Spastic Monkeys

Or Snowpocalypse 2008, if the thought of a snowgasm leaves you a bit queasy and desirous of a shower. Both have been bantered about on Twitter and used with equal frequency. The media is calling it Arctic Blast 2008, which is nicely non-sexual and unhip and with just the right amount of gravitas to sound really bad. You can say it really fast in a deep voice: Arctic Blast! The exclamation point is thrown in for free. I’d caution against the use of jazz hands as you say it, though. You’d just look stupid.

Regardless of what you call it, the simple fact is we are in the third solid day of snow and freezing rain. The third contiguous day of a string of days stretching back to Sunday last, when the first round hit with cold, dead fingers. Since then, I’ve worked from home three days, four counting today. There is a bit of symmetry to it; I was able to get into the office on Tuesday and Thursday and stayed home Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The pattern would seem to repeat itself this week if I wasn’t already off the 24th and 25th. Although I seriously doubt I’ll be going anywhere tomorrow. The Boy gained an extra week of holiday because of this mess, for which he is thankful. Not so much in June when he finds he has to go to school an extra couple of days on the ass end to make up for now. Like he cares, he’ll take what he can get now and let June worry about June.

It’s pretty and all, but honestly I could do with a respite. The Fetching Mrs. and I were able to get out Saturday and I’m grateful, but our entire neighborhood is covered in at least a foot of snow. We tried to get out in the Mustang yesterday to stock up on foodstuffs, but that had folly written all over it. Even with chains, I barely made it to the end of the street and got stuck in my driveway coming back.

I’m getting a little bit of cabin fever. I suspect that may be partly due to stuff happening at work. None of us can get out of our various neighborhoods without herculean efforts and or a giant hair dryer to melt the snow, so we all remote into our desktops at work and ignore the fact that Windows Messenger does very little in the way of providing the visceral feedback you get from being in the same room with the people you work with and with whom you are currently engaged in solving nasty, business-stopping bugs.

Chat is a weird medium to communicate in. When I read what my co-workers write, my brain automatically uses their voices, but it’s soft and spoken as if from a distance. Almost like having an out of body experience or waking up from a coma or serious accident in the ICU where you hear the voices talking about your lost limbs or that big hole in your chest from very far away. Right before you open your eyes and it all crashes into your experience in that instance before the morphine kicks in. But with chat, you never wake up.

Not that that’s ever happened to me, or anything. Anyway, so, things are white all over and very, very cold. The source I have on my browser states 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit, before wind chill is considered. If I do, I’m sure it’s colder than a witch’s tit in the arctic.

Here are some pictures taken earlier today, documenting proof that Al Gore was right and the world is getting warmer :

This is looking out the front door. Notice the gate isn’t closing anytime soon.

Closeup of the bush in the previous photo. The gate gives some perspective of how deep the snow drift is in our front lawn right now.

Here’s the backyard deck. Know that the top of the deck is at least 2 feet higher than the ground.

Another angle on the backyard. It’s almost like a giant snow lake.

A shot down the street we attempted to get out on yesterday. What road?

I’ll be blunt. If you donate money to help Hillary pay back her campaign debts, you are a fucktard, an Epsilon sub-moron, fit only to clean toilets at the local taco stand after an outbreak of Montezuma’s Revenge using only a toothbrush, a handy wipe, and a six ounce bottle of water.

She’s rich, she can pay off those debts and still have enough left over to wax her enormous thighs. She doesn’t need you, you co-dependent, submissive twit.

Hat tip: Liberty Girl.

There is one of you who will follow this link and watch it with a rueful smile.

You know who you are.

Shogun by James Clavell

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I first read this book as a freshman in high school. It left a a lasting impression on me because its accurate portrayal of the samurai life and the high standards of honor, service, and self-discipline was a stark contrast to what I was going through in the cutthroat jungle of high school social politics.

I vividly remember the moment in the book when Blackthorne finally understands the Japanese mind. How even the lowliest of workers had the highest honor, even more than Blackthorne did. It gave me strength at a time when I needed it the most.

This book sparked a lifelong interest in eastern philosophy and thought.

View all my reviews.

True Evil by Greg Iles

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I bought this on impulse one day at Powell’s. It had been over ten years since I last reads a Greg Iles book, Black Cross I think, and I really enjoyed that, as well as Spandau Phoenix. I figured I couldn’t go wrong and I was right.

This book is a taut page turner with a complex plot. The characters are well fleshed out. The good guys are likable and the bad guys are assholes.

I couldn’t put this one down.

View all my reviews.

Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a must read for anyone interested in how the U.S got to where it is now with its foreign policy.

The book, dense with facts, is a sobering read. It will pull the scales from your eyes.

It broadened my historical perspective and, while I’ve never been subject to Bush Derangement Syndrome, it made me realize that Bush’s foreign policy is very much a function of the incompetency of the CIA, an incompetency which stretches back to its founding and thus has tainted the foreign policy decisions of EVERY president since Truman.

View all my reviews.

McCain meets with business executives to discuss the bailout package and stands firm on no “golden parachutes’ for the CEOs of the failed companies.

That’s fine for McCain to stand his ground. I respect him for that. But I don’t think it goes far enough. What I’d like to see, and I think I speak for the majority of Americans when I say this, is for those CEOs to be paraded to the National Mall, stripped naked, tarred and feathered and be pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables until they’re buried. Then they’re dug out of the pile of stinking vegetation, loaded into a van and driven to every major city in the country so they can be pelted again and again.

I bet the crowds would be huge. They could charge a buck to get in and there wouldn’t be any need for a taxpayer bailout.

I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
I’ve tried reading this one three times. I got almost within a hundred pages of the end this last time and I could see the ending coming a mile away. Given how utterly annoying the characters are, life is too short to finish it.

