Via Sullivan…

On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.

A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc…

Therein follows many months of building a house, raising livestock, planting gardens, realizing he needs to mine his own salt, needs not one but three cows (one for milk for butter, one for the beef, one for rennet for  the cheese)…and so on…

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society…

Some would say that’s a good reason not to have a post-agrarian society. I strongly disagree. Never mind steel and integrated circuits. The Industrial Revolution gave us Cheeseburgers.

Ayn Rand placed the dollar sign as the iconic symbol of capitalism and the Industrial age…proof I submit, that the lady had no art in her soul. She should have made it the cheeseburger. Seriously. When her and Owen Kellogg left the abandoned train at the end of part two, instead of revealing himself as an agent of the strike by pulling out a cigarette with a dollar sign on it, he should have started snarfing down a cheeseburger from Hugh Akston’s diner. That newstand at the end of chapter three should have been a burger joint and the old man reminiscing about when they made burgers out of real meat and cheese, not collectivist tofu and soy.  He should have said to Dagny Taggart, “I like to think of burgers held in a man’s hand. Big fat juicy ones dripping with cheddar cheese and mustard.  Food, a dangerous force, served with a side of fries and maybe also a dollip of coleslaw…” At the end of the book John Galt could trace the outline of a cheeseburger in the sky.

Why am I here?   What is my destiny?

We ask these questions naturally.   And as we grow up we are given answers.   We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now.   How it was mom and dad met.   How it was we ourselves came to be.   And when we are young, we do not question them.   They become unconsciously part of the bedrock of our lives.

And sometimes…sometimes…some few of us when we are older, look back upon those answers and discover that they make no sense.

I was born in California, to a mother who had traveled there shortly after her father had passed away. That is the basic fact of my life.   Mom grew up, was born and raised in Greensburg Pennsylvania.   But I was born in Pasadena California, and raised in Maryland after mom divorced dad and moved here.   And it’s only been recently, now in my fifties, that I’ve looked at that and wondered.   She was born and raised in Greensburg, and yet suddenly her and her mother uproot themselves in the late 1940s and move clear across the country to live somewhere they knew practically nobody.   And when she divorced dad, her and her mother moved back across the country again.   And it wasn’t back to their childhood home they moved, but once again to somewhere else that they knew practically nobody.

Well even when I was a small child I often wondered about that.   And always when I asked, I got the same story.

Mom’s father had died she said, from a series of massive strokes, back in a time when medicine could do little for stroke victims.   The event had disturbed her deeply.   She moved to California she said, because she could not bear to live in the house she had grown up in, because the memories of the events of her father’s death were too traumatic.

Mom’s emotional life during that period was rough.   Before her father died mom had loved a man, a navy man, who had gone to war.   It was world war II.   He was Jewish and, she told me, her father had not particularly liked Jews.   But, she said, he had come to know the man she loved and that had changed him.   He had eventually come to like this man, Morris she said his name was, and as time went on approved of their love.

Then one day, so she always said, he had come back from the war changed, disturbed.   Her beloved sailor had been on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended.   His ship she said, became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it from the atomic bomb.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.

So her relationship with her sailor came undone.   Morris’ family, she said, had taken him off to a mental hospital.   She never saw him again.   And then her father had his stroke.   He lingered horribly, for months incapacitated, unable to do anything for himself, unable to speak or even feed himself.   After six months of it he had another stroke and died.

Mom said that afterward her dreams tormented her.   In the way people did back then, before the funeral his body had laid in rest in a coffin situated right in the living room of the house.   Family and friends had held the service for him right there in the house.   That was common in those days.   Mom said that afterward she had dreams of her father rising out of his casket, and walking up the stairs to her room.

After her father was laid to rest, her mother sold the house, and also his nice cabin in the woods in the hills of Pennsylvania.   That cabin was a special memory of hers….of summer months spent there with her father and the family, her dog Jigs, and all her childhood friends from Greensburg.   Sweet childhood memories.   She would tell me fondly of the summer months spent there.   She loved that cabin, and was for the rest of her life sorry that it had been sold.   The new owners had left a fire burning on a stove…the cabin had no electricity…and it had burned down.

But they had to leave Greensburg, mom always said, because she could no longer bear to be in the house she grew up in.   During the war her younger brother, Dean, had found work in California, and so mom and grandma left Greensburg and traveled to California to live near him.   Grandma bought a house in Pasadena, presumably with what she had gotten from the sale of the house and the cabin.   They moved close to where her brother lived.   And one day they traveled to Catalina Island, and there, on the pier in Avalon, she met dad.   They married, and soon they had a son.   Me.

That is the story I was always told.   It is the story of how I came to be.   And now I look at it, and it makes no sense.

