Future Poltergeist

Got our first thunderstorm of the season tonight. One of those weird ones where patches of torrential rain mix with light sprinkling. Ran into one on 62 that made me think of driving in a car wash. Might have been hail too. Exciting! I run into the strangest stuff on Cnn while I'm hold at work. Today there's an article about testing bells in an effort to increase their lifespan. Quoted in the story is a Peter Grassmayr, a 14th generation bell founder. 14 generations ! That would go back to the 1650's or so. Amazing. What were the branches of my family doing at that time? No clue. Sometimes I think that this picture sums up my realtionship with the FP Gal. She's just so darn productive and I'm too busy wearing my handkerchief and playing the fiddle. (Wait, that doesn't sound right.) Anyway, I appreciate all of the stuff she does for me. And I'm not just saying that because I mowed the lawn this weekend. My favorite version of this fable is Fr...

Ever since I ran across that British list of books , I've been thinking about the connection between good books and their movie versions. The book is almost always better for obvious reasons. You can share in the thoughts of the characters. There is more time to expand the themes. You're not distracted by bewildering hair choices . There are some exceptions of course. Sometimes forcing a full length book into a two/three hour time slot cleans up the story. Sometimes an actor can bring something to life that the written work just couldn't. Or it could be that the added visuals and musical score are striking enough that they carry the day. Some examples? The Shawshank Redemption - based on a Stephen King novella. The original here is very good. It adds some texture that the movie couldn't quite get to, my favorite being a list of other escape stories. What made the movie better was the acting of Morgan Freeman. He embodies Red in such a way that you completel...

I'm very happy with Adrian Peterson. He has an incredibly aggresive running style and should be lots of fun to watch. I keep hearing comparisons to Eric Dickerson, but he's got some Earl Campbell to him too. If he stays healthy (a legitimate 'if') then he should do some wonderful things for this team. The Vikes picked up three receivers, all of whom were praised for having good hands. Troy Williamson, you're on notice. We can only hope that at least one of them pans out because the current crop is six shades of awful. Actually, who knows how good it is. Brad Johnson was clearly done last year and Tavaris looked awfully rookieish. I'm willing to give him another year of leash. Quite a few of the players drafted had bad collegate seasons last year. Over and over I've read that so and so looked better in '05 than in '06. The reasons varied from injury to surrounding talent but the Vikings clearly focused on high risk/high reward types of playe...

It's late April and my thoughts turn to the Vikings drafting the best defensive end available. My theory is that different teams have certain positions that they just should be talented at. They've developed an institutional memory and it carries over to the fans. For instance the Bears will forever seem like they should have a good running game. The 49ers should have a great quarterback. The Steelers and Giants should have great defenses, especially at linebacker. The Redskins at offensive line, etc. The Vikings should be great at two spots, defensive line and wide receiver. The current Vikes have the worst receiver corp of a generation and that hurts. The interior defensive line is stellar but the defensive ends are pitiful. They need to get better at both spots. They pick 7th and they've publicly said that they think there are eight 'blue chippers' available. Simple math says that there will be at least two of their top players to choose from. (Of cou...

So the trainer job was open at work again and I applied for it. Did a training presentation on flight times and how to calculate them with time zone changes. Someone else got the job. In related news, I discovered this place and I'm talking with them next week. The presentation led me to research time zones at Wikipedia. Time zones weren't really necessary until train travel came along. Until then time was kept locally and it really didn't matter. That led to this: Timekeeping on the American railroads in the mid nineteenth century was somewhat confused. Each railroad used its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters or most important terminus, and the railroad's train schedules were published using its own time. Some major railroad junctions served by several different railroads had a separate clock for each railroad, each showing a different time; the main station in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , for example, kept six different time...

Expect stories like this to crop up more and more often over the next few years. You should also expect that better analysis (orbital telescopes) to find even more promising planets. This one is just over 20 light years away. I bet we find them even closer.

