Tempo really makes all the difference in the world

The original up-tempo with electronica by Tears For Fears.

The version from Donnie Darko sung by Gary Jules with arrangement and instrumentation by Michael Andrews.

Scenes of this morning

This is the first year in several that this Hydrangea has produced any flowers. I think I was pruning it incorrectly or something...

I planted blueberry bushes about 5 years ago with high hopes. The little bushes had lots of berries the very first year. The next year deer ate the bushes down to stubs--especially this one, but it has made a real come-back. This is the first year with any appreciable fruit. The birds, squirrels or whatever is eating the berries are appreciative I'm sure.

Here is to France's Nicolas Mahut

John Isner has been getting all the attention and it makes sense in a way,-he did win the match and the coverage I see is, as is Mr. Isner, American.

It took two amazing players for the match to have come out this way. They both exemplified the highest traditions of the sport. They brought honor to themselves and to their sport.

Bravo!

It Is A Relief, But I'm Not Sure Why I Care

Here is the back story:

Via Facebook I reconnected with a grade school classmate. We didn't interact much in school, but being in the same class of less than 20 kids for 3rd through 5th grades lets you observe enough to feel like you know the person. I actually knew her older brother better: He and I often sat on the school bus together and would chat. He introduced me to The Lord Of The Rings among other things and I would tell him what I know about the military. My dad was an Air Force pilot and the brother seemed fascinated by all things military. He is serving in the US Army (reserves I believe) even now. Anyway, there were two other siblings, both sisters. One was older and was in my older brother's class, the other was much younger and I think was in a grade below my younger sister's.

The three younger siblings had an active repartee between each other on FB, but there had never been any mention, comment from or entry on friend lists for their eldest sister. I was tempted to ask, across these nearly 40 years, whatever became of "B". I never did, of course--what if something tragic or scandalous had "become" of her?

So, it was a big relief a few days back when she posted a reply to a post her brother made. She is alive, well and employed in a reputable profession. The question is, why did I care in the first place? [Note: I obviously care about any human being, what I mean here is the extra concern conveyed to people you have an emotional connection to.] I don't think we ever exchanged a word with each other. I was too young to be moved by music back in grade school, but certainly had enough of an ear to admire the skill with which she played the piano at recitals. That is a pretty tenuous connection to hang emotional content on.

On further reflection, I think I know why I care: I care about the girl from my class and her older brother because I know them. I care about their sister because they must care, in a really vital way, about her and so by extension I care. She has a big effect on them and I care about things that have a big effect on people I know. Further, it goes beyond this: That other people care deeply makes my empathy reach out to this lady and to wish her well.

ADDED: I have an aunt who is into new-age nonsense and I know how she would view all of this. She would think that my good will directed toward "B" will somehow reach her and make her feel happy. In reality, if she knew that the little brother of one of her class mates from grade school was thinking about her at all, it would probably give her the creeps.

Today's Route

1. I originally posted the route without any text and it kind of messed-up the whole blog format, so perhaps this will help.

3. Maybe if I remove the map...

2. It is still messing things up, but in a different way now. It is showing posts below out of order.

4. Of course the fix required the complete removal of the original post, so I am back to square one.

Dance Recital, Day Two

Today has felt like a day of mostly waiting. It is odd, since really it has been wide-open for the most part.

First thing in the morning, my wife got up and was heading out to go for a jog. I offered to join her since I didn't plan to go for a serious run anyway and she likes the company. Since it was cool, we took the dog along too.

After breakfast, all I really wanted to do is finish the lawn mowing: Yesterday I had run the chipper/shredder for however long it takes to consume one tank of gas. Even with gloved hands, the vibration from grinding branches rends hands weak and bruised feeling, if I did two tanks' worth it might do lasting damage. It was enough though to clear most the the debris left-over from falling a large pine tree last Memorial Day weekend. Before grinding, I had run the mower over the back & side yards and the machine was running fine, so I had high hopes for the front, which was especially lush since it hadn't been cut in three weeks. I got through maybe 1/3 of the front before the machine quit. I didn't have time to fix the mower because I had to get washed-up and go to the recital.

