October 2004 Archives

Usually I like living in Maryland. Like this fall during one of the most hotly contested presidential races in a while, do you know how many political ads I've seen touting one candidate or the other? None. Not a one. Maryland isn't a blip on the candidate radar screens. The residents of Maryland have been spared all that message approval and hot air.

But it's very frustrating during college football season. Michigan football games are almost never shown around here. Today is the Michigan-Michigan State game. And this great match-up is no where to be found on my TV. Delaware-Navy? Got it. Maryland-Florida State? Of course. Howard University-Norfolk State? I can watch that. But Michigan-Michigan State?

Not a chance.
K-

OK, I have an opportunity and I want to make the most of it. Tomorrow - Halloween - I have taking place a coincidence of events almost as rare as the simultaneous occurrence of the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series during a lunar eclipse in an election year.

I find myself alone on Halloween evening.

How can this be you ask? Well it turns out my wife will be in Williamsburg attending some sort of teacher conference, my older son will be attending a Green Day concert at the Patriot Center, and my younger son will be doing things Halloween over at a friends house.

So should I:
a. Go out to eat by myself avoiding all the trick-or-treaters.
b. Stay at home and answer the door.
c. Stay at home and not answer the door.

I'm leaning toward (a) or (c). I don't really like eating alone and I certainly never thought that I'd become one of "those" people but there are so many dad-blasted kids in my neighborhood that answering the door 500 times is something akin to work. Thoughts?

Maybe I'll just go see Green Day.
K-

Tonight here in beautiful Howard County, Maryland, life imitates art. At least I think it's an imitation. D-'s high school football team is playing its arch-nemesis under the lights. And D-, my trumpet-playing son, performs at halftime with his marching unit under the lights.

The addition of the stadium lights at our high school football field was a huge deal this year. First the county was putting them up, then there was no money so they cancelled them, then the county found almost all the money, then the rest was found, then they encountered big rock deposits while installing the stanchions so they needed more money...

You get the idea.

Until this year, no high school in the county had stadium lights at their football field. So all football games - and all halftime shows - occurred on Saturday afternoons. I kind of liked it this way. I didn't have to rush home from work on a trafficy Friday night, I had an excuse for not performing Saturday afternoon house and garden chores, and I didn't have to worry about being up late.

But during the summer there was this huge groundswell of public support for stadium lights at the fields. I'm not sure why it occurred. Maybe it was the movie. Football teams wanted them, football coaches wanted them, cheerleaders wanted them, school administrators wanted them, marching bands wanted them, band directors wanted them, seems like everyone wanted them but me.

So now the lights are up and ready to go. And to make matters more interesting tonight both football teams are undefeated. Undefeated! Two undefeated football teams are playing here under the lights. See what I mean? Life imitates art.

The next thing you know, I might actually start caring about high school football.

Saturday Update
The game turned out to be very exciting. The good guys got out to a 17-3 lead but strong 4th quarter play by the arch-nemesis and our tiring defense enabled them to win 19-17.
K-

I knew more election humor would come my way. View at your own risk especially if you're a Bush fan:

There's the new Florida Voting Machine
There's this soccer mom explaining why she's not voting for W.
And this take on 2004's scariest Halloween costumes from Wonkette is really, really bad.

Suffice it to say I laughed out loud at all of them.
K-

I spent my boyhood in Massachusetts. I arrived there ready to start fourth grade and only left as I was about to begin 11th when my father was transferred to Detroit. The Bay State is where I climbed trees, enjoyed backyard football, joined Boy Scouts, and did all manner of Sawyeresque activities.

It was also where I came to like baseball.

Needless to say the Red Sox were my boyhood favorites. I saw my first major league ball games at Fenway Park. I still remember that night game in 1966 when we sat out in right field not a D-cell battery's throw away from the Yankee's Roger Maris. He caught a few pop-ups but mostly he taunted us Sox fans mercilessly. Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Lonborg, Rico Petrocelli, George "Boomer" Scott, and Tony Conigliaro were some of my youthful favorites. My sadness knew no bounds in October 1967 when my beloved Red Sox lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals. That Bob Gibson pitched and won three complete games that series was a Herculean feat lost on me at the time.

And even though I left Massachusetts 34 years ago to become, among other things, a very loyal Baltimore Orioles fan, I still harbor a soft spot in my heart for the Red Sox.

So it was with no small amount of joy and excitement that I followed this year's ALCS and World Series. Of course watching the final game last night was complicated by the fact that a very nifty total lunar eclipse was ongoing during the game. There I sat watching the game in my family room becoming ever more hopeful as the game came to its ninth-inning climax and then during the commercials I zipped out to the deck with binoculars in hand to watch the eclipse. After the game I snapped a quick photo of the moon fully in Earth's shadow.

Seems the Man-in-the-Moon is part of Red Sox Nation.
K-

I sit working at my computer. Outside, the shrill beep-beep-beep of some monster machine captures my attention pulling me away from the manpower estimates I'm wrestling with.

This huge cherry picker is outside my window. A guy is in the basket maneuvering it down the road. The man in the basket can drive the cherry picker while he's suspended in the air 25 feet above the ground. He wears a harness that's attached to the cherry picker's basket although were the machine to tip over the harness would do him no good.

