11232214.1Catalogs. This particular one, just so I won't hurt their feelings, I've renamed slightly to Touche of Clawss, as befitting its style.


I sent them a kindly email,

Dear Touche of Clawss: Thank you for the lovely catalog. It was a complete surprise. However, after studying all the fine offerings very carefully, I find that it just isn't right for me at this time. Please remove my name from your list. Should I decide to open that whorehouse at a future date, I will be sure to contact you. Regards ..

You never know, you know? Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:37 AM

11232213.1I did my part.    While pouring (about half a million pieces of) Instant Rice last night, I was reminded about that Free Rice website. So tonight, with The Season and all, I went over there. First, I missed couple of words to see what the penalty would be. Seems there is none, except you get no rice. Bummer. Then I went on to score an impressive string of correct answers, raised my Vocab score to a 10 and sent 680 grains of rice to somebody starving. Cool. Then I lost interest in it.

Am I cynical about this too? You bet. See, we'll give, give til it hurts, but only if we're amused. If the concert sucks .. well let somebody else cure that disease, whatever it was. Sad thing is, very little would be given to charity without some kind of hook. I learned that when I got volunteered (decades ago) as the company representative for United Way. We'd have our little meetings and presentations - sometimes a good-looking fireman would come by and join in, and I guess they're all good-looking if you're a hotel maid who has already cleaned 15 toilets today and it's 3:15 and you get an unexpected 25 minute break before the 16th - and our progress charts, and was it all ever gawdawful. We sent our money in and it got added to the pot and the city totalled it all up to $25 million or $250 million or whatever, and all those organizations survived for another year. And that night we all got ripped and went to a concert and I think we gave some more money to something else and felt really, really good and warm about it as we sang along sort of and tried to light something to wave. It was a very boozy cause, I remember that. Did I say boozy? I meant worthy, a very worthy cause. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:07 PM

11232212.1Bali.    It had everything - exotic clothing and wouldya just look at the diversity,


unpronounceable names, "we gotta work together" speeches in more languages than you realized we had, extreme America-bashing .. the list goes on. In the end

"The resulting “Bali Action Plan” contains no binding commitments. The plan concludes that “deep cuts in global emissions will be required” and provides a timetable for two years of talks to shape the first formal addendum to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty since the Kyoto Protocol 10 years ago."

Is that beautiful or what? Absolutely nothing happened except the setting of an agenda for the next meeting. They didn't even decide where to have it except all agreed it should be someplace warm and exotic if practical; no more Montreals in winter! If for no other reason that Montreal in Winter is a bad place to trumpet Global Warming.

The reason why I'm completely and utterly and every other adverb you can think of cynical about Climate Change and Global Warming? Because is has only about 1% to do with science and climate and 99% to do with the young American suburbanite female driving a 2.5 ton SUV with 2.5 spoiled children in back, going somewhere (in her own world.) It might seem hard to understand because we see (endure) the phenomenon every day, but to the rest of the world it is a wasteful, moving, dismayingly expensive carbon-dioxide spewing example of everything that is America and its excess. And up until now they (the squalid rest of the world) has been unable to do anything about it. Yes, they have voted, and in two years they will have another meeting and THEN they will do something about it (us.)

Oh, and Death to America (when it runs out of money.)
Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:25 PM

11232211.1"The Asterisk Era"    That's what the Keith Olbermann program is calling it, the baseball steroid scandal. He is witty at all costs. They played a statement from the lawyer for Roger Clemens who said it ain't so for him .. "Roger Clemens adamantly and vehemently [pause] and whatever other adjectives can be used [inaudible] denies [blah-blah] steroids [blah-blah] performance something-something."

That's good. Only those are adverbs.

P.S. Over 500 other blogs mentioned the adverbia. Baseball and grammar, hand-in-hand I always say. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:16 PM

11232210.1My Cane.    Did I ever show you a photo of my cane? Don't think so. My great-uncle Ed made this cane many years ago for my father after bypass surgery. Turned out he didn't need it, and it was a bit too tall for him anyway. Like things do in our house, it stood where it was last left, pretty much undisturbed. It wasn't as if someone would come along and dust it, but occasionally it did get picked up and wowed over. Ed was about 75 when he made the cane, and he lived 20 more years after that.


People who use canes don't get many visitors to their blogs, because they're usually old. I don't care. There was a woman on the television the other morning, reporting what the "blogosphere" thought about some recent political nonevent. (All the events of this campaign have been nonevents so far. Am I the only one who wishes it would just die?) She was young. All the writers she spoke about were young. They knew everything. Most people who use a cane don't really need one; it just helps a bit. Hard to explain, kind of a balance thing. You spend most of your time looking for where you left it. For some reason, elderly thought processes do not include, "Remember, you're leaning it against the back of the the television instead of someplace sensible where you'll see it."

My irrelevancy permits me to use up an entire megabyte or better of info-electrons to upload this picture, which I took with a filmless camara (amazing, aren't they?) and experience no guilt about the virtual wastefulness of it all.

I'm very happy to have this little treasure, especially given the fact that I'm there now, cane age. It is a very fine piece of work, and it reminds me to think of my dad and my great-uncle Ed every day.Macherat WHAT WE ARE FACING IS A PLANETARY EMERGENCY.

posted by Rick at 10:30 PM

11232209.1Multiple choice.    Who made the following statement? WHAT WE ARE FACING IS A PLANETARY EMERGENCY.

A) Jor-El, 1938 [the year 8751 on Krypton]
B) The President of the United Federation of Planets, 2286
C) Albert Gore, on Earth, 12/9/2007
D) All of the above.

Macherat
posted by Rick at 10:59 PM

11232208.1A little cross tonight.    The loser kid who shot up the mall .. he wanted to go out famous, and CNN and the others granted his wish and continue to grant it every hour. Why not try anonymity just once, huh? "A 16-year-old kid shot 43 people today, then turned the gun on himself. We're not going to tell you anything about him." For the youngsters out there, some advice: go ahead a kill yourself if you feel that life is wretched but, please, for the rest of us (1) do it quietly and alone, (2) be as neat as possible. Someone has to clean up the mess, you know.

I think it's WONDERFUL that Brad Pit is building houses in New Orleans. He makes about three movies per year at $20 million each, and that would allow for about 300 houses per year! I don't think you understand. Huh? It's an 'I'll put up a little money to match what other people give' deal. He's more into giving of his valuable and beautiful time here. Besides he has a film coming out. Oh.

We interviewed all six-and-one-half trillion people on Earth and sent two winners to New York to do talk radio shows. Yes, the best we could come up with was Don Imus and Howard Stern. Sorry.Rick Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:43 PM

11232207.1Doing catalogs, watching it rain.    Everyone knows about our rain, but 4" is a lot even for us. Nine inches in Bremerton. Winds 100+ in "the usual windier places." This particular storm won't have a name unless it lasts a few days longer and becomes the Pearl Harbor Day Winter Storm. It just might have the legs to make that. Things have never been as flooded at they are in Seattle right now. I told Brother just not to go down to the basement. No point in ruining a perfectly good night's sleep over something hopeless.

Wind. We have funny-sounding state park names and big trees here in the northwest. One fewer tree today: the Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis, at Klootchy Creek County Park came down in the windstorm. At 206 feet tall, this 750-year-old giant had been in place since The Crusades. Imagine that.

I saw this product in a catalog,


a camera on the end of an extension rod. Just the gizmo you need for those difficult up-the-skirt shots.