The older girl was in two numbers, one ballet and one hip hop. She really is built for ballet, she is graceful and slim rather than powerful and quick. The younger was in 4 numbers. Singing, acting, ballet and a sort of show dance. She is only 8, but loves the stage. It is revealing to see them up there since they don't practice this stuff at home, at least not when I am around.

One thing I could not help but notice in the endless (seeming) parade of dance routines was that dancing on stage does not favor the chunky. Plenty of slim girls lack either the talent or skill to be entertaining as dancers but if they have much skill then they are a pleasure to watch. There was no exception to the rule that stocky girls looked ridiculous on stage. I think this is due partly to physics and partly to aesthetics. The extra weight prevents high leaps or graceful moves. Dance costumes tend to be skin tight and this only looks good on a fit build. It was really too bad since clearly some of the dancers were well trained and the only thing preventing a pleasing performance was excess mass.

Today I really wanted to finish the lawn since I had made such good progress yesterday. It took about an hour to get the lawnmower running: Changed the oil, added gas, cleaned the spark-plug and then finally got it to go when I took the plug from the snow blower and put it into the mower. It ran like a champ for most of the rest and it was heavy-duty; grass was lush and shin-high. Toward the end, the mower got finicky again and oddly, would only run when I put my finger lightly over the choke-bulb hole. I put a bit of scotch-tape over the hole and this worked, though not as well as my finger.

I finished this work by early afternoon, but didn't feel like doing more.

1. I had already showered twice and didn't want to get filthy again.

2. I was tired.

3. We would be going out to dinner after today's performance and I didn't want to be in the middle of any large project when it came time to go.

4. Really, I think it all comes down to being tired and feeling like I had gotten as much done as could be expected.

18 Years of Wedded Bliss

Yesterday, actually. But we were too busy to do anything. Maybe after recital season and karate belt testing and so forth, we will celebrate.

One Year Ago...

I knew it when we got them...

A couple of years ago we got another few window air conditioning units. When I opened up the box I saw that the ends of the electric cords came equipped with built-in circuit breakers. I thought to myself, "This will be the first thing to malfunction". Sure enough, today after putting in the second unit; the breaker would pop as soon as it was reset.

The basement got flooded this spring, only a few inches though and the electric parts of an air conditioning unit are a ways-up from the bottom. Still, it was possible water got in there and damaged something. I took the whole thing apart and all the electrical parts looked pristine. I disconnected the cord from the unit and sure-enough, it still popped the breaker even when separated from the unit.

I had a power cord from another air conditioner that died a few years ago and so I attached it and the unit runs fine now.

And yes, I do have some screws left-over now that the unit is all reassembled.

Follow-up thoughts

I was watching a Blogging Heads TV segment with Ann Althouse and Eve Tushnet and was struck by an exchange they had. I will not try to repeat it here verbatim since that would be tedious. I will try to be reasonably accurate, though I should note that my purpose here is not to criticize-rather they got me thinking of ways the topic could be almost endlessly expanded.

Althouse was talking about how some of God’s commands don’t have to make sense to the faithful. They obey them because they want to be obedient to God’s will. Tushnet had a different (though not mutually exclusive) take on it. She was attracted to the Roman Catholic church in part because it was the sort of religion that was willing to make demands. That is, a church that tells her she is great just the way she is, is not the sort of organization which will be capable of helping her. Churches that make no demands are implying that they don’t actually believe in anything—there is no absolute truth. If you are perfect now, then why join a church? I am not suggesting that you have to consider yourself a fallen sinner (though that would be fine), just that you are not all you could be—in a spiritual sense, as a bare minimum requirement to joining a church. Again, my purpose here is not criticism and so I am open to suggestions that I have read into or misapprehended what was spoken. What I want to get to is a discussion of reasons for following God’s rules.

1. The Enlightened School.

If I was religious, this would certainly be the view which would be most attractive to me. The idea here is that we may not understand why God makes the rules that he makes, but he is good. As a good God, he makes rules that help us in life. If we follow his laws, the result will be a happy, full and decent life.

