August 2006 Archives

The Tigers were one strike away from dropping a double header to the Yankees today. A couple of walks and a Craig Monroe homer in the ninth put them up 5-3 in the second game; a three-up-three-out relief performance by Todd Jones and his enormous mustache earned him his 35th save.

What is it about relief pitchers and mustaches? The most famous baseball mustache belongs to relief artist Rollie Fingers. The great Tiger reliever of the 1970's, John Hiller, wore a big handlebar. 1984's Cy Young and MVP award-winner, Willie Hernandez, sported facial hair on his upper lip. As did Goose Gossage for most of his career. Dan Quisenberry. Bruce Sutter. Dennis Eckersley. What could it be?

A side note on preparing this post: When I was a little kid (6 or 7) and collected baseball cards, I used to sort them according to various criteria. One common distinction I made was between players older and younger than my dad. According to the Tiger's web site, only three of the men on the Tigers' 40-man roster are older then me. By the time he's old enough to collect baseball cards, Ray probably won't be able to divide them up the way I used to.

For years, I've been wondering just whose opinions are reflected in public opinion polls. I disapprove of the President, too; why doesn't anyone ask me?

Well, finally, I'm going to be one of the 60 percent we keep hearing about. I got a recorded opinion poll call last night from KOMO-4 news. "Disapprove, press 2."

Now, I wonder if I'm ever going to get called for jury duty....

I watched Spike Lee's Inside Man the other night. I love a good heist film, and this was a good heist film. It could have been, however, a great heist film but for one major problem -- Too Much Information. What it needed was a good McGuffin.

You might not know it by reading my blog, but one of the reasons I have this thing is to improve my writing skills. Every now and then, when I have time away from bitching about shitty customer service and offending 90% of the population by implying they can't think rationally, I puruse writing self-help sites and try to glean some wisdom from the gurus of the blogosphere.

The other day, I came across a tidbit that advises to let your blog posts "marinate" a bit before posting them. I know that, often, to meet my self-imposed goal of at least one post per day, I hastily rattle something off only to regret it later. Perhaps I should let things stew a bit and then review them before clicking the "Publish" button.

This reminds me of a deal my former office mate, Paul, and I once had to protect each other's jobs.

There is a long and honorable tradition of fathers introducing their sons to immorality and vice in the absence of a mother's protective embrace. From Bill Cosby nutritionally damaging his kids with chocolate cake for breakfast, to the almost archetypal father-son trip to the brothel on the latter's eighteenth birthday, paternal corruption has a long and storied past.

In the footsteps of those who walked before me, today I led my son into his first den of vice -- the horserace track.

Amy's away for the weekend attending her cousin's wedding. This is the first time since he was born that Ray has spent a night without mama. We had a delicious meal together at Ray's Cafe, and I just got back from tucking him in. So far, he is silent and, I hope, on his way to restful slumber.

I just hope he sleeps through the noise from the party that starts up in 15 minutes. Wooooooooooooo!!!

Following up on my post about Pluto yesterday, folks cleverer than myself have been coming up with new mnemonics to remember the order of the (now) eight planets.

[Via boingboing.net]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Washington Mutual's misleading error message on their online banking site. They later admitted that their Bill Payer upgrade did not go as planned, and plastered apologetic notices all over their site.

The mishap has been widely reported by the media. A later WaMu press release, quoted here, stated: "We began communicating to our customers as soon as the problem was discovered." I can say that the statement is utter bullshit. Reports say the site was down as of July 22nd; my calls took place on the 26th. The "communications" on that day == four days later -- took the form of an irrelevant error message on their site. WaMu claims they provided "telephone bankers with updates and options to share with customers" yet the two reps I spoke to seemed clueless about the nature of the outage and only offered assistance after I begged for it.

When the upgrade was finally completed (so they said), I tried to use it but was greeted with an obtrusive Javascript error message whenever I tried to change the date of a scheduled bill payment. I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, so I am used to sites skirting the web standards and presenting tools that only work in Internet Explorer. So, I dug around my file system until I located IE, fired it up, and experienced the same issue.

I then tried to send a "secure" message to Washington Mutual. The link I clicked prompted me to log on again, so I did, and I was promptly dumped back to account listing. I clicked the email link again only to redirected to the logon page. Ad infinitum.

I resorted to sending a regular email to them, first complaining about their messaging system and then about the real issue: the bill payer. A few days later I got a response that the message problem was due to my browser settings (bullshit) and that completely ignored the issue about the bill payer. I have a number of other complaints related to their web site, so I figured: What the hell, let's send some snail mail around. I targeted the President and a couple of relevant-sounding EVP's with a letter [PDF].