One of the debate programs was on when I went by that channel, and I lingered for about four seconds. Two grim thoughts came to me, 1) on of those people is going to be our next President and, 2) The 2012 campaign will begin on the day after the election. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:34 PM

11232206.1uh-oh.    When Jeff wrote that he had to come up with five people to tag (Meme tag,) I figured I was pretty safe. After all, he and his Meme-tag team would be fairly highbrow whereas I ... well, you know. Yes, you guessed right, I have been tagged. This is my first time, and my instinct of course was to search this house and go through all the books and find the coolest one ever, something so obscure and odd that everyone would be amazed at my highbrowness. Coming down to earth, I quickly realized that no one would believe I was actually reading a 1905 First Edition Precious Bane, by Mary Webb. (Unique narration, in dialect, by a young girl with a harelip; set in rural England in the early 1800's; it's romantic but it's much more than a romance; beautifully written. Quietly suspenseful yet the plot's actually more character-driven, which I love.) So I put down what I was really reading, The Sky's the Limit, by Steven Gaines, a book about luxury living in Manhattan. Page 161,

He certainly was refreshing - exuberant, enthusiastic, full of energy and "wild charm" but his "not being a slave to conventionalities" might have been something of an understatement.

Now all I have to do is remember five people that I know who read (and are on the internet.) Let's see, there's Jeff .... Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:39 AM

11232205.1Cruising.    The sister-in-law is in Antarctica. No really, she's on a ship which is spending several days cruising the coast of Antarctica before heading around the tip and up the other side of South America. She sends me an email every day about tanning, food and her jewels (vs everyone elses.) I feel like her sorority sister. Now, if she would just learn to spell Antarctica.

What is it, a little after nine in the morning? Second cup of coffee, not dressed. But there are tens of thousands of people in downtown Seattle already, watching the Macy's Day After Thanksgiving Parade. It's 33°. Some people have as many as five children along. Everyone who is not along the parade route is in a Mall. Are they all insane? Macy's has bought up just about every department store chain in America, I guess. We had a perfectly good one here before. It featured nice things which were overpriced. Macy's is similar, only with crappy things which are overpriced. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:22 AM

11232204.1Microsoft Invents Workspace of the Future.    The newspapers have devoted a bit more attention than usual to The Company lately as Microsoft moves forward with their campus expansion. The campus has been emblematic of all things Microsoft when compared with more garish companies [notably Oracle,] that is, understated. While being somewhat modernish, the overall impression was Beetle Bailey's Camp Swampy. Now that Microsoft has to compete with everyone else for the brief attention-span of the Millennium generation, God help us, they're updating.

This picture is illustrative of Microsoft at work, reinventing workspace for the 22nd century: [Steve Ringman, Seattle Times]


Careful inspection shows the worker sitting on a utilitarian chair, typing into the notepad computer on her lap. Gone is the entire "desktop" notion. Similarly, doors are out, replaced with sliding glass, modestly frosted at the bottom. The greatest single innovation in my opinion is the elimination of filing cabinets entirely, replaced by cardboard boxes in the hall, accessible to everyone. Once again, Microsoft Rulz. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:16 AM

11232203.1Are we fully dumbed down yet?    Funny how one little article in the paper will annoy you to the point of typing. I used to write LttE, quit that. Cranks. Oh, I'm still a crank, just don't do postage any more. You can send LttE's via email now. Did you know that? I did, actually, but it just doesn't have any oomph.

So, I was reading the business section, something that doesn't take too long around here what with the paper reluctantly giving business at most 4 pages. Business is a little like other personal habits for people in Seattle: we all do them, but it isn't polite to discuss things like money and work. This particular article noted that the McClatchy Company had reduced the estimated value of its minority stake in the Seattle Times by 80% from the calculations of only a year ago. The writer [Eric Pryne] took the time to contact Professor Frank Hodge at the University of Washington, and he selected this portion of whatever the professor said to include in his article:

"This is a big write-down, said Frank Hodge, a University of Washington accounting professor who specializes in financial-statement analysis. They [McClatchy] now feel this investment isn't worth nearly as much as they thought it was worth before."

Really? Is it that complicated? Glad I stayed out of business.

The paragraph sounds mean .. not intentional, really. Just our town. We're green, and yes, weenies and kind of clueless as to where the fark all this money came from. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:03 PM

11232202.1Books.    You probably already knew our town was book-nuts, or wouldn't have been surprised at it anyway. We're quite proud of that, our circulation numbers and all. Especially on a cool, drizzly fall day, there just isn't anything cozier than a book in Seattle.

However, nothing ever ends there, does it? We recently approved hundreds of millions of dollars to improve and expand city libraries, and the project is well under way. Somewhere in all this reading frenzy I think the idea may have gotten a bit confused. For instance, an article in the paper describes the frustration of a man who was on the waiting list for Clerks, the movie, for over a year. Other people, numbering in the 700's and more, languish for months on waiting lists for new novels. Are these things what libraries are for, and did I miss something? Clerks is on the Indy Channel at least four times a year, or one could even buy it at amazon-dot-com. Ditto with new releases. It just wouldn't have occurred to me to go to the library for the latest Danielle Steele and put down my name as #743 to wait for it.

I had been afraid to ask, what with the breastfeeding station, homeless wakeup hygiene facility, Charles Simonyi Mixing Chamber, talking books lounge for neonates and 13 Starbucks, whether our new Library Monstrosity


even had regular shelved books. Turns out it does. Macherat


posted by Rick at 8:37 AM

11232201.1The divide.    Richard Zoglin (not familiar with him) writes about Tom Stoppard in Time. To tell the truth, Time is getting harder to read all the ... well, time. Too many youngsters writing and being At All Times completely cool. Zoglin writes, "Stoppard, who rolls his r's with a continental flourish that somehow manages not to seem affected .."

In his picture, he just looked pretty much like an old, tired lesbian to me. Whether or not that's an affectation, I couldn't say.Macherat


posted by Rick at 12:12 AM

11232200.1That's right, 2200.    I'ven been doing this so long that I noticed something significant tonight: one of the first things to go for Old People is multi-tasking. Just to prove that to you, I should leave this entry as originally typed with my 2:40.10 playlist going. Loud, of course.

I wonder how many music aficionados of today, people with thousands of tunes on their ipods, remember the band Bread. I looked them up on Wikipedia tonight and guess what, the entry was entirely BREAD, the eating variety, with no cross-references to the group. Seems they broke up about thirty-five years ago. I hadn't heard. Guess if you're going to try and be "with it," you need to keep up better with the happenings. Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:15 PM

11232199.1Tunz.    I'm listening to the music from Witness, the movie, the scene where they're building the barn. Always puts me where I like to be. And loud, real loud. Surprised I can even type. Anyway, the music was composed and played on an synthesizer, laid down digitally and I'm now getting those sounds through a computer. Furthermore, I bought the electrons which produce this song online, using my Discovercard. Nothing material ever changed hands. The whole process would make an android ecstatic .. or whatever would pass for that.

Earlier, I noticed the DVD player connected to the main television had died. Imagine that; I didn't think this could happen to digital and solid state, Made In China and all. The machine only cost me $25 about six years ago .. so, I went online and bought a new one on Amazon. Typed in digits. Typed in money. It will be here Wednesday. Then I can watch last season's Dexter. Quirky serial killer. Digital, of course. The show, not the killing. Murder isn't digital yet. Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:09 PM

11232198.1So..    A very little manic research turned this up,


and no, I don't feel a bit guilty about copying the information right off their page and putting it on mine. "Right Media" operates YIELDMANAGER, that gawdawful popup which no computer power on earth can kill, and Yahoo just bought Right Media.

See, when the sharpies sit down and look at the figures on P&L and just how they're doin' -- the one thing they never take into consideration is Ill Will. That's because they don't teach Ill Will in business school. Funny, because we know exactly what Ill Will is, don't we? It's when you don't buy.Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:59 AM

11232197.1Way to go Al.    Did you hear that Al Gore won the Not Bush Prize?

