That's Cool! When Do I Start?

Stargate SG-1 was my mostest favoritest science fiction television show, like, EVAR! It's sad that I find this out after the show has completed it's run and the final season was this past season. Bummer.

I also liked Serentity, my number two here.

I'm left with Stargate Atlantis as my main sci-fi show now. Oh, and Battlestar Galactica (the new one) when it's final season starts next year.

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as SG-1 (Stargate) You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body. SG-1 (Stargate) 94% Serenity (Firefly) 81% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 81% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 81% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 69% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 63% Moya (Farscape) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 50% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 44% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 31%

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Picture Post, Sunday November 4, 2007

A hodgepodge of things.

Been going back through some of my old photos for worthy phtographs that, for whatever reason, haven't been converted to a size and format that I could post on either of my blogs.

So here ya go.

This here is a shurf's dee-partment boat patrolling the waters of the Indian River Lagoon at Grant, Florida.


Some of my Mother and Father In Law's flowers. Back in the early 1980s when Lovely Wife and I were dating and then engaged, I spent a lot of time at their home. They had a beautiful daughter, a beautiful swimming pool, and beautiful flowers to photograph for my photography addiction. My parents didn't see a whole lot of me during this period. What can I say.


On July 4, 2006, the Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off for the first shuttle mission since the tragedy of Columbia in 2003. Lovely Wife and I went to the beach to watch, and while I waited, I watched this life guard. She was talking to a friend, but she was super alert and looked to be scanning the surf all the time she was talking. I decided to take a couple of photos because I liked her stand with all the flags and signs and I took one horizontal shot (not shown) and then switched to this vertical shot and she stopped talking and turned and looked right at me. I was a good ways away from her and using a telephoto lens. I've never believed that people could sense when someone was watching them, but she sure seemed to have the gift.


I used slide film for many years, and good photographic practice with slide film dictated that you, as photographers phrased it, "expose for the highlights." What this means is that with slide film, in general, most photos need to have the exposure adjusted to where the brightest part of the photo is in perfect exposure, letting the rest of the image fall into whatever darker tones happened. Just flip through ANY National Geographic with color photos and you'll notice that every image is rather dark looking, but invariably has some prominent bright highlight that isn't glaring at you. For me, digital photography is like shooting slide film in that the best photos expose for the highlights. I've had comments on some of my photos from time to time that an image was too dark, but this way of thinking of a photo's exposure is ingrained in my mind like multiplication tables from fourth grade. This next photo however, I WANTED to emphasize the glare of the intense sunlight on the water. Sometimes you have to break the rules to "say" what you want with a photograph. It was taken on a brutally hot and humid day and I wanted the photo to have a bit of that feel if possible.


Compare what I just told y'all about proper exposure and how I broke the generally accepted rule of basing exposure on the brightest part of a scene in the above photo with this next photo. The brightest parts of this next photo are the blue-green shutters over the windows of this restaurant and the front fender and top of the white car there. I set the exposure for these two things to NOT be as intense and distracting as the photo above. I was trying to get a good general and flattering photo of this pretty restaurant in Indialantic, Florida, so I played by the rule in this one.

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Funny Stuff From Jack Handey, #1

- I don't think I'm alone when I say I'd like to see more and more planets fall under the ruthless domination of our solar system.

- The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.

- If they ever come up with a swashbuckling School, I think one of the courses should be Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something.

- One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

- Too bad you can't buy a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out.

- The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children across the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.

- If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man, I guess I'm a coward.

- To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.

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UK: Record Numbers Go Abroad for Health Treatment

From the online version of the UK's Daily Mail:

Record numbers of Britons are traveling abroad for medical treatment to escape the NHS - with 70,000 patients expected to fly out this year.

And by the end of the decade 200,000 "health tourists" will fly as far as Malaysia and South Africa for major surgery to avoid long waiting lists and the rising threat of superbugs, according to a new report.

The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration of often waiting months for operations are fueling the increasing trend.

Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away.

India is the most popular destination for surgery, followed by Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, Poland and Spain. But dozens more countries are attracting health tourists.

People with even a few Euros to spare are going overseas in an attempt to receive better and faster surgeries.

Apparently the lines are so long for people needing heart surgery, cancer surgery and the like that folks die before it's their turn under the National Healthcare System.

This is what Hillary and many others in the Democratic party desire for the US health care system?

Have you ever dealt with the inefficiencies of Social Security, the IRS, your state's department of motor vehicles, etc?

Now translate that type of apathy and attitude to trying to get help for a serious illness.

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I'm up to 1433 words on my NaNoWriMo novel as of yesterday. Only 48,567 more words to go before 11:59pm, November 30th. (I need to average about 1667 words per day)

NaNoWriMo Begins / Engineering Humor

National Novel Writing Month starts TODAY!

Consequently, as I try to write the Great American Novel, I'll either steal stuff from other people (like today's post), post some of my photographs, or lastly and least likely, I'll be so far ahead of the required word count (1667 words a day) that I feel I can write a new original post.