So this morning at work I had to figure out how to ticket a reservation on Shanghai Airlines. (They're named for the city, not for a habit of doping strangers and pressing them into service on whaling ships. Not that I have any reason to think that they do any such thing. At least I've never heard of such a thing. And you'd think that would make the news, don't you? But I digress.) So I had to figure out how to ticket them and we didn't have their number at work. So I went to my good friend Google and looked them up. That quickly led me to this page and what looked like the number to call them on. As you can see: Shanghai Airlines reservation center formally stated the reservation hot line 8006208888 in 25Sep 1998. The service quality and service range was completely improved than the former one. Now translations and foreign idiom are always fun and I'm sure that we sound funny when we try to translate over to Chinese too. What really caught my eye...

One of the most rousing speeches in dramatic history.

Goes to Yale . Stage props don't kill people, people kill people. (Actually, it's hard to kill people with stage props. That's kind of the point.)

This movie deals with a dozen or so people that all intersect over a few days in the LA area. It opens with a minor car accident and immediately features a Latin policewoman and an Asian driver trading racial barbs. That sets the tone. Just about every character is openly racist or plays against racial stereotypes. Mix repeatedly and you have your movie. The writing is very good and the acting is superb. You have to suspend belief a tad in that the people in the story don't seem to live in a larger universe of people. You also have to marvel at the coincidence of all the bad things that happen in such a short period of time. But if you can get past that, it's a great movie. The message is pretty straight forward: we're all racist and we shouldn't be because it causes us to shortchange people. The degree of racism from the characters was certainly higher than I'm used to but it's obviously out there. If this message moves us more towards being a post-r...

Was reminded of this statue from my mother's post from her Rhode Island trip. I never did go into the Louvre and see their dishes. Maybe next time. BTW, that's a lion killing a crocodile. Ozzie is very jealous and he wants you all to know that he would have done the same thing. Only quicker.

At work we are divided into teams of people, each headed by a single manager. Our site has been big into building the employee experience and one of the ways they are trying to do that is by encouraging games within teams. Currently my team is playing a game called 'Secret Agent'. The idea is that each agent will answer four personal questions and then everyone else will try and guess which agent it is from their answers. The questions are things like 'What's your middle name, favorite ice cream, dream vacation', that type of thing. Every day features a new agent and whoever gets the most right wins a gift certificate. Sounds simple, no? Tuesday was the first day. We quickly realized that not everyone is there all five days a week as some of us work four ten hour days. Spirited arguments about how to handle that broke out. Some agents started emailing people questions about their middle names and so forth. Crafty agents eithered lied or refused to answer. ...

How dating my ex was like playing Doom II on nightmare mode. Top ten things I hate about Star Trek Knitting project. Exterminate! Tron game Have fun!

Interesting article on Cnn.com today about how general airline taxes are being misused for smaller airports with corporate jets getting off cheap. The article leads with some misleading elements. Passengers pay as many as six separate taxes and fees on a single airline ticket, adding up to more than $104 billion since 1997, the AP found. Yet these assessments often are overlooked by the millions who click the "buy" button to purchase tickets online, even though they can exceed 25 percent of the total airfare. I work with those taxes everyday and have trained dozens of people on how to compute them. There are four basic ones on most domestic flights. Three of them are flat taxes (usually) totaling $10.40 per flight ($20.80 on a connection) and the fourth one is like a sales tax, 7.5% of the base fare. They only exceed 25 percent on very cheap tickets. The norm is lower. The article goes on to list some questionable spending sprees from small airports, including this: Aus...

Just awful news out of Virgina today. I can't imagine what being near that type of tragedy would be like. Thoughts and prayers for that whole area.

So, my office is having a 'Chocolate Week' to celebrate something or other (not fitness). People have signed up to bring in chocloate for each day. My contribution? Jodi's chocolate/peanut butter/oatmeal cookies (recipe available upon request). I don't make cookies very often, in this case because the FP Gal doesn't like my baking. Or the peanut butter or something like that. The whole thing was frustrating for Ozzie because he wanted to watch and/or sample but it was fun for us!

So Britan's largest bookstore, Waterstone, polled it's 5000 employees and asked for their five favorite books published since 1982, the year the store opened ( article here ). They then released a list of the top 100 books ( list here ). There is a minor controversy in that 2/3 of the books were written by men. Does that mean that the employees are chauvanists? I doubt it as I don't think most people base their book choices on the gender of the author. In fact, one quick look at the list will show a common thread. Most of them have movie tie-ins! My years at B&N tell me that nothing moves a book like a film version. The ad campaign for a movie is also a campaign for the book. Maybe moreso. That's not to run down the books and suggest that they are unworthy or diminished by the silver screen. Just pointing out something obvious. (For what it's worth, I bet the audience at those movies were mostly women too.) Some pretty good books on the list. I'v...

