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Update At 2120 Today? Well, let's see. Got to work a bit late, but not so much as so anyone would notice (then again, I beat one other guy in my group by four HOURS and the other one didn't show up, thought he could have been at a doctor's appointment from his rear-end car accident from three weeks ago - I dunno about them - I'm just trying to make sure I look good enough to keep). Spent most of the day struggling to get information out of Active Directory (great tool for keeping information - not so good for getting it back out). I found a couple of good tools, but I couldn't install them from the CD - because I'm running Windows 2000 on my desktop, and I needed tools from the Windows 2003 server CD, and they need a minimum of Windows XP to run - so tomorrow I'm going to ask one of the other consultants if he's got some tools - if not, well, we go to plan B - upgrade my Pentium II with 256 Mb of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive to Windows XP. Yes, we'll see the chipmunks and the ants come screaming out of the cracks in the case when that happens. Probably done to a crispy golden brown... I also spent more than a few minutes wondering why the line FOR /F %%A IN (FLIST.TXT) DO TYPE %%A | FIND /V /I ".RPT" >> FLIST2.TXTbombs - HARD - to the point of aborting a five-layer deep batch file sandwich (Batch file A calls B, which calls C, which depending on the contents of the command line passed from B, calls D1, D2, or D3, and in this case it called D2, which relied on E - which is where the "bomb" line was, and instead of aborting E and returning control to D2, it killed D2, C, B, and A, and flopped at a C:\ prompt. Oh, for the glory days of ON ERROR GOTO :ABORT1in good old REAL DOS batch files - none of this bastardized CMD=BATCH crap we have today, no sir - yeah, I know, I sound like a grandpa yearning for the days of the old Model T, I do... But that was the work day. Came home, and was confronted by the specter of forgery - no, nothing that costs money, only the type that is soul-suckingly painful - stuff like forged teacher's initials on assignments not done, or forged parent's initials on the same. Ouch. So we had a discussion with the forger, who finally confessed the error of her ways and we hope she's seen the light. We hope. I then sanded the primer layer (laid down on Saturday) of the eldest's "new" dresser, and applied the first coat of latex paint (don't ask me why - I have no idea how I ended up with oil-based primer going under at least two coats of latex - I wasn't in the loop when the paint was acquired. I was an innocent bystander. I think). It will be shockingly ... green. Yeah, green. I don't know either. But go figure. Then the morning daycare called in flu-ed up, so we're scrambling on that front... Oh well. If it weren't for the struggle, we'd hardly know we were alive...
<LOCAL_POLITICS_ALERT> For some months now (well over a year) there's been a bit of a tiff going on regarding the new local high school. The town I live in has had the good fortune of being split into three separate school districts. In all three of them, citizens of our town are in the minority. As a city of some 12,000 registered voters, it's not surprising when you're surrounded by suburbs with 40,000 or more. But a fair portion of the local (not metro, but LOCAL) paper's weekly headlines have been devoted to the issue. Leaving aside for the moment that my town donated the land on which the new school sits, we have the small problem of the name. When the land was donated, the city made the provision that they would like to see something other than the neighboring city's name on the school - but not a combination of the two towns (think "Minneapolis/St. Paul High School" as a bad thing). They wanted a non-city-linked name. The school board, being a collection of small-minded, slack-jawed, slightly addled, mostly useless, painfully enfeebled, seriously stupid people (I think I've conveyed a small measure of my contempt for these nincompoops) decided "well, if they don't want their town's name on the school, fine, we'll put ours on it!" Which is how in the southern portion of my town there is now a high school - named for a town about a mile and a half down the road. Which is not the point of this rant, but it helps to understand the background. Earlier this month, we held our usual "off year" elections. That is to say, school board and all the city officials. Which works out just peachy-keen for them. As I type this, the mayor is sitting pretty with a seven-vote lead (and nearly all of our voting machines are automatic - which means that the mayor will still be mayor in January). All of the existing school board members