My grandfather, who I never met, who mom always told me because I took an interest in electronics and technology that I took so much after him, had two nice homes, and a business.   And after his death they sold it all, and simply left everything they had, everyone they knew, and moved across the country to a new place where they knew nobody but her brother and his wife.   Because mom could not bear to live in the house where she grew up.

Really?

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and now I look at this story and it makes no sense.   Maybe everything happened just for the reasons she said it did…but now that I look at it with the experience of my own adulthood I can’t escape the feeling that some important piece or pieces are missing.   Perhaps to understand my doubt you need to understand something I do and maybe you don’t: what the distances we’re talking about here seemed like back in the day before cheap jet air travel and the Internet.

I am old enough to have glimpsed the last days of the great passenger trains.   When I was a kid, most people didn’t travel by air…that was for rich people.     And in their day passenger air travel would have been burdensome even if you were rich.   Before the first Boeing 707s passenger airplanes were propeller things that took much longer to go from coast to coast.   Nearly everyone back then traveled by bus or by train.   Train mostly for the longer distance trips if you could afford it.   It took days, not hours, to go from coast to coast.   So any sort of travel from the east coast to the west wasn’t just a trivial thing back then.   If you traveled far away, let alone moved, you just about fell off the planet as far as your family and friends back home were concerned.   You might send a postcard or two back home…   Having a wonderful time, wish you were here… You sure wouldn’t phone home.   Way too expensive.   Back then long distance phone calls were an expensive luxury.   Postal mail had two grades…regular and air mail.   You sent letters by air mail if you wanted them to get there in a couple days.   Otherwise it might be weeks to get something from clear across the country.   The highways and the rails where how most people and everything including mail traveled.

So if you went on a cross-country trip you were on another planet until you came back home.   And then it was everyone gathered around while you showed your snapshots and told your stories of the far away place you’d been to.   To actually go live on the other side of the country, well, you might as well have moved overseas.   It’s hard to grasp now, but that is how it would have been for my mom and her mother back then.   When they left Greensburg they didn’t just go move to a neighboring town…they didn’t even move to a neighboring state.   They moved about as far away from Greensburg as they could and still remain in the lower 48.

Now I’m grown up and I look at this and wonder…did she not have any roots there?   I know she had a job there for a brief period at an architectural firm…she used to tell me about working with the ammonia stench of the old blueprint machines.   And…she had friends there.   I know because he spoke of them, but not often.   There were a few she kept in correspondence with.   They were friends she never saw again.   After mom passed away I was given a stack of her old correspondence, but there were no letters to her from her Greensburg friends among them.

And there is this…as I grew up I just accepted the constant tension that was in the family.   It was just part of the background noise.   But she was the apple of her father’s eye…daddy’s girl.   That is the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even the ones who later cut her out of the family.   I have albums of the photos her father took of her…he was, like me, an amateur   photographer.   The photos all show a beautiful young girl, posed in various scenes in and around the house and the cabin.

He loved her very much.   And she loved him very much.   If there is anything I am certain of it is this.   But throughout my own childhood there was tension between her and the rest of her family…all except her younger brother Dean and one cousin.   It was a tension I always put down to her marrying my father, who they all despised.   But looking back on all of it now it just seems to me that the tension had to be caused by more then that.   Something more must have happened to her to make her mother take her away from the town they both grew up in, and had spent their entire lives in.   Whatever caused the friction in that side of my family tree, it started well before mom met dad at the pier in Avalon.

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and while I don’t think of myself as worldly I am old enough now to understand some things better that I could not have while I was growing up.   She had a life in Greensburg.   She had friends, family, community.   And so did her mother.   Greensburg was their home.   They were both born and raised there.   It was where everything and everyone they had ever known was.   And I was told they sold everything, their house and the cabin, and left it all for California.   Because mom could not bear to stay in the house she had grown up in after her father had died.

It makes no sense.   They could have bought another house.   Surely whatever trauma mom experienced she’d have needed her friends.   Surely grandma would have had friends of her own there as well to help her through the death of her husband.   In an age before cell phones and cheap long distance, when letters took days to arrive from the next state over, let alone clear across the country, and when long distance cross-country phone calls were so expensive people would gather around the telephone at the appointed time to wait for the call, to move from one end of the country to another would have been like moving to another planet.   They’d have both given up everything they knew, everyone they knew, to literally start life all over again in California.   Because granddad died of a stroke?

No.   Just…no.   It makes no sense.

