Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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The suburban town of Bethlehem, New York had a “Merry Christmas” sign and a “Happy Hanukkah” sign removed from the busiest intersection in town.

Hello?

Grinches in the town named for the birthplace of Jesus banned religious holiday signs so they “wouldn’t violate any laws or distract drivers.”

There’s more. This year, the town of Menominee, Michigan, took down the Nativity scene in their city park — a long-standing Christmas tradition — after “Freedom From Religion Foundation” complaints.

I so wish we could find three wise men and a camel. Heck, I’d settle for a smart camel.


christmas bird

Every radio station has defaulted to Christmas music. I’m surprised we haven’t lost that, too. I don’t particularly like Christmas music but my radio has an off switch. I don’t have to listen to it if I don’t want to.

I was raised in a family that was Quaker on one side, Presbyterian on the other. I may not be as organized now as I was when I reached the age of accountability and joined the Presbyterian church but I am still a Christian. And, of course, a WASP.

You don’t have to be either.

Today is the day Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the meaning of Christianity. It was a pretty big day before the stock exchange took it over.

It doesn’t mean Do unto all the other religions, then cut out. Unless you are a Member of Congress. Or, sadly, one of too many “modern” Americans.

Here’s the thing. If you offer food to the monks on Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday, I will honor your commitment to the poor. If you celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, I will honor with you the victory of Lord Ram over the demon-king Ravana. If you fast during Ramadan when the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammad, I will honor your patience and humility. If you celebrate the most solemn and important of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I will honor your atonement and repentance. If you light the candles of Kwanzaa, I will help you honor your heritage. And if you are a lib’rul atheist, I will not proselytize.

That maybe the most important message.

Not one American soldier in Afghanistan, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guam, Honduras, Indian Ocean, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Netherlands, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, or the United States has forced any man, woman, or child to convert to Christianity at the point of a gun again this year.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Hindu, Islamic, a Jew, a Kwanzaan celebrant, or an atheist. It is time, on this Christian holy day, to let Christians be Christians.

My right to impose my own beliefs stops at my property line (or the end of my nose when I’m out in public). The Bethlehem, NY, grinches’ right to idiocy should stop at pretty much the same place. It is time to stop accepting that “politically correct” credo and start honoring the true message of Christmas.

Scythian philosopher Anacharsis wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.”

Away With the Manger wasn’t sung quite so loudly this year. Menominee restored the nativity scene to the park because it’s a First Amendment right. After all, if I can get up on my soapbox and decry the crooks in Washington, then Washington (or Menominee, this time) cannot discriminate against another citizen who climbs a soapbox to preach his or her religious faith. In both cases the content is protected speech.

I’m off to pass on my Santa hat to Jake and Liam.

Peace.

This column originally appeared on Christmas Day, 2008. It required very little updating.

 

Big Hack Attack

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The Electoral College convenes in every state today, the last Monday before the start of Winter.

A friend found this meme:

“I’m outraged at the lack of outrage, especially on my side.” former Rep. Joe Walsh said on CNN. “I get that the country’s divided, but my God, a foreign government interfered with our election. That should piss everybody off!” Mr. Walsh is a talk radio host from Illinois who served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If a foreign government hacked our election, that’s an Act of War and I will indeed be outraged.

If the Obama Administration is making up the hack, that’s a Criminal Act and I will indeed be outraged at that.

Here’s all we know for sure so far:

• Ms. Clinton and the DNC conspired to commit election fraud and I am already outraged over that.
• The DNC leaks have been thoroughly dismissed the Obama Administration, by the DNC, by most pundits on the Left, and about half of social media. “It’s been non-news for months. I don’t understand the continual flogging of that dead horse,” one friend said. That’s outrageous.
• The Department of Homeland Security tried to hack Georgia‘s voter data computers. CA, CO, CT, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OR, RI, VA, VT, WA, and DC allowed DHS in without a hack attack (note that I’ve been unable to confirm that list). This is only a little outrageous, right?
• There is a sudden “consensus” among intelligence agencies that the Russians committed election fraud (but that Ms. Clinton did not). And no one has seen the proof. Outrageous.
• The president has ordered the Office of National Intelligence to conduct a review of the Russian interference. The Director of National Intelligence said Friday that they conveniently could not brief the Electoral College because of the review. Another outrage.

