Bling

Damn! Now we're going to have home invasions to steal our doorknobs. Well, I guess it could be worse.

Robert "Boochie" Burrest Jr. has always liked to tinker.

As a child, he'd go around his neighborhood with a wagon full of tools, doing odd jobs. In high school, he'd make his own wooden shoes. As he grew older, he began customizing cars.

About eight years ago, after fooling around in his workshop, Burrest came up with his first invention. It's a wooden or metal ring on which you can screw an assortment of decorative doorknobs.

Maybe ol' Boochie here can figure out how to get rappers to use these doorknobs, instead of gold teeth, as a new status symbol.

Foreclosure Rates

Not that I'm saying some houses have been overpriced, or anything, but here is a diagram of the foreclosure rate in the area where I grew up. Each little house symbol denotes a property in foreclosure.



Now, here is the area where I live now. If you looked really closely you'd see I had to fudge a bit. I had to zoom out by one more step in order to get any foreclosures to appear.

It is hot.

Very hot. And humid. Very humid. Mikey is staying indoors except to water flowers and take out the trash. A/Cs on full blast 24x7.

So, I'm playing on the computer, transcribing my grandmother's diaries from 1937-1941. I'm about 85% done. The best part is that I got a new 22" LCD monitor yesterday, to replace my old beater of a 17" CRT. Much easier on the eyes, and I can open multiple windows at once, and see them all.

Arctic Ice Disappearing due to Bush Administration and Volcanoes, but mostly Volcanoes?

Yeah, volcanoes. Under the ice cap.

Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday.

The eruptions -- as big as the one that buried Pompei -- took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge

Meanwhile, in the Colorado mountains...

...they're still skiing.

With an average of 3 feet of snow still covering the upper slopes of Aspen Mountain, the Aspen Skiing Co. will open the top of the mountain to midday skiing this weekend.

Seven runs and 45 acres of mostly intermediate terrain will be served by the Ajax Express lift, officials announced Monday.

The mountain will be open to skiing and riding Friday through Sunday; the Ajax Express chair will run from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. daily. Skiers and riders must upload and download on the Silver Queen Gondola, which will be running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the last ride down at 4:30 p.m.

No, that's not a misprint.

It all evens out

It's been really hot here on the east coast, but on the west coast, all that climate change has people dying.

A Bellevue man who intended to spend only the day on the slopes of Mount Rainier has died after being caught in a blizzard.

Two others in the hiking party, suffering from frostbite and hypothermia, are awaiting rescue at Camp Muir at the 10,000-foot level.

What? It's June. Surely that can't be right. Hmmm, better check another story.

As Western Washington residents thaw out after the coldest June week on record, forecasters say drivers heading for the mountain passes could expect up to 5 inches of snow to fall by Tuesday morning.

What the hell? That can't be right. We were all supposed to be suffering the hottest temperatures ever seen. Well, I guess not in Washington.

With summer only 11 days away, what Seattle has is higher sustained heating bills from the unusually persistent chill of what is now the coldest spring on record for the Seattle area, traction tires required to slip through the passes Tuesday and a threatened growing season for local farmers.

Overall, daytime high temperatures in the region have averaged at least 10 degrees below normal -- while overnight lows have been only slightly chillier than normal -- translating into more gas and electricity use higher bills.

Whew! So I guess they'll be spared a little longer than us.

Almost a Darwin

So close. So very, very, close.

Some of the folks on my project team were meeting with the people in the VDOT bridge section to discuss a new product being built with our GIS Roads layer. It's intended to help steer overweight vehicles over appropriate roads, and to keep them away from weight restricted bridges.

In the middle of the meeting their beepers and phones start going off.

A one-lane bridge in Giles County collapsed yesterday when a heavily laden cement truck tried to cross the weight-restricted span.

The state Route 713 bridge over Walker Creek was posted with a restriction limiting the maximum weight of vehicles to 8 tons.

"It appears that an overweight vehicle violating the posting collapsed the bridge," said Malcolm T. Kerley, the Virginia Department of Transportation's chief engineer.

The 2003 Mack truck was carrying 15½ tons of cement, said state police Sgt. Michael Conroy. "The [cement] alone . . . pretty much doubled the limit on the bridge."

"This is an example of why we post weight limits on bridges," Walus said. "We want to remind all drivers to heed posted weight limits and follow posted safety instructions."

A/C Day

Today we reached the yearly milestone where I have to tote up the window air conditioners from the basement, and put them in the bedroom windows. Up until now it's only reached the mid 80's about 3 days total, but it's supposed to be up there every day this week. It was over 90 today.

So, it was fun working out in the yard later cleaning up from our minor disaster on Thursday. A moderately large (12 in diameter) branch came down out of our oak tree in the back yard. Fortunately we were both at work, and the dogs were inside. Everything it hit was smashed.

Most annoyingly, it came down on top of our clothes line. The lines were fine, but the aluminum post bent! I got out there and pushed it back up, and it seems OK for now.

It was also fun getting out the little chain saw, and carving it all up into pieces. The saw hadn't been used since Isabel, back in 2004.

The saving grace of the day was probably the Williamsburg Farmer's Market, where Coriander got much adoration, and Winnie bought us two quarts of yummy organic strawberries.

Darwin Award - XI

You know the phrase "never bring a knife to a gunfight"? Well, never bring a BB gun to a shotgun fight.

FORT WORTH -- A robbery suspect entered an west-side donut shop early Friday armed with a BB rifle, but a good Samaritan who came to help a shop employee had a shotgun.

Conclusion: the robbery suspect died from a blast of 12-gauge buckshot to the chest, police said.

