Weak links

You don't have to be smart to work at a polling place on election day.
I've seen that truth borne out time and time again in my newspaper career.
And yesterday, was no exception.
My county used state-of-the-art touch-screen voting machines for the first time in the May 2 primary. It made voting a breeze and should have made the final tabulation even faster and easier than the previous computerized system.
The county clerk said she hoped to have all of the votes tallied within 90 minutes of the 6 p.m. closing of the polls.
But she apparently had forgotten about the weak links in the election process.
Despite having attended a training session that covered all aspects of operating the new equipment, poll workers in several precincts shut down their voting equipment improperly, not giving the computers time to write the results to a disc. As a consequence, it was impossible to upload the digital voting data to the master computer in the clerk's office at the courthouse. Fortunately, the machines generate a paper backup.
But that meant the numbers had to be manually read out and typed into the master computer.
I hung around the courthouse until 10:30 p.m. When I called about 11:30 p.m., I was told it would be at least another hour.
I'm reminded of the time when a neighboring county introduced computerized voting machines back in the early 1990s. The county clerk, who runs the election process, proudly boasted that she would have the votes tallied by 8 p.m.
But that was based on the assumption that the poll workers would be quick about packing up their equipment and getting the data modules to the courthouse as soon as possible.
The last precinct straggled in around 9 p.m.
Their excuse?
Their polling place was in a church and the ladies of the church insisted on feeding them dinner after the polls closed.
Nobody said democracy is perfect. It's just better than any of the alternatives.
When the results were finally posted this morning, our friend Ken Campbell had won a resounding victory in a three-way race for the Republican nomination for county sheriff. Ken was clearly the best qualified. He's one of the guys who ran the combat pistol course I took a year or so ago and is also an instructor at Jeff Cooper's Gunsite firearms training facility in Arizona. He got 60% of the vote with the other two guys receiving only about 20% each.
In this heavily Republican county, the GOP primary nomination is tantamount to election, since the Democrats seldom put up candidates for the November contest.
I've never had a political candidate's sign in my yard, largely because my previous life as a newspaper reporter required me to at least give the impression of impartiality, but I made an exception this time and stuck a big blue Ken Campbell for Sheriff sign out there.
I guess I need to check Ken's website to see if we need to turn in the sign or hang onto it in case there is a Democrat candidate in the fall election.

What about Bob?

Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour program debuted this morning on XM satellite radio.
I'd marked my calendar and made a point of being tuned to XM Channel 40 Deep Tracks to catch it at 10 a.m.
I'm not sure what I expected. I guess I hoped for something more intimate and self-revelatory. But that's my problem, not Dylan's.
He strung together an hour of music on the theme of "weather," starting off with Muddy Waters and running the musical gamut through the Staple Singers, Judy Garland, Dean Martin and my personal favorite weather-related song, Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind." He also threw in a lot of musical trivia and details, like how "Walking in the Rain" led to the release of the imprisoned black musicians who introduced it and reminding me that Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics to "Summer Wind."
For awhile there, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't hearing Tom Petty's XM show, although Dylan sounded a bit more self-conscious than Petty.
All things considered, I thought it was a pretty good first effort. It was interesting to hear Dylan in this role and I hope he loosens up a bit.

Pete Report

Pete's home from the vet and recuperating from his ordeal.
I picked him up a little after 3 p.m. and he insisted on lying across my lap for the drive home. Ever try to drive a 5-speed, 2-seat Honda del Sol with a six-month-old Aussie across your lap? Shifting was a bit of a challenge, but we managed.
And, yes, I was right about the cause of our phone problems.
The repairman found Pete's gnawing had damaged one of the phone wires going into the junction box outside the back door.
At least it made for an easy fix. He was only here about 10 minutes.
Pete spent a couple of hours lying next to me on the couch, dozing and whimpering occasionally while I watched TV.

Trust

Pete’s at the vet getting neutered and I’m sitting at home feeling very guilty.
Not because of the decision to neuter – the long-term benefits far outweigh the negative aspects – but because of the terror he must be experiencing.
He has a reasonable expectation that Maria and I will protect him from harm and this procedure, however beneficial, represents a betrayal of that trust.
He looked genuinely alarmed when I handed his leash to the vet’s assistant and left him with her in the examining room.
I keep thinking of the John Belushi quote from “Animal House:” “You fucked up. You trusted us.”

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

Like I said eariler, something is always breaking or failing or wearing out around here.
Today, it’s our telephone line. We have no dial tone and are receiving no calls.
Oddly, though, our DSL internet connection that uses the same phone line, is working fine.
I’ve found a few places where Pete, the Aussie, has chewed on phone cords – specifically the cordless kitchen phone and the lines running to the box outside the back door – so he is, of course, a suspect.
The phone company suggested I sign up immediately for their line protection program, which involves a $3.50 monthly charge and a $25 up-front fee, noting that when the phone guy shows up tomorrow it would otherwise be a minimum $50 charge, plus labor.
I kinda like not getting phone calls on a Sunday. It’s 6:15 p.m. and on a normal Sunday we would have heard from Maria’s mother, her daughter (multiple times) and both of her two brothers. Sprint’s digital cellular service is weak here, so our cell phones are useless inside the house, except up in the attic. If I want to use my cell phone from home, I usually go out to the back yard to get a signal.
We took Pete up to Petsmart for puppy school this afternoon. The young 20-something woman with a fuzzy brown puppy who usually sits to our left in the puppy training corral was there in her usual stiletto-heeled sandals and high-maintenance look. She remembered that Maria is a newspaper editor and started jabbering about a photographer friend who was getting divorced from his wife and who needed a job. At the same time, her puppy was entangled in a vicious fight with another dog and the instructor and other dog’s owner were trying to separate them. She, of course, was completely oblivious to this little drama until the instructor – down on her knees in the middle of the fray, yanked on the girl’s slacks leg and said, “Hey. Would you please control your dog?”

She, of course, took offense and defended her dog with a lame, “Poor puppy. He doesn’t know any better.”
Those of us who witnessed it instantly recognized that we had just gotten a preview of how she will inflict her misbehaving children upon an innocent public if and when she becomes a mother.
During the mid-class potty break in the mulched area to the side of the store, she confided to Maria that she thinks the instructor doesn’t like her and muttered darkly about complaining to the management because she paid “good money” for this course.
I cringe whenever I hear that expression. Ever hear of “bad money?”
Christ! What a self-absorbed twit.
Her dog’s name is Amos and I’m tempted to start calling him Anus just to tweak her up.

Hey, Kids! What time is it?

That used to be how Buffalo Bob Smith opened the Howdy Doody show on Saturday morning TV.
I recently rented a DVD with 4 episodes just to refresh my memory about that cultural icon of the 1950s - the show ran from 1947 to 1960. It was a struggle to get through all four episodes and the only thing that kept me engaged was the cultural anachronisms like the gravel-voiced Chief Thunderthud and the bizarre ADD/HD behavior of Clarabelle the Clown and the commercials in which Smith told kids to ask their moms to buy Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies.
But I bring up that opening line today because I just noticed, for about the 10th time in the last few weeks, that my Windows XP (SP2) refuses to recognize that Indiana is observing Daylight Savings Time.
For many years, certainly since the Uniform Time Act of the 1960s, Indiana and Arizona were the only states that did not observe Daylight Savings Time. When the rest of the country fiddled with its clocks to "spring ahead" an hour in the spring and "fall back" an hour in the autumn, we dwelt in the Land that Time Forgot and did nothing. Consequently, our neighbors in Ohio and to the east fell into step with us in the colder months and the folks from Illinois to western Kansas were in synch with us in the warmer months.
Our new governor, Mitch Daniels, decided this was somehow hampering Hoosier commerce with customers in other states - I never could understand why - and persuaded the Legislature to put us on DST starting this year.
But the folks at Microsoft apparently haven't gotten the word. They reach out and tweak my Windows XP with updates on a regular basis, but they haven't gotten around to addressing the time change issue.
So when I glanced at my computer clock in the bottom right corner of my monitor a few minutes ago, it read 10:35 a.m., when it was actually 11:35 a.m.
I can't imagine than no one from Indiana has e-mailed them about this issue, but just in case, I think I'll suggest they fix it.

