jims musings

Saw this in my local gro­cery. Some­how, I was reminded of “Where’s Waldo?”

Saw this prod­uct in a local store. What other bizarre com­bi­na­tions are out there?

This stuff is good!

My pre­vi­ous post about a few of the less-than-mainstream Olympic events sparked a wave of feed­back and sug­ges­tions.
My wife thought it would be great if, dur­ing the Track and Field relay events, the run­ners used a real baton and had to twirl it as they ran. Another par­tic­i­pant in this con­ver­sa­tion extended this idea so as to include pink and sil­ver tas­sels on the batons– how pretty that would be!
Base jump­ing, hang glid­ing, caber toss­ing, wing­suit fly­ing, street luge, park­our, darts and BASE jump­ing have been a few of the more rec­og­niz­able sports.
But… how about:

• Chess­box­ing (The think­ing person’s con­tact sport!)
• Korf­ball (I– it.… um… well, a ball is involved. And it’s Dutch.)
• Sheep tack­ling (Any game that involves chil­dren, ani­mals being dressed up and wrestling and incurs the wrath of ani­mal rights groups has surely got to be worth playing.)
• Pooh stick­ing (Are you really brave enough to click the link?)
• Camel jump­ing (And I thought this was lim­ited to fleas.)
• Splash div­ing (aka “Ger­man Arse Bombing”)
• No-chute sky­div­ing (Wow.)
• Cheese rolling (“As… you… wiiish!”)

Odd sports, all.
Which raises the ques­tion, what is the most unusual sport on the planet?
I pro­pose Wife Car­ry­ing.

I’ve been say­ing this for years now, but am only now get­ting around to post­ing this thought online.

Mankind has reached the pin­na­cle of soci­ety. Actu­ally, we prob­a­bly reached it around 1980, give or take a decade.
It is this: Air con­di­tion­ing, tele­vi­sion and beer. These three things keep Amer­i­cans (and other west­ern cul­tures) sedate and com­pla­cent. Take one away, and every­thing will come unglued.
“Why should I go out there and protest? It’s much more com­fort­able here, in my Lazy Boy.” These three com­forts rep­re­sent the pin­na­cle of soci­ety. After obtain­ing these lux­u­ries– really, what is there to com­plain about?
Think about it. Where do we see mass protests? Coun­tries where this magic recipe is incom­plete. In west­ern coun­tries, in the rare rally or demon­stra­tion, who is involved? Largely the poor, or peo­ple who eschew the ben­e­fits of mod­ern life. (Yeah, you gra­nola I-don’t-eat-it-if-it-casts-a-shadow peo­ple, I’m talk­ing about you.) Lets call these ABC — Air con­di­tion­ing, Beer and Cable TV. There are vari­a­tions, of course, but it cap­tures the essen­tials.
The dan­ger is, gov­ern­ments are aware of this fact, and will exploit it. This sounds evil, but the iron law will require it. Gov­ern­ment will expand and increase its pow­ers, and it will do so along the path of least resis­tance. Gov­ern­ments have already learned they can do almost any­thing, so long as ABC is pre­served.
Ask your­self this ques­tion: what are you will­ing to let peo­ple get away with, if they leave your ABC alone?

A few of the events at 2008 Olympic games in Bei­jing have caught my eye, namely: Bad­minton, BMX Rac­ing (yes, with motor­cy­cles), Hand­ball, Rhyth­mic Gym­nas­tics and Tram­po­line. Note­wor­thy, base­ball and soft­ball make their last show­ing in Bei­jing.
Now, I enjoy the Olympic games, and I admire the incred­i­ble ath­leti­cism of the com­peti­tors, but some of these– are they really Olympic events? My per­sonal opin­ion was that the Olympics were an ath­letic com­pe­ti­tion, mano y mano, as it were. I’m not sure BMX rac­ing or Tram­po­line fit in with my view.
So… fine. What else can we do at the Olympics? Mat­tress jump­ing? Team C++ cod­ing? Run­ning with Scis­sors? Blind­folded Traf­fic Dodg­ing? (Los Ange­les has a num­ber of venues avail­able right now for train­ing…) How about Team Syn­chro­nized Blind­folded Mat­tress Jump­ing with Scis­sors? Good stuff, there! Boy, if we could only throw in chain­saw jug­gling and flam­ing hoops, we’d have it for sure. I’d pay to watch that event.

