The Opinionated Bastard

No, this isn’t about the election.

This is literally, how to trap a skunk.

is the $100/month for my wife’s Pilates class at Water Mountain.

• It’s made her butt smaller, and tighter.
• It’s made her hornier (shhh… don’t tell her I let the secret out.)

Alice is a great instructor too. I’d take Pilates if I wasn’t spending 12 hours a week at the dojo already.

So the first time I ever met this guy, he didn’t bother to introduce himself, he just broke into a tirade because I was walking my dogs and they ran over and peed on his tires.

During Monsoon season in Flagstaff, where every day at 2PM it rains for 10 minutes.

But I tried to humor him by keeping the dogs out of his yard. Never mind that coyotes used to go through his yard all the time (and still do), but whatever.

The next time I met him, I was walking the dogs again, and I went to throw something away in his dumpster. (He was still building his house.) My wife went up to introduce herself, and the dogs ended up following her. He lost it again. Seems he’s allergic to dogs, which he didn’t tell me the first time. He was also upset because I threw something in his dumpster. Then he ended up calling Animal Control on us, which we thought was kind of dickless.

Anyways, we tried to keep the dogs away from him and his yard, which was pretty easy, because we’ve spent a lot of time training our dogs so they just do what we tell them to do.

A week later, his next door neighbor-to-be came over to ask him if he would watch his construction site a bit better as trash kept blowing into her yard. He told her “Why don’t you just pick it up, you fat lazy bitch!” (She had a baby about 2 months prior…) The vendor he was talking to at the time was so offended that he refused to do business with the guy.

About 2 weeks later, he was surprised when they weren’t willing to let him run an extension cord over to their place for electricity when he was having some problem…

So eventually, he moved in.

The first thing he did was setup a corral for his mule. Except he set it 6 feet over the property line onto their property. The husband went over there and asked him to move it by Friday.

Friday came, and he hadn’t moved it, so the wife called him up and reminded him.

He came over to her house and screamed at her for 20 minutes. She happened to have both a handheld tape recorder and a tire iron…

So now they’re suing him.

After he got the lawsuit, he came over and screamed at her for another 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, some other dog in the neighborhood has been coming over and peeing in his jacuzzi. He’s convinced it must be my dog. I know its not my dogs, because I have a fenced yard so I really doubt one of them is flying over there, peeing in his jacuzzi, and flying back. Plus they’re brothers and practically inseperable, so the fact that its just one dog also indicates its not them. But there are about 5 dogs that look like my dogs in the neighborhood, and at least one that’s a spitting image. He’s videotaped it and everything according to the animal control guy who keeps coming over and leaving these annoying messages on my door because if my neighbor sees my dogs outside without a leash (like I’m getting the mail), he ends up calling animal control.

Now I haven’t told him he’s barking up the wrong tree (so to speak), because for one thing, I still don’t even know his name (me and the wife just call him Asshole). For another, I can’t stand the guy.

Anyone else have any similar experiences?

When I was in my 20’s, I was a nice guy.

Which was terrible for my sex life, because all the women I met were into dangerous guys.

So I had to pretend to be dangerous.

It worked mind you, once I figured that out (and a couple of other things about women, like how to flirt), I was beating them off with a stick.

Now I’m in my late 30’s (38 on December 23rd).

Women are different now, they’re bored with dangerous. Now they like nice guys.

So I have to change my whole routine back to being a nice guy again. After lots of practice with my wife though, my flirting is pretty good though, so I’ve got that going for me.

Of course, I’m happily married, so this is all just to keep my wife on her toes. Plus women like it if other women are attracted to their guy. Some kind of “I’m the alpha female, you can’t have him” thing.

Now when my wife met me, she thought “Hmmm…he’s a nice guy, pretending to be dangerous. Wonder what that’s about.” She’s older then me, so she’d already gone through her “dangerous men are exciting” phase, and was now in the “dangerous men have boring, stupid problems” phase.

Every year, my wife and I have a huge fight over Christmas.

13 years, 12 fights. (We weren’t living together that first year, so we missed the fight. Thank god.)

Basically, she grew up in a household where Xmas started in October. They didn’t have a lot of money for gifts for each other, so the gift part was way reduced.

Instead, they spend months decorating the house, giving neighbors and friends tiny presents, wrapping presents. All kinds of stuff.

That’s not what we did at my house. At my house, we started Xmas in December after my Dad’s birthday December 1st. We didn’t do that much decorating in the house or outside other then putting up a Christmas tree.

Pretty much the fight is because I spend most of the holiday season thinking my wife is this insane Martha Stewart clone, while she spends most of the holiday thinking I’m an evil Scrooge.

At some point, it boils to a head, and she starts screaming at me about how it ruins Christmas for her to have to drag me through the entire process.

Which is, more or less, true.

On my side, I don’t mind doing more during the Holidays, I just never knew until this year how insane she was about the whole thing. October? Jeesh!

Anyways, we had it again this year. We’ll have to see what happens next year. After the fight we had me come up with a list of what Christmas stuff I thought was appropriate to do on my end. Maybe that will help.

So I got home from Christmas with a cold. That was kind of annoying because I’ve been getting a cold after the Xmas holidays for several years in a row. The cold wasn’t too bad so I figured if I just got some extra sleep it would go away.

It was not to be. Last Wednesday a storm came in, turning the homestead into lakefront property:

This is pointed at our neighbors house so it looks worse then it is. The reality is that in the upper right, you can just see the beginning of the “shoreline”, our house is about 50 feet beyond that, but its up a bit from the water, this is the low point on our property. As you can see the neighbors had it much worse, since they now owned a houseboat.

The problem was that the culvert that runs under the road in front of our house was blocked, which backed up the water quite a ways since it has to run under our street before it can run under the main road. None of the water was especially deep, our land is pretty flat, there was just a lot of it because we’d gotten about 3” of rain in about 12 hours.

Since the water was about 3” from pouring into the top of our cistern and polluting our well water and it was still raining, I had to run to Home Depot to engineer some way to seal the cistern.

Meanwhile, that left De to figure out how to unblock the culvert. Its good to have a wife who’s pretty self sufficient. Self sufficient enough that I knew that if I left, she would get all the neighbors organized and helping.

That’s pretty much what happened. While I was gone, De scavenged a 40’ pole from a construction side and managed to ram it through the culvert, unblocking it.

