Monthly Archives: July 2001
Rowr.
In a romantic mood.
I want to just head home, lower the lights, and cuddle up with the girl I love, and get as snuggly and close as possible. Going to burn some nag champa, and hope for heavy rain. 🙂
Protected: Flash is beginning to impress me.
I have perhaps 20-25 homemade burned CD’s of old time radio… (Jack Benny, The Shadow, Dragnet, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, etc). I figure about 11ish hours apiece. I can’t believe I’ve listened to all of them , and am now restarting from the beginning of the stack. I’d estimate I listen to about 2-4 hours a day, after folks go home… My Office-mate isn’t big on 1930s-1950s variety stuff. I can honestly say, that there’s a pile of quality entertainment on those CD’s. I’m not sure why my tastes run to nostalgia from before I was born.. it seems a little more honest, and not quite so… oh, I’m not sure. I’d just much rather listen to an episode of Suspense than Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even though they share a lot of elements. Weird Science, Horror, Fantasy… but without some of the more ‘modern TV’ trappings. Maybe because it’s sound only.. you can fill in your own special effects, character appearances, and I think they deliver a more solid story base sometimes. Also, you can have a show about only one or two people (Like the Shadow, and Margo Lane) and not know what/who the bad guy is in a mystery, or who might get killed. I think the hitchhikers guide is better as a radio show, than a tv miniseries, too (although both were quite fun). Added Bonus, you can listen in the dark, in bed, eyes closed.
Odds are good that the vast majority of folks today rarely listen to anything aside from music or talk stations on the radio anymore… and I think that’s sort of a shame. Drama, comedy and so on. Radio plays are a thing of the past… admittedly some of them should stay there, but there’s a lot of potential for good stuff, even as webcasts. http://prairiehome.org/ does webcasts of the one exception I know. Prairie Home companion is nice… music, comedy, drama, and homespun stuff, to the tune of our current age. I actually tune in once a week to hear the fresh stuff. It’s good. (The website’s better, because you can pick and choose the stuff you want to listen to during the show… So I can Jump right to News from lake Woebegon and Guy Noir.) Plus they have show archives that go waaaaaay back to the mid 90’s if you can’t get enough of it. (I’ve listened to them all, a little at a time… usually a classic episode after listening to a particularly good regular show.)
Not sure what point I’m making, other than “DRAMA RADIO GOOD! MONGO LIKE!”
I awoke this morning gasping for air like a landed fish. It seems that my nose stuffed up during the night, and with the cpap on, that’s a bit of a problem. I think the shock of such a rude awakening is what dissolved much of my dream today. I can’t recall what it was last night, save that my sweetie was with me, and we were laughing about something. I just remember us getting a wicked case of the giggles…
Newt’s a big doofus today.. cuddle-biting, wrestling with my ankles… (they’re just begging to be bit apparently!) I don’t want to go to work! I just want to play at home with the cat. Can I validate taking a day off? hmmm…. nope, not really… got a fresh project coming online in a day or two. Maybe I’ll skip work tomorrow if I can get away with it.
whoops, the first one was broken.
And now… the evil news.
“>Childproof Caps
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The State of Connecticut has created a new law that prohibits schools from recommending psychiatric drugs for any child.
Use P2P, Go To Jail
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In December 1999, David McOwen — a system administrator at DeKalb Tech, part of the Georgia state university system — installed a screensaver from Distributed.net on some of the computers at DeKalb. That was his mistake — but he never could have guessed how big a mistake that would turn out to be. As it turns out he will likely be arrested in the next few weeks on charges that have a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
In fact, McOwen is now being criminally prosecuted for the “crime.” What crime?
The state claims that the Distributed.net client cost the state $415,951.49 in bandwidth charges. The cost of bandwidth, the state says, is 59 cents per second. If you do the math at this rate, you find that the DeKalb is paying $1,529,280 per month for bandwidth. The amount they’re seeking from McOwen is roughly a third of this cost.
Suing For Not Being Aborted
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France’s highest court of appeal, the Cour de Cessation, […] has ruled that disabled children are entitled to be compensated if their mothers were not given a chance to abort the defective fetus. […] The metaphysics is breathtaking. A child stands in court, and demands the legal right never to have existed.
Dog Found Undercooked in Cooking Oil
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The owner of a dog that was found Saturday morning in a trash bin with 3 to 4 feet of cooking oil is offering a $200 reward to find the person who put her there.
“I cannot believe anyone would do this,” said Jill Ballinger, 24. “It makes me so sick. She’s the nicest dog.”
The 6-year-old red and white Siberian husky called Sadie was recovering Monday at the hospital for Veterinary Specialists of Northern Colorado.
Maintence Workers Baked Golden Brown
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A bakery company and three company directors have been fined £373,000 after two
workers died inside a bread oven.
The men were carrying out maintenance work when they became trapped inside the
machine where temperatures were above 100C.