A few days later, I got a fairly generic reply that referred to the problems with the upgrade but that basically side-stepped any of the issues I raised, especially the one about site security.

Today, a woman who knows a former lead worker on WaMu's online security team told me some interesting information. It seems that he once wrote a white paper detailing the security flaws of a certain vendor's product and posted it on a web site. WaMu turned around and purchased that product from the vendor to use for a component of its web site (I don't know if it was related to the bill payer). The vendor complained about the white paper, and WaMu fired the security guy. Out of loyalty, his entire team resigned. This, she remembers, was about two months ago, meaning that it probably happened right in the midst of the roll out of their disastrous "upgrade" to their bill payer system.

Doesn't that make me feel safe?

Yesterday's decision by the International Astronomical Union to strip Pluto of its planetary status left thousands of Plutoans angry, confused, and uncertain about their future.

"I feel disenfranchised," said Pluto native Xbvghirfy who spoke to us from the farm where he works as a day-laborer. "I came here, to planet Earth, to find a job, provide for my family back on Pluto, and make interesting circular patterns in wheat fields. Now that my home is not even recognized as a planet, it will very difficult for me to bring my wife and children here to join me."

Dr. Rufvb!ws, the leader of Pluto's top scientific organization, says that Pluto's solar system demotion will have a negative impact on its interstellar exploration projects. "It will be very difficult for us to get grants to continue our research into the Earth's sparsely populated rural areas and trailer parks," he reported. "Already, our anal probing devices are antiquated; we have no hope now of obtaining the money necessary to update them."

Everyone agrees that life on Pluto is difficult, with its inhospitable atmosphere, no known water sources, average temperatures around -380 F, and stagnate economy based mostly on frozen methane mining. When Pluto was first spotted by astronomers from Earth in 1930, Plutoans geared up for a tourism boom, which never came to fruition. Since then, a steady stream of Plutoans have emigrated, mostly illegally, from their remote, barren home to the Earth.

The IAU defended its decision, citing Pluto's oblong orbit, which overlaps with Neptune's, and the former-planet's small stature. Despite early objections by some, the IAU reports that this decision has the consensus support of Earth's astronomers.

Other organizations expressed elation. Robert Brown of the Interplanetary Minuteman Society said: "This is a great day! Those dirty Plutoans do nothing but take jobs that should belong to citizens of the planet Earth. We can't build a wall high enough to keep them out, so let's see how they like living on an asteroid!"

The IAU's decision will likely have ramifications in Earth's science textbook and mnemonic device industries. Already, mnemonitians are at work on an alternative to the phrase "My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles." Roy G. Biv of Every Good Boy Does Fine, Inc., says, "We're thinking of keeping the first seven terms in place, but we are divided on whether the earnest mother will be serving Nutella, Nuts, or Nectarines."

Ray starts school in less than a month. He's been such a mama's boy for his three years, that Amy and I are concerned about how he's going to adapt. She has carefully explained to him that (a) she's not going to be there, and (b) he goes to school every day that daddy goes to work. He seems OK with it in theory; we'll see what happens when we abandon him in a room with 24 other kids. To be honest, I think it'll be harder on me and Amy. Even as I type this, I can't imagine myself dropping him off and then leaving, even if he's not screaming and struggling against restraints to get to me.

Amy's talked to a few other parents of older kids about their experiences, and things seem to be all over the map. For one boy, there was a lot of crying and clinginess for a week; for another, that sort of thing lasted all year. Amy -- quick to assume that any troublesome character traits in Ray originate from my genes -- asked me if I remembered any stories about how I acted on my first day of school. I had to plead ignorance. I remember wailing hysterically before getting on the bus to first grade for the first time, but only because I thought my mom was going to come too. I don't think I had a problem with going to preschool or kindergarten before that, but I don't recall hearing anything one way or the other.

However, I did have a problem with graduate school.

Writely is an online word processor currently in beta. It supports all the common formatting you'd expect from such a program, plus direct posting to blogs, so I'm trying it out. If you can read this, then I've succeeded in configuring it.

In general, I find I have little use for a word processor. In about 90% of all cases in which I need to write something, email or some other plain text outlet suits me just fine. Word processors were designed for producing print output, and there's very little that I need to print these days.

I also have have issues with most web-based WYSIWYG editors, such as the one I'm currently using in Writely. For some reason, they generally insist on inserting errant spaces and doing funky things with line and paragraph breaks. I've tried incorporating some into the Movable Type interface, but the resulting code always seems to break my validation. We'll see how you perform, Writely.

