Latest From the Shop, More Turned Birdhouses

For various reasons I haven’t had much time in the woodshop this last month.

But I did find time to turn a few bowls and a number of birdhouses.

Not as many as I would have liked, but a few.

These are a little different from the last batch.  I got in a shipment of exotic woods that I felt would make unique and interesting accents. Also, I managed to procure the only three remaining bottles of friction polish in Alaska last month (a shellac/hard wax finish, that is extremely flammable in liquid form and therefore rarely shipped to Alaska because it has to come via ocean in a HAZMAT container, making it very expensive) and that was the perfect finish for some of the accent pieces. So I did some experimenting…and I’m quite happy with the results.  The birdhouses with the glossy finish are done in the friction polish, the rest are finished in orange or walnut oil and beeswax.

Note: Astute readers will notice that most of these houses do not, in fact, have perches.  That’s because a bunch of bird people yelled at me about the perches on my previous birdhouses (I was going to say they got their feathers ruffled, but that just seemed liked a cheap pun so I didn’t say it.  You’re welcome) – apparently the prevailing opinion is that wild birds in general don’t need perches, and that predator birds use the perches as a forward attack base to loot the nest (eating the eggs and/or young chicks).  So I left the perches off most of this batch. 

A number of these are for sale.  They’re marked along with price (Note: these are a bit more expensive than the last batch because of the time and effort involved in their creation and because of the cost of materials).  As always, if you’d like one, so note in the comments. Indicate which one you want by NUMBER. First to comment gets the piece.  I will make updates to the post indicating who gets what.  PayPal is the preferred method of payment. (Please do NOT attempt to transfer funds until you receive a confirmation email from me. Really).

Shipping and Handling is $10 for all pieces.

 

You can click on each picture to embiggen it.

 

#24  American Walnut and Rosewood. (Sold)

 

#25  American Walnut, Orange Agate, and Tigerwood (Sold)

 

#26 American Walnut, Rosewood and Orange Agate (Sold)

 

# 27  American Walnut, Orange Agate and Birch (Available $70)

 

#28 American Walnut, Alaskan Birch Heartwood, Orange Agate (Sold $70)

 

#29 American Walnut, Tulipwood, and Brazilwood (Sold $60)

 

#30 Alaskan Birch, Tigerwood, Cocobolo (Sold $60)

 

#31 Birdseye Maple, Brazilwood, Cocobolo (Available $70)

 

#32 Black Walnut (half sapwood, half heartwood), Brazilwood, Orange Agate (Available $60)

 

#33 American Red Oak, Alaskan Birch, Black Walnut (Available $60)

 

 

These last three, #34-#36 are larger and heavier than the previous pieces.  They are made from Black Locust and I am particularly happy with how these came out.  You can click on each picture for a high resolution enlargement, depending on your bandwidth they made take a minute to load.

 

#34 Black Locust, Tigerwood, Cocobolo (Sold $80)

 

#35 Black Locust, Tigerwood, Cocobolo (Available $80)

 

#36 Black Locust, Brazilian Rosewood (Available $80)

 

 

I am, of course, making more.

Politically Incorrect

 

"I believe what you have is a group of people centered in the Justice Department and the Attorney General, whose law firms all gave pro bono support to terrorism.  They start every day with a presumption that the rights of terrorists are more important than the lives of Americans."

So said Newt Gingrich to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News last night.

Yes, that’s right, New Gingrich, on national television, just accused Attorney General Eric Holder and the senior members of the DOJ of treason.

Treason, that’s what you call it when members of the government give aid and comfort to the enemy.

And that’s what Gingrich says the Department of Justice is doing, giving free and willing support to terrorism (actually, if the government gives aid and comfort to the enemy it would be state sponsored terrorism as defined by international agreement [or Support for Freedom Fighters if done by a Republican Administration through the CIA without the concurrence of Congress, but I digress] and not technically treason, but for the sake of simplicity and so as not to confuse the NeoCons in the room we’ll just call it treason. K?).

Gingrich dragged out the NeoCon hobbyhorse and saddled up in leather chaps and spurs:

"Today, because our elites fear politically incorrect honesty, they believe that it is better to harass the innocent, delay the harmless, and risk the lives of every American than to do the obvious, the effective, and the necessary."

You got to hand it to him, in one sentence he managed to invoke two of the conservatives’ biggest and most fearsome bogymen, the terrifying soul stealing liberal elites before which all right and true patriots must quail, and the inky black legion of political correctness which has been the cause of every terrorist attack, hijack, intelligence lack, economic downturn,  lost dog, lost election, and erectile dysfunction since the Revolution.

Gingrich didn’t say what he really meant, of course, he didn’t out and out use the word treason, but his implication was obvious and as clear as if he’d shouted it straight into Bill O’Reilly’s pasty face.  O’Reilly, of course, was delighted and swallowed Gingrich’s completely unsubstantiated and unsupported statements like a milksnake swallowing a corpulent shithouse rat, jaws extended, eyes bulging, muscles straining to gulp down a furry chittering load of pestilence bigger than its head.  FoxNews viewers virtually swooned and eagerly attacked the bones of this noxious feast when O’Reilly regurgitated them up moments later.

Treason.

Seriously.

You know, I laugh when the Birthers and the Truthers and the Teabaggers and the other goofy bastards make such claims.  It’s funny. It’s like watching a cat with a piece of tape stuck on its paw, confused cross-eyed expression, increasing panic, random Brownian movements, spastic gyrations, finally exhausted collapse…followed by a half hour of licking its own asshole.  Really, who doesn’t enjoy watching that?  I’m less amused when clueless idiots like Chuck Norris wade into the fray – why would anybody take Norris any more seriously than any other entertainer?  Sure he can karate chop a cement block with his forehead – and in fact might have done that just once too often – but politically Norris has less going on than that guy who used to play Gopher on the Love Boat.  I’m even less amused when demagogues like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh parrot this garbage, but in those cases my contempt is mostly confined to the same level of irritation I have for any obnoxious blowhard – seriously, both of these guys remind me of that loud drunk who decorates the end of every dive bar and who you’ll inevitably find later, face down in a congealed puddle of their own puke, on the dirty urine crusted floor of a men’s room stall. 

But it really chaps my ass when this kind of ridiculous bullshit comes from somebody who ought to know better.

I’m about fed up with this ignorant childish nonsense, this pandering to the lowest common denominator, the rabble rousing rhetoric.  It’s never enough to say, “I don’t agree with my opposition,” or “I would have done something different.” No, the Conservatives in this country can only seem to resort to this kind of ridiculous hyperbole – and hyperbole it is and nothing more.  No one, not even the most fervent Teabagger, actually believes in their heart of hearts that Eric Holder or Barack Obama get up every morning and eat their Fascist-O’s with a cup of low-fat milk from Marxist cows and a sprinkling of Cuban sugar, and puts on their Evil Overlord Helmet and gleefully cozies up to terrorists over the rights of the American people. 

Make no mistake, Newt Gingrich isn’t stupid.  He’s a damned intelligent guy actually. While a porch-light crazy moonbat such as Orly Taitz might actually believe the garbage that spills out of her mouth like the drool from a heavily medicated mental patient, Newt damned well knows that he is talking out of his big white ass.    He’s too damned intelligent not to. His nonsense is easily proved wrong, and he knows it. But he also knows that his knuckle dragging followers won’t ask.  Notice Gingrich offered up no proof of this treason (The only crime specifically defined by the Constitution, a death sentence in time of war, and one hell of an accusation for someone of Gingrich’s statue to level at a sitting President and the Attorney General).  No proof whatsoever.  He offered no explanation of how treating the Underwear Bomber within the letter of American law actually deprives Americans of their rights or makes America less safe or panders to the enemies of the United State in any way whatsoever. Or why adhering to our own law in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is treason, but why it wasn’t when the previous Conservative administration did exactly the same thing with Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber.  Or Joseph Padilla, the Dirty Bomb guy.  See, the people he was speaking to last night don’t need any such explanation and it would never occur to them to demand one because they are utterly incapable of understanding the inherent hypocrisy and are used to double think.  They’re already convinced Obama is a traitor, Gingrich is just telling them what they want to hear.

