May 2006 Archives

OK, most of you are probably sick of hearing about my bike commuting and my efforts to conquer the "mountain stage" of my evening ride. But, there are probably one or two of you who are anxious to hear that I did, indeed, purchase the Giant FCR-3 and that I'm loving it. Plus, there have been a couple visitors driven to this site after searching for "giant fcr-3 reviews," so for their sake, too, here's my tale.

I was completely amazed at the difference in riding up the hill. During my test ride, it was virtually effortless. Shedding that 12 pounds from the bike's weight really makes a difference. At the end of a long day, however, the ride home is still not completely without some huffing and puffing, but it's not leaving me near death anymore.

The compact frame is taking some getting used to -- my foot hits the front wheel if I turn while the pedal is in the wrong position -- and I opted for some toe clips on the pedals, which, likewise, are causing me some grief (though once my feet are firmly planted, the clips improve the experience immensely). I also haven't gotten completely used to the gear-shifting, but I'm getting the hang of it.

The seat is narrower and more supportive than on my other bike. It also has a nice little groove down the middle, which I affectionately call the "Prostate Protector." The seat material is slightly tacky (meaning "sticky," not "unfashionable"), which helps keep my butt from sliding off (a problem on my old seat).

The other night, I even rode to the store after Ray's bedtime -- something I'd never done because of the hills between here and there. On my new ride, they were nothing! I am now all motivated to bike everywhere!

Just like this family!

From the wires:

The FBI said Tuesday it found no trace of Jimmy Hoffa after digging up a suburban Detroit horse farm in one of the most intensive searches in decades for the former Teamsters boss.

What does having a loathsome job as a high school student have to do with Jimmy Hoffa? Well, I'll tell you....

Type surreal into the search field of any major newspaper's web site and you'll likely come across results similar to these from The Seattle Times:

Our neighbors told us they were taking their 2-year-old son into the wilderness where they would all sleep outdoors under nothing but a thin sheet of nylon fabric. Before I could get Child Protective Services on the phone, however, Amy reminded me that what they were describing was called "camping," and that it's a socially-acceptable activity that some people actually enjoy.

I have never been what one might call "outdoorsy." It's just not in my nature to commune with... er, nature. I recall my father once proudly declaring that to him "roughing it" was staying in a hotel that had no room service. And for the people I hung out with in my college years, the term "camping" evoked dressing up in drag and singing show tunes more than it did pitching a tent.

My one youthful camping expedition nearly killed me.

In a couple previous posts, I groused about the final 1.2-mile uphill leg of my evening bicycle commute. After getting in better shape and losing 20 pounds didn't help, I was finally convinced to put down the whip of self-flagellation and turn my attention to my obscenely heavy, out-moded bike.

I am just now heading out to the store to pick up my new Giant FCR-3. Check it out.

Actually, I am going to test ride it, and I need to overcome my inherent tendency to not manage my own expectations. It might not work for me; I have to be prepared to just walk away.

Serenity now! Serenity now!

Following up on my "Save the Internet Today" post, "Rob" comments:

I certainly appreciate the energy behind this movement, but I honestly feel that there's more to it.

The more government regulation we put into the business, and the more red tape we put in the way of developers, the more we bog down advancement.

I also find it interesting that a lot of these "member organizations" are the same companies who benefited from government-sanctioned monopolies to build their communications infrastructure in the first place. (See also "The Phone Company Killed My Grandmother")

I certainly don't trust the government to do the right thing, but I trust corporations less, especially ones (BellSouth) who have already said that they will block certain types of traffic if they only could.

FreePress.org has a good piece explaining why the anti-regulation spin HandsOff (and others) are putting on this issue is bogus:

What is not true is that the Internet has never been regulated, or that the imposition of Net neutrality rules will harm the Internet....

With the removal of those common carrier safeguards, the telephone company, like the cable company, is free to raise rates at will, discriminate in favor of their own Internet service provider, favor their own content and services, and even refuse to offer you broadband service at all.

I tend to write a lot about shaving. Is my life really that unbearably dull? Maybe so; I added a new "Grooming" category to the blog to cover it.