Money Pit Redux

The downside to having a lot of stuff is that, sooner or later, all of it is going to cause problems.
Today's problem list is topped by the clothes dryer. We have a washer-dryer combo - washer on the bottom, dryer on the top. I had a splendid one that I paid $1,000 for when I lived in my condo in Indianapolis, but when we moved into this house in 2001, Maria insisted on bringing along her own washer and dryer, despite my predictions that they would not fit into our half-bath/laundry room.
So I included my washer-dryer in the condo sale.
Of course, when it came time to move her appliances into the laundry room, guess what. They were too big. So we ended up giving them to her Amish brother and paid about $1,000 for another combo unit.
A couple of weeks ago, the washer unit started making a horrible screeching sound on final spin. So I called the appliance repair guy. Naturally, we couldn't get it to screech while he was here. He examined the drive belt and pronounced it sound and went away after charging me $65.
Early this week, the dryer started making a scraping noise like a piece of metal was stuck between the drum and its housing.
So I called the appliance guy again and now I'm waiting for him to show up and take more of my money.
Next on the list is the pair of MotoLites mounted on the front brake calipers of my BMW K1200GT motorcycle. They're halogen auxiliary driving lights that I added in the interest of (a.) being more conspicuous in the traffic mix and (b.) being able to see better at night. I discovered last night that they aren't working.
That forced me to finally make an appointment at the nearest BMW dealership - 100 miles away in Savoy, Ill. - for the long overdue 24,000-mile service. I'm on their schedule for 9 a.m. May 23, so let's pray for good weather that day.
Third is our 2002 Subaru Forester, which needs a new catalytic converter. The "check engine" light has been on for nearly a year because the electronic sensors don't like the information they're getting from the exhaust system. The techies at Subaru say it's not a crisis and we won't hurt anything by driving it, but eventually we'll see a degradation of performance and have to pony up the $1,100 or so for a new catalytic converter.
Close behind is my 1994 Honda del Sol, which is waaaaaaay overdue for a new timing belt ($600). The owner's manual says timing belts should be replaced every 60,000 miles. My car has 185,000 miles on the odometer and is still on the original timing belt. Clearly, I'm on borrowed time and it could fail any day.
And I almost forgot about the construction crew scheduled to work on my roof tomorrow. We've had roofers chasing a leak for more than a year and finally we think we have a correct diagnosis.
Seems the bozos who did our current roof did a mostly okay job except they didn't get the flashing right around the main chimney. This made it possible for wind-driven rain to come through our bedroom and bathroom ceilings.
The work tomorrow, which is estimated to cost us $1,800, will correct that problem and also remove an old unused chimney that has served as a point of entry to our kitchen for birds on at least three occasions and also admits minor amounts of rain. This, obviously, is must-do stuff considering how much damage continued rain infiltration could do.
Sometimes I think I retired a bit too early.

Cleaned up

Dressed up... sorta, for a Chamber of Commerce awards dinner. At least I'm not wearing a BMW motorcycle t-shirt.

Eagle Watch

If you have a good broadband internet connection, check out www.infotecbusinesssystems.com/wildlife
It's a realtime webcam of a bald eagle nest in British Columbia where the eggs are set to hatch any time now.
Thanks to my ATO Fraternity brother Dave Knight for this one.

It's for your own good, Pete

Pete, out for a car ride.
Our 6-month-old Aussie, Pete, has a rendezvous with destiny on Monday next.
Pete is going to the vet to get neutered.
I'm reminded of the Gary Larson cartoon of the dog with the smug smile on his face telling the family cat that he (the dog) is going to get "tutored."
As a male, I have a very negative visceral reaction to this business of making my little friend Pete into a eunuch.
He loves me and he trusts me and this is how I pay him back. It seems like betrayal on a horrific scale.
But the vet and others who know about dogs tell me I'm really doing Pete a favor. Male Aussies who aren't neutered have a very high risk of testicular cancer. Also, the overwhelming majority of dogs who get hit by cars are un-neutered males out looking to get laid.
So the best way to assure that Pete will have a long and presumably happy life with us is have him neutered.
I hate it, but I guess it's got to be.

Getting Malled

Shopping, shopping, shopping...
God! How I hate shopping.

The dawn patrol

Got up at 6 a.m. and left home in semi-darkness to make an 8 a.m. dental appointment some 50 miles south of here on Indy's southside.
I had allowed for rush hour traffic that didn't materialize, so I arrived in time for a quick McDonald's breakfast. Took a chance on the bacon, egg and cheese McGriddle sandwich. Gack!
Wrapping blueberry pancake-ettes around bacon, egg and cheese is not my idea of a pleasing taste combination.
Also, what's up with the "Let us add the cream and sugar" campaign with their supposedly deluxe coffee? I think they were losing their ass on sweetener and creamer excesses and decided to cut their losses by controlling the stuff, while making it look like an added service.
Anyhow, I think I need to find a dentist closer to home. I wonder how many I passed on my way to my current dentist...

No cake for Adolf

Today is Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
He would have been 117 if he were alive today.
When I was a kid, the pulp magazines of the time were full of speculation that Hitler had escaped from Berlin during the last days of the Third Reich and was hiding out in South America or maybe Africa or Southeast Asia. The barbershop I went to as a kid had a subscription to Police Gazette, a smarmy rag that wasn’t all that different from the stuff you see at the supermarket checkout counter.
A lot of writers made a pretty good living cranking out stories about how Hitler and Martin Bormann and Dr. Josef Mengle were skulking around somewhere in the bush, having been spirited out of Europe by an underground network of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
Now we know that Hitler and his new missus did themselves in down in the Fuhrerbunker and their burned bodies were discovered by the Russians. There is supposedly some pieces of Hitler’s charred skull deep in the archives of the Kremlin.
Forensic evidence likewise finally determined that Martin Bormann was killed while trying to break out of Berlin.
Mengle, it turns out, was the only one of the three to actually make it out of Germany and Europe, hiding out in Argentina until his death in 1979 while swimming.
But even if Germany hadn’t lost the war, Hitler was doomed. Research of his medical records indicates he was in the final stages of syphilis, probably contracted as a young man in Vienna or perhaps as a solder in World War I.
So he only made it a few days past his 56th birthday.

Duty

I just finished Duty by Bob Greene, the Chicago Tribune columnist.
It's a memoir about Greene's father, who raised his family in Columbus, Ohio. And it's about Paul Tibbets, another Columbus resident, who happens to be "the man who won World War II."
Tibbets was the commander of the 509th Composite Group and the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Greene's father, Robert Greene, also served in World War II, holding the rank of major and fighting in Italy.
The book is about Greene's effort to know his late father - to understand his dad's life and the impact the war had on it. His conversations with Tibbets yielded a series of newspaper columns and grew into an ongoing friendship. He had lingering questions he never got to ask his father, so he poses them to Tibbets - things like how today's sexually liberated America squares with the morals and standards his generation professed and what's become of civility and good manners in public.
He also probes Tibbets' feelings about committing what was at the time the single most violent act in the history of mankind and whether incinerating Hiroshima troubles his conscience.
It's a book that deserves a wide audience, especially among those who question the rightness of Harry Truman's decision to use atomic weapons to end the war.
Tibbets' answer, echoed by countless soldiers who would have had to invade Japan, as well as by many Japanese, is that Truman and Tibbets did the right thing.
Tibbets' mission was a factor in the lives of most of the people I know - certainly those who count American soldiers, sailors or airmen among their ancestors.
That includes me. Had there been no war-ending atomic attacks, my first father-in-law, an Army captain in the 144th Field Artillery Group, would almost certainly have been shipped from Europe to the Pacific to participate in the invasion. He wrote to his wife on V-E day that he expected to be ordered to the Pacific soon. Had he been one of the predicted hundreds of thousands of casualties, my first wife would not have been born in 1946. And, while I may have fathered two sons with another woman, they would not be the two fine young men I call my sons today. And my granddaughter, had she been born, would have a different heritage.
Greene writes about a Memorial Day weekend trip he took to Branson, Mo., with Tibbets, his navigator and his bombardier and their wives. One evening, they were guests of a Japanese-born violinist - now an American citizen and country music star (yeah, go figure). The entertainer tells Tibbets he and his family lived near Hiroshima at the time of the attack and afterward fled into the mountains.
He said his father told him that if the war had continued "all would have died;" that his father had said the end of the war spared the lives of men, women and children all over Japan.
And he thanked Tibbets for his role in ending the war.
Tibbets turned 91 in February. At the time of the writing of Greene's book, he was still driving - a Toyota - and enjoyed dining at Bob Evans restaurants.
He still makes occasional public appearances. I had the honor of shaking his hand at a militaria show in Louisville, Ky., a few years ago.

Congressman Steve Buyer

I had a pleasant conversation with my Congressman today.
Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., was back in Indiana's Fourth Congressional District checking in with constituents and his office arranged for my wife, who is editor of a medium-sized daily newspaper, to meet with him.
I was also invited along because Steve has an interest in the Patriot Guard Riders.
Even knowing that, I was a little surprised when he thanked me profusely for my involvement in the PRG and for what we do to honor U.S. military personnel who die in the service of their country.
I'd met Steve a time or two before at political functions. He has an easy manner and comes across as an old friend rather than a politician.
He said he's working on a bill, similar to the law recently passed in Indiana, that would shield the families of our war dead from the insults of those would would show up at funerals to demonstrate for any religious or political purpose.
Earlier this year, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill making it a felony to disturb the peace at a funeral. Further, the bill requires any protestors to remain at least 500 feet from a funeral. It was immediately signed into law by Gov. Mitch Daniels, just in time to protect the family of a Kokomo soldier.
Members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kans., had expressed intentions of demonstrating at the Kokomo kid's funeral but they never showed up.
Likewise, they were absent from the funeral of an Indianapolis soldier last week.
Buyer's bill would pertain to demonstrations on federal land, such as Arlington National Cemetery and other military cemeteries.
He said he hopes to get it through Congress and on President Bush's desk for signature in time for Memorial Day.

