Right Here, Right Now 3.0

From a Q&A by comedian Will Durst about Gen. Petraeus’ Congressional Testimony.

Q. What happened to the Democrats holding the general’s feet to the fire?
A. Everyone except Moveon.org scampered away like 12-year-old girls running from a big hairy spider.

iPod set to shuffle:

• Poor Man : Old Crow Medicine Show


• Drowned Dog, Black Night : Richard Thompson


• Come Dance With Me : Frank Sinatra


• Rainy Day Woman : Tom Petty (at BobFest)


• Cry Cry Cry : Steve Miller Band


• Oh! Darling : The! Beatles


• Prelude : George Winston (this is how you know I didn't edit the list to remove embarrassing entries)


• Stars Fell on Alabama : Ella and Louis. Ella's voice. Yikes. Smooth as silk.


• Mary's Place : Bruuuuuce


• Sioux City Sue : Willie Nelson

From Chris Prillo

If your friends are “happy” with Windows, they’re either masochists, complacent, or grossly underinformed.

I agree, of course. But I try to be less nasty.

And while we're taking cheap shots at Microsoft, we have this bit of tech arcane. Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format.

Artists take over a block of Sacramento each year during the Labor Day weekend. This year I took a few pictures. These scenes were all created with chalk, on a sidewalk, in blistering heat.

Chalkitup2007

The last recordings of Paul and John playing together.

If you have a TiVo and you rent movies, you ought to check out Amazon's Unboxed. You register your TiVo with the service and then you can go to the Amazon web site and pick a movie and then an hour or so later, it's on your TiVo. The default price is $4 (which I haven't paid yet), but they have regular specials for $1, which I still haven't paid, because they give you a $3 credit for signing up. (or at least they did, I don't know if that was a limited offer.) Last night the drill was:

• Lee and Molly pick a movie.
• Lee and Molly do dinner.
• Lee and Molly watch an old Simpsons because the movie wasn't finished downloading yet.
• Lee and Molly watch Hot Fuzz. (which was hilarious. Slow starter, but it picks up. Rated R for language and cartoon violence.)

The downsides are,

• You can't start watching until it's all downloaded, i.e., there's a wait.
• The movie disappears from your TiVo 24 hours after you first start watching.
• There aren't any extras, etc. It's just the movie.

I got a bike. Not the one I was thinking of getting, but this one. My goal, setting out was to incorporate bike travel in my day to day errands.

Today's errand was to help Molly set up the company picnic. She's been working at Jeanine's office and was in charge of organizing the kid zone at the picnic, which was held at Elk Grove park, a mere 8 miles away. I thought I'd bike over and give her a hand.

Below you can see the route I took. Notice Elk Grove Blvd? It's a friggin 50 mph death trap. WHAT WAS I THINKING? And this is the flaw in my plan to integrate bike riding. My little suburban enclave is surrounded by high speed connector roads and no one on the planning commission gave a rats tail (Hi Heather) about pedestrian or bike way use. There is no sane way to get through major intersections and the west bound over crossing over HWY99 is a few square feet of dodge'em car. Yeesh.

So, I survived and I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad I have health insurance. And boy is my family glad I have life insurance.

Very Short Introductions is a series of books (well over a hundred) from the Oxford University Press that offer a brief introduction to some topic. Philosophy, Maths, History, Politics, etc.

Each book is abut 10 bucks a pop.

They offer boxed sets that give you a discount on a group of books on a similar topic. The Brain Box, for instance, has Evolution, Consciousness, Intelligence, Cosmology and Quantum Theory. The Thought Box has Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.

My two favorite titles of the boxed sets are The Ballot Box (Politics, etc.) and The Boom Box (Ancient Warfare, Cold War, etc.)