I won't get into details about how I became interested in the Philips Bodygroom, a new shaver designed "exclusively for men" and that "safely trims and shaves all body zones." And I'm normally not a big fan of the sort of viral marketing campaign Philips is employing for this product. But I have to set aside my unwillingness to play into uncompensated corporate shilldom out of appreciation for the bluntness of a commercial that strategically uses two kiwifruit and a peach to represent exactly which "body zones" they're referring to.

From Tim Karr, Campaign Director, Free Press, SavetheInternet.com:

Dear SavetheInternet Blogger,

A critical vote is going down in Congress right now and we need you and your readers to get phones ringing off the hook on Capitol Hill.

The House Judiciary Committee is beginning to "mark up" a good Net Neutrality bill at around 11am (EST) this morning. Then they're going to vote on whether to bring it to the full floor. Many in the Committee are being pressured by AT&T, Verizon and other major telcos to vote down the net neutrality provisions in this bipartisan bill.

Below are the members who need to hear from you and your readers to support this important bill. Urge them to support the Sensenbrenner-Conyers "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006" (HR 5417) in the Judiciary Committee -- and to support it without amendment. (Saying without amendment is key as the telcos want to re-write it in a way that guts Internet freedom).

Here are the members who need to hear from you and your readers right now:

I tend to cry about the oddest things. Sick puppies dying in a little girl's arms? Nothing. The HAL 9000 computer asking Dr. Chandra "Will I dream?" before being left for certain destruction at the end of (the otherwise disappointing) 2010 ? Bawling like a baby.

One event that always gets me blubbering is the final pitch and celebration at the end of a perfect game -- all 27 batters retired in succession -- in baseball.

I tried teaching Ray how to play chess yesterday. OK, I know he's only two-and-a-half, but I thought maybe he'd be a prodigy or something. Plus, he's been seeing me read chess books and playing chess on my Palm a lot lately, and he spotted my chess board at work and said he wanted to learn. So I'm not pressuring him or anything; I'm following his lead!

Anyway, we got the pieces all set up and I identified them all for him. He got that pretty well. Then I moved onto the concept of "opening moves," which he seemed to be OK with. After the first two pawns moved (1. e4 e5), Ray picked up the white pawn and moved it back by the black rook and knight. I asked what the pawn was doing, and he replied: "Hiding."

We started to play a more free-form game with the knights galloping around and carrying pawns to safety, and the other pieces trying to find the pawns who were hiding. At one point, Ray pressed a white pawn and a black pawn together and said: "'mooch."

They were kissing each other.

I'm taking a few days off. Our friend Adele is in town, there's a lot to do, and I need to get away from the damn computer for a while.

See you all sometime next week.

A number of blogs and news outlets are reporting on the recent "crack down" on unmarried couples with children in Black Jack, Missouri.

The city council in Black Jack, Mo., has rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together. The mayor said those who fall into that category could soon face eviction.

Approximately 89 other municipalities in the St. Louis metropolitan area have some form of occupancy permit requirements. Most occupancy permit codes include a definition of "family," some of which are more restrictive than Black Jack’s and some of which are less restrictive than Black Jack’s.

Equally discriminatory racial covenants were very common up until 60 years ago when the US Supreme Court decided Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1 (1948)), which held that the covenants, per se, weren't illegal though it was a violation of the 14th Amendment to enforce them. Interestingly, Shelley started out in St. Louis.

Though I don't have much faith in the current Supreme Court's willingness to come to anything like a progressive decision if this case reaches them, it is slightly heartening to see that Missouri's approval rating for Bush is down to 29% and the state now ranks as the 8th biggest Bush-hater in the country.

America's Next Top Model is Danielle. Not Joanie. My Joanie.

I'm so disappointed.

When I was 10 or 11, one of the neighborhood's stray cats had a litter of stillborn kittens in our back yard. The mother was so weak she couldn't even completely birth the final kitten; my dad had to remove the rest of it from her exhausted body. He placed all the dead kittens he could find in a garbage bag in our back yard. All of us cried our eyes out.

