I don't have time for this

But if you do, Google's US puzzle championship is coming up. Sign up by tomorrow, the 29th. I will try the warm up puzzles though...

But is it Fusion?

Asian Fusion cuisine - what is it? A careful blending of flavors and ingredients, an east meets west at the dining table? Or, a menu with selections from various asian cultures?

I vote for the former. The later should be called - a buffet. Fusion is dangerously close to becoming the new Thai restaurant.

In any case, pair with Washington Sauvignon Blancs, Alsatian Gewurtz and try an Aussie Pinotage.

Dust

I'll update the home renovation pictures sometime this week because we're well into it now. There's a fine layer of dust on everything, including my pupils. We just keep repeating - it's an adventure.

We've lived in this house since '89. Moved in, in the early part of the summer before the big quake. After that long, you begin to navigate the same paths, working around piles of stuff you should have gotten rid of ages ago. It's been interesting revisiting all the crap. The donation pile runneth over.

This weekend we emptied out the living room, family room and kitchen. All the other rooms are getting the heavy drop cloth treatment, as a couple of contractors remove the 'cottage cheese' ceilings. This is a major contributor to our new friend, dust.

We've essentially moved into the sunroom. Sometime this week, I'll cut out a hunk of old kitchen counter cabinet and move that in there with the refrigerator. It's gratifying to know we can divorce ourselves from The Stuff and live a studio a-p-t existence again.

Outside, no new work on the koi lake, but this is turning into a big deal. I think I'll need to join the Koi Club.

Inna Gonna Gotta Serve Somebody

Driving tonight, I had KPFA dialed in. It's pledge week, but tonight is/was also their tribute to ol Zimmy. Guess he's turned 62. They played a couple of tracks off a new CD of gospel-singers covering Dylan songs, called "Gotta Serve Somebody." Man, it was great to hear one Shirley Caesar grab the title song and shake it on down. Another great listen was hearing Dylan's rewrite and performance of "Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking," with Mavis Staples.

It's been a while since I talked about rekkids. I think I'll talk about rekkids - tomorrow. Cause tonight, I'll be staying here with you. Happy birthday, Bobby!

Looking for a reason to call your senator?

How about to weigh in with their office on opposing Carolyn Kuhl's nomination to the federal appeals court, covering California? She's quite a work of art. Here's a summary of her track record. Yes, the link is at a site opposed to her nomination, but it is public record. Maybe she's done some good things too, but hey, I don't like the bad stuff and that's enough for me.

Our own Diane Feinstein hasn't weighed in on whether she will fillibuster against Kuhl's nomination. What is up with that?? Senator Feinstein's office numbers are:

Washington, DC (202) 224-3841
San Francisco (415) 393-0707
Los Angeles (310) 914-7300
San Diego (619) 231-9712
Fresno (559) 485-7430

More on the Kuhl filibuster, at MoveON

Just one of those days

The house is a disaster. The world is worse. Me, I normally suck, so nothing new on that front. But my dogs are my total down-dog brothers. Even though they're officially bitches. I luvs me pups! Soon, we'll have a big ol' muddy pond, nay, a lake!, in the backyard and me and the pooches are gonna be gettin' wet wet wet. One good thing about landslides and the slow rebuilding - you get things like new-found springs working for ya. Hot fun in the summertime!

Woof up...for the pups.

(oh and the wife of my life rocks forever)

The Game of Venery/Collective Nouns

You know - 'a pride of lions,' and 'unkindness of ravens.'
I've finally picked up James Lipton's book of interesting collective nouns, An Exaltation of Larks. Too much fun - it makes me want to coin a few myself. But before I offer up any of my own Inadequacy of Suggestions, here's some he compiled:

A Deck of Sailors
A Bridge of Admirals

A Mustering of Storks
A Party of Jays

A Horde of Misers
A Stall of Procrastinators

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

In Dec of 2002, the DOD and the National Nuclear Security Administration of the DOE released a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). This NPR added 5 countries to the potential nuclear targets list. In addition to Russia and China, the US now officially includes North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lybia on the hit list.