For a guy that talks about the greatness of America and who bangs the drum of Patriotism at every conservative parade, Gingrich’s words demonstrate an astounding lack of faith in that self same American system.  For a man who is a member of a political party that likes to wave little pamphlets with the Constitution printed inside, his words betray a profound lack of confidence in that very document, the ideals it embodies, and the nation it guides.

So what’s he up to?

He’s thinking about the Oval Office, of course…and how he’d look sitting in the big chair. 

See, Gingrich knows that in order to make a run at the White House in 2012 - and to challenge the frigid NeoCon Ice Queen of the North - he needs to rally the base.  And base is exactly the right word here, as in base element, base emotion, base impulse, and base intelligence.  The base in this case is a bunch of mouth breathing conspiracy nuts who dream about a return to the good old days when “American” meant white people who speak English and believe in Jesus, economic stimulus meant carpet bombing the crap out of funny looking people in a foreign land, and the HUAC was just good clean fun.  The base in this case wants to believe that liberals are stealing their country, that their neighbors are the enemy, their government is in league with terrorists, and their president is the literal antichrist. The base are those people who disrupted townhall meetings with childish antics and then complained bitterly that their voices weren’t heard. The base in this case are the same idiots who use ‘fascist’ and ‘socialist’ as modifiers for the same proper noun and yet consider themselves politically savvy and well informed on the issues.  The base in this case are those who think America can ignore her own laws when they become inconvenient and still be a beacon of liberty and justice and freedom – and anybody who says otherwise, well, we’ll kill those fuckers.  The base in this case are those who think respect is earned through force and that there is no problem that can’t be solved by blowing shit up, outlawing abortion, and a monster truck rally. 

I’ll tell you, if this kind of crap is what Newt means by “politically incorrect honesty” then he can keep it to himself.

The GOP deserves him.

---

 

It is entirely possible that Driftglass and I were separated at birth.   What he said.  Tip of the hat to Serving Patriot for the link.

Industrial Disease

 

Warning lights are flashing down at Quality Control
somebody threw a spanner and they threw him in the hole
there's rumors in the loading bay and anger in the town
somebody blew the whistle and the walls came down
there's a meeting in the boardroom they're trying to trace the smell
there's leaking in the washroom there's a stink in personnel
somewhere in the corridor someone was heard to sneeze
'goodness me could this be Industrial Disease?
The caretaker was crucified for sleeping at his post
refusing to be pacified, it's him they blame the most
the watchdog's got rabies the foreman's got fleas
and everyone's concerned about Industrial Disease
there's panic on the switchboard, tongues in knots
some come out in sympathy some come out in spots
some blame the management and some the employees
everybody knows it's the Industrial Disease
The work force is disgusted, downs tools and walks
innocence is injured, experience just talks
everyone seeks damages and everyone agrees
that these are 'classic symptoms of a monetary squeeze
on ITV and BBC they talk about the cuts
philosophy is useless theology is worse
history boils over there's an economics squeeze
sociologists invent words that mean 'Industrial Disease'
Doctor Parkinson declared 'I'm not surprised to see you here
you've got smokers cough from smoking, brewer's droop from drinking beer
I don't know how you came to get the Betty Davis knees
but worst of all young man you've got Industrial Disease'
he wrote me a prescription he said 'you are depressed
I'm glad you came to see me to get this off your chest
come back and see me later - next patient please
send in another victim of Industrial Disease'
I go down to Speaker's Corner I'm thunderstruck
they got free speech, tourists, police in trucks
two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong
there's a protest singer he's singing a protest song - he says
'they wanna have a war to keep their factories
they wanna have a war to keep us on our knees
they wanna have a war to stop us buying Japanese
they wanna have a war to stop Industrial Disease
they're pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind
they wanna sap your energy, incarcerate your mind
they give you Rule Brittania, gassy beer, page three
two weeks in Espana and Sunday striptease'
meanwhile the first Jesus says 'I'd cure it soon
abolish monday mornings and friday afternoons'
the other one's on a hunger strike he's dying by degrees
how come Jesus gets Industrial Disease?

- Dire Straits, Industrial Disease

 

Over on the “headquarters of the Conservative underground,” Human Events.com, Pat Buchanan has a bad case of the industrial disease.

It’s all doom and gloom in Buchanan’s America.

The country is headed downhill fast and there’s only hell waiting for us at the bottom of the slope.

Pat, he’s depressed, the last decade met his expectations pretty much exactly – and his expectations weren’t all that high. Here at the beginning of the new century’s second decade, Pat Buchanan is certain that the pessimists like himself have been proven right. 

There’s a lot to be depressed about, according to Pat:

- the United States began the century producing 32 percent of the world's gross domestic product. We ended the decade producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history, save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.

- The United States began the century with a budget surplus. We ended with a deficit of 10 percent of gross domestic product, which will be repeated in 2010. Where the economy was at full employment in 2000, 10 percent of the labor force is out of work today and another 7 percent is underemployed or has given up looking for a job.

- Between one-fourth and one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared in 10 years, the fruits of a free-trade ideology that has proven anything but free for this country. Our future is being outsourced -- to China.

- While the median income of American families was stagnant, the national debt doubled.

- The dollar lost half its value against the euro. Once the most self-sufficient republic in history, which produced 96 percent of all it consumed, the U.S.A. is almost as dependent on foreign nations today for manufactured goods, and the loans to pay for them, as we were in the early years of the republic.

The rest of his column is even more depressing. He spends a dozen paragraphs whining about the “snake oil” of the global economy, interdependence, and free trade.  He kvetches about the Fed and the economy and the deficit. He didn’t like Bush, and he damned sure doesn’t like Obama.  And he concludes by lamenting that we won’t be “presiding over the creation of a New World Order” and whether the decline of America is irreversible.

Enlightening, isn’t it? His phrasing, I mean.  New World Order. End Times. Judgment Day. This is the same old drumbeat of those rightwing religious conservatives who don’t get their way.  When the nation doesn’t conform to their version of the Divine Plan, well then we’re all doomed.

We’ve let Pat down. America let Pat down. The New World Order of Jesusland that he so badly wanted to preside over didn’t come about and now, of course, America is going straight to hell in a hand basket full of aborted fetuses and porn!  Oh noes! We’ve kicked God out of the schools and now the moral fabric of the country is coming unraveled!  The [Muslims, Liberals, Abortionists, Illegal Aliens, Minorities, Gays, Terrorists, Politically Correct, and etc] are to blame!  The commenters under Buchanan’s post are a pretty good example of the kind of “Americans” who buy into this depressing garbage.  They are convinced that America’s “slide into decline” is indeed irreversible – or reversible but prevented by The Jew. Yes, a fun extra benefit of reading Pat’s comment section is the fervent and pervasive anti-Semitism.  And, of course, they are all convinced that if only we’d overturn Roe v. Wade the course of our rapid decline would be immediately reversed - because then God would no longer have it in for us.

The worse things are, the happier people like Pat Buchanan are, convinced that the ills of the world are visited upon us by an angry God, a God who’d be happy and would therefore stop smiting America - if only we’d just listen to Pat.

