I am never tagged for these things.  I just end up doing them.   Peterson just did one (Facebook only) …and since he began his with a photo of his much younger self, I will too.  The boy is father to the man and all that…

Twenty-Five Things About Me

1. I stopped wearing a wrist watch for decades.  Then I found the mechanical wrist watch I wore in high school in a box of old memorabilia and had it repaired and restored.  Took me months to find a wide leather watchband like the ones I used to wear back then…but eventually I found a place that made them online.  Winding it every night before bed gives me a connection with the boy I once was.
2. Speaking of which…I keep boxes of…stuff…saved over the course of my life just to have it for memory’s sake.  I think of them as History boxes.  They contain old toys, notebooks, report cards, draft cards, letters, everyday knick-knacks…the random artifacts of life that at one time or another almost got thrown out, and that I decided at the last minute to keep instead and toss them in a "history box" for memory’s sake.  I’ve done this since I was a kid.
3. I am almost always wearing blue jeans and sneakers and a light shirt of some sort.  I hate long sleeves, and often roll up the sleeves on a long sleeved shirt if I have to wear one.
4. One of my childhood hobbies was model building.  By the time I was 16 I’d made tons of models and had shelves in my bedroom full of them.  Model cars, model airplanes, model submarines…  Later, when in my 30s, I managed to get paid for it when I became an architectural model maker.  
5. I visited a Disney theme park for the first time in my life last November…Disney World in Orlando.
6. Sandwiches make up 2/3rds of my diet.  Ice Tea 90 percent of my fluid intake.  I brew my own of course.
7. I smoke the occasional cigar.  For the nicotine.  When I’m stressed.  Which is usually.  Never cigarettes.  I was never able to get tobacco smoke into my lungs.  But I like the taste and smell of cigar smoke, believe it or not.  Dad smoked them, so maybe there is a link there somewhere…either in the genes or the memory of him.  I have to cut back though…my body is starting to complain. 
8. I developed extremely crooked front teeth in my childhood, and my folks never had the money to get them straightened.  So I hardly ever smiled openly when I was a kid.  Just…grinned.  Or put my hand up to my mouth when I smiled or laughed.  It probably seriously impacted my dating abilities when I was a young man.  Eventually I got them capped when I was in my late thirties, and for the first time since I was 5 or 6 I could smile openly.  (Thank you forever Stuart!)
9. I love road trips.  My favorite form of vacation is to just toss my bags and cameras in the car and just drive down some roads I’ve never been down before, and see landscapes and towns and roadside this and that I’ve never seen before.
10. The first not-a-children’s-book I ever read was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.  In fourth grade.  After I was told I was too young to be looking at the books on that side of the school library.  Later that year, I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling.  My English teacher at the time accused me of letting my mom write my book report on it for me…a thing I still get angry to remember.
11. I had a little stack of Tiger Beat and "16" Magazines stashed under my bed when I was in my early teens.  I kept telling myself I just wanted to read about my favorite bands while I gwaked at the pictures of all the beautiful guys.
12. I still have my collection of 45 rpm records from back in the day.  Most of them are very worn out though, and sound pretty scratchy.
13. I still have many of the comic books I read when I was a kid…the ones grandma didn’t throw out anyway.  And my old Mad Magazines.  And a big stack of Undergrounds from the early 70s.
14. I still have my first camera…a Kodak Brownie Fiesta mom gave me for my ninth birthday.  Shutter doesn’t work right anymore though.  And…I don’t think they even Make 127 roll film anymore.
15. I still have nightmares about my junior high school years.
16. But then…I have nightmares on a pretty regular basis anyway.  They say it comes with the territory for us creative types.  They don’t really scare me much anymore.
17. I love to paint in oils on canvas.  However, I haven’t done an oil painting in years.
18. For the life of me, I simply cannot draw on a digitizer pad.  I need a pencil or pen and paper.  I can touch up just fine on a digitizer pad.  But do the original art?  No.  It’s not just the disconnect between hand and eye…it’s the tactile feel of it.  I don’t do big bold sweeping strokes of the pen…I do these nit-picky little lines and I need to feel them in my hand as well as see them on the paper.
19. I do most of my preliminary drawings entirely in my head.  I compose most of what I write entirely in my head too.  Then I just type it all out.
20. To relax, I take these once-or-twice-a-day walks in a big circle around whatever neighborhood I happen to be living in.  A couple miles usually.  I’ve done this ever since I was a kid.
21. When I am concentrating on what someone is saying to me, I have a bad habit of staring off into space, usually in a downward direction.  It must seem like I’m not paying attention or getting bored but actually it’s total attention.  I’m just tuning out the visual stuff and focusing on what I’m being told.
22. And…is it just me or does everyone else know they have more then one thing going on in their heads at any given moment?  I have lots going on in my head.  Constantly.
23. I was born in California.  I often wish I’d grown up there too.
24. The walls of my basement art room are covered with random photos, artwork, and images clipped from various sources.  They’re like a giant collage of random…stuff.  Much like the thoughts in my head at any given moment.  I did this to my bedroom walls when I was a kid too. 
25. A few of the things decorating my office desk/hutch:  Flaming Carrot action figure; Gigantor and Jimmy Sparks action figures; Stuffed Opus; Crazy Harry action figure; can of Wash Away Your Sins bubble bath; Original Slinky toy (that a co-worker can’t keep his hands away from whenever he comes over to my desk); small cast metal Supercar, sans Mike Mercury; Navajo Long Hair carving by artist Nelson Yazzie; Borg cube Christmas tree orniment; Walt Disney World Monorail replica; stuffed Maryland Crab toy with Blue Meany rider.

