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Life

On names

When we were choosing The Kid's name, one of our constraints was that we wanted something that wasn't very common. As it turned out, the name we liked the most hadn't been in the top 1000 names in the US since 1939, and had only ever gotten as high as the 368th most common girls' name.

Today I wondered what the top 1000 looked like for The Kid's birth year, and turned to the Social Security Administration to find out. Turns out her name isn't in the top 1000 in 2006, either.

What was really interesting, though, was the last 50 in the top 1000 names list. Remember, these are the girls' names that are more common than The Kid's.

Close readers will note that it's more likely that she'll have a classmate named Akira or Leia than it will be for her to have a classmate with the same name.

It's also interesting to note that although the execrable Nevaeh is the #43 girls' name, the poor speller's version — Neveah — is all the way down at #996 .

In which I get schooled by the truly weird.

From: talkingcrow
To: dae, unclevinny, geogeek

it has been very quiet from you kids lately. i miss the inane banter. ;-)

From: dae
To: talkingcrow, unclevinny, geogeek

Many people find an undercoat of primer helps with even coverage oftheir chosen color paint.

From: unclevinny
To: talkingcrow, dae, geogeek

So anyway, I told her that I didn't find the jokes about my divorce as funny as they used to be, and just because I'm losing my hair a little doesn't mean I'm necessarily past my prime. I mean I don't want to get all Judge Wapner or anything, but I will if I have to. Two can play at that game, and I don't mean Jenga. It's easily 14 to 16 hours a week to keep the lawn in fighting condition and I don't get the shittiest "thank you" for it, not a goddam thing, not that I deserve a medal but it would help if she'd scream just a little less... just screaming screaming every day, like everything is a huge crisis well it's NOT a crisis, but it will be especially if we can't afford to get the edger fixed and another 40-pound fertilizer bag. That's a crisis my friend, like she couldn't even imagine. But nooo, it's all "global warming" this and "climate crisis" that, and "oh, why don't we just edge it by hand" as if that's going to get us back on the cover of Homes and Gardens, well it WON'T, I've been through that fairy tale with my last two wives/gardeners, and I'm not going there again!!!! It's back to diagonal cutting regimens, hand-aeration and a lot more attentiveness with the tweezers -- yeah, like that's going to happen! -- just the BASICS, we've completely fallen down on Lawn Care 101, fuckit, and I get a face full of screaming if I try to raise the standards one fucking IOTA, let alone getting us back into regionals (or state, which is where we belong). But anyway, I'm fucking sick of it, and if this thing falls apart you can damn well take it to the bank that I'm taking the dogs with me, no way am I

shit cops are here more later

From:geogeek
To: talkingcrow, dae, unclevinny

so there's this guy right? he's my neighbor on the other side of the driveway. yeah that one--the bald fuck that's always out in his lawn wearing that greasy wifebeater. I swear to jesus he's out there every fucking time you come over, isn't he? yeah well I'd probably be out in my lawn all day and night if I was married to what he has to put up with. yeah, no shit. well, see, I found out something about him. found out when the cops showed up last night and started banging on his door. turn's out that mr fucking chem-lawn hasn't been keeping up with the payments to his first marital mistake. no shit. also turns out that the current mrs chemlawn didn't ever know about #1 or #2. cops didn't tell me that part, of course. shit, you could hear her goddamn shouting all the way down to frank's place. i swear to jesus, frank calls me up and says, he says, what the fuck is all that noise? he thought it was my old lady on my ass again about not cleaning the fucking garage or something.

From: talkingcrow
To: dae, unclevinny, geogeek

I love you guys. Seriously. I am devoted.

More dialog around the house

Miz Becky to eye-rolling me: "You know, that 'oh my god you're so weird' look doesn't work so well when you have a laundry basket on your head."

Two unrelated ideas for reality tv shows

Ho-down, the show where street prostitutes compete at country line dancing. These girls can really move in cowboy boots!

Pimp my Hoe: Each week, a lucky viewer gets a set of rhinestone-encrusted garden tools and a set of garden beyotches for a week. They can really turn those beds!

Fred Meyer, 7:48pm

The checker scans my loaf of bread. Scans the humidifier. Scans the three chocolate bars. She looks up at me.

"Sick wife and baby at home?"

"Uh, yeah."

"See it all the time. Bad time of year for it."