Even if Pat and his followers are depressed over things that are not exactly true.

Take Buchanan’s statement “The United States began the century with a budget surplus” – referring to the famous budget surplus at the end of Clinton’s administration. Just one problem, there never was a budget surplus.  The Clinton administration reduced the public debt (i.e. the portion of the national debt owed to the American public) by about $230 billion in FY2000, but increased intergovernmental debt by about $248 billion the same year.  The overall national debt (public debt plus intergovernmental debt) increased to about $17 billion – a relatively small amount to be sure – and then jumped to $133Billion in the last year of his administration.  Clinton did pay down the public debt, but the national debt increased – and as long as you have a national debt, there is no surplus.  In order to pay down the public portion of the national debt, Clinton “borrowed” from Social Security – as he was required by law to do.  Understand, the Social Security administration had a surplus, driven mostly by the DotCom bubble, and by law is required to take the surpluses and buy US Government securities with it – which during the DotCon bubble allowed the Administration to pay down the public debt by using those securities.  But we still owed that money, we just moved it from one column of the ledger to another. There never was a surplus – it’s a myth (I’m not saying that not having a surplus is a good thing, only that if Buchanan is going to be depressed, he ought to be depressed about reality and not some fantasy).

“No nation in modern history, save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.” Really?  Spain, France, Great Britain? Germany? Japan?  Of course, that would depend entirely on how you define “modern history” I guess – and the method of decline, and the new heights they reaches following their respective recoveries.

Or take the generally accepted statement made by Buchanan and many of his supporters that things have never been this bad – a surprise, I’m sure, to those who managed to survive The Great Depression and the dark days of WWII.

A reoccurring theme, again by both Buchanan and his commenters, is corruption in Washington perpetuated by a greedy and incompetent Congress and aided and abetted by the White House.

Take earmarks, for example. A number of commenters are convinced that if we got rid of earmarks there’d be enough money to fix the national debt. Sorry, wrong. See, while you can argue the ethics of earmarks until the cows come home, the reality of the matter is that earmarks do not increase government spending – they are a percentage of the total amount of spending that has already been agreed to by Congress for a given year.  In order words, earmarks dictate how some of the money in the Federal budget will be spent, not the overall amount of money.

Cut wasteful spending! they cry next. Unfortunately this too is for the most part a white elephant.  Two thirds of federal spending is mandatory, mandated by law for things like Social Security and interest on the national debt.  The remaining third is discretionary spending, which this year will be about $1.4 trillion dollars. A bit over half of that will be spent on “defense.” Leaving roughly $650 billion to pay for education and transportation and so on.  Now, to be sure and for certain there is wasteful spending in there, but even if every bit of it was cut out it would only add up to about $20 billion.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where most of the budget’s discretionary funding goes.

Buchanan’s followers got into a pissing contest over who could be the most anti-Semitic (my personal favorite was the guy who, in a dazzling display of logic, defended Jews as not being part of the problem because “Hitler knocked off six million of them and it didn’t do him any good.” Yeah, go Batshit Crazy, go!).  But the bottom line being that if we’d only reduce or get rid of foreign aid we could save a bunch of money.  Wrong again. Total foreign aid, including aid to Israel to assist in the coming rapture and End Times, is about $20 billion – and that $20 billion buys us no end of strategic goodwill. $20 billion is a bargain for what we get in return.

But my favorite part of the entire article has to be Buchanan’s assertion that “Once the most self-sufficient republic in history, which produced 96 percent of all it consumed, the U.S.A. is almost as dependent on foreign nations today for manufactured goods, and the loans to pay for them, as we were in the early years of the republic.”  I’m not quite sure how to square what appears to be a call for a return to the pre-WWI policy of isolationism with Buchanan’s dream of a New World Order led by a born again United States, or how exactly Buchanan thinks a population of 300 million plus that are accustomed to the lifestyle we Americans are could possibly find the resources within its own boarders to maintain and support such a structure. 

You know, it’s pretty easy to climb on the Buchanan bandwagon. Not everything he says is wrong, pessimistic yes, entirely wrong no. We have lost jobs to Mexico and China, we have outsourced a large portion of our manufacturing capability overseas, and our energy requirements far exceed our domestic resources.

And, yes, we do face the worst economic crises since The Great Depression. 

A lot of people are unemployed and angry and depressed.

And people like Pat Buchanan are busy egging them on. No matter how bad it is, according to Pat, it is just going to keep get worse.

Bah.

See, that’s what chaps my ass, right there.  This nation has faced many, many challenges since its birth. It survived The Great Depression and emerged stronger and wiser and renewed.  And in fact, this nation has survived far worse things than The Great Depression, it survived civil war. 

Every couple of generations we face a crisis and the conservative pundits proclaim the end of the Republic. They decry the moral decay that led to our decline – and they beseech God to save us. And when they don’t receive instant validation from upon high, they give up and wait for the end - witness those conservatives who gave up and didn’t vote when pre-election polls favored Barack Obama. Rather than stay the course, they stayed home. Some faith, eh? It never ceases to amaze me how those who profess such great faith in God, have so little faith in their own nation. It never ceases to astound me how those who claim such great faith throw in the towel when things don’t go the way they think it ought to. It never ceases disgust me how those who claim moral superiority and superior patriotism are always so ready to give up on America when it comes time to pull together – if they can’t have it all their way, they just give up.  And it never ceases to piss me off when those who profess to lead this country, people such as Pat Buchanan, do nothing but pander to the divide and despair and depression when the chips are down.

Industrial disease indeed.

Standing Watch

ShopKat keeping a keen eye out for vermin

 

I don’t know why, but she likes to sit on top of those burl blanks, on the bottom rack of the wood cart. She’ll sit there for hours, absolutely alert, watching for any vole stupid enough to cross the perimeter.

 

This, of course, is my way of saying I spent the evening in the shop working on the lathe instead of writing. 

So sorry.

Things that Chap My Ass About 2010

[Transcript of an actual conversation I recently had. See if you can figure out which side is me]

I’ll send it over to you, what’s your fax number?

My what?

Fax number. I’ll fax it over to you.

Fax it over…  Dude, seriously, just email it.

No. I like to keep a copy.

Keep a copy? What are you using, a fucking typewriter?

I wish. Can’t get ribbons any more. Sigh. So I type it up in the word processor, then print it out. Then I fax it. That way I’ve got a copy for my records.

Nobody says word processor any more.  And paper records? Of routine correspondence?

Yes. Of course.

Dude, email does that for you automatically. Email it to me. Print out a copy for yourself, if you need paper.

It’s not the same.

How is it not the same?

It’s just not.

Did you get kicked in the head by a cow? Like when you were in the barn this morning doing the fucking milking?

Huh?

Yeah, back there in the 18th century where you live, did a cow step on your head? And isn’t all that paper dangerous, you know, with the candles you use for lighting?

Ha ha, seriously, what’s your Fax number?

_____________

 

For the love of free WiFi, folks, It’s 2010.

It’s time to let go of a few things.

It’s time to dump certain technologies into the dust bin of history along with buggy whips and steam powered Babbage engines.

Starting with fax machines. 

Seriously, Fax?  Fax?  Are we kidding here?  Great idea…in the 1990’s. Perfect back when The Two Corys needed to exchange script ideas and the addresses of their favorite coke dealers.  But nowadays, you what?  start out on a computer in digital format, convert it to analog by printing it out, convert it back to digital at stone age resolution, transmit it via POTS at speeds approximating those of an ancient Sumerian carrying cuneiform tablets on the back of a mule, convert it back to analog – and then if you’re really a technology horse you scan it back into a computer using some kind of OCR PDF technology. Here’s an idea, why don’t you copy the document to a stack of 5.25” floppies and send them via Snail Mail? You can listen to your Sinatra albums on 8-track while you wait for an answer.

