pull it out again, so I left it to some ‘future date’. THIS year, the flowering portion came up and – okay, I have to get up and count them, back in a sec – there are THIRTY FIVE buds including three blooms. This is leading me to believe that I should open a school called the Allegra Sloman Academy of Horticultural

canadian lord of the ring

You have to be Canadian to get this
2005-05-25— Posted by: allegra

Thanks to Brooke for the pic, and, like I said, this is a Canuck thing.

enough sleep
2005-05-25— Posted by: allegra

Finished the edging last night, and Keith finished mowing the lawn. My lawn looks better than at any point since I moved in. Then Katie and I went for a walk to 7-11 so I could get root beer, because I had a terrible craving (after I got so sweaty) for a root beer float. So I actually got something resembling enough exercise yesterday, slept like a bear and now feel, you know, chipper.

I think I’m going to buy a club for the car at lunch. I don’t trust the goddamned parking lot attendants now I have a later model car. Yes, Subaru gone and 2002 Echo in hand.

I light a candle for TomandPeggy’s Prius. It ‘was making a funny smell and the warning lights were on’. John’s comment. “How binary! Can’t the gauge at least tell you HOW wrong things are?”

John gave my dad a puzzle of a submarine chasing Argus aircraft. I intend to do it when next I am at the folks’ which should be early June.

Found this at a hideous right wing site
2005-05-25— Posted by: allegra

I emailed the soi-disant editrix to ask her precisely what journalizm awards she had won… after all, she called herself an award winning journalist … and she never responded. From this I must speculate that she actually won a journalists’ drinking contest and man, if she can do that, she can crawl with her head held high.

mushkerrooms

Have fun.
2005-05-24— Posted by: allegra

http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

not enough sleep
2005-05-24— Posted by: allegra

Just got back from screenhead.com, where they have a link to something called Lunch. I couldn’t really understand what was happening – although it was funny – until the lead character ripped off his shirt. This one goes out to all my coworkers.

I am entirely blah. In fact, I am now getting the idea that I am no longer actually seeing anything in colour.

We have a new used car. The Subaru is gone and we have a 2002 Toyota Echo instead.

I am thinking about the Mary Prankster line “**** the next ten years and just go to sleep” as being my mantra for the day.

Coming to a compost heap near you
2005-05-24— Posted by: allegra

Haven’t posted a decent nature picture in ages, so herewith the beautiful Coprinus plicatilis, a relative of the shaggy mane. The biggest one is only the size of a dime. Leo was startled to open his compost bin (he lives in Kanata) and find these guys.

They are actually quite common throughout north America, but they deliquesce within hours, so it’s no surprise he hasn’t seen them. Aren’t they a lovely colour? Oh, and for all you mycophiles, I know I can’t make a positive identification without a spore print, but I spent a pleasant hour in the bath just now, poring over my Kibby’s Mushrooms and other Fungi, and it’s definitely da one, based on the description of where it grows and the finely pleated cap and the colour and the size.

tune that critter

enough sleep
2005-05-23— Posted by: allegra

The sun is bobbing in and out of visibility, the wind is blowing pretty hard, but it isn’t currently raining, thank heavens. May 24 weekend in this part of the world is almost invariably damp, but this weekend was REALLY wet. I just jumped – there was a bird strike against the front room window, but the bird appears to have recovered and flown off. I am very much enjoying not having to do anything aor go anywhere, and my laundry is all done.

The only thing I was thinking of doing today was making some food in advance of the working week. Sausage rolls come to mind.

I may also do some weeding – the ground is so wet the weeds practically leap out of the ground when you tug on them.