I am not on friendly terms with that side of the family anymore…not that I ever really was.   Except for uncle Dean nobody was really nice to me.   I was my father’s son, and they despised him and I was living evidence of that marriage they all hated.   I had his face.   At various times when it was useful to them, and particularly to grandma, I was told I had all his bad traits too.   Did I talk too much?   Well he’s his fathers son isn’t he.   Did I forget to do my homework?   That’s his dad in him.   Was I too proud of something I had accomplished?   A piece of artwork?   A good grade in school?   His dad was vain like that.   Did I a get a bad mark in class?   His dad was shiftless like that.   Stubborn?   His father’s blood obviously.   Whatever I ever did that was wrong, it was always because I was my father’s son.   I got used to it.   By the time I was seventeen and began to realize my homosexuality, I already had a lifetime of training in coping with being hated for something I was that I couldn’t help being. So it wasn’t all for nothing.

The only one who really took an interest in me was uncle Dean.   Mom and he always got along great, and I have lived to regret I grew up on the east and not the west coast where I could have been near him and away from the others.   Whatever it was that was the cause of so much tension in the family, her brother Dean was never bothered by it, or blamed her for it.   Shortly after mom passed away, I took a trip out to California and visited my aunt Cleone, uncle Dean’s wife, and she told me something that shocked me enough to make me pretty much divorce myself, finally and forever from that side of the family.   She said one of my cousins, a daughter of mom’s oldest brother Wayne, an uptight right wing jackass, had told mom after Wayne passed away that mom would not be allowed a grave in the family plot in the Greensburg cemetery.   I put it down to their hatred of dad, but it made me furious.   It still makes me furious to think about it.   So I’ve pretty much disconnected myself from that branch of the family tree entirely.

Whatever they thought of mom, she was a good mother to me, and a thoroughly decent person.   She set a good example for her son.   After she passed away people in the town she had retired to would come up to me…people I didn’t know from Adam…and tell me what a ray of sunshine she was everywhere she went.   That wasn’t an act…I grew up with it, it was her.   It made me absolutely furious how that side of the family treated her…all except her brother Dean and her cousin who lived in the small Virginia town she retired to.   He cousin also loved her very much.   Her older brother and the rest of that family, not so much.   And me…I’m living evidence that mom married a man they all hated.   So I can get no answers from them, and I wouldn’t trust any I got now if I asked.

I had always, until now, put the family static down to her marrying dad.   But now I look at it and it just seems so…wrong…so incomplete an explanation.   Was that really all of it?   I don’t know, but I am certain now that there is something that I was never told, because the story makes no sense.   You just don’t pack up and leave everything, even over such a traumatic experience as your father dying of a lingering illness.   Something happened.

Dad, let it be said, had…issues of his own.   The marriage didn’t last.   Mom loved him to the day she died, but the marriage didn’t work.   Mom divorced dad when I was two, and she and grandma took me and moved back across the country…but not back to Greensburg.   They moved to Washington D.C., to live near mom’s cousin, who was living there at the time.   She got a job as a clerk for the Yellow pages.   We lived in a series of small apartments.   Whatever money they had from the sales of the house in Greensburg, the cabin, granddad’s business, and the house in Pasadena, somehow was all gone.   I grew up in a very low budget household, being raised by a single working mother, in a time when women made about 60 cents for every dollar a man doing the same job made.   Mom’s family in Pennsylvania made no effort whatever to help her out.   It was something I took for granted as a child…but now it really stands out.   I’m having a hard time now believing that was all because of her marrying dad.   They basically shut her out.

But not grandma.   Someday maybe I’ll write about what growing up was like with that cold constantly angry, fire and brimstone Yankee Baptist women in the house.   Somehow she remained a bridge between mom and I and the rest of that side of the family, and a powerful force in it.   She stayed by mom’s side from the time granddad died to the day she died, but at times it seemed to me more to punish her daughter then support her as she tried to raise a kid by herself in a 1950s/1960s world that regarded single divorced women with children as less worthy of respect then prostitutes.   I never saw grandma smile, unless it was at the misfortune of others.   When bad luck struck other people it always seemed to satisfy her somehow.   And I remained a favorite target until the day she died, because I had the face, and the last name, of the man she hated.   Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap was her favorite name for me.

And me…I grew up with next to nothing, but I never really noticed that until I got older.   I was fed on a bland, low budget diet but I never went to bed hungry.   I often wore hand me downs but I never left the house in dirty clothes.   I never saw mom cheat another person, lie to them or say anything about them behind their back that she wouldn’t have said to their face.   I never once heard her utter a curse word or saw her take a drink or light up a cigarette.   When I was a kid the first time I ever saw someone else’s mother smoking it shocked me…I didn’t think mothers did that.   Mom sat down with me and my homework, tried her best to teach me right from wrong, and always encouraged my creative impulses.   We didn’t have much, but I had what I needed to grow up on:   I never doubted mom’s love.   Never.   Grandmas hate, and the disdain of most of that side of my family, I just accepted as part of the background noise.   The love of a good mother can give a kid all he needs to stand up to whatever static life brings his way.

