Dignification

Looks like the Dallas Mavericks and the Miami Heat are the final 2 teams in the NBA playoffs. Does that mean one of them will win The Super Bowl? This whole Sports Thing continues to be mostly lost on me.

Mildly amusing:
The Mavericks play in the AAC [American Airlines Center] while
The Heat play in the AAA* [American Airlines Arena].

* not to be confused with the American Automobile Association

Not sure why American Airlines calls this "Center" versus "Centre" as Everybody Knows™ the latter is more dignified. Oh, wait .. this is Texas. Never mind.

I'm guessing the notoriously ham-handed American Airlines HQ will find a way to royally screw up the marketing opportunity they've been handed on a Silver Taco Platter. Maybe they'll run ads against repealing The Wright Amendment during the games? That'll certainly show their class.

Lay Wah Bob says that her allergies have all been cured, by using Olive Leaf Extract. Hey. whatever works. Rock on.

My 15-year (same employer) Door Prize arrived last week. Given about 24 items from which to pick, I decided on a shiny new digital camera, to supplant/replace the Canon PowerShot A230 I've been carrying for a couple years. So, I chose the Pentax Optio T10. It's actually not half bad, but (naturally) uses a different media format - Secure Digital [SD] - than my others, which have CompactFlash or SmartMedia. So, it's off to The Store to fetch an SD card.

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Everybody Knows is a trademark of Fox "News"; Rush Limbaugh Productions; and the Christian Fascist Republican Party.

Memorial Day 2006

Flashback to Saturday, 21 July 2001. I'd taken delivery of a new car earlier in the month. Partially as a reason to exercise it, I drove down to the DFW National Cemetery.

Although my father spent 30 years in the US Navy, I never had the inclination to join the military, and dad never asked me about it; he died during my second year in college. He didn't talk much about his World War II experiences, other than a brief story about a multi-ship convoy in the Pacific where only his ship and one other survived. I once wrote to the Navy department, asking for a copy of his military records, but they never replied.

I knew the DFW cemetery opened in 2000, and I wanted to look around. I thought I spotted a mountain lion from a distance, but couldn't be sure. There was a sign warning that "(t)his cemetery is being maintained in as natural state as possible [sic] and is inhabited by various wildlife such as lizards; snakes; birds; coyote; deer; fox; skunks; opossums; spiders; bobcat; wild dogs and scorpions". I spent a few hours there, taking photos and otherwise taking it all in.

The next day, I see that I went to the "DFW Founders Plaza" to watch the planes take off and land. I took quite a few photos that day, not knowing that such behavior, two months later, might seem highly suspect in a changed-forever country. Don't bother going back to my thoughts in those days; I didn't start this blog until July 2003.

This morning, I nosed through part of my photo collection (partly as a way to recall when I went to the DFW National Cemetery). I decided to give Adobe's "PhotoShop Album Starter Edition" a whirl with my (eeek!) 11,930 photographs. I'm guessing that they'll offer me all sorts of (paid) upgrades and options, eventually. For now, it's enough that I make a serious stab at organizing them all; if only I had that much time.

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Unrelated thoughts:

#1

I wonder ... what happened to the rest of the bribe? Louisiana Congressman William J. Jefferson allegedly (yeah, right) took $100,000 outside a suburban Washington hotel, but The Feds only found $90,000 in his freezer. Did he stop at Exxon on the way home to fill up his SUV?

Aside: after listening to AirAmerica skewer this moron, I flipped over to one of the 3R stations (Radical Right Radio) and listened to them say that .. because Jefferson is a Democrat (and a black one at that) .. the "Liberal Left Lunatics" were ignoring the whole thing. Ah, the 3R-Media have learned Karl Rove's lesson well: Lie. Repeat the Lie Until Everyone Believes It. Ignore (or, better yet - belittle) Anyone Who Disagrees.

#2

I wonder ... if the phrase "Haditha Massacre" will be this generation's equivalent to "My Lai Massacre"? Unlikely, since the scale of the atrocity is (apparently) so different. In Vietnam, between 347 and 504 people were slaughtered by US soldiers. In Iraq, it appears that "only" 24 civilians were slaughtered by US soldiers. Time will tell.

#3

I wonder ... if Simone and Marvin remembered Jill-Bob, who I picked up at DFW yesterday, following her three week, 4500 mile* RV trip from Minneapolis to Anchorage. Better her than me!

* Yahoo! Maps says the distance between Minneapolis and Anchorage is only 3206 miles (80 hours). I reckon they were moseyin' and lollygaggin'.

gone are the brain cells

It's too bad we didn't have yearbooks in grade (aka elementary) school; I've been trying to resurrect the brain cells which included my teachers names (from first grade onward) and can't remember many of them.

