Scenic views

This is the inspiring scenic view from our window at the Hilton Gardens Inn in Conway, Ark. If there are gardens here, I haven’t found them.
We’re attending the annual meeting of the Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors Association.
We had dinner last night at a splendid restaurant in the old downtown area called Mike’s Place. I had the salmon with citrus dijon sauce and am happy to say it’s the best salmon I’ve had since we moved to Arkansas four years ago.
The other pleasant surprise at dinner was the discovery that the woman seated to my right used to be a gardener for longtime motorcycle friend Ted Simon at his home in Covelo, Calif. Becky Harris works at the Log Cabin Democrat, the Conway newspaper, now. What are the odds of making that kind of connection?

Lasagna coyote

We had a 4-inch-square piece of Macaroni Grill lasagna left over from dinner, so I put it – still in its plastic cooking tray – out as trailcam bait last night. I rather expected neighborhood dogs Zeb and Frank to get it, but it lay there unmolested until 4:50 a.m. when a coyote snatched it from the tray and carried it off to eat.

He reappeared about a minute later, his eyes glowing in the infrared light at the right edge of the frame, now wary of the glowing red infrared light source on the trailcam. He apparently didn’t think it was worth the risk to return for the lasagna residue in the tray.

It’s Farmers’ Market season!

This is Earl Duffel, market master of the Arkansas State University Regional Farmers’ Market, which begins its sixth season Saturday.

The market at the northeast corner of Stadium Boulevard and Aggie Road will be open from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Saturday from now through the end of October.

Beginning June 7, the market will be also open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2 to 6 p.m.

It’s our favorite place to buy fresh fruit and vegetables.

Nighttime visitors

We had a couple of visitors to our trail cam last night after I put out a pile of table scraps.

After the neighborhood dogs feasted, a coyote turned up about 12:30 a.m., followed by a fox at 4:51 a.m.

My first project with Corel VideoStudio Pro X4

I obviously still have much to learn.

New lineup, same buttons

SiriusXM satellite radio re-jiggered their channel lineup today.

I fully expected it to be a laborious process requiring me to re-do all of the pre-set buttons on my Pioneer XM car radio.

But to my delight, the buttons still call up the same programs as before, they just have new channel numbers assigned to them. I wheeled my K1200GT out of the garage so the XM antenna could see the sky and let it acquire the new lineup too, so I’m good to go.

Now all I need is someplace to go.

Channel the mouse

The rain is gone and the sun is shining! O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

After what seems like a solid week of rain, it’s astonishing how much a brilliant sun in a clear blue sky can lift my spirits.

I dumped an inch of water from the rain gauge this morning, then took my time to putter around the house and get my K1200GT ready, then rode in to town for a late coffee at Seattle Grind.

The bike tells me it wants to go for a long ride, maybe to Memphis for bagels, but I think not. I have errands to run – settling up with my bank for safe deposit rental that’s two months overdue (there’s nothing in the box, so I’m not worried about losing anything) and running down to the Honda shop on the southside for a can of their excellent spray cleaner and polish.

I finally quit trying to load my Garmin Zumo 550’s SD card with MP4s – a frustrating process, since the unit can only read MP3s and it clearly says so in the owner’s manual – and now have a selection of my own tunes to listen to, in addition to XM satellite radio. SiriusXM emailed me a couple of days ago to advise they’re reshuffling their channel lineup tomorrow, so I’ll have take time tomorrow to let the Zumo acquire the new arrangement.

I’m ready for the talking heads on TV to move on from the Osama bin Laden story. I was delighted to hear the news Sunday night, even if Obama did use it as a way to cheap-shot Donald Trump by preempting the crucial last 30 minutes of Celebrity Apprentice. But the death of Osama (have you noticed how many times people on TV slip and call him Obama?) has absolutely no relevance to my day-to-day life and all of the speculation about whether this makes Obama a shoo-in in 2012 (Rasmussen polling shows he got zero popularity bump from the killing) or whether Osama’s death will trigger a wave of revenge attacks has become excruciatingly tedious.

The network and cable execs apparently think we can’t get enough of the story and are going to absurd lengths to keep it going at the expense of real news. Like the impending collapse of the global economy and the epic flooding in the Mid-South.

We became more acutely aware of the consequences of flooding here yesterday when the server at lunch said the restaurant was out of certain items because high water road closures kept the supply trucks from getting through.

And human-snake encounters are up sharply since the serpents are being flooded out of their natural habitats. That is a lot more significant to me than whether Osama bin Laden, a snake on the other side of the world, is alive or dead.

BMW bike vs. BMW car–Guess who wins

My favorite front page of the day

You can always count on the New York Post for punchy headlines. They went with “bastard” because “motherfucker” wouldn’t fit.

Snake-bit Pete

We think Pete the Aussie was bitten by a snake yesterday afternoon.

