Well, here we are at the end of another 30 days. I don't know if it's because I have so much other stuff going on, or I'm just running out of things to write about, but this was the hardest year so far. For those of you following along, I hope it wasn't too painful -- I tried to keep it interesting.
Like last year, I have a few ideas that didn't make it into the rotation, so you can probably expect to see those pop up in the weeks ahead. But I won't bother resolving to write more often, since I know that never works out for me. So we now return to our regular sporadic update schedule. Until next year, see ya around the 'net. Maybe next year I can convince Dixie to join me with her shiny new blog.
The Supreme Court handed those who believe in the right to self-defense another victory yesterday with their McDonald v Chicago decision. Sadly, as with their Heller decision two years ago, it was only 5-4, but residents of the People's Republic of Illinois (as my dad likes to call it) can now sleep a little easier knowing that they can once again exercise their individual right to defend themselves. There is still a long way to go in educating the American people that their own security is a personal responsibility, but declaring bans on guns as unConstitutional is certainly a step in the right direction.
I've already heard the victim disarmament crowd whining on the news about how this decision will cause more crime in low income neighborhoods and more violence in the streets. This is simply nonsense. Those who would commit crimes have always had guns, and always will, regardless of the machinations of the legal system. By definition, they operate outside the legal system, so how can one expect the outcome of a court case to have any effect whatsoever on their behavior? On the other hand, the victims of these criminals now have one more option available to them, and the criminals now have one more variable to consider before committing that crime.
I think it is important to keep gun-related crime in perspective. There are over 300 million people in America, and the Department of Justice estimates that there are 275 million firearms. That's almost one gun per person! And yet, the gun homicide rate is on the order of 10,000 per year. Somehow, hundreds of millions of people manage to own and safely operate their guns without killing anyone else. And that doesn't even take into account the number of crimes that are prevented by guns, which could be as high as hundreds of thousands (depending on which study you read). So what is all the screaming about?
Let's take this opportunity to celebrate. Millions of people around the world are denied their right to self defense. Today, we as Americans declared that we will not be among them.
The Lenovo N5901 wireless keyboard is a small handheld remote with a full QWERTY keyboard and built-in trackball. It seems well suited for home theater (HTPC) applications, however, it has a number of drawbacks.
The first, and most noticeable, is that in the home theater environment, there is a desire to control light levels, so it is typically pretty dark. The keyboard on this remote is not backlit, so it is impossible to type on it in the dark. Touch typing is not an option either, as the remote is too small and must be held in your hands.
Other annoyances include the fact that the keyboard has a power switch rather than being smart enough to power itself off when idle. So this means if you forget to power it off, it will sit all night with the trackball LED illuminated until the batteries go dead. I've also had some issues with the purported 30 foot range on this remote, which is surprising, since I plugged the USB receiver into the front of my HTPC and I am sitting less than 5 feet from it. But I still find it necessary to hold the remote up in the air slightly for the signal to transmit.
Overall, I am not pleased with this offering (glad I only paid half price for it), and will continue looking for better alternatives, as I await the release of the Boxee Remote around Christmas time.
What do you get when you cross a child's door with a refrigerator? A door that any kid can use to show off his best work. This is a simple project you can do with your child (it takes less than an hour), and then eliminate the need for tape or stick-tack for hanging those masterpieces.
You will need an old tape measure and some magnets. You can probably find these at a dollar store. You will also need a pair of tin snips, a screwdriver, and a drill. Start by disassembling the tape measure and cutting the metal tape into lengths that fit the door. Remember to leave enough extra to wrap around the outside edges of the door -- this way your screw holes will not show if you ever decide to take the strips down. 
You might want to round off the ends with the tin snips so there are no sharp edges. Then drill a hole in each end of the strip, and attach them to the door. You will probably want to countersink the screw holes so that they fit flush and won't interfere with the closing of the door. Also be careful not to crease the tape measure too much around the corner of the door, as the metal is brittle and might break.
Once your strips are in place, grab your magnets and put up your favorite artwork or photos!