So, today's post is one of my favorites. I know it's been out there a long time, but I'm hoping some of y'all haven't read it before…

Engineering Analysis of Santa Claus


No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

Conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

I Caught You A Delicious Bass

I never was much of a fisherman.

In high school however, a couple of my best friends, Mike and Jim took me bass fishing. Mike and Jim, identical twins, loved all manner of outdoor sports. Hunting, fishing, the works.

I had no rods and reels for fishing, but they said they had plenty and I could use some of their stuff, so off we went.

Monroe, Louisiana has a few bayous that run through town, and in one area where Desiard Bayou ran close to the road, an old man had a little shack and a bunch of aluminum boats for rent. (There's TONS of fish in these bayous.)

I can't remember the price, but you could rent a boat for the day for about $5, and $2 for a floatation device, usually a seat cushion that floated.

So we went down there and rented one and paddled off.

The plan was to slowly paddle up and down the banks of the bayou and cast our lures into the vegetation that grew along the bayou and into the water. In theory bass liked to lay in these grasses and whatnot and wait for bugs or whatever.

I was totally ignorant of this, but totally into it too. Sounded like fun to me.

Before we had gone, Mike and Jim patiently taught me to cast lures with an open faced reel. We were in their yard and just simply tied a weight to the line and I learned the basics of casting a lure with one of these reels. You had to be careful or you could end up with a "bird's nest" of tangled line if you didn't cast the lure in a certain controlled way.

I took to it pretty quickly and we had gone and rented a boat.

What had me totally hooked on bass fishing for a long while was that first day of fishing with Mike and Jim, I caught my first bass within 30 minutes or so and there were enough bites on our lines to keep me out there for however long they wanted to stay.

I was having fun.

They taught me how to attach a rubbery plastic worm to the hook a certain way and on that day and many other days in the future we seemed to have the best results of catching bass with a 6 inch purple worm.

Bayou water is dark like a glass of tea is, and I never could quite figure out just how the bass were seeing these dark purple worms in that dark water, but they sure did.

If three men are in a boat fishing, the guy in the front and the guy in the rear have the best shots at having a good cast, but I caught the first bass that day, and by the time we quit fishing I had caught four bass big enough to have kept.

Three teenage boys are full of themselves and after we had been fishing a while, we saw some friends of ours from our high school coming toward us in a canoe.

Now I'm not the sharpest guy in the world, but even I thought it was pretty risky for 3 guys to be out fishing in a canoe.

At any rate, they came over to us, we had gone to the other side of the bayou by then and were working our way back up, fishing the other side.

Mike knew that these guys would be freaking out when we showed them all the bass we had caught, so he decided to play a joke on them.

As they slowly worked their canoe over to where we were fishing at the time, Jim took the paddle and turned our boat so that Mike was pretty much out of their line of sight.

Mike had a "joke" lure in his tackle box that he was trying to attach to his line before our friends got over there.

The lure looked like the classic rubber ducky, like you would have in a kid's bathtub, only smaller. The little hard plastic ducky had two, three pronged hooks hanging from the bottom of it. In the water, the ducky would float just like a small little bathtub ducky but had these scary looking hooks on the bottom.

The guys got over to us and of course they asked how the fishing had been going for us.

Jim held up the 7 or so bass we had on the line at the time and said, pretty decent, only John and I haven't caught anything. These are Mike's fish.

Their eyes got big and of course they asked what type of bait we were using.

Jim said, that's why these are all Mike's fish, he has a certain lure he's used to catch all of these and he's the only one of us that has that lure.

Mike pulls his rod around and shows them the little ducky "joke" lure on the end of his line. "Yeah, we weren't catching anything until I tried this lure and the bass LOVE it. I can't hardly reel em in fast enough."

The guys in the canoe each got a good look at his lure and one of them asked where he got it. Mike said, "Sutton's Sporting Goods."

The guys in the canoe looked at one another and one of them said, "Man, we're going to go get some of those lures, right now!" and the said their goodbyes and paddled off.

They had just gotten in the water when we had seen one another, and here they were, heading off to buy lures that didn't exist anywhere other than on Mike's fishing rod.

We laughed about that for years. The looks on those guys faces at Mike's impressive catch.

We also were amazed that we were all three able to keep straight faces throughout the whole exchange and not blow the joke.

We kept fishing for a good long time that day, but we didn't see those guys come back out to that part of the bayou again. We caught a decent batch of bass, but every one was caught using a purple plastic worm.

At the end of the day we would either give the fish to someone fishing on the bank near the old man's dock we rented from, or we would just catch and release.

The fun was in the fishing.

We wondered if they actually went to the sporting goods store and asked for and described a little yellow duck lure to the workers there.

I wonder if some guy somewhere tells a story about having once worked in a sporting goods store and three guys came in wanting a bass lure that looked like a little yellow rubber ducky.

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It appears that the joke was on me, sort of. I tried to google and find a joke lure like I described here for the picture. There are some lures similar to the one I talk about in this post, but they look more like a real baby duck and are real lures.

