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I don't know where we come from

Back to the convention report, then, with just a note that I really liked Arnold Stang's work, even if Top Cat and Herman and Katnip cartoons were not what I liked best:

( So I met several people I'd known online for up to fifteen years, and it went pretty well. Also, we got to watch people with puppets, and one person going pretty near insane with that mad energy that is performance. )

This got us pretty safely to a good time for dinner. All we'd need would be somewhere that bunny_hugger, vegetarian, could eat with me and skylerbunny; for that matter, what if we could meet up with the extended company?

Trivia: Names Bell labs rejected for the transistor include the ``surface-state amplifier'' and the ``iotatron'' (from iota as in something small). Source: Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched On The Modern World, David Bodanis.

Currently Reading: The World Of Mister Dooley, Finely Peter Dunne. Edited by Louis Filler.

Cups and cakes, cups and cakes

According to the WiiFit, this morning, I didn't weigh much more than I did last Monday. I didn't weigh a statistically significant amount less, either, a rare break from form, but I regard that as a triumph. You see, last week, I made a pig of myself.

It was the march of a thousand temptations. Monday was the office potluck lunch, everyone bringing in food, and everybody brought in way too much food. I alone brought in two cheesecakes, as deserts, and there's as of today, a week later, more than half of one cheesecake and a quarter of the other left. There were meatballs, ziti, sausage, pierogies, lunch meats, five kinds of cheeses (they were surprised someone was eating so much of the havarti with dill; well, I like havarti, as well as most cheeses). In short, there was a lot of temptation, and I ate. A lot.

But here's the thing: I didn't gain substantial weight. Oh, there were days, Tuesday particularly, that my weight shot up, but I worked it all back off. I stuffed myself, first on Monday, then --- despite my knowing better --- with leftovers Tuesday through Thursday, and then at the pizza party on Friday. And on top of that I missed yoga Wednesday so I could go to Rifftrax, where by the way I had a large popcorn and large Coke Zero. Despite missing that big block of exercise I made up the difference. I can finally say that my weight is really under my control now.

This week, the most food-heavy week I've had, has made clear how this year I took control of my destiny. I could very easily have continued being fat-to-obese, and I changed that. It's ben a lot of hard work, and it's not quite done yet, but ... well, I made it. I mastered a part of my life which I had given up trying to control back in 1985 with awful tuna fish sandwiches made on horrible 'light' 'mayonnaise' and achingly thin bread that tasted like cardboard. In 2009, I mastered my body.

And now I can think what to take over in 2010.

Trivia: Shepherds in Landes, France, would habitually spend whole days walking on ten-foot tall stilts, using an extra pole to form a tripod to rest. These enabled them to walk as much as 75 miles in a day. Source: The Discovery Of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.

Currently Reading: The World Of Mister Dooley, Finely Peter Dunne. Edited by Louis Filler. You know, for 110-year-old humor writings this is surprisingly spry, and a counterexample to the idea that nobody really knew how to be funny before the first steam-powered Robert Benchley was patented in 1922.

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressing in holiday style

Snowstorm, day two: first, the discovery overnight as I meant to take some pictures of the snow: well, we had something like two feet of snow, and it was still coming down. The roads were pretty near impassable from about 6 pm onward, and the attempts by the snowplows to do something about it weren't really accomplishing much. The mailboxes in front were in danger of sinking beneath the snow, even though the plowing wasn't getting near them. There were drifts up to four feet high in the sidewalk leading up to the house. And my father had locked the front door, I suppose to ward off Bigfoots.

I did go out driving, to finish the shopping I hadn't got around to finishing last night, but happily the roads weren't quite so cleared out to spoil the fun thing about snowstorm driving. I mean, it's not fun the car turning more than you mean it to turn or starting from a stop light and finding the speedometer reads 40 miles per hour while the car isn't going forward, or discovering random stretches of road closed off for no obvious reason. But there is something grandly liberating, wonderfully unreal, in the obliteration of the traffic lanes, in the jughandles becoming obscure blurry things, in how the neat lines of parking spaces are gone, and for all traffic considerations you improvise. Someone before you blazed a trail where the cars may go, on the road; you might follow it, or might vary it. Together you create a new lane, or or parking lot, or even sidewalk, inspired by the Department of Transportation, but created by a kind of community folk art.

Unfortunately while driving home I managed to find yet another tailgating idiot. I can't understand people who don't take at minimum two-second distances, and way more when there are inclement conditions such as partially plowed roads in temperatures just dropping below zero after sunset making black ice, you know, almost inevitable. And yet, there one was. I even turned my hazard lights on --- the first time I've done that in my new car, for the record --- but he called my bluff and refused to back off. Happily when I stopped for some cars that were stopped in the road to have people wander around them (don't ask me why) he decided to turn off to another road where, I trust, he found someone else to follow too closely. I hope.

Also I hope the company hired someone to clear the lot tomorrow, since otherwise it's going to be even more impossible than usual to park.

Trivia: The word ``blizzard'' referring to a severe snowstorm appears to originate in Iowa around 1870, by tradition in reference to a severe snowstorm in the northwestern part of the state. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish.

Currently Reading: Outliers: The Story Of Success, Malcolm Gladwell. I was thrown by his reprinting a list that claimed Singaporeans were (of those nationalities sampled) best able to cope with situations in which directions and procedures were most ambiguous or missing, considering how many procedures I saw they had and would share. But then I realized: you know, I had my normal share of weird little problems over there, yet never had what could be really called a bureaucratic hassle. I could turn over any problem and it would just get worked out without the need to get too frustrated (other than getting the campus computer people to believe me when there was a computer problem, at least on the first round through of explaining it). Heck, the year I lost my income tax forms I e-mailed Inland Revenue and they said, we'll send you fresh copies, and you can take an extra two weeks filling them in. It's an awfully relaxed attitude to take regarding income taxes, but awfully ... normal-person-friendly. Yet on the other hand my students were very uneasy the year I had an office with no number. Maybe it's something people grow into.