Apparently the Administration thinks election fraud by a foreign government is not actually an Act of War. (“I told him to stop it,” Mr. Obama claims he told Mr. Putin in the strongest possible terms.) That is outrageous, as well.

There’s more to this story.

Democrats committed enough election fraud to get Ms. Clinton nominated but couldn’t pull off enough to get her elected. I cited the Daily Kos because it is a fake news source that Democrats quote wholeheartedly.

Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically in the weeks since the election. (If this all sounds too too familiar, recall that Democratic operative Bob Beckel plotted to kidnap Bush 43’s electors to push the election into Congress. Mr. Gore himself tried to flip “faithless” electors.)

Now they have a “new” program they hope we don’t recognize.

Can o' Industrial WhoopassUnlike Republicans who questioned Mr. Obama’s credentials and fitness to serve as president in 2008 and 2012, the “Just Say No” Democrats have used the hack attack to try to “turn” half the Electoral College.

It’s time for something actually new.

I agree with the Democrats but they don’t go far enough. It’s time to open up that can o’ whoop ass. It’s time to rend both parties asunder. It’s time for the Electors to buck the parties and go rogue.

Democrats want the Electoral College to subvert the democratic process and pick an “acceptable” candidate? I agree. They should cast all 538 votes for Ellen Kullman, or Ryan Lance, or Alan Mulally, or David S. Taylor for President and they should cast 538 more for politician and businessman Jon Huntsman for V.P.

 

Owie

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Note to self: put Band-Aids in the new truck

South Puffin is in the middle of the glorious Middle Keys1 and more than 50 miles to Key Weird. We don’t go to mile marker 0 very often but we had to on Saturday to pick up a new backpack for SWMBO’s upcoming trip to the frozen north.

First we stopped at the Flea Market where Larry had scratch-and-dent tomatoes which is always a good find. He had more fresh beans, too, picked just Friday afternoon.

The Parade of Paws is the Florida Keys SPCA Animal Care Fund‘s third annual fundraiser. The pets didn’t have the over-the-top costumes of Fantasy Fest but it was still practically perfect. The day started when a local minister blessed the pets. We chatted with a woman who was afraid this would be her 11-year old Goldy’s last blessing. Lots of fun fur. We met Deputy Dawg in his own dress green uniform blouse with a Monroe County Sheriff deputy’s patch on the sleeve. His personal deputy carried him in the parade. Several people carried signs to “Give rabbits a voice.” I have no idea. One 12-ish-year old girl walked around with a rat on her shoulder. Plenty of smallish dogs in Santa outfits and others with red antlers.

All good projects require blood to be shed, right?

We also saw Santa himself. I know it was Santa because his beard was real. He said he had fake padding, though, because he had lost 100 pounds.

And we did well at shopping. Sears had the backpack and the pickup process is even easier (and more robotic) than it was back in the catalog days. The Sears robot read my credit card, displayed the order, and notified Hector. He pulled the backpack and had it in my hands in a couple of minutes. We also saw the Tempur-Cloud Supreme Breeze mattress for 1,000x the price of the backpack, $9,996.00. We didn’t buy that.

Hanging out in the Hood

SWMBO noticed the big nest platform on Summerland before I did. Someone was home: a largish black bird with a white head. That was enough to swing a U-ie on the chance it was a bald eagle. It was an osprey. I had the 400 lens mounted on the tripod so I flipped a camera onto it and used the folded up tripod as a “steady cam” with the feet in my belt and camera body in my hand. Worked a treat. I ran the power winder and got a bunch of closeups of the bird in the nest, taking off from the nest, flying with a mate, and Fat Albert. Ahhh.