I thought he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Same thing. Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:00 AM

11232196.1A small temporary victory.    I had the beginning of another nasty fight with Company A yesterday. By "beginning" I mean that it quickly became obvious that a company which contracts out their Customer Service department cannot be battled in a conventional fashion. All those young people on the other end of the phone are thoroughly used to listening to irate customers. You cannot get to them. I quit before getting mad and saved a few angina pills.

However, on another front. I have to tell you this one. I ordered a bookshelf, one that it turned out required a huge number of screws for "some assembly required." I told you this part already - not enough screws came in the package. Long, short .. they offered to send me another complete bookcase since they weren't equipped to "do screws," as the tepid young snot put it, and if I would kindly repackage and return the other one, the one with the missing screws. Follow me so far? Yes, this really happened!! I was to have in hand two complete products after having paid for only one, violating the cardinal rule of mail order.

For awhile, they didn't get it. But today I received the first stirrings, as their machine sent me a "Do not reply to this e-mail" communication about the second shipment. Estimated arrival date: Sept. 13th. Today is October 9th. The machine is confused: Package was shipped. We have no money. What could possibly have happened?

Stay tuned. This should be fun.Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:41 AM

11232195.1Going Green: #359.    "Eco-luxury"   It's the latest thing in Seattle. What you do is pay some poor people .. a couple of villages worth if you've the means, and of course we all do around these parts .. pay the poor people to eat dirt and live on scarcely nothing, which they would mostly do anyway, so you can transfer the carbon credits and get that 43rd floor Bellevue condo and buy a new jet. Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:11 PM

11232194.1The End is near.    That guy, the one wearing rags, a long beard and carrying the usual sign? He may have been right, just a few years early. You've been talking to Customer Service tonight, haven't you? Why yes, how did you know? Just a guess. Which one? Two Actually, Albertsons and Barnes & Noble. Ah, I believe both of those have female interactive voice phone trees? Yes, and I think it's the same lady. And you can never get out of them or get anywhere useful? Yes .. And at the very, very end at the tip of a tremendously long branch of that tree she/it tells you the Customer Service Agent assistance closed at 12:00 midnight, EST, which was approximately two minutes ago? Yes, yes! Oh God yes! That's exactly what happened. Relax. It isn't the end of the world. Just the beginning of the end.

Okay, what about the RFID's then? I read today where they have made some that are .05mm by .05mm. While I'm not exactly metric-challenged, I am definitely metric-resistant, so .05mm is something I can't don't handle. Put in more sensible terms, the latest RFID's are only 2.424237e-06 furlongs by 2.424237e-06 furlongs. That means they can put them in Anything ... your food even, and track them (you) forever. Furthermore, just think about this: as spooky as The Forbin Project was, they hadn't even imagined these devices - only 37 years ago.

Glad I'm old. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:20 PM

11232193.1Little man so spic and span ..    I should be watching. He's on television right now, the tiny President of Iran. Brother is watching, and he is very agitated. I don't want to get agitated; that's the bottom line, I reckon.

Some day, if there's still television, the few people who are left can have a forum where they talk about the day they heard him. Since I don't expect to be among them, well ..

I remember the day my mother told me she believed in the devil. It was a surprise, #1 because she was a highly educated woman and #2 because the subject hadn't come up until I was fifty and she was seventy-five. I don't believe in the devil, unfortunately, still viewing the whole concept as the bogeyman conjured up to frighten children into behaving. If I did, though, that little troll Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be one of his Devil Helpers for sure.

Incidentally, the "little man so spic and span" reference is only on the internet eight times (nine now.) Jeez, didn't anybody else go to summer camp fifty years ago?
Macherat


posted by Rick at 11:49 AM

11232192.1More then and now.    I like Boeing, the hometown company - sort of. They just got a small contract from the Air Force to install a digital communications package on the B-52 fleet. Now, I'm sure this is more complicated than the two-hour job to install a wireless network and internet connection in my house but,


according to the release, it is going to take 11 months to do one plane, after which they will move on to the rest of the fleet. Well, I have a perspective on this: back in 1957 when I lived on the first base to receive the B-52, Boeing was cranking out about 100 of those behemoths every 11 months, the whole plane! From building 100 from scratch to adding a doodad on one in the same period of time - where we've come in 50 years. Oh sure, I understand what's involved and how it all works, still ... Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:52 AM

11232191.1Misc Fri Musings.    Brother was back in his room, watching a movie. I passed by and couldn't help going in to annoy/amuse him briefly. "Oooo, kewl. A submarine movie." "No [patiently].. it's The Titanic, actually A Night to Remember (1958, black-and-white.)"

"Oh no! Look ... the Carpathia has set off another flare rocket and it's coming directly for the lifeboat with all the surviving stars in it! Oh, the humanity." No comment from Brother.

Finally, as the camera panned in the last scene over the weary survivors aboard the rescue ship, I noticed a familiar face. "Say, isn't that the guy from that show? You know, with the spies?" observed I. "Illya Kuryakin, Man From U.N.C.L.E.," replied he.

Now, how did he come up with that name? He's supposed to be "retarded," for pete's sake. Brother can enter a huge book store and within a few minutes go directly to the book he's after without ever looking at the signs which direct customers to the appropriate sections. I don't know how he does that either. Does the same thing with television, and that can be a little spooky. He subscribes to TV Guide, but I don't know why because he never uses it. Somehow he knows where something good is on and finds it - in this case, a movie way up on Channel 523, a channel I didn't even know we had. Oh, well.

Speaking of ... Did you hear about Ford's new hydrogen car, The Humanity?

A friend's blog went TU today. He sent an e-mail to his regular readers which I thought was kind of him. Only thing, it was entirely cryptic and mysterious. He could have just as easily said he was bored with it. Made me wonder how my blog will end. It surely has outlasted a great many readers, all of whom have died, sadly. I suppose eventually I will too, die that is, and at some point afterward a machine will simply delete it. All that typing. Sigh ... Macherat

posted by Rick at 11:27 PM

11232190.1Tony.   Is this a great picture or what?


Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press
Dang, you can't really tell, but Tony is the only one looking right at us and he's looking with that look. Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:31 PM

11232189.1Sooweeee.    Do a lot of the things going on with the economy mystify you? Don't feel alone. Even Alan Greenspan didn't see the housing/mortgage crisis coming, and that is alarming (because I did.) How can so many people make so much money not doing anything and spend so much on crap and all the while the system just sails along. Is it magic? No. But relax and go with it, because there isn't anything you can do. We're just being fattened up is all. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:54 PM

11232188.1Sorry.    Packages came today - products of a latenight online shopping spree a week or so ago. All but one come from China. All but one stinks .. a stink that ... I tell you what, just type China Stink in the search box above and you'll get the blogs that I've typed on that subject. Then multiply the experience by five. I did go outside for some air. It helped. Afterward, I made brother take the boxes, assorted fillers and the gawdawful tape that sticks it all together, go down the street and put them in the noisy neighbor's trash can. I'm old, okay? We get to be a little antisocial sometimes, especially when it comes to stink.

Oh, and one package was short 14 fracking screws! I know it was deliberate as hell; I would get the one slacker employee out of a billion. Message to that person, whichever one you are,


I hope you find a rat turd in your rice. That happened to me once, and it told me I must have really ticked somebody off in this or a previous life. Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:47 PM

11232187.1Member Since 1967.    Just received in the mail another in the series, American Express Credit Card Information Updates. It's long, and it is eventually signed by Kenneth J. Ciak, President and Paul R. Johnson, Secretary. Ordinarily, I would claim that these are invented names and no such individuals exist, but in this case I happen to know they are real. Whether they actually read this thing before signing it, well you know. I only put their names in for when they search Google to see how famous they're getting to be. Like we all do.