For Spc. Antoine McKinzie

With the PGR.

First PGR mission

I finally made a Patriot Guard mission today.
Fellow Indianapolis BMW Club member and fellow K1200GT rider Harold Patterson and I joined about 150 other riders - mostly Harley-Davidson guys - to shield the family of an Indianapolis soldier from the wackos from Topeka.
Actually, we never saw the protesters and I'm waiting for the evening TV news to see if they even showed up.
For me, the highlight of the day was the moment when we were all standing at attention, saluting the funeral procession as it headed south on Zionsville Road from the Pike High School Performing Arts Center and the car carrying the soldier's parents came by.
The mother was sitting in the front passenger seat with the window rolled down. She smiled at us and said, "Thank you."
We formed a double line of bikes about a half-mile long as we followed the hearse about 8 miles to Crown Hill Cemetery.

--
Sent from my Treo

Pete

Pete the pup had his second session of puppy school this afternoon at Petsmart and he's doing great.
He's got "sit" and (lie)"down" cold.
He was pretty shy during the 20-minute socialization period at the beginning of class but seemed to gain confidence as the class went on.
He's still not getting it where toilet training is concerned, but we remain optimistic.
I'm sitting in the Meijer parking lot with Pete relaxing in his crate in the back of the Subaru while Maria does the grocery shopping. Suits me, since I hate grocery shopping.
I've never been a big fan of bumper stickers, largely because I was a newspaper reporter and we're not supposed to have opinions. The last time I put a bumper sticker on my car was in the 1970s and it was one promoting Transcendental Meditation.
But the one pictured above struck me as a humorous way to tell people we're proud Aussie owners, so it now adorns the back of the Forester.

--
Sent from my Treo

Crap

Went to the eye doc for my annual checkup and he says I have early cataracts.
Just what a photographer wants to hear.
He guesses I won't need to do anything about them for about 5 years.
Well, my mother had 'em, so I guess I shouldn't be that surprised.

--
Sent from my Treo

Crash

I had the unpleasant experience of witnessing a motor scooter crash this afternoon.
I was sitting at an intersection when the van in front of me whipped a left turn across the path of an oncoming scooter.
The rider jammed on his brakes as the van darted out of the way, but locked his front brake and did a spectacular endo.
I'd seen the guy riding his blue Yamaha scooter around town for several months and noticed that he never fastened the chinstrap on his white openface helmet.
So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I saw the helmet fly off just before his head hit the pavement.
As he rolled around on the pavement in pain, I grabbed my cell phone and dialed 911 to report the crash.
Fortunately, I had my camera bag in the trunk and was able to get a few shots as the EMTs bandaged his head, put him on a backboard and then a gurney and hauled him off to the hospital.
The guy clearly had the right-of-way, but was going way too fast into the intersection and did a classic job of "grab and stab" on his front brake.
And, of course, an unfastened helmet is about the same as no helmet at all.

--
Sent from my Treo

************************************************
Turns out the guy was astonishingly lucky. He was treated at the local hospital and was released two hours later.

Batboy from the tabloids

This - from a dental perspective, anyway - is how most people with caps would look without their caps: teeth ground down to points.
Good motivation to never lose my caps.

Buzzards out the back door

They’re back.
The sky over our back yard is full of turkey vultures.
They soar silently on huge black wings, seeking out rising warm air and flapping in to a landing in the tops of a line of tall trees that separate a broad expanse of lawn from an abandoned railroad right-of-way.
This is our sixth spring here, but we noticed them for the first time last year. It seems unlikely that we would have missed a roost of 50-or-so turkey vultures for four consecutive springs, so I can only conclude that they relocated to our neighborhood after something forced them to move.
I’ve long enjoyed watching them fly. I used to see them when my ex and I took our sons camping at Turkey Run State Park a few miles southwest of here back in the 1970s. That’s when I first looked them up in Roger Tory Petersen’s "Field Guide to the Birds of North America" and learned they are the second-largest birds in North America - eclipsed only by the nearly extinct California Condor, itself a form of vulture.
I admit I was mildly concerned about all those vultures peering down at my 4-month-old Australian shepherd puppy Pete.
So I went online to learn more.
Turns out, there’s no need to worry. Turkey vultures don’t kill anything. They won’t touch anything that isn’t dead. Besides that, they will pass on dead carnivores like dogs, cats and coyotes, preferring to dine on dead herbivores like sheep, goats and cattle.
The Cherokees called the turkey vulture the “peace eagle” because it soars like the predatory bird, but does not kill.
They are about 25 inches from end to end with a six-foot wingspan. The average adult turkey vulture weighs in at 6 pounds.
The turkey vultures around here are migratory, wintering in the U.S. south or perhaps as far south as Central America.
I remember seeing a humorous piece on the old Disneyland TV show back in the ‘50s about the festivities surrounding the return of the turkey vultures each spring to Hinkley, Ohio, much the same way the swallows come back to San Juan Capistrano on the same day each year.
I didn’t make note of the first sighting here this year, but I think it was around March 8. I’m marking my calendar to start looking for them in early March next year, just to see if and when they show up.
I also discovered turkey vultures even have their own fan club - The Turkey Vulture Society (vulturesociety.homestead.com).
Bill Kohlmoos, president of the Turkey Vulture Society, has written a fascinating piece about the birds in which he points out they have a rich social life, like to play aerial tag, and will invite other roosts to join them if they find a particularly large meal.
In California, he said, they’ve even been known to tell condors about major feasts and guide them to the scene.
Among his anecdotes:
“…it was reported by a person who had studied turkey vultures for many years that one would wait every morning for his son, a young school boy, to come out of his house. The vulture would follow the boy several blocks to the school bus stop and then wait on top of a telephone pole until the boy got on the bus. In the afternoon the bird would be back on the pole waiting for the boy's return, and then follow him home.”
And:
“One lady wrote us that she has built a small wooden tower-like feeder in her back yard and puts out food for her friends each day. One day she noticed that after eating their breakfast, the vultures had gone down to the lawn in her yard and six of them were in a circle around a soccer-size ball left on the lawn by her grandchildren. The vultures were hitting the ball back and forth to each other by butting it with their head and beak. Each day thereafter they played this game. And although there were four balls of different colors, they always picked the orange one.”
And:
“Turkey Vultures are affectionate and often make good pets. When a bird is injured and taken into rehab he will become emotionally attached to his handler and follow him around and watch him, much like a pet dog. They love to bring an object to a person and then play tug-of-war.”
And:
“A lady in Southern California wrote that she and her husband would drive their car five miles from town and take a daily walk in the country with their dog. A turkey vulture would join them, soaring above and watching them. And then one day at home she broke a leg and the walks were not possible for a while. One day she was in her back yard on crutches and there was her turkey vulture sitting on the fence, waiting to say hello. He had found her in a town of 12,000 people!”
Turkey vultures are covered by an international migratory bird treaty that makes it a federal crime to kill or injured them or to possess one without the appropriate permit as a wildlife rehabilitator.

Stuff

Don't you hate listening to people who end sentences with "but..." or "so..." without completing the thought.
It's on a par with "as far as" without "concerned," like, "as far as the weather is concerned."
I'm sitting in the Starbucks at the Lafayette, IN Barnes & Noble, blogging and drinking a vente mocha frappacino and having to listen to a girl having a cell phone conversation in which she is repeatedly committing all three of these linguistic offenses.
Oh, yeah. I'm fucking sick to death with hearing "awesome."
I just came from a soon-to-be-closed Office Max where I scored an
$80 remanufactured toner cartridge for my HP LaserJet IIP for about $40.
And, of course, the sign by the door apologetically informs shoppers that this Office Max store "will be closing." How about "will close" or "is closing?"
Maybe the sign-maker is getting paid by the letter.

--
Sent from my Treo

Unclaimed Funds

Got a letter yesterday from Joel Maul, who calls himself a “Relationship Manager” with EquiSearch, a White Plains, N.Y. outfit that helps people recover unclaimed funds.
Mr. Maul wrote to me about a year ago on the same matter - some unclaimed stock owned by my late mother.
EquiSearch is cagey in that they don’t tell you what and where the funds are - only a general hint about the amount, like “the current value of this account exceeds $X.”
After reading the fine print and discovering that EquiSearch takes 35% of the funds they recover, I decided to handle the matter myself.
EquiSearch apparently counts on people being too lazy or too stupid to do the recovery work themselves, but being a retired journalist with the skill and inclination to find out pretty much anything I want to know, I wasn’t about to give them a piece of the action.
It really isn’t all that hard to track down stuff like this. The Indiana Attorney General’s office has a website dedicated to helping people recover misplaced funds. Every state has such a mechanism and it doesn’t take much Googling to find the right sites.
So I recovered the funds and, in the process, found a bunch of unclaimed money belonging to friends and, incidentally, my ex wife. There’s about $405 worth of stock from her dad’s estate waiting for her to claim it and, as the executrix of her parents’ estate, it should be she and not one of her two sisters, who goes after it. I e-mailed her about it last year when I turned it up but a check of the Attorney General’s site last night shows she still hasn’t retrieved it. I suppose I’ll e-mail her again, mainly because I hate loose ends.
So I was surprised when I got Mr. Maul’s letter yesterday, considering that the funds he’s offering to recover are no longer out there. I think I’ll use his postage-paid business reply mail envelope to thank him for the heads-up.