Dixie took the kids to visit her grandparents in Orlando last week. They went to New Smyrna Beach, and they even went to visit The three most important people in my life came home from their trip to Florida, and I am so happy to see them. It was getting pretty lonely around here. Trips to the beach, trips to Gatorland -- it sounds like they had a great time. I'll share some photos soon. But for now I'm just happy to have my little family back under one roof again.
It's a good time to be an anarchist. It is encouraging to hear that eighty-six percent of people think the government is broken, even if they are misguided about exactly how and why. You see, saying our system of government is broken is like saying the internal combustion engine is broken. Sure it produces all sorts of deleterious effects on its environment, but it does exactly what it was designed to do, and at the time it was created there just wasn't anything better. So you can waste a lot of time and energy trying to make the engine more efficient, less polluting, or try to make it run on used vegetable oil, but in the end, you will find you are much better off simply scrapping the whole thing and starting over.
And starting over doesn't mean merely changing the party affiliation of the occupant of the White House. Or voting out incumbents in Congress. I think we've tried that. Repeatedly. It doesn't work. But the joyful news recently is that it seems the American people are finally starting to develop some long-term memory where these things are concerned. A poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC reveals "sixty-two percent of adults ... feel the country is on the wrong track, the highest level since before the 2008 election." Well, that didn't take long -- President Obama isn't even half way through his term yet. But the most telling part of the data is here. Specifically, look at the party identification tab. I'm curious what the difference is between Independent and Other -- they are the same thing to me -- but if you combine those two categories, you find that at the beginning of this year, a full thirty percent of those polled identified themselves as neither a Democrat nor a Republican. We haven't seen numbers like that since Ross Perot's campaign, and this isn't even a Presidential election year. Imagine how much farther those numbers could swing in the next two years.
So, to that thirty percent out there I say stay focused. Don't let the shiny objects of the two-party system distract you. Whatever it was that caused you to feel disenfranchised, trust me, it's not going away. You want change? Don't delude yourself into thinking you can fix it by working within the system. It can't be fixed by a simple tune-up or an alternative fuel blend. It's time to take this old engine to the junkyard and start designing a new one.
I don't think I've ever written a restaurant review before, but since I'm waiting for Dobbs to change the oil in my car, and this was the first place I found within walking distance with a free wi-fi connection, here we go.
This is the first and only location of Sammy Scott's, at Olive & Mason in Creve Coeur. They aspire to be a chain, however, if the employee conversations I overheard are any indication. You have to admire their entrepreneurial spirit -- they opened a sandwich shop six doors down from an established Jimmy John's. Risky, but hey, maybe they have what it takes. The proof is in the pudding, er, sandwich.
I ordered the Cuban, which was very good, although a little small for the price: $5.50. It's about half the size of a $5 Subway footlong. For $2 more, you get to choose from a fairly long list of sides, and a drink. I went with potato salad and lemonade. Plus a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie, that was delicious and almost as big as the sandwich. Total damage: $10. They are proud to tell you that they bake their own bread and roast their own meats in the store. They also serve breakfast before 10am.
Overall, a good meal. If you're in the Creve Coeur area, you should check them out.
I just watched Sci-Fi Channel's miniseries The Lost Room for the second time, and I have to say that it is really very good. It originally aired in 2006, but I didn't watch it the first time until 2007. At the time, I was in between seasons of LOST, and found the two shows to be similar in a lot of ways. The mythology of both shows is dense, sprawling, and very intriguing. But I was ultimately frustrated with how The Lost Room ended, believing that they could have done a better job answering the questions raised.
Having watched it again, knowing that those questions are not answered, I can say that I appreciated the intricacies of the plot, and the character development a lot more, and I enjoyed the show much more the second time. It is my hope that one day I'll be able to revisit LOST again, and find a new appreciation for it as well. Although, I'll probably have to wait until I retire before I have 120 hours to waste watching TV. But the point of this post is to let people know about The Lost Room and encourage you to watch it. It is only six hours, and I will save you the frustration by telling you up front that they never reunite the objects. Go ahead and watch it, immerse yourself in the world that the writers created, and enjoy the ride!
