After consulting my iPhone’s weather radar app, I take a quick trip over to a nearby deli to grab some diet ice tea drinks.   Figure I can get there and back again before the next wave of drizzle hits.   On the way back inside the Institute building, a young woman with her iPhone ear buds plugged into her head, is chatting loudly with…some disembodied somebody.     She is oblivious to everyone and everything around her, talking very loudly to the person at the other end of the digital network connection.   Did I not know about cell phones I might think her a lost crazy person talking to the voices inside her head.   In the lobby I walk quickly past her and to the stairwell down to my office, where I nearly collide with another co-worker whose eyes on fixed on the LCD display of his iPhone.

The trope is all our little computer devices are making us somehow less human, less able to interact with each other as humans beings.   And it’s a false one.   These devices don’t subtract from our human identity, they are a consequence of it.   We made these things, and then took a sudden passionate fondness for them, because we are what we are.   As a matter of fact, yes, millions of years of adaptive evolution made us into smart phone consumers.   It created us to eventually build the cell phone and text messaging and computer information technologies and online social forums just as surely as it put the color in our eyes.

Robert Ardrey, in his book African Genesis, took note of our species long preoccupation with weapons.   How long, he asked, would the first human have survived on the African plains, were they not born with a weapon in their hand?   Nothing, he said, in our long history has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of the weapon.   We are the species, he said, whose instinct is to kill with a weapon.   But we are something else besides, something probably even older then the weapon in our hands, something that had to have played just as critical if not an even more critical roll in our kind’s success on planet Earth, and to this day I’m surprised that a writer of all people didn’t see it too:   Language.   We are the species that talks.   We are a chattering breed.   And nothing in the long difficult history of the human kind has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of human communication.

It is the nature of tools to change what they touch.   So the plow changed the earth, but also the farmer.   The mistake is thinking the plow made the farmer less human.   It made him more human.   It made him better at being the thing that millions of years of life on Earth created him to be.   And we are the species that talks.   We communicate with one another.   By whatever available means at hand, by whatever way gets it across the best, we will communicate.   It’s what we do.   It’s why there are libraries and opera and art galleries and weather radar apps.   So we refine our tools and so our tools refine us.   That inconsiderate moron in the restaurant babbling loudly into his cell phone hasn’t been dehumanized by the digital revolution.   Look at him.   He is simply obeying a very old and very ancient and powerful urge to communicate it…whatever it is…to someone.   Birds sing.   Humans babble away.   Smile kindly upon him, before you take that cell phone out of his hand and smack him over the head with it.

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows

This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

–Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

I am not a superstitious person, but this abandoned office building has been creeping me out now since I first laid eyes on it last year on one of my trips down here to Disney World.   It’s located right next to the Holiday Inn I’m staying at.   A sign in front of it suggests that it was due to be converted into a resort/spa opening sometime in the spring of 2009. I’m guessing the money ran out and it’s just been sitting here ever since.

Ever notice those lost little spots in the commercial strips..the ones that never seem to make a go of it and repeatedly close, open again under new management, only to close again and repeat the cycle over and over until they’re finally torn down.   Often the new place doesn’t do much better.   It’s as though some earthly places are just bad spots to build on.

This was one of the intriguing concepts in Shirley Jackson’s haunted house story that really captured my imagination so many years ago.   See…Hill House wasn’t a disturbed place because there were ghosts walking in it.   The ghosts were there because the house was disturbed.   The house was, as Jackson wrote, insane. Old Hugh Crain didn’t create an evil house, so much as unwittingly cause an evil house to be built.   Perhaps I wondered, it had just been built on a very wrong spot.   Maybe old Hugh, because he was such a wicked man, had been unwittingly drawn to it.   But as Jackson wrote, the house had formed itself.

I am not a superstitious person, and yet like all of us I sometimes wonder.   I see a house that, as Jackson wrote, is never off guard, always seeming to be watching, and it creeps me out.   I let my imagination give it an appropriately despairing past, and fill its spaces with lonely ghosts to walk inside. I am human…I read a quote somewhere to the effect that ghosts were born the day the first human opened their eyes.   It had never occurred to me before now, that a modern spandrel glass and concrete aggregate office building could give birth to a good ghost story. But there is one here to be written by someone.