Who knew?

It Didn't Surprise Me. Much.

The other day as I was heading into work I was stopped behind a grey Hyundai Sonata.

On the rear window of the car was a bumper sticker that read ominously: Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History.

Being the brilliant sort when it comes to translating high-minded and high-falutin' speech, my blazingly quick mind almost instantly translated this to plain spoken southern American English:

I'm a mean, vindictive, bee-yotch that would just as soon step on ya as look at ya, so watch out!

(Please excuse the language.)

Then as I sat there thinking that women who make history rarely drive Hyundai Sonatas either, a woman's hand reached out and flicked a green and white Marlboro menthol cigarette hard pack out of the driver's side window onto Sarno Road.

Having read the bumper sticker and realizing this woman was a real piece of work, it also hit me that I couldn't recall the last time I saw someone blatantly throw litter from their car like that.

Here in Florida, you can have your windows tinted very dark, and the windows in this Sonata were very dark, so I couldn't see but just the basic outline of the woman's head, and of course her hand as she threw the cigarette package out the window. But I would have liked to have seen her face to file away for future reference.

I wanted to know what she looked like so that if I ever encountered her in, say, Walmart, I'd know to head down the next aisle and avoid her.

But then again, a woman who is as great as she obviously is would never stoop to shopping in Walmart like a low-life such as me, so I guess I shouldn't worry too much about encountering her there.

Jerk. Times two.

A Strange Turn Of Events

Several years ago Number One Daughter was going to her Aunt's house.

At the time, we had a little Ford Escort station wagon for her to use.

Number One Daughter had, over time, amassed a pretty impressive collection of music CDs. She had these CDs in a big zip-up binder so that she could carry them in the car and listen to them.

On this particular day, as she was putting her stuff in the car, she apparently laid the CD case with $1000 worth of CDs on the roof of the car and then left, forgetting the CD case.

Later in the day she realized that she didn't have her CD case. Of course she was "sure" she had put it in the car with her, but it could not be found.

I told her that if she had laid it on top of the car and forgotten it, it could be somewhere between our house and her Aunt's house, so she walked that short distance back and forth a couple of times.

Still couldn't find it.

Thing is, I had recently started working with an engineer who had taken all of his music CDs and made copies onto inexpensive blank CDs so that he could carry them in the car and not have to worry whether they got stolen.

I had told her about this and had started the process of making a travelling copy of all of my CDs, and she had done a few, but the vast majority of her CDs were in that lost case.

Not only did she have the original CDs in there, but she had also put all of the CD booklets in there too, because she liked to look up and learn the lyrics to the songs she liked.

She was justifiably sick at the thought of having lost all the CDs she had bought over the years.

I told her that the only explanation for their loss was that the case had fallen on the street and someone had picked it up and carried it home with them.

I told her to go buy two large white poster boards and a black magic marker.

When she got home I had her write really large as to take up the entire poster paper, "Lost CD Case With CDs. 867-5307". (Of course that's not our real phone number. It's Jenny's.)

The CD case had been lost on a Sunday afternoon, and the sign was made and one poster paper placed on each side of our mail box beside the road on Monday.

My reasoning was that whomever had found the CD case might live in or visit someone in our neighborhood and had no idea how to return the case to the rightful owner.

Days went past and no one called. She was becoming resigned to the fact that all of her CDs were lost.

Then the next Monday, over a week after the CD case was lost, we received a phone call from a man who said they had found a CD case.

My daughter was able to rattle off a whole list of the CDs that were in there, ultimately to the satisfaction of the man that the case was indeed hers.

Lovely Wife took her over to the man's home who explained that his wife goes over to our neighborhood to visit a relative every Sunday and had seen the CD case lying in the road in front of our house and had stopped and picked it up.

It was the nest Sunday when she went to visit that they had seen the signs on our mail box and wrote down the number and called when they could.

The man told Number One Daughter that she had a really strange taste in music, that he and his wife had never heard of any of the bands the CDs were for.

Lovely Wife and Number One Daughter told him that they were Christian bands and that all of the CDs were Christian rock and contemporary Christian music bands.

So they came home with her case and all her CDs and the booklets for all of her CDs.

She eventually made copies of all of her CDs and used those in her car, knowing that if they were lost or stolen then it's not a big deal, she could make more.

I had done this very thing for many years with cassette tapes. I would buy CDs to listen to at home, but would make a copy onto a blank tape to play in the truck that I had at the time. The Supreme Court had ruled that you could make a copy for yourself as long as you weren't trying to copy copyrighted material to sell illegally. The same principle holds for making personal copies of CDs.

It was nice of the man and woman to call and return the CDs, and they wouldn't accept a reward for it either. But Lovely Wife got the impression that had the music been more mainstream, things this couple liked, they probably would have just said, "finders keepers, losers weepers."

Our family learned that listening to and buying Christian music CDs had other advantages than just simply lifting a persons spirit.