And speaking of POTS, it’s about time to lose the 1, don’t you think?  You know, that damned annoying 1 that you used to have to dial if you wanted to make a long distance phone call from your official Ma Bell black rotary dial phone?  “We’re sorry, you must first dial a one before dialing this number” or “We’re sorry, it is not necessary to dial a one before dialing this number.” Arrgh! Make up your fucking mind.  What is the deal with this bullshit? I don’t have this crap with my cell phone, it just knows whether it needs a 1 or not. Sometimes I dial a 1, sometimes I don’t and it makes no difference at all.  How the hell is it possible that my little cell phone has more brains than the entire corporate infrastructure of AT&T?

I swear if it wasn’t for the fax machine, I’d just get rid of the landline altogether.

In fact I’m about sick and tired of paper. Period.

Take paper receipts.  Seriously folks, what in the hell?  People are always handing you a receipt, I get one with my coffee purchase in the morning, one with my gas, one with my donut, one with lunch, and the newspaper, and the stuff I buy at the hardware store on the way home. Christ, I’ve got pockets full of these bloody things.  I’m probably personally responsible for denuding entire swaths of South American rain forest in order to make the pulp to make the paper for the shear number of goddamned receipts that fill my pockets. And God help me I should lose one, because all the shop related ones need to be sent to the IRS at the end of the year.  And they just keep getting longer and longer, don’t they?  I got a coffee at Starbucks yesterday (Hey, if I’m going to destroy the rain forest, I might as well get it caramel flavored at $6 a cup, right?) and the receipt was longer than Glenn Beck’s liquor store shopping list. What the hell could possibly be on there? The complete text of War and Peace? Glenn Beck’s liquor store shopping list? I got a coffee, and my receipt was four feet long, probably a good thing I didn’t get a brownie too or Al Gore would have had to take a out hit on me.

And as long as we’re on the subject of paper, checks, I hate checks, no, strike that, I hate check writers.  I’ve said it before and got lambasted by certain Random people who shall remain nameless. But, damn, it’s 2010.  If we can’t get rid of checks, can we at least have a special line for check writers…with the rest of the Amish and people who still use paper phone books?

Camera film and recording tape are long gone and good riddance, replaced by memory chips. Lots and lots of memory chips. I’ve got a chip for my Nikon, I’ve a different chip for my pocket camera, I’ve yet another chip for my phone, and another one for for my MP3 player and when I count them up I find I’ve got SD and SDHC and miniSD and ProSD and MemorySticks. I’ve got fast chips and slow chips. Hell, I’ve got fish and chips. I’ve got ten different kind of memory chips. It’s 2010, can we please settle on a fucking standard?  And don’t get me started on the fifty different kinds of USB cables, I’m still trying to find the right kind to plug my BetaMax into my HD-DVD recorder.

English Units of Measure. Hell even the English don’t use English Units of Measure anymore. Everybody else on the planet has managed to move on into the 21st Century. Not us though, we’re still measuring shit using units based on the number of barleycorns there are in a handbreadth or the number of stoneweight in a keg. For crying out loud, even the dimmest goatherd in those countries where they speak the clickclick language and worship rocks can manage the metric system, what the hell does that say about us?  I realize we tried to make the switch way back in the 1970’s and it was an abysmal failure – I remember the whole disastrous thing. But see we were still listening to AM radio back then, which is about one step, technology wise, above smoke signals.  Seriously, show of hands, how many of you have listened to AM Radio in the last year? Last ten years?  Now that it’s the 21st Century, it’s time to shitcan both English Units of Measure and Amplitude Modulation. Of course, if you do listen to AM Radio, you hear the conspiracy nuts who’ll tell you that making Americans switch to that commie metric system is just one more step towards the New World Order and how posting road signs in metric just makes it easier for the invading socialist armies.  I’d like to leave the conspiracy nuts back in the last century while we’re at it.

Tin cans (and yes I know they’re not made out of tin anymore). Cans? We might as well be using clay jars.  I get a can of green beans or corn out of the pantry, I’ve got to cut it open with a tool and dump the contents into a microwave safe dish so I can heat it up. Why the hell don’t the beans come in a microwavable container in the first damned place?

How about we get the hell rid of incandescent light bulbs too?  It’s ten years into the new millennium and we’re still lighting our wigwams with the burning light of a glowing wire in a glass bulb powered by burning coal. We might as well be using rendered whale fat and a wick. 

 

I could go on, you know I could, but I’ve got to take the dogsled into the trading post and write a check for a new dial-up modem.

What technology do you think should be retired?

(You can fax your comments to me and I’ll send you a receipt)

Dogs Sniff Out Underwear Bombs!

The title of this post was lifted directly from a CNN headline this morning.

Dogs sniff out underwear bombs.

Yes, yes they do.

It’s pretty much instinctual with dogs, the sniffing out of underwear bombs, they don’t need much in the way of training for that. Take my dog for example. This morning when the TV flashed Dick Cheney’s pale corpse-like visage onto my screen along with the comment, “Former VP blasts Obama on Terrorism” my dog began to bark madly. I didn’t need a dog whisperer to tell me she was shouting, “Underwear bomb! Underwear bomb!” when the big turd blossom started to speak.

Cheney was lambasting the President for what the former VP says is a poor response to the failed Christmas day terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Cheney wants to know “why doesn’t he [Obama] want to admit we’re at war?” Cheney goes on to say that the President is trying to pretend “that we’re not at war.”

Why doesn’t Obama know we’re at war?

Why doesn’t Obama know we’re at war?

Well, it’s probably because, unlike Dick Cheney, Barack Obama has no military experience. Cheney is an expert on war, he damned well knows one when he sees one. Seriously here folks, you have to give the man his due, you don’t spend the entire Vietnam Conflict working an endless string of draft deferments and not learn something about war – and how to avoid actually serving in one yourself. Dick is also pretty good at hiding in an undisclosed hole in the ground while other people’s kids march off to die in a foreign land and he knows the proper presidential response time to an attempted act of terrorism – after all it only took his adminstration six days to return from vacation and address the nation after Richard “Shoe Bomber” Reid pulled the same half-assed stunt during Bush’s watch. So when Cheney broadsides the President for continuing his vacation and taking two days to address the nation regarding Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempted bombing, well, let’s just saying the man knows about underwear bombs.

Or as my dog says, “If it smell like ass, it probably is ass.”

George W. Bush has remained, for the most part, mercifully quiet. But members of his former administation are all waving torches and pitchforks. Karl Rove was on FOXNews yesterday (really, where else would he be? FOX is like the wormy safety of graveyard dirt for that bloodless parasite, he goes there to avoid sunlight), saying much the same thing as Cheney – almost like the two were cribbing off the same cheatsheet. Both conservatives acuse the White House of downplaying terrorism.

And they are not alone.

Good God Fearin’ Representive Peter Hoekstra of Michigan said, “The threat to the United States is real. I think this administration has downplayed it. They need to recognize it, identify it." Hoekstra then proceeded to recognize and identify his biggest threat - a lack of funds in his reelection warchest - and he then used the failed terrorist plot as an opportunity to get out a fundraising email to supporters.

Senator Jim DeMint, a patriot if there ever was one, said, “The president has downplayed terrorism since he took office. He doesn’t use the word anymore.” DeMint, who uses the word “terrorism” in every single sentence – sometimes twice – has a point, if liberals would only use the word more often the country would be safe. Why oh why will liberals not take the easy steps?