Of course, that makes it sound easy. That entailed:

1. Finding the 40’ pole.
2. Getting 5 neighbors to help her.
3. Arguing with the county flood people who told her not to (while they took pictures of the flooding).
4. Getting sucked into the culvert.
5. Getting rescued from the culvert by the neighbors.
6. Getting about 5 more neighbors to help her so she can go back inside.

7. Going back into the house and changing clothes for the 3rd time. (Realize that all this is happening in the rain at about 35 degrees F, while standing in a foot of water.)

   Anyways, it turned out there was a basketball stuck in the culvert, so unblocking it really helped. The neighbors meanwhile voted De the “Macho Chick” award. Strangely, her husband more or less just felt that it was par for the course, that it was somehow to his credit for picking such a tough wife.

   Shortly after she finished, I got back from Home Depot with the stuff to seal the cistern, with about 1” to spare. That took awhile because cistern seals aren’t exactly something home depot sells, so I ended up having to improvise with a sheet of vinyl cut to fit and about 8 bolts for the lid. De expected it to take awhile, but she thought I’d left about a half hour earlier then I did, so she though I’d gotten sucked into shopping at Home Depot or something. So she was a bit upset with me when she saw me (“I’m going to kill you” were her first words to me) but we didn’t have time to fight we had to dive into sealing the cistern.

   So with both of us standing in about 2 feet of water, with the rain coming down, De and I managed to get the seal bolted onto the cistern. That was a bit hard because we had to hold onto the nuts and wrenches under the freezing water, but luckily I had gotten one of those cordless drills for Xmas about 2 years ago, so I was able to tighten the bolts fairly quickly.

   After that, it was back into the house to sit in a tub of hot water and thaw out. While we were thawing out, De regaled me with stories of getting sucked into the culvert. I still had a cold (now much worse) so I went to collapse into the bed, while De went to help the neighbors some more.

   Meanwhile, the new neighbor we don’t get along with had finked on De taking the pole to the construction guy, so he came over all irate and wanting it back. De and him had words in the driveway and I had just staggered out there to defend my wife from the neighbor when he drove away. De then stomped into the house, grabbed her car keys, picked up the pole and threaded it through her truck windows (having to yell at the county guys to get out of the way, because they were standing around taking more pictures) and drove it back to the construction guy.

Meanwhile, the construction guy had come back to apologize, he hadn’t quite noticed the flooding until he was leaving, and after he looked at it, he realized he was being silly. De met him in the driveway and they shook hands to forgive and forget.

Unblocking the culvert helped quite a bit, as shortly after e the water stopped rising and started to subside a bit, we put the seal on the culvert at about a half hour before the high point. It was still raining though, with more storms coming our way though, so the neighbor went and rented a pump. After some tribulations with that (they gave him the wrong size hose, it wouldn’t start, etc.) De and the neighbor took shifts that night and into the next day keeping the pump running, and they were able to get the water to drop about 2 more feet.

The rain also switched to snow, which helped, because snow stays in one place (at least temporarily).

Of course, now we have about 4’ of snow to deal with instead, so hopefully that won’t all melt at once. 4 feet of snow is about 8 inches of rain so that’s quite a bit, but there’s a lot of melting first.

Anyways, that was Wednesday and Thursday of last week. De managed not to get sick until Saturday, and I’ve been getting better slowly since then, so I’m back at work today. I might have gotten better sooner but Monday is when we got the first 3 feet of snow, so De and I had to go out there, dig out the car, and move it to the end of the driveway so that when we got the next snow, we wouldn’t be snowed in. 3 feet of snow is a little more then the Honda can handle, so that actually meant digging the car out, getting stuck, digging the car out again, getting stuck again, etc.

Of course, that meant we both had to go out in the cold while we were sick, so that didn’t help either of us get better.

BTW, for those of you who don’t live in the country, a cistern is the water tank attached to the well (well fills water tank, second pump pumps into house), and a culvert is the metal pipe you see running under driveways.

So during our recent flooding, one of our neighbors was venting that “The County should take care of this”. My wife just laughed at him, that he thought that the government was actually going to fix it for us.

Now this was the same neighbor who took it personally when our power was out for a good chunk of a weekday during a storm. I guess he’d lived in town his whole life, and now that he was a bit further out of town, it kind of rocked his world to realize that electricity wasn’t 100% reliable.

So my neighbor believes that Government is the solution to all his problems? Wanna bet he was a Kerry voter? Lifelong Democrat I bet…

I’m still blogging, just been hectic here and I haven’t been feeling well.

Coming up soon though: Crushing the Princesses, the true story of how I exposed some “radicals” as a bunch of whiners.

My wife has been getting pneumonia every year for 7 years now.

We thought it might be an allergy to Ponderosa Pine trees, which would mean moving away from Flagstaff, which would have really sucked.

We found out today that’s not it.

Whoo Hoo!

After filling in one and seeing the number of telemarketing calls I get go from 1 a day to 5 a day after I gave them my real name and address, I now use:

Elwood Blues 1060 West Addison Chicago, IL 60613-4397

Which, if you’ve ever seen the movie the Blues Brothers, will ring familiar. It’s Wrigley field. You’ll also know why that’s funny.

Turns out that was a good idea. This guy in Tukwila, Washington almost got framed for arson, based on purchases from his Safeway club card. Read the article here with a hat tip to Bruce Schneier.

I really hate club cards. I especially hate the Barnes & Noble one since it bugs me to have to pay for the privilege of shopping there, and I wish whatever Asshole MBA who thought them up a slow, painful death followed by an enternity in Hell unable to buy a bottle of water because he doesn’t have his Hell club card so he’s short $0.01…

Bad News:

Paris Hilton has been cast in a movie.

Good News:

It’s a horror movie where she gets killed.

In other news, I really enjoyed Constantine, but that was a given because I loved the comic book it was based on.

IMAO Asks:

1. Who the hell do you think you are?

I’m a 38 year old man who got frustrated with the shitty-ass coverage of our foreign policy during one of the most important periods in American history.

1. So, other than blogging, what’s your job? Do you work at some fast food joint, dumbass?

I’m a software engineer, I work for Marketocracy.

1. Do you have like any experience in journalism, idiot?

Since I started blogging, I ended up with a column in the local art monthly, so yeah.

1. Do you even read newspapers?

I read the funnies.

