(2004 continues!)

Kilts have made an occasional appearance in science fiction. One of Robert A. Heinlein's most famous characters, Lazarus Long, wore a kilt.

I wonder if this would be practical? Would it replace my Scott eVest? more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 11:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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"While a llama may produce the finest of wools, prized around the world, its breath, on the other hand, could be prized only in the far reaches of Llama Hell."

(FBI Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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(This posting is made from 100% previously posted electrons and bits!)

During high school (about the time I discovered the female of the species, read much more "adult" science fiction and realized that there were Geeks Like Me out there), I had a brief dream of becoming an architect. Primarily through a book called Urban Structures of the Future, by Justin Dahinden, I became interested in the work of Paolo Soleri and his arcologies. Amazingly, Soleri is still at it. Sadly, he seems no closer to finishing his dream.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 11:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Mailied (Literally, Maysong)

Wie herrlich leuchtet
Mir die Natur!
Wie glänzt die Sonne!
Wie lacht die Flur!

Es dringen Blüten
Aus jedem Zweig
Und tausend Stimmen
Aus dem Gesträuch

Und Freud' und Wonne
Aus jeder Brust.
O Erd', o Sonne!
O Glück, o Lust!
more...

Posted by: JohnL at 02:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I am listening to a piece called Les Preludes (Symphonic Poem) by Franz Liszt.

Quick! What's the connection with science fiction?

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 02:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Robert the Llamabutcher reports that British public schools are reintroducing Latin into their curricula. (Note the proper Latin plural!)

This reminds me of the fantastic scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian where John Cleese surely channels a Latin teacher from his past.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Well, my last post jokingly referred to a Top Chef Tragedy. This is a real tragedy. Hitting Marcel/Wolverine with a bottle? Right out.

Surfing around on the term "Top Chef," I found this great guest blog entry by chef Anthony Bourdain (whose No Reservations is another item of must-see TV for me). Bourdain served a stint as guest judge for Top Chef earlier in the season and his assessments of the various contestants (other than Ilan) squares with my own.

The finale airs tomorrow at 9:00CST on Bravo.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Well not really a tragedy, but I can't believe the Top Chef judges are letting that little crapweasel Wolverine wannabe go to the grand finale next week.

Ilan's fine with me, but my two favorite Chefs, Sam and Elia, got eliminated last night.

My wife thinks the voting was rigged, since Ilan and Marcel have had so much bad blood this season. Say it ain't so! This isn't simply reality TV designed to draw ratings, is it???

Posted by: JohnL at 09:01 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Virginia Postrel has authored an enlightening article in the December issue of Texas Monthly addressing the perception of Plano as the bellwether for "red-state" America.

Read the whole thing (registration required - visit Virginia's site to get the special password).

Posted by: JohnL at 10:22 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I am about 2/3 of the way through Umberto Eco's excellent Foucault's Pendulum, which I started during the cruise last week. I hope to get most of the way to the end tonight after I stop blogging here.

A couple of thoughts so far:

I wish I knew Italian so that I could read this in its original form. It is multilingual anyway, with lots of French, Latin, and Old French. But I can tell that there is lots of clever wordplay, which never translates perfectly.

Best way to summarize the story and style? Imagine that Neal Stephenson had written The Da Vinci Code instead of Dan Brown.

I would like to see them try to translate this to film, since I rather enjoyed the movie version of Eco's The Name of the Rose. But Da Vinci Code (in both book and film form) has probably oversaturated the market for Holy Grail/Templar/Rosicrucian/Illuminati conspiracy stories.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I have loved Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes from the first time I read it (a day or two after it first ran in 1985) up to the present; my wife even got me the hard-bound Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection for Christmas last year.

So I was really tickled to check out this collection of Watterson rarities that Lynn found. It's neat to see his pre-Calvin work, as well as examples of the only couple of authorized Calvin and Hobbes items that Watterson ever licensed.

My sons both love these books, and I wish I could get them an authorized t-shirt to keep the characters alive as they were intended to be seen, not as some peeing or praying little boy sticker planted on the back of redneck pickup trucks.