GOP members of Congress formed committees to sharply question how the suspected terrorist could have gotten on a plane in the first place – after all the man was black, that should have raised red flags immediately. The GOP also questioned why Obama wasn’t doing more to secure foreign airports in other countries run by people who aren’t actually American citizens. And while Cheney’s comments have drawn sharp criticism from the Left, the GOP praised him - and others like Sarah Palin - for having the courage to speak up.

You know, if only Cheney had run for President, if only President Cheney and his plucky sidekick Sarahcuda were in the White House right now, then we’d see a real proper Patriotic response to this terrorist threat:

Step 1: First, ridicule France.

Step 2: Activate a Cold War Bunker. From 3000 feet deep in the Virginia bedrock, assure the American people that you stand with us and you’re thinking of our children and how we all share the risks of terrorism equally. Wish Americans good luck and offer to pray for them. Remind them to report anybody who appears to have a suspicious crotch to the nearest secret police law enforcement agency – especially if they appear to be lighting their balls on fire. In fact, just to be safe, people should probably report the sighting of any testicle, flaming or otherwise. You just can’t be too careful.

Step 3: Blame gay marriage for the rise in Islamic extremism (flaming balls, hello, do I have to spell it out?).

Step 4: Intelligence points to the terrorist being Nigerian. AH HA! Fucking Nigeria! That’s where yellow cake uranium comes from! Somebody is going to get carpet bombed into the far side of a Planet of the Apes movie – go wake up Moses, er, I mean Charlton Heston (Yes, yes, I know he’s dead, trust me, it won’t make any difference).

Step 5: Order the TSA to ban the wearing of underwear on all international flights and require all black men to remove their testicles and place them on the belt during airport security screenings. One hour before landing, all testicles will have to be secured in the overhead storage bins.  Unusual or Oversized testicles will need to be transported in your checked baggage.

Step 6: Blame Clinton for derailing research into crotch sniffing technology.

Step 7: Sacrifice a CIA agent and invoke the sacred name of Ronald Reagan. Announce new “faith-based” anti-terrorism measures which will put a “Sky Minister” on random flights to help passengers pray in the event of a terrorist hijacking.

Step 8: Rally Americans with stimulating speeches about Patriotism (note the capital “P,” you’re either with us or against us, Pal) and the 2nd Amendment – if that doesn’t work, give them a tax rebate.

Step 9: Ensure that no Faith-based program anti-terrorism funds are used for abortion.

Step 10: Invade Iceland.


Don’t worry about that last step, the war will be over in a month. Guaranteed.

And the Icelanders will cheer us in the streets of Reykjavik.

Stop Your Sniveling

 

OK, I take pity on you for the previous ABBA post.

 

Here, wash your brain out with this:

 

Into the Fire by Thirteen Senses, a small band from Cornwall, England. 

That song is probably their best known tune here in the States, though Thirteen Senses has had a number of Top 40 hits on the British Charts. Into The Fire has made the soundtracks of a number of TV shows, including The 4400 and if you watched the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy last night you heard it in the final scene.

You’re welcome.

On Second Thought…

 

Some of you questioned me on my impression of the 70’s today.

I came across this when writing yesterday’s retrospective and being the giver that you know I am, I thought I’d share it with you.

Because it is just too damned awesome to keep to myself.

Yes, oh yes it is.

Don’t ever question me on the 70’s again, because I was there folks, and it wasn’t pretty.

And because there is more where this came from. Much more.

Don’t make me use it, because I will.

Second Fiddle

I’m going to be honest with you folks.

You’re not getting anything tonight.

See, I bought myself a Christmas present – a Nikon D5000.   My pal Beastly introduced me to photography many years ago in Navy technical school. Beastly was professionally trained and is a hell of photographer, and he taught me everything I know about taking pictures and over the years I’ve ended up with many of his cameras as he has moved up in technology.  I have his old Pentax wetfilm 35mm cameras and his Sony D770. But somehow he never would part with his professional equipment, i.e. the Nikons. 

Though Beastly’s castoffs have served me well over the years, I’ve always lusted after a truly professional Nikon.

And now I finally own one, and in fact have managed to get a leg up on Beastly – who tonight on the phone referred to me as, and I quote, “The King of Suck.” 

This gives me no small measure of satisfaction (yes, yes, I am a small petty man, tell me something I don’t know).

I’ve wanted this very camera for roughly 25 years now. I didn’t know that it was this particular camera – which actually didn’t exist until recently - but this camera is exactly what I’ve wanted for over two decades. 

And now that I’m actually holding it in my hands, I’m giddy. Like a schoolgirl. Yes, I am.

This is one of the most amazing and beautiful machines I’ve ever seen, let alone owned, let alone handled.  The handful of pictures I’ve taken so far are stunning in their detail.  Here, have a look:

 

 

 

Both pictures were taken with the exact same lighting setup and from the same distance under identical conditions. Both bird houses are made from similar materials and finishes. The picture on the left is from my old Sony D770, the picture on the right is from the Nikon D5000 – with the Nikon set to “Normal” jpeg compression mode, which is the low end of its capability.   You can click on both pictures to enlarge them to their original sizes and resolutions, but even here the difference is immediately obvious.

The Nikon’s capabilities are multitude and the manual is the size of middling sized town’s phonebook (Question: in the future when the phonebooks, dictionaries, and other such large tomes have become entirely electronic, what the hell will we compare things to? “The electronic manual download was like downloading the entire Wikipedia!" But I digress). 

So, I intend to spend the rest of my evening reading the manual and fooling with this amazing camera. 

Sometime this weekend when I’ve had sufficient time to fiddle, I’ll post a review.

I’ll try to keep the gloating to a minimum.

I suspect I will be unsuccessful.

Stonekettle Station Looks Back At The Last Decade(s)

It seems that as the first decade of the shiny and futuristic 21st Century draws to a close, we should stop flitting about in our jetpacks for a moment and take a look back – just so we don’t make the same stupid mistakes again.

Now, the first decade I remember was the 1960’s:

I was raised in a fairly straight-laced, conservative 1960’s household. My parents were not, by any stretch of the imagination, hippies. I do think they were a whole lot more liberal back then than they are now, this was twenty years before Reagan and all Conservatives were a hell of a lot further left than they are now. But, they did generally support the war in Southeast Asia and they voted for Nixon. We drove a variety of station wagons and wouldn’t have been caught dead in a VW microbus. We listened to Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell and Hank Williams Sr. We didn’t listen to Rock and Roll and the only hippy folk music we ever heard was the John Denver Christmas Special. We watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and the Wonderful World of Disney while eating dinner on TV trays in the living room on Sunday nights – which was sometimes actual TV dinners, but was usually open-faced sandwich melts on leftover hamburger buns with potato chips. My brother and I had brush cuts and so did my dad, my mom had some kind of bouffant thing going on like a pan of Jiffy Pop Popcorn glued to her head. I don’t think anything in our house was tie-dyed or had a peace symbol on it. Things elsewhere in other far out households might have been groovy, but not in our house - in our house things were A-OK and non-hemp derived. During the 1960’s terrorists were called freedom fighters, they came from Ireland and they were invited to the US where they gave interviews in Boston pubs and lectures at Notre Dame.

The first new decade I remember was the 1970’s:

1970. Man, that seemed so futuristic to say. 1970. Wow (or, as we used to say, I’m Hip). 1970 seemed so, I don’t know, different. New. Weird. I remember watching the ball drop on TV and the screen flashing “Live Via Satellite.” Hell yes, in the 1970’s we got color TV - from outer space. Unfortunately, we also got something else from outer space. See, in 1970, as I’m sure you all know from your interactive direct neural interface Internet history websites, astronauts returned from the moon and brought with them an alien disease that caused everybody everywhere in the world to go totally colorblind.