He's rolling down the street alongside my building looking at the windows up on the the fourth floor. At least I assume he's looking at the windows and not looking in them. I wonder what the people up in those offices think as a man in a hardhat peers at their window? Such people don't expect passers-by on the outside outside of their offices.

I'm on the ground floor. I see the base of the cherry picker slowly roll past my office window. If my window opened, I could easily reach out to touch the machine's tires. The man at the controls is somewhere high above me doing whatever men in cherry pickers do. Once the base rolls by I can no longer see anything so I return to my work even though I know the man is right above me.

Windows are such a distraction.
K-

There's more to laugh at on the web. First Ann Coulter is victim of a run-by pie-ing and now this:

Live Girls.

I can't wait to see what's next.
K-

I'm a Sunday school leader for a group of middle-schoolers. It's a program the Episcopal Church calls Rite 13. I do it for several reasons although mostly it's because I enjoy working with young people. It's certainly not because I feel I'm particularly erudite about things religious or theological.

Yesterday we were talking about Moses and his Godly encounter with the burning bush. I was thrashing around trying hard to sustain discussion about why God chose Moses to lead the Israelites and how he felt might have felt about that when a girl raised her hand to ask a question. She hadn't said much during the discussion so I called on her.

"Are you voting for Kerry or Bush in the election?"

BAM! A point blank question that I really couldn't duck. There were no other adults in the room and she was looking right at me. No way could I pretend I hadn't heard her or think that she was asking someone else. I hesitated with my answer a bit because I sensed her opinion of me hinged on how I answered. Answer it correctly and I'd go up in her estimation. Answer it wrong and she would instantly consign me to the ash heap of knuckleheaded Sunday school teachers.

"Honesty's worked before," I thought. "Let's try it again."

So I said to her, "I'm voting for Kerry. Not because I feel he's especially right for the job but because there's simply no way I can reward Bush's disastrous record as president with another term in office."

As soon as I answered I sensed her opinion of me moved up.

And did my answer unleash some discussion! In the blink of an eye, discussion lurched from a languishing talk about a 3300 year-old prophet to a lively 21st Century political discussion. To my surprise, not only this girl but my entire class of sixth and seventh graders were staunch Kerry supporters. And for real reasons too: "Bush has no idea what he's doing in Iraq. Poor people aren't getting the help they need. Not everyone has a doctor." I would never have guessed kids that young were paying that much attention to the election.

Of course there was some comic relief. Several of the girls felt that both Kerry and Bush wore wigs. One boy said that his father no longer permits Heinz ketchup in their house. Another opined that the president looks like "Curious George".

I was impressed. I live in an area that over the last 25 years has moved from predominantly Democratic to fairly conservative. I would have expected the political opinions of middle-schoolers - if they had any at all - to mirror those of their parents. That they all favored Kerry showed what must be independent thinking and not just rote repetition of what they're hearing at home.

Maybe there's hope.
K-

Ordinarily I don't condone violence but I saw this and had to make an exception.
nbc4i.com - News - Men Nail Conservative Ann Coulter With Pies

I doubt she could get nailed any other way.
K-

I've also installed MT-Blacklist V2.01B. It has some nifty features (like you access it from the MT main menu) but it also has some quirks that I expect to be fixed (like you have to delete spam comments one-at-a-time). But it had gotten to the point that I was denying hundreds of comments a day; I'm hoping that with the up-to-date versions of MT and MT-Blacklist, things will be a little more bulletproof.
K-

A- returns from school today. This is not to say he hasn't been home before now. It's just that this time he's here for the entire weekend. The Mighty Sound of Maryland isn't performing and it's his old high school's homecoming weekend.

He got home early in the afternoon eager to see old friends and antagonize his brother. I'm not sure how much we'll see him this weekend but he'll have an opportunity to have his laundry done and be otherwise doted upon by his mother.

Should be a good weekend.
K-

I've upgraded to Movable Type V3.121. So far so good.
K-

On the way into work today, I noticed several crows mobbing some poor raptor as it flew overhead. Normally, crows will harass buteos such as red-shouldered or red-tailed hawks. Today I was lucky, this bird appeared very dark and the larger size and flat wing span indicated that the crows were hassling something more exciting. As I passed underneath the activity overhead - simultaneously craning my neck to see the bird and drive down Rt. 29 at 70 MPH - I saw the white head and tail of a mature bald eagle.

Not a bad way to start the day.
K-

At my job recently, I've been going over some old Fortran written by another company. The code is part of a model that simulates the flow of water around a submarine. For the most part, the code is easy to understand. But some parts are cryptic. Even the people that wrote the code feel that way. I found this comment embedded in one of the subroutines:

C**********
C Run Time Code
C**********

C ----- Taken from sub.f, this code calculates angular quantities
C using a method now unknown

At least they commented.
K-

I'm back from Michigan. I returned home last Thursday but a weekend trip and other things prevented me from blogging till now.

My mother is rehabbing in a nursing home near her house. She receives physical and occupational therapy for a weakened left side. She is also receiving radiation treatments for the next several weeks to kill any lingering cancer cells and to prevent another occurrence. Between the two it will be amazing if she has any energy left for the daily routine. We'll see what happens.

I appreciated all your kind thoughts and cheers.
K-