2. The “It Is Totally Arbitrary” School.

In this version the rules are arbitrary; they won’t hurt us, but they have no benefit of their own. There are a couple of ways of thinking about this. In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a part where Winston is told that illogical rules are needed: The goal of the state is power, so if the people are told to do reasonable things, how will the rulers tell the difference between obedience and people just doing what they would have done anyway? If this is God’s motivation then, other than prudence, I don’t see any moral reason for obedience. But there is another perspective as well: I don’t think that the following is true, but there is a kind of logic to it which illustrates this point further. My dad was a career Air Force pilot and he had a theory about the regulation haircut. He thought it was arbitrary in that it didn’t need to be as short as the regulations required it to be.* The real reason, he thought, was that they (I guess the Air Force as an organization) want to know who is willing to follow orders. This makes some degree of sense. For the military to function in warfare, there needs to be confidence that lawful orders will be carried-out.

*Later, I was enlisted in the Marine Corps and our regulations were even more strict than what I remember my father having to do. We jarheads felt less-than-squared-away if more than a week elapsed between haircuts. In the Marines, having a good haircut was more peer-pressure based than top-down. You just didn’t feel like you could lead your men with authority if your uniform and grooming were not sharp. It was a show of rigor.

3. The “It May Be Arbitrary, But It Is Still Good For You” School

What if the act of submission is the point? When you let go of your own ego and follow God’s law, that this discipline helps you to grow spiritually or in your faith?

Flag Day (for our times)

A Minority Can Really Screw Things Up

The other day I was reading an article in the WSJ called, Honk if You're an Aggressive Driver, which was about some states' efforts to fight the problem of "aggressive" driving.

My initial impulse was to make a blog post setting out the thesis that the largest cause of aggressive driving are the passive aggressive drivers who clog-up the passing lane. They may be going close to the posted limit, but are far below the prevailing speed for that lane.

I decided, partly due to not being able to locate the print edition in the recycling bag, to find the online version. Once I got there, I perused the comments and changed my mind a bit about the post. The comments ran about 10:1, most drivers complaining about people who squat in the passing lane and a small minority of self-righteous pricks (guess which side I am on) who essentially say that they can be in any lane they want as long as they are at, or close to, the speed limit.

The problem is that it only takes one out of ten drivers to royally screw-up a highway. So often I have seen 1/2 to 1/4 mile-long traffic clogs caused by the concatenation of 2-3 slow cars blocking all three lanes. Around here (New England) the posted speed might be 65 (when it is 55 the lane speeds are pretty much the same FWIW). The leftmost lane will have a prevailing speed of 80, the middle 70 and the right 65. The clog happens because many citizens prefer to cruise in the middle lane to avoid traffic entering and exiting on the right. Then a motorist going 66 will pass (on the left) a driver in the middle going 65. The roads out here are usually pretty full, so a lot of traffic will pile-up behind the 66 MPH car while he takes a couple of minutes to pass. The delta speed in the left lane is 14 MPH and in the middle it is 5 MPH.

Oddly, the right lane is often quite empty and aggressive though it may be, I have passed traffic clogs consisting of hundreds of cars, by zooming along in the right-most lane.

Why should BP pay for an Obama decision?

I had read about this in the WSJ and wanted to comment on it but Taranto beat me to it:

Obama: You'll Pay for My Decision! "The Obama administration's latest anti-BP volley is a call on the oil giant to pay up big time--not just for economic damages from the Gulf spill but also for lost wages of workers idled by the president's drilling moratorium," Politico reports. This column has no brief for BP, but for the president to demand that the company pick up the tab for his political reaction to the accident takes chutzpah to new heights

I would still like to expand on this for the kind of people that have trouble with easy concepts like Supply and Demand for instance.