A horrifying side effect of this disease, besides the mixing of paisley and plaid I mean, was the advent of strange unnatural colors such as Harvest Gold and “Avocado.” Also, something called “elephant bells” replaced our blue jeans, we all looked like we had hoop skirts tied to our knees. Suddenly our house had shag carpeting, it just sort of grew overnight like mutant grass covering the good wholesome American linoleum like hippies filling the sidewalk outside a VD clinic and just about as hygienic – it probably spawned from spores deposited in crumbs from Space Sticks and fueled by Tang. My parents became, if anything, more conservative, but mom did buy a tin of something called carob power, supposedly a new age replacement for cocoa. That revolting hippy shit lasted for nearly ten years and defined the 70’s for me – no wonder health nuts always look so damned miserable. Terrorists in the 70’s didn’t blow up planes, they hijacked them, usually to Cuba – which is odd when you consider that most people were trying to get the fuck out of Cuba. Girls’ hair got bigger, a lot bigger the closer we moved towards the futuristic 80’s (or as we would say decades later in the shiny 21^st century, woman became embiggened purveyors of emboldened fashionism). A side effect of the alien moon space virus was that it killed all the barbers, and as a result we men had to let our hair grow long and get it “shaped” by stylists, and stylists of course didn’t actually cut hair – they feathered it, and then sprayed it with some kind of shellac that hardened into a bulletproof shell similar to Darth Vadar’s helmet. People laugh at the funny haircuts sported by the cast of Star Wars, but we all looked like that in the 70’s. That wasn’t an act, that was Mark Hamill’s real hair. Of course, nobody died from head wounds during that decade, though a number of eyes were put out by teenagers trying to get to first base. About halfway through the 70’s the alien moon space virus mutated into a worldwide pandemic and, combined with new and powerful recreational drugs, became one of the most horrifying diseases ever recorded in human history: Disco. Think I’m kidding? How then do you explain this? Those of us who survived built up disco antibodies which nowadays cause us to cramp uncontrollably at the mere sight of John Travolta and suffer a lingering and persistent cough when in the presence of polyester. The other day I accidently heard an Olivia Newton John song on my XM Satellite Internet Hyperspace Radio Modulator and broke out in hives the size of a 1970’s TV remote control clicker. Fortunately the next song was ABBA’s Does Your Mother Know? and my reflexive involuntary projectile vomiting shorted out the radio before my throat closed up and I drove off the road into a bridge abutment – on purpose.

Suddenly it was the 1980’s:

Things stopped being hip in the 1980’s and became Radical. Terrorists lived in Beirut, we were supposed to be living on the moon. Everybody knew it, but, of course, with the alien moon space virus up there the danger was just too great. People were starting to be able to see color again and they were waking up to the polychromatic horror of the previous decade. Avocado green porcelain bathroom fixtures overflowed the landfills in the North and front yards in the South, and God only knows what would happen if we were exposed a second time – people might have voted a washed up Hollywood movie star into the White House or something. Just say no to that. Weird skinny people with weird skinny ties and weird names like Frankie Goes to Hollywood took over the music industry and did their absolute damnedest to make us nostalgic for Disco, and it was obvious that the alien space moon virus had caused irreparable mental damage in a certain percentage of the population – well that and ten years of boiling hot air from the blow-dryers baking their brains every morning. Our TV stopped coming from outer space and started coming from out of a cable. I was living in Europe and Scandinavia during most of the 80’s and frankly I just sort of bypassed most of that decade in the United States, but I’ve seen the pictures and can’t say that I feel like I missed anything.

Then the 1990’s were upon us:

In the 90’s terrorists worked for the CIA and despite meeting the love of my life and the birth of my son I shall always loathe this decade with a deep and abiding hatred. I blame this entirely on Bill Clinton, who’s antics inspired my mother to use the word “blowjob” correctly in a sentence. Out loud. In my presence. I will never forgive the 1990’s for that, and have basically blocked out the entire decade like the missing time after an alien abduction. Let us never mention this again.

And finally we arrived here in the future, the bright and shiny 21^st Century:

I’m sitting here watching TV coming to me via WiFi in a window on my tablet, there’s a talking head blathering on about how great the last ten years have been. Woot! And it hits me that the first tenth of this Brave New Century is nearly over and seriously folks, what the hell do we call it? The Null Decade? 00? O.o? The Big OO’s? The OhOh’s? The Ought Oughts? What the hell are we supposed to do with that? After nearly a decade of George W. Bush maybe we should call it the Uh Oh Decade. OO looks like the eyes on a Middle Eastern terrorist who tried to bring down a jetliner by lighting his balls on fire – and seriously what the fuck is the deal with that guy? He could have gotten his balls blown off in Detroit for free, without being arrested. And speaking of surprised expressions, maybe we should call this the Botox decade. During the 00’s it somehow became fashionable to believe disease can be prevented by flushing your colon out with herbal tea and an extract made from Jenny McCarthy’s watery brain tissue in order to remove “toxins” from your “system.” Garlic and Vinegar apparently now cure everything from cancer to cockeyes because such JuJu “alternative” medicine is “organic” and “natural,” unlike the “poisons” distributed by Big Pharma. However, these same chowderheads will choke down unregulated “herbal” supplements made in some ex-hippy’s bathtub out of grass clippings and dried cow dung, they’ll swill designer “electrolyte enhanced” water that purports to come from some mountain stream and in reality is bottled in that same dirty hippy’s bathtub after being filtered through a gym sock leftover from the 70’s, while having botulism toxin injected directly into their faces. OO describes their unblinking masklike stare perfectly Of course having rat poison pumped into your face is only the latest thing in America’s quest for eternal youth. Why, here in the future, there are places were you can get the fat sucked out of your butt checks and injected directly into your lips. Hell, if you’ve got enough money you can get a famous person’s ass blubber injected into your lips – they sure didn’t see that coming back there in the 60’s did they? We don’t have colonies on the moon, or jet packs, or immortality here in the future, but we’ve got designer ass fat. Makes you proud, doesn’t it? During the OO’s Americans spent over a hundred trillion dollars on fad diets and exercise and personal trainers and dubious health products – and yet we are still the laziest bastards in the world. We are so damned lazy, in fact, that we need a robot to hand us a paper towel. Back there in the 60’s the futurists predicted that in the new century robots would take over all the mundane labor and we human would become great big giant heads sitting on top of little atrophied bodies. We’d spend all day thinking with our huge fucking brains. Close, it’s big giant stomachs under little atrophied heads that spend all day playing video games, but hey they got the robot part right. Half the world squats in the middle of the muddy street to shit, but walk into a public restroom here in the US and the toilets flush by themselves, facets turn on automatically, the soap squirter has more processing power than a NASA Mars lander (seriously, the soap dispenser doesn’t routinely crash into other planets), and the towel dispenser automatically calculates the square footage of napkin surface necessary to dry your hands – it’s like taking a dump at Bill Gates’ house. What’s next, the automatic ass wiper? Oh, wait, the future is now! Our TV’s have become wireless and get 10,000 channels of internet, which is pretty damned cool indeed until you realize that most people use it to watch reruns of That 70’s Show – a simpler time when men wiped their own damned asses.

By hand.

Manually.

Up hill both ways.

In the snow.

And they liked it.

---

They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Jim hasn’t forgotten the past, he just remembers it wrong on purpose - that way if he has to repeat it, at least it’ll be more fun. Right now he’s remembering that he had a six foot tall supermodel nymphomaniac for a girlfriend in high school, then he intends to forget that…

WTF Happened to My Weekend?