It was a quiet out of the way spot on a road just starting to attract the attention of developers and big money financiers.   Hotels were rising, strip shopping centers, discount stores, office parks.   Somehow it had remained untouched in the rush to cash in.   Eventually a particularly slimy developer laid his eyes on the spot and saw a quick fortune to be made.   Financing was hastily arranged via his reliable network of equally slimy bankers.   A magnificent office building was planned and pre-sold to an equally slimy corporation, whose board of directors were even more degenerate then the bankers and developer.   It was dedicated in a glittering grand opening ceremony costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Within weeks of settling into their new office space, the CEO announced a sudden change of plans and moved his company out in a hurry.   Suits and counter suits ensued.   The building was put up for sale.   Nobody who leased it ever occupied it for more then a few days. Turnover in the security guards hired to keep vandalism in check was high.   Reports that vandals broke in at night, stealing some things and wreaking others, could never be verified because nothing ever seemed to be missing the next day. When questioned, former tenants all swore they had never, and would never enter the building at night to take things…or for any other reason.

Somebody needs to write this.   I know a good place to go for inspiration.

At The Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf links to an Atlantic article about World War II…The Real War…

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD War that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? What was it that made the Americans, especially, so fertile with insult and cynicism, calling women Marines BAMS (broad-assed Marines) and devising SNAFU, with its offspring TARFU (“Things are really fucked up”), FUBAR (“Fucked up beyond all recognition”), and the perhaps less satisfying FUBB (“Fucked up beyond belief”)? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied.

Neither man, Disney or Rockwell, was, of course, a journalist.   Nor did either one make any such claim to be one.   They were artists.   I tire Very easily now, of the use of Rockwell and Disney’s names as synonymous with Phony.   These men were many things but phony was not one of them.   Neither one ever put anything before the public, I am absolutely certain, that they themselves did not believe.   Art, said Picasso, is a lie that makes us see the truth.   All artists are liars in one sense, but in that other sense, that soul speaking to soul sense, relentlessly truthful.   Both men spoke to us from their hearts, honestly and sincerely, and you can argue that life isn’t like that if you wish, but my reply to that is Yes, you’re right, it isn’t, but it ought to be.

It’s a different matter though with journalism.   Journalists need to tell the public the facts, or else we simply cannot function as a democracy.   And that is especially true in times of war.

That war, morally justified as it was, was also very heavily sanitized on the home front.   With the last of its soldiers passing away now, we are only beginning to see how nightmarishly savage it was.   The bloody slaughter of the American Civil War it seems, was merely prelude to the 20th century…

You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand. What drove the troops to fury was the complacent, unimaginative innocence of their home fronts and rear echelons about such an experience…

After one artillery exchange, two soldiers, Neil McCallum and his friend “S.” came upon the body of a man after a shell had landed at his feet…

“Good God,” said S., shocked, “here’s one of his fingers.” S. stubbed with his toe at the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. “Christ,” went on S. in a very low voice, “look, it’s not his finger.”

I got part way though the Atlantic article, when this passage struck me…

In the great war Wilfred Owen was driven very near to madness by having to remain for some time next to the scattered body pieces of one of his friends. He had numerous counterparts in the Second World War. At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore. One Marine battalion commander, badly wounded, climbed above the rising tide onto a pile of American bodies. Next afternoon he was found there, mad.

There’s a reason my generation are called the baby boomers. We are the generation born to the ones who fought that war, came home, and all at once returned to what would have been normal lives were it not for the war…which for heterosexuals (and homosexuals, because the closet was not an option but a necessary means of survival in those days…) meant getting married and having kids.   All at once.   It was literally a baby boom.   Housing was scarce for the new families for years.   Suburban Levittowns sprang up all over America.   Schools had to be built, many schools, many, Many schools, to handle the load…only to later be decommissioned as my old high school eventually was, after the last of the boom had graduated. We are a massive bulge in the population, and that is because there was a war.   A very big, catastrophic, savage and bloody war…that changed so much…so very very much…

Mom told me often about the sailor she dated during WWII. When she got started, I could see that look of remembrance of first love in her eyes, hear it in her voice, still, so many years later.   So many little things about him she remembered vividly.   So many stories about the times they had together…about waiting patiently for his letters from overseas during the war…about how her father disliked Jews, but came to see them as fellow neighbors in life by coming to know the Jewish man she loved.   She loved him, probably to her dying day.

