Zooing with Lisa

Steve and Lisa watch dolphins frolic underwater.

Friday was a day when all of the tension of a chaotic week got dissolved.
We were reunited with the prodigal Pete after his 36-hour walkabout and I finally got to see my lovely granddaughter Lisa in an excursion to the Indianapolis Zoo.
It was my son Steve's first visit to the big modern zoo that replaced the cheesy Washington Park zoo of his youth and it was a new experience for his wife Nicky as well.
We hit most of the attractions, including the spectacular dolphin facilities, but agreed the performance was the lamest dolphin show we'd ever seen.
Lisa seemed to enjoy the outing. She got to see what an elephant's skin feels like and especially enjoyed watching the penguins diving and swimming underwater.

Pointing at the penguins.



Gazing at the giraffes.

The Return of Pete

I spent pretty much all day yesterday putting up posters and driving around town.
Except for an hour or so when I had to drive 20 miles to bail out Maria who locked her keys in the Subuaru at the new Super Wal-Mart.
Yesterday evening, Morgan came home with a kid who lives up the street who reported seeing Pete on the loose twice - once during the storm when he was streaking down the street in terror, illuminated by the lightning flashes as he flew over a fence, and again about noon yesterday when he ran flat-out into the side of the barn where they kid and his dad have a shirttail trucking business.
"He hit so hard, we thought he broke the particle board," the kid said. "At first, we thought a car had hit the building."
He said they thought they might have to take him to the vet, but he gathered himself up and tore off again.
That last sighting was less than a block from our back yard, but Pete was apparently too freaked out to navigate on home.
I slept on an airmattress on the dining room floor again last night, wanting to be able to respond if he banged on the back door.
I woke up a little after 4 a.m. and walked out onto the rear deck to call into the darkness for him, but there was no response.
Then I heard a faint yarking. It was the same sound Pete makes in the mornings when he wakes up in his kennel and wants to go outside.
I walked down the driveway a ways and determined it was coming from some distant point to the west.
I woke Maria and we dressed and headed out to follow the sound.
Walking through the darkened town, we tracked the sound - losing it occasionally when the dog fell silent or when it was obscured by the pre-dawn chirping of the birds roosting along the tree-lined streets.
Finally, some eight blocks away on the far west side of town, we found the source - a small dog chained to a mobile home. It was a huge disappointment and Maria, in particular, was bummed out. I promised her that we'd find Pete today, even though I had no idea how.
We walked home and went back to sleep - Maria upstairs in bed and me on a downstairs couch.
Morgan came down about 7:30 a.m., carried some trash to the curb for Friday morning pickup and then continued out for an early morning foot search.
At 7:46 a.m., we got a call from Andrea Smith, who works for our vet. She said she was driving to work just north of town when she recognized Pete in the road. She drives a big Ford SUV and, but the time she got turned around, he was gone. So she drove on to work and called us.
We grabbed a leash and bag of dog treats and flew out of the driveway, heading north. We spotted Morgan about a mile from home and picked her up, continuing toward the place where Andrea reported sighting Pete.
Cresting a hill, we saw him about a quarter-mile ahead standing in profile in the middle of the road. It was unmistakably Pete.
Not wanting to spook him, Maria and Morgan got out of the car with leash and treats and walked toward him, calling his name.
He regarded them warily and, when they got about 100 yards from him, he turned and started trotting away.
A driver who had pulled up behind me figured out what was going on and held back.
I pulled even with Maria and told her I was going to try to drive past Pete to box him in.
But as I approached in the Subaru with windows down, I started calling to him.
I don't know if it was the car or my voice or the scent of home, but Pete stopped in his tracks and then began running excitedly around the car.
I got out and scooped him up in my arms as Morgan and Maria ran to join the group doggy hug. All the while, Pete was licking my face and making little puppy noises of excitement. It was one of those moments where your heart melts in joy and gratitude and you feel like the weight of the world has suddenly been lifted from your shoulders.
We drove to the vet's office where we took Pete in and tried to get Andrea to accept a check for the $100 reward, but she graciously declined.
Pete was deliriously happy to get home and gorged himself on food and water while Ruthie looked on in disdain.
He's dozing under the kitchen computer table now, obviously worn out from his day and two nights of scary adventures.
He's got a slight limp and the pads on his feet are worn, but otherwise he seems OK.
Thanks to everyone for your kind supportive thoughts and prayers. It's great to have the prodigal son back home!