Seems that all of my plans are wrecked now; there's a storm alert in effect now

We got our first snow for the season today. The forecast had been coming in for a couple days, for something Saturday night to Sunday morning, and I figured it would be like most first-snows or for that matter average storms, namely, maybe a couple inches faintly attractive and really built up to way beyond what the storm deserves by the local TV news, which has discovered that people will respond to news of Storm Alerts without the jaded indifference that every other bit of what's passed for news on TV gets anymore. They'll wear down interest in storms, I'm sure, someday, and can't wait for it.

Anyway, since I was expecting a post-midnight flurry I was a little put off to rise early Saturday afternoon and find snow covering the back yard. It wasn't much cover, and grass was still visible, but it still suggested that the ``time tracking'' of the forecasts --- which at 8 am yesterday forecast nothing, at 2 pm forecast a quarter-inch, and by 8 pm were forecasting two inches, implying that by 2 am they were forecasting an infinite amount of snow --- might be on to something. My parents arrived home moments later, with fresh bundles of groceries, since there were four or five cubic inches of space in the freezer, and my mother gave an exceedingly detailed report on just where the roads were tolerable, where they were mushy, and where they were impassible (right where we live), but if I wanted to go Christmas shopping, all right.

I did go out. I had to mail cards, for one, and to get some presents for the tougher-to-shop-for relatives, and I like doing a bit of puttering around on the weekends, particularly since I went into work on Friday so missed that as a day off. It wasn't a heavy storm, really, but it was coming down pretty steadily and continuously and after the Post Office, and then Best Buy, and a short visit to K-Mart I realized the roads were too slushy, and the sky too dark, and the visibility too low --- I could see the world vanishing into grey, as if it were ending, and this on the US Route --- to carry on.

Trivia: Contemporary estimates of the money Argentina's Juan Péron spent on Ronald Richter's Huemel Island fusion reactor in 1951 ranged between $3.7 million and $70 million. Source: Sun In A Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, Charles Seife.

Currently Reading: Outliers: The Story Of Success, Malcolm Gladwell. If this is representative of his writing I can see why he's a bestselling author: it nearly feels chocked full of insight and information while staying extremely breezy a read. I must figure out how it's done before starting work on my own bestselling pop sci book.

What a day to go kite flying

We actually drove back to our hotel, the overflow one, in order that we could ride the shuttle bus intended to run every half-hour between the overflow hotel and the con hotel. Since we had bunny_hugger's car maybe we didn't need to do this, but it would avoid any problems in finding parking spaces, and while skylerbunny expressed skepticism about the schedule of the shuttle it seemed to work by my clock. As we set out, I found my electric toothbrush had decided it should just start running and keep running until I hit it. And I decided to leave my jacket at the hotel since, after all, I was going to be indoors except for the very brief times going from shuttle to hotel room and what would I need a jacket for that for?

( So there was checking in, and getting our bearings, mostly, not to mention just settling generally in. )

One other thing we'd need to get to, and that I felt a bit of anxiety about, was finally meeting in person bluerain --- with whom I've had a fairly tumultuous relationship --- and orv --- whom I've known longer and much more peacefully --- and augustforth --- whom I've known a long while although not truly intimately --- and kevinjdog --- whom, well, I suppose I can count as acquaintance. My experience usually has been that people are easier to know in person than online, but, I can't say that's based on a statistically significant sample. Anything might happen.

Trivia: Apollo 17's Command Module splashed down 19 December 1972 1.0 nautical miles from its designated target, and 3.5 nautical miles from its recovery ship. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-2000-4029.

Currently Reading: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

The moment that he touched the hat the room began to glow

``Only in the movies'' came the warning atop the title card, which was a relief. I wouldn't be responsible for whatever would follow. What would be described ought to happen only in a movie, or in front of a movie camera operated by movie people making a movie. While I was at a movie, I wasn't in a movie, so I was free to act in ways not specified. Plus I wasn't quite at a movie since the movie hadn't started. I figured I was safe. I have these outbursts of optimism.

``Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary'', came the text, ``people in movies think that trying on hats is fun.'' And now I was stuck. I don't habitually wear hats, what with it being after 1962's discovery by the ``long-haired'' Beatles that males could have hair extruded a whole inch from the skin without heads bursting into flame or whatever the problem with long hair was. But the habit of hat not-wearing means I have a habit of hat not-trying-on. I can document three instances of me hat-trying, but this can't be called a habit, and neither can the hats, so don't think I didn't have that one in mind, since I didn't, and can't explain its presence. Please treat it as a hallucination until a proper cover story can be written.

Still: if there's fun to be had trying on hats, then why wasn't I having it? But if there's not any fun to be had trying on hats, I wouldn't be missing out on anything if I didn't try on hats, unless I have that the wrong way around, and what if I never found out that I didn't?

The first question: how much does it take to make a mountain of evidence? Well, a mountain, certainly, although right away we're in trouble since there's such a range of mountains. (I'm leaving that phrase for potential future development.) Mountains can be found worldwide, from Himalaya through to the Dust-Covered Cheap Toys And Small Mountains aisle in the typical convenience store, between off-brand Rubik's Cubes and keychain Etch-A-Sketches. Well, a mountain is evidence for a mountain, so we can start out writing ``one mountain = a mountain'' on a clean sheet of mountain-evidence paper.

