I’m not sure what this is about, except that it is so Japan.
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Lick lick lick lick
I woke at about four o’clock this morning and was at a complete loss to explain the reason for it. I hadn’t had a dream about a bear chasing and eating me, I didn’t have a cramp in my calf strong enough to bend steel, I hadn’t tried to swallow my tongue while snoring. With an hour to go until the alarm clock started having a bleeping fit, I had no idea what had brought me wide-awake … until I heard the sound of a cat moistly cleaning itself. It sounded as if it were inches from my ear.
I sat up in bed. It was inches from my ear! At some time during the night, one of our cats had wormed its way between us and all the way up to a point between our shoulder blades.
Both the cats like to sleep on our bed during the winter months, then go find cooler places to sleep during the warmer seasons. We don’t mind except in a few cases, like when they try to sleep on top of us. That earns either one of them a quick ejection, to the end of the bed or onto the floor. Nobody and nothing gets to sleep on top of me.
And both the cats have tried to mosey on up to the pillow more than once. B thinks that’s kind of cute, but I’m a little funny about having a cat on my pillow. It’s not that I’m worried about them sucking my soul out through my nose. It’s that I don’t want cat hair on my pillow, and keeping cats off it seems to be the easiest and most sure way to guarantee that. Plus, whenever they’re walking on my pillow I’m reminded that, no matter how much time they spend licking their own toes clean, they use the same dainty toes to walk on kitty litter, and that’s something I don’t want to put my head on. Ever.
And I don’t want to wake up at four o’clock in the morning to the sound of a cat licking itself. It’s a great time-saver they’re self-cleaning, and I say this as a guy with enough experience washing dogs that I will pay someone else to do it if I ever have one again. That doesn’t mean I like being in the same room with a cat that’s cleaning itself. It’s such a noisy process. And I don’t want to think about what they’re licking.
So the cat that woke me up this morning — I think it was Bonkers — was rudely grappled and shoved more than halfway down the length of the bed to a less warm spot just behind my knees. And then I rolled myself up in the quilts and tried to go back to sleep, unsuccessfully. Why do we keep cats again?
Monday, March 8th, 2010
One More Stupid Photo, Then I’ll Stop, I Promise
If I had a bunch of these I’d burn up a whole tank of gas just cruising back and forth along the Beltline all weekend.
The Left Half of the African Continent, Still Moving Away
Think way back to middle school to that day in science class when the teacher introduced plate tectonics by showing you how Africa and South America fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, and have been racing away from the starting line of the mid-Atlantic rift at the blinding speed of something like a centimeter a year (I went through middle school during the Jimmy Carter Loves Metrics years).
Well, here’s science class in action: The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Chile last month was so powerful it sent a tsunami clear across the Pacific to Japan, shortened the length of a day (even if it only amounted to a few microseconds), and moved the city of Concepcion 10 feet to the left. Or right, if you live in the southern hemisphere.
Over Morning Coffee
My dream has finally come true: There’s a full-size onesie for adults on the market. I am so getting one of these. I only wish I’d found out about it last fall, so I could have worn it all winter. Bonus: It came from right here in Wisconsin. I only wish it came in flannel instead of polar fleece, the material that makes lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips. Ordinarily I’d think that was pretty cool, but by bedtime I just want to go to sleep, not put on a cape and fight crime.
The Hurt Locker won best picture. Can we not talk about the Oscars for a few hours now? No? Dammit!
Voters in Iceland decided their national bank isn’t too big to fail. This was not a symbolic referendum. 97% of eligible voters went to the polls to answer it. Makes the Tea Party look like a thin crowd of protesters half-heartedly chanting worn-out slogans. Oh, wait …
But the prize for the voters who most wants to make their voices heard goes to these guys. “I was ready to come to the voting center even if there were missiles, not only mortars.” I’d still be under my bed if there were mortars, buddy.
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
The Weekend Wrap-Up
Saturday
Farmer’s Market: A delicious breakfast featuring a pesto Monte Cristo with bread pudding, mushy granola & cranberries, and apple quarters mixed up with some kind of sweet potato stuff. I loved everything except the sweet potato stuff.
Saint Vinnie’s: brought home copies of Henry Hitchings’ Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale Of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. A lexical twofer!
Nap Time: It was good!