are still on the board. We elected two new members of the city council - mostly because the incumbent micro-management types decided not to run for re-election. No, that's not the problem. The problem is that those elections, mayor, city council, and school board, were held on behalf of 12,000 + people. And of that, something like 2800 came out. The last figure I heard was something like 17.7% of the eligible voters voted. To elect a Savage representative (and one ran in each of the three races) onto any one of those school board would have required an additional 250 votes. Not quite an additional 2% of the eligible voting public. We don't get the government we deserve - we get the government that APATHY deserves. Sure, there were no high-profile issues in the forefront (well, aside from the name debate, which will never, ever die down), but I know of one suburb which had over 6500 WRITE-IN votes. Heck, we couldn't even get half that many to check a freaking box... Sheesh. <LOCAL_POLITICS_ALERT> |
Update At 2255 Tonight was another one of those episodes. We were in the Mall tonight (yes, it's too damned early for Christmas shopping, no, I do not like shopping in a mall on weeknights (or any other time, frankly), and no, this was a strictly purposeful trip, as you will soon see) to pick up, what else, the Two Towers Extended Edition on DVD. Paid for it months ago, in fact, and knew to the hour when it was coming out. So after retrieving my prized possession, we were dwadling a bit (this is what men refer to it. Women call it "shopping") and I took a flyer. I went into the Mall's lone music store ("FYE" - supposedly For Your Entertainment, though it could also be referred to as "For Your Exasperation") to check out Let It Be ... Naked. I found said album - er, CD, sorry kids - and the young (oh, my) lady said "in case you're interested, all of our other Beatles albums are also on sale back here." I followed her to see what the difference (other than the Phil Spector credits) were, and started flipping through the rack. Scads of Red and Blue albums, a few White albums... "Don't tell me," I muttered (or so I thought), "you've got Let It Be ... Naked and not the original." "There's an original?" I swear, she said this, and my wife heard it as well. That is nearly, but not quite, to the level of the two teenaged twits my wife overheard some years ago.
"Hey, did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?" When I heard that, I could finally clearly define "apoplexy" - just by looking in the mirror.
Major Decisions We have only three video-game units. And, if the truth be told, they are antiques in the video-game references of the present day. The one that still works is an original Gameboy - yes, the old fat-back Gameboy. I have Tetris and Pipe Dreams for it - that's all. Jack is still enthralled with it in the rare moments I let him play with it. The other two units are a Sega Genesis and a NEC Turbographix 16 - both positively ancient. So (and no, my children don't bother reading this - hell, I've got enough trouble getting them to listen when I tell them to brush their teeth and pick up the damned towels in the bathroom), we're contemplating a possible video game console purchase. I've seen both PS/2 and Xbox demonstrated - I've also seen the Nintendo Gamecube. In my store browsing, the PS/2 seems to have about as many titles as the other two platforms combined. I've also heard more than a few rumors about Xbox/2 or whatever it'll be, and I'm not thrilled with a game console from Microsoft - I already have to use their software for much of my work - I'd rather not give them my fun dollars as well. So that leaves the PS/2 - I guess. Does anyone have any recommendations one way or the other? And yes, I've got a seven year old boy and a ten year old girl - the ultra-violent games won't be coming into the house. I don't like the hack-and-slash variety (I much prefer the strategy games to the "hop on the left foot twice, swing the right arm in a full arc, and release at the top - then you'll land right on target" - bullcrap), and neither does Ann. We're strategy-type people - though that doesn't mean something like a top-gun type flight simulator type of game wouldn't be fun (provided it's got a "training" mode so I can go all bulletproof ;-). Following that, can anyone point me to decent game review sites? We were browsing in a Software, Etc., this evening, and we found a couple of Harry Potter titles (including Quidditch World Cup) and a few Star Wars titles as well. As this store also sells used PS/2s for about $120 (with a 90 day warranty, add $10 and we get a year), it's probably not a bad idea... But I'm loathe to part with that much money without knowing what's in store...