Upon inserting the hyperlink for the first word of this post, I became annoyed. I selected the word by double-clicking it, and the program un-helpfully selected the space after the word as well (grrrr). Then, upon applying the hyperlink, three spaces popped in afterwards that I then had to delete.

Upon checking the code, I am pleased that in-line formatting is applied via the span tag (though the style attributes are in ALL CAPS, for some reason), but I'm annoyed again now I see that two line breaks are used in place of a single paragraph break. Granted, it's hard for software to determine when you're going to hit Enter once or twice and then do the right thing, but it's not impossible and ignoring the basic "p" tag has the potential to mess up my existing styles. Oh, and I just noticed that it inserted a superfluous line break at the start of the text.

There are some collaboration options that might be nice. I can invite other Writely users to see and/or edit this document. And that's really the whole point, I guess. Writely is not just a word processor, but a document management and sharing system. I wonder how good it is at tracking changes? Oh, I see a "Revisions" tab that lists the changes made to this document as I've been working on it. That's sort of cool. I'll have to find some more people I know who use it and try out the sharing functions.

Many see tools like Writely as a potential Microsoft Word-killer. It's been demonsrated that the vast majority of people use only a small fraction of Word's capabilities, yet the software has become the de facto standard for word processing. Everyone seems to need it, but mostly for writing basic documents with minimal formatting. Given what I use word processing for, I have to say that, minus a few glitchy annoyances, Writely could meet my needs pretty well.

After posting this to the blog, I made a few corrections. The document title did not map to the blog post title, and the XHTML-compliant "<br />" tags I saw in the preview were replaced with non-compliant "<br$gt;>" tags with spaces in between them (I removed all of them and replaced with paragraph tags). The weird ALL CAPS formatting I spied on the inline span styles, however, were converted to lower case by Writely.

Amy and I have often discussed the fact that neither of us truly feels "grown up" -- whatever that means. Yesterday, when I took Ray to the playground to meet other kids from his school (and their parents), for example, I felt much more at ease with the other 3- and 4-year-olds than I did their mamas and dadas. The other parents seemed like parents to me in ways that I don't seem like one myself. I pitched whiffle balls to Ray and another little boy while the other grown-ups watched from the sidelines, and I preferred that.

I'm not sure what it is I feel I should seem like. I don't feel unqualified in anything I do. I don't feel undeserving. I certainly don't lack for responsibility. I have a wonderful child and a beautiful partner, have owned two homes, earn a good salary, supervise eight staff, manage a multi-million dollar budget, have lived in four cities, have traveled to six foreign countries, have been married and divorced, and have graying hair on my temples. What could be more grown-up than that?

I tell myself that it's good to feel this way ... that I have not lost touch with my inner kid. Yet every time I write the mortgage check or think about Ray's impending school days, there's a part of it that seems like it's happening to someone else -- or that I'm doing all of it for someone else ... just filling in until the big person gets back.

Objectively, I look at all I've done and all I have going for me and I realize how silly I am being. I know that I'm trying to measure up to some standard or template that either doesn't really exist or is undesirable. Yet, the script for the role of Adult Man outlines the character traits pretty clearly and I frequently feel as if I'm not right for the part -- that the critics will be merciless.

Tom Waits' song "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" provided the title of this post; here's the video from YouTube.

After posting the other day about the box of letters and journals I threw out, I found a box of index cards on which I used to write snippets of conversations and brief thoughts. Most of them date from the early to mid-90's when I lived in Iowa City. I haven't read them in a decade.

Some involve me, others are conversations overheard or reported to be by friends. My hope was that by stripping away all character and context, something profound might emerge. I'm not sure it worked.

There are over 50 cards and scraps of notebook paper. Here are some that seemed worth sharing.

So, no poll for cat names as I promised yesterday. We came up with a good one: Murray.

A few weeks ago, Amy launched a massive and well-coordinated campaign to get a new cat.

In recent years, she's lost both her old boys -- Timmy in October 2005, and Tobiko just last month. In the period between their deaths, we obtained Uni. Uni's transition into our household was rough. Tobiko hated him, so we had to keep them separate for almost a month. Then there was Uni's howling -- the incessant, loud, middle-of-the-night wailing that woke us up and took us back to the dark old nights of Ray's repeated night-wakings. There were several nights when I was tempted to just chuck him outside.

After Tobiko died, Uni calmed down and I actually began to like him. I told Amy that I was concerned about the inherent risks in getting a new cat. I did not want to experience another period like we went through with Uni and Tobiko. I was firm and clear: no new cats.

