***Dave | ***Dave Does the Blog

Food, glorious food!

Doyce is waxing lyrical over the Claim Jumper over on his blog. You can check out the cake he’s talking about (or one like it) at the restaurant link. I’ve…

Doyce is waxing lyrical over the Claim Jumper over on his blog. You can check out the cake he’s talking about (or one like it) at the restaurant link.

I’ve heard commentary that one reason Americans are getting so … well, round (or well-rounded) is because what we “expect” as a serving size keeps increasing. Really, the cost of the raw material for most restaurants is a fraction of what the real estate/capital costs/labor costs are, so it’s an easy “differentiator” for restaurants to simply feed you more food than you can possibly eat. They charge you a goodly amount, but you feel like you’ve gotten a bargain-fargain, and come back more for later. And all for a relatively trivial added cost.

Check out the “serving size” on most packaged/canned food. You look at it and say, “Hah! Are you kidding? That’s just an advertising ploy so that they can say the can has seven serving in it, when each serving is just a tiny, unsatisfying morsel.”

Try it again. Those serving sizes are set by the Feds. They’re set to a standard for each type of food, so that consumers can compare easily. And they’re based on serving size standards of four or five decades ago.

Yup. Once upon a time people ate only six or seven chips from a Doritos bag, not the whole bag all on their lonesome. That was the Depression Generation, folks — eat light, be thrifty, save for a rainy day.

I can’t say I mind having lived through an era of prolonged prosperity (even at its deepest recessions after WWII, the US has been doing better and living better than any previous generation, in aggregate). Heck, my own well-rounded shape shows how much I don’t mind it. But there have been “soft” costs, none softer than those love handles.

The Name’s the Thing

So we are referred to (in some quarters) as the Consortium. Or, more properly, our (Margie and my) place is so referred to. Interesting. The reason, I am told, has…

So we are referred to (in some quarters) as the Consortium. Or, more properly, our (Margie and my) place is so referred to.

Interesting.

The reason, I am told, has to do with our nomenclature. I’m a Hill, Margie’s a Kleerup. Margie kept her maiden name for two reasons that I’m aware of. First, should she publish, there are a lot fewer Kleerups than Hills out there, making journal lookups and the like a lot easier. Second, because there are a lot fewer Kleerups than Hills out there (I can count the number in the US on the fingers of both hands, I think), so it’s a Proud Name That Should Be Retained. (Which is why we decided that if Katherine was a boy, she’d be a Kleerup.)

I’ll add another one to both of those very good (and supported by me) reasons: because I’m not hung up on Margie becoming a Hill. Because we are we, and her having her own name is just fine by me (as would be her taking my name — or, if she had felt that strongly about it, my taking her name). And I’d known her fifteen years as Margie Kleerup (let alone how long she’d known herself to be that), and it would have been weird any other way.

Margie will go by “Margie Hill” or “Mrs. Hill” socially, if that’s how things get typed up on the seating chart or name tags. And I have been known to answer to Mr. Kleerup (usually by those who know Margie and assume she’s taken my name).

Indeed, I had a “David Kleerup” Costco card for a while. Margie’s folks have had a business membership with Costco for quite some time (since it was Price Club) as Kleerup Enterprises. When I married into the business, so to speak, I got a Costco card … that said, for reasons taht escape me, David Kleerup. It had my picture, of course, and I had no problem with it. It was even kind of funny.

Then I got the Checkout Clerk from Hell. No, that’s too harsh. But think of the stereotypical teenage male checkout clerk, completely with breaking voice, from The Simpsons. That was this guy. All was well until I tried to pay my Costco bill with my Discover card (back when they took Discover). He looked at the credit card. He looked at the Costco card. His eyes got wide.

I’m sure he was onto breaking open some incredible credit card fraud ring. Because it was clear that there was Something Funny Going On Here.

“Uh, these names don’t match.”

“Hmmm?” Dave remembers the Costco card name. “Oh. That’s my wife’s last name.”

“It’s not your name?”

“No, but it’s my wife’s. They issued it to me with her name by mistake.”