When I was putting together the list, I marked this book as one that I'd read before. As soon as I opened it, I realized that wasn't the case. Plenty of other Twain, but not this one. Or these ones, since my copy had both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. A quick word about 'Tom Sawyer', plenty of fun and a great read. Creates a window into 1830's Missouri and more importantly a window into the world of a boy. Adventure and hi jinks galore. The original American bad boy and a direct descendant of Bart Simpson. 'Huck Finn' is a little different. The title character doesn't come from a loving family. In fact the book opens with a dispute as his drunken no-good father tries to take money from him and ends up kidnapping him. Huck escapes and meets up with a runaway slave named Jim. They run away from their lives by rafting down the Mississippi. Huck wrestles with his conscience as everything he's ever been taught about slaves tells him that the man h...

Just ran across a blog called Fresh Pics which features, well, pretty pictures. This one is from a set of bridges .

(By request.) Here's the list of the best American Novels . I've marked the ones I already own and link the ones I've already reviewed. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (OWN) Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin James, Portrait of a Lady Cather, My Antonia Wharton, The Age of Innocence Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Warren, All the King's Men Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March Ellison, Invisible Man (OWN) Chandler, The Long Goodbye Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (OWN) Updike, Rabbit, Run Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor Heller, Catch-22 Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (OWN) Nabokov, Pale Fire Roth, The Great American Novel Melville, Moby-Dick (OWN) Twain, Huckleberry Finn (OWN) Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (OWN) Heinlein, Starship Troopers (OWN) Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

I hate it when the Sox are out on the West coast. Baseball games shouldn't start at 9p and they really, really shouldn't end around midnight. One of the joys of baseball is the rythm that you get into watching it every night and the whole time zone thing screws that up. A friend from work loaned me 'Firefly' on DVD and I'm loving it. If you're a sci-fi fan or just a fan of good writing, this is great entertainment. One of the writers has a new series starting on FOX next week called 'Drive'. And yes, I'll give it a look. Article in the Strib about large houses and the neighbors that hate them . Some people have started putting up signs that read 'Monster Houses Make Bad Neighbors'. I'm sure those people would hate my tower. I'd much rather live next to a 'monster house' than a busybody. How do you keep a kitten out of the Macaroni & Cheese? Don't ask us because we haven't figured it out. (Next time he go...

Some of my relatives from California are visiting Minnesota right now, so the FP Gal and I drove down to Austin today. The town looks fine. Two new signs caught our eye. One is for an automotive place called 'The Tranny Shop'. Guess I've lived in the big city for a while because I didn't think 'transmission' right away. The other one speaks for itself, 'No Snowmobiling in the Cemetary'. Had a great time with the family. This is a branch of the family that we didn't really know while growing up and everytime we see them again I'm amazed at how much fun they are. We ate and played some cards. Finally, my allergies got the best of me and we had to get going. Got a hint of this memento from their recent trip to China...

Is here .

Try this link .

Looks warm, doesn't it?

I'm not much for conspiracies usually, but I ran across something today that knocked my socks off. Take a look for yourself. Welcome to the Unfastened Coins website. This site is dedicated to exposing the truth about the government's involvement in the sinking of the Titanic. Specifically, that they did it... I created this documentary to spread the truth about the government coverup in Oklahoma , Waco , New York Middle East the North Atlantic. I'm just a kid with a laptop who discovered the truth, but I encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions based on my premise that the government is lying to you and that your disagreement with said premise constitutes your admission of being a sheep. I suggest starting with my video: jhkjhkjh

So I was reading CNN at work yesterday and ran across this article on the upcoming hurricane season . As far as I can tell, no editor ever saw this. Compare these paragraphs: The probability of a major hurricane making landfall on the U.S. coast this year: 74 percent, compared with the average of 52 percent over the past century, he said. There were 10 named Atlantic storms in 2006 and five hurricanes, two of them major, in what was considered a "near normal" season. None of those hurricanes hit the U.S. Atlantic coast -- only the 11th time that has occurred since 1945. So in the last 100 years the U.S. coast has been hit by a hurricane in 52% of the years or exactly 52 of them. Later on we learn that since 1945, our coast has been hit every year but eleven times. Let's see. 2006-1945 = 61. In those sixty-one years we've been missed eleven times. 61-11 = 50. That means the U.S. coast was hit by hurricanes exactly twice between 1907 and 1945. Somehow I don...