Civil Unions
PROPOSED FEDERAL CIVIL UNION BILL
It's just that simple. When I got "married" it was done in a church before witnesses. My church will not recognize same-sex unions. I don't particularly have a problem with them - frankly, I think that there should be some legal strings binding some of these long-term couples together - especially if there are children involved - to make it that much more difficult to leave. But then again, what do I know? I am fairly certain, though, that it won't be too long before someone files suit against the government for forcing their church to recognize something - which the government isn't doing, but it's a gray area. That's why we should re-define "marriage" as "that which comes from a religious ceremony" and "civil union" as "that which the government recognizes as a binding legal relationship between two people". I'd thought about including livestock, but frankly, I don't want to scandalize the city folk. Even though I are one. And since it's late, it's probably a good time for my favorite sheep joke. My friend Kyle the Scot (yes, the same one who straps a REAL claymore (okay, it was about three feet long) to the stroller his son William Wallace rode in) asks "Why is it best to shag the sheep when the sheep is facing the drop off a cliff?" "I have no idea" says I, the foolish little German fellow who wanders into all manner of stupid jokes like a blind man flailing in a batting cage - or an old fart wandering the aisles of a music store looking for The Beatles - "er, probably in the classical music section, pops" Right, let me get my teeth and my walker, and you can watch the back of my hospital gown flapping in the breeze, as I wonder "gee, is it cool in here, or did I forget a most important part of the morning routine .. underpants? Or pants? Or, perhaps, both?" (he said, attempting and failing to delay the inevitable "yech" that follows...) "They push back." Which, if you think about it, is yet another reason for us to just avoid those sheep-herding Scotsmen altogether. To hell with what's under their kilt - it's what's between their ears that worries me these days. |
Update At 2300 It may have been a morning over cereal, or during a bus ride, or ... I dunno. But I know I heard the song and was captivated. Rock and Roll - but not really. Many people have "interpreted" the lyrics over the years. Some say "Mother Mary" is Marijuana. Others insinuate drug use was the core (such as Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds being linked to LSD). I wasn't in the band, and I didn't go on tour with them. I did read a hell of a lot about them (only partially due to a college thesis I had to write), and I'm fairly certain that while there was plenty of drug influence, Let It Be was at least in part an attempt to get away from that - and get back to the more "real" roots of their music. But Let It Be has long been one of my favorite Beatles tunes. The transition from the quiet, spiritual piano introduction to the soaring heights of the organ and guitar combination - that, I was certain, was just about as classic as it could get. Then I made the mistake of getting Let It Be ... Naked. As I had hoped, Let It Be is the last song on the album. It's eerie, really. I'm hearing a band, half of whom are now dead, clearer than I did when the "original" album came out. And this is nowhere more obvious than the title track. The piano starts. Not down in the mud, near the raw noise level - it's right there, at the top, clear - crystal clear. You can almost hear the action in the piano. The roll of the notes is precise - clear - and yet it's ... just a little reminder of just how good, and how far ahead of their time, these men were. It's still only on one side - the right ear, as I hear this. I could have my headphones on backwards, and if so, so what. Paul's voice is clear - not raspy or rough as it sounds in his later work - his higher range is still clear and relatively unaffected by self-medication via combustible herbage, if you will. If you listen very carefully to his singing on the first lines of the song - "When I find myself in times of trouble/mother mary comes to me/speaking words of wisdom/let it be" - I'd always thought his voice skidded through a note or two on "words" - no, he's quite precise. The vibrato which he later often abandons (a billion or so in income will do that to you) is there and while he's no Whitney Houston, he's got more than enough power in his range to pull the song off. I heard Ringo's tapping on the high-hat - not repeatedly, not in an echo chamber - a simple tap. Keeping the beat. Steady, rock-solid - despite the many rumors to the contrary over the years that Ringo couldn't maintain a tempo I found no excuse to replace him on Let It Be (and he did all the drumming, if I recall correctly - I can't lay hands on my "The Beatles - The Recording Sessions" right now to prove it, but I'm fairly certain). The piano gains accompaniment - not overpowering, overwhelming, massive walls of pipe-organ, but a simple electric organ, just chiming in - not smashing hell out of the song. Then, the bridge - the part that always, ALWAYS made me want to learn how to play both organ and guitar - and lo and behold, the piano is still there - there's no wall of sound, just intimacy. As if you were in the studio, listening to the tapes as they laid them down. The guitar joins - not as a freaking shrieking wail, as Spector had added it, but just where it "fits" - not over, not under, but right there in the middle where it belongs - where it had belonged for eight years before, every chance they