How her older brother, various other members of that side of the family, and especially her own mother treated her is something that some days makes me livid to think about, and others completely baffles me.   She really was that ray of sunshine everywhere she went, a completely decent person and a good mother.   Some of my childhood friends had horrible parents.   Everyone told me how nice mine was.   Everyone.   It wasn’t an act.   Yet her own family, with one or two exceptions, treated her miserably.   I never once heard her complain.   At least, not when I was there to hear it.   Mostly the family tension was just there in the background.   Always there.   Something I just shrugged off whenever I thought about it.   Mom loved me, that was all that mattered.   The only time it burst out into the open in my presence, was when I was 16 and they discovered she had started seeing dad again.   It was like being in the center of a nuclear blast.     But that incident centered on dad.   That they hated him does not really explain it all.

Something happened.   Something more then just her marrying dad.   Something that made them leave Greensburg and everything and everyone they knew, and when her marriage failed, prevented them from returning.   Something her family, other then her brother Dean and her cousin, never forgave her for.   Probably I’ll never know what it was.   Mom never strayed from the story.   Nobody else did either.

[Edited some for clarity, and add a few details that I missed occurred to me…]

[Geek Alert…]

I’ve been on a roll fixing up and beautifying the front and back yards here at Casa del Garrett.   Among other items, I bought four solar powered Tiki torches for the backyard.   They’re pretty simple devices consisting of a solar power cell and two led lights that flicker alternately inside a plastic cup.   The effect mimics a lighted torch well enough and I think they add a nice touch to the backyard.   The other day one of them failed.

It was always the last one to come on at night and I wondered if the rechargeable batteries in it just needed replacing.   So the first thing I did was put some alkalines in it as a test.   Nada.   I checked its internal wiring.   The things were Very inexpensive to buy and inside it showed why.   Just a postage stamp sized circuit board, a double-a battery compartment, a nice looking solar power cell and a smaller cell that looked as if it were a CDS light sensor for switching the torch on and off.   The parts were simply hot glued into place and the wires connecting everything were a gauge somewhere between hair and paper width.   I got out a magnifying glass and looked the connections over with some difficulty as it was hard to see how good they were under the hot glue globs.   But nothing seemed obviously broken.

As I said, they were cheap.   So I figured I’d go buy two more (they come in pairs) and then I’d have one spare in case one of the others failed.   Having bought the last two boxes of these on the shelves at the Lowes in Cockeysville, I figured I’d need to try one of the other stores.   So this evening after work I drove to the one in White Marsh so I could swing by Costco for some gasoline.   But that Lowes was out of stock on those particular Tiki torches.   So I began to wonder if each store only got a couple boxes of those at the start of the season and was I chasing an item that was sold out all over the area by now.

I came back home and considered ordering new ones online. But the ornery techno geek in me nagged at me to look inside the broken torch one more time.   It’s a simple device dammit…I ought to be able to fix it… So I brought it in and took it to the art room drafting table and opened it up.   I got out the multi-meter (you have one of those…right?   Every home should have a multi-meter…) and fairly quickly determined several things.

First, the rechargeable batteries were in perfectly good shape, as I’d expected since replacing them with some stock alkalines didn’t make any difference.   Second, the solar power cell in those things, cheap as they are, are Very Nice and were putting out more then enough voltage to keep the batteries charged.   After the batteries, my suspicions fell on the other small cell that looked like a light sensor.   Here was where I reached way back into my past for knowledge of how camera light meters work.   It looked to my eye like your basic CDS cell…Cadmium-Sulfide…a photo-resistor.   Unlike the older selenium cell meters, which generate a precise voltage based on the amount of light falling on them, CDS cells change in resistance.   Their advantage was they worked better and more precisely in lower light conditions.   What was extra nice about them back in the day was if you forgot and left the camera’s light meter on, putting the lens cap on or just putting the camera away in darkness somewhere would protect the battery because a CDS cell goes to maximum resistance when there is no light falling on it, so it’s basically turned the circuit off.

…which is pretty much what makes them useful as light sensors for turning off and on stuff when night falls.   They can act like a simple on-off switch.   The leads coming off the CDS cell in my Tiki torch were buried under a glob of hot glue so I traced the wires back to the circuit board and took an ohm reading there with a piece of black electricians tape across the cell blocking the light out.   It should have read max ohms but it read like a short.   So the cell was defective.

I clipped the wires leading to it and the torch lit up.   I stripped the ends and touched them together and the torch turned off again.   So now I can either put a micro-switch in place of the CDS cell or see if I can find another CDS cell to replace the failed one with.   This thing is so cheaply built you just know the concept it represents is throw it in the landfill when it breaks or you get tired of it whichever comes first.   Had I found a replacement I’d have probably just scavenged the solar cell and the LEDs and tossed the rest out.   The solar cell is a nice one.   But fixing it leaves me with a degree of geeky self-satisfaction.   In a world of cheap mass-market throw it away goods I am not completely helpless.