Later that evening, we heard a faint "Mew!" coming from the back yard. Had we missed a kitten somewhere? One that had survived? We got out flashlights and combed the yard, but the mewing was so faint and intermittent it made the search difficult. Finally, we realized the sound was coming from the garbage bag. One of the kittens hadn't been dead! We pulled the tiny, brave, strong-willed survivor from its grave, made up a warm box for it, bought some kitten formula and a feeding tube, and nursed it. We were certain that it would pull through. But a few days later it finally gave up the ghost. And we all cried our eyes out again. Loss is always harder the second time.

In a way, this is how I feel about Joanie. I had given up on her; indeed, I previously predicted she would be the first to be eliminated. But through sheer force of will she persevered, she rallied, she soared! She fought her way out of the garbage bag into which I had carelessly tossed her. She won my heart, and I honestly thought she was going make it.

Ooooo, look. "American Idol" is on!

I didn't expect The Da Vinci Code to be any good but I figured it'd be a critical hit since critics inexplicably tend to love Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. But so far, the epic has scored a big fat zero on movie-review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes and the buzz from Cannes has been resoundingly negative.

Tonight's the night. The two-hour finale of "America's Next Top Model." Will Jade go postal and gun everyone down when she's kicked off? Will Danielle learn to suppress her thick Southern accent and speak more like a white Midwesterner? Will Joanie make good on the show's investment in her dental work and prevail?

More importantly, what will Amy and I do with our Wednesday nights?

My annual performance review is on Tuesday. I blocked off the entire morning today to write up my goals, accomplishments, activities, and all the other stuff required for my big meeting with the Dean.

It's now 10:30. I have brewed two pots of coffee, cleaned my office, filed all my loose papers, printed new labels for all my file folders, organized my email, tested out a couple new Firefox extensions, and spent the last 15 minutes chatting with my staff about where to find good bicycle shorts.

Add to that, now, writing this blog post.

I wonder if the Dean would be impressed with the fact that I have posted over 250 entries over the last 12 months and have increased readership on my site to over 100 visits per day?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

(Via boing boing)

Ladies and gentlemen: the Detroit Tigers have the best record in the major leagues.

I've waited a long time to say that.

The other day, I wrote about how it's difficult to explain to people what I do for a living. Well, that's nothing compared to what it was like trying to explain to people what I did when I was in graduate school for film studies.

Today, I stumbled upon a gem of an essay entitled "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything". It chronicles the exploits of a computer programmer as he tries to understand the world of academic literary criticism -- a major influence on modern academic film criticism.

Oscar Madison and I are still locked in an epic battle on the virtual chess board (see the right-hand column for the game's current status). The other day, the trash-talkin' pseudononymous law professor from an unnamed location somewhere in the Midwest paid me a rather back-handed compliment. He remarked that I was playing a good game and wondered if I might be using a computer. In other words, he accused me of cheating.

Had he been seated in front of me, with only 64 small wooden squares and a handful of sculptured pieces between us, he would be eating a rook sandwich right now, if you know what I'm sayin'. But since a distance of somewhere between 750 and 1,500 miles separates us, I am rather limited in my ability to exact satisfaction.

The gentlemanly thing to do when faced with an opponent who resorts to such brutishness is to take the higher road. I cannot let this comment unnerve me. Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.

On the other hand, I could always challenge him to a few rounds of chess boxing.

I have never been one to blame others for my shortcomings. I was raised in a good Catholic household in which I was taught: if something goes wrong, it's your fault. (I love you, Mom. Kiss-kiss!) When I was on the Madtown M's and once struck out in six straight plate appearances, I never once blamed the bat. When I was 10 and I failed to pick up an easy spare during the youth bowling league championship game thus causing my team to lose by 3 pins, I never blamed the ball. Nope. It was always me. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Now, the idea that my bike has been the chief culprit in my inability to manage the 1.2-mile 1.75% uphill climb at the end of my commute had crossed my mind, but true to form I turned such suspicions back onto myself -- my weak muscles, inefficient lungs, and general sorry-ass laziness. The other day, however, my friend Mary ventured down to my dank office in the unfashionable quarter of campus and spied my GT Slipstream resting innocently against a file cabinet. Mary is an avid cyclist and praised me for biking to work.