Pete is missing

Pete is gone.
Maria and I had to be at her paper's high school sports recognition banquet last night, leaving her daughter Morgan home with the dogs.
A thunderstorm with heavy rain swept through about 8 p.m., but Morgan was too busy with her compulsive reorganization of our attic to go downstairs and let the dogs in.
When we arrived home about 10 o'clock, Ruthie was there to greet us but Pete was not.
Our conclusion was that Pete got freaked out by the storm and bolted into the night in terror.
When Ruthie was a pup, she did the same thing and was found later cowering on the steps of a church a couple of blocks away. Seems like Morgan should have remembered that...
Anyway, we mounted a fruitless late-night search of the southeast quadrant of our small town. Maria spoke to the cops, one of whom had been to our house on a routine call about a month ago and consequently knew what Pete looked like.
We left the front and back porch lights burning and I slept on an air mattress near the back door so as to be able to hear if Pete returned and banged on the door in his usual manner.
I woke up at 3 a.m., stepped onto the back deck and called for Pete, but he wasn't there.
Ditto, when I got up at 7:30 a.m.
I just finished printing about 60 of these posters - inkjet color for indoor posting and laserjet black and white for outdoors where rain would bleed inkjet colors. I gave Morgan a handful of the color posters to put up in downtown businesses, but she just called from her waitress job to say she'll be too busy to put them up. So I'll do it.
I'm hoping that once he's done with his big adventure that he'll show up at the back door today, wagging his 4" stump of a tail. And I'm doing my best to suppress the idea that he's dead or hopelessly lost and we'll never see him again.
It's astonishing how attached you can get to a dog in just six months. He really is a member of the family - one who depended on his humans to keep him safe and protect him from harm. We failed him and I feel like I just got punched in the stomach.
So far, I've not lashed out at Morgan because I know she feels badly too. But part of me really wants to scream at her for being a negligent, self-absorbed moron who has quite likely caused us to lose Pete. I pray that he comes back because that will make it possible for me to forgive her. If he doesn't, this will fester for a long long time. If I am able to forgive, I damn sure will never forget and will never trust her with anything important again.
If any of you are inclined to prayer, I'd appreciate anything you can do.
Thanks.
Now, I'm off to plaster the town with these posters.

#1 Son (With apologies to Charlie Chan)

I guess I've been remiss in not saying much about my oldest son, Sean, who is a music producer and recording engineer in Portland, Ore.
I got around to checking out his site on My Space this week and came away very impressed.
He has a couple of tracks available for your listening pleasure on the site and the one by Kaitlyn ni Donovan blows me away. The acoustic ambiance is right up there with Daniel Lanois' studio work, maybe better...
He also has a list of artists he's recorded or mixed. I showed it to my college junior stepdaughter and her eyes got very big and she then showed me a magazine with one of the groups - the Yeah Yeah Yeahs - on the cover.
Here's the list:
Music Producer and Engineer Sean Flora has recorded and/or mixed:
(partial list)
Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney) and Janet Weiss (Quasi, S-K)
Ken Stringfellow (Posies, REM)
Franz Ferdinand
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
She Wants Revenge
Richmond Fontaine
Madness
Cake
James Mercer (Shins)
Smegma
The Minders
Paper Cameras
Richard Butler (Psych. Furs)
Katlyn ni Donovan
Little Sue
Teeming Masses
3 Leg Torso
Purekane
James Angell
Cheralee Dillon
Daniel Riddle+King Black Acid
Dahlia
The Altarboys
Storm Large
Roy Tinsel
Pepe & the Bottle Blondes
Vagabond Opera
Stephanie Smith (Kleveland, all the dead horses)
SuckaPunch
Hungry Mob
The Joggers
8 Foot Tender
Crack City Rockers
Morgan Grace
Sam Henry (Wipers, Napalm Beach)
Chris Newman (Napalm Beach)
The Prids
Michael Vlatkovich
RicanStruction
The Kingdom
The UpsideDown
March Fourth
I noticed that he put his own group, the Crack City Rockers, well down the list.
(And by the way, I'm inordinately proud of this portrait shot of Sean.)

