Wednesday, February 23, 2005
I saw a really freaky moon last night...
...and later another shimmering ghost glaring at me...
Maybe it was just that Dead Guy Ale affecting my brain. But I only had one bottle!
And who can resist it? It's all natural, has no preservatives, and the Dead Guy on the label is utterly cool.
(This last pic stolen from the 'Net.)
Sorry for the beer commercial. Should I go into advertising?
~
(Photos by me except last one: "courtesy of the 'Net.")
2/23/2005 09:40:00 AM
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Pisketti and Hooky and Hijacking Airplanes:
The Relationship (or Lack Thereof)
From an e-mail reply I sent to Heather, who played hooky from work yesterday:
When I was a little kid my best friend Bobby said he wanted to grow up and play hooky. You know, hooky, with all the padding and the skates and the big sticks. I'd guess he did play some hooky in Jr High School. Not the kind with skates. Bobby's favorite food was pisketti, too. I liked pisketti. It was cool with me. Bobby was cool, yeah. Good times.Not that Bob didn't have a helluvan I.Q. He did, and as you know, that's often a problem.
I dunno, maybe Bobby was disappointed when he didn't grow up to play the kind of hooky he wanted to, and his chances of becoming an astronaut were becoming slimmer by the year. Didn't you want to be an astronaut when you were a little kid? I did. Geez. The real world. It just ain't what it should be, what kids know life is supposed to be. Aren't we all disappointed as we grow older?
Later in Jr High School Bobby stole--err, borrowed--a plane. He had cojones. While other kids were tossing cherry bombs in toilets or cutting class to streak across the front lawn on Senior Skip Day, Bobby's idea of a little prank was to break into a Cessna-style airplane and ride it around in circles, almost getting off the ground before being "pulled over" by the cops.
No lie.
You gotta do these things while you're young, see, 'cuz when you're older they can toss you in prison.
Bob's dad was a police mechanic for the local Dept. A BIG police mechanic with a helluva temper and a thick leather belt. I'm betting Bobby nearly got flayed alive for that escapade.
Cheers, Bobby.
Bobby was cool, yeah. Good times.
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was [a kid]. Jesus, does anyone?"
-Stand By Me, written by Stephen King, directed by Rob Reiner.
~
2/22/2005 12:00:00 PM
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
(Click image to view full size...)
~
(Yeah, yeah... manipulated photo by me. I hope the "effect" makes you stop and ponder for a second.)
2/16/2005 10:20:00 PM
Sunday, February 13, 2005
I guess it's a confused oroboros who took a long time finding his way back to his tail...
Or it's a rubber snake on my scanner, nothing nearly so glamorous as "The Worm on the Far Side of the Moon".
2/13/2005 08:21:00 PM
Saturday, February 12, 2005
The Moon in my Coffee Cup
They read tea leaves. If they were to read coffee grounds, would they say the moon is in my future..?
~
(Photo by me. Yeah, right, you guessed it: the colors are inverted...)
2/12/2005 11:26:00 PM
I thought I cut off a nostril this morning.
Not on purpose.
I've never seen the Phantom musical, although I am a fan of the original Lon Chaney bit.
Still, I'm just not the body-mutilation type.
I was shaving in the shower.
It's nice, shaving in the shower. All that hair goes right down the drain. Your skin is wet and slick and you don't need any shaving cream. Shaving cream makes me break out anyway. But just once in a while you make a little ... slip.
I did that this morning, made a slip, and it hurt. Really stung. I was pretty damn groggy, and I felt around my nose to make sure both nostrils were there. They were there, but it still really stung, so I found myself looking down at the water swirling down the drain to see if there were any important nose-parts headed for the sewer.
I must have been REALLY groggy, because I had this surreal notion that it would be cool to see one of my nostrils suddenly independent of my body, having packed its bags and headed downstream, perhaps hoping to end up in the canals of Venice, or floating down the Thames singing "London Bridges Falling Down, Falling Down, Falling Down..." Didn't they always show a picture of the Thames after the Benny Hill show? I have fond memories of the Benny Hill show, and so does my nose.
So, I mean, who really could've blamed my nose, or maybe just one nostril, if it wanted a vacation from my face?
But it was not to be. Just a nasty shaving nick that looks a bit embarrassing, as if I'm one of these men with poor shaving skills for whom every bout with the razor is a fencing match against his own face, an unarmed opponent. Zorro taught my nose a lesson, but got bored and only completed one third of his usual 'Z'.