She goes back to scanning my purchases.

coda: At home, writing this up. Reading the receipt: "Hey, I could have earned nine points with my Fred Meyer rewards card!"

Me: (laugh, almost fall off of stool, high five Miz Becky)

Plague House

Regular visitors may have noticed that there wasn't a new photo this morning. Your author is too sick to shoot — which is saying something — with some evil relative of a stomach flu.

The bright spot, from my perspective, is that The Kid seems to be on an upward trend from her own sickness, and Miz Becky is also much better than she was a couple of days ago. Which means your author's timing is pretty good.

Not that the blessing of good timing makes me feel any better.

Photos will resume as soon as I'm well enough to hold a camera steady.

After the windstorm

I should probably report that despite what was a hell of a windstorm, we came through relatively unscathed. The power was out from about 3:00am Friday morning -- after a rather spectacular set of transformer explosions -- to 11:30am the same day, which means we were among the luckiest.

Something like one million homes in the Seattle area were without power in the aftermath of the storm, and many of those -- like Tim and Heather -- don't expect to get power back for several days. Heather and Bobbin joined us for a little slumber party at our house last night, after Tim went home to take care of the animals. D&C&E joined us for Shabbos dinner, but went home to their dark house. I haven't heard from geogeek but I expect that Whidbey Island is a cold, dark place right now.

I fired up the wood stove, so the living room was warm. Our water heater is natural gas, as well as our stove, which meant that we could shower and I could have coffee -- after grinding it by hand with the mortar and pestle.

What passes for pillow talk around here

Last night...

Me (exaggeratedly huffy): "I'm not interested in talking to you if you're going to mock."

Miz Becky: "What, we're never going to talk again?"

The meteorologist speaks for me

WHAT A MONTH. HEAVY RAINS AND FLOODING...WINDSTORMS AND NOW NOT ONLY DOES IT SNOW...IT SNOWS WITH A NATIONAL TELEVISION AUDIENCE WATCHING. ALL THAT IS LEFT IS FOR SEATTLE TO BREAK THE MONTHLY PRECIPITATION RECORD WHICH LOOKS LIKE IT WILL HAPPEN WEDNESDAY NIGHT OR THURSDAY MORNING.

My mom very reasonably called from Hawai'i to make sure we were protecting her granddaughter.

Update, 10:22 PST: Why yes, I did take some pictures of the snow. They run from last night (weirdo light colors!) to this morning.

No photo this morning.

Instead, I made chicken stock (with plenny feet), and pasta with pumpkin sauce, and granola.

Mmm, delicious. Don't you wish you could have some?

Today's amusing Chinese language story

I'm waiting for the bus to go to work this morning. A guy walks up to me and asks in a strong Chinese accent: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I can catch the number seventy bus?"

I of course answer in Chinese. Bus directions I can still handle.

"Nin dao nali qu? Hao, di qishe che keyi, qishier, qishesan liangge ye keyi. Tamen xia yige lu ting che."

No reaction at all. He chats with me in Chinese, thanks me in Chinese, and goes on his way.

As though it's the most natural thing in the world to walk up to a 6'2" , long-haired, haole guy in downtown Seattle and have him speak your own language.

Why is this man smiling?

There I was this morning, standing on a crowded bus full of wet, crabby people, the windows steaming up from our breath condensing against the cold leaking in from the outside... smiling and bobbing my head cheerfully.

Why?

Because Desmond Dekker was singing sweetly in my ears, and I had no choice but to pay attention, from one happy island boy to another:

Come on, all you people
Come on, before it's too late
Because I and we are going, and we must rejoice
Come on, before it's too late.

That's the refrain from Mount Zion, by the way.

In which we discover I'm even evil in my sleep

Apparently -- I heard all of this second hand, as it were -- early yesterday morning, Miz Becky woke up from a nightmare involving spiders.

As she explained this to 7/8 asleep me, I patted her head comfortingly.

And then made little spider tracks down her arm with my hand.

Of course, as she was describing this to me the next morning, I was terribly sympathetic and contrite. Or, uh, I laughed hysterically, and am in fact snickering to myself as I type this. Not so much that I did that to her, which wasn't nice at all, but that with my societal filters down... I'm basically evil.

Or as a psychiatrist friend of mine once said: "You probably would have made a great shrink, because you're so empathetic... but you use your talents for evil."