Then take any other mountain, which is just one mountain as well, unless it's several mountains. If it's several mountains peel one off and leave the rest for later. Since this is a mountain again, we have a second mountain equal to the first through their both being a mountain. So happily we don't have to worry which mountain we're trying to assemble into evidence; we can take the first one that we reach. Let's hope it's a small one.

But all this reasoning doesn't tell us how many hats amount to one mountain, or how to translate evidence of hat-trying to evidence of mountain-being. Sure, a hat is a hat-sized piece of evidence and we can see how many hats build into a mountain by volume, but how about by fun? And there are levels of fun. Trying on a straw boater is more fun than trying a beaver hat, just from time saved not recovering from angry beaver clawings.

But top hats beat both, especially top hats from cartoons that keep popping up and down. Top hats also beat chef hats, since in a chef hat a series of comic misunderstandings is bound to leave you stuck in the kitchen responsible all evening for spelling ``béarnaise sauce''. More fun than all those are tricornes, which you can't start trying on without wild adventures putting you in the Vaguely 18th century or becoming a Lord Mayor.

Thinking isn't helping, so let's go to the hat store and ask the first person who comes out, ``How many hats would you have to try on to have as much fun as you have evidence for a mountain?''

He pauses, and says, ``I've never seen a mountain. But it's 3,410 hats to one lacustrine plain, if that helps.''

``It does indeed, thank you,'' and now we know better.

Trivia: Harry S Truman's ``gents furnishings'' store, Truman & Jacobson, opened in November 1919 with an inventory valued at about $35,000, of which Truman put up $15,000. Source: Truman, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

There's no meal that's better

With my stuff tucked in the back of bunny_hugger's car, and the car driven by skylerbunny, we had a basic agenda of getting to the overflow hotel where my stuff could be dropped off, getting to the con hotel where I could get my registration and badge and whatnot, and getting something to eat. Optional but desired would be catching the Opening Ceremonies, set for noon and not quite so distant in time as might be desireable. Also it might be nice to get some kind of medication for skylerbunny, who was feeling the traces of what would seem to be some sort of plague which bunny_hugger would aptly dub the California Plague, and which would become a motif of the week.

( We started out with lying to electronics, and ended up with a new kind of tea and metaphysical confusion regarding hand lotion. )

With minor shopping done, though, we were ready to head for the Con Hotel.

Trivia: In the first half of the 14th century between 725 and 1,360 ships per year set out for England carrying Gascon wine. Between 8 October 1349 and 27 August 1350 only 141 ships sailed. Source: In The Wake Of The Plague: The Black Death And The World It Made, Norman F Cantor.

Currently Reading: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris. Oh, this is a lot of fun.

Let it make a happy glow for all the world to see

A capacitor of electricians has descended on the office this week. They're here at the owner's idea, we believe, or at least nobody has chased them off and it's hard to imagine they're spending this much time here on their own accord. The objective is, apparently, to replace all the overhead fluorescent lights with newer and different lights. The new lights are brighter, which should be a welcome change, and more energy-efficient, which is what motivates the change, and so that's why on Monday while I looked around for just where to deposit the food I'd brought in for the first Christmas lunch of the week (leftovers starting Tuesday, and a pizza party for Friday), I found the first floor was a maze of boxes of new lighting fixtures and new lights.

They started on the ground floor and worked their way up, so that I'd have my half-lit status (literally; one bulb each of my two fixtures would work only intermittently) almost as long as possible. But shortly before noon they got up to my office and started work taking out the bulbs and replacing the fixtures. It turned out my lighting fixtures were wired backwards, so that what should have been ground was hot and vice-versa, which revelation was maybe the least shocking thing I might have heard about the office lighting situation. This can't have been a universal mis-wiring or the situation wouldn't have been worth commenting on. They were sorry to interrupt my work, such as it was, but since they were working right around lunchtime it couldn't have been better for me. Now the office is refreshingly bright and much better color-balanced.

A few hours after that came a solid crash from the floor below, which got us third-floor dwellers to walk down and see if there was anything cool to see. While there were startled people there wasn't any blood or maiming or anything, just, as one of the electricians described it, the sound of 32 light bulbs all breaking at once.

On the way back up I noticed the box with the new light bulbs warns while shipping to ``Handle Like Glass''. I hadn't considered that whatever these bulbs are made of might fail to meet some standard of glass-ness. And now I wonder if they were fixtures, which might be fragile without having any glass in them, rather than boxes of bulbs. I do know the boxes swore the product leaves the factory in perfect condition, though, which seems to me an impossible guarantee to give.

Trivia: In the first thirteen months of attempting to identify the proper filament and gas to use in electric bulbs Thomas Edison spent $42,869.21 on experimental work, not counting legal, patent, and other expenses. Source: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Currently Reading: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris. OK, this is more or less the book I wanted Opening Pitch last week to be. It's an exquisitely researched and well-written history of early baseball that's a story, that explains stuff, and uses a lot of contemporary documentation or quotes from people who lived through it. This is the good book about early baseball I wanted.

Soon the man who sweeps the room brings the secret telegram

So I got home. The large box was there; inside, was a smaller box, with my new phone in it. I hoped dearly there'd be nothing complicated to do to get it started because I didn't have time.

( What are the odds of that? But I do get to O'Hare airport, which is the important thing. Surely nothing could go wrong in getting *out* of O'Hare? )

The six text messages that my phone had acquired so far turned out to be from Verizon, begging me to make a phone call so as to complete my activation.