A few days ago, I drove up to Alta in Lit­tle Cot­ton­wood Canyon. My inten­tion was to take some pic­tures, like this one.
I know, after look­ing at that photo, it seems rather pre­ten­tious of me, think­ing I can do some­thing that good… but still, a man should have goals.
Alta is my pre­ferred ski resort. I love it, not the least because board­ers are not allowed. I’ve been there many times, and I knew where I wanted to take my shots.
After park­ing my car– far down from where I should have been, it turns out– and hik­ing my way across the now-grassy ski runs, I finally saw my cho­sen place. I took a num­ber of pho­tos as I made my way up. Saw lots of deer, and found myself sad that I was about a week late for most of the flow­ers.
Sud­denly, twi­light was upon me. Alpen­glow set­tled upon the moun­tains, and I was not where I wanted to be. I ran for it– straight up the boulder-strewn moun­tain­side, rather than tak­ing the longer (but safer) trail.
Halfway up– that is to say, right in the mid­dle of the boul­der field– the rock beneath my right foot rolled away as I pushed off. I went fly­ing, cam­era in hand.
My expen­sive, unpro­tected cam­era in hand.
I reacted with­out think­ing. My right arm swung the cam­era back and away from the rapidly approach­ing gran­ite rocks. At the last moment, I real­ized I should do some­thing about my face, so my left hand came back and cov­ered my face.
I hit the rocks. No time to “tuck and roll”, my friends.

There is some­thing you should know about this gran­ite. Tech­ni­cally, it is quartz mon­zonite, not gran­ite. Quartz mon­zonite has a lower pro­por­tion of quartz than true gran­ite. Mean­ing, there is pro­por­tion­ally more feldspar in it. Feldspar crys­tals, with­out get­ting to pedan­tic, cleave in ways which cre­ate sharp points and edges. In layman’s terms, the bro­ken, frac­tured rocks which greeted my plum­met­ing body were nat­ural cheese graters.

My left arm hit first, directly trans­fer­ring energy from my elbow into my ribs. Things inside my body popped and snapped.
My left leg smashed into a pointy (par­don the tech­ni­cal term) rock. In ret­ro­spect, I believe my left leg was still in motion, swing­ing for­ward to com­pen­sate for the rad­i­cal rear­ward accel­er­a­tion of my right leg. The rest of me hit many other sharp pro­tru­sions. My face some­how missed every­thing; my head sim­ply dropped into a space between some rocks– not that this made my neck happy. The wind was knocked out of me, and my chest prob­a­bly suf­fered a seri­ous CPR-like com­pres­sion.
Dam­age assess­ments flowed into my brain. My left leg hurt so badly I was sure it was bro­ken. I laid on the rocks in pain, try­ing to breathe and assessed my situation:

• pos­si­ble bro­ken leg
• two or more bro­ken ribs
• stuck in the mid­dle of a large, sloped boul­der field
• quickly get­ting dark
• wear­ing shorts and the tem­per­a­ture is dropping
• no flash­light
• is that a wolf howling?

Obvi­ously I was con­cerned, but my cam­era was okay!
Things finally took a turn for the bet­ter. The pain sub­sided. I man­aged to turn over and sit up– no mean feat– and inspect my leg. It was bruised, lac­er­ated and bleed­ing, but not bro­ken. I maneu­vered my way back down to the trail, and thence to a dirt road (where I tried to hitch­hike with some pass­ing trucks, but was ignored) and finally to my car.
I real­ized, as I set­tled into my car, that I had instinc­tively Saved The Cam­era. No thought for the body– Must Save The Cam­era!

I must be a photographer!

And finally, a few pics from the evening– all hand-held HDR:

I have a voice in my head.
Some peo­ple might worry about hav­ing a Voice, but its really not bad. Its like hav­ing a friendly Jiminy Cricket on my shoul­der, giv­ing help­ful advice. Over the years, watch­ing peo­ple, I’ve begun to think that every­one has a voice.
My voice is the voiceover from Home Depot com­mer­cials. It tells me to fix things… I think my wife’s voice is Mr. Clean. What is your voice? Though Tony the Tiger would be grrrreat!, but I would really feel badly for you if it was Paul Reubens.
What is your voice?

Peo­ple just don’t under­stand drag. I know it’s not exactly an intu­itive con­cept, the fric­tion induced by a pass­ing fluid, but jeep­ers, can’t peo­ple think about drag just a lit­tle bit?
I’m not even talk­ing mach tran­si­tion drag, where shock waves and reflected shock waves need to be con­sid­ered, let alone high-mach drag where the heat from fric­tion can melt alu­minum and steel. Just your every­day basic drag, which of course increases with the square of veloc­ity.
In short, the big­ger the thing, and the flat­ter the front, the more drag it will have.
Okay?