Nevertheless, Amy persisted. Whenever Uni appeared to be wandering around aimlessly, she'd ask him: "What's the matter, Uni? Are you lonely?" She began visiting the web sites of local shelters, and sending me email at work with links to attractive cats. Last week, she happened upon "Midas," a nice-looking orange Manx with a big upper lip like Tim used to have. This is the photo she sent.

I dug in my heels. No, no, no, no, no. No way!

I am such a sucker.

I actually gave in yesterday, and called Amy from work to tell her that if she wanted to call the shelter and find out if he was still available, she could. She gleefully informed me that she already had, and that the shelter would have him and a number of other cats at the Petsmart store in Woodinville on Saturday morning. I told her I figured she'd already called; in fact, it wouldn't have surprised me if I had arrived home that night and found Midas sleeping comfortably on our sofa.

He was named Midas by the shelter, who found him as a beaten-up stray. He still bears scars on his ears, scabs on his forehead, and has a little chunk missing from his ear. I'll post a poll later in the day for names.

I'm reading The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank, the author of A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I have a sneaking suspicion that the book is considered "Chick Lit," so I'm hiding it behind a copy of Maxim magazine when I'm on the bus.

In today's passage, a junior high school character is thumbing through a worn copy of her elementary school yearbook. The girl is described by the narrator as the leader of a gang of bully girls. Now, however, the other girls in her gang have turned their attentions to boys and being pretty, and their former leader is feeling left behind. The now-pathetic girl clings to the yearbook, and her out-of-style friendship bracelets, as a reminder of her former glory.

I rarely hold onto things purely out of nostalgia, though I do to wax about the past (especially on this blog). I've moved far too many times in my life, and usually into smaller places, and have learned to not shed too many tears on my way back from the Goodwill donation box.

But there are some things that I've carried around from place to place, and I wonder what they say about me.

I've written before about how we arrived at Raymond's name. We wanted something classical but not currently (or likely to be) popular.

There's always the concern, however, that you'll inadvertantly tap into some baby-naming Zeitgeist and pick a name that becomes fashionable. That's what happened with "Amy" and "Jennifer" in the 1970's and what's going on with "Emma" and, inexplicably, "Madison" now. But we didn't want to try to go with an unusual name -- like some of iVillage's helpful "Name Trends" suggestons such as "Canyon," "Japheth," and "Brayden" -- even though there was a risk that a classic like "Raymond" might catch on.

According to the Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager, I don't think we're in danger of that. "Raymond's" popularity peaked in the 1920's where it was as high as 15th, but it's steadily declined since then: 17th in the 30's, 23rd in the 40's, 38th in the 50's, 45th in the 60's, 61st in the 70's, 75th in the 80's, 118th in the 90's, and a healthy 188th in 2003 when he was born. Just two years later, "Raymond" was clinging precariously to the top 200 coming in at number 200.

Of the 75 kids in the three primary classes at Ray's new Montessori school, he is the only Raymond. Let's take a look at some other names.

There's a woman who lives in a corner house down the street from me who is frequently in her front yard wearing a bikini. I generally have no problem with this.

Yesterday, as I was walking home from the bus stop, I ambled by bikini woman's house and noticed a cat along the side. I like cats, so I made some kissy noises in its general direction hoping it would come over for a little pat on the head. It ignored me.

Moments after being snubbed by the cat, I glanced up just in time to see bikini woman (who I hadn't previously noticed) turning around to, apparently, determine the source of the kissy noises she had just heard.

Since the cat was by the side of the house, I can't be sure she knew it was even there much less that it was target of my kissy noises. Therefore, I have to now assume that she thought said kissy noises were directed at her and her bikini-clad body.

If my life were more like a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode, we'd later learn she's Ray's teacher or something.

Via Feministing:

In Canton, Ohio, a school board decided to expand sex education to allow for discussion on contraception after realizing that 13 percent of [Timken] high school's female students were pregnant.

An interesting footnote revealed by a comment on the original post:

This is the same Canton, Ohio that is home to the Timken Company. This is the same company that is run by Bush "Pioneer" William Robert Timken. George Bush visited the company in 2003 to push his tax cuts for the rich. A year later the plant closed.... So the High School, named for Timken, followed the BushCo abstinence-only doctrine and this is the result.

So, people sure are scared of terrorists again and are not really thinking much about Iraq and stuff anymore. Yesterday, there was even a terrorist threat in Seattle (or not), and a terrorist cell was recently uncovered near my home town of Dearborn (or not).