Picture Post, Sunday October 28, 2007

In the past month or so I have posted some panoramic shots. I have been going back as I felt the desire to the highest quality images that make up each panorama, and have been creating new ones with these higher quality images. The one's I posted originally were made with low resolution JPEGs, and while they looked good, I wanted to use the RAW images and recreate them so that I would have the best quality of these panoramas that I could get.

Here's another one. This is at Ocean Park in Melbourne Beach, Florida. It's one of the nicer beach parks around here, yet one of the closest ones from our home. We can be on this beach in about 20 minutes from our house. It's not an exciting photo, no killer sunrise or anything, but I wanted it to look like it does when we go there for a day on the sand. Lovely Wife has picked me up from work many a lunch time and we came here to eat. They have a small pavilion above the beach with a great view. It was a nice, hot day when I took this (these) photo, kinda late in the afternoon, but still, see how few people were on this beach?

Since the above panorama was taken in the city of Melbourne Beach, Florida, I thought I'd throw in a couple of other Melbourne Beach images. This one is the pier that has been the star of many of the photos I've posted on here.

Here's another in Melbourne Beach. The street in this photo curves 90degrees to the left just past the blue building and goes striaght east for about a mile and takes you right into Ocean Park where the panorama above was taken. It's an easy walk and a beautiful little town out there.

This final shot was taken in a park in Melbourne, Florida called Erna Nixon Park. It's just a few miles from where I work and have gone there and walked on the boardwalk that winds through the park. It's a nature park, showing natural Florida, not a swings and slides kind of park. These palm trees crossing one another caught my eye.


Have a great Sunday, folks!

Violence in Iraq has dropped by 70 percent...

...since the end of June, when U.S. forces completed their build-up of 30,000 extra troops to stabilise the war-torn country, the Interior Ministry said on Monday.

Also:

GRADUAL IMPROVEMENT

In Baghdad, considered the epicentre of the violence because of its mix of Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs, car bombs had decreased by 67 percent and roadside bombs by 40 percent, he said. There had been a 28 percent drop in the number of bodies found dumped in the capital's streets.

Read the whole article written by Aseel Kami for Reuters here.

A 70% drop in violence since June. That's amazing. That's saving lots of American and Iraqi lives.

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Today on John's Daily Digital Images, My Street, Looking East.

Another "It's A Small World" Story

Don C. (my father) worked most of his career on off-shore oil drilling rigs.

Many of these rigs are what are referred to as "jack up" rigs. They float. The legs of the drilling platform are raised high by motors and the platform floats on the water. The rig is then towed by ocean going tugs into the area they want to try to drill for oil.

The legs are then lowered to the sea floor and the rig is readied for action.

The rig might be there a couple of years as the prepare and then drill for oil.

Over the years my Dad worked with a lot of the same men as long as the rig stayed in one place. There were a lot of men on there, and some came and went, but there were always a core group of men who came to know one another really well.

He might later be assigned to a different rig with a whole new group of guys to get to know and work with.

On an oil drilling rig, the man in charge of the whole rig is referred to as the "tool pusher." Don't ask me why that name because I don't know. It just is.

This one guy that he worked with for several years became familiar to our family because Don C. would refer to him and a few other men and we came to recognize their names and positions on the rigs when my Dad would tell stories about things that went on while they were off shore.

Around 1980, when I finished high school and started my first foray into college, I read a book that I had checked out from the library called, "A Walk Across America" by Peter Jenkins.

In around 1973-1974 Peter Jenkins, a young man, decided to walk across America to try to "find" the real America. The book is the story of his beginning on the east coast and his walk through the south and he would stop and live with people who welcomed him into their homes and then when he had some money saved, continue on his trek.

The first book ends with Mr. Jenkins having made it to south Louisiana, where he had stopped and obtained work as a roustabout on an off-shore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the book, he describes in detail what the work was like and some of the people he worked with and even had some pictures in the book from that time.

Mr. Jenkins had a picture of and talked about the tool pusher on the rig he had worked on for a while, and I recognized the name of the tool pusher.

I was sitting on the couch in our den at home when I was reading this part of the book, and Don C. was in the kitchen cooking something. I called over to him and asked him the name of the tool pusher on his rig and he named the man in the book.

I walked in there and explained to my Dad what I've just explained to you here, what this book is about, and showed him the picture of the tool pusher that the author had worked with.

My Dad confirmed that this was indeed the man that my Dad was presently working with on his rig.

The next time Don C. came home from his week off-shore, he told me that he had mentioned the book to the tool pusher and that the tool pusher told him about having worked with Peter Jenkins for the few months Mr. Jenkins stayed in Louisiana to work and save money.

It's really no big deal, but I always thought that whole situation with reading about these men and my Dad working with one of them was cool. At the age of 17, that was one of the biggest "It's A Small World" stories I had personally encountered.

Peter Jenkins wrote a second book detailing the rest of his trip across America from Louisiana to the west coast called "The Walk West." He later walked across China, Alaska, and all kinds of places.