I don't know. Groggy types like me should grow beards.
Whaddaya think?:
(Art: Mr Bernie E Mireault, AKA 'BEM', a favorite of mine. Borrowed from his graphic novel MacKenzie Queen.)
~
2/12/2005 10:35:00 PM
Friday, February 11, 2005
I'll say more later, but this e-mail explains one of the things that has been keeping me busy. It's basically THIS versus THIS...:
Hello, folks.
I don't have a very good camera, but I'd be willing to photograph the bait I found at the end of Parkland last Monday on my lunch-hour hike. There were maybe a half-dozen piles of corn, maybe 1 & 1/2 feet in diameter, in the open grass bordering the woods, and a couple deer nosing around them. Parkland is an industrial dead-end, and the road wasn't even 15' from the corn, making it easily accessible by truck. There were no deer stands in the trees, although there were some in the woods beyond on the ground, probably left over from hunting season. But I've read they'll be firing from pickup trucks, not just stands. Their excuse is that they fire from platforms *on top* of the trucks, so they'll be aiming downward and a missed shot will be less likely to hit anything but the ground. They're ALWAYS supposed to be firing at a downward angle, for safety reasons.
As you know, White Buffalo will be having loads of fun playing out a paramilitary fantasy, like a real-life video game, at night with high-tech equipment, night-vision goggles and scopes, shooting with high-powered rifles with very effective silencers.
I read that in one town it took them 12 days to kill eighty deer, though, so I have my doubts as to how long it'll take them to kill 600 of Solon's 1200. WB also hasn't ruled out the use of net-and-bolt methods, for culling deer in residential or city areas where shooting would be dangerous.
I'm confused as to why that bait was there on Parkland this early, but it didn't look like the kind of corn the local deer-lovers put out. I commonly see ears of feed-corn on and around the railroad tracks, put there by the people whose houses on Glenallen Ave run parallel to those tracks, but these piles of corn off Parkland were big, regularly spaced, and consisted of kernels, no husks.
As far as those shots I heard last Monday, I took a loooong hike after work Wednesday. The shots turned out to be nothing to worry about, and the hike ended up kind of funny story:
After hearing that one nutty old guy at the Council meeting on Monday night (you know, the one who wanted EVERY deer in Solon killed because the "manacing, ravaging beasts" were eating his precious panzies and petunias), I was a little afraid maybe he'd been out in the woods on Monday with a shotgun, leaving potentially injured deer behind.
So Wednesday I started worrying about this, and after work I drove to the end of Arthur, parked and went over the guard rail at the end of the cul-de-sac. Slid part way down the hill on my butt, heh. Took a long hike for about an hour-and-a-half. I crossed the stream on a slippery old log and hiked all over on both sides of the path that follows the high-tension wires. There are plenty of fields back there bordering woods, with paths accessible by pickup truck, but I couldn't find any bait whatsoever, despite the fact that this is a likely place for culling.
I must have been somewhere around Cochran (?) when the sun started to set, so I headed back quickly in the direction of the Water Treatment Plant. Sometimes when you're out in thick woods around dusk, when the sun dips below the horizon it turns absolutely suddenly pitch black, which is no fun at all. Of course, I probably could have found my way out of the woods after dark by following the smell of the Treatment Plant, which REALLY stinks when you're downwind of it. I ended up behind the plant behind a huge, really steep hill, maybe 30' high, with signs at the top of it.
Curiosity got the better of me and I just HAD to read those old faded signs. I scrambled up the hill on all fours, which was kind of demeaning as there was a deer at the top of the hill who had obviously pranced up there effortlessly. He looked at me pityingly as I dug my heels in the mud and clutched with my hands at rocks and long grass. I finally got to the top, panting and exhausted, and read the signs, which said "Live shots being fired" or something to that effect. I looked over the hill and there it was. "Shooting Range." And there was a cop car pulling around to drive out, and he stopped. I think he saw me. I started down the hill, then went back up (I'm an idiot) and took a picture of the sign for a memento; the cop was still there, still stopped in his car, so I slid back down the hill quick, almost landing in the stream at the bottom. I doubt if the picture will turn out.