1. Do you watch any other news than FOX News propaganda, you ignorant fool?

Sometimes.

1. I bet you’re some moron talk radio listener too, huh?

Nope, can’t stand talk radio.

1. So, do you get a fax from the GOP each day for what to say, you @#$% Republican parrot?

Not since they stopped sending me the checks. :-)

1. Why do you and your blogger friends want to silence and fire everyone who disagrees with you, fascist?

In my case, because its fun.

1. Are you completely ignorant of other countries, or do you actually own a passport?

Traveled a lot, actually.

1. Have you even been to another country, you dumb hick?

Yep.

1. If you’re so keen on the war, why haven’t you signed up, chickenhawk?

Thought about it actually, not the armed forces (too old), but I thought about the State Department. Worried I might not have a job when I get back, and it took me several years to get to the point where I could work from Flagstaff, AZ

1. Do you have any idea of the horrors of war? Have you ever reached into a pile of goo that was your best friend’s face?

Er, yes, I have an idea. No I haven’t.

1. Have you ever reached into any pile of goo?

Yep.

1. Once again, who the hell do you think you are?!

I’m the Opinionated Bastard, That’s who I am.

IMAO Asks:

1. Who the hell do you think you are?

I’m a 38 year old man who got frustrated with the shitty-ass coverage of our foreign policy during one of the most important periods in American history.

1. So, other than blogging, what’s your job? Do you work at some fast food joint, dumbass?

I’m a software engineer, I work for Marketocracy.

1. Do you have like any experience in journalism, idiot?

Since I started blogging, I ended up with a column in the local art monthly, so yeah.

1. Do you even read newspapers?

I read the funnies.

1. Do you watch any other news than FOX News propaganda, you ignorant fool?

Sometimes.

1. I bet you’re some moron talk radio listener too, huh?

Nope, can’t stand talk radio.

1. So, do you get a fax from the GOP each day for what to say, you @#$% Republican parrot?

Not since they stopped sending me the checks. :-)

1. Why do you and your blogger friends want to silence and fire everyone who disagrees with you, fascist?

In my case, because its fun.

1. Are you completely ignorant of other countries, or do you actually own a passport?

Traveled a lot, actually.

1. Have you even been to another country, you dumb hick?

Yep.

1. If you’re so keen on the war, why haven’t you signed up, chickenhawk?

Thought about it actually, not the armed forces (too old), but I thought about the State Department. Worried I might not have a job when I get back, and it took me several years to get to the point where I could work from Flagstaff, AZ

1. Do you have any idea of the horrors of war? Have you ever reached into a pile of goo that was your best friend’s face?

Er, yes, I have an idea. No I haven’t.

1. Have you ever reached into any pile of goo?

Yep.

1. Once again, who the hell do you think you are?!

I’m the Opinionated Bastard, That’s who I am.

How to destroy the Earth

Foolish humans! The Earth is much more powerful then you! You are to the earth as an ant to an elephant!

Hat Tip: Bruce Scheirer

I got a new plugin for movable type, so I’ve tried turning on open commenting again. Let’s hope it works because forcing people to do TypeKey registration cut the comments in half and comments are one of the main encouragements I get as a blogger.

Added a local blog (Flagstaff, AZ) to the blog roll today: Clever Zen Monkey

SpamLookup is working great for me.

Not only is it blocking a bunch of spam, but I cleverly added a filter to block all spam with &#1 in it, which is the beginning of an encoded spam message. That seems to be blocking tons of spam, since my real commenters don’t use HTML-encoded entities. Between its general lookup, and that filter, only a couple of things have slipped through, enough for me to manage by hand.

I’ve been thinking of myself as attempting to be a straight, conservative Oscar Wilde.

Now I know, I’m really Ann Coulter With a Penis

Congratulations to Time Magazine for giving her the cover.

Since most of my readers don’t live in Flagstaff, here’s where you can find out more:

The hippies in favor of the proposition can’t seem to agree, so there are two pro-proposition websites:

YesForFlagstaff YesOnProp100

Of the two, YesOnProp100 is the more honest one as YesForFlagstaff has a number of factual errors on their website. Something that bothered me about the YesOnProp100 site though is that they site this study. Well, unlike the hippies, I actually downloaded and read the study, and according to it, ALL businesses are bad which is just stupid. It’s not even clear that it applies to Flagstaff anyways, given that Barnstable, Massachusetts and Flagstaff are probably very different towns. The study was written from a very narrow viewpoint, that of property taxes anyways, and sales tax is a big factor in Flagstaff.

The anti-proposition folks only have the one website, which is basically sponsored by Wal-Mart:

ProtectFlag

Taken together, I’d have to rate the WalMart site as being the most honest. The pro-proposition sites shade the truth in various ways about what the proposition is supposed to do, while the anti-site provides a link to the proposition at the top of their home page. I kind of worry about political sites that argue for a proposition they don’t want people to read…

The Arizona Daily Sun, a paper I can’t stand, ended up coming out against the proposition, and given their general liberal bent, that’s kind of surprising. You can read their editorial here. So the fact that even they condemned the proposition says something important to me.

Funny story about commie pizza from my ex-business partner

I would have called it hippie pizza.

I’ve been re-reading Camille Paglia:

Sexual Personae : Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

And I’ve been struck again by how great it is. She’s got a book of poetry out now (not hers, just pieces she’s selected with her commentary).

Break, Blow, Burn : Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems

I hardly ever buy poetry, because as she says in her introduction, most of the “Modern Masters” suck. I didn’t know why until I read her introduction, but now I do. :-) Here’s an excerpt

Anyways, I Googled her today and found two great pieces:

Crisis in the American Universities is a speech she did at M.I.T. Here are some great excerpts:

The problem of the last twenty years is that people think that “liberal” and “conservative” mean something. The liberal and conservative dichotomy is dead. The last time it was authentic was in the Fifties,

The situation right now is that we have on one side people who consider themselves leftists but to me, as far as academe is concerned, are phonies, people who have absolutely no credentials for political thinking, have no training in history, whose basic claim to politics is simply that nothing has happened to them in their lives. A lot of these people have money. I’m sick and tired of these New Historicists with trust funds. I’m so sick and tired of it. And because they’re pampered, their whole lives have been comfortable, because they’ve kissed asses all the way to the top, they have to show they’re authentic by pretending sympathy for the poor lower classes, the poor victims.