Today's the first day of summer, and it felt like it too. Hotter'n Hades. I spent the day (and most of yesterday) doing yardwork -- what was I thinking? This was a fairly productive weekend, but I didn't get everything done that I wanted (as usual). I can't believe the year is almost half over. The weeks and months just fly by. 
It must be the kids' fault -- they are growing way too fast. I can't believe Noah will be five in a few months, and our little diva is already a teenager in her mind.
Well, thanks for indulging me. As Ferris Bueller said, life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Consider me stopped.
I can't let these 30 days go by without saying something about the story that has everyone talking. Everyone has their own theories about how to clean up the disaster in the Gulf. And the blame game has been played by everyone as well, with no clear winners. I'm not going to jump into any of those debates, but I did have a couple of observations that I'd like to share.
First of all, I'm surprised by the reaction (or lack thereof) by all of the other oil companies. Besides being hauled in front of Congress to testify, there hasn't been a lot of communication from your Exxons and your Shells. I guess that's to be expected to some extent, their first reaction was probably to sit back and see how bad the backlash against BP would be, and let them take the initial brunt of it. But we're sixty days into this catastrophe, and I can't believe that BP's peers haven't stepped up and took a more prominent role in the cleanup effort. It would be outstanding PR for them, to come together, form some kind of "dream team" of engineers and leaders, roll up their sleeves, and then take the slow motion walk into the fray, like Bruce Willis and his roughnecks in Armageddon. But that hasn't happened yet (to my knowledge). And I'm surprised, because the CEOs of all of the other oil companies have to realize that if they don't jump in and do something voluntarily, the government is going to make them do something they probably won't like very much. Oh, and it won't be cheap. So it is in all of our best interests for them to solve this problem on their own, because the government's regulatory reaction to this mess is going to cost them a fortune, and they will certainly pass that cost on to us. Get ready for five-dollar gasoline.
Which brings me to my second observation. We have not seen the customary increase in gas prices in the run-up to summer, as we usually do this time of year. Gas seems to be about the same price it was all winter. Why is that? Could it be because an oil company that raises gas prices with the Gulf clean-up as a backdrop is likely to wind up on the list of America's Most Hated, right along with BP? Can we presume that gas prices will remain flat for as long as pelicans covered in goo is the lead story on the news every night? Just wondering what that will mean in the long term. If we make it the entire summer without significant increases, the oil companies will have to come up with a new perennial excuse for summer's higher prices. Or maybe they will just have to admit that it's all a scam.
You've no doubt seen the story by now of this Seattle police officer caught on videotape. The headline reads "Seattle officer punches girl in face during jaywalking stop," which is a bit sensationalist, but does sum up the salient points. Watch the entire clip on YouTube, however, and you're provided with some context for the events that transpired. I find myself having sympathy for all parties involved.
The cop is easily the bad guy in this story. Considering the entire incident stemmed from his attempt to enforce a law against jaywalking, it is especially sad. Jaywalking is not a crime, and there should be no laws against it. Choosing to cross a street at an unsafe point is foolish, but people have a right to be stupid. Just like they have a right to drive without seatbelts or motorcycle helmets. Why do we, as a society, continue to allow pointless laws such as these to be passed, and then, more importantly, why do we continue to task cops with enforcing the stupid things?
Given all of that, resisting arrest in this particular case was warranted, in my opinion. No crime occurred, no one was harmed, so no one -- including the cop -- has any reason to involve themselves in the lives of innocent people just trying to cross a street. Now, do I believe that these individuals were taking a principled stand against what they viewed to be tyrannical behavior on the part of the local legislature and constabulary? Hardly. I could be wrong, but I'm going to guess that their resistance was based on other factors. Nevertheless, objecting to unwarranted searches and seizures is justified, and they have my full support.