When I asked her once why she married Dad instead, she said her sailor was on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended, and that his ship became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.

…and all these years I wondered, never doubting that he’d gone mad as mom had said, if that bodies trapping a big U.S. navy ship part of the story could possibly be true.   Really?   Perhaps he’d seen lots of bodies certainly…but so many they trapped a huge Navy ship?   Madness if it will strike, strikes young men around the age he was, so perhaps it would have happened to him anyway.

Or…not…

At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore…

It wasn’t an a-bomb that did that either.   So just imagine the aftermath of the first plutonium bomb, small as they say that one was, compared to what nuclear weapons can do nowadays.   Reading this Atlantic article I see now it probably was exactly as mom had said.   So her sailor boyfriend became lost in madness. So some years later on the pier at Avalon she met my dad and they married.   So now here I am, writing this.

So many people died in that war…many from the two atomic bomb blasts alone.   Every year they toll the bells in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the a-bomb dead.   And every year it’s been in the back of my thoughts always to wonder if I was born because of one of those atomic bombs.   But that war violently changed a great many lives, and I am certainly not the only war baby ever born, who but for war would not be.

Via Sullivan…     Here’s a handy flow chart showing how various energy sources were used here in the U.S. in 2005…

The contribution of the alternative fuels is vastly smaller then even I had imagined.   Even hydro-electric sources are way too little to be of any reasonable help replacing petroleum, natural gas and coal.   Take away petroleum and you have not only eliminated motor vehicles for all practical purposes…you’ve killed off the airplane.   Without petroleum and natural gas we just about have no industry left.

But all that wasn’t the first thing that caught my eye here.   Look…just look…at how much goes to waste.   That’s the gray band on the graph.

Think just of your automobile.   Unless yours is an all electric model, it’s the heat from gasoline combustion that makes it move.   That heat is almost entirely lost to entropy, in the form of waste heat.   Very little of it actually moves the car.   Most of it goes out the tailpipe.   Some leaves via the radiator and some just radiates off the motor, drive train and exhaust pipes.   And when you apply the brakes, the energy of your car’s motion is reduced to brake pad and disk heat and radiates into the air.   Some electric and hybrid vehicles recapture some of that energy via “dynamic braking”   (that is, you load the traction wheels with an electric generator which charges batteries).   But even there, most of the momentum of the car is simply lost to heat, to entropy.

Think you’re getting a better deal from an electric automobile?   Just look at the lost energy in the electric grid.   That’s what really shocks me here…how much energy is lost in electric power transmission.   Every time you put a current down a wire you create a magnetic field.   That field radiates out into space, and takes energy away from the current you are throwing down the wire.   A/C transmission recaptures some of that, by switching polarity so that the magetic field repeatedly collapses back into the wire and gives it a little extra jolt.   I thought it was more efficient then this.   But…jeeze…look at it.   I suppose a lot of that is also heat loss in transformers and switches too.

Entropy.   You really have to admire its relentlessness.   It’s like a tax on everything you do, every muscle you move, every breath you take practically.

I have no idea what a post oil world is going to look like.   I am not simply an optimist.   I think I’m a little bit more of a realist then the doomsayers.   Necessity as they say, is the mother of invention, and I am certain human ingenuity, curiosity, ambition, greed and just plain laziness will find a way to keep our factories and our vehicles in motion.   Eventually.   But that future is going to look very, Very different from anything being imagined now.

A larger version of the graph is Here.