Then my feet went right out from under me. I slipped on the marbles and uneven surface where we parked and went down on my hands and knees. Scuffed my knees and punctured my hands. All good projects require blood to be shed, right? Sheesh.

It was the shoes, darn it.

Ancient History from 2011
Five years ago, I had just “holed” the walking surface of the heel of a pair of high tech, ultra light sports shoes by stepping on a pebble.

“Wonder if brand name walking shoes have more durable outer soles,” Liz Arden asked back then.

I have only one data point (my Reeboks) but I would think so. That said, any relatively thin, soft rubber covering that bridges a honeycomb is the most vulnerable design.

We went to the now-gone Reebok outlet in Essex Junction, Vermont. I had a coupon and, since my then-current “good” sneakers were 10 or 15 year old Reeboks, I have a definite brand preference.

I wanted cross trainers that felt good in a brief walk around the store. Shannon the saleslady did a nice job of showing and demonstrating the features and guiding me into the right shoe (she threw in the left one, free).

She first wanted me in the air bladder sole, but I ‘splained about the stones I walk on that caused the holiness of my current soul so she moved right over to a solid foam core. I was predisposed to Reebok but the initial prices scared me. That’s when she showed me they were priced at $10 off and the store was running a Buy One, Get One for Half price or Buy Two, Get One Free deal. On top of that I had the 15% off your first purchase coupon and Vermont doesn’t charge sales tax on clothing. With all that, they cost $25 per pair and I was “all set for the next 10 years or so” I thought.

So. I AM™ now the proud owner of 3 (yes, THREE) pairs of Reebok cross-trainers, two for down south and one for North Puffin.

“Why on earth do you need three pairs of shoes?!?” SWMBO asked then.

Have you counted yours, my dear?

I walk about two miles at a fast pace every morning. I swapped shoes in the middle of walkies and it was a good experiment. The new shoes tended to give me a straight heel-toe strike so I think I land more in the center of my heel than on one side or the other. The old shoes both have the hole blown into the heel on the outside and yet I found that they pronated me (is pronate a verb?).

I wouldn’t mind having shorter laces in my new sneaks but they have funny fabric slides instead of holes-and-eyelets for the laces and I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life threading the darn things.

I looked after the fact and saw that the soles on both shoes are about worn out. The uppers and the rest of the shoes are still in good shape. They give good, firm support and comfort. Click the pic to see.

Reeboks Started with Plenty of Sole

That’s just wrong. I actually have four pairs of walking shoes, all about the same age, that I walk in on alternate days. Since I spend about half my days in South Puffin, each pair of the shoes here probably gets pounded about 85-90 days annually. That adds up to just 850-900 miles in five years. I do mostly walk on pavement and some loose stone down here but I’m pretty sure we got better mileage out of our sneaks when we were kids.

The one Reebok store in Vermont evaporated three or four years ago but the Florida Outlet Center in Florida City may still have a Reebok outlet. I hope so because I like the fit and support I’ve gotten with that brand. I just hope they come with Kevlar soles.

The Band-Aid brand covering on my finger has lasted through walkies, food prep, raking gravel, the beach, and at least two showers.

 

Florida Dreamin’

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Dreaming? I’m pretty sure this would keep me awake at night.

“You remember your dreams in a lot of crazy detail,” my friend Diana Bauer said. She lives up where the air is thin and dreams find it harder to escape.

I pretend mine are interesting but I have trouble remembering them. Often a lot of trouble.

She suggested a dream journal.

Night 1: I wasn’t particularly tired but I got to sleep as quickly as usual and remember waking just once around 2:00 local time. I may have awakened somewhere in the middle of a weird traveling dream because it got split into two different episodes.
Night 2: More normal except for a wackadoodle dream in which I really did think I was in a different house/apartment/hotel suite when I got up to pee and was completely surprised that I knew where the bathrooms were.
Night 3: I had trouble getting to sleep and think I woke early. The worst came when I dreamed I woke an hour ahead of the alarm. I was in North Puffin, in my study, when I realized I was up so early. I spent some of the extra time vacuuming. Now I feel as if I slept only about two hours all night.