There is also the larger matter of the cop's use of excessive force. There should be no question in anyone's mind that punching an unarmed woman in the face, even under those circumstances, is completely reprehensible. This officer should be required to publicly apologize to all parties involved, and then promptly be fired from his job. Having said that, I can certainly recognize that he found himself in a very difficult and stressful situation. His training seems to have kept the situation from escalating any more than it did. But just like the folks who chose to cross the street, he made a choice too -- when he decided to enforce an unjust law. So the situation was largely his own making. Maybe next time he will think twice about attempting to enforce a stupid law, and maybe they will think twice about their own safety.
[Update: pretty good discussion on this one going on in the forum]
I've written about how rights are digital, but there is another quality that I'd like to explore a bit. While all of our rights may be equal, they may not always be symmetrical. We all have the right to do whatever we want unless or until it infringes upon the rights of another to do the same, but what happens when two parties are exercising the same right, equally, at the same time, but only one of them is infringing on the other?
For example, few would deny that one has the right to sit out in the back yard and enjoy the peace and quiet of the outdoors. But at the same time, sitting outside with your stereo on listening to your favorite tunes would also seem to be a right we should all enjoy. It is clear that the right to be as loud as you want, when exercised by multiple people simultaneously, can lead to conflict. Resolving these disputes is beyond the scope of this essay, but the intriguing thing to me is this: the guy who wants to be as quiet as he can doesn't infringe upon anyone else's rights, it's only his next door neighbor, with the amplifier that goes to eleven that infringes on others. So there is an asymmetry in the right to be as loud as you want.
Another example would be walking down the street. You walk at your own pace, and certainly no one would argue that this isn't an inherent right -- you walk as fast as you like. But I'm sure we've all been in a situation where someone has stepped aside, to allow faster walkers to pass, with a polite "excuse me." This act is recognition of the fact that exercising the right to choose the speed at which we walk is asymmetrical, and that walking slowly prevents others from exercising their right to walk fast. The converse is not true, however -- the fast walkers do not prevent the slow walkers from walking slow -- so again, this right is asymmetrical.
The state of Georgia recently considered this assymetry by proposing to fine slow drivers. I think this is a step in the right direction. The next step, of course, would be to eliminate the penalties against those who want to drive fast, since they are not infringing on anyone's rights.
I am hereby starting the national dialog on reforming our nation's Appetite Care laws. Your appetite cannot be ignored, after all. If you cannot afford to address your appetite issues, then you will surely die. So, clearly, you have a basic human right to appetite care. But not everyone sees it this way.
There are a number of greedy appetite care providers out there, charging exorbitant rates for their services. The other day I went into one of these places, and got served and then they proceeded to give me a bill! I tried to explain that I had been there once before when I was hungry and had paid them the last time I was there. They tried to deny me coverage -- they said hunger was a pre-existing condition! This is outrageous! Are we supposed to just go without? Obviously, the government needs to step in and do more. The current Appetite Care system has been wildly successful, so why not just expand it to include all Americans? It seems like a no-brainer.
As long as the government is going to regulate every aspect of marriage (who can get married, who pays for the kids, etc.), I think Congress should go ahead and eliminate the moral ambiguity of adultery. Sen John Ensign's comments about his extramarital affair last year highlighted the fact that adultery isn't technically illegal. Why isn't it? Shouldn't we have a law against sleeping around? I think it would reduce the number of failed marriages, and illegitimate children, thus lessening the impact these behaviors have on society. We (allegedly) protect the institution of marriage by forbidding homosexuals. We protect married couples from temptation by going after prostitutes. We protect our children by going after deadbeat dads. Certainly there is sufficient moral justification for it, so isn't it time we take the final step and outlaw infidelity?
Oh wait, we can't do that. Then members of Congress would have to go to jail even more frequently that they do already.
Now let's address our hypocrisy where drugs are concerned. Interestingly, when the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed in 1914, it was estimated that 1.3% of the population was addicted to some kind of drug. In 1970, when the so-called War on Drugs was launched with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, the rate of addiction was again estimated at 1.3%. And today, after 40 years of violence and billions of dollars wasted, the addiction rate in America is... drum roll, please -- 1.3%.