[Edited a tad…]

[Update…]   I see from their online catalog I can buy little CDS cells in packs of five for a little less then four dollars at Radio Shack.   So tonight I’ll check the one in my neighborhood.

So it occurs to me while having to restart both the iPad and iPhone this morning to get them responsive again, that either Murphy’s Law applies to software systems too, ie: software increases in complexity to its level of incompetence, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to software, in a sense: with every upgrade, chaos always increases…

So…yes…I Twitter. I’m coming to find that the running Tweet list is a really great way to stay informed and pick up on interesting conversations. Of course, it all depends on who you’re following. Follow a bunch of vacant celebrities and you get nothing but vacant celebrity babble. But follow people like Atrios, Ezra Klien, Rachel Maddow, Krugman and such and you get a really absorbing mix of real time chatter. And there are celebrities who are worth following: George Takei, Eddie Izzard, Christopher Walken (Although he doesn’t tweet much anymore…)

So…anyway…I tweet. And I watch. Mostly I watch. And during last night’s nightly bout of insomnia I saw this from Myth Buster Grant Imahara…

…and the first thing that crossed my mind was Who are Lanikai and Mahalo and why haven’t I read their stories? I have tons of yaoi here at Casa del Garrett and I have never heard of these characters that are supposedly so popular.   However, the concept of “starter ukes” is…intriguing…

What a starter uke might look like…

What I don’t get is why Shuichi didn’t make the list.   In my opinion he’d make an excellent starter uke, provided you could handle his mood swings…

Now that I’m offically a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists my bi-weekly cartoon chores for Baltimore OUTLoud will be taking on some additional tasks.   I need to be more punctual about updating the cartoon page here for one thing.   OUTLoud will be carrying my cartoons on their page soon, and I can now create a small space of my own on the AAEC web site.   Since I don’t do this as my primary occupation, I am an “associate” member, not a “regular” one.   The difference is regular members get to vote in the board elections and post their cartoons in the main cartoon space.   I don’t begrudge them that…those folks are trying to earn a living in an economy that is very bad for cartoonists of any sort, let alone editorial cartoonists.

I’ve no illusions now about ever earning a living by my artwork alone.   I’m just not that competitive a soul for one thing.   But also, my cartoons can get brutal.   My aim isn’t merely to provoke…I have always believed that political cartoons are best when the artist takes a passionate stand for (or against, but mostly for) something.   But that’s not a selling point to newspaper editors in today’s climate…

More over at The Cartoon Page.

Evan Hurst says he’s listening to Queensrÿche tonight because he’s a category-defiant gay.   When my first grade teacher called me defiant I should have insisted she prepend that term with “Category”…   Oh no Miss Kiefer…I am Category Defiant… A good way to make her hate me even more was to let her know I knew more words then the other kids…

A Random 10

(Open iTunes or your iPod app, go to your songs list, select Shuffle and list the first ten songs that pop up…)

1. “Career March” – The Apartment, Adolph Deutsch
2. “Sound of Thunder” – Duran Duran
3. “Reflections of Earth – Epcot: Tapestry of Dreams, Gavin Greenaway
4. “Hit The Ground Runnin'” – Lie To Me, Jonny Lang
5. “Goliath” – David and Bathsheba, Alfred Newman
6. “$100 Understanding” – Happy Ending, Michel Legrand
7. “Jeux d’ enfants” – Bizet
8. The Rite of Spring, Part II, The Exalted Sacrifice – Igor Stravinsky
9. “Freedom” – The Best of Jimi Hendrix
10. “Cutting Edge” – The Brave Little Toaster, David Newman

No kidding…one minute its Enter Sandman and the next its Wichita Lineman…

[Edited a tad…]

Oh look…a message from the Social Security Administration asking me to review my annual statement which they have helpfully enclosed as a ZIP attachment.     Three messages actually.   Addressed to three different mail accounts of mine.   One comes from…

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person:                 Denis Shatskikh
address:               per. Kupyansky 7, Voronezh, Russia
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% Information related to '212.232.0.0/20AS13178'

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One from rcdelectric.com and one from…

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descr:                   SKYBroadband
origin:                 AS23944
mnt-by:                 MAINT-PH-SKYBB8
changed:               cmgalicia@skycable.com 20100226
source:                 APNIC

role:                 Vanessa Maria Dolores Bueno
address:           409 P.Guevarra Street cor Ibanez San Juan City
country:           PH
phone:               +63-2-6369276
e-mail:             vcbueno@skycable.com
admin-c:           VMDB1-AP
tech-c:             VMDB1-AP
nic-hdl:           VMDB1-AP
mnt-by:             MAINT-SKYBB8-PH
changed:           hm-changed@apnic.net 20080521
source:             APNIC
changed:           hm-changed@apnic.net 20080521

I had no idea the Social Security Administration used the services of so many different companies to stay in touch with its account holders.   The enclosed ZIPs didn’t set off my anti-virus software either.   No I didn’t open them.