I don't read a whole lot of non-fiction, but when I do, a good portion of it is personal travel stories like those written by Peter Jenkins.

I might never visit these places in my lifetime, but I can experience them to a certain degree through the eyes of others who have been there and written about it.

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Check out the amazing sky looking west down my street this past Tuesday, on my John's Daily Digital Images blog. My Street, Looking West

Palm Bay Makes The Drudge Report

Yesterday I checked to see what headlines had been posted on The Drudge Report, and one of the news items was "Florida City Tries To Ban All Chinese Products."

So I clicked on that one to see exactly which city in Florida was being talked about, and lo an behold, it was Palm Bay.

Then I had to see if it was positive news for the City.

Our mayor, John Mazziotti is trying to put into effect a ban on Chinese products when the city buys something.

It isn't a total ban on Chinese products coming into the city, just that the city itself when making purchases for the city, cannot buy Chinese products.

"I don't think people have the slightest idea how much is from China," said Mazziotti. "I remind people every day. Pick up that label and see where it's made. You might surprise yourself."

I think it's pretty cool myself.

Then last night as I headed home from work, I turned on a local AM station to listen to the Jerry Doyle Show, an independent conservative talk show, and he was talking about the issues with all of the recalls and political problems with China going on right now. (Jerry Doyle was part of the cast of the science fiction show, Babylon 5, and also ran for Congress as a Republican in California. He's now an independent and a talk radio show host.)

Then Jerry Doyle starts talking about "this city in Florida, Palm Bay" whose mayor has announced a ban on the city purchasing Chinese products and how he supports that and that this mayor has a lot of guts.

Then, on the air, he asks his producer to call and try to get "the mayor of Palm Bay on the line" and after the next commercial break, he had John Mazziotti on the show as a call in guest.

They talked about the whole range of issues going on with China right now and I thought Mr. Mazziotti was quite articulate and very plain spoken (always a plus in my book) and made his points quite convincingly.

It was kind of surreal driving around town here while listening to our mayor talk live on a nationally syndicated radio program.

Go Mayor Mazziotti!

I certainly don't agree with all of his policies, for example, he opposed a local ordinance that would have fined local businesses for knowingly hiring illegal aliens that I think is a great idea, but I do agree with him on this issue with China.

Iran And Nuclear Weapons

For years we lived under the threat of mutually assured destruction.

We had a whole passel of nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had a bunch too.

We knew if we sent ours off at them, that they could send theirs and poof, the world would be back to the bronze age or something like that.

What few people survived that is.

But as we were developing nuclear weapon capabilities, we never ever said to any other country or group of people, "Hey! We're building super weapons that we're gonna use to kill all y'all." (at least that's how a southerner would have said it.)

The Soviet Union didn't either.

Luckily, the Soviet Union/Russia ran out of cash.

But repeatedly in the past couple of years, Iran has declared that they are working lickety-split to develop nuclear weapons capabilities and that when they have them they're gonna blow Israel off the map.

This is SUCH a different situation. A country led by a group of ultra-radical muslim clerics have basically said that Israel has no right to exist, and when we get the bomb, soon after Israel and the Jews will no longer exist.

The honestly believe it's their duty to destroy Israel. Literally.

So you have a very powerful, rich nation that has openly stated they're trying to build nuclear bombs and missiles and that when they do, their first target will be to destroy Israel and the Jews.

The more radical groups within islam believe that it is OK to kill other muslims if they are in the way. In other words, they excuse the collateral damage in the killing of innocent muslims as long as the intended target is worthy.

We let Iran's President Iminajihad come over here to speak at the UN and at Columbia University and he's all smiles and had this total "Aw, shucks" attitude, but he has made many speeches to his own people and openly declared that they, Iran, feel it's their responsibility to destroy Israel and the Jews.

Now or later, somebody is going to have to take out these nuclear research facilities in Iran.

Will it be the US?

Will it be Israel?

I don't know, but if we don't, Israel will.

I'm just sorry to say that we live in a screwed up country and world that will throw their hands in the air and cry foul when whoever has the guts to do so, makes a preemptive strike or series of strikes against Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.

I'm sorry, but I say it's getting close to time to fire up the stealth bombers and the stealth fighters and turn 'em loose.

Because if Iran gets nuclear capabilities, Israel is in trouble. And Israel is the one true friend we've ever had over in that part of the world.

And if I may go off on a crazy, fundamentalist Christian tangent here, I personally believe that the United State's reason for being is to have helped and supported the founding of the nation of Israel in the 1940s and supporting them up to now.

Crazy? Maybe. But I truly believe that, and I cannot fathom an America that would stand idly by and watch Israel become a nuclear waste land.

I do not want war for anyone. But to me it's as if the guy two houses down the street were to start assembling a howitzer in his front yard while saying that when it is completed he's going to start blowing up the houses belonging to the rest of us. We can't sit idle and watch the howitzer come closer to completion each day that passes.