I admitted my trouble with the homeward commute, and admitted that I would likely bike in every day if not for that. She walked over to my bike, grabbed it with both hands, and hefted it up. "My God!" she grunted. "This is a heavy bike."

I looked at this site with Internet Explorer the other day for the first time in a long while, and I was horrified. The addition of the "Save the Internet" graphic messed with the left-hand margins and forced all the content to the bottom, the right-hand column had somehow grown to overflow its boundaries, the background colors in entry footers and blockquotes were vanishing (fixed using this trick), and my ultra-cool "SweetTitle" tool tips (the text that appears when you hover over a link) were generating a JavaScript error (fixed using this variation)! I am left wondering: Why didn't anyone tell me!?

According to my web stats, Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser for viewing my site, but not by much. Its 43.8% share is closely followed by Mozilla Firefox's 42.6%.

Given that for the rest of the world the ratio is still something like 80% IE:10% FF, one of two things (or parts of both) may be skewing the field on my site.

First, is that I use Firefox exclusively and though I have configured my web stats package to ignore all my IP addresses, it might not be doing so for the browser stats. Second is that, apart from friends and family, the majority of my web traffic is coming from the Seattle Blogmob site and Technorati, members of whom are far likelier to use Firefox.

I have to remember to check things out with IE whenever I make a change to the templates. But if any of you Major Readers happen to notice something amiss with the site, please drop me a line.

Or start using Firefox already!

Yesterday, I met a woman who had worked for AT&T back in the 70's and 80's before the divestiture of the Bell companies. It was like I was Harry Potter staring into the face of one of Voldemort's Death Eaters*. For it is a well-established fact in my family that the phone company killed my grandmother.

Having a red-pen wielding grammar cop for a mother has turned me sensitive about certain matters.

The other day, I was in a meeting (where else?) and a co-worker said to someone, "You know, some of these things might not be your ... forte." She correctly pronounced the last word fôrt and not fôr'tā', which is more common (but wrong*). I could also tell by the pause before she said the word that she was thinking the same thing I always think before using that word:

"OK, I'm going to use that word, but if I pronounce it correctly, will everyone think I'm pronouncing it wrong and that I'm an idiot, or will they all know it's right, or do I even care what other people think?"

After the meeting, I thanked her for pronouncing the word correctly. She smiled broadly and confirmed that the above was exactly what was going through her head during that pause.

Ah, a kindred spirit.

*And by "wrong" I mean prescriptively, etymologically, definitively wrong. See the entry for forte on Answers.com for a discussion and editorial note. Nevertheless, it reports that seventy-four percent of people "preferred" the two-syllable pronunciation. Well, what if 74 percent of the people preferred jumping off a bridge! Would you follow them?! Huh? Would you?!

I'm a little behind the curve posting about the threat to "Net Neutrality" posed by recently proposed legislation.

From www.savetheinternet.com:

This is about Internet freedom. "Network Neutrality" -- the First Amendment of the Internet -- ensures that the public can view the smallest blog just as easily as the largest corporate Web site by preventing Internet companies like AT&T from rigging the playing field for only the highest-paying sites.

But Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality. If Congress doesn't take action now to implement meaningful network neutrality provisions, the future of the Internet is at risk.

Call your representative today and demand that Net Neutrality be protected.

Encourage groups you're part of to please join the SavetheInternet.com Coalition.

Show your support for Internet freedom on your Web site or blog.

Tell your friends about this crucial issue before it's too late.

If you still don't get it, have a Ninja explain it to you.

Amy's making allowing me to read the Harry Potter books the Out-laws sent her a few months ago. I skipped the first two since I had already seen the movies; I just finished the fourth one. I'm actually enjoying the experience, and am looking forward to the fifth book (The Order of the Phoenix) since there hasn't been a movie yet and I don't even know the basic plot (and what the hell is up with Snape anyway!).