I hereby tag the first five people to read this.

Whilst scanning the English language page of Der Spiegel I come across this…

Germans Full of Angst about the Future, Survey Reveals

Okay…from all the books on German culture I’ve been reading lately, is this is something like saying Pope Still Catholic, or Bears Found To Prefer Woods To Port-A-Johns.  Germans and angst are like southerners and barbecue. 

In a nutshell…

The [Ford] Taurus is one of the top-selling nameplates of all time, for any carmaker, with more than 200,000 purchased in 1986, its first year, and 1 million by 1989.

The nation was enamored of its aerodynamic design and innovative features such as a wrap-around dash with new controls that could be identified by feel, keeping the driver’s eyes on the road. By 1992, Ford was selling more than 420,000 a year. That made it the No. 1 sedan in the country, and analysts suggested the car had saved Ford from bankruptcy.

By the mid-1990s, however, Ford’s focus had shifted to highly profitable trucks and sport utility vehicles, and its redesign of the Taurus for the 1996 model year was a disaster. Not only was it widely regarded as unattractive, but also cheaply made, with Ford skimping on quality and features such as replacing modern disc brakes with outdated, but less expensive, drum brakes.

The next year, Taurus relinquished its sedan leadership to the Toyota Camry, which has held the position ever since…

–Can The New Taurus Save Ford Again, The LA Times.

Drum brakes.  Drum brakes.  I remember drum brakes.  The Pinto had them and so did the two junkers that followed.  Drums don’t last very long and they fade horribly because they can’t shed heat as well as discs.  They just don’t have the stopping power.  But Detroit would sell people cars with Flintstone brakes if Washington didn’t require cars to have brakes that actually work. 