got to play together. Missing is a bass guitar - obviously, Paul was playing piano, and never got around to writing a bass guitar part. The lower register on the piano took over - or so I figured. No, it's there on "Naked" - smooth, solid, and just as moving as the rest of the song. Harrison's guitar, far from screaming through a wall of sound, is just a "simple" guitar solo, back when one pick and a couple of fingers was a decent guitar solo. No flash, no playing behind his head. The final crescendo rises together firmly, steadily, the "choir" behind McCartney's voice is singing WITH him, not OVER him, and then, the final chords - not as a brick wall to end the song as if it had run away from the composer and had to be stopped, but as the composer intended - following crescendo, a nice, steady, downward spiral until you land at the final chord - much like a head hitting a pillow after a long, satisfying day. One listen to this record is enough to convince me that if Phil Spector doesn't spend the rest of his life in prison for murder, he should spend the rest of his life in prison for what he did to those damned tapes. Abomination is too good a word for it - though I'll keep the original Let It Be so I can point it out to my children. Frankly, the biggest surprise on the album wasn't Let It Be - it's The Long And Winding Road. I had known, from plenty of film and other research, that Paul did a heck of a lot of piano work around that time. What surprised me was the melody and the work he put in - and the grace notes that Phil Spector's production totally ... well, hosed up with his "wall of sound". The blending of the guitar and piano are unbelievably precise - and effortless. You have to listen a half-dozen times before you realize it's a piano, electric organ, AND guitar - these days, effects like that are done in the mixing, easily - rather than in the studio, as these were. I was surprised at the number of songs on the album that had definite endings - the Beatles were a huge force in the "play it until it dies" method of ending a song. Many rock songs of the late fifties and early sixties had definite ends - The Beatles helped to do away with that - and yet here on Let It Be the song endings are there, and they're intricate and Rhiannon shows plenty of talent in a musical fashion - I doubt she'll be the next girl-pop singer (and God help her manager if they try to turn her into Brittney Spears), but it will be a good lesson for the kids in what to do if someone utters the words "producer" when they're done creating any sort of musical collection. I do pity Phil Spector, though - especially if I ever catch the little runt. He'll sound more like Mickey Mouse than a record producer when I'm through with him. And he'll look a hell of a lot more like Mickey as well, with his testicles the size of basketballs on his head...
Gardening? I think he stole a couple of tricks out of my mother's book (er, had she written one, that is), because I remember using some of these as a kid - so yeah, they work, and well, too. I just don't know yet if I want to tell Ann about it - I can see that there's a whole heck of a lot of back-breaking work involved, and I'm all in favor of that - if someone else does it.
'Umor And on that note, I'm off to bed - You people REALLY don't need me filling up the remainder of this column with blithering noises, which is about all I'm really capable of doing, since the balance of my week just pissed down the drain. On the positive side, we did get the wood for my father's ramp - on the negative, we're looking at a whole heck of a lot of wet lumber. Ugh. So much for "this'll hold until spring". I'm tempted to see if I can buy the lumber we'll need for the real ramp and store it somewhere to let it dry between now and next spring. At least I was smart and got the arsenic-free treated lumber. No point in pointlessly killing... And with that, I'm off to bed - with a good thought for Kerry, the Thompson's faithful friend, who is now romping with butterflies and getting plenty of belly rubs and the best spot in the sun for a nap, and more good thoughts for my good friend Matt who stumbled into an opportunity with - get this - a financial institution, and is now gainfully employed once again. Here's hoping he's not going to tear great chunks of his hair out when he learns that they're doing things at the bank that way because, well, they've always done them that way, and no one's ever considered doing them any other way, young man... It's a common occurrence with me. "Why the hell are we... Never mind, scope creep." I swear, it's something I should have printed on a sign - or on a hat in letters that light up. Oh well. It could be worse. I hear Monica Lewinsky is complaining that the noteriety is ruining her love life. Yeah, and I'm guessing all the dates she has ask the same questions. And I suppose she has bad knees, as well... |
Update At 2140 I was intrigued by my son's rather limited linguistic abilities this evening. I was painting a ... what, third or fourth hand dresser we'd acquired when we moved into this house (and yes, after nearly two years, I'm finally getting it out of my garage), and my son said "Cool" forty-nine times in a seven minute period. And for the record, it seems that Ms. Hilton has discovered that money can't buy intelligence - and that you do, in fact, have a permanent record. It's called Google. And it's going to keep your information (and your dumb-shit moves that you videotape) around for a very long time. The one thing that occurs to me - where the hell where her parents? Partying with Michael Jackson?