Trivia: Gemini VI turned on its acquisition radar, to detect Gemini VII already in orbit, at three hours seven minutes after launch. It locked on Gemini VII at three hours ten minutes after launch. Source: Gemini 6: The NASA Mission Reports, Editor Robert Godwin. (Technical Debriefing, 20 December 1965.)

Currently Reading: Call Of The Mall, Paco Underhill. Now on the one hand, it's fun reading about what malls do right and wrong from a guy who likes them. On the other, a lot of what he dislikes is spots where things in malls could be used to advertise other things, and I'm tired of every surface being an advertisement. He's got a point about the storefronts being painfully dull, though.

Now because you think that time has passed you by

I don't tend to make fun of the Department of Motor Vehicles (in New Jersey now the Motor Vehicles Commission after a decade of trying out every variation on department names, possibly in an attempt to dodge Child Organization Support). In part this is because most of the jokes to make about them are lazy: ``the lines are enormous and the employees hate everybody and you sit around waiting forever to be told you're in the wrong line''. Heard that joke already, lots of times. Sometimes I'll make a lazy joke, but everyone is occasionally lazy. More, though, these jokes lack the molecules of truth that they need to be sound: at least in these parts, my experiences with the Motor Vehicles Commission this decade have been efficient, swift, and reasonably painless. Jokes rarely work when they're documentary, but I feel that even absurdist or whimsical humor plays better when there is that bracing of reality behind it.

That's a longwinded way of saying I went to the Motor Vehicles office to get my driver's license renewed. Mid-month is allegedly the sweet time to do it; when I got in there were a couple people in the various queues but nothing too long or sluggish. In fact, at the driver's license section --- with 25 seats, 24 of them empty --- the woman working the little table to check over all the paperwork told me to stand by the wall next to where they take photographs. Apparently they weren't expecting this to be a long wait. And they weren't, although after the wait by the wall I was told to come to line six (a third of the way across the main counter) where I verified all my information and paid (cash, for no obvious reason) and was told it'd be just a few seconds so I should sit down. I never found out why they had me stand a little while.

Before I could even take out a book to read they were ready for my photograph. They had my four-year-old one on file, but, you know, this is my first chance to make a formal impression with my not-fat-anymore face and I wanted that. Plus I realized over the past four years that most photographs of me look like I'm asleep because I open my eyes just enough to see. If I hold my eyes more open I look like I've ever been conscious. They took a picture. With my eyes a little wider open than normal I looked like I was photographed while being attacked by flying squid. They allow re-takes since digital pictures make that painless except that you have to look at what you look like. I tried looking less alert, and came out looking like I was being attacked by smaller flying squid.

Each time we photographed and the clerk asked if I wanted to use this picture I felt that much more awkward. It felt like wasting her time and demanding special privileges to keep reshooting, and yet, this is going to be with me four years and looked at possibly as soon as 2013 when I come up for renewal again, shouldn't I get it right? But with so little visible improvement from one picture to the next it felt like getting it right might take into 2013. I finally settled on the next photograph, in which I look not so much attacked by squid and more like a perky android learning what you humans mean by ``slapstick''. That will probably do.

Still, the service was prompt, efficient, and courteous. I think the photograph problems are entirely my own down.

Trivia: When the Aero Club of America, under the authority of the Féderation Aéronautique Internationale began awarding pilot's licenses, Orville Wright was granted number 4, and Wilbur Wright number 5. Source: Over Land And Sea: The Dramatic Story Of The Great Aviation Pioneer Glenn H Curtiss, Robert Scharff, Walter S Taylor.

Currently Reading: Call Of The Mall, Paco Underhill.

A thousand faces will watch as I wander alone

I got to the hospital, parked, clumsily gathered all the things I was bringing in (the bag of toys and my bookbag, plus a jacket it wasn't quite cold enough to wear, yet somehow this made a clumsy bundle), turned back, tried to re-park so I wouldn't be quite so obnoxiously close to the car on the right of me, got out, found I wasn't really much better off and decided, with that irrational and repeatedly and easily disproved by looking at any watch, bank dot-matrix display, or listening to traffic reports on the radio belief it was an hour later than it actually was decided to go ahead with where I had been parked.

( My father, by the way, had got a little Slinky, which proved to be much more successful than I would have guessed. I'd passed on the Slinky on the assumption it took too much finger work to use. )

Somewhere around a quarter to nine a nurse came in to tidy up things in general and my father suggested that perhaps we should be going. Good thought; I had a 6 am flight to take, and I still had a phone to open up and, I dearly hoped, get working without problems. On the way home, I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts to buy a half-dozen for the drive up in the morning.

Trivia: New England's textile mills grew rapidly enough in the first half of the 19th century that profits averaged 24 percent annually for twenty consecutive years (until 1845). Source: Big Cotton, Stephen Yafa.

Currently Reading: Asimov's Choice: Black Holes and Bug-Eyed Monsters, Editor George H Scithers. You know, this is a really enjoyable book. Maybe science fiction of the 70s wasn't a dread wasteland of inflation-ravaged resource-starved post-New-Wave doom after all.

How does it feel when the day is over

Clearly the thing to look for would be --- well, first, clear directions on how to get to the hospital, whose location I roughly knew but which had passed from conscious memory. But after that, where was there a toy store on anything like the path from work to the hospital? I've driven along that way many times, and surely saw a toy store somewhere, but any exact locations had never affected my memory, so far as I could remember. There was one very likely rich target spot, though, a good-sized mall just along the route.