The incident was reported about 2 a.m. at the Happy Donuts shop, 109 Roberts Cut Off Road, said Lt. Paul Henderson, police spokesman.

The suspect was Richard Lane, 45, of Fort Worth, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner's office.

"What I understand," Henderson said, "is this particular suspect was known in the area for possibly other criminal activity -- other robberies, other burglaries."

The neighbor who shot the man was not arrested.

Headline of the Day

Great tits cope well with warming

Well, I should think so.

Canadian Anchor Babies

Dr. Winnie asked me recently if I'd feel as bad about Canadians sneaking across the border as I do with Mexicans. I said sure, they were all dope heads and had funny accents. Now, it also turns out they're coming to raid our health care system.

More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year - in what a doctors' group attributes to the lack of a national birthing plan.

The problem has peaked, with British Columbia and Ontario each sending a record number of women to U.S. neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Specifically, 80 B.C. women have been sent to U.S. hospitals since April 1, 2007; in Ontario, 28 have been sent since January of 2007, according to figures from the respective health ministries.

André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, said the problem is due to bed closings that took place almost a decade ago, the absence of a national birthing initiative and too few staff.

"Neonatologists are very stretched right now," Dr. Lalonde said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. "We're so stretched, it's kind of dangerous."

Great! So they come here to give birth, making their kids American citizens. I scanned the whole article, and apparently the provinces are footing the bill. But there is a question of why they can't open their own neonatal units. Maybe Canada isn't such a great place after all.

Stephen Bennett

The reason I was really interested in going to the concert where we saw Tommy Emmanuel (see previous post), was to see Stephen Bennett. He's married to a VIMS professor, and I see him from time to time around town.

For the concert shown here, the Fifth Harp Guitar Gathering, we were in the audience, for the third time at one of these festivals. Every one that has been held near us. (The other two gatherings were in OR & FL.) We were sitting just a bit to the left of the camera. Just awesome.

Tommy Emmanuel

Charles at LGF posted this, and I couldn't help piling on. I've gotten to see Tommy once, because, Winnie wanted to go, and he was amazing.

Tornados and such

While we were missing the Sierra Madre fire on the one hand, we were also missing the tornadoes at home on the other. Well, nearby tornadoes anyway.

Or so I thought. Apparently they were a lot closer than that.

And yes, purely in the interest of studying the social effects of natural disasters on communities, when we got the chance we moved toward the fire, not away. Kind of like when there's a storm.

UPDATE: Here's a great bit of tornado video, from the camera inside a parked ambulance.

The Wedding

We are just back from our daughter's wedding in Pasadena. Despite what some folks at the reception asked, no we were not the wedding party that had to be airlifted out of the Sierra Madre fire zone.

It was in a park, though, just south of Jet Propulsion Lab. I've posted the video above, and there are some photos loaded at Flickr. My thanks to Michele, who took all the best shots.

The County Budget

Here is why so many of us find government incomprehensible from the get go. I live in a county with a population of about 34,000.

The proposed budget for the county for FY2009 is $122 million dollars. That's seems incredibly large. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea of spending that much money for anything in this county.

Sixty million goes to the school district, which has about 7,000 students. Plus federal dollars.

I know the numbers all add up and make sense, but the sheer scale makes me feel like I'm trying to do my personal finances by counting on my fingers and toes.

And the Government Shall Set You Free

Obama needs to learn to shut up. Fresh off of this -
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Then he says this -

"What is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they're being listened to," the Democratic presidential contender said. "So they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives.

" And what we need is a federal government that is actually paying attention. A government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream and that's what this campaign is about."

You see when people have problems they shouldn't be praying or turning to friends and family. Their first thought should be that the federal government should be doing something for them. That's sure my American dream.

Bringing Up Baby

Parenting is hard enough when everything is going smoothly, but it gets worse when the parents can't agree on "how to raise their kids." Sometimes it can even lead to fights.

When police asked the woman why the two had separated, she said they have "different ideas about how the baby should be raised," according to a police report.

When officer Daniel Swift asked the woman what she meant by that, she said that the two belong to different street gangs. "They could not agree on which gang the baby would claim," Swift said.

How about we all chip in and send them a little bitty prison uniform?

Gobal Warming Causes Volcanic Eruptions

You knew it had to come up eventually.

Increased volcanic activity is linked to ice melted by the effects of global warming, a study has found.

So much ice in Iceland has melted in the past century that the pressure on the land beneath has lessened, which allows more of the rock deep in the ground to turn to magma. Until the ice melted, the pressure was so intense that the rock remained solid.

Carolina Pagli, of the University of Leeds, led research which calculated that over the past century the production of magma had increased by 10 per cent.

The research team, reporting their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, said an extra 1.4 cu km of magma has been created under the Vatnajökull ice-cap in the past 100 years.

Since 1890 the ice-cap has lost 10 per cent of its mass, which has allowed the land to rise by up to 25m (82ft) a year.

Son of a B! The area where this ice cap was has risen 25 meters per year for the last 118 years? Where there was a flat plain before, now there's a mountain nearly 10,000 feet tall? That in itself ought to pretty well accommodate a measly 1.4 cu km (0.34 cu mile) of magma. But what a great tourist attraction!

19 March 2005 - Day Thirty-one

Another momentous day has arrived! First, the kids got their first real solid food today. I feed them about 4 oz. of cooked hamburger, split 8 ways, this morning.

Then, they got their first trip outdoors! We moved the pen fencing out onto the patio, and let them roam for a bit. You never heard such complaints! This floor is hard! My toes are getting cold! What happened to the walls and ceiling? That light is too bright!

Anyway, I think you'll have to agree that they are adorable.