Category: Journal

Second Chances

This morn­ing I watched a bit of a Sun­day morn­ing news pro­gram. The pan­el of pun­dits was dis­cussing Michael Vick. I was­n’t pay­ing close atten­tion but I believe that they were all more or less in agree­ment that “Amer­i­cans believe in sec­ond chances. Vick deserves a sec­ond chance, but I would­n’t sign him if I was a GM”.

I’m not sure what that is sup­posed to mean. You deserve a sec­ond chance, I hope you can get it from someone.

What Vick did was bad. He has served his prison sen­tence. He lost mil­lions. He deserves a sec­ond chance.

I would have had no prob­lem if the Pack­ers had signed him (report­ed­ly they con­sid­ered it), and I bet the Eagles will ben­e­fit from hav­ing him on the ros­ter. I believe he will be a star again and I wish him the best (except, of course, when the Eagles play the Packers).

The Spider and the Fly

Here is a video I shot a few weeks ago on the job site. I noticed the move­ment beneath the bot­tom step of a step lad­der and bent down for a clos­er look.

Although the spi­der does not seem all that appre­cia­tive of the spin the fly cre­ates, I am not con­vinced that the spin isn’t coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. I don’t think one can tell from the video, but it would seem that the spin­ning could lead to more web wrapped around the fly­’s legs. Now I wish I had watched/“filmed” more than I did.

I did check on it awhile lat­er and the fly was com­plete­ly wrapped up and stowed safe­ly tight up against the bot­tom of the step.

In the back­ground on the radio is NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

This was shot with my Nikon Coolpix L5.

My apolo­gies for the incon­sis­tent focus.

Facts?

It is inter­est­ing to me how often peo­ple I talk to do not believe in “facts”. Maybe it is true, maybe it isn’t. Who’s to say? That there is no short­age of talk­ing heads out there with no more agen­da than rat­ings and a will­ing­ness to just make stuff up (or repeat what some­one else made up) cer­tain­ly con­tributes to this phenomenon.

But there are facts. Jonathan Chait has a nice post up over at The New Repub­lic talk­ing about some facts.

One exam­ple is it is a fact that in Eng­land, the gov­ern­ment owns the hos­pi­tals and the doc­tors are gov­ern­ment employ­ees. It is also a fact that this kind of arrang­ment is not even being con­sid­ered by Oba­ma and the con­gress. More at the link.

Increas­ing­ly the right side of the polit­i­cal spec­trum seems to be spend­ing its time with hands over the ears chant­i­ng “no, no, no, no”.

No, we do not accept evolution.

No, we do not accept man caused cli­mate change.

No, we do not accept that the cur­rant health care sys­tem is in crisis.

It would be nice if there could be a dis­cus­sion of facts instead of rants.

Town Brawls

It is hard to know just how dis­rup­tive the protests have been at var­i­ous town hall meet­ings that con­gress­men and women are hav­ing around the coun­try. Some of the video I’ve seen is edit­ed and it isn’t clear whether a town hall meet­ing was allowed to go on or not.

The video of Texas Con­gress­man Dogget­t’s town hall seems to be at the end as he is prepar­ing to leave. The video could eas­i­ly have been pre­ced­ed by a pro­duc­tive town hall meeting.

Still, I sus­pect there have been some town halls that have nev­er got­ten off of the ground due to the dis­rup­tive protests. I think you can see more evi­dence in the video post­ed at TPMDC. I don’t know much about Rachel Mad­dow, and I believe she is guilty of being strong­ly biased to the lib­er­al side of things, but I do think that some of the video she shows counts as protests that dis­rupt the town hall.

Is that a bad thing? It is not as evil as many com­menters are mak­ing it out to be. When the con­gress­man needs a police escort to get safe­ly to his car, that may be over the line a bit. But from what I’ve seen, I’m bet­ting that there have been many such protests in the his­to­ry of this coun­try from many dif­fer­ent sides of the polit­i­cal spectrum.

The tac­tic of shout­ing down the oth­er side in a forum designed for dis­cus­sion is often used by those who have no good argu­ment to make.

Neat Packer Tradition

I am a life long Green Bay Pack­er fan. I have only learned of this tra­di­tion in the last year or so. Dur­ing train­ing camp the play­ers have to get from the lock­er room to the prac­tice facil­i­ty. The method of trans­porta­tion is bicy­cle. Kids show up with their bikes and each play­er bor­rows a bike and “rides” the bike to prac­tice while the bikes own­er walks along beside him car­ry­ing the play­er’s helmet.

Jeep­ers!! To have your bike cho­sen and to car­ry the play­ers hel­met!! I can only imagine.

Video is here.

Wedding Observations

Deb­by and I attend­ed a wed­ding on Saturday.

The cou­ple was almost gid­di­ly hap­py. Most cou­ples get­ting mar­ried are hap­py, but these two were joy­ous. It was cool.

The cater­er was very care­ful to serve the sal­ad to every seat at every table. Even the emp­ty tables. There was an emp­ty seat at our table and we tried to stop the serv­er, but no “We have to set every chair”. And, of course, charge for every chair. But only the sal­ad gets served. The rest of the food is in a buf­fet. A bit of a rack­et, but then, they had to have enough of all the food just in case every­one showed up.

When it was time for our table to go through the buf­fet I was not yet done with my sal­ad. By the time we got back to the table, my sal­ad plate had been cleared. This is a pet peeve of mine…wait staff remov­ing stuff from the table before I’m done with it. I am amazed how often the serv­er wants to take my plate before I’m done eat­ing. I have become very para­noid about it.