It's only been what .. 42 years since I was in the 1st grade? Odds are that more than a few of my teachers have now died. How many of my teachers can I remember without resorting to the yearbook?

grade school (1963-1969)
(x) principal
(_) school bus driver
(x) 1st grade
(_) 2nd (blank)
(_) 3rd (blank)
(x) 4th - PE
(x) 5th - TV classes (science; geography; etc)
(_) 6th (blank)

We had the same teacher all day for grades 1-4, before we began going to different teachers. About the only thing I remember from the first grade was that the playground was right outside the door, and we had a mandatory nap time. I dimly recall one of those rubberized coin-holders which I used to buy lunch each day at the cafeteria, although I did carry a lunchbox part of the time (mine had Yogi Bear on the outside).

jr high (1969-1971)
(_) principal (blank)
(_) school bus driver
(x) 7- band, art, Latin/Greek
(_) 8- (blank)

Junior high was easily the most traumatic of my educational years. I was bused to a distant school for their advanced studies program, but it was too intense for my 13-year old body. I attended a (much closer) high school, and fit in a bit better.

high school (1971-1975)
(x) principal
(x) 9- English 1; analytic geometry; sociology; Spanish
(x) 10- English 2
(x) 11- calculus
(x) 12- newspaper staff (I was both sports editor and photographer)

college (1975-1978)
(x) president
(x) freshman / sophomore: communications theory; accounting; advanced studies
(_) junior (blank)
(_) senior (blank)

grad school
(_)

a complete blank. Truly, I can't remember the names of any of them. There are a few muddy images of a face or two, but nothing substantive. I can only remember the names of 2 or 3 classmates. Hmm .. truly weird. I suppose this memory lapse would be disturbing, if I began to fixate on it ...

Oftentimes, I've found it useful to "background the process" (a Unix term) and eventually those brain cells will be located, and the result returned. I'll continue that attempt. Then I'll resort to The Yearbooks, assuming they haven't succumbed to parchment fatigue.

Pass the Bread

This week's must-read item:

Bill Moyers' Baccalaureate Address to Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) on 20 May 2006: Pass the Bread

Deep (unrelated) Thought: Aren't you happy that President Quagmire has turned things around? See New high: 81% say nation's moral values getting worse, by Michael Foust, Baptist Press (who quote a Gallup Poll on the issue). Looks like even the Baptists acknowledge that President Quagmire was a Colossal Mistake.

Grammar Lesson

I really should take the day off; it's Victoria Day in Canada. Here in the US, we acknowledge the holiday by saying "eh" at least 2 dozen times, eh?

Deep Thought: I wonder if English teachers in Canada diagram sentences ending with [eh].

I'm not sure how the Canucks acknowledge our similar holiday ("President's Day"). When I was growing up, we had the twin holidays of Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday, since combined into one to make way for Martin Luther King's birthday.

A few days ago, I read one of David Duke(of Louisiana KKK fame)'s opinions that America's two worst presidents were (in order) Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt (the former for freeing the slaves and the latter for getting us into World War II). In Duke's mind, the Japanese wouldn't have bombed Pearl Harbor if we hadn't embargoed them, and the Holocaust is a myth (Iran's president Ahmadinejad must be a Klansman, too).

Sometimes I read Duke's rants and find myself agreeing (when he says President Quagmire is among the worst presidents), then he opens his mouth with these distortions of history and I have to wonder whether he's growing his own crack down in Louisiana.

Anyway ... the faux-French in Québec don't acknowledge Her Majesty The Queen, so instead of Victoria Day, they're busy celebrating Fête des Patriotes (a/k/a the Lower Canada Rebellion). It's only a matter of time before they succeed in seceding, eh?.

spineless in Texas

I noticed an Associated Press article making the rounds:

The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines apologized for disrespecting President George W. Bush during a London concert in 2003. But now, she's taking it back.

"I don't feel that way anymore," she told Time magazine for its issue hitting newsstands Monday. "I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."

Oh, baby .. I think I'm in luv. It's not everyday you wander across a woman who's both intelligent* and has a giant set of cojones.

* not that it takes a mental giant - anymore - to discern that President Quagmire is a waste of space

Odds are the Fundamentalist Country Music fans (some of whom secretly adore the Dixie Chicks) will once again rise up from their double-wides and spew more hate. For me, well .. it's good to see someone stand up for their convictions, even if their fan base will sooner eat their own younguns than admit Their President is little more than a fool.

I read the item in the Fort Worth newspaper ("The Chicks are ticked") about how some CFRP members bullied radio stations into pulling their music off the air. That's all these pond scum inbreeds know how to do - bully others to get their way.

The fact that the radio stations caved in shows how spineless most of them are.

Hell, as much as I loathe country music, Natalie's stance makes me wanna run down to The Record Store and plunk down my last food stamps for their latest CD ("Taking the Long Way"). I wonder if it's available on anything but 8-track?

clean power, Dallas style

Is this what's considered clean power? The power monitor I bought earlier this month can not only capture data, but show it in a spreadsheet, or graph it in a wide variety of ways.

One of the things it can do is visualize how clean my power is (TXU ultimately supplies it). I suppose I should be looking for a flat line at the 125 volt line, but it dipped to 122 on the low end and nearly 128 on the high end, over a two-day span.

This measurement is from a television set that's not connected to a UPS, which presumably would tidy things up a bit.

Here's another view of the data, adding the "Minimum Volts" and "Maximum Volts" measurements, showing even deeper troughs and higher peaks. Maybe I should return to school for one of them Double-E degrees, so I can understand what I'm a-lookin' at?