“She doesn’t have the same last name?” This seemed to be a novel, probably heretical, concept.

“No, she goes by Kleerup.”

“But this credit card says ‘Hill.'”

“Yes.” Dave starts speaking more slowly so that the clerk can understand him. “My name is Dave Hill. My wife’s name is Margie Kleerup. I got this Costco card through her family’s business, Kleerup Enterprises, and they put the wrong last name on.”

“That’s not the same last name as on the credit card.”

“Noooooo, it’s not. But that’s me. See, there’s my picture on the Costco card. And –” Rummaging. “Here’s my driver’s license. See — my real last name, plus my picture.”

“But they don’t match.”

Dave looks around for Margie, who had gone to the drink stand to get me a soda. “Margie?”

Margie comes over. Margie shows her ID — her driver’s license (“See, same home address”), her Costco card, even some Kleerup Enterprises business cards.

“I’m going to have to call the manager.”

Meanwhile, of course the line is backed up, impatient customers are wondering who to lynch first, and, dammit, we always go to Costco as the last stop on our errands (since we usually end up with perishables), so I was tired and hungry, and not just a bit embarrassed.

The manager, fortunately, was able to hold two or more concepts in his head at once, and so understood the problem. I was asked to get a new Costco card, with my real name, and all was right with the world.

I’m sure that checker, though, was disappointed.

At any rate, I was willing to be Dave Kleerup as need be (and still am).

And, frankly, given the hassle I went through with that, I can’t imagine pressuring Margie to change her name.

For those folks who have decided otherwise — more power to you. Names have magic, and how we conjure with them is up to us, thank you. Don’t fence me in, and I’ll not ring you with chain link either. ‘Nuff said.

The only other complexity our dissimilar names cause is … well, the source of this Consortium thing. Because it’s not the “Hills’ house,” and it’s not the “Kleerups’ house.” And we don’t really hyphenate our names (except in our domain). I’ve tended to use “Hill/Kleerup” at times, but that’s not always possible. It makes doing up invitations to functions interesting, too, when it’s for people (like at the office) who know one of us or the other, but need more than just first names.

So. The Consortium. There we go. “An association or combination for the purpose of engaging in a joint venture [i.e., marriage].” I like it.

Picture Perfect

I’ve put a picture of me and Katherine at the top of the page. It’s so cute I could scream. It’s main (and glaring) flaw is that it ignores my…

I’ve put a picture of me and Katherine at the top of the page. It’s so cute I could scream. It’s main (and glaring) flaw is that it ignores my Better Half. If I can get an equally fun one of Margie and me (or even the three of us together), I’ll put that up instead.

Commentary

I am a cheapskate. At least when it comes to the Net. I hate to spend any money that I don’t have to for a “hobby.” So the next thing…

I am a cheapskate. At least when it comes to the Net. I hate to spend any money that I don’t have to for a “hobby.”

So the next thing on my Blogger wish list is a way to get comments. A few reasons. I want to know that somebody is reading this stuff. And I want the opportunity to explore some of the topics further.

Big problem: so far all the commentary stuff I’ve seen requires server-side services, and, being a damned cheapskate, I’m on the cheapest, barest-bones hosting plan I can get. So no SSI, no PHP, no ASP. So far, I seem to be SOL.

Doyce says he has another cheap host in mind. Of course, he said he’d e-mail me about it, too, so …

Blogvision

Blogvision An expansion of the theme below (i.e., from earlier today) on how having a blog has an impact on things. I was driving off to my golf game on…

Blogvision

An expansion of the theme below (i.e., from earlier today) on how having a blog has an impact on things.

I was driving off to my golf game on Saturday, and I noticed myself … noticing things. Hmmm. Light rail — that’s neat. Gotta write about that. Oh, look, folks queued up at the light rail station to go to the game. Hah — idiots! Y’know, they don’t have gravel igloos like CDOT has here back in Southern California — I remember how amused I was when I first saw them. I should share that. Gotta talk about my ring finger some time, too. And so forth.

They say that the best way to learn to write is to write. When you are going to write, it makes you think about writing. When you’re going to be blogging observations about the world about oneself, it makes you observe said world.

