Hisssssss

When we ran out of Swiffer WetJet cleaning solution a few weeks ago, I put it on the Sam’s Club shopping list.

I was about to buy a three-pack of the stuff when I noticed the Shark steam mop, which uses plain water and washable pads.

The price was close to $50, but I figured that over a year or so, it would pay for itself, since WetJet pads and solution aren’t exactly cheap.

I really like it, so far. It cleans and sanitizes with a confidence-inspiring hiss, has a generously long cord (which they omit from their illustrations to make you think it’s cordless), and costs next to nothing to operate.

So there.

My mother hated the Japanese

It’s probably a good thing my mother didn’t live to see the Japanese Trifecta Disaster.

You see, Mom hated the Japanese with an implacable white-hot passion.

Why? Because her nephew Norman was a U.S. Navy ensign who was captured by the Japanese in the fall of Corregidor, the last U.S. stronghold in the Philippines in World War II. Norman suffered through three years of brutal abuse in a Japanese prison camp. At one point, American prisoners of war were being shipped from the Philippines to Japan to work as slave labor in the mines. Norman was judged too ill to make the voyage, a twist of fate that saved his life. The transport ship in which he would have sailed was mistakenly torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine.

All of this, plus his condition when he returned home, fed a hatred that became stronger and more irrational in Mom’s later years. I remember several occasions when we took her to lunch or dinner and noticed Japanese students from nearby Purdue University. She would mutter darkly and make us cringe for fear of serious public embarrassment. Fortunately, it never went further than that.

I’d like to think she’d have some pity for the Japan of today, but I kinda doubt it.

For his part, Norman is alive and well at 90, living in southern California. He was an ad exec for Toyota before his retirement in 1985.

New boots on Monday

The UPS guy brought my new Bates GX-8 Gore-Tex Composite Safety-toe Boots this morning.

I knew from the UPS tracking site that they were out for delivery today, but it’s rare for the UPS truck to get to our neighborhood before noon.

My Gore-Tex BMW motorcycle boots are about a decade old and are showing their age, so I decided this was the season for new boots. In my experience, dedicated motorcycle boots tend to be overpriced and are seldom comfortable enough to wear all day, every day for two or three weeks.

So I went to the BMW MOA forum and looked for boot ideas. The Bates Gore-Tex boots got good reviews in the forum and also from Amazon.com customers, so I pulled the trigger last week and ordered a pair.

They feel fine after three hours or so of wearing them around the house and I have yet to pull out the stock insoles and replace them with my custom orthotics.

I’ll write more after a get a few miles on them.

Weekend report

It’s been another low-key weekend.

I took the K75S out for a spin in the sunshine yesterday morning – just a little jaunt down to the post office and a roundabout way home via Goobertown that ended up as a 14-mile ride.

I was going to do more riding in the afternoon, but Maria had an attack of cabin fever, so I changed into street clothes and we drove in to town for lunch at the new Chipotle Mexican restaurant, a visit to Hancock’s for fabric and then down to the Parker Road Walmart to pick up some prescriptions.

Chipotle is not the build-your-own burrito chain of that name in Indiana. It’s a real sit-down restaurant and the first Mexican restaurant in this dry county to get an alcoholic beverage club permit. The ambiance is nice, but the food is overpriced and just so-so on flavor. I have no desire to go back. If I want a beer or a Margarita with my Mexican food, I’ll drive up to Paragould where the dining is less pretentious and the food actually has some zip to it.

I fired a few test rounds with our new Mossberg 20 gauge shotgun, blasting birdshot into the huge fallen tree in our back yard. The neighbors didn’t seem all that concerned – our neighbors across the cul-de-sac routinely shoot clay pigeons in their back yard – but Pete freaked out.

The first shot sent him hauling ass into the house where he cowered in his kennel until the shooting was over. Pete hates thunder, fireworks and gunfire. He’ll never be a hunting dog, but then who wants to try to teach a herding dog to hunt?

About 6:45 p.m., we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to drive back to town to see Rango. It was a good choice. I’ll say no more, other than to recommend it.

Thanks to the time change, we didn’t get out of bed until about 10 a.m. We had a late breakfast at noon at IHOP, then loaded up on groceries at Sam’s Club.

Maria worked on a special quilt this afternoon and I hung out and surfed the Internet, which brings us up to the present. Maria’s cooking something for dinner that involves a lot of garlic. If I close my eyes, I can pretend I’m in Gilroy, Calif.