Absolute Beginners

One of my favorite bloggers is a young Canadian woman who writes Totcetera. She recently wrote about her love for the 1974 movie Phantom of the Paradise. Never having seen the film, I put it on my Netflix list and it showed up in my mailbox yesterday.
I watched it last night and could immediately see why it has developed a cult following. It's a quirky. cleverly made movie that can get into your consciousness and refuse to go away. It was made about the same time as Tommy and, at times, has a similar look and feel to it.
I suspect that if I had seen it at the right time in my life, I would have the same affection for it that Tot does.
My favorite movie musical, however, remains Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners. It's been called the first music video movie and a lot of it looks like a music video, particularly the ones Temple did for David Bowie (who, incidentally, has a significant role in the film). It's typical Temple in that the colors are vivid and the lighting and camera angles are inspired.
The soundtrack CD - the British import, not the abbreviated U.S. release - is the most listenable movie soundtrack album I've ever owned. It's got Bowie, Sade, Ray Davies, Gil Evans - a great range of pop and jazz.
I practically wore out my VHS version and now have it on DVD with Dolby 5.1 sound for my home theatre sound system.
I won't trouble you with a plot synopsis other than to say it's set in 1958 London when the youth culture emerged from the drab post World War II years.
Ok, Tot. I watched your movie. If you haven't already seen it, check out Absolute Beginners and tell me what you think.

Am I a lucky grandpa, or what?

My son Steve and granddaughter Lisa at the Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, checking out a butterfly exhibit.

A Picture Share!

My favorite ride to one of my favorite stores.

Happy Birthday, Blog!

My blog is 2 years old today, which makes it just slightly older than my granddaughter Lisa whose birthday is May 30.
I'm in Lafayette, Ind., again this morning on some errands and to keep the battery up on my K1200GT. I needed chlorine for the hot tub and some printable CDs and blank DVDs and they provided the perfect excuse for a ride.
There's rain coming up from the southwest, but I'm keeping track of it with some new Treo software and should be home before it arrives.
Maria and I did about 40 minutes in the hot tub this morning. It's nice to greet the day with a cup of coffee while soaking in 101-degree bubbling water while the dogs chase each other around the backyard and occsasionally peer over the side of the tub to say hello.
I probably ought to change the water - it's been 6 months at least and, while I keep it pH balanced and sanitary with chlorine - it think the water gets "tired" after so much chemical treatment. Sounds kinda unscientific, but fresh water somehow feels different, better.
Ruthie is going in for a long-overdue haircut and nail trimming Friday morning. I think she's put on some weight since Pete arrived in December because she's taken a liking to his fatty puppy chow. That, plus her winter coat of fur makes her look like a little yellow sheep. She usually looks positively skinny after a good buzz cut, so we're curious to see if she looks a little fatter after pigging out on Pete's food.
Pete, on the other hand, helps himself to her geriatric dog food, but also gets his fill of his own stuff.
I'm blogging this from a Barnes & Noble while drinking a vente moca. The sound system is playing Bruce Springsteen and I am reminded that his nickname is "the Boss." Well, he's not my boss. I never could get excited about Springsteen. He is to New Jersey what Billy Joel is to Long Island, Bob Seeger is to Detroit and John Mellencamp is to Indiana. So it's no particular surprise that Mellencamp's music resonates more with me than the others. But then Michael Jackson is a native Hoosier too and, as far as I'm concerned, he's from another planet.

--
Sent from my Treo

Sports-testing the D200

One of the great features of our new Nikon D200 is its "continuous shooting" feature that lets you blaze away at up to 5 frames per second for several seconds at a time. The D100, in contrast, could only manage 3 fps and the buffer loaded up after about 5 shots.
The continuous shooting mode is particularly useful for action/sports photography, so I took it over to the Little League ballpark across the street from our house last evening for a test run.
The sky was overcast and it was late in the day, so there wasn't a lot of light. To compensate, I used my 80-200mm f/2.8 lens and cranked the ISO up to 1,000. That let me shoot at shutter speeds in the 1/2000 sec range which permitted a reasonable number of frames per second on continuous shooting.
I was leaning on the left field fence for stability, so I was about as far from home plate as you can get and still be on the perimeter. Consequently, my home plate shots had to be substantially cropped to isolate the action there.
But even with a high ISO and the attendant image noise, I got some pretty decent stuff. Here's my favorite, with the color saturation juiced up and some sharpening added in Photoshop.
Notice, you can even see the stitching on the ball.
Of course, you never know exactly what you're going to get when you depress the shutter button - it all happens way too quickly for you to see what the camera is capturing and it's always a surprise when you review the images on the monitor on the back.
About the only thing you need to know is to start shooting when you think the action is starting and stop when it ends, then see what you got. So all you can really control is your shooting position and the parameters of the exposure: f stop, shutter speed and ISO.
I'm eager to try again under better lighting conditions and from a better vantage point.
I was reminded anew last night that kids at this level of play are pretty awful when it comes to ball-handling. If I were coaching, I'd tell my kids to never swing at the ball because the odds are excellent that the pitcher can't put 3 out of seven pitches through the strike zone.
That's what happened last night. The Knights of Pythias team (blue shirts) must have scored five or six runs by getting baserunners advanced to home plate on walks. The play captured in this shot was one of the rare occasions when a batter got a hit. Even more surprising is that the fielder threw the ball anywhere near the catcher.
Most of the time, balls are thrown wildly and then fumbled on the other end.
A team with a good, accurate pitcher could dominate this league.