Dinner: Fired up the Weber to grill a couple of ribeye buffalo steaks. B served with baked potatoes. Bliss!
Movie: The Informant! — funny as hell.
Bedtime: Late. Slept sound and long.
Sunday
Auction: A total bust. Didn’t see one thing we thought was worth staying for, so we didn’t. Home before noon.
Furniture: Moved it. I’ve been saying for weeks that I would get around to setting up an office in what used to be Tim’s room so B would have a desk with a filing cabinet so she could work on finances. Finally did that. Still have to put up book shelves and get a day bed for visitors, but it’s a good start.
Furniture again: Built it. My desktop computer, upon which I bang out these words, formerly sat on the desk that is now upstairs in our gonnabe-office, so before I could move it I had to have an emergency back-up desk on which to set up my computer. Lucky for me I saved the door that used to be in the wall that I knocked out of the basement work shop. Put four legs on it and voila! a desk. Wobbles a bit, but I think I can fix that.
I like coffee, I like tea …
If one billion people on this planet drink a cup of coffee every day, and one billion people drink a cup of tea … it’s probably way more than that, but you get the idea … then where is all that coffee and tea coming from? How’s it even possible that people can grow that much coffee and tea on this planet?
Same with corn. Every can of soda pop has high-fructose corn syrup in it. Everyone I know drinks at least two cans of pop a day. Where in the world do they find the room to grow all that corn?
If they’re growing it on this world. Maybe it’s coming from outside our world, and there’s a massive corporate cover-up going on to keep us from realizing that we’re dependent on alien worlds for our food supply.
It kind of boggles the mind, doesn’t it? It boggles mine. Discuss.
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Carrying The Fire
Michael Collins is the astronaut who drove the bullet-shaped command and service module in circles around the moon while Aldrin and Armstrong took the lander down. He told the story of his career from jet plane test pilot to astronaut in Carrying The Fire. I’ve read about two-thirds of it now; the last third is the Apollo program, so I’m pretty jazzed about finishing it.
During the Gemini program, Collins was tapped to sit on a board that would review the applications of the newest recruits to the astronaut program. He was surprised there were no African-American applicants, but relieved there were no women applying for the job. I gritted my teeth and read on, expecting the usual garbage about how the job was too dangerous, or that women weren’t qualified, but it turns out that Michael Collins didn’t want to fly in space with women because he wouldn’t feel comfortable taking a dump:
I think our selection board breathed a sigh of relief that there were no women, because women made problems, no doubt about it. It was bad enough to have to unzip your pressure suit, stick a plastic bag on your bottom, and defecate — with ugly old John Young sitting six inches away. How about if it was a woman? No, it was better to stick with men.
By the way, Collins wasn’t quite telling the truth when he said there were no women trying to become astronauts. Maybe he meant only that no women were reviewed by the board he sat on, but as early as 1957 a group of highly qualified pilots, some of them with more flight time and experience than the first seven astronauts, applied to Nasa for the job. They eventually took their case before a Congressional inquiry. John Glenn, who sat on the panel (while he was still an astronaut), brushed off their petition as unnecessary to the program. Since the whole point of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs was to find out how to put people in space, Glenn’s evaluation was wrongheaded, to say the least.
Your Beer’s Good, We’re Just In The Mood For Something Else
It’s a first: We stopped by Star Liquor yesterday evening to see what was featured at the Friday afternoon beer tasting and somehow, don’t ask me how, we didn’t end up taking any home.
Before this, we always ended up picking a six-pack from the brewer who was handing out free samples. They always offered a sip of at least one at the tasting that we liked so much that we had to take home more. This time, through no fault of the guy handing out samples, we didn’t. Weird.
It happened this way: We strolled past the coolers, looking at the tasty new brews on display, making our mental wish list. I grabbed a bottle of Central Waters IPA because I’d been jonsing for it all week. B picked out a four-pack of cherry stout that the store owner recommended, and finally I grabbed a sixer of Mighty Arrow, a seasonal beer from New Belgium Brewing (one of the first signs of spring). Having reached the limit of what we could comfortably carry, we paid, said our thanks to everyone and headed home.
Mighty Arrow is soooo tasty. Get yourself some. [Disclaimer: I don't own any stock in New Belgium Brewing. I wish I did, but I don't.]
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Funny Coz It’s True
Or maybe “funny until it makes you cry” would be a better subject line.