Perhaps we need to encourage more politicians to blog.

What to do, what to do?

So mail is down at the office this morning. Which serious puts a crimp into what I can do. So I’ve been noticing that the Archives section of my blog…

So mail is down at the office this morning. Which serious puts a crimp into what I can do.

So I’ve been noticing that the Archives section of my blog template is generating an annoying Javascript error.

So … I’ve fixed it. Woo-hoo. The old programming skills haven’t completely atrophied. Of course, since I actually created a separate archive directory (which is good practice, and which seems to be encouraged by the Blogger documentation), a lot of the relative references that the archiving processes use don’t work, so I’ve had to hardcode the blog URL into a whole bunch of the template code. Messy. Annoying.

Of course, the really annoying thing here is that, as of WinXP, Java will not be automatically available on new PCs (i.e., it is not part of the default XP installation). Micro$oft claims this is necessary due to their court settlement with Sun, which is, ah, a prevarication on their part. The goal is actually to make the C## scripting language (owned by M$, natch) the de facto scripting standard on the web. Sincek, of course, if it isn’t owned by M$, it can’t be allowed to be a standard ….

Which means that, eventually, either bits and pieces of my blog (and many, many web pages) will break, will need to be recoded in C##, and/or will require that people download a Java VM (for XP-or-newer systems) or C## VM (for pre-XP/non-M$ systems) (or both).

Bad enough that M$ and Netscape “broke” the HTML standard. Bad enough that server-side scripting is still a crapshoot depending on what sort of host you have. Now we’re breaking standardized client-side scripting. Granted that Sun has a finger in this, since they kept trying to twist M$’ arm. But the reality is, it’s yet another step forward for the MicroBorgs, one step backwards for the Web.

End of Diatribe. Time for lunch.

The Deconstruction of Blogging

So a man walks into a blog … (That wasn’t meaningful, but the phrase occured to me, and I wanted to use it). Doyce raised the issue over in his…

So a man walks into a blog …

(That wasn’t meaningful, but the phrase occured to me, and I wanted to use it).

Doyce raised the issue over in his blog of why those who write blogs do it. Rather than simply comment over there, I’ll comment here — since I have this damned page and can do with it as I like.

On one level the reasons are probably as varied as there are people doing it, if not moreso. But for myself, the following come to mind:

Narcissism. There’s something terribly self-important about the idea of writing one’s personal opinions and experiences and posting them out there in the Internet for the entire frickin’ global community to read. I mean, what an ego-boost. And what presumption, that one’s inner thoughts (edited to whatever degree one does) are actually worthy and entertaining enough to be so posted.

(Digression. One day when I was in 6th Grade, we got back our little packet of school pictures — the individual kind. They came, of course, with a flimsy little cardboard frame. I noticed some folks putting their 5×8 self-portrait into their frame and putting it on their desk. I thought this was amusing, so I went them one better, and put my sheet of wallet-sized shots into the frame, so that, Andy Warhol/Op-Art-like, there were several shots of me gazing outward sedately. One of the neighboring 6th Grade teachers, Mrs. Snyder, who was something of a wag and who knew me because of my zany intellectual hi-jinx with one of her students, happened to spot this and dubbed me Narcissus on the spot. She even clipped a New Yorker cartoon of Narcissus gazing into the pool, while his girlfriend asks, “Narcissus, is there someone else?” and gave it to me. Today, of course, she’d be be sued, fired, and probably tarred and feathered. At the time, it was a useful, if odd, lesson for me, not to mention an anecdote for my future blogging.)

On a more innocuous plane, it’s push communication. I could write a lot of this stuff (“How I Spent My Labor Day”) in e-mails to people. It’s simpler, in some ways, to blog it. Of course, I don’t really know if anyone (aside from a very few people) actually read this, so it may not be being pushed very far.

It’s journaling. In other words, it doesn’t matter who’s reading it, as much as that I am writing it. There’s probably some of that, but I could do it a lot more simply in another format, and without worries of who might be reading it restraining me from commentary on certain items. (It occured to me, as we were going through our Buffyfest this weekend, that Dawn ought to be journaling in a blog, with appropriate hilarity ensuing.)