Via Atrios…   Digby has a good post up about Hippie Randism and Libertarian Lefties that goes into something I’ve wanted to discuss more.   A libertarian isn’t a Randiod and either one of these could occasionally seem to resemble either a conservative or liberal.   Or to put it another way, and speaking of Whole Food’s hippy climate change denying champion of absolute corporate deregulation and union busting, just because someone looks and acts like a granola organic liberal progressive New Age self-actualization holistic health guru that doesn’t mean they aren’t a right wing asshole when it comes to the prerogatives of massive corporate money.   Here, Digby quotes the Times profile…

In the early eighties, Mackey told a reporter, “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.” (That quote, to Mackey’s dismay, won’t go away, either.) His disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come before, he says that it was only when he started a business—when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape—that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right. But there is also a psychological dimension. It derives in large part from a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does—to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so the safeguards that have evolved over the generations to protect against human venality—against, say, greedy, bullying bosses—are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.

Digby goes on to say…

He’s a libertarian who identifies culturally with the left. He’s into New Age religion and self-actualization and believes in holistic health practices, clean food etc. But he’s not a left libertarian. These things get confusing, but it’s important to make the distinction.

Basically, this guy is a standard issue right libertarian which means that he is a free market fundamentalist, hates unions, hates government and extols the virtues of the John Galts like himself, although he believes in a sort of corporate paternalism that requires him to look after the parasites (workers) in some rudimentary fashion. He is also a believer in civil liberties and drug legalization. (I assume that since he’s a Paul supporter, he’s also critical of the Fed.) There are quite a few of these folks out there who seem like your liberal next door, more than you might realize. Hollywood, for instance, is full of them. I worked for a few. Many of them even think they’re liberals and will vote for Democrats on social issues. But when it comes to taxing the wealthy and regulating business they might as well be Dick Cheney.

There is, of course, an actual left libertarianism and it is best articulated by Noam Chomsky, not some wealthy twit like Mackey…

It gets confusing, and I suppose it will only get more so as the republican party degenerates further and further into theocracy and outright populist-nationalist lunacy.   Others have noted how the 2010 edition of the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference is going to be sponsored in part by the John Birch Society…they of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Was A Communist fame.   If this is what the republican party wants to become then don’t be surprised to see people fleeing from it into a lot of factions and libertarianism is a very popular label to wear in some circles.   But that’s really all it is in most of them.   Just a convenient label the wearer hopes means I’m Really Not A Right Wing Asshole…Honest…

There are Lefty Libertarians.   They think government shouldn’t regulate business and shouldn’t regulate morality.   There are Right Wing Libertarians.   They think government shouldn’t regulate business and states should regulate morality but not the federal government since it had the unmitigated gall to desegregate the schools.   And then there are the Randoids.   Rand herself and her intellectual spawn Leonard Peikoff absolutely loathed the libertarians.     There are mixes and matches (call them mashups if you will…) of all three and then some.   There are almost certainly for example, John Birch Libertarians and John Birch Randoids.   Probably some of these shop at Whole Foods and look outwardly like hippies.

I like to think of it as that little corner of the Twilight Zone where which way is up depends on which ideology you’ve bought into.   The problem with all of these is they have very little interest in how things actually work, and why things can and do fail.   It’s all about the ideology.   So in one very real sense there isn’t much to practical difference between any of them.   But don’t try to tell a Lutheran that they’re more or less like an Episcopalian just with different vestments.

It’s going to be a fun decade, with the republicans leading the way to a political landscape where parties begin are more and more like religious movements, then conversations about how to…you know…actually govern…

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.

-Emo Philips, The Best God Joke Ever

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on this particular google search lately…for some reason…

robbie benson

When I first noticed it I got a tad scared that he’d suddenly passed away or something.   But no.   It seems the gods of Google are just favoring my little blog with hits from people, I assume they’re mostly girls, who think Robbie is very nice on the eyes.   I know the feeling.   I’m assuming they came here for this…

Yes…it’s a nice one.   So for all you folks who ratcheted up my hit count lately over this photo, I would like to take a moment to say thank you…

You’re welcome.

To the Verizon DSL user running Windows on their Mac (ugh!) who asked google today…

bruce garrett gay?

The answer would have to be…yes.   But you knew that after shuffling through all my episodes of A Coming Out Story I suppose.

I got a flyer in the mail today from Costco advising me to pre-order my Valentine’s Day flowers now, right next to an offer of $4 off on Splenda artificial sweetener.   It must be an omen.   So to the user whose google…

valentine’s day posters

…brought them here: Come back in February.   This year’s winner promises to be even more worthy then last year’s!   Here’s a wee sample of the awesomely fun time we have here during the annual Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!