Anyway, the cop didn't follow (and probably would've had a hell of a time trying), but I didn't know my way very well from there and ended up crossing that stream about four more times, back and forth, on slippery logs above the rushing water. I cut back to what I thought was Arthur, but was actually Kingsview or Longwood or *whatever*, one of those side streets off Arthur. I was all splattered in mud and my legs were soaked and I must have been a crazy sight, and I asked directions to Arthur from a lady out for a walk, who stared at me like I was from Mars.
It was good exercise (!) and lots of fresh air (except downwind of the Plant, heh), and I can't tell you how relieved I was to see that shooting range. That was obviously the source of the shots I heard last Monday. It really feels good, working for something you believe in. That's the best kind of exercise you can get.
Best,
-Shane
2/11/2005 09:29:00 AM
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Happy 250th
I think this is Argy's 250th post, but here I am just stringing sentences together to remember what verbs and nouns are for. It has been a busy week.
He passed out at the wheel of his company pickup truck, somehow rolled to a stop blocking some or all of one lane of the highway, then presumably woke up when he was rear-ended. Maybe he didn't wake up until the troopers dragged him out of the truck, for all I know. I don't think he remembers much of it. He wasn't hurt, probably because his body was so drunken-relaxed, but his blood alcohol was so high he ended up in the hospital on an IV anyway.
The Pennsylvania troopers cuffed him when they took him to the hospital.
No ambulance was called to the scene, so I guess we can assume the other driver wasn't hurt. The other guy must have slammed on his breaks just before he hit the stopped truck.
The drunk driver was a relative of mine, so I was recruited to drive his nervous wife to Pennsylvania to bail him out last Saturday. Maybe she should have left him in jail for the weekend. But she wanted him out, and it would have taken bail bondsmen in PA and OH cooperating on a weekend for a bond, so she took the whole $15,000--that's right, $15,000--for bail out of the bank as a home equity loan.
He has had a drinking problem for a long time now, but refuses to go to couselling or AA. His drinking lost him his last job of twenty-odd years, selling and delivering automotive and industrial cam-shafts and other custom-tooled parts. He should never have gone back to driving for a living again, but he couldn't resist the temptation to take a job with his former company's competitor.
Ego--> Revenge--> Stress, when he couldn't immediately steal his former company's business--> Vodka--> $15,000 bail.
Not to mention a night in jail. Jail food. A couple of two-hour exercise periods, where he was allowed to walk around the prison yard, conversing with one man who was a child-molester and another who was on his third DUI. Three-DUI-Man recommended an excellent lawyer, at least.
I drove his wife to the bank. I had to speak my conscience, so I said a little. I told her this wasn't a bad thing, if it was a turning point for them. "It's a turning point for him," she said. She refuses to admit she too has a drinking problem, although she's smashed nightly starting every afternoon and has the shakes until her first drink. "The doctor says my hand-shaking is tremors," she told me. Right; tremors just basically means shakes, I thought. "Did he say what causes your tremors?" I asked her. She said he did not.
I guess they call that denial. I told her three times she would have to quit drinking in order for her husband to successfully quit. All three times she refused.
I told her she was lucky, lucky that he'd never drive all day for a living again, lucky that he'd possibly be stuck in rehab or counselling and finally confront his problem.
"WE'RE NOT LUCKY!" she snapped. "LOOK AT ALL THIS MONEY IT'S COSTING US!"
I normally don't lose my cool, but I raised my voice in a hard, stern tone:
"You ARE lucky. He won't be driving anymore. He might have to quit drinking. AND NO-ONE GOT HURT. HE FELL ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL ON THE HIGHWAY! HE COULD EASILY HAVE KILLED SOMEONE, KILLED HIMSELF, OR BOTH. YOU'RE DAMN LUCKY AND YOU'D JUST BETTER THANK GOD FOR IT. THIS IS A WAKE-UP CALL."
She shut up after that.
Driving from Ohio to PA and then back and forth between the jail and the judge took all day. The judge wanted to see that $15-grand check in person. I tried to concentrate on the natural scenery, but all I saw were a couple hawks and a number of horses. Pennsylvania has a large Amish population, so everywhere you go you see hitch-posts for their horses. Even the spaces around the courthouse, instead of parking meters, have small metal posts with cast-iron horse-heads, rings in their mouths to connect them by tether to the mouths of real horses. Very quaint.
The horses have a tough time too. Many are retired race-horses, not thoroughbreds but the kind that pulled carts, so they're pre-trained. But they don't always have much life left, and they're dog-food when their usefulness is at an end. And even Amish people commonly get DUIs, often end up in accidents, and the horses don't always fare well.