1. Let's say that the 6-month moratorium on deep water drilling is justified: There is some flaw in regulations which made the current blow-out nigh inevitable. This flaw is not the fault of BP. In fact, it would be just the misfortune of BP that they happened to find the flaw first, they kind of helped the rest of the industry to avoid this mistake. As an aside: Just to gauge how reasonable a 6-month moratorium is. How would you feel about a similar ban on building jetliners as a reaction to a plane crash?

2. After a 6-month investigation it is determined that the current regulations were fine and should remain unchanged. We would then conclude that the half-year ban on drilling was a mistake--one made by Obama, not BP.

Either way, there is no rational basis for charging BP with lost wages due to the ban. In addition, why just lost wages? Are there not many other expenses to be considered? What about the capital costs of idle equipment, money already paid for leases on drilling areas and so forth? The current administration is sometimes accused of being Socialist, this has been debated far and wide elsewhere. It is interesting that when they look at the consequences of the drilling ban they only consider lost wages and not the (almost certainly higher) corporate losses. It is like they think labor is the only factor in production

Day Of Three Motorized Devices

The Lawnmower: I made sure it would start before investing the time into taking the blade off for sharpening, reattaching the drive belt and fueling it up. Then I mowed a good part of the lawn.

Weed-whacker: I always get this to start, but had to fill-up both spools with new line. Then trimmed the borders.

Leaf Grinder: Started it first, then hauled it down to the front area to grind-up branches from the pine tree I felled over the Memorial Day weekend. It usually starts, but I like to make sure before moving it around since it is very heavy and our place is hilly. The work was slow, but I got through a substantial volume of branches before running out of fuel. I have more gasoline available but this was a good stopping point since it was just enough time to shower and go to our 2nd grader's portfolio party.

The weather outside was frightful...

So the weekend was filled with cooking.

I got 6 whole chickens from the store and cut them into parts:

--Odds and ends for broth and dog treats. --Wife marinated breast fillets for grilling and leg-thigh pieces with tandoori spice for oven cooking or grilling. We had the back pieces encrusted with corn flake crumbs and baked for dinner last night.

Wife made a batch of some 10-dozen meatballs.

I made a batch of spaghetti sauce.

I even made a batch of cranberry sauce, which we use like jam year-round.

For dinner tonight we had a pork rib roast. My wife purchased a large one which I cut in half. Then she spiced-up both--one for the freezer and one for the oven.

All in all, we should have some easy meals ahead of us. This is good since weekdays are a mad rush from the start of each day 'till the end.

Harvested from the garden today

Rainy and gross all day long, but there was a little break of sunshine so I ran out and got these. Rose, Peony and Strawberries.

Feel bad for the next-door neighbors: They are all set-up for some kind of big party (I think a HS graduation) and they have been getting rained on all day. They do have a pavilion installed, so they have an outdoor place to huddle when the rain is especially fierce.

Dahlia models her new glasses

Odd Week

I normally work 4 10-hour days per week, On weeks that have only 4 weekdays I don't do 3 10-hour days or 4 10-hour days, but rather 4 normal 8-hour days. Due to meetings and the need for late evening coverage, I still come in at 9:00 AM and leave at 7:00 PM. So what I do is take a longer lunch break than usual. This gives me the opportunity for longer runs than the usual 5-miler.

This week I did four consecutive runs of an 8.24 mile course. It was just bad luck that we are having a bit of a heat-wave now. It is only in the mid-80's, but very humid and I do run in the early afternoon.

My times were not great: 8:30, 8:20, 8:21 and 8:12 were the average paces. Normally I am unhappy if things are above 8:00 and really, below 7:30 is what I feel like should be happening.

The heat alone should account for some of the slow pace, but I think there is another cause as well. This route has a section of bike path that is made of packed gravel. I know how long each of the segments are and so I know that the pace before and after the bike path are solid 8-minute miles. At an 8-minute pace, it takes 20 minutes to get to the path, 16 minutes on it and then 30 minutes back to the starting point. All the losses are due to the inefficiency of running on gravel. The heat is somewhat less on the path since it is narrow and wooded, thus shady. There is less of a breeze in the woods though.

Cedarford and Helen Thomas Making a Chicken Dinner

Purple Flowers and Mint