Be sure to stop by then.   It’ll be Fun!

The great photographer Margaret Bourke-White once averred she became positively irrational if she couldn’t get a shot she wanted. I know the feeling, but I guess part of the reason I never became a professional photojournalist is I am too polite about it.

Case in point: I’m driving home from Orlando, up I-95, in the lost, lonely mood I usually am after vacationing in a spot where I’m likely to run into a lot of happy couples. It’s the morning after New Year’s Eve and it’s gray and cloudy and looking very, very somber, and I am driving back north away from the sunshine and warmth of Orlando and Disney World and back into the Baltimore Maryland cold. So I’m not feeling exactly cheerful.

As I drive through North Carolina, I see an abandoned motel to my right, that oddly has its front walls entirely removed. What you see is just the shells of the rooms behind the wall, like a lot of post office boxes with their doors torn off. The effect is of a stark hollowness.

No… I think to myself. It’s too obvious… But I can’t get the image out of my mind. I’m driving north and the miles are piling up and I just want to get back home and back to my nest and sulk for the last few remaining days of my vacation and maybe do a little housework. But I can’t get the damn thing out of my head. I even know Exactly the shot I want to get. I can picture it in my head clearly…picture exactly where I need to stand and what angle to shoot at and what my camera settings are.

No…no…it’s too obvious. And…I don’t want to go there. I’m feeling down enough as it is right now. Do I need to make myself feel worse? I think not. Damn…the sky is just right for that shot though. I’ve never seen a place with just its front wall torn off. Why the hell did they do that? It’s so damn odd… Be nice to just wander around it a bit. No…it’s probably fenced off. I’ll bet they have No Trespassing signs plastered everywhere. Do I want to get arrested in North Carolina? Seriously. Just let it go. Damn the sky is just right… Those gray clouds…just the right amount of sunlight up there. That scene really wants to be low contrast. I should just keep going. I don’t need to go there. I’m feeling miserable. Damn that sky is just right. If I stop some other trip it won’t be right. They might have the rest of it torn down by then. I should just keep going. There will be other shots like that one. I’ve never seen a place with just the front wall torn off like that. Do I really want to be wandering around a derelict building all by myself? It might be dangerous. Some thug might see me pull up in my Mercedes-Benz and decide to shoot me for my car and my camera and nobody would ever know what happened to me. Too dangerous. Why the hell did they just take down the front and leave the rest of it up? It’s so damn perfect. It’s like its bearing its empty heart to the sky. All those people who stayed inside, found warmth, shelter for the night, maybe a moment or two of love, and eventually they all left without a second thought and now it has nothing. The front wall was its face…and then the people left and its face fell away and all that’s left are the empty rooms open now to the sky. I should keep going. I don’t need this. I should turn around. Do I really want to go there? Darn it…I can’t let that one go… How far to the next exit…

Which by then was about 3 miles ahead of me and the motel in question about 12 miles behind. I did a loop back and on the way looked for some other possible shots in the landscape. And I found a few, which made me feel better about loosing travel time. There were two service roads paralleling the main Interstate where some lonely restaurants and strip shopping seemed to be barely holding on. I figured after I took a few shots at the abandoned motel I could drive up one of the service roads and get a few more of other stuff by the highway.

I actually had to drive past it again and loop back to find the correct exit. What apparently happened was a new highway was built nearby, cutting off the old exit by the motel, which killed its drive-by business. I had to go back to an exit a few miles in the other direction, and find the place where I could access the service road that led to it. There were few other surviving businesses along that road. A collection of self storage bins. Some odd pumping station whose purpose I had no idea. There were some empty highway billboards and a junk yard/auto body shop that looked like it had been picked over until nothing of value was left. Yet it seemed to still be in business. I wondered who got their work done there. Close by the motel was a trailer/RV park that actually seemed to still be doing a reasonably good business. It was called Sleepy Bear.

I have no idea what the abandoned motel next to it was called, but it was clear that its current owners wanted nobody getting near it. There was a huge, and I mean huge NO TRESPASSING sign right in front. The building itself was only partly fenced in however. Anyone could just walk onto the property from the street.