Somehow, the following expressions of skepticism about the alleged terror plot in Great Britain don't surprise me.

From the AP wire:

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

Highlights from the ruling [pdf]:

Defendants assert that they cannot defend this case without the exposure of state secrets. This court disagrees. The Bush Administration has repeatedly told the general public that there is a valid basis in law for the TSP.9 Further, Defendants have contended that the President has the authority under the AUMF and the Constitution to authorize the continued use of the TSP. Defendants have supported these arguments without revealing or relying on any classified information.... Consequently, the court finds Defendants’ argument that they cannot defend this case without the use of classified information to be disingenuous and without merit.

In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained.

The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself. We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.

As Justice Warren wrote in U.S. v. Robel, 389 U.S. 258 (1967): "Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart.... It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of ... those liberties ... which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile."

That's how they smack down tyrants in Detroit, Mr. President.

The bus I ride some mornings passes the ramshackle headquarters of a local catering business called "Secret Chef." The building's windows are covered in wooden furring-like material and no hours-of-operation or contact information is posted. I have to question the wisdom of associating secrecy with food preparation. I want to know what's going in my mouth and who's preparing it. What is that "secret sauce"? Which "eleven herbs and spices" are you talking about? I want to be able to tell the public health inspectors the name of my murderer as I lay dying of listeriosis.

Honestly, I can't say if "Secret Chef" is truly a secretive organization -- I picture its cooks in ninja gear operating in the dark -- or if it's just an attempt for a clever name. But I am familiar with a truly secret food operation -- the mysterious "Secret Pizza" of Iowa City.

I got a call today from someone at a completely different state university, which just happens to also have the name of our state in it. They were referred to me by a software vendor who told them I was the contact for the university's site license for a particular product.

Not only did the vendor have the institution wrong, I'm not even the contact for my university's site license anyway -- in fact, we don't have a university site license. I am the contact for my college's license, which is a critical distinction. Today's experience tells me that they really don't care as much about me as they keep saying they do.

Most companies have some form of "CRM," or Customer Relationship Management, software. The CRM business itself is enormous and highly profitable. But I have to wonder how effective the products really are.

There's been a lot of hubub recently about AOL's release of 650,000 users' search information. Though the users were "anonymized," The New York Times was able to analyze patterns to identify at least one person simply by what she searched for. Slate magazine has used the data to classify web searchers into seven categories, including the Pornhound and the Manhunter.

My web site statistics package (awstats) lists the search terms by which web browsers stumble upon my site. There's certainly not as much data here as in AOL's logs, but maybe there's enough to form some kind of understanding about my visitors.

Here are the top search-driven hits to my site from the last 2½ months (June, July, and part of August).

In today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, political cartoonist David Horsey wonders: "Why are human beings so eager to ignore hard realities and buy into reassuring myths?"

I was a staunch Santa Claus believer well into second grade....

Finally, though, when my friend Ronnie showed me all the toys "from Santa" he'd discovered in his parents' closet two weeks before Christmas, I began to give in. I felt no resentment, however. Santa Claus was a happy, magical illusion that I was glad to have had and one that I recreated for my own kids.

Not all frauds are quite so benign, yet grownups throughout the world cling to them, usually because they reinforce deeply held political, ethnic or religious biases.

He goes on to cite Holocaust deniers, WMD holdouts, and 9/11 conspiracists as those for whom "it is easier to believe a Big Lie than a mitigating truth about people they have chosen to hate."

The belief in gods is the fundamental underlying cause of this phenomenon, and, ultimately, the answer to Horsey's question.

It's nearly 7:00 p.m. on the west coast, and those producers from "Millionaire" still haven't called!

Here's a shot I took around 7:00 a.m. of the scenic back-alley in which I spent my wee morning hours today. Aren't malls just lovely bits of architecture? There's nothing that quite showcases the success of capitalism and the bountiful choices it offers us than a squat, beige cement building in the middle of an asphalt field surrounded by Dumpsters. [Click for a larger view.]

And here's the blank official "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" scantron pictured moments before our 10-minute test-taking clock started ticking.

Unfortunately, my recall of the actual questions from the test isn't that great what with my being preoccupied with fantasizing about rolling around naked in piles of crisp US currency.

For the movies, I know I blew the questions about the song Harry and Sally sang in When Harry Met Sally (it was from Oklahoma, not 42nd Street), the opera Richard Gere and Julia Roberts attended in Pretty Woman (Don Giovanni, not La Traviata), and the first film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes (Marty, not East of Eden). But I did know that Linda Hunt, not Hilary Swank, won Best Supporting Actress for playing a man (tricky question!) and that Roger Moore has been the only Bond who was born in England.