( I found a store! And, better, I found things within the store. I hoped my niece would appreciate Clone Wars materials. )

When I got back to my car, with cookie and toys, I had a momentary panic when I thought I'd spent over 90 minutes in the mall. I never got around to setting my car's dashboard clock back from Daylight Saving Time. While all sanity assured me I had not wasted so much of the time available to me before the early bedtime, you try convincing my mind of something like that once it's got a fright like that. The traffic is always bad going up that route, however much Google Maps's Traffic thingy claims things are moving right along; now, the rest of the ride up, I felt a very irrational anxiety at losing time with my sister-in-law, niece time, and time to get ready for the flight in the morning, and time to get my phone working in case anything went awry.

Trivia: Between 1693 and 1791 grain consumption in Flanders fell from 758 grams per person per day to 475 grams, with potatoes replacing about two-fifths of all cereal consumption. Source: Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño And The Fate of Civilizations, Brian Fagan.

Currently Reading: Asimov's Choice: Black Holes and Bug-Eyed Monsters, Editor George H Scithers. I think it's a spinoff or transmutation of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, with some right fine content (John Varley's ``Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe'', which alone could found a decent online roleplaying game), some oddities (Martin Gardner doing variations on the probability puzzle where mothers who give birth to females are sterilized and how this affects society's gender balance; a Black Widowers mystery), and miscellaneties of late 70s science fiction writing (Earth gets conquered so aliens can outsource a particular job to India). Interesting but easy-reading stuff.

Nora's freezin' on the trolley

The holiday season officially began yesterday, when over fifty percent of households possessing Advent Calendars remembered they'd gone over two days without finding and lifting open the little windows. But just because the holiday is well seasoned (we have nutmeg) doesn't mean it's risk-free. The weeks before Christmas bring problems nobody would imagine without prompting. After the dangers are suggested they can crowd out all other thoughts until the thinker is a quivering mass of thoughts about perils, which is part of what makes the season so fun. I mean fun for others.

Consider the Christmas Tree. The season would be nearly unrecognizable without one, and a shocking number of states would lack melodies for Official State Songs, special music patriotically never played or sung, for good reason. Yet they can become menaces, for instance by attracting Druids. A couple gathering to worship in your foyer is pleasant at first, but when they make Flash Druid Mobs or get into chanting you're stuck, especially if they're tone-deaf. And try sneaking presents under the tree. You couldn't get past slipping the desktop calendar in just the spot to have the stand's water spill onto the wrapping before someone catches you at it. But a pack of Druids doesn't litter more frequently than any other group of the same size, so don't worry about that.

The simple way to handle that is to tell a friend, ``Boy, that was a fantastic ancient megalithic henge they opened by the Town Square Mall!'', and have the friend answer, ``Fantastic place, I haven't seen orthostats like that since the last time they opened one. Plus they serve peppermint tea.'' Add a rumor of free wireless and they'd disperse, solving your problem unless you're by the Town Square Mall. If you are send them to the Squankum City Park instead. Yet that carries further risks: what if you don't have a friend? You could deliver both parts of the dialogue, changing your voice. If you're no good at changing your voice? You should include a book on becoming a voice actor on your Christmas list --- but how do you get it under the tree, under the mob's gaze, or unwrap it before the appropriate gift-unwrapping time? This is why it's best to take up voice acting around holidays you don't decorate for, such as Arbor Day or Delaware Return Day. (Note: you do not need to have left Delaware to observe Delaware Return Day. Nor do you need the receipt, but the gift wrapping is nice.)

Whatever that exhausts it's not all the potential risks. One might put up strings of lights. What if they start blinking? What if a strange ionospheric myocardiogram causes the blinking be receiption of Morse Code messages from ships in distress? You might not know Morse Code. Yet Morse Code has not been sanctioned for maritime radio distress signals since 1999 so you are not legally at fault ignoring it. If you are getting someone's Morse Code through your Christmas lights they must be personal messages and if you are not reading them then you show the sort of discretion which makes it safe to let you eavesdrop on other people's conversations. If you want to do something anyway you're to be admired for your public-spiritness. Plus I don't think myocardiograms have anything to do with Christmas lights.

How about considering the risk of falling weights? That's enough considering. You want to handle falling weights instinctively, preferably by dodging. Or just don't let them fall. You can keep your weights from falling by putting some paper over them, which is why you see that so much. Oh, I know why I'm talking about that: if you use a weight to hold a stocking still, and someone tugs the stocking, it might fall, causing serious injury because it's almost impossible to get sympathy for a stocking injury. So instead of weights hold stockings in place using magnets or napping Druids. There's probably also advice for ladders, so if you find someone good with ladders (ask ``how are you with ladders?''; people who say ``yes'' are good or heard the question wrong), best to ask for it.

Trivia: A London fog, mixed with industrial smoke, lasting four days in December 1873 reduced visibility to a few feet, at one point stretched as far as fifty miles from the city, and resulted in the deaths of at least twenty people by drowning; statistical evidence suggests somewhere between 270 and 700 Londoners were killed in it. Source: Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese.

Currently Reading: Opening Pitch: Professional Baseball's Inaugural Season, 1871, Warren N Wilbert. Bah. I want to read a good book about early baseball. Be better, book, be better! Don't be this sloppy disorganized mess!

You can see in the future of a thousand years

My niece has a cleft palette. This was not a surprise to my sister-in-law and her husband; they knew it well before the adoption went through. It was just one of those things for which she would need surgery possibly several times in her life. One of the lingering chores from after the adoption would be to have her evaluated for, and then undergo, the first surgery, preferably several months after she'd arrived so she would have time to adjust. Her parents felt the time had been enough for her to adjust, and set the surgery for Wednesday as my phone arrived but went undelivered.