Also, a notice from DHL about the package I must have forgotten that I ordered…

The courier company was not able deliver your parcel by your address.

You may pickup the parcel at our post office personality,

The shipping label is attached to this e-mail.

Please print this label to get this package at our post office.

This one comes from the DHL offices at…

inetnum:               95.84.32.0 - 95.84.63.255
netname:               SAN
descr:                   Network of Saratov branch of OJSC "Volgatelecom"
country:               RU
admin-c:               AVB35-RIPE
tech-c:                 AVB35-RIPE
status:                 ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by:                 MNT-SAN
source:                 RIPE # Filtered

person:                 Alexey V Bogdanov
address:               JSC "VolgaTelecom", Saratov Branch Office
address:               Mirny pereulok 11/13 410000 Saratov Russia
e-mail:                 avb@san.ru
phone:                   +7 8452 757575
nic-hdl:               AVB35-RIPE
source:                 RIPE # Filtered

% Information related to '95.84.0.0/18AS39229'

route:                   95.84.0.0/18
descr:                   SAN route object
origin:                 AS39229
mnt-by:                 mnt-san
source:                 RIPE # Filtered

Another ZIP attachment that didn’t set off my anti-virus.     Also…I got an email greeting card! From my dearest anonymous friend at…

inetnum:           117.192.0.0 - 117.255.255.255
netname:           BSNLNET
descr:               NIB (National Internet Backbone)
descr:               Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited
descr:               8th Floor,148-B,Statesman House, Barakhamba Road, descr: New Delhi-110001
country:           IN
admin-c:           NC83-AP
tech-c:             CDN1-AP
remarks:           IP Addresses for Multiplay network
remarks:           -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
remarks:           This object can only be updated by APNIC hostmasters.
remarks:           To update this object, please contact APNIC
remarks:           hostmasters and include your organisation's account
remarks:           name in the subject line.
remarks:           -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
changed:           hm-changed@apnic.net 20070801
mnt-by:             APNIC-HM
mnt-lower:       MAINT-IN-DOT
status:             ALLOCATED PORTABLE
source:             APNIC

role:                     NS Cell
address:               Internet Cell
address:               Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited
address:               8th Floor,148-B Statesman House
address:               Barakhamba Road, New Delhi - 110 001
country:               IN
phone:                   +91-11-23734057
phone:                   +91-11-23710183
fax-no:                 +91-11-23734052
e-mail:                 hostmaster@sancharnet.in
e-mail:                 abuse@bsnl.in
admin-c:               CGMD1-AP
tech-c:                 DT197-AP
nic-hdl:               NC83-AP
mnt-by:                 MAINT-IN-DOT
changed:               dnwplg@sancharnet.in 20030120
changed:               hm-changed@apnic.net 20071227
source:                 APNIC

role:                 CGM Data Networks
address:           CTS Compound
address:           Netaji Nagar
address:           New Delhi- 110 023
country:           IN
phone:               +91-11-24106782
phone:               +91-11-24102119
fax-no:             +91-11-26116783
fax-no:             +91-11-26887888
e-mail:             dnwplg@sancharnet.in
e-mail:             hostmaster@sancharnet.in
admin-c:           CGMD1-AP
tech-c:             DT197-AP
tech-c:             BH155-AP
nic-hdl:           CDN1-AP
mnt-by:             MAINT-IN-DOT
changed:           dnwplg@sancharnet.in 20030120
changed:           hm-changed@apnic.net 20071227
source:             APNIC

This one did set off the anti-virus.   Project managers take note: this is what happens when you outsource your software development projects to India.   Outsource to the Russians instead, they’re Much Better.   And you can trust them now that they’re not communists anymore!

This morning, after weeks of cleaning and re-cleaning, I think my pen finally forgave me.

Mom may have known she was raising a little geek when in 1959 she asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I told her I wanted a fountain pen.   I was six, and I’d seen a teacher using one and was fascinated by it.   I got my fountain pen, a Sheaffer sized for a child’s hand, and I’ve been writing with them ever since.

Fountain pens are archaic, fussy, finicky things.   But the graphic artist in me (I still draw and sketch with the “traditional” tools of pencil, pen and paper) loves their tactile feel.   And they have one supreme advantage over all other handwriting implements: they will, over time, break in to your particular way of holding a pen…customizing themselves to your own unique handwriting.   The disadvantage though is you cannot then ever loan yours to someone else, particularly if you write with a light touch and they with a heavy one, because the moment they us your pen it will never be right in your hand again.   Ever.   Ask me how I know.