Perhaps, in the long run (as Meery Berry implied in her comments to Doyce), there’s not much different between what drives one to write a blog, and what drives one to write. All of the above could apply to writing a novel, a textbook, or a poem. Or, for that matter, in a more abstract fashion, sculpting, painting, or spraying oneself with Cheeze Whiz and reading the phone book naked (made possible by a grant from the NEA). There’s the (necessary) Narcissism of believing one has something to say that is worth hearing. There’s the desire to promulgate information that can’t be sent out any other way. And there’s an element of self-therapy in working through thoughts and beliefs and ideals in another venue that offers its own opportunities (and pitfalls).

It’s worth more thought, one of these days.

‘Tis the Season

No, not that season. For various reasons (Alpha class schedule, other stuff) Margie and I were serious slackers when it came to watching Buffy and Angel this past season. Lucky…

No, not that season.

For various reasons (Alpha class schedule, other stuff) Margie and I were serious slackers when it came to watching Buffy and Angel this past season.

Lucky for us, Doyce is as compulsive about taping them as I was about B5. And he has been noodging us to catch up. And more than noodging — making extraordinary efforts.

So this weekend, between basement cleaning and tree planting, we watched at least four or five Buffy eps, and two Angels. And FFed through a few more of each. I worry if we’ll be able to catch up, but it’s worth doing.

And, in return, I finally got around to loaning Doyce Season 3 of B5, and will be taping the Farscape stripping that SciFi is doing (though not this week, since it’s all on the tapes I already bought and loaned).

Media ‘R’ Us.

Trees, trees, trees

Trees, trees, trees This Labor Day weekend was, indeed, laborful. Sure, Friday was Dad-at-home, taking care of the Squig, while Margie worked at the office. And Saturday … well, that…

Trees, trees, trees
This Labor Day weekend was, indeed, laborful.

Sure, Friday was Dad-at-home, taking care of the Squig, while Margie worked at the office.

And Saturday … well, that was a golf day. Labor, but of a pleasant sort.

Really, it was all of a pleasant sort. Sunday, post-church, Margie and I went off to CostCo and bought four Gorilla Racks. Came home. And started in on the basement.

Long ago and far away, we had a relatively open basement. Between the initial move-in and some organizing elbow grease from Margie and Ginger (Margie’s mom), it was in pretty good shape. A little cluttered, but not bad.

But time and tide have worked their toll. Progressive Christmases have left boxes of decorations and wrapping materials in disarray. Storage of large items such as Margie’s old loom, the crib and various other baby things, have filled up space. The sewer blockage had left the contents of that room stacked in the rest of the space.

And, of course, there’s Old Man Entropy, making disorder out of order.

It was becoming an intolerable situation, and Doyce’s comments that, hey, we should get it cleaned up so we can use it for gaming made that even clearer.

So that’s what we did.

Not entirely, of course. But it’s a zillion times better than it was. All four gorilla racks are set up, some with boxes on them. Several dozen empty boxes or boxes of trash are in our dining room and living room and back deck, waiting to be put out at the street tomorrow night for the trash men. Things are stacked in a relatively efficient manner.

The trick, of course, is finishing the project. Going down there and getting boxes really loaded onto the racks, things back up where they belong, etc. With a little nudging, maybe I can do that this week. Or maybe not. But at least there’s space to walk around in, which is light years better than where we were before.

A tip of the hat to Doyce, for helping me with the racks, and to Jackie, for helping Margie with the organizational stuff. And Justin, natch, for both trash carrying and babywatching.

That was Sunday. Monday, we tried to return the favor.

Doyce and Jackie’s yard is, to be polite (and as polite as I need to be, since they are the first to tell you), a “fixer-upper.” Heavy on the grass and conifers. Light on the aesthetics.

Jackie got a coupon to Arapahoe Acres for money off a tree. This led to an off-the-cuff “let’s get a tree” party. Doyce determined that one or more of the low pines by the front door needed to go. I bundled up a box of tools and headed over, leaving Margie while Katherine went down for a nap.