Happy Birthday, Lauri!

Today is our friend Lauri’s birthday. Her thoughtful husband Jim gave her a Mac with a full design suite, which will come in very handy for the classes she’s going to take now that she’s no longer a wage slave in the Philip Smith Salt Mines.

Cell phone bill

I got the cell phone bill today and noticed it was up sharply from last month’s bill.

Austin, who has my old Treo 700p smartphone, racked up $35.76 worth of Sprint Data charges, i.e., Internet access.

He’s been cautioned about that, but I suspect he’s doing something that accesses the Internet without realizing it’s happening. My best guess is that he’s posting stuff to his Facebook page, thinking Sprint will consider it just another text message.

So rather than complain about it, I called Sprint and disabled that feature on his phone.

He’s also seriously into text messaging, which is fine, because our plan allows unlimited texting.

The bill shows 2,350 text messages to and from his phone last month.

I’m the next biggest texter with 33.

That’s right, his text volume is 71 times mine.

Interesting times

“May you live in interesting times.”

Chinese curse?

Well, maybe not. “The Yale Book of Quotations” says, “No authentic Chinese saying to this effect has ever been found.”

Regardless, if these are not interesting times, I can’t imagine what would be.

From a journalistic perspective, the inanity of the talking heads on TV is always at its worst when they attempt to cover huge breaking news events like the earthquake off the coast of Japan and the ensuing tsunami.

The apparent need to say something, anything, turns most of these people into jabbering fools. FOX News’s Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum, who come across as superficial twits on a good day, are making me want to scream this morning.

Absolutely hilarious!

You don’t have to be a Trekkie to enjoy this brilliant piece of work.

Mitch was six years ahead of the curve

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has an op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal reiterating the merits of his decision to restrict collective bargaining for state employees.

I had to smile when I read this paragraph:

When Gov. Mitch Daniels repealed collective bargaining in Indiana six years ago, it helped government become more efficient and responsive. The average pay for Indiana state employees has actually increased, and high-performing employees are rewarded with pay increases or bonuses when they do something exceptional.

Wisconsin Senate GOP Votes to Strip State Workers of Collective Bargaining Rights

Bypassing Democrats hiding out in Illinois, Wisconsin Senate Republicans voted Wednesday night to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights.

Republicans voted 18-1 to pass the stripped-down budget bill in a hastily arranged meeting. None of the Senate Democrats were present.

The state Assembly votes on the bill Thursday.

All 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois nearly three weeks ago, preventing the chamber from having enough members present to consider Gov. Scott Walker's so-called "budget repair bill" -- a proposal introduced to plug a $137 million budget shortfall..

The Senate requires a quorum to take up any measures that spend money. But Republicans on Wednesday split from the legislation the proposal to curtail union rights, and a special conference committee of state lawmakers approved that bill a short time later.

The lone Democrat present on the conference committee, Rep. Tony Barca, shouted that the surprise meeting was a violation of the state's open meetings law but Republicans voted over his objections. The Senate then convened within minutes and passed it without discussion or debate.

Spectators in the gallery screamed "You are cowards."

What does it mean?

English is a rich language with an enormous vocabulary of words borrowed from other languages that bring to it shades of meaning you just can’t get in most other tongues.

That richness puts a lot of tools into our linguistic toolbox, but like any toolbox, you can’t get a good result if you reach blindly and grab the first thing that comes to hand.

As Mark Twain said, the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.

And when a wrong word shows up, it can be startling and jarring.

A woman whose blog I visit has just such a problem with the word banal. When she and her friends get together for friendly socializing, she calls it “banal discourse.”

Here’s what Dictionary.com has to say about the word:

ba·nal

   /bəˈnæl, -ˈnɑl, ˈbeɪnl/ Show Spelled[buh-nal, -nahl, beyn-l] Show IPA

–adjective

devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite: a banal and sophomoric treatment of courage on the frontier.

Judging from the context, I really doubt she means to be so insulting to her friends and herself.

The editor of my college newspaper somehow got the idea that the word dildo meant a silly or dim-witted person. She was horribly embarrassed when she learned that a dildo is an artificial erect penis. Fortunately, she never used the word in an editorial.

There’s a short copy editor’s prayer that goes, “Lord, save us from the things we think we know.”