Tom and Peggy fed us dinner last night… Paul cooked up salmon on cherry wood charcoal again. Really really really good. I have had salmon a lot of ways, but barbecued over cherry wood charcoal is definitely my favourite. And Mike J was there with Agnes, and they brought brie (!!!) and shrimp skewers (!!!). (That was for my mother’s benefit). Once again we were damned near too stuffed to sing. Satya and John brought accordion and mandolin respectively. Next time I’m going to insist that we tune before we start singing.

return of winky

N E W S
2005-05-22— Posted by: allegra

I’ll start with the best possible news: Winky, who has been seen twice on this blog, has returned to her home in East Vancouver. She was gone for about three or four days. Mike, the man who slaves to support her in the style to which she has become accustomed, was a VERY unhappy man when she disappeared, and so I yelped for joy when he held her up to the phone (purring loudly) upon her return. Keith and Kate were also very happy… Winky is a superior feline, very friendly and smart.

Last night Paul and Ana held their first wedding anniversary celebration on a chartered yacht in and around Stanley Park. It was an open bar! I’d be scared to do that with my friends, so I have to hand it to them. I have never actually heard Lilli Marlene done in polka tempo before. It absolutely peed sheets of rain, but it was plenty warm and congenial inside. Everything about the evening was perfect. Mind you, I kept thinking about how I’d do it differently, and I kept fixing Paul with a basilisk stare and saying things like You Know Our Twenty Fifth Anniversary is coming up. God, twenty-five years. Sounds, I don’t know, cosying up to decreptitude, dude. It was a lovely time anyway and a total class act, just like Paul and Ana. And all of their friends and relatives were complete sweethearts, including three kids (nieces and nephew to Paul) who live in Georgia (Kurtis 9, ? 7 and Faith 4). Faith made me laugh so hard I just about hurt myself. I had loaned her a pen so she could start to entertain herself. She laboriously wrote something out on her place-card and handed it to me to read. It was a very long assortment of consonants, with the letter U at the end. I owned as how I didn’t know what it said and asked her what it said and she widened her already enormous blue eyes and said, sweetly, “I can’t read.” Her sister and I killed ourselves laughing. I’m glad I spent some time talking to them, they were wonderful kids.

Cooked a big restaurant style breakfast this morning with the four of us. Very pleasant.

Hey Brooke, I dreamed about you last night. We were in an orbital station and you were trying to run along one wall and ‘fly a kite’ behind you. None of the rest of the dream involved lemming tarts, though.

walking panda

What the well dressed Venezuelan is wearing
2005-05-20— Posted by: allegra

http://world.guns.ru/assault/as05-e.htm

The Venezuelans will be the first outside of Russia to make this baby under license. They bought several hundred thousand at almost $400 US a pop. Liberty is ‘spensive, y’know? Boy did the Americans yowl about this. But they just don’t make a gun this good, this cheap.

Chiba Park’s bipedal panda
2005-05-20— Posted by: allegra

This is Futa the lesser panda. He can stand on his hind legs for ten seconds at a time. Did you ever see an animal that looked more like something out of an anime? He’s apparently a star at the Japanese zoo where he’s incarcerated. I thank Sploid for providing the link to the pic.

I have little to report but a very great deal of happiness about the long weekend. John is off to Victoria/Courtenay, and so I have to feed Pokey.

Don’t all thank me at once for not posting a link to Saddam Hussein in his underwear. Here, however, is a link to Bush in court http://billmon.org/archives/001864.html – and don’t forget to read the commentary, it’s amusing in a very partisan kinda way.

I hate to say it, but the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Digest I just read was a major guilty pleasure. I especially like the Mina Harker character, and the expression on Quatermain’s face as he peers up her bloomers (she’s on a ladder above him) made me spew tea. What I don’t understand is how they got away with the quite in your face racism of the piece. I couldn’t tell whether it was a matter of parody or what… it was sort of post parody. The best thing about it was the Picture of Dorian Gray Paint by Numbers kit. Inspired. And Pollyanna turns up, as a character in a very disgusting school for wayward girls. Arab and Chinese characters speak in Arab and Chinese, untranslated – for pages! Given how racist the depictions are, I am at a loss as to how I could possibly get the dialogue translated. Hauling it into work doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Writers Group on Wednesday was fantastic. I read that piece from my blog a while back about Monumental Angst.

Well, it’s time to get up and get out.