Back in the saddle again. For an afternoon, anyway.

A couple of hours on the trickle charger gave the K1200GT enough juice to get started, but it took a remarkably long time for the engine to catch. I put about 30 miles on it last evening and put it back on the charger overnight.
I got a call from my favorite camera store about 1:15 p.m. today telling me that the extra battery for my new Nikon D200 is in. The special grip that gives me a vertical shutter button takes two batteries. Naturally, the D200 uses a different battery type than the D100, so we can't mix and match.
Anyhow, I was pleased to find the bike fired up right away - no hesitation or grinding - and performed flawlessly over the 70-mile round-trip.
I remain mystified about the cause of the low battery and balky starting. It had sat idle for three weeks, which is hardly a long time by BMW battery standards. I plan to ride it as often as possible between now and when I ride it over to Savoy, Ill, on May 23 for its 24,000-mile service.
I called Twin City BMW today to tell them I'll need a new front tire too, so it oughta be a pretty hefty service bill.
My friend Skip has offered to ride along on his Japanese cruiser, which is probably much less expensive to maintain. He oughta be stunned when he sees my bill. I know I always am.
My friend Harold, who also has a GT, said he paid about $700 for a 24k service at the same dealership.

Happy VE Day

Yep. WWII ended in Europe 61 years ago today. I wasn't born yet, but I was working on it.
I'm blogging today from the White Castle on Sagamore Parkway in Lafayette, Ind.
They take plastic, but the Dog 'n Suds up the street doesn't.
I didn't think they did, but I let Maria and her daughter persuade me to the contrary yesterday and suffered the embarrassment of having no way to pay for the tray full of food when it showed up.
I hardly ever carry much cash and neither does Maria.
Apparently this happens enough at the DnS that they have a policy to deal with it: you leave your driver's license with them and get it back when you return with cash for your food.
So we surrendered Maria's license and ate our late lunch while I stewed in silence.
Then, when it came time to go find an ATM, I discovered that the Subaru's battery was flat. I'd turned on the ignition to put up my window when the waitress came with the tray to hang on it and neglected to turn it off again.
It shouldn't have been enough of a drain to wipe out the battery, but it did.
Fortunately, I've been paying my $4.50 monthly fee to the Shell Oil Co. for their USAC Motor Club service, so I whipped out my Treo and called for help. The wrecker showed up about 45 minutes later, gave me a jumpstart and we were back in business.
Then it was off to the Chase Bank ATM and back to the DnS to redeem Maria's driver's license.
We had planned to do grocery shopping after lunch, but chose to abort that mission and head for home in case the problem was with the charging system. Didn't want to end up with a dead car again in the Meijer parking lot.
As it turned out, the drive home was enough to recharge the battery and the car started easily for an evening run to Dairy Queen and again this morning for Maria's drive to work.
So when I got ready to ride my BMW K1200GT to Lafayette this afternoon to deposit a couple of checks, I don't suppose I should have been all that surprised when I found the bike's battery was down and not able to fire the engine. I put it on the trickle charger and rode Maria's K75S instead.
Everyday is an adventure in system failure and fuckup lately.
Our friend Tim is back in Indiana from Colorado to pick up a couple of dirt bikes and we had planned to join him and other BMW Club friends at a restaurant tonight.
But when the plans got changed to Sunday night, Maria's daughter didn't think it was important enough to convey the voicemail notification we got on Saturday.
So the only bright spot of the weekend was Saturday afternoon when I broke down and bought a new Nikon D200 digital SLR. It's a spectacular camera and I'm having a lot of fun climbing the learning curve and discovering all of the amazing stuff it does. I'll post some photos shot with it in the next day or so.

--
Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

Pete's wearing a Gentle Leader Headcollar that transforms him from a spaz to a cooperative dog while on the leash.

A Picture Share!

On a Mexican party photo gig.

Sheep shot

Well, a lamb, acutally. Photo by Maria.