They died from burns and heat exposure after being unable to escape…
“No-one, it seemed, looked at the temperature gauge at the side of the oven
which would have indicated it wasn’t safe to go in.”
Oregon Law Officers Cannot Tell A Lie
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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — For nearly a year, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been handcuffed in Oregon, constrained from launching undercover operations as basic as sending an agent to buy drugs from a suspected dealer…
The reason is an Oregon Supreme Court ruling that all attorneys — prosecutors included — must abide by state ethics rules against the use of deceit.
Under Justice Department policy, undercover activities by federal agents must be approved by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office. Since the Aug. 17 ruling, the U.S. attorney’s office in Portland has suspended some undercover operations and has not approved any new ones for fear of disciplinary action from the Oregon State Bar, which can disbar members.
The FBI said the cases hampered include an undercover operation against Russian mobsters, an investigation of adults who go into Internet chat rooms to try to lure children into having sex, and a probe of a check fraud scheme involving more than $1 million in losses in four states.
Crack Crappy Encryption, Go To Jail
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A Russian computer programmer who gave a presentation at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas this weekend has been arrested by the FBI on charges that he wrote a program that allegedly circumvents a controversial U.S copyright law…
“The information for how to copy PDF files is being treated the same as lock picks and nuclear information,” Schneier said.
New Zealand Jumps In Lead For Most Screwed Up Kids
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New Zealand: A 14-year-old Te Puke girl was sentenced in Tauranga District
Court yesterday to three years’ jail on charges of sexual violation, attempted rape, robbery and kidnapping.
Originally a Youth Court matter, the girl was sentenced in the District Court because the charges were too serious for the Youth Court. Judge Ian Thomas suppressed the girl’s name, saying it may help with her longer term rehabilitation.
The six charges arose from an incident involving a 13-year-old boy and girl at Te Puke’s Jamieson oval on November 11 last year.
The 14-year-old was the main offender in a scene inside the unused scoreboard building where the two 13-year-olds were taken and ordered to have sex at knifepoint.
word of the day – carom
carom KAIR-um, noun:
1. A rebound following a collision; a glancing off.
2. A shot in billiards in which the cue ball successively
strikes two other balls on the table.
intransitive verb:
1. To strike and rebound; to glance.
2. To make a carom.
transitive verb:
To make (an object) bounce off something; to cause to carom.
Carom derives from obsolete carambole, from Spanish carambola, “a stroke at billiards.”
I bet the woman I love has gone to bed, and is racing through dreamland right now. I’m going to dive in there after her, and see if I can catch up. But first off… I need something to eat. What’ll promote dreams? I’m fresh out of rarebit.
I guess some ramen noodles and Tabasco will have to do! 🙂
*hugs* to all you of you folks hitting the sack, and *kisses, love and adoration* to my sweetheart, wherever she may be. 🙂 nigh-night.
Regarding Zeppelins. I’ve always loved ’em.
One of my eccentricities in this life is my fondness for airships. It’s really unfortunate in my mind that the Hindenburg disaster seemingly wrecked any chance of us having a nice lighter-than-air fleet. Zeppelins don’t go up as easily as you might think…Simple bullet strikes won’t necessarily do it — there were cases of German WWI Zeppelins being shot full of holes by attacking British planes, and, while they eventually lost altitude, they didn’t ignite. Even the hydrogen didn’t leak out at the high rate you would expect, as a rigid airship’s gas cells are at atmospheric pressure. (That is why they appear only partially filled when the ship is on the ground, and expand to full volume at what is referred to as “pressure height” — the maximum altitude the airship can reach without triggering automatic valves, or risking rupture of the gas cells…) The RFC/RAF could only reliably down a Zeppelin with MG fire when they used incendiary rounds, or at least a higher proportion of tracer in the MG belts.
There was no smoking aboard the wartime Zeppelins, and the only way around that was to volunteer for duty in the “spy basket”, a vaguely teardrop-shaped car suspended a few hundred feet below the airship. (The theory was that the ship would cruise above the clouds, and the man in the “spy basket”, dangling below the clouds, would serve as a spotter for navigation and bombing, communicating with the ship via a phone line braided into the suspension line for his perch. This was not as successful as it sounds, and the USN abandoned its own version of the idea in the early 30s…) The spotter wore a parachute, but it was generally believed that, if the cable broke, the suspension system would foul the basket opening long enough for the ground to come up and hit you while you were trying to work your way free… So you had to risk your neck for a chance to flick your Bic — better to simply wait until after the ship landed back in Germany!
The post WWI German commercial Zeppelins were rather fanatical about fire safety. IIRC, Graf Zeppelin (LZ-127) was a “smoke-free” airship. Hindenburg (LZ-129) and, I believe, her sister ship Graf Zeppelin II (LZ-129) included a “smoking room” — the only place anybody was permitted to smoke on the airship. This room was asbestos-lined, and you still couldn’t use your own matches or lighter (such implements were temporarily confiscated while you were aboard) — you had to use one of the special lighters that were chained to the tables!
