Electric Josh

So I (mostly) did my taxes. I'm such a good boy.
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So I got to Mad River all geared up for a day of superb skiing only to discover that the temperature was near zero (Fahrenheit) and the wind was blowing steadily at about forty twenty miles per hour. At the base lodge. Try again tomorrow, I guess.
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Randomly stumbled across my cap from UVM graduation just under twelve years (!) ago. It was in Lib's (formerly Emmett's, now the guest) room for some reason. It has the definition of Helmholtz free energy written on the top in athletic tape. Statistical mechanics helps me write analytics-heavy software, which pays the bills, even though I've forgotten a disturbing amount of the physics I used to understand. Glad to see that the cap didn't get tossed, though.
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Matt Taibbi claims, in an article that I can't believe I missed four months ago, that the recent broad shift of (American) public opinion against the war in Iraq is not better late than never, which sent me scurrying back to this very space's own archives from late 2002 through 2003, just to make sure that (if nothing else) my kids, when they get old enough to wonder what the hell anyone was thinking supporting the invasion of a country that had already capitulated to demands that weapons inspectors be readmitted, had been effectively contained for ten years, and was in the center of the Middle East, which has never been, um, stable to begin with—that when the kids start poking around on this space to figure out what their dad thought about the whole thing they don't think I'm gullible or bloodthirsty or easily frightened or blindly vengeful or something. And I think invading Iran is a terrible idea, too, one I hope we can avoid.

It's totally disturbing how quickly that turned into a rant.
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Mr. Sulu says, "I love sweaty basketball players."
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Anytime normally august newspapers confuse Slayer with the U.S. House of Representatives you can be sure that this space reels with pleasure.
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So this space had been a bit worried that its purchase of a snow blower this past October (when it was still pretty warm) had been the reason that winter had pretty much skipped the whole Northeast until two or three weeks ago. Waking up this morning to the southerly edge of a nasty winter storm, therefore, was a great relief. Even better was that my fancy new two-cycle snowblower cleared the plow-generated crud at the end of the driveway without me getting all sweaty. A-and this storm means improved trail conditions over at the local ski hill (although I'm not holding my breath for the appearance of moguls anytime soon). Nice!
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Cool: Weather stations galore!
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On Saturday we learned that our local (mini-) ski area was open. There isn't a trace of natural snow, even in the shadows, but they have apparently been running their snow guns constantly, as evidenced by the several feet of man made snow on the trails. (They must make it in one large pile that they then grade out over the trails: the snow's edge is steep, looking pretty much exactly like freshly graded dirt at a construction site, but white.) I carried Sophie over to the base area in one arm and proceeded to get her all geared up to try skiing herself, pointing out with my other arm the big kids on snowboards and skis, some other kids her age just learning how to ski, and the fancy orange handles on the rope tow. Getting her all geared up proved not to be all that hard. "Can I try this when I get bigger than you?" she kept asking, as she tends to nowadays.

So I ended up taking her skiing on Sunday morning, and we lasted about two solid hours before my back and her whole body were all done. We took many trips up the magic carpet (a little conveyor belt on which one stands and is transported about a hundred feet up a slight hill) and, when that broke, a couple of trips up the rope tow. She had started the day completely unable to stand upright even for a moment and ended the day able to glide in a straight line, completely out of (her own) control, loving it. For my part, I discovered that teaching a three-year-old to ski—lifting a heavy kid with heavy skis, pointing her down the hill, arranging her skis into a snowplow, skiing backwards ahead of her and then catching her—is much, much harder on the back than mogul skiing.

At any rate, we drove eleven minutes back to the house to get lunch and take a nap, at which point I realized that I still had about an hour on my lift ticket, so the lovely wife sent me back for what proved to be six solo runs in the space of 45 minutes. As you might expect for a ski area whose trails extend only about 500 vertical feet, it doesn't take an experienced skier long to get to the bottom. As you might also expect, the trails described on the trail map as black (expert) runs would more aptly be labelled blue (intermediate) anywhere else, especially given the perfectly smooth groomed surface, but what do you want for skiing that's less than fifteen minutes from the house?

Finally, it was completely bizarre to be skiing at all in view of the Boston skyline (as seen from my crappy cell phone camera).
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The Washington Defense of Marriage Initiative would codify marriage as a union between a fertile man and a fertile woman, would require "proof of procreation", without which the marriage would be automatically annulled, and would make it a crime for anyone not so "married" to receive marriage benefits. Mere copulation won't do! The folks behind this initiative apparently don't expect it to pass, but they do have the good humor to note that:

..at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.

This is the kind of fun that politics needs way, way more of.
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Today is the five year anniversary of this space's first post. Holy crap!
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Performance artists/guerilla advertisers hold a ridiculously wonderful press conference.
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So most of the car transportation in the fair town in which I work was shut down the other day to allow bomb squads to investigate/neutralize what my colleague claims were described by the famously speech-impaired mayor, to my great delight, as "several suspicious bombs." They turned out to be magnetic LED signs with an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character. Three things:

• I'm completely conflicted about whether this kind of advertising is any good in general. Compared with the annoying crap that blinks on the TV it's great, so anything that reduces blinking TV junk is good. But perhaps it might have been wise to avoid sticking these things on actual infrastructure.
• Clearly the Boston Police (and the Coast Guard and whatever paramilitary or security outfits were involved) don't employ stoned college kids, who would have identified the Aqua Teen characters, nor do they employ folks who read boingboing (I thought everyone read boingboing! It's in the sidebar, right?) or makeblog, who would have immediately identified these things as magnetic LED signs. Apparently, the NYC police do.
• Might be good to be a bit less paranoid about terrorism. Now "the terrorists" know how to shut down the city of Boston for about twenty bucks in parts. Even if these things were bombs, a better response would have been to just go about our days as normal, like they do in London.

As for me, I'm just glad I live on the hopelessly uncool South Shore, where there are no cool kids to market this stuff to: my commute was completely unaffected. Twenty minutes as usual.

Links: Boingboing link #1, link #2, the Globe, and here are the artist's flickr page, his website, and here's a video of the things being installed:

I refuse, of course, to link to the local TV stations' coverage of all of this; they tend to operate in constant hysteria mode even when nothing at all has happened, I can only imagine what they're doing with this story.

Update: The press conference the two defendants held sounds excellent!
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