Electric Josh

We had the guitar out this evening, playing three- and four-chord songs for my and the kid's enjoyment, when she requested a song we couldn't identify. "The song about right," she said. We pressed for details about where the song came from—school, Mom, etc.—nothing. Finally she said, "The can't make it right song." Holy crap, my three-year-old just requested St. Ignatius from the first Old 97's album, which she has never heard a real recording of, just my crappy, non-plugged-in, sing-along-with-Dad version, and not for at least a month and a half. I quite seriously could not possibly have been more pleased.
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This enormous ship pulled into drydock next to where I work this morning. It's about twice as tall significantly taller and slightly longer and wider than the office building in which I work. Let me reiterate that it's unbelievably large. Good lord.
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Lee points out that the extractor of blood whose job I failed to name properly yesterday is a phlebotomist. (I was literate, once.) Thanks, Lee. Also, I only lost about a week and a half of GPS data, so my nerdly autotracking project is mostly uninterrupted. Back to work!
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Just realized to my great irritation that I've dropped the time dimension off of the last two months of GPS data I've collected. That means paths, but no times of day; no speeds. Incredibly annoyed.
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So I went and gave blood after work today. As usual, the pricking of the finger for the iron test was more painful than the actual giving of blood. The actual needle insertion, moderately painful but always super duper creepy, was milder today than I would have thought possible. I asked the [nurse? technician? harvester?] how she managed to get a gigantic reverse-mainlining needle stuck into my arm so easily, and she said, "Well, I used to work mostly with children." So that made sense. Completely forgot to ask what her name was. At any rate, I currently face the task of ripping a bunch of sticky surgical tape off of my hairy arm, and so am procrastinating.
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The menacing voice in Cincinnati which I describe below referred to a Terror Alert. This is kind of a subtle and nasty (although here presumably unintentional) linguistic trick. A warning about possible terrorism—a notice about ugly acts of a particular ideological sort—has been abbreviated into a sequence of words that each are rough synonyms for fear. We can do better! Let us describe the Terror Alert voice recording on the CVG intercom as the Terror Alert Fear Alarm. And the baggage inspectors as the Terror Protection Stike Force Authority. And the loud, expensive puff-of-air machines that passengers are randomly subjected to (imagine how much a two-year-old girl enjoys an array of such machines) can be known as Air Blast Bomb Warners. Should be popular with Security Moms. Rather than attributing this sort of thing to the usual George, we should instead recognize George Carlin, who said, of course, "I hope I'll be safe at home!"
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So the kid and I made it through a trip to Cincinnati, sans mère, and it went fine. It was surprisingly easy. (Just in time for #2 to make life difficult again.) The only thing that went wrong was that the TSA found my wrist-mounted GPS unit in my luggage and nearly destroyed its nylon wrist strap in an attempt to...do something to it, I guess? A card left in my luggage explained that, "...[my] bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to [my] bag." There was no mention of squirting our bug spray on our toothbrushes, failing to close the toothpaste cap tightly enough to prevent it from leaking, or fraying the strap on my GPS unit. This completed a trip home that had started with a surprisingly menacing, and deep, and slow recorded voice at the Cincinnati airport chanting something along the lines of, "The Terror, Alert Level has been raised, to Orange. Please, be alert...and report, any suspicious, activity." Methinks the massive, national paranoia exemplified by the color coded "Terror Alert" is probably more harmful than the thing to which it is an overreaction.
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Best cartoon this week.
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Excellent! Now the people who write better and more diligently than me are starting to notice (or I'm beginning to notice that they notice) that winning the War On Terror is, by definition, simply not to be terrified. Wait, aren't you scared? Typical snippet from that article:

FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?
CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.
US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

Even a hundred years ago, everyone knew that people look at you differently when you're on a unicycle. [Bonus: Scenes from a clown funeral.]
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The lovely wife just noted that our Yellow Pages contains a page that lists Wrecking through Yoga. We both found this hilarious.
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(Parenthetical rant: This space used to be driven by a program that I rolled myself, kind of by hand, and whose chief virtue was that "hitting Save"—that is, saving my work regularly as I typed—was very natural. I typed using Emacs, although any decent text editor would have been fine. Now, though, I have to use this awful Movable Type system, which is a nicer piece of software than mine was in almost every way except that I'm supposed to edit this text in a textarea on a web page, which is a sucky way to edit more than about two sentences of text, chiefly because it takes some effort to avoid hitting the key combination for abruptly quitting the browser. Aaaargh!)

At any rate, I was talking about my iPod that broke 30 seconds out of warranty last winter. The Apple Store helpfully suggested that I spend X + $40 to fix it, where X was the cost of a brand new iPod. After a couple of days my rage evolved into a pair of resolutions: first, that I will never replace this iPod with another one; and second, that I will take this iPod apart and screw around with its contents someday. What I actually did was to toss the iPaperWeight into my (secondary) backpack and forget about it until the other day, when I stumbled across this account of fixing an iPod with a violent smack. Either it starts working or I can smack it again: either way I win! I tried to turn it on in order to verify that it was really broken, but of course the battery was dead, which meant that I wouldn't be able to tell if the technique had worked, so I stuck in into the computer to charge it up and the damn thing spun right up without even a hint that anything had ever been wrong. It's been merrily playing music for me ever since. I've never been so disappointed to have an overpriced piece of electronics working properly.
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The dearth of activity in this space, instead of representing a lack of activity around here, like I'm tempted to claim, really reflects laziness on my part. We've been getting to the beach several times a month, along with sitting around waiting for kid number two to arrive in a month or so, enjoying the bizarre personality of kid number one in the meantime. Not a whole lot else is going on—somehow this (and going to work) take up pretty much every waking hour. Alas.
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Fifteen entire rooms as pinhole cameras. The last one of the series shows what looks to me like Times Square, totally devoid of people, which I assume never really happens except in pictures with ridiculously long exposure times.
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A Norwegian band called Hurra Torpedo plays Total Eclipse of the Heart using a guitar and some kitchen appliances. Holy crap, do I love the internet.
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