The universe hates me.

It does.

See, including today, I’ve had four days off over this Christmas weekend.

I figured I’d at least get to spend one day in the shop, and maybe a day writing (just between you and me, I figured I really wouldn’t get much writing done because the family is home too and they’re nothing but constant interruptions. Always demanding attention of some kind, feed us we’re hungry, pay attention to us we’re lonely, let us come inside it’s cold out, blah blah).  Anyway, I thought I’d at least get to spend some time in the shop.

But, see the universe, it hates me.

A couple weeks back we took my wife’s tablet into the geeks at Best Buy to have the power connector fixed.  The machine slid off the couch (one of the damned cats may have been involved) and landed on the power cord connector, damaging both the plug and the socket.  When we bought the machine we’d gotten the Best Buy Black Tie extended warranty, which covers incidental damage. So even though the machine still worked, if you wiggled the power connector, we decided to take it in and have it fixed.

Now we’ve used the Black Tie service at Best Buy several times for my tablet and had excellent results – so we were expecting more of the same.

But see, as I mentioned, the universe hates me.

When we took my tablet in to have the screen repaired, the whole thing (including shipping to the repair center in California and back) took only five days.  Since damaged power ports are a common problem with laptops (apparently a lot of people have cats), we figured it wouldn’t take too long to get this one fixed.  I backed up Becky’s machine to the main server and then sanitized it of all personal information and we took it in to the new store on Muldoon in Anchorage.  No problem, the geeks pulled up our warranty and checked in the machine.  They told us it could take up to three weeks, which we knew, but didn’t expect based on our previous experience. 

Yes, yes, I should have known better - because as I’ve may have may have mentioned, the universe hates me.

See, I can live without my laptop.  I don’t like it, but I can always use the big machine in the den for most of what I need to do (and in fact, I’m writing on that machine right now).  But my wife is massively inconvenienced without her tablet.  She does everything on it, from the family finances to email to chatting with her family online.  She could do some of it on the big machine, but we don’t have some of the programs she uses on this machine and we didn’t feel like paying a couple hundred dollars for additional copies when we were supposed to have the laptop back from Best Buy fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the universe hates me and enjoys nothing better than screwing with me.

The computer didn’t come back…

…and didn’t come back…

and didn’t fucking come back.

We checked online and with the store.

They’re working on it, we were told.

It needed a new motherboard and power supply.  Yep, I agreed. The damaged power connector is soldered to the motherboard. Cheaper and easier to replace the Mobo than to pay somebody to do board work – nobody fixes circuit boards anymore, they just swap them out nowadays. It’s cheaper, faster, and much more reliable.

Usually.

After two weeks we got a notice.  It’s fixed.  Yay!  It’s on its way back. Yay!

Days went by.

We checked with the store.

Oops.

It wasn’t fixed. The parts didn’t come in and had to be reordered.  So the repair center cancelled the first order and issued a new one, which the computer system interpreted as a completed repair and sent us the notice that the machine was fixed.

So another week went by.

We checked with the store again.

Finally they told us that it was fixed for sure and on its way back to Alaska. Yay (note the lack of exclamation point this time).

I got a call Christmas Eve, it’s here, come get it.  Great, but well, crap. Because that meant a trip to Anchorage instead of doing what I expected to be doing that day. Nothing for it though, I turned the shop off, we packed up and headed to Anchorage.  The computer looked good.  They booted it up at the customer service desk. It worked fine, though the power supply fan did seem to be running a bit hard.  They apologized for taking so long, we said hey whatever as long as it’s fixed and Merry Christmas to you.

As soon as we got home my son and I headed out to the shop to wrap some presents and my wife, as you might imagine, booted up her computer.  I intended to come in and transfer her data back onto the machine as soon as I was done with the Christmas preparations.

Remember that part where the universe hates me?

I came into the house to find my wife cursing and angry.

This was a unpleasant turn of events, because when my wife is unhappy, nobody is going to be happy. And no matter whose fault the situation is, it’s always somehow my fault (I’m kidding of course, but I like my wife to be happy and somehow I always feel responsible when my wife is unhappy even if it isn’t my fault).

The newly repaired computer had shut down and wouldn’t reboot.

Odd.

I picked it up…and damned near dropped it on the floor from the unexpected heat.  Christ, the thing was burning up. No wonder it shut down.

I let it cool down and tried booting it.  It booted to Vista, but the fans kicked on right away and were blowing air just shy of plasma temperatures.  It ran for maybe twenty minutes, getting hotter and hotter and finally shut down.

It’s probably unnecessary to mention that the temperature of Becky’s ire was also increasing moment by moment, unfortunately for me, my wife does not have an emergency overheat shutdown safety. 

We called the Best Buy Black Tie Geek Squad service line and got some “expert” in some place where they worship cows and allow them to wonder around in the street (Florida, actually).  I explained my ire, my wife’s ire, the situation, and the symptoms (I didn’t give him my background though, which as many of you know is in, among other things, advanced computer science, engineering, and information systems) and opined that somebody in the repair center had forgotten to hook up the CPU cooler.   Nonsense, says he.  Those tablets always run hot, let’s try a few things – and he proceeded to demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of basic computer systems, laptops, troubleshooting, and any kind of knowledge related to electronics whatsoever. It being Christmas Eve, I assumed that the Service Center didn’t have the A-team on and the guy I was talking to was so low on the totem pole that he couldn’t get out of working on a holiday.  He had me disable automatic updates, he had me adjust the display properties, he had me check internet connectivity – all the while I’m pointing out that the machine is blowing boiling hot air and the power supply fan is running flat out in overdrive and the bottom of the machine is about to melt through the desktop. Nonsense, says he, those machines always run hot.  No, says I, it never did that before and in fact this particular machine (HP TouchSmart tx2) has a reputation for running cool and not melting your balls off when you’ve got it in your lap, it’s one of the advertised features. Look, says I, it’s going to shut down any second, it’s too hot. No no no, says he, it’s software. It does that when it’s trying to update the operating system, go ahead and reboot.  WTF did he just say?  And blip! the machines shuts down and will not restart and in fact is making clicking and pinging noises like a cooling oven. I put the phone next to it, so he can hear it.  OK, he ventures, you might have a heating issue.

No fucking shit, Sherlock, I could bake a potato in the DVD drive bay.

Obviously there is no way around this, we were headed back to Best Buy – but since this took place on Christmas Eve, well after the store closed, we were obviously going to be making that trip on Saturday.  Going to Anchorage is an all day adventure for us, so much for getting a Saturday in the shop.

So I got up early on Saturday, went downstairs, made coffee, and sat down in front of the computer figuring to get an hour of writing time in.  Five minutes later my wife shows up. Uh, says I, what are you doing up so early?  I was informed at that point we’d be leaving for Anchorage early and to get ready.  So, no writing, blogging, or surfing for me. Also no shower, but it didn’t seem wise to argue at that point.

Once at Best Buy we demanded to speak to the customer service manager.

She wasn’t in yet, so we end up with the store manager.

He turned out to be a damned nice chap who knew nothing about computers, but promised to help us out just as soon as his repair manager arrived – which he expected in about fifteen minutes.  Fine, says we, we’ll wait.  Fifteen minutes later the repair department manager arrived, we explained the situation to her, she looked up the repair ticket and I asked her if they could open the machine there and check to see if it was something as simple as the service technician’s failure to hook up a heat sink or a fan connector.  Normally they don’t open laptops in the store service centers, but under the circumstances they agreed to check for us.  They didn’t find anything obviously wrong, so they put the machine back together and booted it up. 