As for me, I read it. Mostly. My normal reading comprehension is Fair to Somewhat Good, but in this case it was Nonexistent. I could at least tell that it was frightening and threatening and the only safe thing to do is not use the American Express card at all, pretty much my policy since about our 25th anniversary.Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:55 PM

11232186.1Sir Jim.    Our perpetual Congressman, Hon. Jim McDermott (D-Seattle) has been knighted by the King of Lesotho. Henceforth, he may add to his list of honors: Knight Commmander of the Most Dignified Order of Moshoeshoe. Since he is congressman-for-life here locally, he is able to spend most of his time in Africa. He is a psychiatrist.

You might remember:

Friday, April 20, 2007. In Washington State, we care about the fish and animals, and hang the cost, doggone it. One million dollars per salmon? Yur darned tootin,' whatever it takes. For example, the multimillion dollar project to reintroduce pygmy rabbits to the scrub flats of Eastern Washington is not going to be deterred by the fact that 14 of the first 20 rabbits were quickly devoured by predators. So long as the money and new GPS devices to replace those also apparently eaten holds out.

There's news. Federal officials have approved a plan for the rescue. I read it. There may be news, but I'm afraid I cannot tell you that there's hope. The press release uses the word "managing" three times in quick succession as well as "program," "collaborating" and "developing." Nowhere in the vast scale of the exercise is there any hint of "going outside." So, they're not getting into boots and rugged clothing and crawling around in the sand and sagebrush, looking for tiny rare rabbits? Rabbit. There's one rabbit left. No, I'm so sorry; it's all memos and meetings. In fact, can you imagine what it would take to get a Washington bureaucrat from there to the wild badasslands of Eastern Washington? The best part of the whole plan is this:

As part of the draft recovery plan, federal officials will continue to pursue cooperation with land owners in the rabbit's historic range under a "safe harbor" agreement which allows landowners, after a survey of their land for any wild rabbits, to pay $50 for a permit to be absolved of any harm for violating the Endangered Species Act if they incidentally kill or hurt a rabbit while operating their farm.

The remaining rabbit would probably appreciate that.

The new hotel in Dubai, the one with the giant sail ... I checked on a standard room, wife and kids: $4,084.74 a night. "Published Rate is subject to 10% Municipality Fee and 10% Service Charge and is inclusive of complimentary parking and access to the beach." I wonder if we'll get pillow mints?

There was a house advertised in the real estate section which I couldn't believe: 3br/2ba, meticulously remodeled, only $215,000. Then I noticed the address: 17711 - 648th Lane Northeast. A bit out of the way.

Finally, residents were evacuated for about five hours when David Hahn,


the "Radioactive Boy Scout," was caught trying to steal a smoke detector. Once again, ignorant hysteria. Nuclear energy is perfectyl safe when employed properly.Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:40 PM

11232185.1The Warlord.    He was Magnificent, and his title was just as Magnificent and it was expected that one would employ it, being careful to include all the honorifics and nuances, when addressing His Magnificence. I always did anyway. This day he was energized, enthusiastically reviewing the grand plans for his new city, and he finally decided upon the alignment for our Grand Boulevard which was pretty much the key to the whole plan. Now, things could move forward. I didn't imagine at the time that a question about the statue would end up being so important. As it happened, the Boulevard, when extended, pointed directly at a small statue of Jesus on a nearby hillside, and His Magnificence asked about it. Somebody explained, briefly, and we moved on.

Who would ever have expected it? Later, I'm not sure how much later, in a vast, fine gathering of All Who Were Important, Noble and Well-dressed, His Magnificence announced that his subjects would be converting to Christianity, as he only just had, and furthermore he planned to introduce human rights, universal suffrage, capitalism and a few other things which I can't remember now. It was heady stuff, and this made persons in the assemblage heady as well, though I remember thinking as some of the questions grew slightly more impertinent than usually would be dared that all it would take would be a slight shift of mood and heady might end up being headless. I stayed out of it anyway and just listened.

Later, he presented a large map to a group of advisers (I was there too) which he had drawn himself. The map showed the proposed boundaries of our kingdom (somewhat expanded from what I remembered our extent as having been) relative to the boundaries of the adjoining kingdoms. I think there were three neighbors on the map. He had written a rather crude threat and added something like, "This is how it's going to be from now on, fellas," right on the map and, so he told us, he had already mailed it to the other three kings. So, I thought, it's Christianity, Freedom and now War. Quite a week.

Through this adventure there are incredible costumes and pageantry, horns announcing arrivals, feasts and the usual royal stuff. Oh, and did I mention that we were all Japanese? Pretty impressive, taking place as it did from the time I got up to pee at about 5:10am and an hour or so later when the alarm went off. (See: Norvasc, side-effects, vivid dreaming.) Macherat


posted by Rick at 10:47 AM

11232184.1Consider this.    You know how you'll sometimes get an idea but not have time to explore it, so the way to keep it alive is to make a brief start of a post and then save that thought in Draft? No? Well, I do that occasionally, and this is one of those times. Trouble is, a day later, the idea is often so mind-dullingly stale that you can hardly wait to get it deleted. This is one of those times. However, I had already typed an entire sentence, so ...

It has to do with investing and making money at a level which you and I can't fathom. Do you realize that a handful of men, maybe 70, around the world have the means to put an employee of theirs in the accounting department of every Fortune 500 company and pay them, say, $100,000 a year just to spill an occasional tip, phone in a number just a few hours early, maybe make a tiny mistake once in awhile? Doing the math, this would cost a mega-investor Fifty Million Dollars a year. Easily made up in one or two phone calls. Think about it. Even scaled down tremendously, the possibilities mean that you and I have no chance in hell in that casino.

On the housing/credit crunch, so-called. In case you start to worry about this, just remember that it's poor people losing their houses and fabulously rich greedy people who are losing the money. While losing a house is sad, it's really just converting equity (precious little at that) back to rent and moving on just like any other move-out. Not a tragedy. But the idea of a bunch of filthy Euroes and worse losing billions is almost too wonderful ever to hope for. So, there's that. Macherat


posted by Rick at 11:59 AM

11232183.1Aunt Sue.    My great-great-Aunt Sue was a writer and I've suspected maybe a bit depressed. This morning, I was telling my own great-grandchildren, Lancelot and Genghis, about her. They're a little young yet, perhaps, for Sue, who I understand had many issues. She dedicated her best volume,

With sorrow in my heart
and
Much pity for the weak
WHO PUT STUMBLING BLOCKS IN MY PATH
and
Wished my life a perpetual
SLOUGH OF DESPOND
I respectfully dedicate this volume.
The Author

and soon thereafter, in 1907 actually, she moved to San Francisco where she no doubt enjoyed a joyless life in the rubble.

Sometimes I think I am becoming my great-great-Aunt Sue. Years ago, when I first opened this book and first tried unsuccessfully to read much of it, the sentiment seemed very strange. Half a century or so later, it really doesn't. Been fighting an urge to move to Banda Aceh.Macherat


posted by Rick at 11:37 PM

11232182.1Good sense.    There has been considerable coverage this week on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Looking at the (still) messed up New Orleans, I just have to shake my head. People, people ... why do you have to build right where the hurricanes come, year after year? Even as we plan to pour more billions into the Gulf coast, projections are that New Orleans will be an island by the end of the century, a below-sea-level island completely surrounded by levees. Good levees, we can only hope.

I'm just so very glad to live where I do. Why just now I'm leaning back and admiring my lovely view across the bay and city, towards ..


My goodness, we didn't realize that volcano was so huge! What volcano? Oh, you must mean The Mountain. Not to worry, completely harmless. Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:57 PM

11232181.1It isn't me after all.    Living in these times can do it to you, that is, make you think you're losing it, getting senile, whatever. Fact is, the culture itself is what's FUBAR. Silly things come along - gag me with a spoon - we absorb them and move on. But when Time Magazine picks up on something, you can bet it has been taken up by the group DNA already and is part of us. Like this:

As post-Minimalists do, he finds ways to make abstract forms to speak to things outside themselves.