The home stretch

Somehow we've gotten to the point where, one way or another, we're going to have a baby in the house in the next four weeks -- either she'll decide it's time to see the outside world, or the (as is typical these days) if we go two weeks past the due date, the doctors will likely want to induce labor.

This has been, with one exception, about as average a pregnancy as there is. If there's a measure, this baby is at the middle of the range. Heartrate expected to be between 120 and 160? She's 140. When I glanced at Miz Becky's chart a couple of weeks ago, I at first couldn't see where they were marking down her weight, until I realized that she was exactly tracking the pre-printed average weight gain line.

The one exception, unfortunately, is that Miz Becky seems to have won the coveted "slightly nauseated throughout the pregnancy" award. That "totally fine after the first trimester" thing? Not so much.

Aside from that, though, her spirits are good. We've made good progress on our tasks, and now have a shockingly yellow nursery (vaguely post-it note color) filled with most of the things we're going to need. Everything, of course, except a baby.

I must thank our friends and family here -- all of whom have been so generous with hand-me-downs and gifts and help and good advice that we honestly can't imagine having gotten to this stage without them. We are blessed to have this community around us, and our daughter is lucky to be coming into the world surrounded by so much love and support. Thanks to all of you.

Nostomania

From the wonderful A Word A Day:

nostomania (nos-tuh-MAY-nee-uh, -mayn-yuh) noun
An overwhelming desire to return home or to go back to familiar places.
[From Greek nostos (a return home) + -mania (excessive enthusiasm or madness).]

Rich used to have a great cat named Iris. During most of her life, Iris was a sweet cat who loved sitting on the couch getting petted, or lazing around in the house tracking the sun. When she first showed up in Rich's life, though, she came as a feral kitten who had been living in the woods near his grandmother's house in rural western Oregon.

It took a few years for Iris to be comfortable in the house, and both of us probably still have scars from the painful experience of trying to get her in a carrier to go to the vet. (While she was at the vet, of course, she was sweet and lovable, which meant that we would spend the visit getting dirty looks from both her and the vet.) Eventually, though, she settled down and became the sweet housecat we knew and loved.

We were surprised that years later, towards the end of her life, she seemed to revert to her old habits -- she didn't like to stay indoors, and would spend hours or days stalking the fields around their house.

When I read Anu's Word of the Day today, it reminded me of Iris, and made me think about some of my habits that seem to be reverting to my childhood. Maybe taking on some of the behaviors of our childhood is a way of dealing with this kind of longing.

For me, it hasn't really happened in big ways, but there have been a lot of little things I've noticed returning to me. One example: for a long time I was perfectly happy wearing closed-toe shoes, even though I grew up barefoot or wearing slippers and ended up with what used to be known in Hawai'i as "lu'au feet" (named for the wide leaf of the taro plant).

In the last few years, though, wearing closed-toe shoes has become more and more irritating to me. At first, I dealt with it by taking off my shoes during meetings or long car rides. I'd still think of them as my default footwear choice, though. For the last few summers I've worn sandals all summer (no socks, thank you, that's one tacky habit I never picked up from the northwesterners around me).

This summer (such as it's been) I've gone all the way back to slippers on days when it's even reasonably warm. I just don't want to wear shoes, and I'm happier all day when I don't. And, fortunately, I work in an environment where I can wear whatever I like.

Hopefully, of course, we do keep some of the habits and beliefs we've learned along the way (otherwise what's the point of having experiences, anyway?), but it seems reasonable to me that we might eventually reject some of the things we learned away from home -- like a long-term version of the Amish practice of rumspringa, we go out into the world of new ideas and new ways of living only to discover that, no, thanks, we liked some things just fine about how we grew up.

What about you? Do you notice any returns to the habits of your childhood? I know some of you eventually moved home, and some of you have never left your childhood homes. What about you? Do you experience this longing, even though you're physically home? Any habits coming back?

Something to talk about

I've been painting this weekend, which is always a bad idea. And while I've been painting -- when KEXP hasn't been occupying my mind -- I've been thinking about this question:

Imagine that you've been contacted by aliens. You're satisfied that you're not insane, didn't hallucinate it, etc. -- that it really, truly happened. However, you have no objective proof to show anyone to convince them -- no artifacts, no mysterious tattoos, no burn patterns on the ground, no impossible knowledge, nothing. Not even a damn crop circle.

How would you convince people it really happened? Say you had a message to deliver, for example, so there's a reason you need to convince people. How would you get people to believe that you're not insane?