The service road dead-ended just past the motel, where the old highway interchange had been closed off. I wasn’t about to park in the lot. But there were some pull-offs just down the street that were off the property and I stopped Traveler there and popped the trunk. I took out the new camera, popped off the lens cap, adjusted the hood, switched on and checked my settings. I took a quick light reading. Then I wandered over.

Damn…that sign is big…

Okay…fine. They didn’t want me trespassing. I looked the site over to see if I could get the shot that had been so fixed in my mind the moment I laid eyes on the motel, without setting foot on the property.

Yes…I can do this…

But I was beginning to get the creeps. It was deathly silent all around me…gray and overcast and a tad chilly. Even the Interstate just a few dozen yards away was quiet, due to it being early New Years Day. All the revelers were sleeping it off. Only us lonely travelers on it now…just the occasional sound of a car going by was all there was.

I walked up to the fence along one side of the motel. I couldn’t take my eyes off the building. In a creepy sort of way it felt like it was looking back at me, through empty eyes…

Damn…they really did just yank the front walls off of everything here. WTF…???

I began to wonder if trespassing meant don’t go beyond the fence or if I was trespassing by simply walking up to it. I decided to just get my shots and skedaddle. This is why I am not a professional photojournalist. I am way too timid. The spirit of Weegee laughs at my timidity.

I couldn’t shoot through the fence…the chain link was too much in the way. So I raised my camera above my head and started shooting. The nice thing about a digital camera is you can see your shots instantly and know if your getting it. Every time I clicked the shutter the LCD display on the back of the camera showed what I had just taken. So I could adjust the camera angle a tad and take another…and so on until I had it. At one point, I knew I had the one I wanted…the one that said it. Whenever that happens, it’s like a little electric current goes through me from the camera. I swear.

I backed off and looked around some more. I felt something tempting me in. But I wasn’t going to risk getting arrested. I’d seen a little house down a private driveway next to the motel, and there were certainly people over at Sleepy Bear. As I walked back to Traveler I saw a truck towing a nice vacation trailer behind it drive away. I wondered if the driver noticed me. I walked briefly to the front of the motel again, near the sign but well on what I thought was its good side.

Damn…that sign is Big…

I fired off one more shot of the front of the motel and tarried with the idea of wandering around the front some more to see if there were any other good shots I could get from outside the fence. But something about that sign kept creeping me out.

They really mean it…

So I got back into Traveler, started up and headed back toward the Interstate. There were a couple other shots I’d seen as I made my way to the motel and as I approached one of them, a sign that said simply “Units Available” in front of a long lonely row of cookie-cutter identical self storage bins, I wondered if I could just stop my car in the middle of the road and take it from out the window, because it didn’t look like there was any usable shoulder to the road there. I didn’t want to get stuck. I was about a quarter mile away from the motel.

Suddenly I saw a police car coming at me from the opposite direction. It blew right past me and if it wasn’t doing at least 90 I am no judge of speed. There was nothing in the direction it was going, except Sleepy Bear, the little house behind the motel, and the motel, and the end of the road.

Damn! Damn! Did someone see me taking pictures and call the cops??? I wasn’t about to hang around and find out. Good thing I didn’t stick around… I decided to forgo getting my other shots and politely asked Traveler for triple digit velocity. Traveler happily obliged. I don’t think Das Auto likes being confined to American highway speeds. I had a couple tight curves to navigate but Traveler hunkered down over them and didn’t even flash the Electronic Stability Program light at me, and there wasn’t anyone else out on the roads just then except me and Mr. Policeman.

Good thing I didn’t have the camera hanging out the window… I figured the cop, if he was called out for a trespasser at the motel, would first check the area and only then would the thought cross their mind that perhaps the perp was in the car that they’d shot past like a bat out of hell. By then I’d be well down the Interstate and it would be a fifty-fifty shot at guessing whether I was going north or south, if I was even on the Interstate to begin with. I didn’t think anyone could have gotten my license plate, and at a distance all I would have seemed to be driving was a white compact car of some kind.

I slowed to legal speed when I got on the Interstate. I wasn’t about to get caught in a radar trap either and I had noticed a lot of them already that morning.