Everyone had sent their good wishes, of course, and the surgery was as successful as could be hoped. The surgeon thought it went without a hitch and that she shouldn't need any kind of follow-up until she's reached about age seven, maybe five years from now, and has had the chance to grow substantially more. This is not to say that she was back home: she would have to stay in the hospital --- not quite coincidentally, although not with conscious design, the same hospital in which I was born --- for at minimum three days, and longer if there were complications. Furthermore she has to wear bandages around her hands thick enough to keep her from putting her hands in her mouth for at minimum three weeks. (She's still in this period.)

But the immediate issue was that she needed to be in the hospital, albeit in the cheery side of the children's ward. And this required my sister-in-law to be with her, because my brother can not watch over anyone in hospital. He can barely go to one himself. He once passed out and was unconscious for at least twenty minutes while text-messaging from his office with someone else describing having had a blood sample taken earlier that day. (He was working then the same place I am now, which shows the company's relaxed attitudes regarding employee consciousness.) He couldn't trade off supervision chores with his wife, no matter what. I cast no moral judgement here; nobody can control what makes them nauseated, but it presented a practical problem.

Namely, after 24 hours of watching a squirmy, anxious, curious two-year-old who'd just undergone surgery and was learning to cope with mitten-hands she couldn't know where merely temporary, my sister-in-law was going crazy. My father had gone up, the previous day and on Thursday to visit and lend moral support, but the more the better. And so my father called me asking me to come visit --- sure, happily --- and maybe stop somewhere on the way up to get some toys which might distract a squirmy, anxious, curious two-year-old.

Of course I would. But since I can be as self-centered as anyone I realized the implications: I'd probably lose my chance to exercise that evening, and if there were any problems or complications with my new phone I would not have time to get it sorted out before flying. Oh, and also there was editing into shape my humor piece for the week. I could get that word length about right while still at work, anyway, even if I lost the couple hours between composing and editing which make my worse writing tics stand out to me.

And, say, where could I buy toys for a two-year-old along the way up to visit?

Trivia: The Brush Electric Compan installed its first high-voltage arc lamps along Broadway in Manhattan --- which would give the street the nickname ``the Great White Way'' --- at the end of 1880, between 14th and 34th streets. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: Opening Pitch: Professional Baseball's Inaugural Season, 1871, Warren N Wilbert.

And you let go, let go, let go all

So came waiting for the phone to arrive, projected to arrive Tuesday. Obviously nothing would happen for Sunday, but there was the chance it might arrive early and let me set it up well ahead of leaving for bunny_hugger's. Nevertheless, it didn't arrive Monday, even though home did its part by being present all day. Tuesday was the first time it might be expected, and, it wasn't there. My father was getting a bit anxious about this, since he was eager to see my phone, and he was shocked to learn that it was from Verizon because there was the store just down the street and why didn't I buy one from there? I suspect that he's built up a nearly complete immunity to his hearing aid, and will need a replacement soon. I got to checking over my receipt to see if I had a tracking number; I didn't, or I couldn't find it in the eighty meters of tape ribbon produced when I bought the phone.

Still, Wednesday would be another day even if I could be expected to get in late --- yoga class, not to mention last-minute shopping for needed trip items --- and why shouldn't the phone be delivered then? What I found was one of those ``sorry we missed you'' delivery slips instead, stuck to the window beside the door. The existence of this annoyed my father because the Post Office and Federal Express have been told to just drop off packages. Well, Verizon wanted a signature, but I could sign the ``sorry we missed you'' slip and stick it back on the window, and the package would be dropped off tomorrow. That'd leave me an evening, at least, to get the phone set up and tested.

I signed the form and stuck it back on the window, and got to exercising, and within twenty minutes my mother brought in the slip for me to sign. She didn't notice I'd already signed it. Still, every reason to expect the phone to be delivered sometime Thursday and I'd have the whole evening, up until the time I went to bed early in order to make my flight while faintly conscious, to set it up. Early Thursday morning, my father called me at work to report the phone had arrived, indicating the moment he displayed more accumulated interest in my phone than I had. Still, I'd be home in one standard-issue workday, I'd have plenty of time for setup, and it wasn't as though there were any family members undergoing surgery that might need attention more urgently, except for the one who was.

Trivia: The See of Canterbury was paid compensation for the loss of income on the horse ferry across the Thames based near the Archbishop's home of Lambeth Place when the Westminster Bridge was built. Source: Old London Bridge: The Story Of The Longest Inhabited Bridge In Europe, Patricia Pierce.

Currently Reading: The Mightiest Machine, John W Campbell. Aaaaaaand there's the genocide. Sheesh. (In raiding an Enemy museum: ``That [ temple ] will have to be destroyed along with the rest of Teff-el. I think if it alone was saved, posterity would blame you for destroying the race that could create it.'') Imagine how the war would have wrapped up if Our Heroes had talked first with the other side. (As traditional, the alien war that's been going on for, oh, ever gets wrapped up when Scientist Protagonist whips up some new death rays off-screen and they wait a whole couple scenes to build, test, install, and deploy them.)

Have it your way

I don't go very often to the Burger King that's nearest my home, for a few reasons. I usually eat fast food on the weekends when I also do recreational shopping that takes me a few miles farther. The shop seems to have minor problems with tricky parts of orders like ``with cheese, no mayo''. And then there was a stretch of a couple visits where the Diet Coke dispenser had consistently flat soda. Every soda fountain spends some time flat, but too much of that makes a place unappealing. Add in a failure to have ice twice in a row (so it was warm enough to need ice which was thus impossible) and I can mark the place down.

And there's one other thing. The place turned into, for whatever reason, a pretty big teen hangout. I don't want to sound like those cranky elderly people upset about lawns of various existence, because I'm not, really. I don't mind most of what teens do and the lawn isn't even mine. But I do suppose that teens today are, like those since the basic model was invented (1941), prone to doing foolish things loudly, and by myself I prefer to eat in reasonable quiet and without distraction. If they want to see whether they can use food trays to skateboard along the planter walls before a manager catches them, that's fine, and I'll leave them their space.