The airships of every non-US nation during this period used hydrogen for two main reasons:
1. Hydrogen, in the purity normally used for filling an airship, will lift approximately 68 lbs per kcf, while helium will lift only 62 lbs per kcf.
2. Helium was found in useful quantity only in the US, and our government had restrictions on export of helium. Even in the US, it wasn’t inexpensive — it generally cost at least ten times what you would pay for an equal amount of hydrogen. This fact was not lost on a penny-pinching Congress, but use of helium in US airships had been mandated, ever since the loss of the Italian-built US military semirigid airship Roma, which struck a high-tension line, and crashed, with heavy loss of life, when her hydrogen cells caught fire. Los Angeles was filled with hydrogen for her delivery flight from Germany, but this was very soon replaced with helium. (However, Congress was slow to fund extraction of enough helium to refill the ship, so the gas from the Shenandoah had to be transferred over to Los Angeles, temporarily grounding that ship. Shenandoah only flew again after Los Angeles went in for overhaul!)
Airships went everywhere, including to the poles. Norge reached the North Pole, as did Italia later on (though Italia crashed on the way back), and even the Graf Zeppelin made an Arctic flight, though she didn’t cross the pole.
A polar expedition was planned for USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) in 1925, soon after the ship finished up a goodwill tour of the Midwest. Unfortunately, the Shenandoah broke up in a squall near Ava, Ohio, on the night of 2-3 September, 1925 (the anniversary of the ship’s commissioning!), killing over a dozen of her crew, including LCDR Zachary Lansdowne, her CO.
A good starting source for airship data is Airship: The Home Page for Lighter Than Air craft (http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/airship.html). If you want to go directly to the German Zeppelin data, try http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zeppelin.html
For a picture of the Los Angeles doing a nose-stand at the high mast at Lakehurst NAS, in New Jersey, see
contraception, mating habits, and so on.
from queso-
Man… some really misinformed youths out there. click on them to read some common teenage myths about contraception.
It found 85% of GPs thought young people were not using effective contraception because they were too embarrassed to ask for advice. But 70% believed ignorance was the problem, and 70% believed teenagers were worried their confidentiality would not be respected.
(And yes, overlap occurs. it’s not bad math.)
Despite the noise and annoying passengers, being a train conductor must have its moments:
Gil Murtagh’s train from Hoboken, N.J., stops at Paterson. One day recently, a pretty girl got off and ran into the arms of a young man holding flowers. From his seat, Mr. Murtagh smiled nostalgically at the lingering embrace, mood uplifted. As the train pulled out, the conductor smiled, too. “She was smooching with some guy in Hoboken also,” he said.
My first attempt to use the ‘quote class’… let’s see how it looks… not sticking out. bah! it must be restricted, or I’m doing it wrong.
In other news, another hippie couple of my aquaintance is fertile. Leisa is 2 months along now! Here’s a picture of she and me at my first phish show, way back in the day.
Times have changed since that photo… I’m down to a goatee,(and hopefully my face looks a bit thinner) she’s got a red rinse now, instead of being a blonde… and the VW van behind us is long sold. I think she’ll be a grand mommy! She’s quite the maternal type, and will be a wonderful nurturer.Her hubby, Brian will benefit from a munchkin, too… he seems the type to shoulder responsibility well. I hope they make like Dave and Cathi, and cut out the pot for the duration.
Well, thats 2 sets of Hippies… Dave and Cathi are about 4 months along now, too. They had an ultrasound recently, and as soon as the image comes back, I’ll post a link… I’m so amazed by the human life cycle, and how it works. Women have some remarkable plumbing that men don’t… (and vice versa… women’s are just more active in the cycle.) That’s part of the reason I started the
Protected: GILLIGAN’S LESSONS
LJ update …
You can hide your list of who you’re a friend of on your bio page, if you so desire.
Nice, if somebody with a vulgar name wants to read you, or whatever your reasons might be to hide it.
3 words of the day – arriviste, clochard & myopic
arriviste a-ree-VEEST, noun:
A person who has recently attained success, wealth, or high status but not general acceptance or respect; an upstart.
Arriviste comes from French, from arriver, “to arrive,” from (assumed) Vulgar Latin arripare, “to reach the shore,” from Latin ad-, “to, toward” + ripa, “shore.”
clochard KLOH-shahr noun:
A beggar; vagrant.
From French clocher, to limp, from Latin clopus, lame.
myopic my-OP-ik adjective:
1. Nearsighted; unable to see clearly objects at a distance.
2. Shortsighted; lacking foresight; narrow-minded.
From New Latin, from Greek, myopia, from myop- nearsighted, from myein, to close + ops, eye.
Happy Birfday
I hope your times are wonderful on your remaining spins on this orb. 🙂