Really? I got up real close to his masterpiece and didn't hear nothin'. Frankly, I thought


Brunhilde 1998-2000 was a wicker trash basket and caused a huge unnecessary ruckus when I turned it over and dropped a banana peel in it.

Did you know that nanofiction is a term coined by role-playing game designer R. Sean Borgstrom to describe fictitious quotes (that is, quotes which are "excerpted" from a non-existent source) which appear in the margins of the role-playing game, Nobilis. Now you do, should it ever come up.

Let's get lost tonight/You could be my black Kate moss tonight. Try reading Coldplay's lyrics while thinking ba-boom ba'-boom; helps you to get the message. Or if you still don't, go read about it - "omnivorous piece of hip-hop sprawl Electro frenchies gangsta mien."

They go on and on with this horseshit, all swept up like it all actually has some meaning. We need a depression or war or something to bring people back to earth and reality. Fifty people got burned up in Greece, but Olympia was saved. I just don't think those two facts belong in the same sentence. Trouble is, with six and a quarter trillion of us now, frankly, human beings are pretty much dispensable.

Television has gone from saying/showing things that would have made me sweat, turn red and slump down in the chair were I watching it with my grandmother, to my mother, to watching it with anyone. RE: Sen. Larry Craig. TV people, we don't need to know all the techniques for soliciting sex in restrooms oh for god's sake now they have actors demonstrating it and they're playing his tape on every channel. Where can we go to escape? Pluto?

Long/short of it, although I may truly be quite hopelessly senile, I feel quite regular and just old-fashioned tonight. Macherat


posted by Rick at 8:44 PM

11232180.1WMD.    It was announced today, somewhat hysterically, that deadly chemical weapons from Iraq were found in the files at the United Nations.

My word ... so does this mean the Americans were justified in attacking that wretched country?

It would appear so.

When is the evidence from those files going to be made public?

What evidence?

The information. Information in those files.

I don't think you understood. It wasn't information; the actual deadly poisonous fatal murderous chemicals themselves were found in United Nations' file cabinets. There has been a full New York-style haz-response and general panic.

Good Lord! Does this mean the Americans will next be invading the United Nations?

I'm afraid so. Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:21 AM

11232179.1Demented.    Terrible word, isn't it? Several times I've had a notion where I sign in to my blog, and a reader has left a comment, "Dude. We got together and I was elected to tell you. Dude, you've gotten really senile. Sorry." Is that how you find out? Do you ever really find out? Will I have that last oomph of sanity and typing ability left when the time comes to answer that question for you? Or has the time already come and I just don't know it yet? In any event, there aren't any readers, so the issue is fairly moot, isn't it, and I can just go on typing all I want. And that will happen just as soon as I think of something to say.Macherat


posted by Rick at 9:41 PM

11232178.1"Fluffy came out from behind a stack of beer cases .."


Macherat

posted by Rick at 9:27 PM

11232177.1Memories.Macherat Irritating and scary, that's what it is, losing your memory. They've invented this thing called "the senior moment" to placate our concerns, but that's all it amounts to. There really is no such thing as the Senior Moment. The forgetting and the lapses and all those Oh fiddlesticks, what did I come in here for? episodes - creeping, inexorable, inevitable senility. Sorry.

So tonight, out of the blue, here comes Nevil Shute's book, "In the Wet." Huh? Yeah, me too. Where was that in my shrinking brain, and why now? I remembered a brief passage from the book which I would have read around 1961 or so. Thinking a little harder, I remembered not only not finishing it but in fact only getting a few pages along and then losing interest. Now we have the internet, so it was easy to find out what it was all about and if it was worth either looking for here at home [good luck] or buying a new copy on BN. It seems the story takes place in the future, 1980, which is now of course the distant past, and the issue of Socialism has been settled for good. No need to bother with it. Whew, because I also remember that it was terminally boring in a British making-an-obscure-point sort of way, and it had that awkward problem [especially for us Yanks] with one character. On the Beach was better, but I hear Nevil hated the movie. Had he lived, I doubt if he would have much liked what they did with A Town Like Alice either.


posted by Rick at 9:34 PM

11232176.1Clarification.Macherat The Oz love to name things all Abo so they seem dusty and outbacky, when in fact most of their places are thoroughly suburban with sidewalks, cul-de-sacs and good behaviour. A perfect example, is the area containing the frequently confused communities of Woolgoolga and Woogoolga.


Woogoolga is the smaller suburb, of course, with Woolgoolga being the major town. I've found it easier if one remembers that Woolgoolga is south of Woogoolga.


posted by Rick at 10:15 PM

11232175.1A glitvh.123 That company which lets its customers make free long distance calls over the Internet, you know .. Skype? .. Yeah, that's the one, Skype. They had a computer failure. No calls went through. It was as if someone had blown the building which houses the company completely to smithereens. No explanation, of course .. no computers. "Our engineering team determined that this was a software issue," users in Vietnam, Colombia, The U.S., Brazil, Germany and Finland were eventually told. [Somehow. I couldn't figure that part.] "We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours." Oh yes, the 12-24 hours; I know it well.

In related news, the same thing happened, pretty much, to the company which does pagers a day or so before. No beeps went out for 12-24 hours, I heard. About the same time, the milking machines in 13 states and the Virgin Islands went down. Several cows exploded. We put up with this stuff now. What else could we do? It isn't as if caring, or complaining or going berserk is going to make the people who repair these things work any faster. I believe they are not from our planet anyway. What follows is a story from very long ago, long before that dingbat at your register was born, long before your brokerage statement arrived that time showing you had eighteen cents left. This was in the real olden days.

Shortly after I invented The Cubicle, I was chatting with one or two of the old ladies [in their cubicles] in the Room Reservations department when a younger woman, a newly-hired employee, went tearing through the room screaming and ran into the bathroom where she locked herself in. "The computers are down!" she kept shrieking. "What's this?" I thought, and I went out front to investigate. Before I even got out there I could hear this little buzz-buzz, a strange sound I hadn't heard before. Sort of [I would say later] what you would expect a gradually rising tsunami of human rage and anger to sound like. Yes, we [I] had invented the first computer glitch. Strange how innocuous things can steamroll. You take a fairly large hotel with about 5,000 registered guests, shred every bit of information about them
and then try to continue operating. "Checking in?" "Checking out?" Good luck.

Eventually, I escaped the riot since I couldn't be of any help there anyway. We had specialists for that. Nell T., for one, an impassive, pleasant Nisei girl, would be shoved out the door and told to hold the line while we hatched a plan. What a great little trooper she was. I went upstairs to brief Big Boss.

To say Big Boss was tight .. well, he really acted as if it was his own money, so I had to play on the one thing he hated more than losing money, "Boss, either we start paying compensation here right quick and get a handle on this or you'll be answering complaint letters until you're 95." "How much?" "A lot, boss" "How much!!?" "Under six figures, I promise." "many, many, many profanities," and him a former Mormon even, or so I had heard.