If you’re even a little unsure about what a word means, look it up and save yourself some embarrassment.

Don’t be a dildo.

Clean bill of health

The vet’s office called this afternoon to report that Pete’s definitive heartworm test came back negative, validating our suspicion that the initial test result was a false positive.

We are understandably relieved.

A tip for writers

My blog gets the occasional visit from young or aspiring writers who think I might know a thing or two about the craft, having spent my whole adult life in and around newspapers.

One of the best insights I ever got came from a writing coach from the Poynter Institute when I was a young reporter at The Indianapolis News. He opined I was over-writing, using big words when short synonyms would do.

And he introduced me to the Gunning Fog Index, which measures the readability of text and estimates the level of formal education needed to understand it the first time through. For instance, an index of 10.0 is at the reading level of a high school sophomore.

The light bulb came on and ever since, when I re-read my stuff, I declare war on big words whenever a short word will carry the same freight. (I also declare war on “that.” It’s often just a useless stumbling block in a sentence.)

You can copy and paste some of your writing here and get a Gunning Fog Index number for it.

This blog post has a fog index of 10.58.

So much for being retired

I’m not feeling very retired this week.

I have two more stories to research and write for the upcoming special section and I just got called off of the bench this morning to substitute for a sick photographer.

I’m headed for one of the major industries in town to shoot an environmental portrait of the new plant manager.

Did I mention I’d rather be at the Flagler Beach pier, staring out at the Atlantic Ocean?

What motorcycle rider hasn’t wanted to do this?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to do this. I’m pretty sure the K75S is low enough that I could clear the underside of one of these things. If I were a bit younger and stupider, I’d do it.

A tip of the hat to my neighbor Tony Micenhamer for discovering this one.

Two down, two to go

I finally got leverage on myself this morning and knocked out the first two of four stories I’m writing for an upcoming special section of the paper.

Were it not for this project, there is about a 70 percent probability that I would be at Bike Week in Daytona Beach this week. I’m trying not to grouse too much about it because I want to be helpful, but the timing is bad when it interferes with my need to ride.

Threads of Life

Nancy Chrisman, Maria, and Sharon Jones sold raffle tickets yesterday at the Stories in the Forest storytime program at the Mall at Turtle Creek.

Maria is a member of the Women’s Advisory Council of the St. Bernards Development Foundation. The group supports the programs of St. Bernards Hospital in Jonesboro.

She’s created a Facebook page for the Council’s Threads of Life Quilt and Fiber Art Show, April 2-3. Check it out at www.facebook.com/pages/Threads-of-Life.

They’re raffling a hobo quilt – featuring symbols hobos used as their secret language to designate places where food was available, where people would welcome them or have them arrested, etc. I think Maria said she made three of the quilt blocks for the project.

A clown, whose name I failed to get, reads “How do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?” to a gaggle of kids at Stories in the Forest.

175 years ago today–the line in the sand

Facebook friend Neil Burrell has a running day-by-day commentary on the 175th anniversary of the siege of the Alamo.

Today’s entry:

Day 12, March 5: Col Travis drew his famous line in the sand asking those willing to die defending the Alamo to cross over. Everyone crossed over except Louis Rose, a mercenary and Napoleon veteran who stated that he was not ready to die.

Even James Bowie was carried over as he lay in his cot. Cannonading continued all day.

Crowley’s Ridge State Park on a sunny spring day

If you've for the bandwidth to support it, watch this video full screen and bump the resolution up to 720p or 1080p.

Friday stuff

The vet’s office just called to report that Pete came through his dental cleaning just fine and that I can pick him up in a couple of hours.

I’m always a little concerned about the effects of anesthesia on our dogs and it will be a relief to get him home again.

I shot some video on my ride through Crowley’s Ridge State Park yesterday afternoon and am getting reacquainted with Windows Live Movie Maker. One of the nifty features of the software is that it lets you add music and balance the volume of the music against the volume of the ambient sound on the original video material.

I like the music and visual stuff to match up, so when I determined I needed a song exactly 5 minutes 30 seconds long, I opened up iTunes, clicked on the “time” column and scrolled down to see what songs in my library are 5:30. Turns out there are 22, which gave me a nice variety from which to choose. I picked Montana Banana from the Bluesiana II CD.

The video is uploading to YouTube now and since it’s 1.08G it’s taking a long time. I’ll post it when it’s finished loading.