Why can't we just get along?

Here's why:
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan man facing a possible death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity may be mentally unfit to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.

Abdul Rahman, 41, has been charged with rejecting Islam, a crime under this country’s Islamic laws. His trial started last week and he confessed to becoming a Christian 16 years ago. If convicted, he could be executed.

But prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about his mental fitness.

Can't Touch This

I discovered the other day that MC Hammer has a blog here on Blogger.com. I always liked the guy and enjoyed his music and videos. He struck me as more wholesome and less menacing than the "gangsta" types and I liked it that a lot of his stuff had a very positive spiritual vibe.
Does that make him a less authentic voice for the African-American community? I really don't care. I think he's an authentic expression of the American experience.
His blog isn't a load of showbiz hype and glitter. Rather, it's full of day-to-day experiences and stuff about his little boy's upcoming baseball season. He has a Sidekick and loves mobile blogging with text and pictures.
You can check him out at mchammer.blogspot.com.

More on the PGR

Good Morning America did a piece on the Patriot Guard Riders and their work to shield the families of U.S. military personnel from wacko protests at their funerals.
Sign-ups surged today as a result of itand the membership is up to more than 19,100.
Click here to see the ABC News report.

Router Wars

It has often occurred to me that we misunderstand the supposed master/servant relationship we have with computers and that it is we who serve the computers and not the other way around.
When I went to check my e-mail Saturday morning, I discovered my DSL internet connection had gone wonky. This happens from time to time and sometimes it’s my equipment and sometimes it’s the ISP’s fault.
Living in a small (population 1,500) rural community, I suppose we’re lucky to have highspeed internet at all. It’s provided by the local Frontier Telephone Co. and is called Frontiernet. Turns out, Frontiernet is in various places all over the U.S. and Canada.
So, after rebooting the computer and cycling the modem and wireless router, I called Frontiernet’s tech service. It didn’t surprise me that the techie who took my call had a Canadian (“oot” and “aboot”) accent.
We checked my connections, did a lot of DOS prompt PINGing, turned the Norton security software off and on, took the router out of the loop and fiddled around for about 45 minutes before he came to the conclusion that my D-Link wireless router is hosed.
Since our photo and writing enterprises depend heavily upon having a reliable internet connection, buying and installing a new wireless router went to the top of the day’s To Do list.
Maria and I bade farewell to our dogs and drove the 35 miles to the Best Buy store in Carmel, Ind. I had also decided to look for a replacement for my 5-year-old Speedstream DSL modem on the assumption that there must be faster modems out there. The Best Buy sales guy directed me to a combination modem/wireless router that had the SBC-Yahoo logo on the box. He assured me that it wasn’t a proprietary unit and would work with any DSL connection.
Wrong.
When I ran the software installation CD, I found it gave me no choice but to create an SBC-Yahoo account. Since my town isn’t served by SBC, that made the unit useless to me, so we drove 35 miles back to the store and swapped it for a D-Link wireless router.
By the time we got home, having driven 140 miles on our quest for a reliable internet connection, it was past time for dinner and I was in no mood to mess with installing the new router.
I was reading the specs on the router box over my breakfast the next morning when I started wondering if maybe I needed a faster router than the one I’d just bought.
I had a non-networked internet connection for my desktop computer only, so I did a little research and concluded that it was probably plenty fast, since my DSL data transfer rate is only 1.1Mb/sec down and 750Kb/sec up. Just for the hell of it, I reconnected my old, supposedly hosed, D-Link wireless router and - wonder of wonders - it worked fine. I came down to the kitchen and fired up the laptop to see if the Wi-Fi was working and, sure enough, it was cranking at 5 bars.
So, it seems, the problem wasn’t on my end after all.
Maria and I were driving up to Lafayette to do a bit of grocery shopping, so we included the Lafayette Best Buy in our route and returned the unneeded new router.
I went online later and found an ISP discussion forum with a thread devoted to the experiences of Frontiernet customers. I was not at all surprised to find complaint after complaint about spotty service, disrupted service, and tech service people who will never ever concede that the problem might be on their end.
At least I didn’t get stuck with a wireless router I don’t need.

************************************************************

Tuesday, March 21
I went to the D-Link website today and downloaded the newest version of firmware for my router, which includes such enhancements as Super G Turbo speed and extended range.
I installed it configured the router for passsword security and it's working better than ever. So much for Frontiernet's diagnosis.

The Ring, Part 2

The day after Maria’s wedding ring turned up in the bathroom jewelry box - a place she says she never puts it - we were having breakfast in the kitchen when she noticed she wasn’t wearing her ring.
That was especially startling, considering the anxiety we’d just gone through leading up to its discovery.
She dashed upstairs to search, only to discover the ring was back in the jewelry box in the same drawer, in the same spot in the drawer.
Again, she swore she had absolutely no recollection of having taken the ring off or of putting it into the box.
This, of course, left us with a couple of possibilities:
1. The painkilling drugs she’d taken a week earlier in the wake of her hysterectomy were still kicking around in her nervous system and making her do things she normally wouldn’t do and couldn’t remember, or
2. There was some supernatural explanation.
I’m not ruling out either scenario.
She hadn’t had any of the pain meds for at least a week and wasn’t having any other noticeable lapses in memory of judgment.
At the same time, she and her daughter claim to have sensed the presence of my late mother in the house at various times and the central stone in Maria’s wedding ring did come from my mother’s engagement ring.
Her daughter Morgan said she’d “seen” my mother a couple of times when she was sick - once when she was recuperating from oral surgery. Mom was a Registered Nurse and I suppose it would be natural for her to show up when someone in the house needed nursing. And, of course, Maria was recuperating from a hysterectomy.
I’ve always been blissfully oblivious to these “presences” and apparitions, although I sometimes think Mom takes possession of our dog Ruthie when I catch Ruthie giving me that reproachful look that Mom used to shoot me whenever she disapproved of something I’d done or said.
Maria says she’s seen and experienced ghosts and spirits numerous times since her childhood and I don’t disbelieve her. I just don’t see them.
Maria’s mother also claims to have been “visited” by the spirit of her mother. Over one period of time, she said, she found a succession of face-up pennies on or around her desk and recalled that her mother considered it good luck to find a face-up penny. After that, she said, she began finding diabetes blood test strips around the desk and between the pages of books. She took it as an indication that her mother was visiting and saying hello.
Whenever Maria has found the presence of spirits bothersome, she tells them in a loud, firm voice to leave and apparently they do.
In this most recent case, she said she had a chat with my mother and told her it was okay to hang around, just stop messing with her wedding ring.
Now, five days later, the ring is still on Maria’s finger and we’ve had no more problems.
I’m withholding judgment. I learned a long time ago to believe nothing and believe everything.

O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Two days of tension and anxiety ended yesterday afternoon.
Maria's wedding ring went missing on Sunday. She normally puts it into a large makeup box by the bathroom sink when she's applying hand cream or doing anything else that she wants to protect the ring from.
Aside from being a substantial investment - it was custom made by one of the top jewelry designers in Indiana - the ring incorporates the main stone from my mother's engagement ring, so it has a lot of emotional weight as well.
She did a search of the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen and every other place she thought she could have put it and eventually we came to the conclusion that Pete the pup might be involved in the disappearance.
While scouring the bedroom and bathroom floor for the ring, we also considered that me might have swallowed it. After all, he chews and gnaws on everything he can get his paws on.
Maria called the vet's office and determined an X-ray would cost $75-100. Failing that, she was advised to keep an eye on his poop for the next day or two.
So we put the ongoing housebreaking training on hold and made sure he pooped in the house for the last few days, Maria taking on the task of gathering it up in a plastic wastebasket liner and suppressing her gag reflex while kneading it and feeling for the missing ring.
We had outgoing mail that didn't get picked up yesterday, so we decided to run it down to the postoffice in the county seat and also get bite to eat. Freshening up before leaving the house, Maria opened the top drawer of the jewelry case she keeps in the bathroom to pick out a pair of earrings. And there, where it had been all along, was her wedding ring.
Pete, for all his mischief and destruction, was off the hook for what could have been a deal-breaker for the little guy.
So we celebrated with dinner at White Castle and a bad movie from Blockbuster (Kicking and Screaming - formulaic and predictable and not all that funny).
I'm chalking it up to the effects of Maria's post-surgery painkillers that have left her slightly off-balance for the past week. She's pretty much back to normal, but still has the occasional lapse.

Jimi!!!!!