Pre Iraq War Interview is an interview about the war she did. Remember she’s an art historian, but she’s also a realistic true thinker, and she gives criticisms of the Bush administration even I would agree with, while at the same time criticizing the critics as well. I’m glad that there are people out there who consider themselves leftists without being idiots. Here are some cool passages:

What do you think of the antiwar movement that is taking shape in the U.S.?

Well, I had great hopes for it but am discouraged. I turned on C-SPAN with great excitement to watch the big march in Washington last month. But talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Several speakers were good, but most of them tried to drag all sorts of extraneous issues into it — calling Bush a “moron,” accusing America of imperialistic ambitions, “No blood for oil” — all these clichés. When fringe, paleo-leftist voices take over the platform, it drives away the moderate, mainstream people in this country who have nagging doubts about this war.

Why aren’t more public figures speaking out about the war, both pro and con, outside of the usual circles? I mean, on the antiwar side, of course, we have some high-profile Hollywood liberals like Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon …

Yes, that’s one of the problems. Of course actors have a right and even obligation to speak out. But so many of them — not Sarandon, whom I respect — come across as witless or knee-jerk. They question Bush’s intelligence, or they sneer and snort. They don’t sound fully mature; they don’t sound like they’ve fully considered the complexity of the positions that any president and his administration have to take. The infestation of the issue by posturing celebrities and the usual suspects on the fruitcake far left make people think, “I don’t want to be one of them.”

And then there are the intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky who’ve made a career abroad out of anti-Americanism. Sontag’s made no secret of her lifelong adulation of all things European. My take is different: My immigrant family escaped poverty in Italy, and so I look at America in a very positive, celebratory way. So I’m reluctant to become part of this easy chorus of anti-Americanism.

I wonder what she thinks now? Some of what she worried about (and I worried about as well) hasn’t come to pass.

Anyways, I love Camille, as I love anyone who’s as opinionated as I am. Its the fuzzy headed people who annoy me. If you haven’t read Sexual Personae order it immediately and read it. It’s probably the best art history book I’ve ever read. Even though I didn’t agree with everything she says, Camille can think, dammit, and its apparent on every page.

I’ve been re-reading Camille Paglia:

Sexual Personae : Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

And I’ve been struck again by how great it is. She’s got a book of poetry out now (not hers, just pieces she’s selected with her commentary).

Break, Blow, Burn : Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems

I hardly ever buy poetry, because as she says in her introduction, most of the “Modern Masters” suck. I didn’t know why until I read her introduction, but now I do. :-) Here’s an excerpt and an interview about the book.

Anyways, I Googled her today and found two great pieces:

Crisis in the American Universities is a speech she did at M.I.T. Here are some great excerpts:

The problem of the last twenty years is that people think that “liberal” and “conservative” mean something. The liberal and conservative dichotomy is dead. The last time it was authentic was in the Fifties,

The situation right now is that we have on one side people who consider themselves leftists but to me, as far as academe is concerned, are phonies, people who have absolutely no credentials for political thinking, have no training in history, whose basic claim to politics is simply that nothing has happened to them in their lives. A lot of these people have money. I’m sick and tired of these New Historicists with trust funds. I’m so sick and tired of it. And because they’re pampered, their whole lives have been comfortable, because they’ve kissed asses all the way to the top, they have to show they’re authentic by pretending sympathy for the poor lower classes, the poor victims.

Pre Iraq War Interview is an interview about the war she did. Remember she’s an art historian, but she’s also a realistic true thinker, and she gives criticisms of the Bush administration even I would agree with, while at the same time criticizing the critics as well. I’m glad that there are people out there who consider themselves leftists without being idiots. Here are some cool passages:

What do you think of the antiwar movement that is taking shape in the U.S.?

Well, I had great hopes for it but am discouraged. I turned on C-SPAN with great excitement to watch the big march in Washington last month. But talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Several speakers were good, but most of them tried to drag all sorts of extraneous issues into it — calling Bush a “moron,” accusing America of imperialistic ambitions, “No blood for oil” — all these clichés. When fringe, paleo-leftist voices take over the platform, it drives away the moderate, mainstream people in this country who have nagging doubts about this war.

Why aren’t more public figures speaking out about the war, both pro and con, outside of the usual circles? I mean, on the antiwar side, of course, we have some high-profile Hollywood liberals like Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon …

Yes, that’s one of the problems. Of course actors have a right and even obligation to speak out. But so many of them — not Sarandon, whom I respect — come across as witless or knee-jerk. They question Bush’s intelligence, or they sneer and snort. They don’t sound fully mature; they don’t sound like they’ve fully considered the complexity of the positions that any president and his administration have to take. The infestation of the issue by posturing celebrities and the usual suspects on the fruitcake far left make people think, “I don’t want to be one of them.”

And then there are the intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky who’ve made a career abroad out of anti-Americanism. Sontag’s made no secret of her lifelong adulation of all things European. My take is different: My immigrant family escaped poverty in Italy, and so I look at America in a very positive, celebratory way. So I’m reluctant to become part of this easy chorus of anti-Americanism.

I wonder what she thinks now? Some of what she worried about (and I worried about as well) hasn’t come to pass.

Anyways, I love Camille, as I love anyone who’s as opinionated as I am. Its the fuzzy headed people who annoy me. If you haven’t read Sexual Personae order it immediately and read it. It’s probably the best art history book I’ve ever read. Even though I didn’t agree with everything she says, Camille can think, dammit, and its apparent on every page.

Just post an answer in the comments or send email to the-at-opinionatedbastard-dot-com where -at- and -dot- are @ and .

(The email address is weird because spammers search web pages, so if I just posted uce@fbi.gov, the spammers would send a lot of spam to that address. They’re more then welcome to send email to uce@fbi.gov. :-) )

Derek got me hooked on Megatokyo

How a light saber works

Ph33r my po\/\/3r!

We were talking about people with low self-esteem, and I said that I have that sometimes.

She responded: “No you don’t. Thinking Hmmm…my plans for becoming Master of the Universe aren’t going so well today does not mean you’re having low self esteem”.

Here’s a review from Variety for those who didn’t like I and II. It looks like Revenge of the Sith will be really cool.