I have a house. I just bought it, actu­ally, and I think it is a fine place to be. It was built before Rea­gan told Gor­bachev to “tear down this wall”. Com­pared to homes built today, my home is ruggedly built with lots of solid wood beams, rather than lam­i­nate ‘engi­neered lum­ber.‘
In con­trast to the con­struc­tion of the house, the schmo who installed the ven­ti­la­tion ducts leaves much to be desired. I have spent many hours inspect­ing, dis­as­sem­bling and reassem­bling ducts in the base­ment. I am aston­ished how poorly some things have been done:

• The flue which con­nects the fur­nace to the roof vent was dis­con­nected, expos­ing occu­pants of the house to car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing. A small pos­si­bil­ity per­haps, but this lit­tle over­sight could have killed someone.
• The ducts which dis­trib­ute hot and cold air through the house are leaky and often mis-connected, by which I mean giant holes with air pour­ing out into wall spaces. Pre­sum­ably the mice were comfortable.
• Other ducts go… nowhere, sim­ply dis­ap­pear­ing into walls with no appar­ent outlet.

It is obvi­ous that the ducts were not done right, and have been wrong since before the Berlin wall fell. The exces­sive cost to heat and cool this house over the inter­ven­ing years must surely run into the many thou­sands of dol­lars. I am now spend­ing tens of hours to fix, inso­far as pos­si­ble, these prob­lems.
Com­pared to the triv­ial min­utes it would have taken to do it right the first time, my sit­u­a­tion is a fiasco of won­drous pro­por­tions…
Doing it right the first time can really pay off.

Con­tin­u­ing in the vein of What Every Adult Should Know about Tech­nol­ogy, I must de-mystify how elec­tron­ics work.
It is not lit­tle gnomes. Not even really lit­tle gnomes.
Most peo­ple are under the delu­sion that ‘elec­tric­ity’ or ‘elec­trons’ or ‘tran­sis­tors’ are involved. I will for­give those guilty of the inter­mis­sion of thought this silly benighted belief implies.
No, ‘elec­tron­ics’, despite the decep­tive name, rely upon a mag­i­cal blue smoke invented (some say dis­cov­ered) in 1784 by Sir George Philo­dan­derthop, Fifth Earl of Buck­ing­ham­sire. It was quite acci­den­tal, appar­ently. All those poor sheep…
…but any­way, before get­ting side­tracked with that story, mod­ern soci­ety owes much to Sir Phi­lan­der­erpork­chop. With­out his magic blue smoke, where would we be? Descen­dants of Ben­jamin Franklin would be frit­ter­ing away their time with kites and keys and light­ning to this very day. Indeed, a myr­iad of clever lit­tle devices sim­plify our lives and bring hap­pi­ness to our souls. Our night skies are illu­mi­nated, our ears and eyes are enter­tained, and the com­forts of our lives mul­ti­plied. Three cheers for Sir Plumber­strop!
Unfor­tu­nately, the secret of Blue Smoke is tightly con­trolled by a close-knit cabal of greedy cor­po­ra­tions and shad­owy gov­ern­ment fig­ures, secretly bent on destroy­ing human­ity and the world. Known as ‘Repub­li­cans’ or ‘Cap­i­tal­ists’, these Machi­avel­lian char­ac­ters sad­dle us with coun­ter­fac­tual con­fab­u­la­tions of ‘elec­tric­ity’ and so forth. What are they really incin­er­at­ing in those tartarean ‘power plants’ of theirs? Endan­gered species, that’s what! Start­ing with the highly flam­ma­ble dodo bird, these pan­de­mo­niac plu­to­crats are method­i­cally destroy­ing the ani­mal king­dom. Baby harp seals, spot­ted owls, bald eagles (really, who wants a bald bird?), polar bears, dol­phins (you think that’s ‘Tuna’ you’re eat­ing?), whales (burn­ing those bad boys in oil lamps wasn’t fast enough), panda bears (they’re fin­ger Ling-Ling good!), rhi­nos and Nean­derthals– just to name a few– are cur­rently being con­sumed in their mad quest for ‘power’. Hah! All in the name of ‘elec­tric­ity’.
You can see right through their scheme. Haven’t you ever burned out a mixer, or spilled water on a so-called ‘elec­tric’ device? What hap­pens then? The magic blue smoke gets out, of course!