For the general test, I got one about "erythrocytes" wrong (red blood cells, not white), but I was right about rods and cones being on the retina (as opposed to the iris, lens, or cornea), that James Ellroy and not Elmore Leonard wrote L.A. Confidential (again: tricky!), and that mudskippers were fish and not lizards (thanks Ren & Stimpy!)

OK, guys, it's nearly 7:30 now. Maybe my phone's not working! But if I pick it up to check, what if they call right then!? Maybe I should call them to make sure they have my number right!! Does that seem too desperate? But what if they call while I'm calling....????

I passed the "Millionaire" test and just had my minute-long interview with one of the producers.

It was touch-and-go there for awhile. There were two 30-question tests -- one for the special movie episodes and one for the general show.

They did the movie test first and it was mighty hard. Despite my degrees in film studies, I was not one of the only four people (out of 192) who passed. I guess that's why I never got the Ph.D.

The general test seemed surprisingly easy and I was worried that there would be very little margin for error. But only 40 people passed, and I was one of them!

The interview was quick and the whole process was remarkably efficient. I swear, they should hire these people for airport security.

They said there is a slight chance some contestants will be called this evening to appear on the current series, which is taping now. But eligibility remains open for about two years, so I may get a call when I least expect it, or not at all.

I'll try to remember some of the test questions and post them later.

We're inside now, which is nice as it's a bit chilly outdoors.

The last time I waited in line like this was for tickets to David Bowie's 1991 Sound + Vision tour. My girlfriend, Katie, and I drove to the ticket outlet at 5 am. It was freezing out, and a dozen or so fans were there already, but they were still in their cars, thus violating a major rule governing queuing up for concert tickets: no matter the weather, you wait in a line outside.

We boldly strode to the doors and sat down. Slowly, the others emerged from their car and joined us. One guy engaged us in some pleasant conversation before awkwardly stuttering that he had been there since 2 a.m. and, surely, we would let him in first.

" Well," I replied, "you weren't at the door."

For the next several hours, I think he and the others thought we were bluffing. The atmosphere was tense, and when the doors opened, Katie and I rushed in to the ticket window and placed our order.

No one had a chance to object, and we ended up scoring font-row center tickets.

At the concert, the 2 a.m. guy spotted us from his 8th row seat. He was, rather inappropriately, in full Ziggy Stardust regalia, and shouted angrily at us. We smiled and waved, and, later in the show, took great pleasure in watching the decidedly anti-glam Mr. Bowie recoil from his touch.

I am blogging to you live from the picturesque rear parking lot of Everett Mall. I am number 115 in a line of folks waiting to audition for the game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

The bluetooth link on my computer doesn't work, so I can't post photos yet. But. honestly, it isn't a pretty locale, and as far as the people go, well, it's not like it's an audition for "America's Next Top Model."

It's almost 7:00 am; auditions begin at nine. I arrived about a half hour ago, but I was waiting in the wrong place (along with some other folks who shared my amazement that there were so few people.) The auditions can accommodate up to 2500 people, however so I'm not worried.

More soon. Wish me luck.

A few weeks ago, I ranted about the shabby design and programming that is apparent behind MySpace ("I Have 1 Friends").

Now, MySpace and its cabal of monkey-brained coders has found a new way to torment me:

You can see for yourself (unless I get more friends by the time you read this).

MySpace is the most popular social networking web site in the universe. It may even be the most popular web site, period. And yet it seems to have been built by someone's friend's 12-year-old cousin who "knows a lot of HTML and stuff."

Family Steel was kicking it on the beach at Golden Gardens park the other day when a lone bicyclist cut through the sand, struggled past our camp, and rode into the Sound. Before we could utter a hearty "WTF?!" a swarm of similarly-garbed cyclists followed suit, screaming and carrying on as if they had just reached the end of a two-month bike trek from the Atlantic to the Pacific or something.

Which is exactly what they had done.

It turns out we were witness to thirty or so members of Bike & Build's Providence, RI, to Seattle, WA, ride. Bike & Build sponsors cross-country bike trips that combine riding with construction work on affordable housing projects. They raise money and awareness for affordable housing projects through donations and via rider sponsorships. It sounds like a really good organization, and the riders all seemed quite pleased to be at their destination.

Though several of them learned the hard way that Puget Sound seaweed is a tenacious plant.

Ray has a world map placemat. A couple months ago, he pointed at a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean and asked "What that leeetle tiny thing is?" I explained it was the island of Bora Bora, words that delighted him to no end.