For me, I’ve always been willing to give Lucas a little more slack. While I was somewhat disappointed by I, unlike most of my friends, I just said “it feels like the first third of a movie”. After II I said, “it feels like I’ve now watched two-thirds of a movie”.

In other words, it seems to me that the reason I and II were so weak is because they’re really one 6-hour long movie. Traditional 3 active dramatic structure generally follows this structure:

To quote from here:

In the first act, get your hero up a tree. In the second act, throw progressively bigger rocks at him and force him further up the tree. Then in the third act, let him climb down or shake him out of the tree.

Act I Exposition: The first act has to establish the characters. So in the Phantom Menace, we meet Anakin as a little boy, we meet Padme as a young girl, and we hear about the prophecies about someone “restoring balance to the Force”. We also meet the Chancellor, and of course, the infamous Jar-Jar Binks. In this movie, though Anakin is still young, we see the character traits that make him great yet flawed. In Western literature drama is created when events overtake our hero, exposing his tragic flaw. This narrative structure has been common to theatre since the Ancient Greeks. Much like Oedipus ignored the Greek Chorus, we see Anakin ignoring again and again the advice of others. Typically, Act I is only 25% of the total length. I think one of the problems with Phantom Menace was that it felt padded, I think that Lucas had to pad this movie a bit. Cut down to an hour, I think this movie might have been better.

Act II Development: In the theatre, Act II is usually twice as long as Act I or Act III. Here, Lucas is again constrained by the fact that his vision was too long to fit into one movie. A lot happens in this movie, and I suspect that when I see the third movie I’ll fund a good chunk of Act II plot development ends up being part of the third movie. Anyways, in this movie, we start to see all the elements start to come together for Anakin. The Republic is corrupt and obviously a large collection of factions. Meanwhile, the Sith are behind the scenes actively working to bring down the Empire, and as everyone knows, the Chancellor is the head Sith. Having seen the other movies, we see the clones, the supposed saviors of the Empire for what they really are: Imperial Stormtroopers. We also see evidence of Anakin’s tragic flaw, but in this case, it leads to what should be a happy ending: Anakin marries Padme. Jar Jar Binks shows up again here, and it is he who proposes giving the Chancellor emergency powers, when Padme is busy elsewhere. Perhaps we are supposed to dislike Jar Jar, for he is the ignorance that leads to evil.

Act III Climax: Of course, I haven’t seen the movie yet, but we know what happens don’t we? Anakin is corrupted by the Emperor to the dark side, and becomes Darth Vader in the process. One doesn’t have to be a dark lord of the Sith to see how that can happen: Anakin’s vulnerabilities are his stubbornness and his love for Padme.

So in most plays, the first 75% of the play is just to setup the final 25%, Star Wars is no different, the first two movies were just to setup this one. So I’m looking forward to the third movie, and if its any good, I probably will get all 3 on DVD when they come out. Maybe if I edit all three movies into one really long movie (cutting about half of the first movie) others can see what I see.

This isn’t the first movie I’ve had this experience with, Back to the Future parts 2 and 3 were one long movie, the 2nd and 3rd of the original Star Wars movies also seem like one long movie, and the Matrix sequel was one long movie as well.

Back to the Future is really still 2 separate movies, it seems more like an old movie serial in that each movie seems like a TV episode. I think that’s why that movie hangs together so well.

The 2nd and 3rd (now 5th and 6th) of the original Star Wars movies leveraged off the 1st movie as Act I, allowing the Empire Strikes Back to function as the plot development movie. If you just watch Empire, its really not that good of a movie. If you watch all 3 at one sitting however, despite the fact that the first movie seems more self-contained, they can loosely function as one long movie.

The Matrix sequel splits 3 acts into two movies, so consequently it ends up being a much better movie viewed as one continuous piece then either piece separately. There’s no climax in the second movie, and no exposition in the third movie. Viewed together, the whole Matrix sequel as one long comes out as a better movie.

It’s important to remember though that we’re talking about the 3rd movie in a 6 part series. Taken as a whole, Star Wars is really the history of Darth Vader: prophesied to restore balance to the Force, it is really Darth Vader who destroys the Emperor, not Luke Skywalker. Perhaps I shouldn’t edit the first 3 movies into one, perhaps I should edit all 6 movies into one.

P.S. To my liberal friends: It took Bush 2 to get rid of Saddam…

I was watching the first Star Wars movie (1977) last night.

Ya know, Luke is a total whiny butt.

I never noticed this when I was a kid.

Now I’m watching the movie and thinking, “so he has some chores to do. Big Deal.”

Growing up sucks.

So the last couple of years, especially since the beginning of this year, my wife has been in the throes of peri-menopause.

That is, the changes women go through before menopause. You would think that early on, the doctors would have correctly diagnosed her.

No such luck. These days, because of birth control pills, most women have the effects of peri-menopause much reduced. They're still present though, they just don't realize it, because all that knowledge has been lost by the general population because it basically skipped a generation. We've forgotten that the “change of life” happens before your periods stop, not after.

In my wife's case, because of fertility issues, she's never taken birth control pills. So she had a wide range of weird unexplained symptoms: lack of energy, GERD, GERD-related asthma. Even with an Eastern approach, I couldn't find much of anything wrong.

Luckily, a friend of the family had recommended a book:

The Change Before the Change: Everything You Need to Know to Stay Healthy in the Decade Before Menopause

My wife started reading it...pretty much every symptom she had was related to perimenopause. Not only that, but reading the book, she realized that while cancer didn't run in her family, depression and divorce around age 44 did...

So now she's on low-dose birth control pills, and its made a world of difference. As we say around here now, We Love Estrogen.

Thought I'd pass that along to any women in their 40's or men married to them. Buy that book.

This is a long post touching on hernias, elderly parents, medicine, Qi Gong, dieting, nutritional fads and California…

It does not use the I-word at all…

Spent 8 hours trying to get somewhere 2 hours away today.

That is, I spent 8 hours in Phoenix trying to fly home to Flagstaff.

The problem is that it was all a small set of incremental decisions which are each reasonable but the overall outcome is just stupid.

My flight from SFO arrives at 2 pm for a 1 hour layover. Then the flight to Flagstaff is 1/2 hour late leaving…then they decide to switch from a 37 seat plane to a 20 seat plane…bumping 17 people. I’m #38 (don’t know how that works, but I was), so I know I’m getting forcibly bumped. Since I haven’t eaten all day, I volunteer for what I think is the 8pm flight, thinking I can change my mind and drive if I have to, but I have to eat first before I can make my decision.