This model uses the most efficient and reliable braking system known to mankind…your own two feet.  Consider that while walking we stop and go hundreds of times a day and yet our feet last an entire lifetime without needing to be replaced.  Here at The Large American Car Company, we have gone back to the basics in order to bring you a car that not only uses the amazing power of the human foot to safely bring your car to a halt, but at a cost that is only slightly more expensive then last year’s model.  Full loads no longer tax your brakes because the more passengers you carry, the more feet are available for stopping and the greater your stopping power!  Dad, Mom, and all the kids can enjoy a far safer ride then in other vehicles equipped with antiquated mechanical braking systems…

They would do it.  I remember how they hollered like their teeth were being pulled out when Washington told them to put seat belts in cars.  And it’s not just the technical qualities of their cars that they allowed to suffer, but the aesthetic ones as well.  Sit down in an American economy car and run your fingers over the plastic in the dash and the center console.  Work the buttons, knobs and the shifter.  Then do the same in a Honda or Toyota.  The American car just feels cheaply made, the Honda and Toyota more solid to the touch.  I don’t think the cost differential between the plastic they use in Japan and the plastic they use in most American cars is much, if any.  It might even be the same basic kind of plastic.  They’re just not thinking about the impression it makes on the buyer just to touch the finished product.  That may seem trivial, but it’s the mindset and it’s ruining them.

Every week I end up with about a dozen or so links I wanted to write a post around but I never got to it.  And I don’t know how widely most of the folks who stop by here travel the web, since most of you don’t write or comment.  I’m not complaining or trolling for comments…I do the same on most web sites I visit.  So if you’ve already seen any of the following just skim over it.  But I want to at least run this stuff by you in case you haven’t…

• Parental rejection of gay teens worsens health

  Oh…you think?  I’ve been waiting for the usual suspects to start bellyaching about this study and its results but they’ve been conspicuously quiet about it.  I wouldn’t have thought it would be all that terribly hard for the hate pews to step up and assert that brutalizing gay kids doesn’t really hurt them at all and even if it did they’re better off dead then homosexual.

• Latter Day Protest? Proposition 8 and Sports

  Once upon a time the Mormon Church faced a furious backlash over its racist religious beliefs.  Did you know that the reason some folks have black skin is because in their spirit life they rebelled against god?  From the article…

  As tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in his book, Hard Road to Glory, "In October 1969, fourteen black [football] players at the University of Wyoming publicly criticized the Mormon Church and appealed to their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to support their right not to play against Brigham Young University. . . . The Mormon religion at the time taught that blacks could not attain to the priesthood, and that they were tainted by the curse of Ham, a biblical figure. Eaton, however, summarily dropped all fourteen players from the squad."

  The players, though, didn’t take their expulsion lying down. They called themselves the Black 14 and sued for damages with the support of the NAACP. In an October 25th game against San Jose State, the entire San Jose team wore black armbands to support the 14.

  One aftershock of this episode was in November 1969, when Stanford University President Kenneth Pitzer suspended athletic relations with BYU, announcing that Stanford would honor what he called an athlete’s "Right of Conscience." The "Right of Conscience" allowed athletes to boycott an event which he or she deemed "personally repugnant." As the Associated Press wrote, "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU, assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students, perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."

  On June 6th, 1978, as teams were refusing road trips to Utah with greater frequency, and the IRS started to make noises about revoking the church’s holy tax-free status, a new revelation came to the Book of Mormon.

  Whether a cynical ploy to avoid the taxman or a coincidence touched by God, the results were the same: Black people were now human in the eyes of the Church. African Americans were no longer, as Brigham Young himself once put it, "uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind."

  Nice.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU, assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students, perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."  Maybe if you jackasses would stop sticking knives into your neighbor’s hopes and dreams it might come to pass that we could all just…you know…get along.

• A New Year’s dinner for one watched by millions

  Every New Year’s Eve tens of thousands of Germans are delighted to gather around the TV set to watch the umpteenth annual repeat of an old ten minute British slapstick sketch that most people in Britain have never seen and don’t even know exists.  But they adore it in Germany, and apparently consider it quintessential British humor.  I can sympathize.  Most Americans have absolutely no idea what it is the French see in Jerry Lewis.