Speaking from the perspective of having removed several large, overgrown junipers from the front of our house once upon a time, said junipers being embedded in several inches of clay-cemented decorative pebbles, I was expecting this to be a massive effort. In reality it was a walk in the park. About an inch and a half of pebbles. Dirt that was almost sandy in consistency. A stump with few tap roots, and a pickup truck with a chain to do the actual yanking. And minimal sticky-pokey branches and debris. Not to mention a young helper to clean up the cuttings.

Then off to the nursery to find an appropriate tree. Fittingly, Margie and I purchased two trees (a dwarf apricot and a semi-dwarf Jonathan apple), while Doyce and Jackie got a semi-dwarf Red Delicious apple.

A little shoveling, a little shifting around of rocks, and, voila, instant front yard tree. And it already makes their front yard look better.

One weird thing in this was my taking on the Jim (Kleerup) role — being the Elder, Experienced Advisor, suggesting grand plans and decorating ideas for the yard. Doyce & Jackie seem to welcome the advice, but I do keep waiting for the one piece of it too many. It also worries me that I might steer them wrong on one of these ideas.

Still, it’s kind of fun having a blank canvas like their yard to “work” in. There’s a lot that could be done, limited largely by money (of course) and willingness to get out there and sweat. And if I can help, it’s a pleasure to do so.

And it was neat getting a couple more trees, especially since we just discovered that the aspen in the east side yard has completely died. Not sure when we’ll install the apricot tree there (nor the apple tree on the east side), given my folks coming out around this next weekend, and the need to get the house cleaned before that, etc. Maybe some post-work yardwork. We’ll see.

Children

Children are … complicating. From a purely pragmatic and selfish PoV, Katherine has complicated our lives immensely. Nights punctuated and interrupted by howls of varied distress, often requring getting up…

Children are … complicating.

From a purely pragmatic and selfish PoV, Katherine has complicated our lives immensely.

Nights punctuated and interrupted by howls of varied distress, often requring getting up to find out what the problem is and correct it, but always requiring arousal from sleep. The living alarm clock deciding it’s time for someone besides her to be up sometime between 5:30a and 8, regardless of whether it’s a work day or not, or whether the parents were up until 9 or Midnight, or were up during the night dealing with those distressed howls. Trying to keep her constantly amused so that she’s not screaming for attention. Tripping and dancing about various toys (and pieces thereof), pots and pans, and other dropped-where-interest-flagged detritus. The constant struggle to keep things out of her reach, which keeps getting longer, such that any horizontal surface becomes an emergency hosting place for coffee cups, books, papers, anything that shouldn’t be chewed, taken, or dropped. Outings that come to an abrupt halt because Katherine is too tired to be awake but too wired/unhappy to go down in her porta-crib. The inability to plan or execute any activity without working it around ad hoc right-now-dammit naps, feedings, bath time, bed time, or just I-want-to-crawl-in-your-lap-and-pound-on-the-keyboard sorts of demands, etc.

Heck, not being able to sit down and watch a movie on TV at night without at least one irresistable demand for food/visitation/re-binking from Our Mistress’ Voice. And having to be constantly attentive, waiting for said Voice, whether it comes or not.

There are times it gets incredibily frustrating. And harrying. It introduces a level of stress that leads to me grinding my teeth, Margie and I snapping at each other, and general misery.

It is something that nobody not in the situation can understand. Really. Trust me. I thought I did.

And yet …

Yesterday morning, I came downstairs, having slept in until 9:30a (albeit with multiple interruptions at wee hours of the morning), to find Katherine sitting on Margie’s lap on the sofa in the family room. And she was smiling, and happy, and full of joy, and she looked up and saw Daddy desending the stairs and the look on her face was just astonishingly precious. It made it all worthwhile.

At least until the next time I found myself grinding my teeth …

Back to work

Back in the office after a long weekend. That’s always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there are the mental pressures of Things that Need Doing which can finally…

Back in the office after a long weekend. That’s always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there are the mental pressures of Things that Need Doing which can finally be released. On the other hand, it means getting up at 5 a.m. and dealing with … well, the stuff they actually pay me to do.