Anyway, I paid, a lot, while the geeks hacked, and we reconstructed the old manual system which we had [wisely] not demolished as instructed by Corporate but instead covered with an attractive blue Drapery and got back to running in ... 12-24 hours. But, when word got out that these computer thingies could bomb out and it could cost you tons of money and goodwill, well, things had to change. No, there wasn't anything that could be done about the boxes themselves, the aliens, you know, so they eliminated the compensation and all that apologizing. Now it's just "the computer's down." And we take it. I'd like to think that although I invented the crash itself, I also had a hand in the right way to deal with it, however briefly that lasted.


posted by Rick at 9:59 PM

11232174.1RE: The Market.123 Is this the end? I mean with stocks down another 324 points, is it the end of being rich as we knew it? Of course not! It is NOT the end. It is only the beginning of the end, so you should definitely not panic and pull all your money out at this time. Wait until I get mine out first.


posted by Rick at 10:06 AM

11232173.1My favorite catalog.123 It came today. You remember the one, full of outdoor furniture and other gracious-living items, all outdoor. I'm on their list despite living in Seattle because I occasionally buy items to use for something else. In this issue, they have moved just about the entire house outside: living room, dining room, kitchen, family room with wide screen plasma and other loud things to endear you to the neighbors. Even beds, though they don't come right out and say you're supposed to sleep on them outside. Only one room missing and, yes, just momentarily I thought about calling and asking them before remembering I'd get a help-phone-person in India who would be ever-so-polite as he/she tried to comprehend why people with fabulous multi-million-dollar American homes would want to live out of doors. Good thing, because on almost the last page of the catalog, my question would have been answered anyway:


Yes, it's true. For those summeroutsiderites who just can't make it back inside or don't care to.

There are generally fewer than five days a year in Seattle when one would/could enjoy outdoor furniture. Statistically, these dates fall around the first week in August, so that is why the city schedules Seafair, our annual thing, at that time. The big event is the Race of the Hydroplanes and the Blue Angels Show. The thing to do is drive your boat out onto the lake, tie it to the "Log Boom" and pard-eeeee. Someday, future archaeologists will probe the depths of Lake Washington and try to comprehend why there would possibly be over one trillion beer bottles in that one place. Anyway, a real Seattleite either does that, or he stays home and does the same thing on his own private lanai, balcony or patio. Hence the catalog.

The year my great-grandson Lancelot's father, North [long story,] took me to Seafair, he swore he had the password for entry to the Stan Sayres Memorial Pits. Dumbass. Everybody knows "Arrid" is an inside joke. Just as well; there is nowhere to sit down in The Pits, and no drinking. These happen to be the only two things I do at Seafair, which has to be the most boring thing ever invented. Well, three things actually, fall asleep and snore loudly, entirely embarrassing whatever remaining family members are still around. And yet they keep inviting me. Could it be simply because I pay? Surely not.


posted by Rick at 11:16 PM

11232172.1He must have made that up.123 No, as imaginative a writer as The Tomato is, he does not make things up. Yes, he embellishes, so go enjoy this one. I'm convinced that your better writers actually do have more interesting things happen to them, whereas the rest of us ... well, I had a sweaty nap today and that was about it.

My absences lately have been entirely due to the rush of events, far too much happening to stop and write about them. It's getting to be so crowded and busy here that maybe we should consider dividing ourselves into half a dozen planets.

Skipping all that planetary business, I tried to explain something which had struck me - to Brother. He understood what I said, which was good, but I could tell he was completely disinterested. Bummer. So I'll tell you. When I was a kid, living briefly in France, I distinctly remember the old ladies, sitting in the sun and wearing black from head to toe, talking about The War. Terrible. Unspeakable. Only they weren't talking about WWII - rather WWI. The World War. True, the lines had run right through this area of northeastern France, and the Chemin-des-Dames was literally across the street and up a fairly steep hill from our house. My first real connection with such a thing as "history." All that incredible suffering and death, right there where it was now so quiet, peaceful and flowery. I remember thinking that those old ladies must be a hundred years old [they looked it anyway,] since World War One was ancient history. That brings us to today, at my kitchen sink, where I'm realizing that in 1953 these old ladies were only 35 years removed from the end of their war. Heck, they could have been young widows and still be under sixty. By this time Brother, who is not good with numbers, was glazing over as perhaps you are too. But what this means is now that I'm .. oldish .. already, I shouldn't be surprised if the Vietnam War makes virtually or no impression on today's eight-year-olds. Things do move along, don't they?


posted by Rick at 8:53 PM

11232171.1Graveyard.123 To be truthful, this post is being written solely for the purpose of getting some keywords into the electrons of Internet. Tonight I did a search for some elements of my first (and only real) job and found a few. A couple of stories - not that good, actually, considering the job. What job? Night Auditor. When you think about how many hundreds of thousands of people have done this job at some point in their young lives or for incredibly extended periods of time in their old ones, there isn't much out there. And what is it? Night Auditors run the front desk and balance the books in hotels overnight. During the period we're talking about, before computers, this was a challenging, solitary, fascinating, scary, weird, frustrating, and wonderful job. I did it for about four years steadily, then off and on in relief for another four before moving on to the Big Job. Whoopee.

There are enough stories for a good-sized book. In fact, every night auditor I ever knew said there was a book in it. No surprise that none of us ever wrote one. Night Audit is mostly a solitary jumping-off point for Hell, so you don't get a lot of ambition on the graveyard shift. Ha - the graveyard shift, how appropriate.

I worked with Ruby, the PBX Operator, at least until she finished off her vodka and passed out. Ruby was pretty much walking death to begin with, so I let her be. She did the restaurant audit (easy, nothing to balance,) and I did the rooms. To her credit, she always finished her audit and got the wake-up call clock set before turning in. That was usually about 2:30, as soon as she got the register tapes from the bar, so she got in a couple of good hours snoozing before the first calls at 5:30 or so. She was able to sleep through incoming calls, so I had to kind of climb over her to answer the switchboard. Believe me, the effort was worth it; as she got drunker, she got louder and more argumentative, so it was a pleasure when she finally went unconscious each night. That allowed me to finish my own work and deal with the unending weird things on the other side of the desk all night long.

Oh, let me stick in a few more keywords. NCR 4200, Room and Tax, Trial, D-sheet, pickup error, FOLIO MISSING grrrrr. Gosh, this brings back memories.


posted by Rick at 10:40 PM

11232170.1Impress your friends.123 Just this evening I discovered something very interesting: if you are looking for a word peculiarity, the word Ghoti in the language of West Bengal is pronounced fish. No, really. They read "ghoti" and say "fish." "Ghoti," incidentally, refers to The Ghotis, a people of western Bengal, who have a culture, traditions, and cuisine distinct from their Bangal counterparts of East Bengal. The noun also has application in the distinction of subtleties of caste, but that gets entirely too complicated for this blog and this typer. Been there, studied that, bailed out.

That's only the half of it. In the Klingon language, called tlhIngan Hol in Klingon [or Klingan as I've usually pronounced it,] the word for "fish" is ghotl, a frequent misspelling of the correct form: ghoti.

Friends, things like this are not always coincidental.


posted by Rick at 8:59 PM

11232169.1Just Watch Big Brother, same idea pretty much.123 Every blog in the world has probably latched onto this. How could you not? Lindsay Lohan, celebrity in the early 21st century sense, has given an interview. In it, she said,

It changed my life. I didn't have a good grip on it and I needed to get my shit together. I was going out too much and I had too much pressure on my shoulders. I was not that happy and I needed to go to that place to be happy. If I get stressed out I say a serenity prayer. I meditate too. I was going out with someone and they said I should read Machiavelli and I was like, 'nah', and then I was, 'OK, I'll read it' and now it is always with me.

When she talks about Machiavelli here, she means Niccolo Machiavelli and his work, "The Prince." The webpage I found to copy her quote from already had 871 comments. They weren't kind. My take ... our society has turned loose upon a city of nine million a Machiavelli-swilling blonde with megamoney, automobiles, an I.Q. of a grape and an attitude in the stratospheric range. I can see only positive things here as a new industry comes to life with the job of chronicling the fallout. Could be good for a full point of GDP in the long run.

