Recently in Miscellanea Category

I haven't posted in a while. I have been very busy but nothing really momentous has happened.

1. I play the guitar now.
2. After a two year hiatus, Fred and Ethel, my bluebirds, are checking out the nest boxes in my yard. Keep your fingers crossed.
3. My older son, Andrew, graduates from University of Maryland at the end of May. He moves to Virginia later in the summer where he has a job.
4. My younger son, Danny, comes home from York College on May 15 after a great freshman year.

And a sad note. William W. Warner, author of Beautiful Swimmers, an exquisite book about the blue crab and the Chesapeake Bay, has died at the age of 88.

All of Maryland mourns.
K-

There's an old story about how you can boil a frog. You don't put him hot water right off the bat because he'll just hop out. Instead you put him in cold water, then heat the water with him in it. The change in temperature happens so slowly that he doesn't realize he's being cooked.

So it is with Google and me.

Google first grabbed me with its search engine with its nice clean look. Then Google added image search, then Google Earth, then Google Desktop, then Google Maps, then Google Toolbar, then Google Mail, then Google Talk, then Google Reader, then iGoogle, then Google Notebook, then Google Picasa. I checked out each one and found I could use them all.

On Tuesday I found this:

Google Calendar with Outlook synch.

My calendar available from anywhere automatically synched with my Outlook server every 2 hours.

I am the frog and Sergei Brin keeps turning up the heat.
K-

Yesterday I had some time to kill. I ended up looking at the MySpace and Facebook websites. I created an account on Facebook and managed to get my two sons to join as a couple of friends.

Now what?

I'm sorry, I'm just not getting Facebook. Other than posting pictures, I don't see the point. What happens next? Am I supposed to do something or just wait? I'm not seeing what all the excitement is about. At all.

Maybe it would help if I actually had friends.
K-

I was cable surfing last night. That's about all I ever do anymore when I watch TV. Only occasionally do I stop to watch a show for any length of time. Last night something on PBS grabbed my attention that kept me transfixed for an hour. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

It turns out there are some folks down in Oklahoma that have unique pastime. I never would have guessed people could - or would - do this.

Hand fishing. They call it "noodling" in the business.

The idea is simple: you hop into a river, then, using nothing but your bare hands, feel around inside hidden crevices and hollow logs looking for catfish. If you're lucky, a 60 lb. male flathead catfish guarding its nest will bite your outstretched fingers, whereupon you simply grab its lower jaw and haul it ashore.

Of course, snakes, snapping turtles, muskrats, and beavers could also be inside those underwater hang-outs.

Ouch.

I can't imagine what would possess someone to hand fish for catfish. I'm terrified to go near the drain at the bottom of a pool let alone blindly stick my arm up some underwater log hoping to get bit by whatever happens to be living there. It did strike me that the noodlers interviewed for the movie weren't exactly the brightest guys in the world. Most were self-described as fellows "who just like to use their hands." They were all earthy, unassuming, country lads, so to speak. As the Oklahoma DNR cop said on last night's show: "Not many people are willing to dive underwater and reach inside somewheres hoping to get bit!"

Risk aside, I can't believe any form of predation where you pull a nesting animal away from its brood is sustainable. It seems kind of irresponsible and mean to me even if it is just a catfish. Though maybe flathead catfish are super-abundant in Oklahoma.

Hand fishing is only legal in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
K-

I am sitting in my living room - new laptop squarely positioned in its namesake location - blogging over my recently-installed wireless network. I haven't been this happy since...

Well, this could be the happiest I've ever been.
K-

Faithful readers of this blog already know I’m a nerd beyond redemption. They like me in spite of it. So there should be no surprise that as a boy I was very interested in the subjects of knots and knot-tying. My interest went way beyond Boy Scouts. I had books - 3 or 4 at least - on the subject.

The Ashley Book of Knots given to me by my father is one of my prized possessions. I thumbed that book countless times. Monkey’s fists, sheep shanks, bowlines on a bight, hitches and splices, plaits and sennits all fascinated me. To this day, I can easily tie a couple dozen different knots right off the top of my head. Bowline? Piece of cake. Carrick bend? Easy as pie. Hangman’s noose? Since I was ten. Want to win friends and influence people? I can show you how to tie a sequence of evenly-spaced overhand knots simply by casting a bunch of underhand loops over your thumb and passing the running end of the rope back through it all.

It turns out there are whole branches of science and mathematics devoted to knots. Physicists at the University of California are studying random knot formation using nothing more than a plastic tumbling box and strings. They’ve learned, for example, that long strings tumbled for a long time create big, complex knots. Short strings tumbled for a short time create simpler knots. Stiff strings don’t knot much at all. Thanks to this research, they are on the verge of explaining why all those neatly arranged computer cables under my desk spontaneously knot up into this intractable rat’s nest without any external influence whatsoever. Good for them.

It must be exciting to be a grad student.
K-

The Maize and Blue played a great game in yesterday's "Capital One" Bowl defeating Florida 41 to 35. It was nice to see Lloyd Carr retire on a win. That my alma mater beat a team from Florida - a state I've never been able to take seriously - made the victory all that much sweeter.

I'm going to forgo objectivity here. There will be no sportsmanlike tributes to the vanquished, no game-well-played paean. Florida is the reigning national champion, has as quarterback the current Heisman Trophy winner, and got to play the game in their own backyard, the stadium packed with their fans. They still lost. Michigan whipped them. Henne had more than twice as many yards passing as did Tebow. I'm going to gloat for the next 365 days.

Michigan and its fans had to endure all sorts of crap after we lost to Appalachian State. Now it's our turn to revel in an upset victory. So my advice for any Florida fan?

Go sit down, loser.
K-

I ail. I ail. O, woe is me. I ail. Fell affliction, begone. Relieve the putrescent humour that afflicts my being. O, what a world, what a world.
K-