Wait. I want to remember that?

A dream diary (or dream journal) is simply a log “in which dream experiences are recorded. A dream diary might include a record of nightly dreams, personal reflections and waking dream experiences. It is often used in the study of dreams and psychology. Dream diaries are also used by some people as a way to help induce lucid dreams. They are also regarded as a useful catalyst for remembering dreams. The use of a dream diary was recommended by Ann Faraday in The Dream Game as an aid to memory and a way to preserve details, many of which are otherwise rapidly forgotten no matter how memorable the dream originally seemed. The very act of recording a dream can have the effect of improving future dream recall.”

Dreamin'We humans average five sleep cycles per night with a period of REM sleep at the end of each cycle. Most people dream for 100 minutes each night. The closer it is to morning, the longer your REM sleep is and the closer to remembery your dreams become.

Keeping a dream journal or dream diary seems a little woo-woo to me but if it does make it more possible to remember your dreams…

“If you have trouble remembering dreams, you can use a lucid anchor. Anchoring comes from the fascinating branch of psychology called Neuro Linguistic Programming. Just before you go to sleep, choose an object that you can see clearly from your bed. This is going to be your anchor” the World of Lucid Dreaming tells us.

I’m hoping I don’t have to sleep with a night light.

I’m also hoping I don’t have to hang a photo of a grizzly bear on the wall. If I looked at grizzly every night before sleep, when wake up to pee, and first thing in the morning, I’m pretty sure my first thought won’t be “I will remember my dreams.” I’m pretty sure I would dream about blood and gore and veins in my teeth and I’m pretty sure my first thought every time would be, “Holy s**t, there’s a bear in my room!”

I was awake out of an action-adventure dream for both our South Puffin trash trucks 20 minutes before the alarm.
At the end of the dream I was defending a storefront from a gun attack by people we probably knew but knew we wouldn’t recognize. Somehow I twigged that it would be a Bonnie and Clyde team and that the bonnie looked like Johnny Depp. Then I was snuggling with SWMBO, trying to get some rest before the attack, when I woke.

Creative people commonly have stronger dream memories.

Wait. I’m not (particularly) Freudian, nor do I play a shrink on TV. Why do I want to?

I can’t repeat my pornographic dream in this family-friendly forum but strong men expressed surprise and women left wailing.

OK, besides that.

I have always had the idea that once, just once, I’ll dream a story I can write and sell. Awake or asleep, we writers are dreamers. I want to forge a link between the imagery and symbolism of my dreams so perhaps a story or a novel will spring “fully found” onto the page with no work beyond transcription on my part.

It’s not so far-fetched. Stephen King told Naomi Epel In Writers Dreaming, “… I had a dream about leeches inside discarded refrigerators. I immediately woke up and thought, ‘That is where this is supposed to go.'” That took his novel, It down the road to the publisher. Ms. Epel discussed dreams and the roles they play in their work with Maya Angelou, William Styron, Art Spiegelman and 22 other writers.

I’ll be satisfied, though, with “just” a plot point or a look at a character’s back story.

It was a two-memorable-dream night. I don’t know why I keep having traveling dreams but this one was fairly realistic except for the hotel part.
I was at a hotel trying to get the truck packed for a road trip. Anne and a couple of others kept distracting me. She wanted to look at this, pack that, go here, do the other thing. In the middle, an arts council sponsor called me and I had to talk him into running a TV story about the Rotary Home Show. I had accomplished that and it was only 3:00 in the afternoon when one of the gang traveling with me told me the camping trailer I was towing was on the road, ready to hook up. I was to take it to Watertown NY on my way to South Puffin. Watertown is west, and nowhere near anywhere I might have been going.

I have always had the idea that once, just once, I’ll dream a story I can write and sell. This Dreaming piece may be it, but I’ll keep trying anyway.

 

Trump Budget Could Cut Climate Funding for NASA

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or Where I Think Government Should Spend Our Money

Let’s get something straight.
Climate Change is real.
Political Science is fake.