Another entry from the "Don't Get Old" Journal. Your ears. Hair grows throughout your life but, sadly, at a certain point, DNA goes berserk and begins to grow it just about anywhere and at any angle. Like on your ear where it can curl a bit and just barrrrely touch the inside where it itches to the point where you wish someone would just reach in and pull your brain out. So .. I got the idea of using the new camera to get a real good picture of that side of me, a view which is awkward if not impossible with a mirror - the beginning of a plan at least. I put the camera on max everything for the closeup of the left side of my head.

Advice: Do Not Do This. Itch or not, you will never again be ready for that much of a close up, Mr. DeMille.


posted by Rick at 9:47 PM

11232168.1You seem pretty strong for a girl.123 Having groceries delivered is probably a bit beyond my means, but who knows what "means" even are these days? I'm not buying diapers or crack cocaine, so that portion of my disposable income I suppose can go for groceries. In any event, I'll never go back. If there is one place on earth where I definitely do not belong, aside from a kitchen, it's a grocery store. This girl, woman, drives a huge truck and hauls all my stuff UP the driveway [steep] and UP the stairs [10] to the front door and then into the house with more bags in each arm than I could lift in half a dozen trips. Okay, slight exaggeration, but she did heft enough that it prompted the comment from me. She was all right with it, even though these days it would be considered critically gender inappropriate, because I'm old. Oh let it go, Sasquatchia, he's old. Kinda cute, though.

Down at the Safeway you get no breaks, however, old or cute. I used to ask the old ladies for help in the produce section. Not the young ones, though; they tend to freak when dirty old men talk to them. But I pretty much stopped talking to anyone when all I did was ask this one old lady which she thought would be better, squash or cucumber, and then she got all weird and loud.


posted by Rick at 11:39 AM

11232167.1"Mike, our next millionaire.."123 That's what John Beresford Tipton would say each week in his labored, raspy, airless voice as he reached out his bony, scaly arthritic hand to give the check to "Mike." Three adjectives for Mike? Androidistic. Cold as a dead fish, can't remember the word for that - something ichthyish. Efficient.

Our next millionaire, not as uptown. Long/short, a young boy was taken from the woman who gave birth to him and delivered to a maternal step-grandmother for safekeeping. How could that hap... No one knows. Grams beat the hell out of him for years, parked him in a small trailer in the back yard and generally treated him with a bit less kindness and care than she would her junkyard dogs. She got paid for this labor of love, of course, we do that. Many, many C.P.S. referrals later, enough that when the whole thing finally hit the fan, which these things generally do, dead or alive, the Actual Director of C.P.S., a blonde, went on television herself to do the statement. Cracks, as in "Falling through the." Adjustments. Training. More phones. Changes, so it will never happen again. Studies. Meanwhile, in Seattle, several lawyers very high up in skyscrapers found they were developing erections, and these weren't for the blonde.

Yes, in a few years the lad will indeed be our next millionaire, in a sense, after the investigations, the court stuff, the routine. There will be a small headline back in section B-2 $1.93 million awarded in child ab ... and some might glance at it and wonder wasn't that the one with the kid and the step-grandmother? Of course, the lad will never know that he was briefly a millionaire, since the loot will be oh-so-carefully held and monitored "for his ultimate protection" until it is completely consumed by the holding-of-for-protection fees and considerations. Ahhhhh.

And how do you retain your soul and sanity in a world where such cruelty and injustice prevails, thrives? By having a strong belief in an alert God Almighty who takes Very Good Notes. Sadly, I don't.


posted by Rick at 10:06 AM

11232166.1Millennium. Little things. I'm adjusting.123 Take the phone book, once a messy and indispensable object in every home. Now .. a review. Brother brought in a huge yellow plastic bag; it was on the grass down by the mailbox. Long story short: kitchen counter, grass-weeds-spiders clean-up, cutting knot off the bag, lifting 39# of new phone books out, replacing with old phone books [never used, incidentally,] hauling old books down to recycle toter [yes, I know; I won't be going by the 10806 SW 339st Street old phone book drop-off location any time soon;] stacking new books with the pile of other regional, semi-regional, neighborhood, metro, etc. books.

Do I really need all this? Frankly, it's only 10:30 in the morning and I'm ready for my nap already. A solution to all of this is the computer, of course, one of the few reliably good things about the computer: it has addresses and phone numbers and they are generally correct.

In cultural news, [Greg Gilbert/Seattle Times]


The Everett DuPen sculpture "FOUNTAIN OF CREATION," commissioned for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and also sometimes known simply as "The DuPen" was unanimously recommended for removal by the City Council Parks Committee after listening to an appeal by the "skateboarding community." Yes, there is one. The site will be redeveloped as a new skateboarding park. Evidently, it was felt that a skateboarding park would be more in keeping with the location, site of


than some old sculpture/fountain.


posted by Rick at 10:32 AM

1 1232165.13rd & Pine.123 That's right, 3rd & Pine. Can you get more downtown in a more nice city? I don't think so. So, people from all walks of life were terrified, horrified, embarrassed, irate, stunned and annoyed by the gun battle which erupted there this afternoon. The details are sketchy, aren't they always, but apparently an altercation broke out between two groups of hoodlums and it ended with somebody pulling out a handgun and firing. No, I'm not making this up; right in the middle of the shopping! It's just a miracle that the young shooters weren't stampeded and killed right there in the crosswalk.

And the best part .. of all the uncountable thousands of shoppers, tourists and office-persons with uncountable thousands of bags and briefcases, only one young man was hit, and he is in non-life-threatening condition at Harborview Hospital, shot in the ass¹.

1. See #2159.RMACHERAT


posted by Rick at 9:47 PM

11232164.1Well now, this was a bit of a shock ...123 Playing with Google Earth - they just keep making it more amazing every day, don't they? Say, I wonder how the place where I worked for my very first real job is looking these days. Whoa ..


Either the place has been rubbed out by Homeland Security for some secret reason which we don't need to know, or it's gone. Some in-depth internetting was required. Turns out .. they demolished it. It's gone, and no one said anything. There are ex-alums all over the world, each with stories to tell, and no one saw fit to let me know the old shop was crushed, smashed and hauled away. Memories. When were the protests? Did I just miss all of it, or was it a case of nobody really cares, dude. I suspect the latter. We were all young, we've moved on.

So I got up to take two aspirin, and Brother arrived in the kitchen at the same time with a leading question designed to mess with my mind. He's wily that way. I handled it as best I could, and he went away, leaving me standing there wondering if I took the dad-blamed aspirin or not. That would have perplexed me no end a few years back, but no more. I promptly took two [or two more, who will ever know] and came back in here to resume typing. What's the worse that can happen? Okay yes, a massive stroke .. but at least I won't have a headache for awhile.

There were so many stories in that interesting little hotel/motel, a real car-stopper in its day. Did you ever write that book? Gosh no, I never did. All the hookers, drug dealers, petty criminals and thousands of plain old nice folks are gone, most dead by now probably, at least the hookers, drug dealers and petty criminals. The hotel could hardly compete with the newer places which were built at the airport. This guy was apparently still there until recently,

BEST HOTEL HAIR SALON
Mr. Paul of Paul's Hair Fashions is a sweet old guy who opened his salon in the Swept Wing Motel in 1967. The hotel has changed hands a few times and is now called the Airport Plaza Hotel. Mr. Paul's salon looks exactly like a trailer home--it's a smoky, cramped space cluttered with figurines, a TV, pictures of ladies from the '40s, and a screen door that stays shut. "It's been quiet for the last couple of years," says Mr. Paul. "I've been doing people here for the last 30 years.... I used to do everything: electrolysis, cuts, colors. There's nothing new in our business. Hair, going back to the '40s and '50s, it was just more or less finger waves and stuff like that." Mr. Paul, who won Alaska's Mr. Fur Face competition in 1960, says he's keeping a low profile in the industry these days. He no longer goes to the international hair fashion shows, but he still tends to his stable of regulars who loyally return every month for their trims and styles. 18601 International Blvd.

and I wonder about the abortion doctor. He leased a suite of offices many years ago to capture the business of people flying in to the airport from non-abortion states to have to procedure done and get back home the same day. The whole thing gave us all the willies. You could spot the customers as soon as they came in the door: young, pimply, scared, usually a girl with her boyfriend.