There are few easy answers in this world. One of the advantages of being in the cold war was that, at the end of the day, the Soviet Union loved their families as much as we loved ours. They knew that to start a nuclear exchange would guarantee their wives' and kids' deaths.

The Iranian government, like all of modern, radical islam, have no such feelings. They consider it an honor to kill whomever is innocent to achieve their aims, even if the innocents are their own families.

They are ten times the menace the old Soviet Union ever was.

Gentlemen, start your engines.

Discovery

The Space Shuttle Discovery just lifted off on time at 11:38am Eastern time.

I watched until the solid boosters separated, and then I could see the main engines for another 30 seconds or so and then came back into work.

When we first moved to Florida, Numbers One and Two Daughters attended Discovery Elementary School.

They didn't go there but half a year, but I always take note when Dicovery has a flight.

My coworkers didn't even wait until the boosters separated before heading back inside. Yeah, it's hot and humid outside, but still...

Scrooges.

National Novel Writing Month, November 2007

Like millions of people, I dream of writing novels for a living.

A big, beautiful home by water with huge yard and a little air-conditioned shed away from the house where I would write my blockbusters.

Oprah would love me and give me lots of free press and I'd start the winter fires in the fireplace with hundred dollar bills.

Then the press would find out I'm a conservative and the dream would crash and burn but it would have been fun while it lasted, ya know?

Each November is the month that some of us wanna-bees write an entire novel of at least 50,000 words.

The rules are simple.

Start the first words on the 1st of November and by midnight of November 30th have written at least 50,000 words, even if you aren't quite finished.

Last year was my first year to try it. You are allowed to do character sketches and outlines and so forth before you start, but you know me, I just sat at the computer with nothing prepared before hand and shot from the hip. An entire novel.

It was a stupid book but every word and character was original and I didn't cheat one little bit.

In times past I couldn't "write" on a computer or typewriter. I wasn't a good enough typist and the effort of typing distracted me and caused me to lose my train of thought and I would give up, grab a nice pen and some paper and write that way.

But early 2006 I started this blog. While that's no big deal, then or now, but the act of writing on a keyboard so much for day after day after day paid off by allowing me the freedom to "write" into the computer and allow me to participate for the first time in National Novel Writing Month last November.

I felt as if I had been set free from a huge weight, not from the pressure of writing a book, but that it's one thing to fancy yourself a writer, or to dream of writing a novel and another thing entirely to actually complete the task, regardless of how bad the work is.

As I said, my book stunk to high heaven, and I won't EVER allow it to see daylight, but I was excited that I was able to prove to myself that I could start and finish a novel.

In fact it was easier than I would have ever thought possible. Even when I had no idea what to write, just reading the last of the previous day's entry would have ideas popping into my massive cranium and I would take off on that day's writing.

Due to the constraints of life there were a few days that I didn't write at all, but on my makeup days I would pound out 5,000 or more words and totally amaze myself.

Let this post serve as notice to my loyal fan(s) that my posting here might be spotty during November.

Who knows, all that writing may make posting blog posts easier instead of harder. Hopefully the air around me will be thick with inspiration.

If you are interested to see what this is all about, they have a web site. Just click on the icon at the top of this post and it will take you there and you can see what all the hubub is about.

Since National Novel Writing Month is such a mouth full, us writer types usually just call it NaNoWriMo.

Lovely Wife is all for the huge house by the water with big yard and is wondering when that part of the dream shows up. (And I'm sure that if Big Sis is reading this she's wondering where her and Long Suffering Brother In Law's new cars are.)

Hey, at least I cleaned and straightened up My Man Corner on Sunday.

You can't rush greatness.

---

On John's Daily Digital Images today, I posted a couple of photos that I took of President Reagan in 1983. Check 'em out.

Copy Cat-er

I saw this over at Dane Bramage's blog, and thought it was different enough for me to try. There have been various forms of this meme around and I've never done it, because I've NOT read so many famous and "classic" books.

The meme rules are:
Bold those you've read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn't finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

I'm going to add to this my own comments, because it's hard to read a list and remember what bold, italics, etc., means.

I try to read at least 100 pages in a book before I decide to keep reading or stop.