After that night, we didn't speak of Bora Bora, or anything on the placemat, again for a long time. Then, one night last week, he pointed to the same spot again and said: "Daddy, say that funny place again."

"Bora Bora?" I asked. Peals of laughter followed.

Seizing on his interest -- as well as his uncanny ability to locate the same island again in the midst of all of French Polynesia, Micronesia, and the other South Pacific islands -- I sat him down in front of the computer and we looked up Bora Bora on Wikipedia. After reading about the island's long history (settled in the 4th century!) and looking at photos of Mount Otemanu and the water bungalows built on stilts over the lagoon, Ray declared "I want to go to Bora Bora."

But with airfare from Seattle to Tahiti currently running in the $1,200 per passenger range, I think we'll stick to domestic vacations for a while.

Bora Bora sure does look pretty, though. Check out the webcam.

One of my staff members has about 20 years of accumulated equipment, software, and manuals in his office. Because of some demolition and construction work going on in our building, he's having to move everything out temporarily.

We came upon a 1993 text called Desperately Seeking Solutions -- a guide to troubleshooting problems with Macintosh computers. The title was an obvious allusion to the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, a title that seems to be particularly prone to this sort of wordplay. There are over 2 million Google hits for ("desperately seeking" -susan), for example. Of course, a similar phenomenon befell Sleepless in Seattle, which continues to produce countless "[Something] in Seattle" or "Sleepless in [Somewhere]" references.

What other film or book titles have generated similar amounts of plays on words? Can Major Readers think of any?

In the "Faith/Values" section of the Seattle Times last Sunday, I read an article about Francis S. Collins, a scientist who converted to evangelical Christianity after reading C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and who now lectures on the supposed compatibility of faith and science.

One of my bus friends, who is a biological scientist and a Christian, was reading that very book the other day, so I thought the mention of it in this article was an interesting coincidence. I've never read Mere Christianity, though I've certainly heard of it. And now, here's a renowned geneticist who claims that the first few pages birthed him again, so to speak. What powerful arguments or reason-shattering prose was this C. S. Lewis fellow capable of? I didn't much care for those Narnia books; but maybe his skills lie not in fables but in faith.

I was pretty disappointed to learn that Mere Christianity is the modern origin of the old "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" argument, otherwise known as The Trilemma.

As of tonight, the Detroit Tigers (76-36) have 50 games left to play in the regular season.

If the Tigers only win half of their upcoming games, and the White Sox and Twins each win two-thirds of theirs, the Tigers will still end up one game ahead of the AL Central with a 101-61 record.

If the Tigers win only one-third of their remaining games, and the Sox and Twins each go 25-25, the Tigers end up on top again by one game with a 93-69 record.

If they stay on the same second-half pace (17-7, or .708) they will tie the regular season win record of 116 games (Cubs in 1906; Mariners in 2001).

They need to win 29 of the last 50 (or .580) to set a team record of 105 wins (breaking 1984's 104-win record).

And now back to doing something useful....

Whilst driving from Madison to Seattle a couple years ago, I passed through South Dakota during a rain storm. Being the cautious driver that I am, I was interested in learning if the storm would get worse as I proceeded through the state or if it would let up.

Now, South Dakota has a special way of making "foreigners" feel at home. At the eastern border of the state, for example, drivers are greeted by a sign reading: "Animal Rights Activists Aren't Welcome!" Even their radio stations are designed to obfuscate. The only one I could pick up that had driving conditions (as opposed to preaching) reported that it served "the entire Kelo-land region."

WTF!? There was nothing on the map indicating a "Kelo" county or city. Even a hundred miles into the state, all the reports I could hear were for this mysterious "Kelo-land." It was clearly some reference that only South Dakotans could get. Finally, I figured out that the station's call letters were KELO and "KELO-Land" was their ridiculous "branded" term for the eastern part of the state. But that did absolutely nothing to help me figure out for what areas the road conditions applied to. Am I driving into a storm or out of it? The information was without context and, hence, completely useless for out-of-state motorists.

But South Dakota can't be exclusively blamed for this type of myopia. Today, I was searching for some information and one high-ranking Google hit took me to an article on the Star-Telegram's web site. The article seemed relevant to what I was looking for, but I was curious about where it was from.

There was nothing on the masthead that indicated the paper's hometown. Nothing in the by-line. Nothing in a sidebar. Nothing in the footer. Only by inferring some local geographic information from the fourth paragraph of the article did I figure it out.

Here's a challenge: Take a look at just this article (which was randomly selected and is not the one I was searching for) and tell me how long it takes you to figure out the hometown for the Star-Telegram.