The reason that hotel means something to me is that it was the first one I lived in while working there. That's an interesting life, believe me. Maybe I should write something about all of one of these days. It was about eleven years after all, long time between check in and check out. And you know that movie, Hotel, with Rod Taylor from the Arthur Hailey novel? It wasn't exactly like that.


posted by Rick at 10:37 PM

11232163.1Lives of quiet desperation.123 Financial analysts are in the same condition as the other well-compensated professions in America, that is, living at the abyss of flesh-eating doubt, praying that the clods [i.e., us] never find out how truly incompetent they are. Small example: SuperValu, the megagrocer. They acquired Albertsons, you'll remember, when the suits at that company gathered for a meeting one day and discovered they didn't really know jack shit about the grocery business and promptly decided to sell, pocket their millions and go play golf. Great golf in Boise, by the way. Once Albertsons was a part of SuperValu, that company began to see a decline in the growth of sales. Odd, they must have thought, shouldn't things be going UP now that we have bought out the competition? The CEO, Jeffrey Noddle [great name by the way, huh?] explained in typical CEOese, and it was readily lapped up by the analysts, that the slow trend stemmed partly from competition [huh?] and high gas prices which resulted in customers making fewer trips to the store. See, your typical lame-ass analyst knows that gas prices are high because he fills up too, and the making of this connection lights a bulb for him, albeit a dim one. The Real Reason is that the old Albertsons employees do not care anymore, and anyone who shops there [or used to] can tell you that.

High gas prices, weather [too hot, too cold, too rainy, too dry,] and interest rates, anything about interest rates .. this laundry list of factors is used to explain and predict any economic eventuality. Just listen for a few minutes to any business blabber anytime.

Tomorrow morning could look like a buying opportunity. It isn't, so hold onto your cash. There will be buying, but it will be foolish buying because there are still some solid lumps ahead. How do you know? I just know, and I'm always right. I'll tell you when.


posted by Rick at 8:33 PM

11232162.1Dear Blog,123 Yes, I've been a bit MIA lately. It's because of new toys that Brother and I have bought. Once we get into manuals and F.A.Q.'s, we can get lost for days, but I never forget you, Dear Blog. It's just that wading through all the smelly boxes, wrapping and mechanicals from China to get to the computer ... well, you know.

These were topics which would have happened. Will they eventually? Sadly, no.

Declaration of Registered Domestic Partnership [cue organist]
The terror of cheese
Gluteus Glorious, a Latin fable
The Maude Z. Clumpett true story

Oh, a little hint about our latest toy - if we ever figure it out, I may not have to take pictures for you anymore just using my telephone.


posted by Rick at 9:08 AM

11232161.1Uh ... about the rain123 This is a little embarrassing. See, we're so phony and stuffy that we claim to be completely disinterested in visitors - "tourists' [ugh,] but the truth is that we're just like anyone else. We're down deep defensive about our weather, Summers are glorious, really! and we're secretly delighted to meet people from all over, even Southerners who laugh loudly and mispronounce words. Frankly, I'm astonished we get as many visitors as we do, and most of them seem to have a wonderful time. Go figure. And the taxes don't hurt anything either. Like most places, we really sock it to the tourists.

Something odd is happening this month, however. It simply Does Not Rain in Seattle in the Summertime. You can count on that and feel free to invite Aunt Billie [long story] with the promise that she'll be able to see The Mountain every day and especially on the day we drive up there to do it. So, there she sits, in a sulk by the vast picture window, the steamed-up, rain-spotted gray picture window which has been exactly that way for days and days and days. And it's not just her. All the rich people who go live somewhere else September through June are starting to grate, as if it is happening to them personally.

Oh look, Aunt Billie, Larry King is doing the whole hour on Tammy Faye.


posted by Rick at 10:54 PM

11232160.1Installation.123 The first few years of computers were fairly dustless and well organized, for me at least. First thing we always did was dust, organize, then install. I've gotten much more lax ..


and now the situation is completely out of hand. As the photo readily illustrates, there are two free USB ports on the little hub but many, many loose USB cables back there. How quickly the entire thing can get out of hand, although this is nothing compared with the room downstairs with the c. 1990's inventory of so much money. It actually hurts to think of the money. [I even bought software!] We never throw anything away, but we are running out of rooms.


posted by Rick at 10:12 PM

1232159.1Oink.123 Seattle has a problem, not a huge one but one which is exacerbated by the fact that this is, after all, Seattle and all that goes with it. The recent proliferation of highrise condominiums and their early-retired baby boomers and DINK thirty-something owners has come squarely up against the Club Scene. Both have staked out a previously run-down part of our city called Belltown. Oddly enough, the poor, druggies, homeless and crazies who were the original residents have all managed to stay. The result is an .. interesting mix. "Club Scene" is naturally a euphemism for "Hip Hop" which is a euphemism for black people. That would be black people with money. And cars. And guns. Can you visualize: drunk passed out in the doorway in his own vomit, yuppie couple steps over him and right into a gun battle between a crack dealer and a dood.

Fortunately, all of the young men cruising the club scene streets in their hot Japanese cars with three or nine of their friends along tend to be pitifully poor shots, the result being that victims have for the most part been only a few fashionable local residents shot in the ass. So, who do you imagine will attend the public meeting? You guessed correctly, and these citizens are upset as only their kind can be upset - with a shrill whine of indignation which inspires the rest of us to rise up and do absolutely nothing at all about it. Unfortunately for them, that would include the police department.

Here are some lovely fat white chicks having no trouble being admitted. [Jim Bates, Seattle Times]


The problem is that Seattle simply isn't big enough to accommodate all of this sociology at the same time. Other cities like New York and Los Angeles have Districts.

Seattle residents will have to begin reclycling food scraps by 2009. Yes, this means the greasy, yucky smelly stuff that won't fit down the disposall - assuming you have one which works, which I don't. That means we'll have to save the food for two weeks, then put it out in a separate container [this will make 13 of them] to be picked up [Hopefully,] after being thoroughly inspected by the [yes, we have them] Recycling Inspectors.

And Speaking of Rats, China has an extra two billion of them after the recent floods. Stories about peasants killing them by the hundreds and thousands with farm tools and poison were too graphic for this blog. On a more positive note,


it was reported that "people in Guangzhou have a lot of money and like to eat exotic things," and truckloads of live rats were on their way to restaurants in the south. Ahh, getting rich is indeed glorious, isn't it?RMACHERAT Inspired by jessejb


posted by Rick at 9:29 PM

11232158.1Hot Dirt.123 Yeah, that's how I remember West Texas - hot dirt. And as for the few places which were paved - hot concrete. Egg-fryin' hot, as someone would demonstrate about once each year. Found this,


hmmm .. I see they've planted some since I was there. It was my first day of school, the Very First Day of first grade, and I missed the bus. Had to walk home, but where was home? I knew it was on Sheridan Road, and this was Sheridan Road, but I didn't know which way or how far and that's what I told the soldier between sobs when he stopped to help me. I remember lots of tanks roaring about, clouds of dust, noise and one kind soldier. Evidently, he pointed me in the right direction because I did get home. Years later, I asked my mom who worried about everything if she was worried about me that day. She wasn't. Even on a safe-at-home extremely cool and rainy day in Seattle, some years later, no dust or tanks, I still kind of wonder about that.


posted by Rick at 11:15 PM