The List:
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (never even heard of it)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (never even heard of it)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Number One Daughter has a copy, but I haven't read it yet.)
Life of Pi: A Novel (It had glowing reviews, and I WANTED to like it, but I HATED it. I gave it my full 100 page limit, then I gladly put it down.)
The Name of the Rose * (Loved it. Also loved the movie with Sean Connery)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (Had to in High School)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities (I'm weird. I love Charles Dickens.)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (never even heard of it)
War and Peace (Didn't even make it to my 100 page limit.)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife (I liked it. It was graphic, but very inventive and broke all of the "rules" of time travel that's usually stated in time travel books and movies, so I liked it even more because of her breaking these rules.)
The Iliad (Had to in High School)
Emma
The Blind Assassin (never even heard of it)
The Kite Runner (never even heard of it)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (Have I said that I love Dickens?)
American Gods (never even heard of it)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (never even heard of it)
Atlas Shrugged (I've always wanted to, and almost got it at the library the other day. I didn't have a wheel barrow.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran (never even heard of it)
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex (never even heard of it)
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (never even heard of it)
The Canterbury Tales * (Under duress, in high school AND college)
The Historian (never even heard of it)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (For college)
Love in the Time of Cholera (never even heard of it)
Brave New World (Under duress, high school)
The Fountainhead (On the to-read list with Atlas Shrugged.)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch (never even heard of it)
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo * (One of my all-time favorite stories in both book and movie form.)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (I just couldn't make it.)
Anansi Boys (never even heard of it)
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible (I love Barbara Kingsolvers other books and gave this one my 100 pages but hated it and put it down.)
1984 * (A favorite, but such a downer)
Angels & Demons * (So much better than DaVinci code, that the whole hoopla over DaVinci Code had me scratching my head.)
The Inferno (I couldn't even finish this for school. Made a C on the test thanks to Cliff Notes.)
The Satanic Verses (I've always wanted to read this. Anything that pisses off radical Muslims enough to put out a fatwah against the author will make it at least onto my to-read list.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park (never even heard of it)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (The movie is a classic, but the book is way better.)
To the Lighthouse (never even heard of it)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (Dickens, what can I say. The musical movie version is worth watching for the "Please, Sir. May I have some more." scene.)
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections (Didn't make it through. I've read one complete Jonathan Franzen novel, he's way over rated in my opinion.)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (never even heard of it)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (never even heard of it)
Dune * (I loved this and it's sequel and the rest of the series were horrible swill.)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things (never even heard of it)
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (never even heard of it)
Cryptonomicon (never even heard of it)
Neverwhere (never even heard of it)
A Confederacy of Dunces (never even heard of it)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (never even heard of it)
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (never even heard of it)
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake (never even heard of it)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (never even heard of it)
Cloud Atlas (never even heard of it)
The Confusion (never even heard of it)
Lolita
Persuasion (never even heard of it)
Northanger Abbey (never even heard of it)
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid (In Latin) (never even heard of it)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit * (I've loved Tolkein's books and read this again a few months ago.)
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island (A classic that I loved.)
David Copperfield (My favorite Dickens book)
The Three Musketeers

Picture Post, Sunday October 21, 2007

Growing up in Louisiana, Spanish moss in big old oak trees was just part of the scenery. Everywhere. I still get a charge out of seeing Spanish moss in big trees. It's some sort of ingrained emotion that makes me think of the area where I grew up.

This tree filled with Spanish moss was in a local park.


I saw several of these trees in the park, but wasn't able to figure out what kind they were. The smooth bark almost made these slender trees look as if they had been stripped of all their bark. I liked how their reddish-brown color stood out in the forest.


If you look carefully at this next photo, you see what appears to be on huge horizontal branch of a tree with another large tree growing straight up behind it. That's NOT what it is. The tree that appears to grow normally behind the horizontal branch of another tree is itself a humongous branch growing straight up out of the horizontal one. Look carefully and you cannot see any tree trunk from the horizontal branch to the ground.

I was amazed that this big horizontal branch could levitate in the air five or so feet off the ground with what must be a tremendous weight of that massive vertical branch. I thought at first it was simply an optical illusion based on my position, but I walked around and confirmed that this weird looking thing is just that, simply weird.


Yet another of the many, many sunset photos I have. I really like this one because when I first started work down here I used to bring my lunch from work and eat right here at this scene on the Indian River Lagoon. I've seen all manner of water fowl and even dolphins and manatees sitting right here. Of course there's no sunset at noon, but it's awfully pretty here during the day too.


I've milked the white ibis photos I took at the library here recently for all they are worth. Here's one more. I just liked the way they were almost in the same position and how they were reflected in the water there.


Have a great Sunday!

My Thoughts On Politics

I've had a number of posts lately regarding things that are out there in the news that are related to politics.

I've had this blog for over a year and a half now and have made over 600 posts here.

I've plainly spoken that I am a conservative, fiscally and socially, and I do not apologize for that.

Thing is, I know what I believe, and I know why I believe what I believe.

But if you are a liberal, a Democrat, or even a "progressive" then I have no problem with that. I have friends who are as well.

By and large the engineering world that I have been exposed to has lots of conservatives, the ones that care one jot about politics that is. But a number are die-in-the-wool liberals and like me, sure of their positions on the issues of the day.

When I talk about politics here, it's usually can be plainly seen that the underlying emotion of them is "How can liberals believe this way?".

But though I don't understand liberal trains of thought, I have tons of respect for anyone who is firm in their beliefs and knows why they believe what they believe.

If you have thought about and looked into matters and arrived at different conclusions than the ideas I express here, that's totally cool with me.

I might vehemently disagree with your conclusions and even your logic, but if you've truly thought it out and disagree with me, fine.

A blog is a strange thing. It's a way to express myself to many people which makes it seem like I'm feeling all special about myself and that I'm going to ram my ideas down your throats, but in reality, that's not what my intent is.