• Teacher terminated over marriage

  If you think it’s only the hopes and dreams of gay folks the Catholic Church wants to bury think again.  This is a story of a heterosexual teacher in a Catholic school who was fired for marrying a man she loved.  Her crime against the baby Jesus and his was that he was a divorcee.  Clearly, there is too much love in this world.  But don’t worry, Pope Ratzinger is on the case…

• George Bush and Sarah Palin make Michael Tomasky’s worst people of 2008 list…
  

  3 George Bush. There were years when he would have been higher – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. I’ll give him a slight pass for 2001, what with the attacks and all that. In those previous years, he stole an election, started an unnecessary war, lied about it, approved torture, let a great US city drown and so on. This year he merely presided over the bankruptcy of the global economy. Twenty days and counting.

  2 Sarah Palin. Does she really deserve to be this high? Never in my adult lifetime has one politician so perfectly embodied everything that is malign about my country: the proto-fascist nativism, the know-nothingism, the utterly cavalier lack of knowledge about the actual principles on which the country was founded. So, heck, you betcha she does!

  Palin doesn’t have Bush’s spoiled rich boy sense of entitlement, she has Nixon’s class resentments.  But she’s not as stupid as Bush.  She just seems that way in part because she has Bush’s utter disinterest in the world beyond her own nativistic tribe.  Nixon wanted the presidency because he wanted to be a world leader.  He wanted to shine on the world stage, be glorified by it.  Bush and Palin figure giving the world the finger is all it takes to make them great leaders.

• This has got to be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.  On the other hand, it’s nice to know there are people who are more desperate for companionship then I am by light years.

• Why there is still a need for Gay Youth centers, forty years after Stonewall.
  

  Maybe they do not need the escape as much as their predecessors did in 1983, when the door first opened. But a smattering of teens were spread across the couch in the TV room. They are comfortable here, the boys free to dish about cute guys if they choose, the girls relaxed enough to throw an affectionate arm around one another.

  In some neighborhoods, being gay is not a big deal, and that is what the anniversary celebration was about. In other places, even now, boys liking boys or girls holding hands still provokes sneers or even a shove. That is why, 25 years after it opened, Gay and Lesbian Youth Services’s drop-in center still serves a purpose.

  The article closes with "…dozens of gay teens come in every week, looking for something they do not find anywhere else. Until the day comes when they do not walk through the door, we will hold off on the final celebration"  My life could have been so different had I access to a resource like theirs.  Maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely now, had I been able to just be myself then.  It is wonderful, absolutely wonderful, that at least some gay teens can find places like this.  But let us pray for the day when gay teenagers no longer need a place where they can just be themselves.  It shouldn’t have to be like that.

Okay…  I discover now that Brad DeLong’s Egregious Moderation is still up and running…just at a different address.  Serves me right for not visiting it more often.  So it’s re-linked…

An old friend from grade school, who lives in Pennsylvania these days, has offered to take any of the computer hardware and software I don’t want anymore off my hands.  Techno geek children tend to befriend one another at an early age.  I am grateful.  I dislike the thought of tossing all this stuff away, even if it’s to a recycling bin.  With all the hazardous materials in electronics these days, I doubt much of it really gets recycled anyway, so much as disposed of.  He’s an ingenious tinkerer whose grade school accomplishments included building a pirate radio station and hacking the school sound system.  I’m sure he can put my boxes of old computer hardware to good, possibly even nefarious use.  "You have violated Robot’s Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future, immediately."

I have another friend in Kansas who I suspect would have loved to take all this stuff off my hands too, but I don’t see myself taking a drive to Kansas until after winter has left the plains, and this stuff is too heavy and bulky to just box up and ship.  He should remind me to look in the computer closet for anything I’m not using though, before I take my next road trip west.

I’m struggling with insomnia again for some reason, and sitting here at the computer surfing around I am reminded that the solstice occurs in just a few minutes as I write this.  So…Happy Winter Solstice 2008 everyone.  I’m sure happy.  Because now the days can start getting longer again. 

Well…except for you folks in the southern hemisphere that is.  Sorry.  Now your days start getting shorter.  So I guess that should be Happy Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice 2008.