On this topic, here's an amusing bit I found the other day: Titles of Harry Potter Fanfics We'd Rather Not Read. My favorites:

Harry Potter and the Uneventful Year When No One Tried to Kill Him

Harry Potter and the New Love Interest Who Happens to Have the Same Name as the 15-Year-Old Girl Writing this Fanfic

Harry Potter and the Uncomforatble Oversexualization of Minors

Harry Potter and the Things You Have to do to Get By in Prison

Harry Potter the Geopolitical Realities of the Post-Nuclear Age

Harry Potter and Whoever Alan Rickman's Character is are Totally Doing It

Harry Potter and the Insidious Compact Disc Root Kit Installation

All week, I've been excitedly awaiting the drama that is sure to take place on tonight's "America's Next Top Model" as the season winds down to its final two episodes (Go Joanie!). But in the real world (no, not the MTV reality show), some top models choose more dangerous ways to get publicity. From the New York Daily News:

Glamorous model Tatyana Simanava nearly became a tragic fashion victim yesterday - stepping off the runway of a moving bus and tumbling out the door onto the Gowanus Expressway.... She somehow got disoriented after stepping into a passageway outside the bathroom of the luxury bus.

I was roped in to another month-long bike-to-work contest -- the Group Health Commute Challenge. I actually quite enjoy biking to work -- both the fact that I live in a community where I can do that, and the actual ride itself. Most of my 6-mile trek is along the Seattle ship canal on a smooth, flat bike trail that leads right into campus. It takes me about 20 minutes to ride in, which is 5 minutes less than the bus takes.

Riding home is another matter. Again, the bulk of the trip is fine -- beautiful, in fact. But the last 1.2 miles is a steady uphill climb from the lowlands of the canal banks to the front door of my house.

I call it the Mountain Stage.

I don't want to run the risk of turning this blog into a platform for unsolicited corporate promotions (hence, no ads), but I have to acknowledge the unsurpassed greatness that is the ING Direct bank's "Orange Savings" account.

I've been working out with dumbbells lately and now Amy has decided she wants in on the fitness action. Knowing our laziness, however, she realized that if we had to keep switching weights on and off the dumbbells it'd just give us an excuse to not do it at all and we'd sink back into our slothful existence. So, we headed out to Play It Again Sports over the weekend to pick up another set of dumbbell rods for her.

Amy also decided she needed a few more lighter weights for herself, so we picked out four 2.5 pound disks in addition to the rods. Ray was acting up a bit, so Amy scooped him up and took him out to the car while I went up to pay.

I was a bit self-conscious about buying, essentially, two 5-pound dumbbells, but the clerks were pretty busy gabbing with each other and weren't paying customers a whole lot of attention. I paid for the weights and as I was scooping them up off the counter to leave, the cashier said: "Have a good set, man."

I related this to Amy when I got back to the car, and she laughed so hard she started to cry.

"Did you clarify things with him?" she asked between sobs.

"No," I replied. "I was caught off-guard. I may have even said 'You too.'"

"That's worse than having to buy tampons," she acknowledged.

Now I either have to go back there and buy the 50 lb. weights, or never shop there again.

I posted a while ago about how university building floorplans are notoriously irrational. Yesterday, to cite another example, I had a meeting in a room on the 4th floor of our Electrical Engineering building -- one of the most seriously messed up buildings I've ever encountered. For one thing, the elevator helpfully has three 4th floor options for my navigating convenience -- 4, 4R, and 4M. EE is also attached to another building that has its own overlapping system of room numbering and no signage to indicate you have moved from one building to another. I was finally able to figure out where to go, but three others were 5, 10, and 15 minutes late respectively as they all got lost in various parts of the labyrinth.

Fellow blogger Tonya recently posted an amusing photo of a sign in the Social Science building on her campus. The commenters on that post also discuss other mind-boggling space challenges and are worth a read.

As my Major Readers will recall, I recently threw off the corporate yoke and dumped my beloved Gillette Mach III razor in favor of an old-school double-edged safety razor I picked up at an antique store.

This morning, I cheated and reverted to the Mach III in an attempt to hasten my morning toilette. But my new safety razor is a jealous little guy and somehow induced my Mach III to nick up my face like a piece of tenderized meat.