But I gave the place a try, and while they had modest confusion regarding my order (the cashier asked for it several times after the back-room folks insisted it was done), the soda was suitably fizzy and cold, and while there were two packs of semi-associated teens all seemed respectable enough. And then I overheard a girl describing a phone conversation. She had been upset at the caller because she ``was chugging bottles of water to go peeing on a car later'', and she was concentrating her squatting on the seat so as to save her urine for its intended purpose.

I worked diligently to not hear the rest of this. So I do not know if she was speaking of a new trend in inappropriately placed urine, or if she was speaking sarcastically to a person who would not get off the phone long enough for her to tend her business. I don't want to know. But I think I will give the teens their space, and that I am not being being too curmudgeonly.

Trivia: After the bombings at Pearl Harbor, the United States's B-17s at Luzon, Philippines, were ordered into the air to avoid being caught on the ground. They finally landed about 11:30 local time to prepare for a delayed strike on Japanese forces in Formosa, when the Japanese air forces based in Formosa, delayed by fog, arrived. Source: History Of The Second World War, B H Liddell Hart.

Currently Reading: The Mightiest Machine, John W Campbell. This 1972 reprinting from Ace features a cover note, ``Science Fiction From The Great Years'', by which they mean, when you didn't need to have the restrained tones or closely observed realism of E E `Doc' Smith.

So I took what I could get

So my phone choice was logically made: prepaid contract-free to reflect my exceedingly low volume needs. Verizon to reflect that the people I would most likely need to call in the foreseeable future are also on Verizon, implying lower costs (eg, unlimited talk time not just evenings and weekends). Full QWERTY keyboard for such messages as might need typing in because I have tried sending messages using phone keys and, well, I understand kids can do that but I can't. Or won't. Maybe it's my attitude problem but I'm sticking with it.

This should seem to simplify phone model selection since if you look at Verizon's web site and their prepaid phones they have one QWERTY-keyboard prepaid phone, the Samsung Intensity. And the local store had a model which I was able to experiment with and found ... more or less all right, yes. I could be comfortable with it. It even displayed web sites I'd created with my own Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction on them in a reasonably legible fashion. Decision made. Except ... one visit the store nearest me had another model, the LG Env2, on the shelves of prepaid phones. They had none on hand to experiment with, but they did have an Env3 with very similar physical dimensions and properties. And that fit ever so slightly better. (And rendered pages better, although I'd guessed the Mobile Web stuff might easily vary between models.) When I went in that Saturday to buy a phone, though, they had none in stock. I asked and they had none nearby either, and couldn't do prepaid phone service with an Env3.

But! They could order one from the warehouses, and have it come in, most likely by Tuesday. That wouldn't be too bad, and there'd even be two days of margin before I'd be off to see bunny_hugger. So I committed to it, and bought my first hand phone, getting a number comfortably in my home area code but with a suspicious-looking zero as the second digit in the exchange block, which looks unnatural. And my parents found it not excessively strange that I had managed to go to the store, buy a phone, and not have an actual phone in hand from it. (I couldn't even be sure which of the several colors of phone it would be.) They know me at home.

Trivia: AT&T president Fred Kappel overcame the phone company's reluctance to offer phones in colors other than black in the late 50s by secretly having an advertising agency prepare four large magazine advertisements for colored phones, and then announcing to a corporate conference that Western Electric was proposing to put colored phones in mass production and marketing. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: The Visible Man, Gardner Dozois. Ah, that early 70s science fiction: most stirring right where it's most disturbing or depressing.

And maybe you will get a call from me

I would imagine that any Verizon sales person would have a fair idea whether the prepaid cell phone Mobile Web service, which charges 99 cents per day, is charging that just to use the Mobile Web at all with separate charges for actually downloading things, or whether that's all-you-can-download-in-24-hours for that cost. Certainly I had, even though the brochures, flyers, and web sites make none of this clear. Partly the problem is they run every possible bit of disclaimer together in the fine print that explains actual terms. And web site reviews explained surprisingly little, possibly because the professional writers don't seem to find the fine print of a boring service worth mentioning, and the comment-writers that cling to those pages are --- you may have noticed this --- functionally illiterate and mostly upset at how every company in the world is the worst company in the world ever.

( I searched for an answer. I managed to get every answer, leaving me with a question whether I had heard any correct answer. )

Several weeks later, I still don't know if the answer was right as I haven't had to look anything up on the phone's web, but I felt confident enough to look to picking out phone models. This will lead rapidly to the crash of personal events.

Trivia: The first parliament, held in 1377, of English King Richard II's reign, took the unusual step of insisting the taxes produced should be put in the hands of two merchants (William Walworth and John Philpot), as the treasurers of war, in order to assure the money was properly spent. Source: The Later Middle Ages, 1272 - 1485, George Holmes. (Walworth would later be Mayor of London.)

Currently Reading: The Visible Man, Gardner Dozois.

Then a new beginning ventures in

I interrupt my tale of phone-buying for one cute and one baffling thing. The baffling thing first: I just moments ago got a phone call from my brother, the one with the new job in Massachusetts, who was glad to get me because he ``didn't have much time''. He started to talk about getting something called a Nonsense List about things going on in New York City, and then the call died. He phoned back reporting he'd got a ``call failed'' message, and this does seem to satisfy the general specifications of a failed call. Anyway, he had found information about a comic book convention going on in New York City this weekend, and wanted to be sure I might be interested in it before he went to the trouble of e-mailing it. He got a Blackberry through work recently, and hasn't entered all his data into it, but did reportedly spend Thanksgiving comparing it to my other brother's Blackberry.