The abject futility of the "War on Drugs" can no longer be ignored -- even the Obama Administration has stopped using the term as the President has recognized that it is counter-productive -- and the American people are slowly starting to realize this as well. Last week, NPR ran a series of stories on the shift in attitudes towards marijuana. One individual, whose livelihood depends on continued prosecution of the War, not surprisingly is opposed to relaxing the regulation of marijuana. Andrew Cummings, a Drug Court director in Dekalb County Georgia, said, "People often think about marijuana, and understandably so, as one might think about having a drink at the end of the day and relaxing, but it doesn't stop there for a lot of people. And as the potency increases, the likelihood of dependency increases." He actually makes the comparison to everyone's favorite legal drug, alcohol, with no hint of irony. Alcohol has all of the same potential negative effects, and yet we allow it to be sold on virtually every street corner. Isn't it time we take the final step and outlaw alcohol?
Oh wait, we tried that, and Prohibition taught us that we cannot ban a substance. We lack the Constitutional authority, and attempting to do so only creates underground markets that spawn all kinds of intolerable side effects. The most obvious of which is the businessman who sells these products is forced to resolve his disputes with other businessmen using violence instead of in a court of law, as legal businesses do. But here is one of the less obvious ones: the number of people who drank hard liquor increased significantly during Prohibition, because it was easier to brew your own bathtub gin than it was to brew your own beer. Consequently, the alcohol was more concentrated, and more prone to harmful impurities -- it put the roar in the Roaring Twenties. Are we to believe that no one suffered ill effects of drinking a product that was both more potent and more polluted?
The logical inconsistencies in our laws loom large, and we continue to ignore them. Homosexuals are not allowed to marry, but Britney Spears can get married for 55 hours, and we're somehow protecting the institution of marriage? Serial drunk drivers kill by the carload, but we put a million people in jail for possession of weed, and we're protecting who exactly? Our hypocrisy is sickening.
This is addressed to those who routinely mispronounce the name of my home state. Some of you, inexplicably, are from this state and you still don't know how to pronounce it. Since you somehow managed to escape any proper instruction in its pronunciation, allow me to enlighten you. It is pronounced Mizz-oo-ree. Please note that the word ends in the letter 'i' and not 'ah.' Would you care to explain why Missouri gets special treatment? I've never once heard anyone say "Miss-iss-ipp-ah." Or talk about how they had spaghett-ah for dinner. So what exactly is your problem, anyway?
I don't mean to impugn anyone's upbringing, or education level. I don't think those are relevant, anyway. Our very own Senator Kit Bond, who grew up in St. Louis, went to Princeton and was a Rhodes Scholar after all, suffers from this same horrible affliction. I guess I need to write him a letter and ask why it is he can't correctly pronounce our state's name.
On one of my recent journeys down the Wikipedia rabbit hole -- you know what I'm talking about, when you look up something in Wikipedia and one of the links on the page draws your attention, and you click on it, and then repeat until you are seventeen pages and at least a dozen knowledge domains removed from the information you came looking for -- I wound up on the page for aqua regia (don't ask) and stumbled across this interesting tidbit of history:
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.
I thought that was simply amazing and just had to pass it along.
We celebrated Father's Day a week early this year, and spent the day with the grandparents. Dixie got me the yard cart that I've had my eye on for a while, and the kids benefited from this purchase as they got a mini-hayride (minus the hay) around the yard before having fun in our mini water park. It's not Oceans of Fun, but hey, what do you want for fifteen bucks?
A year ago I wrote about the electric car from Zenn Motors that was on the verge of becoming a reality. A year later, it doesn't appear to be any closer to real, unfortunately. I'm pretty bummed about that, but I can't say I'm surprised. The promise of an electric car has been made and broken my entire life. Please click the picture to see an ad from Hot Rod Magazine for an electric hybrid car that GM was promising. Also, please note the ad appeared in 1969!