Space thriller Serenity has beaten Star Wars to the title of best sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll of 3,000 fans. How crazy is that? True, the movie does have great writing but is that enough to overcome the impact Star Wars had on movie making? Of course, if it spawned better writing it would only be a blessing for the rest of the movie universe... The top ten: 1. Serenity (loved it) 2. Star Wars (classic) 3. Blade Runner (very good) 4. Planet of the Apes (are you kidding me?) 5. The Matrix (loved it) 6. Alien (best haunted house movie ever) 7. Forbidden Planet (no opinion) 8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (most boring movie ever, incredibly overrated) 9. The Terminator (great movie) 10. Back to the Future (loved it) They missed Tron, The Wrath of Khan and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind.

Word from my dad down in Austin that Robert 'Bo' Dudley died this past weekend. I know he'd been sick for a long time and it sounds like it was a blessing. Still very sad though. Bo was known primarily for his set design for the local theater. The very first play I was in, 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' had it's set designed by him. It looked like enormous snowflakes that unfolded so that various scenes could be staged differently. My favorite set was placed in the forest with a series of stone pillars. It all looked quite real. Only on closer inspection did you find out that the pillars were made of styrofoam. (One of those found a home in my bedroom for many years.) I'll remember him for his directing. He was very good with small casts. One of the best that I ever worked with. A professional in the best sense of the word. He was also just plain fun to be around. I remember a Matchbox play that he was directing where we ran into proble...

Wanted to say some things about last night's episode of 'Amazing Race'. [Everyone who doesn't watch and/or care should skip this post.] So you've got a fairly scattered set of people due to airline problems in Africa. Very long separations because of the lack of flights in the sub- Saharan part. If your flight is overbooked, you're out of luck because the next one isn't out for hours and hours. That heightens the drama but completely screws some teams. Small time differences in going to the airport become days long penalties. It makes it impossible for the back teams to compete. So we get to last night's episode. To the producer's credit they tried to take up some of the slack by guaranteeing a ticket on the last flight out. So the front teams, with time to kill, went to a travel agency. And then the bitchiest pair of women on the show in a long time decided to freak out the poor agent that they drew. Let me give you a clue, if you want ...

Interesting article in the Strib today about last year's flying experience . More passengers found themselves bumped, their flights delayed or their bags lost last year than in 2005, a study found. This doesn't surprise me in the least. Unless we have a very calm weather summer, I expect the numbers to get even worse. It seems like the planes are flying so full that the system doesn't have any slack. If several flights are canceled or seriously delayed it throws the whole system out of whack. Those passengers are pushed on to other full flights and the problem starts to cascade. Any time we have big weather issues we see this happen. A snowstorm on the east coast a few weeks back stranded people for two or three days. A big one right before Christmas stranded people in Denver for a similar time. This article continues: Industry spokesman David Castelveter blamed the majority of delays on bad weather. Making matters worse, he said, more planes will be in the air in co...

While watching 'We are the 80's' on VH1 Classic (look, actual music videos!), worst/funniest video of all time? It's Raining Men . Holy cats, that's some bad stuff.

This marks the 20th year that I've rooted for the White Sox. The first few years were pretty bad (217-267) and included a last place finish in 1989. I like to think that rooting for a team that's twenty games out builds character. Anyway, their fortunes turned around in 1990. They've only finished below .500 four times in the last seventeen years and finished no worse than third. And of course the 2005 season went fairly well. This year features four AL Central teams that are all of similar (high) quality. The difference between the Indians, Tigers, Twins and White Sox is (probably) not that much. Injuries and other unknowns like rookie maturity will decide the whole shebang. Seriously, you could randomly select the four in any order and have an equal shot at getting it right. The key for the Sox is the starting pitching. It went south during the second half of last year and so did the team. The bullpen should be a strength of the team again and the offense should...