Fittingly, the first page I open with my browser today contains a Metafilter thread about how shaving cream is a scam and weakens your skin. The post links to a rant entitled "The Shaving Cream Racket," and the MeFi discussion that ensues reveals all manner of interesting shaving practices I had never been privy to, including a couple references to the hard-core military method of cold water, no shaving cream, and baby oil.

I'll try anything once. Any other good shaving tips out there in the Mist?

Last week, The Stranger's Dan Savage berated a letter-writer for asking a question that a simple web search could have answered. The writer asks: "Hello, Mr. Savage. Could you please tell me what GFE stands for. Thank you." Savage replies:

GFE stands for "Google Fucking Exists," OAF—or it should. Because if you had taken the time to type GFE into Google—which takes about 1/1000th of a second—you wouldn't have to ask me what GFE stands for: The very first result is "What GFE (Girlfriend Experience) Means to Me in Sexwork." GFE = girlfriend experience, which means the sex worker will, for money, treat you nicely, kiss, cuddle, etc.

I only read advice columns and I get annoyed at the inane questions that the columnists get. I can't imagine how crazy I'd get if I wrote a column and had to deal with them a hundred times over, like I'm sure Savage does.

I wish other columnists would grow balls his size and take their letter-writers to task. I especially wish this of the Seattle Times technology Q&A columnist, Patrick Marshall. Then again, Marshall's problem isn't limited to his letter-writers.

This weekend's "Pacific Northwest" magazine, which comes bundled with the Seattle Times/P-I on Sundays, featured an essay by retired reporter Steve Johnston about a computer crash he recently suffered. He goes on and on about how he never learned much about computers except how to use them to write his articles, and describes his wacky, bumbling adventures getting a hard drive replaced.

"Suffered" is also the term one can use to describe my experience reading this article.

During a recent trip to the restroom at Pike Place Market, I came across a hot-air hand dryer from World Dryer Corporation on which the "instructions for use" were not defaced.

Why is that so notable? I'm sure that all of my male readers will understand, and none of my female readers will.

My coffee drink of choice is an Americano, which consists of two (or sometimes three) shots of espresso in hot water. I usually get a short (8 oz) or tall (12 oz), and to avoid over-dilution I ask for "room," even though that implies "room for cream," which is a substance that shouldn't come within 10 feet of a coffee drink, IMHO.

It has always annoyed me that some coffee shops charge different prices for the various sizes of Americano regardless of the number of espresso shots. The "short" usually comes with one shot by default, while the "tall" and "grande" sizes come with two. Some shops charge a quarter or more extra if you jump from a "tall" to a "grande" even though the only difference is more hot water.

Today, we ate at a crêperie at Pike Place Market. The short Americano was $1.80, and both the tall and grande sizes were $2.20. That suited me fine. But when I asked for a tall with 2 shots, the cashier rung me up for $2.20 plus $0.50 for the "extra" shot.

"How many shots come with the tall size?" I asked.

"They all come with one," she replied. "It's fifty cents for another one."

I argued that the extra shot should be covered by the price jump between "short" and "tall" sizes, and that otherwise I'd be paying more for simply more water. From her open-mouthed stare, it was clear she didn't quite understand my point. She called over the manager (or maybe the owner) and I explained it to him. He thought for a second before admitting, "You know, you're right. I never thought about that." He then turned to the cashier and said, "It's my mistake. Don't charge him for the extra shot in the Americano, and don't charge anyone for it anymore." He thanked me profusely for adding a little rationality to his business.

While I waited for my drink, he came back over to the counter and asked me: "It makes sense to charge more for a grande latte, right? Because of the extra milk?" I agreed with him, and he happily went back to making his crêpes.

The good folks at Seattle City Light seem to have resolved our months-long electrical problem at home, as I wrote about a few days ago. After making our "temporary" connection to the city's utility grid more permanent, our lights now emit steady, warm, and pleasing glows. So, in case you were afraid that my lack of a blog post on May 3 was indicative of a catastrophe, fear no more.

This whole experience reminds me of a story....