So yeah, electric cars are coming. Just like the flying car, the personal jet-pack, and video phones. Those technologies have been on the horizon my entire life as well, and we are no closer to them today than we were during the Johnson administration. It's not that I've given up hope completely. Nissan is now taking reservations for the Leaf, the Chevy Volt is right around the corner, and of course if you have the dough, you can always drop $100K on a Tesla. So the cars are around, but you still have to ask yourself the question, why has it taken so long?
Many years ago I remember hearing about a story where someone had the battery stolen out of their car. A day or two later, a brand new car battery showed up on their doorstep, with a note apologizing. The heartfelt apology described how they were down on their luck and needed the battery to get to work to feed their 12 kids, or something along those lines, and in the envelope were two tickets to a local sporting event, to act as compensation for their trouble. The homeowners attend the sporting event, and return home to find their house robbed of all of their valuables. I'm not sure if that story is true or not -- it could just be an urban legend -- but today I read this story about a cruise ship employee who robbed the homes of vacationers. The moral here, of course, is to not make it public knowledge when you are going to be away from home.
But if we dig just a bit deeper into this, and acknowledge that this was a matter of personal privacy, the moral to me is, never give anyone your real address. Get a post office box and use it for everything. Because nobody needs to know where you live -- that's none of their business. Now I'll concede that choosing this path will make your life a bit more difficult. Your dentist's office will call you and demand your real address, claiming that too many people use post office box addresses to skip out on their bill. If you order something online and have it shipped, the company will demand a shipping address, because they have exclusive arrangements with UPS or FedEx, and they don't ship to PO boxes. The worst one so far, though, is the DMV. The State of Missouri does not allow you to use a PO box on your driver's license anymore. Apparently, in order to drive legally, you have to live somewhere. I called the Department of Revenue in Jefferson CIty and asked what do I do if I am homeless? Does that mean I can't renew my license? The simple but painful answer is yes. Sorry homeless people -- you can live in your car, you just can't drive it anywhere!
Not to mention the bigger problem of what if I lose my wallet? Whoever finds it now knows where I live. What if my car is broken into and my wallet is stolen? The crook now knows where I live, and also which house the garage door remote works. Call it paranoia, but as the true story above illustrates, there are plenty of people out there looking to take advantage of this private, personal information, however they can get it, and I believe that businesses and government -- most importantly government -- are obligated to help us to protect it.
A few weeks ago I discovered a very cool and very useful Boxee feature of which I was previously unaware. On the right side of the Boxee home screen is your queue. Normally, this is populated automatically when you include shows in "My Shows", or when you add an individual video that you find while browsing within Boxee on your TV. But, what if you find a cool video while browsing the web on your computer, and you want to remember to watch it later when you're kicked back on the couch? Well, that's simple. Just drag the Boxee Bookmarklet to your browser window, and the next time you are on a page with a video you want to watch, you click the button that says "Add to Boxee" and like magic, the next time you run Boxee, the video shows up in your queue. It's so cool!
Having spent a few weeks on the road this year, I've had more exposure to the TSA recently than I really care to. This, coupled with the announcement that the current theater that passes for airport security will be enhanced with random hand-swabbing, is enough to bring into sharp relief the myriad reasons that I dislike the TSA and everything for which it stands. This isn't new, of course. I've written about the TSA before and that I believe common sense will eventually prevail, and the TSA will be relegated to the dustbin of history. I look forward to one day regaling my grandchildren with stories of the post-9/11 world, and their slack-jawed reaction to the sheer absurdities of this life. So here is the start of a collection of these stories.
In January, traveler Bucky Turco took a photo of a TSA agent sleeping on the job at LaGuardia airport. Granted, the agent was not on duty at the time, but gaffes like this do little to improve the TSA's image. Also in January, a terminal at Newark was on lockdown after a TSA agent left his post, allowing a man to duck under the rope to say his goodbyes to a friend. I suspect incidents like this are fairly rare, but again, they do nothing to improve the general perception that the TSA is is suffering from a severe lack of professionalism. Whether you leave your post, or fall asleep on the job, no one is going to believe that you are taking the security of passengers seriously.