Remember:
1) You know it's true.
2) You have no evidence to show anyone else.
3) You need to convince people it happened.

Um... maybe you should practice on something smaller, grasshopper.

Kung fu fan tries to stop train

He was taken into custody for breaking railway rules and said he wanted to test whether or not he could use kung fu to stop the train. Liang is a great fan of swordsman fiction and has also learnt martial arts.

Two conversations that you won't find as funny as I do …

… but which will give you a certain amount of possibly disturbing insight into our home life.

Dinner out with Miz Becky's parents, Sunday night.

Miz Becky: "I think I'm going to have the mousse."
DAE: "Ew. You're going to eat a rodent?"
MB: "No, silly. That's a meese."
DAE: "OK, and those guys with the horns are mushers… so what's a mouse?"
MB: "I think it's like a duck."

Home, last night.

MB: "Ew. What's that funny smell in the fridge?"
DAE: "Is it the leftover clown?"

In which I dream

I am in an anonymous Eastern European nation. It's time for me to give birth, which is very exciting for the local townsfolk. A woman offers to help me through the process, since I am otherwise alone there.

They move me into a birthing center, all grey concrete, with a television in one corner, a bed in another, and a shower in a third. Nevertheless, it somehow seems cheery.

After I'm settled in, and we have talked for a while, it's time for me to bathe. She helps me get under the shower, and brushes my hair for me, and hands me soap as I need it. I towel off, and she hands me a robe to wear.

We sit there, chatting, me on the bed, her on the only chair, as other people drift in and out, sometimes stopping to talk, sometimes doing mysterious things to the machinery that has appeared in the fourth corner of the room.

Eventually everyone, including me, starts to realize that I'm a man, and somehow we've been mistaken. Slowly, everyone drifts out of the room in an uncomfortable silence, and I am left alone to wake up.

The really big news

In August, everything changes.

Yay!

Two lonely guys instant message

Miz Becky and T's wife are both out of town this weekend, and T and I were chatting in IM earlier, just after T succeeded in getting his small baby to sleep...

dae says:
    I'll call you about 2:30 in the morning when I can't sleep because Becky's out of town, k?

T says:
    noooo ....

T says:
    but you if you need to spoon I could have come and picked you up

dae says:
    Um

dae says:
    called my bluff.

T says:
    YESSSSSSSSSSSS

Hypothetically speaking ...

... if there were police cars driving through our neighborhood — as there are ...

... and there was a police helicopter circling north of our neighborhood — as there is ...

... should I stand naked on our lanai and scream "you'll never take me alive, coppers!!!!"?

Miz Becky says no. I think she's a fuddy-duddy. Opinions?

Two of a kind, just two of a... not really.

TOKYO - Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one's a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a four-foot rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo's Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster — whose name means "meal" in Japanese — to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October, after the snake refused to eat frozen mice.

But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.

"I've never seen anything like it. Gohan sometimes even climbs onto Aochan to take a nap on his back," Yamamoto said.

Aochan, a 2-year-old male Japanese rat snake, eventually developed an appetite for frozen rodents but has so far shown no signs of gobbling up Gohan — despite her name.

"We named her Gohan as a joke," Yamamoto chuckled. "But I don't think there's any danger. Aochan seems to enjoy Gohan's company very much."

The Tokyo zoo also keeps a range of mostly livestock animals, and promotes "cross-breed interaction," according to Yamamoto.

But Gohan and Aochan's case was "was a complete accident," Yamamoto said.

(Via the excellent MYT)

Trying to communicate

When we were up in Canada over Chanukah, and people would ask me where I lived, they would always ask me whether I was excited about the Seahawks' record this year. And I would always mumble something about not really following sports at all.

The usual response was that instead of saying "Oh, Ok" and moving on, they would continue to try to talk football with me, as though somehow I wasn't serious, or perhaps lying because I don't like talking to people, or because I was keeping secrets from our perky neighbors to the north. Something like that.

When we got back, I asked Tim (the biggest sports fan I know) what I should say in those situations — how could I give some sort of culturally appropriate response without actually having to know anything?

Tim thought for a moment, and then gave me a magical phrase to use. "Sounds good!" I said, and tucked it away.

This morning on the bus to the gym I got my chance. There were several Seahawks fans on the bus, heading down early to do whatever one does before a football game. They were laughing and talking about previous games and where to eat after the game.