Got an e-mail over the weekend from the stock photo agency where we list our pictures, saying the Jimi Hendrix people want to license one of my shots from his May, 1968, concert in Indianapolis.
Seems they're working on a book and I'm the only shooter they could find who was at that particular concert. Actually, I know of at least one other - he was with me - but I'm not telling him about it until I have the check in my hands.
Not that it's all that much money - $132 (my 60% of the $200 licensing fee) - but I don't want to blow an opportunity.
This is the first sale we've see after more than two years with this outfit and I was beginning to think we'd wasted our time sending them more than 1,000 high-res images.
You never know what's gonna sell, but my insistence on never throwing away anything that could conceivably have value continues to serve me.

Who was Tom Fox?

Terror Meets Delusion: The Murder of Tom Fox
March 11th, 2006



An American peace activist is slaughtered by Islamists

Yesterday, peace activist Tom Fox was found murdered in Iraq.

Fox, along with fellow activists Harmeet Singh Sooden, Norman Kember, and James Loney was kidnapped in Baghdad on November 26, 2005.

All belonged to the leftwing Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), which provided “human shields” in Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, works side by side with the anti-Israel, quasi-terrorist International Solidarity Movement and takes the standard leftwing position that America, as the world’s biggest terrorist, got its comeuppance on 9/11/2001. CPT’s official motto is “Getting in the Way,” and it ran a program called “Adopt a Detainee,” which was sympathetic to suspected terrorists being detained by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq.

So, the late Mr. Fox belonged to a group that essentially saw the “good guys” as being equal to, if not worse than, the bad guys. He believed he was doing a righteous thing by essentially throwing stones in the path of the U.S., Iraqi and Coalition soldiers, the same men and women who are trying to round up the Islamist terror-mongers washing the streets of Baghdad in blood and misery, terror-mongers like those who murdered him.

Everything I’ve read about Mr. Fox indicates that, though misguided in his worldview, he was in many ways a decent man. Fox played in the United States Marine Band for twenty years. A Quaker, he served as a youth leader at Langley Hill Friends Meeting. His daughter, Katherine, says that while he was in the military, he refused military discounts on principle.

But Fox also harbored hatred for his culture and an overall disdain for America, as indicated by statements he made on his blog. He also suffered from a terrible naiveté:

I think it would be fair to say that a survey of opinion taken from news sources in various parts of the world would find people using the words ‘fear and hatred’ much more often than they would use the words ‘respect and love’ when it comes to describing the United States. Not only in the Middle East but in Europe and in much of Asia and other areas as well. We are seen more as an empire rather than a beacon of hope to the oppressed and downtrodden. We are seen more as a militaristic superpower, bent on imposing our will on others, rather than the keeper of the flame of the hope and promise of democracy,

said Thomas William Fox, ignoring, among other things, the fact that people fear America so much, that they flock to its shores in droves, seeking freedom and peace and economic opportunity.

After reading most of his blog entries, it seems to me that Fox’s tragic flaw, the one that ultimately got him killed, was that he did not really believe that some men are more evil than others.

Crippled by this moral confusion, Fox habitually ignored the greater of two evils. His blog entry on Fallujah hints at as much. Though in his writings he essentially described the liberation of Fallujah as a senseless act, he failed to mention that after U.S. forces chased out and killed the Islamists who had held the town hostage, they made the gruesome discovery of nearly two dozen torture chambers, awash in blood, some with bloated bodies and hacked off body parts dumped near them. Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl, a Marine said,

The face of Satan was here in Fallujah, and I’m absolutely convinced that that was true.

Ultimately, Tom Fox saw that face up close and personal. It is the face of those who commit shocking evil while promising Heaven on Earth. I wonder if, in the end, he finally recognized it for what it was—and is.

The Utopian fanatics who killed Tom Fox couldn't have cared less whether or not he was sympathetic towards them, or if he hated them or whether he believed in God, or not. They couldn't have cared less if he had a family or friends who loved him. They did not care for his compassion. They did not care that, on some levels, he even empathized with them: they, who held him captive. They did not care that, in his way, he was trying to help alleviate the suffering of their brothers and sisters.

All Tom Fox was to his captors and murderers was filth—a piece of garbage; a weak, vile, subhuman infidel of the Western variety; a creature to be spit on and reviled and, when no longer useful, slaughtered like an animal and then discarded. They treated Mr. Fox like they would treat us all, as stones to be kicked aside while building the road to Paradise. They treated Mr. Fox, and if given the chance they’d treat us all, like the Nazis treated the Jews.

If there are lessons to be learned from the murder of Tom Fox, they are primarily for the Left: Like a person, it is never too late for it to abandon its suicidal march until the moment the executioner strikes.

Thomas William Fox (1951-2006) R.I.P.

Rocco DiPippo, a freelance political writer, publishes The Autonomist website.




Rocco DiPippo

A public relations boon

It occurred to me this week that the Rev. Fred Phelps could be the best friend the sport of motorcycling has had in years.
Phelps, you may recall, is the looney tune Baptist pastor from Topeka, Kans., who calls upon his followers to picket the funerals of U.S. casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan because the U.S. tolerates gays too much for his sensibilities.
Those of us who ride motorcycles have been concerned about the unsavory image our sport has had ever since the 1950s when Marlon Brando appeared in "The Wild One" and the Hell's Angels captured the media spotlight in the '60s.
Most of us cringe whenever the media stereotypes all of us as biker lifestyle types with tattoos, greasy hair, drug and alcohol problems and loud Harley-Davidsons.
But thanks to Fred Phelps, we're enjoying a new resurgence of respectability. You see, his stupidity gave rise to the Patriot Guard Riders - an organization of motorcyclists who have banded together to attend those same funerals, at the request of the bereaved families, to shield the families from the obscene protests.
The PGR include vets, hawks and doves and motorcyclists of all ages and brand persuasions who are united in their belief that the grieving families of U.S. military personnel deserve respect and honor.
The organization is growing like crazy. Membership stood at 8,000 when I joined a couple of weeks ago. It will pass the 16,000 mark this weekend and there's no end in sight.
The media loves us, the cops love us, the military loves us and the families love us. About the only people who don't love us are the followers of the Rev. Phelps and we're supremely indifferent to their opinions.
So, thanks, Fred. You're bringing out the best in everyone except the folks who agree with you.

--
Sent from my Treo

Are you insecure?

I have a wireless router as part of my home computer network.
I use the hard-wired side of it to link my desktop computer with Maria's, since our desks face each other in close proximity in our home office.
I used the wireless, or Wi-Fi, side of it to access the internet from my laptop. I'm doing that now as I write this.
When Maria's daughter Morgan is home from college, she uses the Wi-Fi to connect her desktop to the network from her room.
When my friend Tim helped me install our first wireless router - we're on our third now - he did a cursory test of its range by keeping his laptop connected as he backed out of our driveway. He reported he lost the signal about the time he reached the street.
My router is supposed to have a range of 150-200 feet, so it's not inconceivable that someone could park in front of the house and piggyback onto the signal.
I was aware of that possibility but didn't give it much thought - after all, this is a sleepy little country town of 1,500 and besides, our side of the street is posted for no parking.
But when we got the laptop last spring and started connecting to the router whenever we powered up, I noticed that my next-door neighbor in the big yellow house to the north of us also has a wireless router. Occasionally on power-up, our laptop would lock onto his signal at a quite usable strength of 2 bars out of 5.
I immediately realized that if I could see his network signal, he could see ours.
I didn't really think he was any kind of a hacking or snooping threat, but I wasn't eager to be proven wrong. So I decided to explore the encryption instructions that came with my D-Link router. It was a bit of a challenge because the geeks who wrote the instructions assumed that the reader had a working knowledge of the vocabulary of Wi-Fi, which I did not. I went to Barnes & Noble, got a vente mocha and browsed through a copy of "Wi-Fi for Fucking Morons," made some notes and went home to give it a try. I finally sorted it out and now have a secure network with its own name (Pearlsend, since we live at the south end of Pearl Street), accessible with a password.
My neighbor's network appears in my laptop's list of available networks as "linksys," the name of the router manufacturer, and "unsecured wireless network." I discovered last June, as we drove west on our photo safari, that the air in most cities is filled with unsecured wireless networks named "linksys" and "dlink."
That's because most people just plug the things in, make sure they can get a signal, and never bother to use the encryption features.
With so many open networks, piggybacking in an urban environment it a pretty easy thing, especially in apartment buildings where there are lots of tightly clustered living spaces. Other than marginally slowing the host's broadband connection with added traffic, I figured it was mostly a harmless thing.
But then I read a piece by Glenn Fleischman at wifinews.com.
He references a recent New York Times story about piggybacking that's a pretty comprehensive look at the subject.
But here is what Fleischman said that really got my attention:
Worse, however, is that a local network is usually given less scrutiny by firewalls and thus a user who piggybacks onto your network and whose machine is infected with viruses and worms could unintentionally compromise your systems. That’s a bigger risk, in my view. Now I feel even better about having a security-enabled wireless network. I might even mention it to my neighbor.

