Rating:

Next time you want to kill a day or two sitting at your computer, check out the TV Tropes site. It’s a wiki collection of all the common tropes in TV shows and other entertainment, with lots of examples of most of them. (A trope is a device or convention that writers use repeatedly in stories. Sometimes a trope gets used so often that it becomes a joke, like red-shirt characters on Star Trek, or bomb timers that take a minute to count down from 10 seconds.) It’s a pretty fun site; just don’t go there if you’ve got important work to do!

(Phlebotinum, by the way, is the term for any sort of “magical” substance that’s used in a story to save the day. A very common trope in sci-fi, often accompanied by techno-babble.)

On a few of the blog posts I’ve made lately, the first copy had a mistake that caused it to get cut off, so instead of fixing it in place, I just deleted it and re-submitted the fixed version. Apparently this caused subscribers to get two notices about the same post, and one of them linked to the deleted version which was no longer there. Sorry for the confusion; I won’t do that in the future!

To make it up to you, here’s a picture of Francis the Donkey. (Er, I said mule at first; try to fix one mistake and make another….)

I got a new truck! Well, new to me, anyway. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s just what I was looking for: a small truck that’ll get good gas mileage, but will still let me haul stuff around once in a while. Here’s Pepper waiting to go for a ride.

Now that I’m set for transportation for a while, I can start saving up for the wheels I really want. I guess if I had to pick a “dream car,” it’d be the Buick Regal GNX. They only made 547 of these things in 1987, because 500 was the minimum number you could produce and call it a stock car for competition purposes. It had the turbo version of Buick’s 3800 V6 engine, which promptly started blowing all the V8 competitors of the time off the track. (The same engine was used in the 25th anniversary Pontiac TransAm and other high-performance GM cars.) With nothing more than a change of tires and a cutout in the exhaust, a GNX can go from street legal to the drag strip and put down a 13.4 second quarter-mile, going 0-60 in 4.7 seconds.

The GNX and Grand Nationals were all very black and very shiny, so it’s hard to find a good picture of them, but here are a couple.

Unfortunately, most GNX models are in the hands of collectors now, but a standard turbo Grand National would be just fine too. If I can’t get one of those, a Buick Reatta would be a nice substitute. This sports coupe was made from about 1988 to 1991, on a special GM production line where everything was hand-assembled. It was intended as a high-end performance car, but about that time, Buick decided to focus on the older, more traditional market. So the Reatta fell out of favor, and was scaled back considerably. For example, even though it had the same 3800 V6 engine as the Grand National, it had a much higher 0-60 time at around 8 seconds, and was electronically limited to a maximum speed of 125 mph.

Still, I rarely need to go over 125 mph these days, and I always liked the looks of the Reatta, so I’d love to have one.

And, if I ever want something older to restore, I’ll track down a Skylark GS, from 1970 or so. These beasts had a 455 cubic-inch engine — one cubic inch bigger than Chevy’s famous 454, but it also was a 90-degree V8 instead of Chevy’s 60-degree version, so it had ridiculous amounts of torque. The 1970-1/2 came from the factory without even a radio — it was pure muscle car, all the way. Here’s a pic, although mine wouldn’t be this color; it would be a deep blue with a white top.

There was a commercial years ago — I don’t remember what it was for — with a guy saying, “Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars.” I don’t particularly need a flying car, but there are some products that I wish would go ahead and get here.

At least ten years ago, I read an article in Games Magazine about a thing called the MindDrive. It’s a bio-feedback system that plugs into your computer and has a sleeve that slips over one finger. The sleeve senses a bunch of different things in your skin, like the temperature and electrical impulses, and uses that to determine your thoughts, in a very rough sense, then uses that to control movement on the computer screen. Is that cool or what?

At the time, they released it with a bunch of games, like skiing and pinball, and you’d play by thinking left, right, forward, and so on. Apparently it does work; I’ve found several articles by people who tried it out. Unfortunately, that’s all they ever did with it. A decade or more later, they still have the same dozen games, for DOS and Windows 3.1, and the MindDrive itself and the games are all still the same high price. The web site is in Italy and is horrible, with slow-loading blinky graphics and some pointless Java cruft.