It hit me (and I may be the last per­son on earth to fig­ure this out…) that the throw­ing of the bou­quet and the garter actu­al­ly serves a use­ful pur­pose. It allows the sin­gle peo­ple to see who among the oppo­site sex is single.

Two girls wres­tled over the bou­quet leav­ing a lot of petals on the floor. I was won­der­ing if I was on a movie set.

The recep­tion dance floor was not at all slip­pery. It was non slip. Pre­sum­ably this is to reduce lia­bil­i­ty? I would think I’d be more like­ly to get hurt try­ing to “dance” on a non slip sur­face than I would on a slip­pery surface.

“Dance” is in quotes because…you’ve heard of the TV pro­gram You Think You Can Dance?…well, when they come up with the show You Know You Can’t Dance But You Don’t Care…that’s the show I’ll be on.

Obsessive Compulsive Not!

This is my guitar:

guitar

I bought it in 1974. If mem­o­ry serves, it cost in the vicin­i­ty of $300. So that con­ser­v­a­tive­ly comes out to at least 25 min­utes of play­ing for each pen­ny spent (fig­ur­ing an hour a day play­ing on aver­age). Rea­son­ably well spent money.

This is my can of gui­tar polish:

guitar polish

I bought it in 1974. I don’t remem­ber what I paid for it.

Yes­ter­day I put new strings on the gui­tar and I took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pol­ish it up a bit. Judg­ing by the feel of the can of pol­ish, I think it must be close to half emp­ty. So I only have a 35 year sup­ply of gui­tar pol­ish on hand.

A Time I Spoke Stupidly

I can not believe I did not think of this a cou­ple of days ago.

My senior year at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty (1977), I man­aged a job as a part time super­vi­sor in the MRC/​LLC dorm cafe­te­ria. There were a few less than kind things that could be said of me back then (and to this day?), but the per­ti­nent info for this sto­ry is that I was a bit of a fas­cist in so far as that means I did not yet under­stand that rules were meant to be broken.

I was a hard ass, always try­ing to enforce every rule at all times. It is not beyond the pale that stu­dents were mak­ing fun of me behind my back (I don’t think they were, but it’s possible).

Of course, the stu­dents, being col­lege stu­dents, pret­ty much nev­er heard of a rule that they did­n’t think exist­ed so to be broken.

In spite of that set up, my mem­o­ry of that job is not dom­i­nat­ed by con­flict between me and every­one else. In fact, I only remem­ber a cou­ple of times that things got out of hand. Once was when some stu­dents were attempt­ing to smug­gle food out of the cafe­te­ria to eat on the ride home. In my mem­o­ry, one stu­dent attempt­ed to toss a bag of food over my head to anoth­er stu­dent wait­ing out­side the din­ing hall. I inter­cept­ed the bag, but the activ­i­ty led to the door (a beau­ti­ful old wood­en door) sus­tain­ing some damage.

I do not remem­ber what led to the sec­ond inci­dent. I remem­ber a cou­ple of stu­dents on the oth­er side of the counter and I was becom­ing exas­per­at­ed with what­ev­er the sit­u­a­tion was. After some “dis­cus­sion”, I final­ly said “You peo­ple!”, mean­ing “stu­dents.” The prob­lem was the stu­dents I was talk­ing too were African-American.

They under­stand­ably react­ed a bit neg­a­tive­ly to my state­ment and asked what I meant by it. I respond­ed “Stu­dents.” One of them start­ed accus­ing me of bring­ing race into the dis­cus­sion and I prompt­ly replied that I was not the first one to bring up race. Appar­ent­ly my sin­cer­i­ty shined through because they let it go pret­ty quick­ly (more quick­ly than I deserved…I may have been sin­cere, but it was still stu­pid of me).

I’m just hap­py that for talk­ing stu­pid­ly I did not have to pay the penal­ty of hav­ing to drink a Bud Light. Gaaa!

Faces

I have always been amazed at how easy it is to see a face in what is real­ly a ran­dom “pat­tern”. Clouds, tree bark, weird tex­tile prints are just a few exam­ples of where a “face” can be found.

Back in the mid-sev­en­ties, when I was attend­ing Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty, an artist vis­it­ed cam­pus. (Well, prob­a­bly a few artists over the years I was there, but I was only aware of one). I do not remem­ber his name, but I do remem­ber watch­ing him do his thing in the hall­way of the stu­dent union.

He had a table set up dis­play­ing a col­lec­tion of recent draw­ings. They were very small, maybe three inch­es square and there was prob­a­bly fifty of them. All but three or four were faces.

His schtick at the time was tak­ing a small piece of paper, lay­ing a cou­ple of con­te pen­cils on the paper, plac­ing anoth­er sheet of paper on top, press­ing his hand on the stack and rotat­ing his hand. This result­ed in some ran­dom marks on the paper. Then he would look at the ran­dom marks, see a pic­ture and add a line, some def­i­n­i­tion, etc. to bring the pic­ture out.

One can see why so much of his work turned out to be faces.

He did a demon­stra­tion while a group of stu­dents watched. He stacked up his paper and con­te, rubbed it with his hand, and pre­sent­ed us with the raw “draw­ing”. I clear­ly saw a small stone cot­tage with a gar­den in front and a stone wall in front of the gar­den with a gate on the right and a path to the cot­tage door. He asked the opin­ion of the attrac­tive girl stand­ing next to me who saw, sur­prise, sur­prise, a face!

Today Alt­house linked to Acci­den­tal Mys­ter­ies which has a post about a French artist who makes faces out of toi­let paper tubes. I find them more impres­sive than the artist I saw at IU thir­ty some years ago, even if too many of them look like a George Bush.