Mission Accomplished

The morons from the Westboro Baptist Church were a no-show today at the funeral of Sgt. Rickey Jones in Kokomo, Ind.
But the Patriot Guard Riders were there and they did a splendid job of showing the Jones family their son's service to his country mattered and was valued.
The funeral came four days after Gov. Mitch Daniels signed a bill making disorderly conduct within 500 feet of a funeral a felony in Indiana. Mitch said he's reasonably sure the law will stand up to judicial challenge.
A dense fog lay upon the land around central Indiana this morning and visibility was less than 500 feet from the vantage point of the church where the funeral was conducted, so Fred Phelps and his gang of malignant imbeciles wouldn't have been visible even if they had shown up. It would seem that God Himself wanted the Jones family protected from their hideous insults.
***********************
This morning's Indianapolis Star story quotes Shirley Phelps-Roper, a Westboro spokeswoman, who said protesters stayed home mainly because of the law.
"We're not going to go some place where your government is busy setting a trap for us," she said. "We're not stupid."
Sure. If believing God is kills soldiers because the U.S. tolerates gays isn't stupid, I don't know what the hell is.
Stupid, Shirley. Stoooooooooooooopid.

Hey, it's Bike Week in Daytona Beach

The calendar on my Treo smartphone reminded me Sunday morning that this is Daytona Beach Bike Week.
Since I was gazing out my window at snowflakes the size of cornflakes, it's obvious that I didn't go this year. Again.
I went for a couple of years - 1993 and 1994, I think it was. And, of course, I rode all the way both times.
(That's kind of a standing joke for touring BMW riders. After awhile, we get used to people looking at our license plates and asking, "Did you ride all the way from (insert home state here - in my case, Indiana)?"
Yes, of course we did.
I take pride in the fact that I've never trailered my bike anywhere.
We BMW folks like to call it Trailer Week instead of Bike Week because most of the bikes (i.e., Harley-Davidsons) arrive on trailers or in the back of pickup trucks.
The first year I rode to Bike Week, I lacked a proper cold weather riding suit so I went to a farm supply store and bought a $100 set of Carhart coveralls - the big tan thing you see farmers wearing in winter. I bought an XXXL size so it would fit over my leathers and other gear. There was 6 inches of snow on the ground and the temperature was in the 20s the day I left for Daytona and I looked like an overstuffed couch perched on my '91 K100RS. But I was reasonably warm. Of course, I could only turn my head about 60 degrees and couldn't see my boots. I'd left in the afternoon after work and made it to Elizabethtown, Ky., before darkness and spitting snow persuaded me to bag it at a Third World motel.
I was able to shed the suit somewhere south of Chattanooga, Tenn., the next day and never wore it again. Instead, I bought a proper Motoport cold-weather riding suit from a vendor at the Daytona International Speedway complex.
In those days, the BMW enclave was at Bulow Campground - a former KOA operation north of Daytona and a few miles inland from Flagler Beach. The Space Coast BMW Riders ran the operation and we had about a third of the sprawling campground that used to be some kind of plantation.
The rest of the camping area was given over to other brands and, since Daytona is mostly a H-D affair, that meant Harley folks. I discovered that some of them regarded us with a kind of uncomprehending awe since it was generally understood that we routinely ride great distances with little or no regard for weather. It's a consequence of choosing riding gear for its functionality rather than because we want to look like cowboys or Indians.
I was walking to the showers early one morning, plodding along past a sea of H-D rider tents and watching the sun rise over the palm trees when someone back in the BMW compound popped a cassette of Wagnerian opera into the stereo system on his bike. How nice, I thought, humming along.
Then I noticed the biker lifestyle types emerging from their tents and staring with bewildered looks in the direction of the music, heads tilted in puzzlement like dogs. One of them mumbled something about "church music."
It was as if they had just discovered their neighbors were from another planet.
That first trip to Daytona Bike Week was entertaining. Some of my Indianapolis BMW Club friends showed me around. We went to the Jap Bike Bash at Gilley's in New Smyrna Beach where they beat a Japanese motorcycle to death. We went to the Cabbage Patch and watched Reubenesque biker chicks wrestling in coleslaw. We rode up and down the beach and cruised the freakshow that is Main Street.
I rode back down the next year, but it was a bore. After the second day, I was sick of the mass stupidity and the noise. The only thing I liked about it was being able to ride in warm sunshine in early March. And when I rode home that second year, I knew I wouldn't do another Bike Week for a long long time.
When I mentioned Bike Week yesterday, Maria asked if I wanted to go. I didn't have to give it much thought.
The only reason I'd care to go back would be as a photographer rather than as a motorcycling participant.

Blogging from the library

Did I ever mention how much I love Wi-Fi?
I'm at the local public library where I fled this morning to thrash out a magazine piece that is a bit overdue.
I find it very difficult to work at home because Pete the pup requires semi-constant supervision and I can only focus on projects during the brief periods when he consents to nap in his kennel.
Maria kindly agreed to keep an eye on Pete while I adjourned to the library's reading room to sort out my notes and lash the final piece together. Now that I've done as much as I can here at the library, I'm taking a moment to catch up on my blogging.
Maria continues to improve after her surgery Monday, but is still on the heavy-duty painkillers. She recognizes there is a lot of very serious pain just waiting to grab her if she slacks off on the drugs too soon.
She got flowers this week from my son Sean and his wife Ruth, from a young woman whose case she championed in the paper last week and from her coworkers at the paper. Her spirits were also buoyed by a call from son Steve the other night who let us listen to our granddaughter Lisa count to 10 and beyond with remarkable clarity. Lisa, who will be 2 on Memorial Day weekend, started going to preschool shortly after Christmas. She sounds like she's doing splendidly and I'm feeling guilty for not paying a visit to her and her parents since the holidays.
Things are shaping up for a very large turnout Monday for the funeral of Sgt. Rickey Jones, a 101st Airborne trooper killed in Iraq. The loonies from Westboro Baptist Church have promised to bring their obnoxious sideshow to Kokomo for the occasion and they will be counterbalanced by at least 100 members of the Patriot Guard Riders, myself included. The posts to the PGR website - www.patriotguard.org - indicate there will be members there from throughout the Midwest, despite what promises to be really crappy late winter weather.
Maria's mother has agreed to come over and fill in for me as nurse and cook while I'm off doing my patriotic duty.

Operation successful

Maria's hysterectomy went fine and she was out of surgery much sooner than expected.
Her parents and I saw her in the recovery room and she's in great spirits, mainly because of the pain meds and the relief that it's over.
Said she wants to doze and cut me loose to find some breakfast, which I did up the road at McDonald's. Turns out this McD has free Wi-Fi, so I could have brought the laptop.
Now the big challenge will be to make sure she doesn't lift anything heavier than 10 pounds for the next six weeks. That seems an incredibly stringent restriction, considering all of the 10-pound-plus stuff we routinely pick up in the course of an ordinary day.
Fortunately, her camera weighs less than 5 pounds.
We got a call on Saturday from a girl whose senior portrait we shot last fall asking if we could photograph her wedding this coming Saturday night. Yeah, one week's notice. But then she was pregnant when we shot her senior portrait, so you can see that timing is not her strong suit.
Maria, obviously, won't be in any shape to shoot a wedding that soon and the girl has a very limited budget, so I'm going to do her a cheapie abbreviated shoot of the ceremony and reception for $200.
Gotta get out of here now. There's a family with a brutally stupid and noisy grandfather two tables away and I can feel my psychic energy draining away...

--
Sent from my Treo

Counting down

Maria's hysterectomy is set for 8 a.m. Monday and we're getting all of our waterfowl aligned for the surgery and the recovery.
I took a fistful of prescriptions to the drugstore this afternoon and walked out $171 poorer. Could have been worse - the poor bastards without insurance would have paid $427 for the same drugs.
She's been floating on Valium since Wednesday and all of her coworkers have been amazed at how much calmer and unflappable she's been.
I mentioned this morning that I got an e-mail from the state captain of the Patriot Guard Riders about early reports of the death of a soldier from Kokomo in Iraq. The PGR guys, being mostly veterans, call these gigs "missions." So when I told Maria I had a possible mission with the Patriot Guard Riders next week, she dissolved into hysterical laughter. I admit, it does sound like some kids' club - "Mom, Billy and I are going on a mission for Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron..."
Anyhow, at some point she realized she was laughing way out of proportion to the admitted goofiness of the situation and declared herself unfit to drive herself the 19 twisty country miles to work. So I chauffeured her and now I'm sitting in her newspaper office waiting for her to wrap things up and ride home with me.
All of this also serves to remind me that I courted disaster several years ago when my first wife was in a hysterical rage by observing that the word "hysterical" has the same feminine origins as the word "hysterectomy," thereby suggesting that she was being irrationally hormonal.
Needless to say, we are no longer married.
So Maria is preparing to be off work for two, maybe three weeks and I am preparing to cook and feed and fetch and otherwise do for her during her convalescence. She expects to watch a lot of movies on DVD and we're going to sign up with Netflix over the weekend with that in mind.
We dumped cable for DISH satellite TV last summer, but still find we have lots of channels and very little we care to watch. Most evenings, we watch several episodes of Cops - there's something deliciously fun about watching stupid people fucking up - until South Park comes on, and then off to bed.