It ran fine.

Just wait, I said.

Twenty minutes later, it overheated and shut down.

Hmmm, that’s not right they said and agreed with my assessment that either the motherboard or the power supply was faulty.

The service manager offered us a number of fixes, none of which were really acceptable and ultimately we all agreed that the only real solution was to send the machine back to the service center – and the service manager promised to expedite the portion of the process she had control over (1 day shipping to CA and back, etc).  Sigh. Well, it wasn’t her fault and she was bending over backwards to help us, so there wasn’t any point in yelling at her. She went in the back to start the paperwork and we resigned ourselves to being without the computer for another couple of weeks.

She came back with the store manager.

He apologized for our trouble and said, look normally the Black Tie process is to replace the machine only after four trips to the repair center, but given the situation and our policy of making the customer happy I will replace the machine with an equivalent right now if that’s what you want.  Well, hell, you can’t ask for better than that. 

Unfortunately they didn’t have an HP tablet. 

In fact they didn’t have a tablet machine of any kind.

My wife has to have a tablet, and she is really really addicted to the advanced HP TouchSmart. 

The service manager told us to hang on a minute, she looked online and found that the other Anchorage store had twenty six Windows 7 HP TouchSmart Tablets.  She wrote us up a full replacement ticket, including the extended warranty, called the store and reserved us a unit, and asked if there was anything else she could do to make us happy.  No, that would just about do it (I thought about asking them to pay for my gas to drive to the other store and maybe wash my windshield but I thought that might be pushing my luck).

We drove across town and picked the new machine up with no trouble whatsoever, it was waiting for us at customer service.

Once home, I started the process of installing my wife’s software, integrating the machine into our network, and transferring her data back from the server.  I fully expected this to be a long and painful process. It wasn’t. Well, it was a long process because there was a lot of data to transfer and because installation of Microsoft Office and a couple other big software packages is long process, but it went better than I’ve ever experienced, Windows 7 is orders of magnitude improved over Windows Vista – especially in boot-up speed.  This makes a huge difference when you’re installing a shitload of new software, because everything wants you to do a reboot to finish up the installation process.  Windows 7 networking is massively improved, which isn’t saying much actually since two cans and a piece of string would be an improvement over Vista. The OS is leaner and faster and much more responsive – which again really isn’t a triumph when compared to Vista.  I love what they’ve done with the Aero interface and somewhat less thrilled with some of the weirdness on the taskbar and the fact that the goobers in Redmond rename the documents folder with every single new version of Windows – it’s now called “the library.”

Windows 7 is probably the best thing Microsoft has come out with in ten years and now that I’ve played around with it, I’ll probably upgrade my other Vista machines to it ASAP. The XP machines are going to stay exactly as they are.

Overall, I think I like Windows 7.

Yes, I know, but my expectations aren’t very high when it comes to Microsoft.

So, that pretty much ate up yesterday.

And today I had a number of other jobs that my wife has been after me to do and I could no longer put off.

And here it is, weekend over, and somehow in four days off I never got one minute to myself.

Damned universe.

 

Of course, there’s always next weekend.

Merry Christmas

The kid let us sleep in this morning.

Best gift ever.

It was an accident, of course. He stayed up late and then overslept.

The gifts have now been opened. The kid ended up happy with an amp for his electric guitar. He saved up and bought the ax himself, a Gibson Les Paul, but couldn't afford the amp. So we got him that and a large LCD TV/Monitor for his room (really, how do you expect a kid to vaporize aliens on a small screen?). My wife is happy with a new camera, jewelery, and an addition to her Christmas village. I got tools which I am quite pleased with (especially since they followed my explicit directions to the letter). There were gift cards and other cool things from the grandparents. My wife filled our stockings with exotic chocolates and strange little treats, as she does every year. We exchanged the traditional gifts of socks and underwear (longjohns, actually, a gift we Alaskan are always grateful to receive). Hell, I even got a poster in the mail yesterday, Princess Leia in her bikini, which made me laugh hysterically - it's a sort of inside joke, having to do with a running gag within the UCF that was set off several months ago by some spectacularly unfunny events on a blog site that shall not be named - and strangely enough when the posters arrived Star Wars was playing on the living room TV, how's that for a bit of Christmas coincidence?

Now the house smells of bacon and coffee, and my wife is making scrambled eggs.

After breakfast I'll put on the ham - and by "put on" I don't mean I wear it on my head like a hat, I mean I put it in the oven with sliced apples and cherries and brown sugar. Mmmmm ham.

Then, it'll be phone call time, if we can manage to get a line out of Alaska today and there's enough bandwidth to support video calling. We'll see.

Christmas day here at Stonekettle Station is well underway and pretty darn good.

How about you, how's your Christmas working out? Get anything good?

A Little Ookymmass Cheer

Ask Stonekettle Station about the Fiction in Science Fiction

Today’s extra crispy search phrase:

What is the location of the stone hanging mountains in Avatar? Australia?

Yep.

See, because they’re not floating mountains, they’re dangling - from the bottom of the earth.

 

 

Some of us, it seems, will not be advancing with the others to the next grade.

Aiiiiighh!!

 
Jesus Jumping Christ!

This just may be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen…

 

…and I’ve been in the same room with George W. Bush.

 

This painting was commissioned by Michael Jackson and painted by David Nordahl.

Clicking on the picture (makes you a sick damn bastard and) will take you to the original Telegraph article, where you can find even more disturbing pictures of the King of Fruitcakes.  You might want to drink a couple shots of Jesus Juice first.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the garage bleaching my brain.

Attention Frothy Obama Hating People

Stumbled into your “blog.”  Can’t understand how a “veteran” could be a big dumb lib. I know alot of vets and none of them are “socialists.” Makes me wonder if maybe you might be lying about your military service, chief? Because I “cannot” understand how a supposed vet like you could support the fascist traitor Obama and his socialist dumbocrats.  But, yeah, you keep fighting the “good fight” there, you hear?

 

Couple things:

1) By “Stumbled into your blog” do you mean using the StumbleUpon service for Firefox or Chrome?  Because if so I hope you gave me a big thumbs up! Thanks!

 

2) Quote marks are for quoting, not for emphasis.  The rule applies to both liberals and conservatives.  See the example in the previous paragraph, also note the use of italics in this paragraph to denote emphasis.  Perhaps English is not your first language?  If so, I certainly hope you are a lawful guest in this country and not some nasty stinky illegal alien here to eat our good Christian babies and steal our jobs.

 

3) I don’t think either the words “fascist” or “socialist” mean what you think they mean (also, note the proper use of quote marks).  Allow me to explain (don’t worry, I’ll use really small words):

Let’s start in the middle, where you have Centrists, moving left you have moderate liberals, moving a little more left you have Liberals (note the big “L”), moving further left you have Socialists, and moving even further left left left, you end up with Communists.

Note the lack of Fascists.

See fascism is on the other side of the aisle. That would be your side, just in case you’re as obtuse as you sound (that means “stupid” and “ignorant”).

Again, let’s start in the middle, only this time we’ll go to the right. Centrist, Progressive, moderate conservative, Conservative, batshit crazy Neo-Conservative, Fascist. 

Sort of explains why the Nazis (fascists) hated the Soviets (Commies) and vice versa, doesn’t it?

Labeling Obama a Fascist is the same as calling him an ultra conservative.

Here’s a handy diagram to help you keep it straight:

 

4) Print this out and show your friends in the militia.

 

5) Lose my email address and please, fuck right off. Thanks.

 

 

Seriously, folks, the words, they’re really not interchangeable.