I think a lot. My job is thinking related. Thinking can be hard work but I have no illusions that I'm any better at it than anyone else.

I like to think I'm fairly logical and reasonably smart, but I also know that there are lots of folks out there way smarter than me.

This is just one man's blog. In the banner up there at the top of the page I say this, "Whatever I feel like talking about on any given day. You know. Stuff."

I mean that, I'm just shooting from the hip. This blog is a sounding board.

At least we live in America where, for the present time at least, we can express our own ideas in relative freedom.

So if I go on a political rant and you think I was a total idiot or a total genius, I respect that.

You would be surprised after reading all of my politically conservative rants over the past year and a half +, to see how many blogs I read where the people are politically liberal and although I disagree with them on many points, I like them a whole lot as individuals and our comments back and forth make me feel that they are my friends.

Can you have friends that you've never met in person? I think so.

Anyway, I guess the whole point of this post is that I do realize that my politically charged rants from time to time may cause folks who lean liberal or left of center or are flat out progressive not come back and read here any more.

While I don't lose any sleep over that because I'm sure a number of people just read and leave and never come back without commenting, so that I never know that they were here in the first place; I am concerned that my heavy-handedness in my political posts might cause someone to mistakenly feel I'm not worth the time to comment or hang around and read long enough to get to know me.

I'm a strange mix of things. I'm by nature a loner. I have to make an effort to engage people, and while most folks don't find interacting with others to take effort, for me it really does.

That's why this whole blogging thing is so strange. It's as if I can be a loner and also engage the whole world. A true dichotomy.

I like ideas and thinking, and I welcome an honest exchange of thoughts, ideas, and reasonings.

I totally understand that a person can be the political flip-side of me and yet be a much better person than I am. I have no lofty thoughts about myself about being superior in any way to anyone else, even though some may assume this after reading some of my posts.

Hey, I like to eat; everyone likes to eat, so come back sometime and, as they used to say in the 80s, let's do lunch.

If you don't want to comment on this blog, but you have something to say, a link to my email address is on my Blogger profile page. Feel welcome to write and send me an email with your thoughts.

That is all, carry on.

Geeks Win The Day!

Before recently, perverts and pedophiles could post pics of themselves doing their unspeakable acts on their victims on the internet, and not worry about identification because they digitally swirl their face and heads in the photos.

But just as some smart software geeks wrote the programs that allowed this to be done as a special effect in programs such as Photoshop, other geeks have come to the rescue by developing an algorithm and writing the code to un-swirl these monster's faces.

This guy has been on Interpol's list of folks they would like to have a chat with for a while now; a known pedophile.

And some enterprising software writers have undone the swirls of his face and head in the photos he's posted on the internet.


The last reports I read, they believe he's somewhere in Thailand, and that it will probably not be very long before he's caught.

An Associated Press article said this: "While Interpol declined to release the suspect's name, police in Thailand said a 32-year-old Canadian named Christopher Paul Neil is the person sought. "We believe he is still in Thailand and we are now collecting information from neighboring countries where he committed crimes of pedophilia so we can issue an arrest warrant for him," Thai police Col. Apichart Suribunya said."

I think that's a cool use of technology, and the brains behind it.

My Dad used to say there's a special place in hell for people like this creep.

I sure hope so.

Tax The Rich

Hilary Clinton (what happened to the Rodham part, anyway?) and Barak Hussein Obama and especially the Breck Girl, John Edwards talk about the inequities of the rich vs poor in America.

They say that George Bush has been too good to the rich Americans, that rich Americans don't pay their fair share of income tax.

Let me throw a few figures at you from the latest Internal Revenue Service tax numbers; who pays what and in what amounts, OK?

The top 1% of income earners in America, folks making over $350,000 a year, paid 39.38% of all the income taxes paid to the government last year.

That means that the top 1% of income earners in the US paid a larger percentage of the total income taxes collected by the IRS than at any other time in the history of the United States!.

The top 5% of income earners, making over $145,000 per year, paid a whopping 59.67% of all income taxes last year.

So when Hilary, Barak, or John Edwards, or anyone else for that matter say before the cameras that the rich are not paying their fair share, they are lying.

They are lying and they know it.

The bottom 50% of all income earners, earning less than $30,800, paid a measly 3.07% of all income taxes paid to the IRS last year.

George W. Bush's administration, in spite of big tax cuts for everyone, has soaked the rich for more taxes than any other administration in history.

Remember that when in the coming year the Democrats throw their tired old class warfare pitches to get votes.

George Bush has collected more taxes from the rich than any US President in history.

Don't let the Democrats make you believe that the rich don't pay their fair share.

They pay MORE than their fair share.

And just remember this when you hear the "fair share" lies in next year's Presidential election runup:

The top 1% pays 39% of all taxes,

The top 5% pays 59% of all taxes,

and that the rich have paid more taxes under the Bush administration, despite tax cuts, than the rich have ever paid before in US history.

Simple.