Posted by: JohnL at 10:18 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I love the "narrowcasting" enabled by the ubiquity of television channels and the internet. But d-i-y videos can be a hit-or-miss proposition. So I'll do a little filtering for y'all. A "value add," if you will.

Hit:

A nicely done reenactment of the Halo 2 trailer using stop-motion Lego animation:

Miss:

A mixture of live action and crude stop motion to tell an original story set in the Halo universe:

If I had a few more hours a day to goof off, I could see the fun in putting something like these together. And now there's a global audience ready to consume whatever is posted for their viewing pleasure. Maybe someday...

Posted by: JohnL at 07:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Today's Business section in the Dallas Morning News tells the story of Ed Bailey, whose ownership of 61 McDonald's locations in the ultra-competitive Dallas dining market has made him one of the most successful restaurant franchisees in the world.

Mr. Bailey's success as an entrepreneur began in the fashion business. Having first worked as a traveling dress salesman, Mr. Bailey soon opened and ran a successful men's designer clothing store in Cincinnati for 10 years. When he got his first franchise from McDonald's in 1984, he moved his family to Plano (a great place to live!) and was successful enough in the difficult Valley View Mall food court location that he obtained a second franchise within a year. Over the next 22 years, he added 59 more stores to his portfolio.

His story could have ended there as a great tribute to the American Dream lived by so many successful small business owners. But as the article points out, there's a special angle to Mr. Bailey's success. In the early 1990s, Mr. Bailey decided to distinguish his franchises by spending money to make them more aesthetically pleasing at the same time as his corporate management was pushing cost controls:

Mr. Bailey knew then what Virginia Postrel would later identify as the "aesthetic imperative." In Ms. Postrel's words:

Or, as Mr. Bailey's experience showed, to beat the competition.

For more in the same vein, check out Ms. Postrel's The Substance of Style. And be sure to read the entire Morning News article about Mr. Bailey.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I wonder if private space travel will follow in the steps of the Internet, where sex was one of the earliest successful commercial ventures.

While joining the 250-mile-high-club would certainly be uniquely stimulating, it won't necessarily be easy, was the message of a panel of experts at the recently-concluded Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2006 conference in Las Vegas.

NASA (not speaking for the agency, of course) doctor Jim Logan had the money quote:

"It's a pretty messy environment, when you think about it....And for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. However ... I can well imagine how compelling, inspiring, and quite frankly stimulating choreographed sex in zero-G might be in the hands of a skilled and talented cinematographer with appropriate lighting and music....I'm not kidding: Sex in zero-G is going to have to be more or less choreographed. Otherwise it's just going to be a wild flail."

Alan Boyle and Rand Simberg have much more on this, er, titillating topic.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:12 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of the benefits of moving from time to time is the opportunity to go through old boxes of stuff. Last year's move unearthed an old box of pictures that I took with my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 44. I had great fun going through the old pictures with my kids, including showing them some pictures of places that still exist (the Dinosaur statues in Glen Rose, for example, which they have seen in person several times).

Tonight I scanned the first few of what I expect to be many. I'll do a bigger post on the camera itself someday (I also have pictures taken with a Kodak Disc camera -- a film disc, not a digital disc and my mom's old Kodak Retina).

Your humble author, making himself the center of attention even then:

A successful fishing trip at Lake Lavon:

Colorful Colorado:

Posted by: JohnL at 04:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Owlish relates a conversation with someone concerned about the impending 6/6/6 date. Of course the world didn't end on June 6, 1906 (or 1806, or 1706, etc.) And which number of the beast applies? Some early manuscripts of the Revelation make the number 616, others 666. So look out on June 1. Unless you're someone other than a US civilian, since the rest of the world orders their calendar dates differently, and your world didn't end on January 6.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Well, I've been pretty incommunicative around here recently. Sorry about that, but I've had my hands full with my job, family, and fighting a [so far losing] battle against the safety Nazis in Texas government.

Virginia Postrel has already posted a good wrapup, and I can't describe the situation better than Tim Rogers at D Magazine. Seriously. Go read those before you continue, or it might not make sense.