One of these days I have to travel to the southern hemisphere so I can experience the disjoint in seasons for myself.  Oh, and look up at the night sky and see the half of infinity that I don’t see up here.  At some time or another in your life you should experience in a way that really drives it home, the fact that you are living on a planet. 

That’s what’s wrong with Larry Niven’s Ringworld.  It experiences no seasons.  Everywhere you go on Ringworld it is always the middle of summer.  Except where the engineers installed heat fins underneath.  But even there it is always winter.  Or Autumn.  Or whatever season the engineers have decided it will always be.  Which would be worse I wonder…a never ending summer or a never ending winter?  And even the artificial winters of Ringworld wouldn’t be right, because the sun’s radiant energy is always the same no matter what.  Now that I think of it, it would be really Wierd to experience a Ringworld winter because the ground would be cold, and maybe the air around you somewhat too, but the sun is still bearing down on you like it’s summer.

I’m geeking out here aren’t I?  Time to go back to bed and try to sleep a little more…

Germans seem to just love to cobble German words together to make bigger German words.  In German, there is no such thing as the word is too big.  Sometimes a word isn’t big enough so another word gets added to it.  Thus, gammeliges, which means rotten meat, gets combined with fleisch, which means ‘flesh’ to become gammelfleisch, which is German for, uh, "rotten meat".  Somehow this new bigger word for rotten meat got coined during a recent food scandal, when it was discovered that some meat packers were shipping food that was past it’s use-by date to restaruants.  I’m sure a certain someone could tell me why the one word just wasn’t good enough.

Germans also tend to be brutally direct in their opinions.  And thus gammelfleisch, becomes gammelfleischparty…

Gammelfleischparty is German youth word of year

German is famous for its long words — and today’s youth are just as adept at creating new ones as their predecessors, to judge by a poll released Wednesday by the publishers of Langenscheidt dictionaries.

Judges chose "gammelfleischparty", or "spoiled meat party," — an unflattering term for a gathering of people over 30 — as the "youth word of the year 2008." The word "gammelfleisch" was in the news frequently during the year when it was discovered that meat packers had been regularly supplying some kebab restaurants with past-due products.

"Bildschirmbraeune" or "screen tan" — referring to the complexion of someone who spends too much time at a computer — came second, while "unterhopft," meaning "underhopped," or in need of a beer, took third.

Emphasis mine.  What’s German for "trick market"? 

Willie Hewes comic this afternoon, followed by Guerrillas this evening.  Snow tomorrow.

Thank you Willie!

Snowstorms that dump two or three feet of snow overnight, and the Friday after Thanksgiving, are why I stock up on supplies for the Winter.  There are days when you just don’t want to set foot outside, let alone drive anywhere.

It’s…cold…in Baltimore…in November…   Uck…

I was at a local Office Max the other day looking for a few household office supplies, when I noticed that the cordless phone set I bought with my credit card "bonus points", that sold for ninety bucks at Costco, was selling for one-hundred and forty there.  Wow.  And I hadn’t had to shell out anything to buy them.  Well…other then the fraction of a cent extra my credit card company is adding to every dollar of charge I put on the card to support the bonus point plan that is.

I’d come there looking for Dymo Label Maker tape…the old plastic stuff in various colors with an adhesive backing.  I actually have several rolls of the stuff here, that I’d bought cheap in the 1970s, that I was hoping to use for…I dunno…the rest of my life maybe.  But it turns out the adhesive degrades over time I guess, because the labels won’t stick to anything anymore.  So I went out to buy some new and discovered of course that my 1970s label technology is so…1970s.  Now it’s all some sort of electric imprinted tape stuff.  Bleh.  I like my colored plastic labels.  But Office Max wasn’t selling that stuff anymore.  I think I can order it online though.