Heinlein is a master at blowing your mind with great ideas, but even masters of their craft have turkeys.

View all my reviews.

Lileks today:

Parenthood: driving by yourself, you see a VW, and you say “Slug bug.” Out loud.

This is something we do as a family all the time. The Boy is the all time points leader only because he’s not driving and thus concentrating on not getting us all killed. It won’t last. He’ll be driving next year and I predict his point total to drop significantly as he concentrates on driving fast and racking up speeding tickets rather than spotting Beetles.

Of course the Wife and I both say “Slug Bug” when we’re driving alone and see one. How can we not. At this point, it’s Pavlovian.

Larry Elder on why he won’t vote for Obama

Thomas Sowell on why imitation is NOT the sincerest form of flattery, especially when it comes to Europe, part one, part two, part three.

Glenn Beck is a bit bombastic at times, but I like what he wrote here.

Portland is such a nice place to live, what with the emphasis on sustainability, green living, public transportation, not to mention all of the cool outdoorsy things right in front of you like the Willamette river, the hiking trails in Forest Park, the Columbia Gorge a short 30 minutes east of the city.

Even the weather is cooperating with a beautiful sunny 75 degree day forecast, finally here in the middle of June.

So you can imagine my joy when a city and an area that has already given me so much to be grateful for went that extra step and offered up a free buzz while walking to work.

A new MAX line has been in construction along 5th and 6th streets for the past year. Since my office is on 5th, I’ve had a ring side seat as the street was torn up and rebuilt with shiny new rail lines, the curbs reshaped and the intersections redone with spiffy new brick work in an oh so Urban chic herringbone pattern.

Last week they finished installing the pole supports for the power lines and stringing those lines. This week, they’ve been painting those poles a nice, unobtrusive institutional gray. You can smell it from two blocks away. It’s some sort of industrial strength paint designed to bond with metal. The first whiffs don’t really do more than warn you of what to expect but as you walk further into the invisible zone around a pole, your nose wants to pack its bags and run home to momma, without so much as a forwarding address. But you press on because you’re already committed to heading in that direction. Besides its only this one right here you need to pass. You get closer and the astringent smell fills your head with its strangely cloying sweetness, so much so that it feels like that’s all that’s in your head, this smell. For a few seconds you feel heavy, then you feel a slight rush in your arms and you’re past the pole, out of the chemical zone and in fresh air again.

So thanks, Portland. You go above and beyond.

This past Memorial Weekend the Great Prognosticators of Weather had predicted partly sunny days, which is the same as partly cloudy in parts of the country where it doesn’t rain as much as it does here. You see the allusion, it rains SO MUCH that when the clouds finally do part, it’s partly sunny. There’s no point in calling it partly cloudy when fully cloudy is the default behavior.

Not that it mattered, the Weather Prognosticators were WRONG WRONG WRONG. It stayed fully cloudy all that weekend and into that Monday, but by Sunday, after a hundred or so years of the clouds and rain, we decided to bid a hearty “Fuck You” to the weather and the oh so smug Weather Prognosticators and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

So we did. I’ve been to the Oregon Zoo, briefly, and wasn’t too impressed. It a zoo, after all, and unless you have a hard on for listless African beasts laying around in enclosures faked to look like natural habitat, once you seen one zoo, you’ve seen them all. The cool thing about the Oregon Zoo, though, is where it’s at, namely Washington Park, which has a lot of other cool places to visit, too.

So we went to the Japanese Gardens.

Maybe it was the cloudy weather laying down a mellow atmosphere, maybe it was the fact that we drove a mile or so into Washington Park on a winding road through some beautiful, primeval forest, thereby losing, or at least temporarily suspending, our connection to the modern, hectic, world, but the vibe at the gardens was one of peace and tranquility.

Where the city is one big knot of humanity moving as fast as possible, as loud as possible, the gardens were still and silent. The moment I stepped through the gates, I felt all my tension and stress leave my body. There is just no way a person can be angry, or sustain any negative emotions for any length of time while in the gardens. The beauty of the place just overwhelms you and makes you happy to know such a jewel can exist in the middle of a major metropolitan area.

My photos do not do the place justice, but I am inspired to improve so that I can better convey the awesomeness of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always looked at protests, those crowds of unwashed humanity snaking their way through downtown shouting and holding incoherent banners, as completely useless in solving/ending whatever or whoever is being protested. A protest isn’t for the thing being protested about, it’s for the protesters. The protest makes the protesters feel good, feel like they’ve accomplished something tangible when in reality the protest itself is just Chinese food, an hour later you’re hungry again and no progress has been made toward solving the problem.

As far as I’m concerned this is a blanket statement that applies to anyone or any group staging a protest, although generally speaking I’ve only seen leftist and left-leaning groups protesting. This says a lot about how ineffectual the left is in getting their point across. Rather than digging in and getting their hands dirty doing the work to come to a solution, which would be much more satisfying in the long run, they would rather whine and bitch about it in public. It’s a painful thing to watch and leaves me feeling dirty, like I’ve just burst in on my grandparents doing the nasty. Intellectually, I know they can and frequently probably do, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has a slightly more nuanced take:

The left needs war and strife, because without war and strife, they would have to make actual contributions to benefit others. Bitching about democracies and freedom does not contribute to the benefit of anyone but the frauds doing the bitching. In every case, bitching is a lot easier than actually working and contributing- and if you bitch loud enough, you can convince yourself you are more relevant than you really are.

Obama is getting pissy:

In an interview aired today on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Obama said, “The GOP, should I be the nominee, can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record. If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family.”

If you don’t want the other side to ‘attack’ your wife, tell her to keep her piehole shut. She stopped being a non-combatant when she started making speeches for your campaign.