Up on the roof

The washer lid is fixed and the chimney work is done.
There was no charge for the return trip to correct the washer lid mistake and the construction company charged me exactly the $1,800 in the contract. Amazing – no overruns or surprises.
Well, there was one surprise.
The guy in charge of the operation, same guy who did some roof work for us in March and gave us the estimate for the chimney work, said we got severe hail damage to the roof from a cluster of storms that blew through here in late April. He says we need a new roof ($4,500) and seems confident our homeowner’s insurance carrier will agree.
If he’s right, that means we get a new roof paying just our $500 deductible.
The insurance company says they’ll send an adjuster out to look at our roof sometime next week, so we shall see.
Like I said, it’s always something.
When I logged onto our online banking connection this morning, I was astounded to see that the check I’d written to the construction company at 4:30 p.m. yesterday had already cleared. I had no idea that was possible.
The foreman must have raced to a branch of Chase Bank – it’s at least 20 miles to the nearest branch – and made the deposit before the 5 p.m. closing.
And Maria’s daughter decided yesterday that she didn’t want to wait until tonight to come home, so we cleared out the Subaru Forester as soon as Maria got home from work and headed down to Bloomington. We managed to jam all of her stuff into the car without a cubic foot of space to spare and hauled it home, arriving about 10:30 p.m.
So our empty nest lifestyle goes on hold for about three months.
Dragging the trashcans out to the curb this morning, I noticed the lawn is overdue for mowing. And it looks like we’re running a dandelion farm. I’ll get on it as soon as the dew evaporates.
The child support agreement proposed by Maria’s ex and forwarded to us by her attorney has been sitting on the center island in the kitchen for a week. Maria finally pulled it out of the envelope yesterday, but has not signed it and we haven’t discussed it.
I glanced at it this morning and stopped reading when I felt my blood pressure creeping up. The item that made me put the paper down and walk away was the requirement that we make the $100/week support payments through the county clerk’s office, rather than directly to the ex.
Back when both kids lived with her, Maria tired repeatedly to get him to make his support payments through the clerk’s office because he was a slow pay, often letting it slide for two or three weeks before catching up. Now the sonofabitch has the audacity to imply, through this request, that Maria and I require court supervision to make timely support payments.
I also read, with some amusement, his request that he be allowed to count their son as a dependent on his income tax return, beginning with the 2005 tax year. As I mentioned before, I discovered last month that the tax laws on dependents changed this year and that neither child can be used as a dependent because the both earned more than half of their support in 2005. I confirmed this with H&R Block and Maria communicated it to the ex, but he refuses to recognize it.
Fine. Explain it to the IRS, moron.

Stuff

Today is another home improvement day.
The roof repair crew is supposedly en route to my house from Indianapolis right now to fix a faulty chimney flashing job and to remove a redundant, non-functioning chimney.
At the same time, the appliance repairman who was here last Thursday to fix the dryer half of our stacked washer/dryer unit is coming back today to correct a mistake he made in reassembling the appliance. He didn't get the thing back together right and now the washer lid binds and will eventually wear away the enamel and lead to rust and ruin.
At the same time, Maria is lunching with a couple whose wedding we'll photograph later this summer. The bride is a coworker and she's getting a killer deal, but her parents are skeptical and want to know what they're getting. I'm staying out of it because I feel like we're getting ripped off to begin with and it really frosts me to have someone question the value of what they're getting under these circumstances.
Maria's daughter comes home from college for the summer tomorrow evening, which represents what we hope will be the final interruption of our empty nest status. The positive side of the equation is that she's increasingly mature and self-sufficient and she will be able to take care of the dogs and let us actually travel a bit.
I just noticed that we're coming up on the two-year anniversary of this blog on May 10. Maybe I'll reflect on that more later.

Guilty

I've been feeling increasingly guilty about neglecting my Cincinnati son and his family lately.
We haven't seen them since Christmas and I know that my granddaughter Lisa is growing and developing at an amazing rate. She'll be 2 on May 30.
Steve called yesterday to ask about dirtbike training for a 16-year-old neighbor kid. I took him and his brother Sean through the Northern Illinois University trail riding course when they were in their teens. It was based at a campground near Hart, Mich. and consisted of about 5 days of intensive training in the art of riding sand and mud, threading a bike down a single-track trail where the trees are closer together than the handlebars are wide and surmounting logs and other obstacles, culuminating in a couple of days of riding a great trail system through the Manistee National Forest.
Sadly, the course is no longer offered. But the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, whose beginning RiderCourse I taught for 10 years, has created a dirt riding course and it's offered in Cincinnati.
So I e-mailed him the contact info on the dirt riding course and he sent me a couple of great photos of Lisa that he shot minutes after we got off the phone. Here's one of them.

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.