I picked up some other things on my list and walked to the cashier and that was when I noticed how low budget things were getting in that store.  The sales isles were nicely stocked and well kept, but the front of the store by the registers looked desolate, and the employees manning them ragged and depressed.  Boxes of returned or damaged goods were scattered around, inventory was haphazardly tossed here and there.  There was only one person manning a checkout line that was pretty long, and the other employees you could see were all wandering around indifferently with other chores, completely ignoring the long line.  The store had maybe three-fourths the staff it should have had to keep things running smoothly and the ones that were there were all simply overworked and you could tell that beyond the breaking point was their normal day. When a person is depressed, you see it in their disheveled clothes and you see it in their disheveled faces.  I’ve seen this before in other retail stores that were on the verge of going belly up.

It’s a vicious circle that starts when management decides to treat its workers like they’re just another expense they can cut to the bone.  I’ve worked in retail and it’s hard work for low wages as it is.  Time was though, back when I was a kid and labor still had some clout in this country, that service workers could at least make a living wage.  Maybe not the greatest of one, but at least you could get by.  A small apartment, a cheap second hand car maybe.  A forty hour work week could get you a basic living, and if you wanted more you could take night courses.  At least you had enough free time to recover from your week before you had to get back to the grind.  Nowadays that’s nearly impossible on a service wage.  My mother raised me on the wages of a basic clerical job and what impresses me about that looking back was that was in a time when the glass ceiling ruled and women made only a fraction of what men did for the same work. 

But that was pre-Reagan America.  There is simply no way mom could have made a home for us doing that kind of work today.  Service workers are hurting bad, and the result is you walk into a store or office and the atmosphere reeks of despair.  How management expects to attract and hold on to customers in that kind of environment is beyond me, other then the obvious fact that they’re morons who should be the first ones out the door when layoffs…excuse me…Downsizing…happens. 

I do a lot of bulk shopping at Costco, and one thing you notice about them is their people are not just busy but Engaged with it.  I never feel like I’m walking through someone’s eviction pile when I shop there, unlike say the Office Max I was just at.  Costco isn’t Bloomingdale’s, its isles are sometimes cluttered and it does have long lines but that’s because they have lots of customers who buy tons of stuff.  It’s actually pleasant shopping there.  Costco tries hard to pay a living wage to its people.  And Wall Street is constantly bellyaching about it.  I read one jackass investment columnist who said that Costco treats its employees better then its investors.  But Costco makes money and that’s better then Wall Street can say about itself these days. 

I was just reading the Mercedes World forum and saw this…

From hidden engineering manu, command HD has 4 partations and SW update option. Head unit is from MELCO which is same manufacture as Mitsubishi MMCS head unit and same CPU.

Interesting find that OS is Windows CE and we may have software patch for VIM in future. 

Windows CE?   Windows CE??  My Mercedes-Benz Nav/Phone/Stereo system is running Windows CE???   Oh…great… 

So this spam email arrives in my personal (not my work…there’s pretty good about blocking spam here at work) mailbox.  Gain Inches The Easy Way…reads the subject line.  Ah-ha…thinks I…of course it’s easy.  Just stuff your face with cookies all day long and you’ll gain lots of inches.  Er…around the waste.  That’s what you meant…right???

Ever notice how much spam is targeted at male sexuality?  Never mind the porn ads…just look at all the ads for bootleg Viagra, among other things.  Either spammers think the entire world is gay (and that gay men like straight male pornography too) or they’re targeting all this to a mostly straight audience.  Yet we gay men are the ones who are obsessed with sex, and have like, thousands of sexual partners every night or something…

Via Benz Insider… Yes. I know. Mercedes sedans are owned by senile old rich guys. With trophy wives no less…

I’m really not sure who Audi is trying to sell their cars to here, but I’m guessing it’s people who don’t already own a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus. I have to say though…the two girls in the back of that Lexus SUV do the best Wednesday Adams since Christina Ricci in the Adams Family movie. That Lexus family should get its own show. The Adams Family, only instead of everyone being disturbed the same way, everyone is disturbed in their own special way.

As for the old guy in the Mercedes…look…I’ll gladly endure senility, if the ‘S’ class, the mansion, a hot young guy and a good cigar go with it. Was all that supposed to be a disincentive?