I insist on one candle for each year. As you can see, it is quite an inferno. I suppose it is fitting that as each year I get closer to an eternity in fire, the fire on my cake becomes a little larger too.
This is October 18th and the 2nd time it has snowed this Fall!
So, what is it? Below are images and please bear in mind that the effect is stronger with moving pictures or especially in reality-space.
If you, like me, find these things a little creepy then that is Uncanny Valley at work. It seems that if things look sufficiently non-human, then we judge them as things. Beyond a certain thresh hold, when they start to look more human than not, we start to judge by human standards. The odd way they move, sound and look strikes us as repulsive. That is the valley.
Kind of cool that something noticed in passing turns out to be an actual field of study.
We found a place with all the required amenities nestled along the Merrimack river in Tyngsborough MA--not far from where we live. We picked a half bushel of really great apples, ate some doughnuts and let the kids play on bales of hay. It was mid-afternoon by the time we got home.
I had hoped to get Surenna to come with me on the bike path for an 8 mile jaunt, her on a bike-me running, but she was tired and wouldn't agree. My wife wanted to take the dog for an outing, so I went with her on that and we jogged for about a mile at the end. Feeling, if not invigorated, at least warmed-up; I set about running over fallen leaves with the lawnmower. About 2 hours later, the yard looked fantastic and I was ready to bake.
While I was outside, wife and Jemma mixed together 7 pie crusts--I think they would have made more but ran out of butter. I turned on the TV and settled in for apple peeling and the other steps to make apple pie. By the time I had to knock-off to grill lamb chops for dinner, there was one medium-sized pie baked and four others assembled and put into the freezer.
Am tempted, even though bone tired, to make a few more pies tonight since the 1/2 bushel bag is more full than empty at this point. We shall see.
Me: Sure. Did you think they invented dairy cows just since then?
Jemma: I think that there were cows, but they just didn't know what would happen if they did...(makes motion like milking a cow)
Before I left, I made some bread dough. Part of the reason was that pizza would make a good dinner tonight and the other part was that I was killing time hoping for the rain to stop--which it did.
I got on my work-out clothes and banged off a 6-miler at a high 7:30's pace. Not particularly fast for that distance but not so slow as to feel bad about it either. It got sunny and warm early in the run but then the last 5 minutes were a downpour.
Had to shower and dress in a hurry since we were meeting wife's parents for lunch. We got to the place at the same time they did. While eating, the sky cleared and it became (temporarily) a cloudless bright Autumn day.
After lunch, I ordered a 3/4 violin for Surenna, then baked two crusts for pizza and one pan of rolls with the remainder of the dough. After that I worked on the new office till dinner time. I was nailing up corner pieces before plastering the beams. At first I thought I got far too few pieces to complete the job, but then just when I was ready to knock-off, I discovered another tranche of material and had just enough to finish--an hour later.
Pizza for dinner with the in-laws.
Special bacon day! I had eggs and bacon for breakfast, bacon wrapped scallops salad for lunch and then mostly for completeness, I sprinkled bacon onto one of the pizzas. It was good in all of its settings. There is nothing bacon can't do!
--Glycogen: Stored mostly in the liver, it is a source of energy. It may not completely run out but it certainly does become scarce. The body has to switch over to fat metabolism. This is an essentially bottomless well of energy, the problem is that fat cannot be converted into a directly useful form quite fast enough.
--Dehydration: I do not bring water with me on runs of any distance and can easily loose four pounds of water weight on a long run. What happens is that as a person becomes dehydrated, it causes the blood pressure to drop. (One of the main classes of hypertension medications are diuretics) When the blood pressure drops, the heart must pump more rapidly to accomplish the same circulation. Respiration seems to go hand-in-hand with this. What I find is that toward the end of a long run, I cannot maintain my starting pace without becoming winded. The drop in blood pressure is not due entirely to dehydration, so even in marathons that have hydration stations, this is still an issue.
--Will power: As exertion continues, the will to maintain it becomes depleted too. It is too bad since all of the above things make the need for will-power more acute toward the end.
In a race, much but not all of the above issues are at least of smaller concern--at least (with a marathon approaching) this is what I tell myself.
My wife will go for the classics of mope-rock, like this:
Lots of people find this deeply creepy. We always would consider it a hallmark of authoritarian places that they would have billboard sized posters of their leaders in public places. In the West the leaders were often in military uniform, in the East they would go for the more bland look. East is East and West is West & etc.
As if to answer the concerns, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, trotted-out footage of school kids singing some kind of pro-President Bush song. On a very superficial level this would seem to indicate that we live in a big country and you are bound to find pretty much every conceivable thing taking place. Hence, the songs for Obama mean precisely nothing. Not so fast!
I never got the impression President Bush wanted to be worshiped and I didn't see much evidence that many on the left thought that either. Plus, given that the education, entertainment and news media are almost monolithically to the left of center, it is not realistic to think any Republican could achieve cult of personality status, even if they wanted to.
Another question occurs to me: Why wasn't video of children singing the praises of GWB seen before now? That is, why is it only shown now and only as a counterpoint to the Obama videos? Obviously, because it didn't say anything "interesting" back when Bush was President. A huge number of things happen and they can't all be on the news. Nobody worried about a Bush cult of personality back then or it would have been in the news for the purpose of bolstering that meme. Why else put it on? It might seem odd that schools dominated by Democratic teachers would allow/lead students in a pro-Bush song, so there is a whole man-bites-dog angle but I suppose nobody thought of it till now...
Taking on a major new constitutional dispute over gun rights, the Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to decide whether to apply the Second Amendment to state, county, and city government laws.
It never made sense to me that the 1st has long been incorporated while the 2nd hasn't. The first amendment is written in a more limiting way: "Congress shall make no law..." while the 2nd is more general: "...the right of the people..." The first would seem to be a limit on what Congress can do while the 2nd is indicating a right that all the people should have.
In the younger daughter's class the teacher was talking about the pattern: a_e where a consonant goes into the blank spot and creates a long a sound. The kids would group words by whether they make the long a, a short a or something else. "Make" would be long a, "have" would be short a and so on. Mentally, I decided that it would be interesting to find words that were only three letters long and satisfied the rules: "Axe"--short a, "Ale"--long a, there are lots of three letter ones so coming up with these two on the spot is looking less and less impressive.
As soon as I was done, I realized how much a waste of time it was: The thing is so deformed now that I doubt any play can be had from this toy. Unless you count the puzzle game called, "tangle-up the slinky and then figure out how to untangle it".
Now I am writing about that and sort of halfway considering getting some,- point of lay hens. It is probably a bad idea since we have coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks, owls and our own little dog--all of whom would love to eat or at least chase chickens.
On the plus side, it would give me a lot of material for blogging.
After they get the bomb, there will be new and more compelling reasons to do nothing.
QED. Iran will have the bomb.
Food for thought: However bad the options look now, don't they look infinitely better than the inevitable prospect of what our options will be soon?
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