They have other disadvantages, mostly being that they’re high maintenance things.   You are always cleaning and refilling them…a process that becomes a ritual after a while.   And they tend to form a fondness for a particular brand of ink, so should that brand become unavailable, or changes its formulation, your pen will complain bitterly in its own way (skip… skip… skip…) for weeks if not months, until you hit on a substitute it finds acceptable.   Some weeks ago, having run out of my pen’s preferred brand (Parker, black) and not finding any at the usual places, I let a pen store salesman talk me into a substitute.   I won’t name it here, each individual fountain pen is unique enough that what doesn’t work in one can work very well in another regardless of make.   The pen that shipped from the factory right beside mine might adore that brand of ink for all I know.   But it took me weeks of cleaning and re-cleaning my pen to get it to forgive me.   Yes, yes…I promise to feed you the Exact ink you want dear…

It’s a Mont Blanc 149.   I bought it in 1979 for a figure I was embarrassed to say to anyone and still am somewhat.     It took me months of saving to be able to afford it…at the time I was a mail room clerk for a data processing company…and what is worse, on a scale of 1 to 10 my handwriting is 11 in awfulness.   But my hands are finicky about their tools and my drawing/writing hand knew…it knew…the moment it held one at the Fahrney’s on F Street in Washington…that was The One.   I go through the technical pens I use for drawing like crazy because they don’t make them to last, and the nibs wear oddly enough that it doesn’t take long for me to feel uncomfortable drawing with one.   Wish I could find a good source for nibs for the dip pens I used to use…but don’t get me started…

Some years after I bought the 149 I bought a Parker Duofold that I like very much, and still occasionally use.   But…the 149 is My Pen.   I checked recently and the thing sells for Many hundreds more now then it did back then so I’m not sure I would buy one now.   Like the Mercedes alas, it’s a status symbol.   But that is not why I bought it.   Materialism is when you want something just to have it…as if the having of it makes you too an object of worship.   An enthusiast uses what they buy, takes pleasure in the experience of human excellence.   You are not the worshiped, but the worshiper.   It’s not commerce, it’s art.

This last trip to Disney World found me hitting the Grand Mariner Orange Slushie stand in Epcot France and the Frozen Margarita stand in Epcot Mexico the moment I entered the park.   The stresses of my life at this stage of it are making it increasingly hard to just…relax…and enjoy myself without some form of self-medication.   It worries me.   But the worry is itself becoming more and more vague.   I’m starting not to care about my health anymore.

Anyway…I saw this graph which perked me up a tad…

My college experiences were So Different from most of the other kids…     Who the hell even thinks they can down 10 drinks in a sitting, let alone that it would take that much for them to start puking their guts out?   Anyway, the first thing I noticed about the graph is it Starts at five drinks.

So…I’m still cool.   Five drinks and I am, not kidding, on the floor.   If my end point is where everyone else is just getting started then I’m not doing so bad.

This today from The London Telegraph…

Cleverest women are the heaviest drinkers

Women who went to university consume more alcohol than their less-highly-educated counterparts, a major study has found.

You don’t say…

I have often wondered about the relationship of intelligence to recreational drug use…and let’s be serious here, alcohol and tobacco are merely legal ones.   Sherlock Holmes did cocaine because his mind couldn’t stand being without a problem to solve.     I’ll go down to my household bar and humidor whenever Mr. Logical…

…this guy, if you’ve been reading A Coming Out Story, becomes too much to deal with.

The only cocktail I know how to reliably mix is the “Blue Glow-tini” I first had at the Disney World Hollywood Studios 50s Prime Time Cafe’.     I loved it so much I googled the recipe the instant I got home.   On thing I love about watching Rachel Maddow is her occasional Cocktail spot.   One of these days it’s going to motivate me into fixing up the art room bar a little nicer.   Add a bar sink and under the bar fridge and ice machine.   The disadvantage of having a brain is the world makes you want to drink, but at least having a brain lets you do it decently.

So I was handed the following books by one of my project managers today…

• The One Minute Manager
• Managing Projects – Harvard Business School Press
• Leading Teams – Harvard Business School Press
• Running Meetings – Harvard Business School Press

I guess I’m at that stage in the life of every little tadpole techno nerd kid who one day becomes an engineer somewhere and then goes on to become a senior engineer and then one day finds themselves reading the Harvard Business School Press.   So I’m walking back to my little office feeling a tad elated somehow.   It’s always Very Nice to know your employer wants to keep and nurture you.   Plus, it’s good to find new challenges.   Your brain needs challenge if you’re not to get simply old and tired and set in your ways.   You just can’t let your one life slide on past you like that.   Yes…this is all well and good.   Except I’m walking back to my little corner of the Institute and this line from a song I haven’t recalled since I was a teenager suddenly bubbles up from somewhere in the shag carpet basement of my brain…

…Find out I’m the chosen one
Oh noooooo!