Top officials draw top dollar

My take on this phenomenon is two-fold. Either the marketing folks believe that their brand is so well-known they don't need to include the city of origin (which ignores the fact that people from outside the region lack that brand knowledge). Or, in an attempt to break free of regionalism and appeal to the broader worldwide audience that 21st-centry media enjoys, they avoid labelling their product with anything limiting it to a particular area. This, however, ignores the fact that most of their news only applies to that limited region, so the context of locale is even more crucial.

Either way it's a bad marketing move.

I found this Risk-like online game called Dice Wars and have quickly become addicted to it. I can't find any rules, so I had to learn how to play via trial-and-error. Here's a summary so you, the Major Reader at home, can play along.

My "pings" to the Technorati site haven't been working. None of the tags I specify for my posts are getting picked up. I've tried a few suggestions I found about the web, but it looks like I need to keep the test posts up for a little while to see if they work.

In the meantime, I've updated the site (well, the index page for now, at least) to be XHTML 1.0 compliant. Isn't that exciting!?

Updated: The test posts are gone. The Technorati tagging seems to be working now.

One of Ray's favorite sculptures -- Alexander Calder's Eagle (1971) -- has been dismantled and is headed for the Seattle Art Museum's new Olympic Sculpture Garden, which is set to open in October 2006 along a previously derelict stretch of Sound-front property in downtown Seattle.

During Ray's first walking months, we took him to Volunteer Park where the modernist Eagle had been rather incongruously perched in front of the art deco Asian Art Museum. Ray and I played hide-and-seek amidst its steel butresses. Over a year later, when we again visited the park, Ray immediately ran to the sculpture and demanded that we play hide-and-seek again. The kid never forgets anything.

I saw a documentary once about Calder and the mobile he designed for the National Gallery of Art. His prototype design ended up not scaling well to the massive size needed to fill the gallery space, so other artists and engineers were brought in to experiment with new materials that could retain the piece's lightness while holding up heavy slabs of steel on the end.

Calder was pretty old and feeble by this time and puttered about the workspace, muttering to himself and getting in the way. At one point, the engineers and artists were reviewing the prototype mobile again and expressing concern about one particular "wing." Calder reached over to the mobile and helpfully offered to bend it back a little so it would work. The others freaked out and practically body checked him away from "revising" the mobile and "disturbing" the original piece.

I remember thinking to myself: it's his own damn mobile! Let the old man change it if he wants to!

The notion of the purity or aura of art has always bugged me. I prefer Ray's attitude: Can I play around it? Then I like it!

The image at right is hanging, in poster form, above my home computer. I've had it ever since graduate school when it was given to me by my friend Scott. I had an idea at the time to collect old photographs of disasters and hang them on the same wall of my apartment. To that end, during a trip to San Francisco, I purchased a beautiful 1906 photo of the city on fire. Unfortunately, I left it in my hotel room during a pneumonia-induced haze. After that disappointment, I gave up on my Wall of Devastation.

I never really bothered to learn anything about the event pictured in the poster. Doing the research seemed so onerous. "If only I had access to some global database, or 'web,' of information," I'd say to myself, "so that I could find out more about it."

Signs that things are getting better:

South Dakota Abortion Ban in Trouble

Mel Gibson's Holocaust Miniseries Project Canceled

Evolution Backers in Kansas Gather Political Momentum

Signs that things are getting worse:

Eyeful of breast-feeding mom sparks outrage

Colorado Residents Angered by Nude Sculpture

Young Conservatives Indoctrinated at 'Boot Camp'

The more things change, the more they stay the same....

The other day, I met with a facilities worker who, if he so desired, could have easily braided his eyebrow hair and even added some attractive rasta beads to his dangling brow-locks. It was quite something to behold. He was almost tripping over them.

I have relatively hairy eyebrows and I live in fear that, as I grow older, they will similarly take over my face. In my goth days of yore, I tweezed them into a suitably malevolent arch, but I refuse to go the whole metrosexual route in my advanced years. Ray already barges into the bathroom at inopportune moments; I don't want to have to explain "Daddy's plucking his eyebrows."

Amy will occasionally point out a single lengthy strand when she notices it, and I appreciate her candor and willingness to call my attention to my grooming shortcomings. I've never felt comfortable issuing such advice, even to those close to me. An ex-girlfriend of mine, otherwise quite attractive, had a nose hair issue that I never brought up. There were times I considered waiting until she was asleep and then getting out the scissors.

I guess the true measure of love is the willingness to say: "Honey, you really need to trim/pluck/shave that."