--
Sent from my Treo

Not a joiner, but...

I’m not much of a joiner, but I enlisted in a potentially controversial organization yesterday. I did it because I felt compelled to do something to offset the pain being inflicted by members of the Westboro Baptist Church upon the families of U.S. military personnel killed in the line of duty.
The Topeka, Kans., church sends it members and sympathizers to the funerals of soldiers to protest and to proclaim that U.S. casualties are God’s punishment for America’s tolerant attitude toward gays. If you want to get a good dose of their craziness, visit their website: www.godhatesfags.com
Their hateful actions have created a huge backlash with legislatures in several states considering laws banning protests at funerals – a measure that doesn’t sit well with anyone who values our First Amendment rights to free speech.
I covered a funeral recently where a handful of WBC loonies showed up. Their presence was more than counterbalanced by a contingent of 60 or so members of the Patriot Guard Riders – a motorcycle organization whose membership is mostly veterans and Harley-Davidson riders.
I visited the Patriot Guard Riders’ website – www.patriotguard.org – yesterday and satisfied myself that I could be comfortable with their mission statement. They attend the funerals of service personnel to show support for the families and to shield the families from the disturbing presence of protesters. They attend only at the invitation of the families and with the knowledge and approval of local law enforcement. Their intent is to show respect and not to visit violence – however richly deserved – upon the WBC folks.
Even though I’m a BMW rider and not a fan of the black leather biker lifestyle look, I share their desire to show respect for those who gave their lives for our security, so I filled out the online form and signed up.
Looks like a lot of others are joining as well. Their membership counter indicates more than 400 people joined yesterday and another 988 have signed up today and it’s not even noon yet. Their total membership at the moment stands at 8,634, but at this rate they’ll top 10,000 by the weekend.

Oh, yeah. It's not Monday.

I feel like I'm running in sand today - flailing away and not getting anywhere.
I have another aviation piece to write and, of course, I'm deep into procrastination. This one is a no-brainer - a 1,000-word interview with one of the execs of a major aircraft manufacturer. I did the telephone interview last month and haven't even looked at my notes. Just letting the thing marinade in my consciousness until I'm ready to bash it out.
(As I write this, Pete the pup is playing with a golf ball we found on the baseball diamond across the street. He's fascinated with tossing it around the kitchen and watching it roll and bounce on the vinyl floor. Lots of running around and making noise.)
So it was almost a relief to have a good excuse not to write today.
First thing on the agenda was a 9:40 a.m. pre-op meeting with Maria's gynecologist who will perform a long-hoped-for hysterectomy on her next Monday morning. After several years of frustrating non-progress at the hands of her longtime family GP who tried to solve her problems by putting her on the pill and taking her off and putting her back on, Maria went to a real OB/GYN doc and got what we consider the definitive solution.
So we got the prescriptions for the various pain meds and the pre-op briefing this morning. Maria is looking forward with great eagerness to being rid of this semi-constant discomfort and hassle and only has flashes of anxiety about the surgery. It'll be an outpatient affair and they expect to cut her loose to float home on her pain meds by 5 p.m. Her parents are coming along, so I'll have plenty of help.
My job is to keep her comfortable, make sure she takes her meds on time and keep her from returning to activity too soon. I'll also be in charge of meal preparation, which is no big deal for me. I was a bachelor, off and on, for six or seven years and managed not to starve, so I think I can handle a couple of weeks of kitchen duty.
My other big achievement today was to rip Quadrophenia (by The Who, of course) to MP3 format and load it into the SD card in my Treo 600 smartphone. It's a 256 megabyte card and the album only took up 75MB. I'm on the last track of the album at the moment and am pleased to discover the whole thing only took my battery from 100% to 90%. Got me thinking about a 1 gigabyte SD card and all the possibilities.
Yeah, I realize it's nothing compared with my son Steve's 60GB iPod, but it's still pretty good for a cell phone.
It kills me that everyone asks if it's a Blackberry when I whip it out. No, it's a Treo 600 and it does pretty much everything a Blackberry does, only better, plus being a kick-ass Palm PDA. Sorta like riding a BMW and having people call it a Harley.
Now it's time to go see why Pete and his golf ball are so quiet...

Breakfast thoughts on a Friday morning

Scanning the MSNBC website over breakfast this morning, I came upon an interview with Robert Redford and a couple of his remarks stood out and reminded me that nobody is right all of the time and nobody is wrong all of the time.

In the "right" category is this observation about the Sundance Film Festival he founded 25 years ago in which he uses a pointles celebrity to make a point:
It was too intense for me. To the outside world, it's a big fat market where you have people like Paris Hilton going to parties. Now, she doesn't have anything to do with anything. I think the festival is close to being out of control.

In the "wrong" category is his Michael Mooresque observation about the current political scene:
Now you pick up the paper and there's a Watergate every day. I don't think anyone's connecting the dots and saying to the public, "Wake up, folks, because you could end up in a totalitarian nightmare, wondering what happened to your country."

Redford, an avid environmentalist, has never made a secret of his disdain for President Bush. So one would suppose that he believes the totalitarian threat is coming from the Republican side of the aisle. I think the party that wants to take away private citizens' guns in the interest of "a safer society" is the one that bears watching and that's not the NRA-endorsed GOP.
But maybe Redford actually meant the Heil Hillary crowd. I'd like to think so.

Oh Roy, oh Roy, is that your hat?

It all started last August when I was hanging out with some of my closest BMW motorcycle friends at the home of Tim and Linda in Alma, Colo.
It was the Indianapolis BMW Club's annual Colorado Chalet Week and we were comfortably ensconced at Tim and Linda's place some 10,600 feet above sea level in the heart of the Rockies.
We were watching a DVD copy of Kevin Costner's classic Western, Open Range, and I opined that Costner's character in the movie had the coolest cowboy hat I'd ever seen.
So a few days later, friends Linda and Webb and Cindy coaxed me into the Colorado Mountain Hat Co. on historic Front Street in Fairplay.
Sherry, who is a consummate hat-seller, dragged out a century-old phrenology device - a relic from the pseudo science of determining one's personality on the basis of the contours of their head. In this case, it was used to make a record of head measurements for a precise hat fit.
These are not cheap hats. They're custom made and come in three grades - felt, felt/beaver blend and pure beaver. Beaver sheds water better and is more appropriate for real cowboys who ride the range in all kinds of foul weather.
They had a considerable variety of hats on display, including a splendidly goofy looking replica of Hopalong Cassidy's tall black hat. They also said they could duplicate the Costner Open Range hat in any color and blend I wanted. I couldn't justify a pricey cowboy hat, so I stuck the punch-card set of my measurements into my motorcycle tank bag and dismissed it.
But Maria got wind of the encounter and decided I'd look smashing in an Open Range chapeau. So she ferreted out the measurements and ordered me a felt/beaver blend charcoal hat with a custom braided leather band for Christmas for $350.
Unfortunately, the folks in Fairplay were seriously backlogged on their orders and my Christmas hat arrived today on Valentine's Day.
I wore it to dinner at the local restaurant this evening and only felt a little self-conscious. After all, this is a rural county and there are lots of horse farms about.
Now I can't wait to get back to Colorado where a hat like this makes a little better fashion sense.

Just shoot me

The press is acting like such a pack of Bush-hating jackals, I'm ashamed to admit I ever called myself a journalist.
Also, their lack of knowledge of firearms is appalling. Shotguns don't fire "bullets" and the terms "birdshot" and "buckshot" are hardly interchangeable, unless you think a bird is the same thing as a buck. And these morons think they're qualified to interpret the happenings of the day for us?

Old dog, new trick

Our older dog, Ruthie, loves lasers.
In fact, she probably owes her life to laser technology.
When I went to the animal shelter with Maria and her kids seven years ago to pick out a dog, I took my laser pointer along to test adoption candidates for alertness and responsiveness.
Most of the dogs paid little attention to the appearance of a bright red dot skittering across the floor of their kennel enclosure. But Ruthie went crazy over it.
Besides that, she smiled at us with a look that said, "Here I am. What took you so long? Take me home."
So we did.
And the laser - in this case one that resembles a pen with pocket clip and runs on a pair of AAA batteries - remains her favorite toy.
I can stand on the back porch at night and run her all over the yard with the red dot. I can run her up and down the stairs until she is near collapse and her face registers deep disappointment when I stop to let her rest.
Pete the Australian sheperd pup who came to live with us just before Christmas also has an interest in the laser, but he doesn't get much of a chance to play because Ruthie knocks him out of the way in her frenzy to get a paw on the elusive crimson dot.
There was little positive interaction between the two dogs at first, but as the weeks have passed, Pete and Ruthie are learning to play together. They engage in games of tug-of-war with a rubber mallard and other dog toys and Pete loves to pester Ruthie. He nips at her flanks, then darts out of the way when she wheels around to get him. Being a herding dog and much younger, he can run circles around Ruthie and make her crazy. This can lead to Ruthie barking hysterically,which only makes Pete more aggressive with his playful soprano growls.
This usually happens in the evenings while Maria is sitting in the bedroom crocheting and watching TV and I'm in the adjacent upstairs office trying to edit photos or write. I gave up yelling at Ruthie to shut up and decided, instead, to break her concentration by flashing the laser onto the carpet near her.
This, of course, worked wonderfully and she was immediately drawn into a game of chase-the-laser, which Pete seemed to enjoy as well.
But over the last few nights, I began to notice Ruthie barking wildly at Pete, sometimes picking a fight with him, and then looking expectantly in my direction.
I finally caught on that she was deliberately making a fuss so I would bring out the laser.
The old dog was teaching me a new trick and I didn't even realize it.