In yet another story from January, an agent in Philly tried to remedy his boredom by playing a prank on traveler Rebecca Solomon, planting a plastic bag of white powder in her bag, and then letting her off the hook with a grin and a "just kidding!" Using your position of authority to meet women was a helpful plot device in the recent movie She's Out Of My Leauge, but when it comes to real life, these agents need to stay a bit more focused. The agent was subsequently terminated for this behavior, but it does lead one to question, where did that bag of white powder come from? Was this simply the desperate action of a lonely guy, or are TSA agents actually trained to use tactics such as this?
What about the agents that detained Ron Paul campaign staffer Steve Bierfeldt at the St. Louis airport in 2009? His quick thinking to record audio of the entire incident on his iPhone helped him win his case and reestablish some proper boundaries around the agency's outrageous power grab. The TSA subsequently "issued a new policy directive making clear that its safety screening procedures would be strictly limited to passenger searches for the purpose of safeguarding flight safety." We owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Bierfeldt for standing up for all of our rights, and striking a significant blow in defense of common sense.
I was disappointed with the Lost finale. There, I said it. It wasn't very good. Actually, it was good -- just like every other episode of the show, it was well acted and well made -- it just wasn't very satisfying. But there are a ton of people who are in denial about that. They are raving about the deeper philosophical meaning embedded in the show and how the finale was not only deeply meaningful but the only ending that fit. Well, I call bullshit. People who say that are just embarrassed to admit that they, like the rest of us, wasted 120 hours watching the show.
Perhaps that is too strong. I don't feel like the time was wasted, necessarily. I was entertained by the show, after all, and the story is still intriguing. But I feel like I've felt in the past when a show has been canceled prematurely and didn't get a chance to tie up all of the loose ends. This is especially frustrating since producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse deliberately called their own end to the show, limiting it to six seasons, claiming that they had to determine the pacing to tell the story they wanted to tell. Very well. You may have told a story, but you didn't answer the questions -- and that was your only job in the eyes of most fans. The questions were as confounding as they were incessant. The questions piled up season after season, like the mountains on the island. The questions were the yarn of the entire tapestry of Lost. And in the end, they are left dangling at the bottom of an impressive, but nonetheless incomplete, masterpiece. Why wouldn't you leave yourself enough time to properly answer the questions?
I not only committed 120 hours of my life to watching the TV show, but I also indulged the producers for untold hours listening to their podcasts. The podcasts were entertaining in their own right. "Darlton," as Damon and Carlton came to be called by podcast devotees, would spend a good portion of the show answering questions emailed to them. Sometimes the answers even shed light on the direction the show was taking, or would take in the future. On more than one occasion they refuted claims by fans that the island represented a kind of purgatory, and that everyone on the island was already dead. They assured their listeners that this was not the case, and that they had a much better explanation for the island's strangeness. This is especially frustrating since this appears to be exactly what they ended up doing with the show. Everyone was dead and trapped in the island's purgatory until they could find a way to collectively "let go" and move on.
I am left to believe that, despite their claims to the contrary, the roadmap for the show was not laid out in any great detail from Season 1, and that they were ashamed to admit that those fans who guessed purgatory way back in Season 1 were right on. Rather than rewarding those astute observers, they strung us all along promising us a grandiose mythology that could only come from the mind of a genius (or several geniuses), each season growing ever more implausible until somewhere around the end of Season 5 they realized that they had painted themselves into a corner. With no remaining path forward, they fell back to the only solution that ever made any sense and punted.
Lost had great potential, but like The Matrix trilogy, it just never lived up to it. Maybe one day after I retire, I'll go back and watch the entire series again and find some new appreciation for its genius. In the meantime, I'm just disappointed.
Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl make a pretty good team in the new romantic comedy Killers (whose plot seems strikingly similar to the Cruise-Diaz vehicle Knight and Day that opens later this month -- just sayin'), although I will say that the on-screen chemistry seemed to be lacking, when compared to Heigl's previous pairings with the likes of Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth) and Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), so I guess I'll have to blame Kutcher for that.