Last week we had a major server melt-down in the office — two RAID drives on the main NetWare server going bad, which turned out to be actually a bad SCSI cable to the backplane. Non-NetWare services weren’t affected, though, so no major impact on me.

On the other hand, this morning, with most NetWare services back up, our e-mail is running veeeerrrryyyy slowly, and usually timing out after 5 minutes or so of hitting it. Since e-mail is about 90% of what I do and/or how I do it, this is a Bad Thing.

Looks to be one of Those Weeks.

To Margie

Let’s get married, We’re ready for tying the knot, Let’s get married, Set the seal on the feelings we’ve got, Let’s get married, We can make each other happy…

Let’s get married,
We’re ready for tying the knot,
Let’s get married,
Set the seal on the feelings we’ve got,
Let’s get married,
We can make each other happy or we can make each other blue,
Yeah, it’s just a piece of paper but it says “I Love You.”
For the good times,
For the days when we can do no wrong,
For the moments when we think we can’t go on,
For the family,
For the lives of the children that we’ve planned,
Let’s get married,
C’mon darlin’, please take my hand.

— The Proclaimers, “Let’s Get Married”

Love you, Margie. Even if it is cuter with a thick Scottish accent.

Vroom

I have grown old enough that I have given up hope of owning a motorcycle. I know it’s dumb. I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s wildly impractical in this…

I have grown old enough that I have given up hope of owning a motorcycle.

I know it’s dumb. I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s wildly impractical in this climate (when it’s either sunny and hot, or snowy, or thunderstormy, none of which make for pleasant cycling).

I also know that Margie would break both my legs before she’d allow it. Even though I’d wear a helmet and jacket and pants and all the things necessary to avoid it becoming a “donorcycle,” as they so quaintly put it down at the ER.

My Nono (my Mom’s Dad) wanted a motorcycle when he was a youth. His mother disagreed. He went ahead and, when he had enough money, bought one. Hah! Take that, Mom.

The next morning, the tires were slashed.

Some lessons enter the genes. Natural selection at work, I suppose.

Meat

A nice evening. Margie barbecued two big steaks. I do have a few digestive difficulties, minor ones, when I eat that much beef at a time, but, wow, it is…

A nice evening. Margie barbecued two big steaks. I do have a few digestive difficulties, minor ones, when I eat that much beef at a time, but, wow, it is so tasty, it’s worth it. So far.

I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain just to eat leaves!
— Michael Rivero

The general convivial tone of the evening was not harmed when Margie spilled the sauce she’d made from the drippings and mushrooms and wine onto her dress, and so took it off.

Life is good.

Fuzzy dice

We have fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror of our mini-van. Our friends find this most amusing, so they tell me. They originally came from Margie, who I assume, in…

We have fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror of our mini-van.

Our friends find this most amusing, so they tell me.

They originally came from Margie, who I assume, in her carefree single days, hung them from the mirror of her sportly little Fiat Spider convertible.

Now for a confession: I don’t really know what fuzzy dice symbolize.

I mean, I have a general contextual understanding that they are kind of a wild, young, sporty, “taking risks,” “hot stuff,” “lookin’ for action” kind of thing. Which is why I hung them on our sedate, suburban, yuppyvan, since the root of most humor is absurdity … and because we hate to think that we are completely domesticated, even with the Squig.

But that’s all contextual guesswork. I was never in a crowd as a youth that did the fuzzy dice thing, so if they actually mean, “I am soliciting sex, honk twice if you are cute,” I am, perhaps, doing something a bit odd. Though Margie would be allowing it, which is disturbing in either case. So I assume that my contextual guesswork is pretty much on target.

Listen, rinse, repeat

I have odd music-listening habits. When I start listening to something I enjoy, I listen to it again. And again. And again. Over, and over, and over again. Sometimes a…

I have odd music-listening habits.

When I start listening to something I enjoy, I listen to it again. And again. And again. Over, and over, and over again. Sometimes a single track, played on Repeat, the entire trip to and/or from the office.