Probably they’d have let it go when they discovered the trespasser had left the scene. Why bother, right? Except…do you blast down the road like a bat out of hell just to nail a trespasser at an abandoned motel?

I wasn’t trespassing dammit. I stayed behind the damn fence. What is it with that place…?

I stressed about it all the way to the Virginia boarder. I took the memory card out of the camera and hid it so I could plausibly say, What…Who…Where…Huh if cornered. Except that people who wear their hearts on their sleeves like I do don’t make excellent liars.

The spirit of Weegee mocks my timidity. Did I take some pictures? You talkin to me? Yeah I took some fucking pictures…

Oh well. I got my shot and it was worth it…

Abandoned Motel – Lumberton, NC.

Dang…I wish I could wander around that site and get a few more shots. But I don’t think they want to let me…

So I’m looking through my server logs and I run across this google search string…

as by the gods how as by prayer do you petition the five sex groups as a knowledge part of Eden

Er?  What?  The five sex groups…?  That anything like the four food groups?

Everyone should get tested.  Just saying…

Via XKCD…

So I’m walking to class in one of my old Junior High Schools (they call them Middle Schools these days…).  The bad one.  The one I got bullied in so much I actually skipped out some days.  I had a hideout in the corner of one of the apartment building basements where the tenants could store things.  I’d found a storage bin that wasn’t being used and set up a bunch of big old cardboard boxes and some carpet and a flashlight in it, and brought in some books to read and on days when it was really bad I went and hid there until after school let out.  That was the only time in my life I ever skipped school, but some days it was just too much.  Surprisingly, nobody at the school ever questioned my occasional unexcused absences either.  In retrospect, it was of a piece with the administration’s lackadaisical attitude toward discipline.  Bullies at that school essentially had free reign.  Nobody was ever punished for picking on the smaller kids.  And sometimes I saw the smaller ones dragged into the principle’s office for fighting back.

Anyway…  So I’m walking to class in this Junior High School.  At least…I think it’s that one.  Something about it is different.  Odd.  The halls seem the same, and yet different somehow.  And then I realize I’m naked.  

You’ve all had this dream…right?  You’re in school and you’re naked and suddenly you realize that fact and you spend the rest of the dream dying of embarrassment.  I’m walking to class and I realize I’ve forgotten, somehow, to put my clothes on (maybe I’d just left gym class and forgot to dress after showering or something…) and now I’m trying hard to find my locker so I can put something on and then maybe…I dunno…flee the school or something.

But then I realize I’m dreaming and it gets odder.  Somehow I know that I’m dreaming and I’m walking in the geek wing of the school…where all the geek kids go.  And what is more, it’s the geek wing in a school where everyone goes when they’re dreaming about being back in school.  So I’m walking down the hall without a stitch on and trying not to make eye contact with anyone, and I see another kid walk past me the other way also trying not to make eye contact, and he’s only wearing his pajamas, and I’m thinking Okay…that kid’s having an "I’m in school in my pajamas" dream.  Then along comes another kid with her hair a really gross shade of green and I’m thinking She’s having her Bad Hair Day In School dream.  Another kid is struggling with his locker door and I think He’s having a Can’t Remember My Locker Combination And I Have A Final In Two Minutes dream…

Eventually I get to the door to my classroom and I see a rack of towels beside it with a sign that says Naked Dream – Self Serve, and I grab one and wrap it around my waist, walk inside and sit down to take a test.  Nobody pays me the slightest attention as I walk to my desk.  After I woke up I couldn’t recall what the test was about.

My dreams get like this sometimes.  Really.  In some Twilight Zone dream school there is a wing where all the geek kids go to have their tormented dreams about school.  But the administration provides towels.  So maybe it’s where uncaring school principles and teachers are sent to try and make amends. 

A huge meat eating plant has been discovered in the Philippines…

A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.

The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.

There’s a photo of it on the BBC site.  I used to grow pitcher plants and Venus fly traps, but these kinds of plants don’t take well to the Mid-Atlantic climate (they are tropical plants mostly) and I gave it up.  But this one seems to grow at high altitudes which can’t be all that hot.  Be nice if we could get it to grow in here in Baltimore.  I could grow a bunch of them around my garden and not have to worry about rats going after my bird feeders.