As a comedy, the movie has its moments. Former Marine, and former Daily Show correspondent, Rob Riggle lights up the screen in a supporting role not unlike his scene-stealing cameo in last year's The Hangover. And The Mustache That Wet A Thousand Panties makes an appearance, as Tom Selleck returns to the big screen with a solid supporting role as the over-protective father, deadpanning his disappointment with Kutcher as a son-in-law. Overall, this movie is formulaic, predictable, and a bit implausible in places, but still entertaining.
We just got back from our family vacation to Kansas CIty. It was a crazy busy week. We stayed at the Embassy Suites hotel on the Plaza. We hit a number of the sights, including Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun, which the kids thoroughly enjoyed. We also visited the Steamboat Arabia museum, which I found fascinating.
A couple of restaurants that we really liked were the T-Rex Cafe and Fritz's Railroad Restaurant, which is simply a marvel of engineering. We also had lunch at Ingredient, and dinner one night at Wild Bill's Steakhouse.
We finished the week with room service and an absolutely excellent meal provided by the hotel's Cattleman's Steakhouse. Overall, it was a great week, and a good time with the family. Pictures from the trip are now available in my album.
It's been about six months since we bought this memory foam mattress at Sam's. At the time, I read every single comment on the page, left by dozens (if not hundreds) of people who had purchased the same mattress. They all expressed the same apprehension about buying a mattress online, without ever having laid on it, but in the end, they all did it anyway, keeping their fingers crossed that they would not live to regret it. There were only a handful of truly negative comments about the mattress -- overwhelmingly the owners of this mattress were happy with it. I can now add myself to that list.
We have been very pleased with how comfortable this mattress is, and for a memory foam mattress of this size, you certainly cannot beat the price. The only question now is how long will it last? This mattress is not flippable, and very few of the commenters had been sleeping on theirs for more than a few months, so it's hard to say how durable the foam is, or whether we will end up needing to use the product's 10-year warranty. In the meantime, I've never slept better, and I don't wake up with a back ache, like I did most mornings with our old mattress.
Earlier this year, I documented my Home Theater PC project. My primary motivation for this endeavor was to find a viable alternative, preferably less expensive, to my subscription to DirecTV. I had been a customer of theirs for over 10 years, and in that time I watched my monthly fee creep from $29.95 all the way up to $59 -- almost double! And what did I get for my money? Not a damn thing. I still had the same satellite decoder (circa 1999), with no DVR, and no High Definition content. Their latest rate increase that took effect at the beginning of the year was the proverbial last straw.
The customer service representative that took my call made an enthusiastic attempt to sway me. He offered a $10/month rate reduction (but only for 12 months) and 3 free months of all the premium channels (which I don't watch anyway). Then when he said he was going to transfer me to their customer retention department, I told him not to bother. I wasn't calling to complain -- I had done that plenty of times in the past, to no avail -- I was calling to cancel. It felt good to send that message. I know the faceless rep on the other end of the phone will not lose any sleep over it. But I do know that this is the only message I can send that will have any impact at all. I am now a statistic in DirecTV's databases somewhere. A ten-year veteran customer who got fed up and told them to take a hike. And I'm not alone. And if enough of us send this same message enough times, they will change. I know I will never be a DirecTV customer again, but maybe this will help make it better for their current subscribers. So if you're a DirecTV subscriber, you're welcome!
Welcome to the third annual Running of the Blogs! We've called it 30 Days of Blog in years past, but that title isn't terrible catchy, so I thought we could use a new name for it. In fact, I might even register the domain name and turn it into a NaNoWriMo kind of experience. Running of the Blogs evokes images of frightened tourists being gored in the streets of Pamplona. That's kind of how it feels -- you know if you don't keep running, writing something new every day, you are likely to be impaled by the horns of ridicule and derision for having failed in your attempt. I've said it in years past, I have a lot of respect for bloggers who manage to crank out a quality product day after day. It's not easy. But once again, I am accepting the challenge. So, here we go again. Tighten your red sash. On your mark. Get set. Blog!