But with one thing and another, I don’t get the paperwork until 5:30… At that point, I would still have to uncheck my bag, then rent a car, so I decide what the hell, I’ll wait, I’m tired anyways.

Except what I heard as the 8pm flight was actually the 8:56 flight. I kind of missed the :56 part.

Except now its 9:30, and the flight coming in from Flagstaff still hasn’t arrived, and it takes at least 20 minutes to turn the plane. So if it arrived right now, it wouldn’t leave until 9:50. So maybe I’ll get out of here at 10, then a 40 minute flight, so 10:40. If I’d just gotten my suitcase and rented a car, I would have been home at 6…

Sigh. And I’ll have to get a cab ride once I get to Flagstaff…

So my wife and I signed up with the local program to help the soldiers families while they're away.

So today, my wife went shopping with the wife of a local soldier. She has a couple of 2 year olds, so shopping can be lots of work, but with my wife there to help it was fun.

Though I dunno, it might have been cheaper to send a care package to Iraq instead...

Just kidding, I did that at Xmas.

Not my wife's choice anyways, it was the other ladies choice.

In a week or so, I'm signed up to go help her move a couch.

Technorati Tags: Iraq

So lightning struck my local broadband node 2 weeks after I'd gotten addicted to it.

Hence the light posting this week.

In other news, Michael Yon (see blogroll) has an eyewitness report of a failed IED attack.

It seems to me like the individual IEDs are more deadly, but our troops are more experienced.

Just because I actually enjoyed the Dukes of Hazzard movie?

Granted, its not Citizen Kane. Good thing too, because that movie was really boring...

Rosebud!

Back in May, I wrote a piece called Goose Stepping Hippies where I made fun of one of our local health food stores for being overly anal about the use of their parking lot. I thought it was particularly bad on their part, because as a customer of that store, I knew that more often then not, it was the health food store’s customers who were parking at the bookstore, not the reverse. The only time there are more then 3 people in that bookstore normally is the 3 times a year students are trading in their old textbooks for pizza cash.

Unfortunately, my smacking them around didn’t have the desired effect. If anything, things have escalated. Now if you go to the health food store they’ll warn you that if you didn’t park in their particular section of the conjoined parking lot, your car might get booted and towed. In other words, they’ve resorted to WAD, Weapons of Automotive Detention.

Presumably what is going to happen next is that they are going to paint borders on the parking lot. There will be the “bookstore zone”, the “gas station zone”, and the “health food zone”. Border guards and checkpoints will come next, followed by peace keeping troops after tensions break out between the people buying Slim Jims™ at the convenience store and the vegans.

Yep, I can see it all now. We’ll have to have a United Lots or UL, with a Parking Council made up of ambassadors from each business. Then if customers from one business “invade” the parking lot of the other business, the “Parking Council” can institute “sanctions”.

Of course someone will violate those sanctions (probably people who need both gas for their car and granola for their tummy). This will no doubt lead to some parking log superpower like say, WalMart™, invading the gas station in order to make the world safe for shopping.

Or maybe everyone could just lighten up. Because its not just these three businesses either. It seems like every business in town has peed on certain parking spaces while other businesses have peed on others. Whenever I go shopping at a local business its like playing Monopoly™ except I never seem to get $200 for passing Go.

Some businesses, like the place where I had coffee this morning not only are insisting that only “their” customers park in “their” parking spaces, but now have conditions! According to their new sign, they would rather people not use their parking lot for car pooling, car repair, skiing, and a couple of other things. I can understand them asking nicely that people not use their parking lot as a “Park-N-Ride” service (profit before the environment after all), but it seems to me that if your car breaks down, unless you have magical teleportation powers, you’re going to have to fix it where it lies. Though the prohibition against skiing confuses me, given that the sign is new, its summer, and the sign is hand lettered so it won’t last until winter…

For all that it has become the mission in life of the Daily Sun (our local crappy Pulitzer-owned paper) to rag on WalMart at every opportunity, I notice that they aren’t particularly anal about their parking lots. In fact, come to think of it, every major corporation in town is fairly relaxed about their parking. The exception would be the banks downtown, but only during business hours from what I’ve seen. In fact, I generally won’t go downtown until after the banks close just for that reason.

Perhaps the small businesses in town could learn something from the big businesses in town. It’s not your parking lot. It’s our parking lot, because we're the customers. We give you money, and you do what we say. That’s the way it works. If you want to start giving us money, we’ll think about doing what you say. But until then, lighten up, and stop telling us what to do. We’ll park where we damn well please, and if you don’t like it, we’ll be more then happy to stop doing business with you.

Technorati Tags: Flagstaff

So my wife comes into my office and says “my bruises from paintball have healed. That means its time to go again!”

Ever notice how every couple of years they try to invent some new kind of magic fat that somehow its ok to eat? Or the reverse in this case, that somehow Lays Potato Chips are ok, because they don't have any Trans Fat?

One of the reasons Weight Watchers worked so well for me is all that nonsense went away. You get a point for every 50 calories, so its like shopping: you can eat those Super Size French Fries for 16 points, or you can just have a cheeseburger for 12 points.

Surprised as I was to find out the French Fries were more then the cheeseburger, it was easy to give them up. They tasted good, but they weren't that much of a bargain...

Your shopping instinct meets dieting. Genius!

As you may have noticed, I've been getting a little bored with Ernie the Troll.

I admit, when he first showed up, I enjoyed reading his half-baked rantings. It was like watching the monkeys at the zoo. And at first, his comments had at least the glimmers of reason.

But he needs new material. Lately its just the same-old same-old.

It's just, well, boring.

Lately he's been getting weirder.

In the last couple of months, Ernie has said:

• That I beat my wife
• That all US Soldiers are ignorant hillbillies
• That I'm a Fundamentalist Christian, part of the “American Taliban”
• That I'm a Satanist
• That I'm a neo-con
• That previously, it wasn't popular to dislike conservatives, but “now it is”
• That he's going to “vote Republican” to “help destroy the nation”
• That he is “bushido” and is going to “kick my ass”

Yeah, whatever. The problem with trolls is that its pointless to reason with them. Anyone who read's the masthead knows that I'm not a big fan of the right or the left, what I am a fan of is intelligent criticism. That's why I linked to Fester today. People who can intelligently disagree with me are much more interesting then people like Ernie. Most trolls are really just looking for attention so responding to them (as this post is doing, unfortunately) just encourages them.