How could this not be a hit? I’d love to be able to wrap a thing around my arm or somewhere and control the cursor on my screen with my mind while I have my hands on the keyboard. No more reaching back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. I think they made a huge mistake by only creating games for it. They should have released it with a “mouse” driver, so people could install it and use it with any program. As long as you can only use it with their games, it’s a toy for geeks; but if it were a general-purpose controller, anyone could use it. I also don’t understand why some other company hasn’t bought it up and done something useful with it by now.

In any case, I want one. I’d prefer one that I can use with my web browser and other software, but if I can’t have that, I want a MindDrive that I can play with, and try to hack together my own general-purpose controller for it. It’s over $300, so it probably won’t be in my Christmas stocking, but one of these days…..

The other thing is electronic paper. This is something people have been working on since the 1970s, but it’s finally starting to hit the market for consumers recently. In short, it’s an attempt to come up with something portable that reads as comfortably as paper, because a back-lit computer screen wears out your eyes much more quickly than paper.

There are different types, but in general, electronic paper has zillions of microscopic black-or-white beads suspended under a thin clear layer. Beneath the beads, an electronic grid tells the beads at each “dot” — thousands of dots per square inch, just like on a computer screen — what to do. The beads don’t move around on their own, so once they’re in place, they stay there until told to move again, without any need for continuous power. The “paper” is as thick as a few sheets of ordinary paper, and I don’t think you’d want to fold it(!), but it reads just like paper.

Of course, you still have to get the data on the paper somehow, so all the products that have come out over the past couple years have one piece of electronic paper contained inside a frame that includes batteries, memory, and an interface to communicate with a computer. That way it can contain entire books, turning the “page” electronically at the press of a button. Since the display doesn’t require power except when turning a page, the battery can last for months without charging. One product is the Sony Reader for $300, but there are several others, and they don’t all use the same technology, so the competition should bring prices down. (Fortunately, Microsoft doesn’t appear to be making one.) One that runs about $800 even allows you to write on it with a stylus and then transfer those pages back to your computer.

So they’re a little like a Palm Pilot or something like that, except that they have bigger “screens,” they don’t use nearly as much power, and they read like paper. Very, very cool. When the prices come down — or I find one reasonable on eBay — I’m getting one.

Ok, I know what the flies are now: buffalo flies. I was talking to my mom this morning, and she asked me if I’d noticed them, because they’ve been terrible out at the farm, too. They’re wearing hooded jackets outside sometimes just to keep the flies off, and she saw one lady working in her garden wearing a bee veil. The worst thing is they’re really getting after her chickens, burrowing under the feathers and driving them crazy. A few have even died, so if that keeps up, I could lose my free egg supply!

The good news is that they’re only supposed to stick around for a couple weeks, so they should be gone soon. And now I don’t have to throw away my shampoo. Apparently they don’t bother things in the dark — people are putting black paper over the windows of their chicken houses to keep out the light and keep them off the chickens — so maybe I’ll walk Pepper before dawn and after dusk for a while.   The rabbit hunting is better then anyway.

Ok, so this morning I washed my hair with bar soap, no shampoo, and I doused my head with Off before we went for our walk. I still got swarmed. Whatever they are, these flies don’t mind Off, and they still like my hair. Now what? Maybe when the town sprays for mosquitoes, that’ll get rid of them. I feel like I should ask around and see if anyone else has noticed them, or if I’ve been singled out like Job, and should expect to start sprouting boils any time now.

More to come later today; I’m working on a couple long things.

Maybe it’s my shampoo. I’m a guy, and all I ask of my hair is that it stay clean and in the vicinity of my head, so when I buy shampoo, I get the biggest bottle of whatever they sell at the dollar store. This “White Rain” stuff I’m using now doesn’t even claim to have a fragrance.

But for the last few days now, whenever I take Pepper for a walk and we get to a park or grassy area, I get absolutely swarmed by these little flies of some sort. They’re smaller than houseflies but bigger than gnats, so I don’t know if they’re fruit flies or something else. They don’t bite, but they swarm around my head and land in my hair and make it completely impossible to just hang out at the park for a while. I have to keep moving at a fast walk to generate enough breeze to keep them off me, or I end up standing there swatting at my head like a crazy person.