Sunday observations

"Have a nice day!" said the cashier at Wendy's, fixing me with a maniacal grin.
According to her nametag, her name was "Autum," and I found myself wondering what happened to the "n."
Is that really her name? Did her parents really not know how to spell the third season or were they trying to be cute or clever? Or did her store manager make the mistake when he wrote her name down on the nametag order? Or was the nametag order placed verbally and the person stamping out the tags the weak link?
All I know is that sitting here three days later, drinking a vente cafe mocha at Barnes & Noble, I'm still wondering about it.
We're in Lafayette, IN where Maria is doing the weekly grocery shopping at Meijer and I'm taking a moment to blog after running an errand to Best Buy to pick up some printable blank CDs for the Indianapolis BMW Club's annual slideshow.
It's a little project I've taken on for the last few years - collecting motorcycle and club-related photos to add to a rapidly growing gallery of several thousand images that comprise a computer slideshow.
We play it on a laptop connected with a digital projector as background entertainment for the club's annual Valentine's Day weekend awards banquet.. I make extra copies and sell them to club members for $10 a pop to cover production expense. I also include an archive of all of the club's monthly newsletters from the time I took over in December, 1993 until now, so the new folks can get up to speed on who's who and a bit of the club's history.
Most years, I'm the biggest contributor of images, but 2005 was a low-mileage year for me and I hardly took any photos. I didn't even take a camera along when I rode out to Colorado for the club's annual Colorado Chalet Week. That was mainly because I didn't want to expose one of our Nikon D100 digital cameras to the dust and vibration of a motorcycle adventure and I didn't feel like dragging around my massive Nikon F5 film camera. Besides, I've been digital so long that the idea of buying film, then paying to have it processed and then having to scan it to digital is abhorrent to me. And after carrying around a camera that can shoot more than 300 high-res images without reloading makes a 36-exposure roll of film seem downright primitive. Which it is.
Why it's even dumber than "Autum."

--
Sent from my Treo

Saturday night shopping

Maria being amused by my Treo camera at Jo-Ann Fabrics.

Here's your shopping list

Food:
Arla milk, cheese etc.
Danish crown (meat)
Lurmaerket Butter
Danish Bacon
Thor Fish
Danisco Food

Candy:
Toms (chocolate)
Lagermann
Galle & Jessen

Beverages:
Tuborg Beer
Carlsberg Beer
Aalborg Aquavit

Medicine:
Novo

Clothing:
H2O
Hummel
Per Reumert

Shoes:
Ecco
Jaco

Danish Design:
Royal Copenhagen
Georg Jensen
Stelton
PH-lamps
Lego (toys)
Brio (toys)
Raadvad (knives etc.)
Trip Trap
HTH- kitchen
Morsoe (Fireplaces)
Royal Danish Porcelain
B & G Porcelain
Vesta (Windmills)
B & O radios/televisions etc.

Other:
Watco Danish Furniture Oil

Emotional retards

I imagine the handful of folks who check in here on a regular or semi-regular basis find my political and religious observations a bit tedious, so I'll keep this one mercifully brief.
While there are doubtless millions of Muslims who are horrified by the current frenzy over a few cartoons published in newspapers, the impression being given to the rest of the world is that Islam is a form of mental illness and its adherents are emotionally retarded.
A friend who was in Tehran for a few months around the time of the fall of the Shah observed that the masses in the streets who supported Khomeini had the political sophistication of children.
Sadly, nothing seems to have changed.

Worth repeating

Sensitivity' can have brutal consequences February 5, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I long ago lost count of the number of times I've switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ''Death to the Great Satan!'' Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ''Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And Semi-Retired Satan!'' But I never thought I'd switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.
Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that's easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon? If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven't a clue how I'd get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.
Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen, the Danes are a little bewildered to find that this time it's plucky little Denmark who's caught the eye of the nutters. Last year, a newspaper called Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, whose physical representation in art is forbidden by Islam. The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.
Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.
Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.
Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.
That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he's impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."
And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciates the "sensitivity" of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And the "sensitivity" of the Dutch film director Albert Ter Heerdt, who canceled the sequel to his hit multicultural comedy ''Shouf Shouf Habibi!'' on the grounds that "I don't want a knife in my chest" -- which is what happened to the last Dutch film director to make a movie about Islam: Theo van Gogh, on whose ''right to dissent'' all those Hollywood blowhards are strangely silent. Perhaps they're just being "sensitive,'' too.
And perhaps the British foreign secretary also admires the "sensitivity" of those Dutch public figures who once spoke out against the intimidatory aspects of Islam and have now opted for diplomatic silence and life under 24-hour armed guard. And maybe he even admires the "sensitivity" of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada and New Zealand.
Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.
One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."
© Mark Steyn, 2006 Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006 Copyright © The Sun-Times Company.

Great Danes

As a career newspaperman, I share my colleagues' outrage over the behavior of much of the Islamic world in response to a few cartoons published in Danish newspapers depicting the Prophed Mohammed.
The reaction has included recalling ambassadors from Denmark, boycotts of Danish products, burning Danish flags, threats against Danish journalists and Danes in general, and on and on.
Yet nobody would raise an eyebrow if Western newspapers published irreverent cartroons depicting the Pope or Jesus or the Virgin Mary.
I came across this piece on one of my favorite sites this afternoon and think it's worth repeating here:

So it’s OK for ayatollahs to offend Western values by routinely issuing fatwas requiring devout Muslims to kill those whom they dislike (a la Salman Rushdie)!

It’s OK to preach hatred of Jews and Christians every day in Koranic schools and mosques the world over! It’s OK for Muslim newspapers to publish cartoons that portray Jews as pigs and apes, and exhort Muslims to “to slaughter them and murder them, according to the words of Allah”!

It’s OK to blast planes and buildings in the name of Allah and celebrate the mass murderers, called the “Magnificent 19” in the Islamic press, by organizing conferences in their honor!

It’s OK to praise martyrdom against the West, and encourage it by agitating the lure of 71 virgins and making hefty payments to the families of those who blast themselves!

It’s OK for Islamic leaders to demand the physical elimination of the Jews and of their state in holocaust fashion!

It’s OK for Arabs living in the West to deny their daughters education in violation of Western laws! It’s OK to rape those who dare dress with Western fashion! It’s OK to practice polygamy! It’s OK to defend women abuse and battery from the pulpit!

It’s OK for conservative Arab countries to ban Western women from driving and force them to wear chadors in public. It’s OK for their courts to order mutilation and death-by-stoning for minor offenses.

It’s OK to turn a blind eye to female genital mutilation.

It’s OK to randomly seize hostages and murder them like pigs, while praising Allah!

Let’s stop this nonsense! The West has values too that are non-negotiable. They include freedom of the press, freedom of expression, equality, and democracy among others. If Arabs want to live in our midst, they must uphold them. No exception! If they do not care to, they are welcome to return to the sand dunes that are more hospitable to their sensitivities.

And, let us never make the mistake to apologize for our values or tolerate compromises and exceptions. And shame to the weak-hearted and feeble-minded politicians and editors who offered regrets and apologies for what is nothing but an assertion of Western most cherished values. They have once again failed their people and dishonored their offices.

Taking stock

Maria and I have been submitting our photos to a stock photo agency called PAI Networks for the past couple of years. Nothing much has come of it, but we remain hopeful that some publishers will go to www.painetworks.com, do a keyword search for some particular subject and fall wildly in love with our work.
So far we have 1,319 images posted there. If you're terminally bored and want to see what we do, click here.

Space cowboy

Poking around in the attic this afternoon, I discovered an album containing long-forgotten photos of my childhood.
I was particularly struck by this one. I'm wearing some kind of Buck Rogers space hat, complete with goggles, and using my tricycle to pull my dog, Spot, in a wagon.
This would be around 1951 or so and the setting is the alley behind our house.
I was very space-minded and couldn't get enough science fiction stuff. This was at a time when Tom Corbett - Space Cadet and Space Patrol were on TV and I never missed an episode.

Sunrise at Punxsutawney

The goofballs in top hats say this lardass rodent saw his shadow this morning, signifying there will six more weeks of winter and no early spring. Pretty scientific, eh?
So far, we've hardly had any winter at all here in central Indiana, so another six weeks of daily highs above freezing is no big deal.
Bring it on, Fat Boy Phil.
(Hey, isn't that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on the right?)