Here's a Wikipedia article on trolls. It's pretty good. For me, the thing that makes Ernie a troll are the following:

• Inability to use the shift key indicates he's probably a teenager.
• Ernie Ervin is a fake name, no Ernie Ervin in Flagstaff that I could find.
• Never refutes points made in counter to his arguments, just jumps to a different topic.

I see a great future ahead for Ernie after he graduates from high school as a media pundit. That is not a compliment...

So last night, my wife and I went to this slide show by Martin Gray. It was very interesting, and annoying at the same time. It was very interesting because Martin Gray has spent most of his life traveling to and taking pictures of the world’s sacred sites.

It was annoying because he talked non-stop, and it was a mixture of interesting information about the pictures and rants about all kinds of things (like he dislikes much of the new age movement, despite being a member of same).

One of the things he ranted about was the proposal to use reclaimed water for snowmaking at the Snow Bowl. According to him, if this went through, then the people of Sedona would end up drinking the people of Flagstaff’s pee. He also likened having the ski area up there in the first place to be like “having a WalMart in the vatican”.

Well, I’ve been to the Vatican. I bought a plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus from a nun for $.25. Come to think of it, the Chapel in Sedona has a really nice gift shop downstairs. If theres one thing the Catholic Church knows, it’s the correct quote; it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil. So its too late, there already is a WalMart in the Vatican, and its run by nuns.

The argument about Sedonans drinking pee was just funny to me, because I live at the base of the mountain and I have a septic tank, so residents of both Sedona and Flagstaff have been drinking my pee for 7 years now. In fact, since about 10 neighbors live upstream of me, I’ve been drinking my neighbors pee for about that long.

In fact, the people of Sedona already drink the people of Flagstaff’s pee, because what Flagstaff does right now with that reclaimed water is let it flow downstream…to Sedona. All this snowmaking on the peaks thing would do is move the output north about 8 miles. So what would happen is that the people of Flagstaff would start drinking their own pee. Similarly, I guess that means that I would have to be drinking Flagstaff pee, instead of just my neighbors.

Of course, some people think that “recycling” your pee is a good thing.

Of course the real issue is that the mountain is sacred to the Navajo and the Hopi. They have a point; I wouldn’t like it if they went into christian churches and peed on the altar. But it’s kind of too late; my wife and I go hiking on the mountain multiple times a week, and there aren’t any bathrooms on the mountain if you get my drift. Somehow I don’t think that the Navajo hold it until they get home when they go hiking on the mountain either…

So if you live in Sedona, you’re already drinking my pee, and the pee of everyone in Flagstaff. If you don’t like it, well, I guess you’ll have to move upstream. I hear there’s lots of room in Alaska. As the joke goes, you don’t buy beer, you just rent it.

Of course, all of the water in the world was originally part of the ocean, and fish don’t have toilets either…

No matter how you slice it, I see lots of pee drinking in your future.

Read the link

via Defense Tech

I sent this in response to an email from someone who reads the Noise and thought I was more right wing, because I see it as my job in the Noise to provide a counterpoint to the left-wingedness of the local arts & entertainment rag:

 I'm a small-l libertarian. 

 That is, I find the right's obsession with turning morals into laws and the left's obsession with political correctness equally annoying. I'm small-l, because its obvious to me that there are certain things the government is good for, and a reasonable amount of government is good. We don't have captialism in this country, we have democratic capitalism, an oxymoron that means “whatever we want it to mean”. 

  A good example was there was the diatribe in Reason (the libertarian magazine) recently about the Bush Administration refusing to funnel foreign aid money through any NGO that wouldn't sign a pledge against prostitution. “Interfering with their first amendment rights.”

  Personally for me, that's dead on. If you want a hotbed of prostitution in a country, including child prostitution, slavery, etc. just go to an area where lots of foreign aid workers and peacekeepers hang out. Its not interfering with anyone's first amendment rights to not give them money to spend in another country... 

  Now do I think prostitution should be legalized in the US? Maybe. Its a tough call, there's good and bad sides. A large L would say Yes, me I'm just more Jeffersonian. 

  So definitely small L. The world is too complicated for capital letter people. Be a democrat, not a Democrat, or a republican, not a Republican. Be a christian, not a Christian. 

  You're definitely right that I trash the left more then the right even on my Blog. That's because I generally find them more annoying. My wife put it best: All snobs are bad, but Granola Snobs are the worst. 

  That is, I find that right wing extremists are obviously ignorant idiots, while left wing extremists are well-educated idiots. It seems more useful to puncture the balloons of left wing extremists because they're more smug. 

  I actually have plenty of criticism of the Bush administration's conduct of the war, but I tend not to write about it because the stupid-left-wing-let's-make-it-worse-by-pulling-out-or-make-up-shit-because-we-hate-Bush is so much more common. Probably that's a response to comments, I don't get a lot of “boo-ya, kill the ragheads” comments on my blog, instead I get more of the “soldiers are hillbillies” comments. 

  Something I think we both agree on though is that the Bush administration is very Wilsonian. However, I see the Bush administration's change in foreign policy direction as a big change for the US and I hope it continues. I (and for that matter the Bush administration) very much acknowledge that in the past the US has supported dictators at the expense of freedom. Even Ronald Reagan did so right? 

  However, while all previous administrations except perhaps Wilson (who might have been successful if he hadn't had a stroke) have mostly paid lip service to spreading freedom (except for RR in Eastern Europe), Bush2 has stated clear goals and is tracking the State Department in working towards those goals. see here

 So are we supporting a dictator in Pakistan? Yes  Are we also trying to build up the infrastructure to support democracy in Pakistan? Yes

 To me those two questions/answers sum up the period we're living in. If 9/11 taught us anything, it taught us that we need to be a mixture of Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.

Last Year I bought a printer from Epson and got a rebate for $20. Except instead of sending me a check, they sent me this weird debit card for www.myecount.com. So when I was cleaning out my office, I found the stupid thing and tried to use it. No go. So I went to their website.

Turns out they charge you $3/month for every month you don't use the card.

I now have only $5 on the card, which is going to be almost impossible to use.