In more good news, this year's DOE budget requested funding for a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP). The House passed it, but it didn't make it through the Senate. A joint congressional committee is supposed to revisit the impasse sometime around July.

Isn't it all too wonderful? The terrorists are still effective. The administration is happy to simultaneously manage multiple 'conventional' wars. Now, we can look forward to the resumption of nuclear weapons development. Better still, it's the development of more "usuable" nukes. If there's one thing we know about US testing, it begats other countries resuming their own testing programs. It just keeps getting better and better, eh?

What's the punchline?

oh, I can think of at least one....
Cows at Marin County ranch run off cliff

& we're back

Spent a long weekend away visiting pater-in-law, and the rest of that side of the family, in Quincy, MA. He's doing good. Showing off his scars from the bypass surgery and slowly getting back to his daily routine.

Nice visit, but holy cow, when did I become a grouchy traveler? The culprit/the cause? Crazy ubiquitous cell-phone usage, that's what. Loud pointless yabbering, simply to kill time, while sitting near me, in the waiting area. Not one overheard conversation was of the busy on-the-go executive deal maker variety. Nor one critical call to relatives waiting in intensive care. Just that wassssup? stuff. Doofus, doofus, doofus.

Bring back the crying babies!

By the way, smoking was also just banned in Boston restaurants. Quincy MA is treating this as an opportunity to lure the disgruntled, the smelly. Hey ho way to go oh-Quin-cy.

(...having now alienated you the smoking, cell-phone using, good people of Quincy....)

J.A.

Those old photos got me thinking about some of the old stories that go along with them. There's one picture, of a guy waving a rebel flag in our high school parking lot. Let's call him "J.A.," cause I have no idea whatever happened to him.

J.A. was our HS token racist.

He lived across the street from a HS girl friend of mine, otherwise I doubt our paths would have ever crossed at school. While the rest of us were all peace,love,dove, ol J.A. went towards the other extreme. An early Goth and a Reb. That was a potent mix: a dracula/death fetish *and* an anti-hippie/anti-black schtick going on.

I actually found him kind of interesting. We talked a lot, after I bumped into him, over near girlfriendo's side door one day. A bright kid, well read and had smarts. But he was also seriously neglected and it definitely drove him to be anti-social. Most people probably considered him a borderline psychopath. There was something not right in his house, but he never let me in on the specifics. An only child, with parents that, from what I could see, didn't exist in his life.

He once admitted to me, after I had sworn to secrecy, that all his posing was just a game. Poor kid - he really was just trying to get some attention. He once gave me and that girlfriend (whom he had never spoken to, in all the years living across the street from her) a pair of silver goblets. As an 'anniversary' gift. I didn't even know we had been dating for 6 months, but John did! It was a little creepy - he kept calling them our 'sacrifical chalices' - but also touching too.

I lost track of him after he finally went too far. He brought a handgun to school. He had publically announced (by passing out flyers in the parking lot!) that he was going to gun down this big ol hippie, named Ralph West, the following morning. The Law had a day's notice to be prepared. Not a cry for help? Nah, of course not. They sent him to JD school for the rest of HS. Later, he headed south, to Florida. Curiosity makes me wonder what ever happened to him...but that also kills cats, I hear.

Part of being John Malkovich...

...apparently includes being a huge tool.

I just heard Terry Gross interview him on Fresh Air regarding his new movie, The Dancer Upstairs. In one scene, they needed to stage a city-wide blackout. They went to Porto, Portugal & got the mayor to agree to shutting off the power. Hmmm, wonder how they did that. Two takes. Terry asked him how he felt about inconveniencing that many people. Listen to his response.

WHAT A TOOL!

Golden Years, gold, wopwopwop

That post about books I read decades ago must have stimulated some nostalgia gland...cause...I'm starting to put together another blog. It will mostly be about old neighborhood stories. Old, as in, when I was a kid; growing up in Pearl River, NY. Yes, that old. The 60s.

I started by scanning a few old photos. The older the photo, the better it communicates little stories - even when you don't know the subject. I like how that works.