…the Japanese ones anyway.

Niigata Bust Pudding from Japan

Nothing more appropriate for our blog than sexy things you can eat. Japanese brand Niigata makes a pudding packaged inside a pair of tits with some caramel dipping sauce. YUHMM

I’m guessing the pudding tastes like spackling compound so they packaged it in a cup that looks like a female’s breast on the theory that sex can sell anything, even pudding that tastes like spackling compound.  But who knows…maybe it’s perfectly decent pudding and some guys just like having it served to them in little tit shaped cups.  I’m still trying to figure out that inflatable tits in a box for boys thing…

I have this quirky sense of humor that (I think) alternately charms and appalls my friends.  The problem with being a nerd is you never quite know for sure when you’ve taken it too far until your friends are giving you that Oh Do Grow Up look again.  There is some subtle social sensibility you are missing, which prevents you from stumbling across the line from smart and funny into dumb and annoying. 

I have to admit…I was tempted when I saw This.  Oh…very tempted…

Novelty Bavarian Lederhosen With Yodeling Frankfurter Controls: Hurry!

Each 6-inch tall plastic pair of Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen is activated by an infrared remote control knockwurst.  Press the button and the self propelled Lederhosen hops around and sings a merry yodel.

You can have your very own Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen for $19.49.  Requires two AAA batteries.  Knockwurst remote control operates your Lederhosen to within 10 feet.

He’d probably never speak to me again…

Via SLOG.  Poor little guy just couldn’t wait for Oktoberfest…

Drunk badger blocks traffic

Road kill reported by a driver in the German state of Lower Saxony turned out to be a drunk badger taking a nap, police in Goslar reported on Wednesday morning.

Late on Monday night, a driver reported what he thought was a dead animal on county road 32 near Groß Döhren to police.

But when officers arrived on the scene to remove the traffic obstruction, they were stunned to find that the animal was not dead or injured.

“Right in the middle of the street there was a badger sitting and staring at the officers incredulously,” a police statement said.

The officers quickly discovered that the animal – which was not frightened by their presence – had been snacking on the overripe cherries on a nearby tree.

“The animal’s belly digested the fruit to alcohol and the badger was, as the saying goes, ‘drunk as a blackbird’,” the statement said, adding that the little mammal was also suffering from “diarrhoea containing cherry pits.”

Officers directed the badger off of the road, where he could “sleep off his intoxication in a meadow.”

–The Local, Germany

Well of course they let it go on its way.  Who wants to arrest a badger for public drunkenness?  You’d get your hands chewed off.

Good thing it was the happy peaceful kind of drunk and not the loud belligerent kind.  Just imagine walking home from a night out at the bars and suddenly encountering a drunken pissed off badger…

So I get to work, and immediately after settling into my office, go wash my hands before I touch anything on my desk.  I mean…since I’ve had to touch all the door knobs on the way to my desk.  And as I’m washing, I’m thinking…

Remember Y2K?  Remember how it turned out to be no big deal after all.  That wasn’t because it wasn’t any big deal.  It actually was.  If nothing had been done, guarantee you nothing would have worked by the time the calendar rolled over to the year 2000.  Actually, things would have begun to fail Much sooner, since all the programs that calculate things like morgages and car loans and credit card exparation dates would have begun to fail years ahead of Y2K.  But never mind that.  If nothing had been fixed, nothing would have worked.  We computer professionals took the warnings seriously, and got to work, and Fixed The Problem.  And when the magic night came along, it wasn’t much of a problem after all.  Thanks to us.  And what did we get for our trouble?  A lot of grief about how we’d scared the whole damn world for nothing.

Now it’s Swine Flu.  Excuse me…Industrial…Pig Farm…Flu.   Everybody’s gotten the message.  A Dangerous Flu Is Spreading…  Take Precautions…  Be Alert…  Good Hygiene Is The Best Defense…  Suppose it works.  Suppose that enough people take the message about good hygiene seriously enough, and government health agencies take the threat seriously enough, that this flu does not spread so rapidly, and not so many people die of it.  Will we all say afterward that the threat was overblown?

Yeah…probably…