So let me get this straight. Instead of giving me $20, Epson has given these guys $15?

Idiots. Once burned, twice shy. I won't be trusting Epson for a while now. Don't these guys know it takes a long time to gain a customer's trust, but only an instant to lose it?

Those HP printers are looking better now...

Technorati Tags: rebate, epson

I liked Aeon Flux.

Looking at the movie reviews though, you'd think it was the worst movie ever...

It's not. In fact, its one of the best science fiction movies I've seen in that it doesn't talk down to the audience.

Of course, it's not really Aeon Flux, the movie. I didn't expect it to be, because the original Aeon Flux was sort of this oblique commentary on the whole Cold War. From the trailers, I knew that wasn't going to happen (the Monicans are no longer a separate country but “rebels”), so about 30 minutes into the movie, I decided to evaluate it as a regular science fiction movie. In that case, I found it pretty good.

It's fun, stylized, and makes you think. The future actually looks like the future, instead of “like the present only different”.

I found it to be like Gattaca, only entertaining...

Though, sure, the Original Aeon Flux was better (in an artsy sort of way), I still enjoyed the movie.

Get your “Opinionated Bastard Coffee Mug” right here

T-Shirts buttons and some other fun stuff there as well too.

This is my own version of a cake recipe I found on the internet one day looking for “espresso chocolate cake”. My main tweak is that I use Hershey's Cocoa powder and butter instead of the baking chocolate. That way there's nothing to melt, so this cake is even easier to make...

Flourless Chocolate Espresso Cake

Things you will need:

Sauce: 3 packages of Frozen raspberries in syrup 10 oz each

If you can't find the ones in syrup, you'll have to mix in a LOT of sugar.

Cake:

   1.5 cups cocoa powder
   5.5 sticks butter
   1 cup white sugar
   1 c  Freshly brewed espresso
   1 c  Golden brown sugar; packed
   8 lg Eggs; beaten to blend

   Parchment Paper, Cake Pans with high walls

If you want to be fancy:

Some powdered sugar for making a design on the top.

Making the Sauce: Working in batches, puree raspberries and syrup in processor. Strain puree into medium bowl. Chill.

Making the Cake: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line bottom of 9-inch-diameter cake pan with 2-inch-high sides with parchment. Basically, you do this by putting the pan over the parchment paper, drawing a circle around it with a pencil, then cutting out the circle slightly inside the line. That gives you a nice circle for the bottom of the pan, which will keep the cake from sticking when you try to get it out.

Place all chocolate in large bowl. Bring butter, espresso and sugar to boil in medium saucepan, stirring to dissolve sugar. Add to chocolate; whisk until smooth. Cool slightly. Whisk in eggs. Pour batter into prepared pan. Place cake pan in roasting pan. Pour enough hot water into roasting pan to come halfway up sides of cake pan. Bake until center of cake is set and tester inserted into center comes out with a few moist crumbs attached, about 1 hour (takes me about 1.5 hours in Flagstaff though). Remove pan from water. Chill cake overnight.

Cut around pan sides to loosen cake. Using oven mitts as aid, hold pan bottom over low heat for 15 seconds, warming slightly to release cake. Place platter over pan. Hold pan and platter together tightly and invert. Lift off cake pan; peel off parchment.

A fancy design for the top: Ok, now what I generally do is get some sort of stencil and I put it over the cake. Like a flat snowflake ornament, or if I'm making the cake for a pot luck at the martial arts studio the black part of a giant yin-yang symbol. Or if its for Xmas dinner, I get one of the giant plastic snowflake ornaments and use that instead. If you then sift powdered sugar onto the top (fairly thick because the top of the cake is moist) you end up with a cool design on top of your cake after you remove the stencil.

Serve very small slices (cake serves 20) with sauce and fresh berries. Trust me on the small slices, this cake is so rich you'll never finish a typical cake slice.

So InstaPundit reviewed, of all things, a bean bag chair. Fair enough. But I went to the website, which asked me “What's your favorite position?”.

Complete with a hot blond you can “pose” by mousing over the various options.

I'd have to say, position #3 babe, position #3. Hunh! Hunh! Hunh! Aaaaah!

Well, first off the last few weeks I've been working on my GTD tool, Frictionless.

Mostly though work has just been busy and stressful or I've been traveling.

Sometimes, it amazes me how everyone in this country and the rest of the world mesh together to form a whole, a living machine we call by many names: Civilization, the economy, life...

There's this picture in my head of a giant glowing web of people interacting.

Today I found a concrete example of that picture. Impossible to describe, just go see.

Sometimes, it amazes me how everyone in this country and the rest of the world mesh together to form a whole, a living machine we call by many names: Civilization, the economy, life…

There’s this picture in my head of a giant glowing web of people interacting.

Today I found a concrete example of that picture. Impossible to describe, just go see.

Technorati Tags: 300, puppy

Money made from my blog to date: $1600

Money made from non-nekkid-women on my blog: $40

Money made from nekkid-women: $1560

Sign Up Here if you want to make money on your blog as well. After you’ve signed up, email me and I’ll send you the HTML for your own site if you like.

Here’s the interesting part.

When I get a Instalanche, I don’t see an upsurge in revenue.

It seems that the people who are willing to signup for the pretty high-quality stuff at the Digital DreamGirls site aren’t the same people that read Instapundit. Rather, its the casual web surfers who end up subscribing. That is, bored web surfers are more likely to buy porn then Instapundit readers.

Who knew?

Also note that my wife, who gets to deposit the “Porn Checks” as she calls them, heartily approves.

Technorati Tags: blogging, money, porn

I have no idea why, but someone emailed me a link to their blog. It seems they work in the porn industry in Britain.

So I went over and checked it out.

The very first post I read was all about how they have a pot luck at work constantly.

Meanwhile, in my new job, occasionally people bring in food for lunch to share with everyone.

Of course, they don’t come up with cute “Porno Names” for the dishes like Cock Soup (lots of sausage in that one) or Lesbian Stew (no meat).

But maybe they should.

Anyways, her blog is a bit surreal, but its worth a link

Spoof trailer for the Shining.

Finally, an on-line to-do manager that understands the concepts of contexts, sub-tasks, works with the iPhone, email, SMS, etc.

I'm going to seriously look at supporting this with Frictionless, my freeware program for Getting Things Done.

Check it out.