We took an accidental detour down a long country road with old farm houses, barns and residences spaced far apart down its length. I was amazed at the number of parked cars I saw. Over the space of a few miles I might only have seen one house every half-mile or more (with the occasional barn in-between), but I saw three junk-yards and three mechanics. Every house had the usual new car, plus an SUV or pickup, plus two, three, sometimes as many as five older cars sitting around, some up on blocks, some missing doors or hoods, others in perfect repair.
What were all those cars doing there, and where were all the drivers? The car-to-person ratio seemed insanely out of whack, and this in an area in which a good portion of the population drives horse-drawn carriages.
We are an insanely automobile-obsessed culture, make no mistake about it.
Back at the jail, the DUI was dressed in orange pants and shirt, sort of like bright sunny hospital scrubs dyed with orange sorbet. Very cheerful. When he was finally released I said Hello and asked him if they'd let him keep his orange pyjamas. He just said, "No."
The sun was setting as I drove first north then west back to Ohio. The bright glare shone on the windshield and blinded us, my aunt complained, and I said "I just shut my eyes when it gets like that." A little humor never hurts.
I normally watch Cartoon Network on Saturday Nights, but that night I needed to escape. Get out of the house, you know? Tonight I wanted adventure. And when we think of adventure, who doesn't think of a decaf soy cappuccino? So I went to Border's where I learned that "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" is indeed a movie, a real honest-to-gosh film. It was on the bargain rack. I think I'll buy it--the title alone is worth the $6.99.
Is there a moral? I guess so, but I probably don't need to spell it out, and I'm still too tired anyway. I recuperated all day Sunday, then went to work Monday to find a phone-message from some local animal activists, finally returning my call to tell me the city council meeting was that night and we'd be allowed public comments late after the docket items, so we'd be able to make a final case against the city paying a half-million dollars to a group called White Buffalo hired to kill 600 deer at night, playing all paramilitary with infra-red goggles and scopes and tree-mounted hunting stands. The city of Solon is keeping the "culling sites" a secret, so I hiked for an hour on my lunch-time and easily found one field full of piles of corn to bait the deer out of the trees.
But that's another adventure, full of nutty local rednecks and slimy politicians.
I guess I'd better dredge up a moral after all, if for no other reason than self-protection:
KIDS: DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE.
BECAUSE I'M NOT DRIVING TO PENNSYLVANIA TO BAIL YOU OUT.
~
2/10/2005 11:56:00 AM
Friday, February 04, 2005
Highrise Construction Maintenance:
Insulation, Fortification of Structure...
I watched a squirrel fix up its nest yesterday, which is an amazing sight. Many nests that you might notice high in the tops of trees, so far up that you wonder how they can survive anything but a mild wind, actually belong to squirrels and not birds. This was just such a nest, maybe 80' up in the natural valley formed by several branches jutting up and out from the very tip of the tree's trunk.
I was admiring the long snow barrier the plows had created around the perimeter of a parking lot, like a miniature mountain chain rolling around a concrete lake, when I heard a crackling noise just beyond those hills. I stopped dreaming of childhood games of King of the Mountain and moved closer for a look.
A squirrel was in a small tree that somehow had retained many of its dead leaves, which at first I thought he was eating. He was filling his mouth with them. Then he began a weaving journey through the trees, up one limb to another, side-to-side and sometimes even briefly back downwards as if he were on a winding Escher-esque staircase choosing the most effective route to the sky. Occasionally he made a frightening leap from the tip of one branch to the next to avoid a more laborious route, and each time he simply scampered up the new branch unerringly as it bobbed wildly up and down beneath him.
Finally he arrived in his treetop nest, where he disappeared inside its deep bowl, presumably packing leaves around the sides and bottom for padding and for insulation against the cold.
But soon after, his head hedgehogged out of the nest again, peering about to plan his next move. Then he made another zig-zagging quest until he found a dead tree, and I heard snapping noises as he broke off thick twigs. These he carried back to the nest for added support, weaving them into the existing structure expertly, fortification against the high winds in which trees sway crazily in a dance that would give any human instant vertigo.
But squirrels are brave and tough, and evidently expert carpenters.
It's fantastic, the things you're privileged to see if you only listen and look in the stillness of a cold winter's day.
~
2/04/2005 01:51:00 PM