“Aides to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, … unveiled plans to remove the budget for climate change science currently used by NASA and other US federal agencies for projects such as examining Arctic changes, and to spend it instead on space exploration,” the Guardian reported.

“Shoot the messenger?” one correspondent asked. “Trump is cutting NASA’s arctic research because the agency brings inconvenient news.”

It’s interesting news and I’m halfway to liking it.

I like funding more deep space exploration. That and the development of colonization technologies is where NASA should spend its money now. Let the Commercial Spaceflight Federation members do the near Earth orbit stuff. And, it sends a message to the scientific community that we won’t fund all the “me too” studies any more. That’s all to the good. Still, I don’t like losing the NASA satellites monitoring temperature, ice, clouds, and other meteorological phenomena because the data itself is crucial.

“Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.” Trump adviser Bob Walker said.

Yay!

Salon and other drum beaters call it “Politicizing climate change.”

Boo, hiss!

“Federal government scientists have been unnerved by Trump’s dismissal of climate science and are concerned that their work will be sidelined,” the Guardian reported.

Granted (heh), scientists who live from federal grant to federal grant like to know where their next meal will come from, but they make one important point.

NASA Launch from Cape CanaveralAnyone who has read history knows that the climate has changed many times in the last 4.543 billion years. Anyone who has read history knows that the climate changed a lot more before our first human ancestor developed speech and the ability to clear cut forests, a couple of million years ago. And, unfortunately, anyone who has read history knows that our climactic data from that time is woefully incomplete. We simply don’t have good, complete, contemporaneous data for planetary conditions two hundred years ago, let alone two million or two billion years ago.

Last week, we learned that “evidence suggests the Earth underwent an ice age so cold that ice sheets not only capped the polar latitudes, but may have extended all the way to sea level near the equator” around 700 million years ago but that during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum “the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle.”

We don’t have enough actual data from any of those times even to build trustworthy quantitative climate models.

That’s an inconvenient truth for the alarmists who have the hubris to sell you that the rising sea will cut off the land bridge across the modern day Bering Strait (but that their settled science will cure it if we humans just stop breathing, farting, heating, and start paying higher taxes).

Loss of contemporaneous data for planetary conditions today is also an inconvenient truth for the real scientists who know that having that data is the only way our human descendants two millennia from now will know what we experience today.

We need good data about today now and we will need that good data about today 200 years from now, too.

Where should our governments spend our money? Beyond the alphabetically obvious answer of public arts, public education, public infrastructure, and public security and social protection, man has some imperatives that are best handled together. Exploration tops the list.

Basic science and basic data gathering is one such area and is an arena that jumpstarts exploration as well as commercial applications. We don’t need a new detailed map of the human brain because brain mapping is already commercially viable and well funded by private business. We do need to cure cancer. The biomedical industrial complex treats profits from its high-budget care but has no financial incentive to find a cure. We don’t need to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail because that’s better done by the cartels. We do need to explore beyond the solar system and we do need to explore this little blue marble we live on.

Every program government funds can profit from the “commercialization” filter.

NASA has publicly archived all of its data received from spacecraft projects — that’s over 4TB of new earth science data every day. The available data includes the CEOS International Directory Network, Earth Plus, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), Gateway to Astronaut Photography, Global Change Master Directory, Global Imagery Browse Service (GIBS), Goddard Institute for Space Studies Earth/Climate Change Data, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center, LandSat 7 Datasets, NASA Earth Observatory, NASA Earth Observations, NASA’s HEASARC Web-based Tools, Ocean Color, Physical Oceanography DAAC, USGS/NASA Landsat Data on New Earth Explorer, Visible Earth, and more.

Global meteorological data. NASA may not be the best agency to interpret the findings but it is still the best agency to ferret it out for us. Pretty soon, we should examine that data for commercialization but, for today, it fits the basic data gathering filter and we need NASA to continue to record and store it.

We need that data so a future generation of researchers and scientists, unencumbered by politics and newspaper punditry, can build climate models that actually work.