As I got ready to get off the bus, they noticed me and asked "Hey man! You going to the game today? Wooohooo!"

I turned to them and said, smiling, "It's a great time to live in Seattle."

They cheered again and went back to their conversation! It worked! Thanks Tim!

This morning's sitcom idea

Waking up to the unusual sound of seagulls suggested this idea:

A couple wakes up one morning to discover that global warming has happened calamitously overnight. While they slept, the polar ice caps melted, the ocean waters rose, and their house that was formerly well inland in a temperate environment is now semi-tropical oceanfront property.

Hilarity ensues.

I'm thinking "Northern Exposure" meets "Magnum, PI". The opening credits sequence could show the ice caps melting to some swinging Sinatra number, eventually morphing to ice in a cocktail glass.

More of our home life you don't want to hear

Last night, D&C forgot E's copy of Goodnight Moon, and of course I had to read it aloud before we went to sleep. And also of course we had to invent new verses, including this one:

Goodnight Edgar, Goodnight Rusty.
Goodnight cutting boards getting crusty.

At home with Becky and Dave

The scene: Last night, as we're falling asleep. Edgar jumps on the bed and, from my perspective, disappears.

DAE: "Where'd the cat go?"

Miz Becky: "He's snuggled down between my shins."

DAE: "Oh. Have you repented your shins?"

Miz Becky: "No, the first coat still looks good enough."

Confidential ...

... to the perky blonde woman talking about your weekend on the bus this morning:

Talking about all the work you did at your friend's wedding, and how first you were a flower slave, and then a kitchen slave, and then a cleanup slave, might have a slightly different semantic weight to your african-american seatmate.

Just a thought, mm-kay?

In which I can't pass up an easy shot

On the bus this morning, a couple of young Chinese women were sitting behind me and chatting. The bus stops, and people get on.

One of them leans over to the other one: "Look at that guy's coat!"

"Which one?"

"The blue one!"

"Oh, wow, that's really ugly!"

"Yeah, foreigners have such bad taste sometimes!" (laughs loudly)

"Shhhh! Don't talk so loud!"

I can't resist. I turn around a bit and say, quietly, in my terrible American accent, "It's OK. Nobody on this bus speaks Chinese."

In the horrified silence, I turn back to my book. They get off a couple of stops later and glance back at me as they walk off the bus. I smile at them.

Creationists gone wild

Well, this was only a matter of time:

Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back

ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.

Similar efforts are under way or planned around the country as science museums and other institutions struggle to contend with challenges to the theory of evolution that they say are growing common and sometimes aggressive.

One company, called B.C. Tours "because we are biblically correct," even offers escorted visits to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Participants hear creationists' explanations for the exhibitions.

So officials like Judy Diamond, curator of public programs at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln, are trying to meet such challenges head-on.

Dr. Diamond is working on evolution exhibitions financed by the National Science Foundation that will go on long-term display at six museums of natural history from Minnesota to Texas. The program includes training for docents and staff members.

"The goal is to understand the controversies, so that people are better able to handle them as they come up," she said. "Museums, as a field, have recognized we need to take a more proactive role in evolution education."

Maybe it's because I'm mean-spirited, but I think that training docents better isn't exactly what I was looking for in a head-on response.

Instead, we should gather people together, go to the churches that are participating in this stupidity, and challenge them to their face on doctrinal matters that conflict with settled precepts of science, or that are internally inconsistent.

Possible subjects (and yes, some of these are low-hanging fruit):

• Adam and Eve. We're all descended from them? Who did Cain marry, then? Why aren't we all inbred?
• Lot. Sleeps with his daughters. This is the one good man saved from Sodom?
• Leviticus. So, what's with the meat and cheese in the after-church casserole?

I'm sure y'all can come up with other examples. Who's with me? As Miz Becky likes to say, "oh, it's ON."

One point to the spontaneous combustion theorists!

At least in Australia, it seems it could actually happen.

Power-dressing man leaves trail of destruction SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.

When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet.

"It sounded almost like a firecracker," Clewer told Australian radio Friday.

"Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt."

Employees, unsure of the cause of the mysterious burning smell, telephoned firefighters who evacuated the building.

"There were several scorch marks in the carpet, and we could hear a cracking noise -- a bit like a whip -- both inside and outside the building," said fire official Henry Barton.

Firefighters cut electricity to the building thinking the burns might have been caused by a power surge.