Back? OK. I would only add that Reason's Hit and Run recently referenced a Baby Blues cartoon that perfectly describes the current trend of protecting our kids out of their childhoods.

As I've written before, I'm a board member for The Texas Pool (whose website I happened to design and author during my copious free time).

For four and a half decades, the pool has operated without any diving board injuries that would have been prevented by the new regulations. When looking at the cost-benefit analysis of the new FINA-derived standards, it seems that our benevolent state government believes even one potential injury sometime in the future would be too many. That of course disregards the many risks that responsible individuals take and allow their kids to take every single day. I put my kids at greater jeopardy every time I drive them to school. Or let them ride their bikes to school. Or even let them walk across the busy street to school.

But what really cranks me is that this regulation was slipped through on the sly. There was no public comment and no public record in the Texas Register of any kind of justification for the retroactive application of the new depth and spacing standards to existing diving facilities. Also, the standards come from a set of rules governing competitive diving. It's HARD to hit the bottom of a 10-foot pool unless you dive with a really good form, and kids doing cannonballs is hardly good form (I doubt most of them ever get below 5 or 6 feet).

So how can you begin to fight the professional government inflicted on us by the late 19th-century progressives? Our approach is really two phases (possibly three): (1) ask the State Department of Health to reconsider their decision not to include a grandfather clause for existing facilities, (2) ask our state legislators to overrule the administrative agency, and apply a grandfather clause, and (3) initiate appropriate litigation, contingent on finding an interested pro bono firm.

This would be a great opportunity to try out an "Army of Davids" approach. I can't really take the time to research the epidemiology of diving board/pool depth injuries and in any case don't have ready access to a university library with medical or sports injury journals. But from everything I've read to date, there's no real evidence of significant danger, even from a 3-meter diving board, when the diving well is at least 10 feet deep (as is ours). Most injuries occur in less than 5 feet of water.

Would any of my intrepid readers like to take on a pro bono research project? I already have some leads (authors, journal and article titles). I'm totally serious. If so, contact me at john.lanius@gmail.com.

I will be blogging more, on this and other things.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:06 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Lots to say, but no time to say it, really. Hoping to reengage here really soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this video of that new Burger King commercial (I Am Man, Hear Me Roar), found thanks to Lynn:

Nothing much to add, except to note that the product being hawked is NOT the Massachusetts Double Whopper. I wonder why.

Heh.

Posted by: JohnL at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Oh my. Nicely done.

Anyone else want to take the hint and Google-bomb "that fruity little club"?

Posted by: JohnL at 09:39 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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According to this report, men in their 50s are more satisfied with their sex lives than at any other time in their lives except their 20s. On a scale of zero to four, men reported satisfaction as follows:

20s - 2.79
30s - 2.55
40s - 2.72
50s - 2.77
60s - 2.46
70s - 2.14

After giving this just a moment's thought, I realized that one little word explains this: kids.

Seriously. Most people start their families in their late 20s or 30s. Before a guy in his 20s settles down, there's likely some fun on the dating scene. But once you find "the one," nothing tops the excitement of the courtship, honeymoon, and early years together without kids.

After the children appear, you find that both of you are a bit more tired, a bit less attentive to looks or clothing, a bit more prone to headaches and irritability, and less likely to enjoy the less-frequent sex. As the kids get older and more independent, they continue to invade your space and their schedules become more demanding.

Once the kids leave the nest, it seems that one of two things happens: (1) husband and wife fall in love all over again and experience some really great time together, going at it like newlyweds, or (2) husband, now financially successful and confident, dumps the old bag for a trophy wife 20 years his junior. (Two of the four commenters over at Science Blog tend to confirm this latter point). In either case, the man is likely to be more satisfied with sex than at any time since before he had kids.

[THWACK]

Ouch! That was my wife taking a swipe at me for the "old bag" comment. For the record: she in no way resembles any sort of bag (unless it's one that's sleek and fashionable and will never go out of style...)

(Hat tip: Instapundit).

Posted by: JohnL at 09:39 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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