Ever since The One Minute Manager first came out, something deep down inside of me would get a tad irritated every time I laid eyes on its cover.   Any art you can teach in a minute cannot be that worthwhile.   Is this why so many bosses are idiots? And now here I am reading the damn thing.     But the Harvard stuff looks good actually.   And…I guess I need to know this stuff now…

Life goes on…

Sorry that my last post alarmed some of you, but this isn’t a political blog, it just looks like one sometimes.  It’s just one guy’s little life blog…my small corner of the Internet when I can put up my cartoons and photography and write about this and that so family and friends can see what I’m up to.  Life isn’t all wonder and joy, and I was very depressed when I wrote that.  Thank you, those of you who write, for your kind words of encouragement.  I think I’m over the worst of it now.

And I believe I understand better now, why I got so terribly down, and I’m working on a post about that.  But for the record I took a brief weekend trip back down to Epcot a couple weekends ago and managed three things.  First, I enjoyed the Epcot Food & Wine Festival immensely.  Really…the food at all the little nation kiosks was fabulous.  Second, I managed to drive past Hilton Head without so much as phoning my ex.  I’m not over him so much as I understand better now why I need to keep my distance from him.  It’s worse when they still want to be friends.  There was no lover’s quarrel…I just got dumped but he still wants me to come around his way whenever I’m down there and it isn’t good for me to do that.  I’m fifty-six years old and I’m only now learning lessons about dating and boyfriends I should have learned when I was a teenager.

Thirdly, I got to see a certain someone down in Florida this time around, that I didn’t last time.  It cheered me up a lot. 

As I said, I have a post I’ve been working on I want to put up here, before I resume regular blogging.  In the meantime, I’ve been chattering away on Facebook, so you can look for me there if you want.

[Update…]  I’ve pulled that post for the time being.  My blog is a place for me to think out loud, vent, thump my pulpit…and even occasionally bleed in public.  Just not too much.

A few readers here have asked me what’s up with the silence.  It’s nothing serious…just life apart from the web.  I’ve been real super busy with a major high visibility project at work and I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime on it.  That’s "non-comp" time for all you salaried workers out there.  But I don’t mind.  Working at Space Telescope has been a dream come true for me, and the vacation package is so nice here I really don’t mind putting in long hours on something.

I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk about…but first, I’ve posted a bunch of new cartoons to the political cartoon page…two of which have been published in our local Baltimore gay paper, OUTLoud.  I have a steady gig with them now and it’s been a real source of satisfaction seeing my cartoons in print.  I’ve been published elsewhere but just randomly, whenever someone somewhere takes an interest in one of my cartoons and asks for reprint rights.  This seems like it’s going to be a real steady gig so I’m delighted.  Cartooning was the first love.

Here’s one I didn’t get into this month’s issue…

There’s more on the cartoon page.  Hopefully, more to come soon as I get back into this.  I have several other fun-er cartoons on the drawing boards, including the next episode of A Coming Out Story.  Plus several political cartoons I didn’t put up from way back.  You may have noticed that the last cartoon was from the aftermath of Proposition 8, and before that practically nothing for almost a year.  I was just getting burned out on it, burned out on staring hate in the face week after week after week.

So I’ll try to post some more stuff soon.  I have lots to talk about.  But end of next week I’m going to disappear again for a while and visit Disney World in Orlando for my birthday and try to leave the ugliness behind.  There are two anti same-sex marriage referendums coming up and it seems every time I look at the news I’m seeing anti-gay crap that just makes me angrier and angrier and venting about it here and on the cartoon page only gets it out of me a little.  I’m at a stage in my life where I just want to bale out of civilization altogether and forget that I ever heard of the likes of NOM and Proposition 8 and so many people who don’t know me from Adam but keep screaming in my face that I’m a cancer on society…but they have nothing against gay people personally.

Ta-da…

Basically, I got tired of how it was always getting in my face unless I had it pulled back into a ponytail.  This is how I always used to wear it.

I’d forgotten how energetic the wave in my hair is.  Without all that extra weight it just comes roaring back, even when I blow dry it.

I’m going to let it grow out again in the back and sides eventually, but I’m keeping the bang because I don’t like it getting in my eyes.  The problem has always been finding hair stylists who know how to do long-haired guys any good.  That was why I just let it all grow out some years ago…I’d given up on hair stylists and decided to just let it grow and pull it back into a pony tail when necessary.  And…I wanted to see just how long I could get it to grow.  Now I know…about a third of the way down my back.  That’s it.  It won’t grow any longer then that.  I have this very fine baby hair and it takes forever to grow and it never gets very long.  I was hoping I could get it down to my waist.  But…not…

Damn…I’ve really gone gray haven’t I…?  Crap…