Last Thursday was Take Your Son/Daughter to Work day. I asked Amy if she thought Ray would be interested in coming to work with me or if he was still too young.

"Well, he has expressed an interest in a number of jobs," she reminded me. "Just not yours."

Sometimes I just want to pinch her cute little cheeks until they fall off....

The Seattle Times and Microsoft on the software giant's plans to plaster advertising all over its future products:

Video games are unique in that players aren't subject to the disruptions or distractions that TV viewers or people browsing the Internet have become accustomed to.

With its new [advertising company] Massive acquisition, Microsoft will be developing ways to insert advertisements into the games themselves.

"You can take your message and imbed it in that immersive environment," Bach said, "and they get it and they may not even know they got it."

For the last several months, the lights in our house have been flickering intermittently. We clearly have some problem with our wiring. I'm sharing the story here in case you don't hear from me for a while and read about the north side of Seattle being devastated by a massive fire or something. Yup, that'd be us.

What follows is a tale of troubleshooting...

Amy and I are in the midst of watching Batman Begins, which is even more disappointing this second time around for me. This is not the Batman I knew and loved as a small boy.

When I was a kid, I lived and breathed for Batman. Or "The Batman," as he was known in his earliest comic book incarnation, and which I loved pointing out to people since I was a pretentious nerd even at age 6. I was Batman for several Halloweens running, and I organized a Super Friends-like gang of first graders during recess. My friend Frank was Superman, John was the Flash, Matt was the Green Arrow ... and I was Batman. We'd fight crime. And we ran around a lot.

My favorite TV show was, of course, "Batman". And by "Batman," I mean the Adam West version. That's right, kids; before Mr. West was the lovable, addle-brained mayor of Quahog on that "Family Guy" show that's all the rage these days, he was Batman.

I took my Batman very seriously. During the height of my interest, it never occurred to me that the "Batman" show was a comedy. The Bat-puter, Bat-erang, Bat-phone, Bat poles ... all serious crime-fighting instrumentation. The sight of two men running around in tights in broad daylight ... perfectly normal. Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr. popping out of windows during the "Bat-climbs" ... all in a day's work for our two heroes.

Then, during one episode, it dawned on me.

Batman was in Commissioner Gordon's office and the phone rang, which he answered. We don't hear the other half of the conversation, but Batman simply repeats the lines: "Yes, Mr. Mayor," several times. When he hangs up, Robin excitedly asks him: "Who was that?" Batman stoically replies: "The Mayor."

Of all the jokes in the show, this one registered with me. I think I had heard it before, or read a similar exchange in some kids' joke book. I remember walking out to the kitchen and telling my mom about it; she guffawed hysterically about the fact that I had been taking the show seriously all that time.

I developed a newfound interest in "Batman" and began watching it, and appreciating it, for its comic genius. But I think I felt a little betrayed. I stopped dressing up as Batman around that time, and as I grew up, I never really developed more than a casual interest in the later versions -- the Dark Knight, the movies, etc.

It's hard to take the character seriously after you've seen him escape from a giant clam, dance the Bat-tusi, and be menaced by Liberace.

The major downside to not having cable TV (or digital, or satellite, or whatever the kids these days are watching) is not having Comedy Central. And not having Comedy Central means we don't have "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report."

Before turning on a DVD last night, Amy and I caught a segment of "60 Minutes" with Morley Safer (who knew he was still alive?!) profiling Stephen Colbert. The clips from his interviews with members of Congress was hysterical, especially his hard-hitting question to Ohio's Stephanie Tubbs Jones:

Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?

Then today, I'm finding that Mr. Colbert spoke at the White House Correspondent Dinner on Saturday night. Editor & Publisher reports:

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, "and reality has a well-known liberal bias."

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. "This administration is soaring, not sinking," he said. "They are re-arranging the deck chairs--on the Hindenburg."

Colbert told Bush he could end the problem of protests by retired generals by refusing to let them retire. He compared Bush to Rocky Balboa in the "Rocky" movies, always getting punched in the face--"and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world."

The Daily Kos has a full transcript, and Democratic Underground has video.