Advanced Apologies... That out of the way (after a long work day, to boot), I come home and crash, because Ann actually needs to beat me to school tomorrow morning - yes, it's Girl Scout Badge day, and Cub Scout Wreath day - that means I lay down plastic in my trunk (and perhaps back seat) and then travel around dropping off wreaths. This should take a fair amount of Saturday. Which is fine - Saturday evening I will FINALLY watch LOTR:TTT. And get to bed early, because Sunday morning I need to be at church at 7:30 to meet with another fellow, and then I'm going to give most of the day over to the Knights of Columbus. Then, we storm back into a shortened work week (I still don't know if I'm working next Friday), which will see me NEXT saturday crawling around outside mom and dad's house, putting up a temporary ramp for them to get in and out of the house - until we determine the need for a permanent ramp. Gee, after that, it's freaking DECEMBER. Mind you, I'm not complaining - it beats the hell out of being bored. But all of that means that pickins is likely to be pretty slim here for some time to come... |
Update At 2130 Ann had another Pancreatitis attack. This one started around 9:30 this morning, and by 11 am it was over - as in no more pain. She felt a bit run over (not run down, run over), but otherwise fine. Of course, by 11 am, I'd dropped everything, ran to St. Paul, picked her up, and brought her back down to our hospital (doing a fair amount of it at 80-85 mph), where they found nothing much wrong. The doctors who looked at her came to the conclusion that her 1994 gall bladder removal might have left a few pieces behind. When they shake loose, they can apparently clog the ductwork that is shared by the Gall Bladder (which she no longer has), the liver (which is a large organ, and can handle additional stress), and the pancreas (which is, in Ann's case, smaller than her liver (which is normal), and over worked (as she's missing her gall bladder)), and this ductwork can occasionally be plugged by some of those wee bits of crud. The pain comes from when her body is trying to shove the bit of stone out, and they get stuck at the top of that ductwork. When they finally do break free, they disappear in her intestines, and pretty effectively disappear. So the plan is to put her through a CAT scan next friday (yes, the day after Thanksgiving), and then we'll see what we'll see. One prevailing option is for the doctors to sedate Ann (and move me to another planet), and then they'll run a tube down her throat, through her stomach, into her intestine, and back up that ductwork - and they'll try to find any remaining bits and haul them out with the trash. Fun? Only for psychotic lunatics. I'm just wrung out. After her release, we headed for home, and then I went to my sister's to build the ramp sections for Dad's temporary ramp. We'll get that in, hopefully, next week. And take it from there. One day at a time... |
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Update At 1400 So let's see. Yesterday was supposed to be the obligatory "where was I?" forty years ago - likely as not in the bassinet, sleeping, eating, or pooping. I was a lousy six weeks old. On the one hand, I often wonder what would have happened if those bullets had struck off their mark - would Kennedy have survived, and if so, what sort of country would we have? I suspect that the Viet Nam war would have come to a head sooner - Johnson and Nixon were looking for ways to disengage, whereas Kennedy was looking to stop the communists. I also wonder about the legacy of the Kennedy years - not the "Camelot" crap or the space program - but the more insidious "tell-all" tales which have come out, and how they seem to have convinced every reporter out there to dig for the "scoop" - some with justifiable and useful product, and some without. But the tell-all legacy, I think, has helped to drive the sides of our political system apart, and polarize the various groups to the point where very little gets done any more. Which is where we are today. Now, that is completely and utterly opposed to my yesterday - wherein I
And along the way, I picked up some crud variant, which is making me both hot and cold by turns - and I can't miss work tomorrow, or Tuesday, or Wednesday ... So time to go nap, methinks. |
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