Clewer, who after leaving the building discovered he had scorched a piece of plastic on the floor of his car, returned to seek help from the firefighters.

"We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited," Barton said.

"I've been firefighting for over 35 years and I've never come across anything like this," he said.

Firefighters took possession of Clewer's jacket and stored it in the courtyard of the fire station, where it continued to give off a strong electrical current.

[ . . . ]

Off to poetry camp

That's right, our friend Janel is winging her way off to grad school to study poetry for three years. And what better way to send her off than to post a high school picture I snagged at her parents' house? Especially when she's going to be away from the internets for a few days?

What are friends for, really?

Bus vignette

One woman walking up to the bus stop, speaking to another woman already waiting:

"I don't want to be saying it's going to be one of those days every mornin' I see you here, but it's going to be one of those days."

In other news, I think I'm close to having the comments problem resolved. Never fear. Your voice as the reader will return, in a real sense, not in some annoying postmodern way :-)

Urban folkcraft

We were talking the other day about the crappy coffee in the kitchens at work -- drunk by those too cheap to pay for a better-tasting caffeine hit in the cafeteria -- and the different strategies people have for making it taste halfway decent.

Several people put two coffee packets in the machine at once, to make it stronger. A couple of people maintained that drinking the coffee right away meant that you got more of the essential oils that would otherwise evaporate. And one person revealed his technique of using two coffee filters, not just one, so the grounds would spend more time in contact with the hot water, extracting more coffee goodness.

This all got me to thinking about urban folkcraft. As an anthropology student (which is how I started out my academic career), we spent a lot of time looking at rural folkcraft: pottery, handmade knives, little tools to make life on the farm or in the bush easier, etc. etc. But what about urban folkcraft, like the coffee? Or just general urban folk wisdom? Special ways to sit on the bus, or how you avoid crossing the street in certain ways?

Do you have any folkcraft or folk wisdom?

Cat leaves bag

Today we announced Virtual Earth, AKA the enormous project that's been taking up all of my time.

I can't really say anything specific about it, but you can read the news stories about it to your hearts' content.

UPDATE: I've posted a PR video showing the site in use (windows media format only) in sizes large (9mb) and ginormous (21mb).

Can you tell I'm a proud poppa?

It's been a long few weeks

Sorry for not keeping up here lately... it's been a long couple of weeks. Both Miz Becky and I have been very busy at our respective jobs; we've also been trying to make the sale of the old house move forward, which takes a surprisingly long time.

Work for me has been very exciting and rewarding lately, but also very stressful. Tensions are running high, and I'm working way too many hours, but it's for something that I'm very excited about, so that makes it worth it. I wish I could be more explicit, but all I can do is promise that I'll have something very cool to show you, very soon.

The biggest stress around here lately is that we learned that Mr. Edgar, the younger of our two cats, has bladder cancer. There's nothing to be done, according to our vet, so we're focusing on palliative care for as long as he has left. Could be a few months, could be more, could be less. I'm going to miss the little, bitey, shredding punk.

A cautionary tale

When I got on the bus to head home Tuesday evening, I saw my friend Jerry on the bus.

"Hey, Jerry, how's it going, man?"

"Oh, pretty good. Want to know how I spent my birthday?"

"Yeah!"

He pulls a folded copy of The Olympian out of his bag. On the front page is a picture of a flattened car. "My son survived that."

"Holy..." I read the article. "Holy..." I look at the picture again. "Holy..."

"... shit," Jerry finishes for me. "The doctors told me that only one in 100 people survive this kind of accident. Greg only needed a few stitches."

Greg was apparently going a little too fast and following the car in front of him a little too closely. When the car in front of him braked, he braked too, and went end-over-end in mid air, not hitting anyone else, and landed in the median.

So... all of you out there who like the going fast, and the following close behind... heads up. You might not be this lucky:

(click to see a larger version)

This story is painful on so many levels

Here's a few choice excerpts from a story from the London Telegraph. Note the Telegraph's opinion, cleverly hidden in the title of the article:

I'll buy houses and a flash car, says yob awarded £567,000

A teenage criminal who received £567,000 in compensation after falling through a roof while trespassing boasted about his wealth yesterday, saying that he was looking forward to buying "a few houses and a flash car".

Carl Murphy, 18, got the payout last week, nine years after being injured in a 40ft fall at a warehouse in Bootle docks, near Liverpool, prompting angry protests from