He didn't need my address, you understand. He just phoned to make sure it was all right to e-mail me. I'd say he was turning into our father, but our father's never done something so odd.

The cute thing: I made contact again with the folks at the Popcorn Park Zoo, and got through to the person who handles lost membership cards and the like. There were a few moments of oddness, such as when she asked what it was I had lost. I had a general idea, sure, but what specifically? Well ... the stuff you get at the start of buying support for an animal. skylerbunny had some idea what might be expected, but I could speak only in the vaguest terms. But I believe she knows what I don't have and will be sending that out soon.

And as she mentioned, I had received (besides the 2010 calendar) a card from the adopted Cocoa. The card isn't autographed, but it did come with a photograph so that I now know what he looks like. I don't know when I'll be able to get there and see him in person, but now I know what to look for. So I've got that to smile about today.

Also it turns out my wireless printer scans in color or black-and-white, depending on which of two buttons you pick without saying explicitly ahead of time how the choice matters. Also you have to plug it in to scan, so the wireless part is only for printing, not for unprinting.

Trivia: A survey in 1334 found France's Hyères saltworks produced between eight and eleven thousand metric tons of salt per year. In 1892 the saltworks produced ten thousand metric tons. Source: Salt: Grain Of Life, Pierre Laszlo.

Currently Reading: Options, Robert Sheckley. I liked some of these elements in other productions, notably It's Garry Shandling's Show. I'm not sure why it's not working other than that Sheckley can slather on things that might be more effective in sprinkles.

(Editorial note: I don't quite believe the lyric, from Golden Dawn's ``Seeing Is Believing'', as the lyrics web sites all give it, sine it doesn't really sound like that to me and the lyrics sites all copy each other, but I can't come up with a better transcription from what I can find on the Internet.)

He never done it before

Like any sensible orange-despising person I watch for news about breakthroughs in practical colors such as blue. It's usually a quiet watch, with only the occasional stranger approaching in the night for that classic routine where you ask who goes there, friend or foe, and the other party is confused as a result of not having heard the question clearly. Yet can you blame friend or foe? No, particularly not when something interesting comes up like a new blue.

I'd love to say I had some part in the discovery, but that would be a lie. More accurately I'd like to say I had some part in the discovery, but I'm all right with not having had any part in it. I did experiment with discovering new colors when I was younger and went to schools that left out boxes of crayons where just anyone could tear the wrapper off the interesting colors and leave behind as many as 56 Very Dark Colors Equally Likely To Be Navy Blue, Purple, Black, Or Any Other Color You Do Not Want Right Now in every group of sixteen crayons.

By combining these I determined that Yellow mixed with Blue produces Brown, while Red mixed with Blue produces Brown, and Carnation Pink mixed with White produces Brown. And yet Green mixed with Orange, Violet, and Yellow makes Brown. So I mostly discovered crayons are made of compressed brown. And so from this I nkew right away if someone had discovered a new blue it wasn't through trying out crayon combinations, because we already have a brown, and that's not blue. I could similarly rule out colored pencils, made of a less waxy compressed brown, and markers, made of damp compressed brown.

Still there are fortunes to be made in producing new colors, particularly in blue, which has always been in high demand thanks to its use in poetry. Since `blue' rhymes with both `you' and `do', it has been perceived as an active, intimate color that's going places and doing things ever since it was admitted to the English language in 1871. In contrast, for example, `red' rhymes mostly with `lead' and `dead', which is why its reputation as an inert and toxic color depresses its use. This fact leaves many red manufacturers feeling blue, and the irony of that makes it worse. Some take to feeling chartreuse out of pure spite, even though they think `chartreuse' might be a mountain range in eastern France, and French border inspectors are catching on.

It's not a surprise that the new blue was found my materials science researchers at Oregon State University. Oregon has lead in blue ever since 1947, when Prussian Blue --- so named because of its ability to undergo intervalence charge transfer --- was broken up and distributed among Poland, Lithuania, RCA, and the National League. The school appointed its first Cerulean Professor in 1952, and from 1960 to 1967 supported a Dean of Periwinkle. While that position was eliminated by the establishment of the School of Shades and Pigments its professors still edit three of the most important peer-reblued journals in the field.

And it's not surprising they skipped all the compressed-brown color sources like crayons and markers, or the leading faintly-grey-somehow color sources of computer screens. Instead they mixed up manganese oxide by confusing it with yttrium oxide and indium oxide, which when you think about it is the natural thing to do with all those oxides. They aren't going to whip up new colors left to themselves. They'd just sit there, oxidized, maybe trading stories about what they were like before they got into rare earth metals. Things seemed much clearer then.

More surprising to me and Dr Mas Subramanian, was they weren't trying to make a new blue at all. They were trying to come up with something that had some neat electronic properties. But thanks to the laws of crayolamagnetism, interesting electric thingies produce interesting color thingies and vice-versa, and before you know it, you have blue all over the lab. The big surprise is they went in hoping to prop up the ailing crayon industry by producing a new brown.

Trivia: Engineers for the Baltimore and Ohio railroad in 1828 proposed in a survey report laying stone rails in gravel-lined trenches, with wrought-iron plate rails fastened by rivets to the upper surfaces, but recommending wooden sleepers and rails for temporary constructions. Source: The Railroad And The Space Program: An Exploration In Historical Analogy, Editor Bruce Mazlish.

Currently Reading: Options, Robert Sheckley. Ah, it's going to hold me down and pummel me with zany.