I took a picture of them, but my camera isn’t very sharp at close range. (As usual, click on the pics to popup a full-sized version.) That was at the park, with about 50 of them swirling around my head. It’s just my head, not the rest of my body, which is why I suspect my shampoo. I still see other people sitting in the park, so I don’t think they’re bothering everyone else like this. I’m going to put on some Off later and go down to the store for some different shampoo.

A couple other recent pictures; here’s one of the devil dog in one of her favorite sleeping positions in her chair:

Other cameras cause red-eye; apparently mine causes green-eye. Not sure what’s going on there. Here’s one I took the other day, after she chased a rabbit under this corn header. She couldn’t get under there, so she just ran around and around it dozens of times, hoping to scare it out. I finally had to tell her to give up so we could head home. (Turns out my camera isn’t fast enough for “action” pictures either.)

These three puppies came out to play on the south side of town one morning. I have no idea what they’re looking at in this picture, because Pepper was standing at my feet. Maybe they’re camera-shy.

I got a kick out of this: two lawns, side by side. Want to bet these neighbors don’t especially get along?

Every time we go for a walk, I’m reminded of how much I don’t miss mowing my lawn. That’s the main noise you hear in town this time of year: mowers running everywhere. I even hear them regularly here in the middle of town, for some reason.
I swear I will never mow my lawn again, no matter where I live. I won’t have a lawn unless I can afford to pay someone to mow it, or build a robot mower. (In fact, the coolness of a robot mower might be the only reason I’d have a lawn.) Otherwise, I’ll turn the whole thing into a European-style garden with paths and plants, have sheep to graze it, put down artificial turf, or just pave the whole thing. Never again will I look out at my lawn and think, “Oh man, I have to mow today.”

This morning on Fox Sports Net’s First Team, Steve Czaban said the Cardinals should take the black patches off their uniforms because Josh Hancock had a blood alcohol level of .15 when he wrecked his car and died.

People have problems. People make mistakes. Sometimes we get lucky and don’t have to pay for them; sometimes we pay with our lives, as Hancock did. Why keep beating up a guy who already paid the ultimate penalty? What’s wrong with honoring the memory of your friend and teammate and his life as a whole, regardless of why he’s gone? Have we become so simpleminded that we can’t separate the sin from the sinner anymore, so everyone has to be an absolute hero or villain?

I hope not. Those patches are for Josh Hancock, not for drunk driving, and if people can’t separate the two things, they need to grow up a little. Hancock’s family and friends aren’t grieving any less because of how he died. Chances are they’re grieving more, now that he’s not only dead, but being called names.

My first thought was that we’ve become awfully callous, but that can’t be it, since we just had a week-long national cry because some old white shock-jock said mean things about some black college girls. It seems more that we’ve become obsessed with finding fault in every situation. (Except when people are clearly at fault and brag about it, as in the World Trade Center attacks; then we call it a tragedy.)

It’s awfully hypocritical, too, because anyone who likes to have a few beers or drinks now and then, as Czaban does, has driven drunk at least once. If you have a driver’s license and you aren’t a teetotaler, and you think you’ve never driven drunk, you’re lying to yourself. You don’t know your blood alcohol level, and you can hit the new .08 limit without feeling drunk, so don’t be so sure. If you’ve driven home feeling good from the bar or the 19th hole at the golf course, and you never got a DUI, you’re lucky, not superior to Josh Hancock.

We really need to get a grip on this Prohibition stuff, if it’s not already too late. I guess it’s illegal to smoke in your own hole-in-the-wall bar in Illinois anymore, or soon will be. I’ve never smoked in my life, and don’t like to be around it, but this is ridiculous. If millions of us are non-smokers and want smoke-free bars so much, wouldn’t you think a couple of us could open a smoke-free bar and instantly have the most popular and profitable bar in town? This isn’t about making life better for us, it’s about punishing them, and feeling good about ourselves for being better than them. Well, I’m not better than them, and I almost want to take up smoking in sympathy with the targets of the self-righteous. Besides, this will just mean more used butts around doorways than before. If you want to ban it, be honest enough to try that; otherwise let them smoke inside where at least they might use an ashtray.

I told myself I’m going to blog at least once every day this week, and see how that goes. I’ve got more positive topics lined up for the rest of the week, but this one was irking me this morning. Upward and onward from here!