Category: CKB

Dogs and cats living together… Mass hysteria!

Senator John Cornyn (R – TX) is afraid that gay marriage will lead to a slippery slope Sodom & Gomorrah of marrage absurdity

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.”

So why stop there?.

John then listed the stuff he plans to marry. Not long afterwards, Victoria at Unspeakable Vitrine picked up the meme and came up with her own list.

Now that the bedrock of Western Civilization has been irrevocably shattered here in Portland, I realize that it’s time for me also to be lawfully wed to a selection of animals, objects and concepts. Here’s my list. I encourage you to post your own. Remember, an elected official has made it clear that if you can marry someone with the same bathroom parts, you can marry ANYTHING. Have fun, and happy marriage!

Therefore, I intend to marry:

The box turtle, because The Man is putting them down.

box_turtle

The 1964 New York World’s Fair

nyworldfair1964

Iapetus, a moon of Saturn

iapetus

“Southforkscu“, a Romanian replica of the set of the TV show Dallas built by the King of Romanian cheddar, Ilie Alexandru.

romanian_dallas

This album cover from the band Quatermass

quatermass_cover

Excel-ing through life

Anil Dash asks:

Most of the people I know are geeks, and some large number of geeks are obsessive to one degree or another. (This can be verified by anyone who’s ever mumbled “Asperger’s…” under their breath while watching me arrange my Windows desktop.)

Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of dorkiness is the fact that almost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss’s mood. There’s no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one’s personal life.
…
Thus, it’s time for a bit of market research. Have you ever made a spreadsheet for your personal life? Talked to your kids using PowerPoint? Share your geekiness, and maybe it’ll justify the creation of an exciting new community of dorks.

As much as I would like to hop from one foot to another and whistle idly, I have to confirm that yes I’ve documented part of my life in Excel. To be precise, I calculated mileage and the total amount of money I spent on gasoline on my big 1994 “loop the USA” road trip to see the remaining states I hadn’t yet been to. For the record my trip looked like this:

Place Odometer Cost Miles Gallons Used M.P.G. Day # Date
Starting 3175 1 16-Mar-1994
29 Palms, CA 3481 $12.60 306 10.08 30.36 1 16-Mar-1994
Flagstaff, AZ 3829 $13.25 348 11.73 29.67 2 17-Mar-1994
Santa Fe, NM 4225 $12.25 396 11.14 35.55 2 17-Mar-1994
Trinidad, CO 4492 $9.50 267 7.99 33.42 3 18-Mar-1994
Elmwood, OK 4785 $10.00 293 9.70 30.21 3 18-Mar-1994
Eureka Springs, AR 5223 $13.01 438 12.52 34.98 4 19-Mar-1994
Lakeland, TN 5568 $12.10 345 11.64 29.64 4 19-Mar-1994
I-81/I-40 jct., TN 6015 $12.50 447 12.51 35.73 5 20-Mar-1994
Wheaton, MD 6491 $14.00 476 12.91 36.87 6 21-Mar-1994
Tuckerton, NJ 6731 $8.50 240 8.68 27.65 6 21-Mar-1994
Boston, MA 7098 $15.50 367 12.93 28.38 7 22-Mar-1994
Rumford, ME 7333 $8.00 235 7.85 29.94 8 23-Mar-1994
Keene, NH 7671 $10.50 338 10.70 31.59 9 24-Mar-1994
Ithaca, NY 8039 $13.50 368 12.50 29.44 11 26-Mar-1994
Sandusky County, OH 8447 $14.00 408 11.67 34.96 11 26-Mar-1994
Williams County, OH 8820 $13.00 373 12.63 29.53 13 28-Mar-1994
Marshall, MI 9205 $13.00 385 12.75 30.20 14 29-Mar-1994
Oak Park, IL 9535 $14.00 330 12.29 26.85 16 31-Mar-1994
St. Paul, MN 9982 $15.00 447 13.64 32.77 17 1-Apr-1994
Fargo, ND 10269 $12.50 287 10.60 27.08 17 1-Apr-1994
Minot, ND 10610 $13.00 341 11.82 28.85 18 2-Apr-1994
Glasgow, MT 10888 $11.50 278 9.90 28.08 18 2-Apr-1994
Shelby, MT 11160 $11.50 272 8.99 30.26 18 2-Apr-1994
Kalispell, MT 11396 $10.00 236 8.48 27.83 18 2-Apr-1994
Moses Lake, WA 11755 $14.50 359 12.09 29.69 19 3-Apr-1994
Salem, OR 12182 $15.60 427 12.38 34.49 20 4-Apr-1994
Yreka, CA 12464 $12.00 282 10.00 28.20 20 4-Apr-1994
Berkeley, CA 12832 $12.25 368 10.47 35.15 21 5-Apr-1994
Totals $347.06 9657 310.59 30.98

This was all done in a rented 1994 Buick Skylark.

Onion soup

Saturday night was onion soup night. I used Rachael Ray’s recipe as a starting point also, but switched a lot of things around also. I skipped the sherry and used beaujolais as my reduction sauce along with my usual allotment of leeks and shallots in addition to the onions. The end result didn’t have much complexity, but what tastes were there were wonderfully strong. Nice full-on rustic soup:

onion_soup

I made a second bowl with a less oily comte cheese in places of the “grocery store grade” gruyere, and it was fantastic. Nothing approaching The Best French Onion Soup On This Continent, but a good start.

Up the hill. Down the hill. Repeat many times.

So the last time I was skiing was roughly twenty years ago: new wave was still king and MTV had yet to air a single video. So it was rather random to go up to Mammoth for a couple of days (credit goes to my mom, who’s 78 and still skies a couple weeks every year).

Amazingly, there’s still a lot of snow even this late in the season and no one is skiing on Mondays. So I had the whole mountain to myself, which is just as well since I was pretty much a public health hazard for the first couple of hours while I got my ski legs back.

uphill

downhill

By the afternoon, I was right back to where I left off in high school when I was skiing all the time. Could have stayed another couple of days!

Tonight’s total lunar eclipse

There was a early evening ocean haze here in Long Beach that was making totality rather hard to see. But once the moon just peeked out from under the Earth’s shadow it was high enough in the sky to clear the haze and just be absolutely spectactular.

In retrospect I wish I fished my telescope out of the garage, but there’s barely any room left here on the roof for anything. However, here’s a nicely overexposed featureless pixelated photo. I need to get a new camera adapter for the scope.

200305lunareclipse

This is the city…

longbeach200302inIt’s raining steadily in Los Angeles. We celebrate the coming of rain here by driving extra-dangerously while racing home to see how fast the local television news update their “Stormwatch!” graphics.

Last weekend was pretty nice. I took some photos out the window then but only just now found the PCMCIA adapter for the Cammedia card. So, while it doesn’t quite look like this right this minute, this is how it’s supposed to look.

A picture of my desk:

And looking out the window. Santa Catalina Island in the background.

longbeach200302