And yes, looking at them has made me feel ancient! Endangered, perhaps existing only as part of the fossil record.

Sci-fi, the early years

Borrowing a posting from an email list I'm on. I'm nothing, if not redundant (or is that legitimate recycling?). Someone asked what science fiction we read, as kids.

---

I never really had much of a sci-fi phase, as a young kid. Accent on the 'fi' part. Nature and history writings, explorers; that was me. Mummies, Kon-Tiki, Aztecs, J. Fenimore Cooper type things.

My parents still keep an egyptian mummy book I bought on a field-trip to the NY Mus of Nat History. I must have really made a huge stink about wanting that book - maybe I should tell them it's ok to throw it away now.

When I was around 9 or 10, I religiously bought each paperback volume of the Alfred Hitchcock mystery short story series. I'm positive I got them from our scholastic book club. And of course, the big bopper - Edgar A. Poe - I could never get enough of him. Alexander Dumas too,
of all people. Not sci-fi, but proto-fantasy, maybe.

Comics. We weren't actively forbidden to buy them, but it was frowned upon. But if I did scrap up the coin, I'd usually buy a Sgt Rock, over a Superman. "Combat" was a very popular TV show.

A childhood pal, Ted (here is the story of a boy named Ted), was the serious comic-book fan. Mostly Marvel comics. One day, he gave me a huge pile of his old comics and we brought them down to the clubhouse (which we actually called 'the solarium.' That's how the parents
referred to it. Ah, unclear-on-the-concept visions of naked
naturists...). For a day, the usual suspects got together and we had a marathon catch-up read.

By the 6th grade, I was voraciously reading about the early astronomers and how-to-build-telescopes books. Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo - I guess their lives scratched whatever vestigal sci-fi itch I had at the time.

In my teens, I did finally read a bunch of Phillip K. Dick. But at the time, he was also something of a counter-culture hero, at least in my world. I think that influenced 'how' I read his stories. The exploration of drug awareness manifested itself in so many ways! Tolkien was similar - the counter-culture part, that is. His novels
impressed me as much for their morality life-lessons, as the adventures. In the time of LBJ and Nixon, you got your morality where you could find it.

"Lamb - The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal"

I finally finished this Christopher Moore book. I think it took a while because I kept being distracted to go on the internet & look up historical details.

The book is fictional humor. But there's something about the Greatest Story Ever Told that still makes me want to 'know' what really happened. I've tried reading John Crossman's "Historical Jesus" - more than once. I am OK knowing I will never finish that one.

It's interesting to me there isn't much of a record of Jesus' life between infancy and his 30s. And what does exist is truly spotty. Like what they sometimes refer to as the Gnostic Gospels. Some pretty weird stuff there. One, in particular, the Infancy Gospel Of Thomas speaks of one mighty smiteful little bugger. Some poor kid, apparently hyperactive, makes the mistake (the sin!) of bumping into The Son Of God on the playground. The spaz is immediately smitten; smote well and rightly, dead.

Later Jesus even blinds the poor kid's parents.

The Infancy Gospel goes on to also relate some of the good miracles Lil Jesus performed. But it's disingenuous - they're basically the same miracles he is credited with as a man (raising the dead, creating *huge* amounts of food) - only now from the perspective of what a boy would be dealing with. Fun reading.

The epilogue of Moore's book closes out with a pretty good joke. If you're not going to read the book, I can spill the punchline.

House Renovation

Things are apparently too hectic for me to keep the blog entries plopping out. So let's see, what's up?

The house remodel is moving on, mostly on the outdoor front.

We're putting in an interesting exterior door, between the new kitchen and the new sunroom. A Nana bifold door. Also here's some pics on the small 'slipping acres' vineyard and the new raparian pond. This will be our 3rd outdoor water feature (one in the front, two in the lower backyard). The vineyard is only 17 vines small - if the vine growing gods allow, that might make about 2 cases of cabernet sauvignon per year. Or at least some excellent deer food.

We're also finishing off the wineshed.

Take a look at the frontyard landscaping too. If you have an idea what color we should paint the house and trim, I'm all ears.