Margie is very indulgent of me in this. It has to be pretty annoying. I think she chalks it up to one of my charming eccentricities, and a relatively harmless (if noisy) one.

For the last three or four months, it’s been John Barry‘s soundtrack to The Living Daylights. Barry is the king of James Bond movie soundtracks, and is noteworthy for them as well as for other such trivial soundtracks as Out of Africa, Dances with Wolves, The Lion in Winter, Born Free, Midnight Cowboy, Body Heat, Peggy Sue Got Married, Somewhere in Time, Howard the Duck (!), and many others. Once you know his style, it’s unmistakable, a lush, lyrical melange of violins, brass, and contrapuntal rhythm. (Indeed, if you are not aware of him as an artist, consider the above tunes plus most of the Bond soundtracks. You’ll probably recognize the commonality right there and then.)

When we had to provide music for our wedding video, we (well, I, but Margie agreed) selected his Moviola theme for the finale. Sweepingly romantic, strongly melodic … I can’t say enough about his work. Incredibly neat stuff. If I had to have someone composing the soundtrack for my life, it would be him.

Anyway, The Living Daylights soundtrack has some really fun, driving themes to it, including tunes done by The Pretenders and A-ha. Leaving out the soppy romantic tracks (which Barry also does extremely well, but which isn’t nearly as much fun cranked up on high as you go driving down the freeway), it’s rollicking good fun.

Riding the rails

Denver has light rail. There are a lot of people who pooh-pooh this. Some of them think we should expand our bus fleet. Others think rapid transit is a goofy…

Denver has light rail.

There are a lot of people who pooh-pooh this. Some of them think we should expand our bus fleet. Others think rapid transit is a goofy idea, and that we should just expand our freeways to LA-size megaways (since that has, clearly, made LA traffic so much better).

I, frankly, think light rail is keen. I dearly wish it traveled somewhere along my commute, because I would ride it (as I rode the bus downtown when that was where my job was). The critics would note that it does not do so, and so condemn light rail as a profligate waste, a boondoggle, a passle of porkbarrel.

But there is value in symbols, and light rail, even though it does not solve all our ongoing transit problems (though the Southwest corridor has turned out to be far more successful than anyone thought, and I predict similar success for the Southeast corridor), is a symbol. It is a sign that we can at least give lip service to solving regional problems. It’s a sign that we are looking for alternatives to simply paving more roads to accomodate more cars and more people.

And you know what? People do ride the light rail. And when petrol prices climb even higher, more will ride it. And folks will bitch about short-sighted politicos who can’t wave their hands and make more light rail magically appear.

Such is progress.

Three cheers and a bleat!

Driving off to my golf game today (see below), there were various cars festooned with sports paraphernalia, and many, many people queued up at the Park-n-Rides along Santa Fe. Yes,…

Driving off to my golf game today (see below), there were various cars festooned with sports paraphernalia, and many, many people queued up at the Park-n-Rides along Santa Fe.

Yes, it’s the day of the great CU/CSU game.

People get goofy about this sort of thing.

I always feel obliged to root for CSU, since I lived in Ft. Collins for 9 months in High School.

CSU got waxed today, something like 14-42.

Take that for what you will.

Satanic Games!

The interesting web bit of the day. From Satanic Games:

After an exhaustive research one commission, the Christian Life Ministries, tells the naked truth through these incisive comments: ‘Dungeons & Dragons, instead of a game is a teaching on demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan-worship, gambling, jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination, and many more teachings, brought to you in living color direct from the pit of hell.’

Wow. I feel so … dirty.

It hurts so good.

Treasure

So there’s this commercial on TV, on a “treasure chest” of rare coins, including at least a dozen wheat pennies. (Which reminds me, I found a 1946 wheat penny in…

So there’s this commercial on TV, on a “treasure chest” of rare coins, including at least a dozen wheat pennies. (Which reminds me, I found a 1946 wheat penny in my pocket yesterday. It’s been a while since I got one at random. Neat.)

Anyway, “even the chest itself is a collector’s item,” made out of real wood and “genuine brass-tone hinges.”

Genuine brass-tone hinges.

Wow.