He seems OK now, but he went all wobbly and spastic about 6:30 p.m. yesterday. He found Maria in the bedroom, walking funny with his front legs buckling. I was in the garage, reinstalling my tank bag and GPS on the K1200GT when Maria yelled to me that something was seriously wrong with Pete.

I watched him follow her into living room where he collapsed and went into what looked like a mild seizure. While Maria comforted him, I got a flashlight and checked his pupils (they responded properly) and called the emergency number of our vet. We were put through to one of the vets on call who asked the usual questions about whether he might have ingested antifreeze or some other poisonous substance. By the time we were talking to her, he had barfed a small piece of dog food and was coming out of his distress and looking more like himself.

We concluded that he may have eaten something bad. She suggested we keep an eye on him, so we kept him with us while we drove in to town and Maria did a little work at the office.

Consulting with our friends Deb and Charlie this morning, Charlie – who grew up in a farm near Texarkana and is a pharmacist – offered that it was probably a snake bite, since he saw snake-bit dogs when he was a kid who behaved similarly. Our guess is that Pete tangled with a baby copperhead, most likely in the woodpile in the back yard. Consequently, if and when it stops raining, the woodpile will be disassembled and any snakes found will be dispatched.

Back from the Cape

This is a badly stitched-together three-shot panorama out the window of the restaurant where we had lunch today at Cape Girardeau, Mo.

Charlie’s Toyota SUV, with my bike on a trailer behind, is parked in the middle of the parking lot. To the right is the flooded Mississippi River, held back by a floodwall. The river is huge, swollen by a week of torrential rain, and the wind was whipping whitecaps up from the waves. Every now and then we’d see a massive tree floating down the river.

We delivered Deb’s R1200GS to the BMW shop for a new set of shocks and picked up my K1200GT. It was a good decision to trailer the bikes since there was a fierce wind out of the south this morning, complicated by a threat of rain this afternoon.

Scaling the learning curve

I took Maria’s K75S out for a ride on Crowley’s Ridge yesterday afternoon and shot about 40 minutes of video, mounting the camera in seven different ways to get shots through the windscreen, along the starboard side and of me from various perspectives.

Then I pulled the resulting seven video clips into Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 and started exploring and learning. By 7 p.m., I had cobbled together a passable ride video, burned it to a DVD and viewed it on the big 42” flat screen. It’s rough, but I love the color fidelity and resolution.

The learning process is coming along nicely and I’m already at a point where I could scrap the editing I’ve done so far and create a better version in maybe one-third of the time.

I’ll post a video here in a day or two when I’m a bit farther along.

The software presumably can make 3D videos and came with a pair of 3D glasses. I’m weeks away from even thinking of playing with that feature, but the glasses look bizarrely cool.

In the meantime, I’m running up to Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles in Cape Girardeau, Mo. this morning with Charlie Parsons to haul his wife’s bike up and retrieve my bike with its new fuel pump. I’m taking my riding gear out of sheer optimism, but the forecast is for high winds starting at noon and rain starting around 3 p.m., so my K1200GT will most likely come home on the trailer.

The learning curve looks pretty steep from here at the bottom

I got my Amazon Vine Program review copy of Corel’s VideoStudio Pro X4 this morning and installed it.

Now I’m staring at it, overwhelmed. This is serious, powerful software.

It’s my second encounter with Corel software, the first being CorelDraw several years ago. I never could get my brain around CorelDraw because of what I considered overly complex controls.

VideoStudio Pro X4 looks a bit more intuitive, but I can see right now that I’m going to have to spend a lot of time with the User Guide before I can produce anything worth looking at.

What the hell, it’s supposed to retail for $99.99 and I got it free. The least I can do is play with it and review it from the perspective of a rank rookie stepping up from Windows Live Movie Maker.

Yep, that’s what I saw too

Click the “Full Screen” icon at the bottom right for the best view

This is exactly what I saw when I downloaded the PDF file from the White House web site.

There is absolutely no way this is an unaltered PDF made from a scan of an original document.

There is some speculation that the fakery was intentionally obvious because Obama’s enemies in the White House want him to be found out.

Whatever. I’m not in a hurry to see Congress lose interest in fixing the economy just to chase this issue. The end result would be President Biden and an even worse economic situation.

The time to pursue this matter is after the Republicans regain control of the White House.

Damages

dam·age

   [dam-ij] Show noun, verb, -aged, -ag·ing.

–noun

1. injury or harm that reduces value or usefulness: The storm did considerable damage to the crops.
2. damages, Law . the estimated money equivalent for detriment or injury sustained.

Above the cart corrals in the Walmart parking lot. I think they meant damage, not damages.

Sunny skies, the rain is gone

The sun is shining in a cloudless sky and the rain is gone.

The rain gauge readings:

• 8 a.m. Sunday to 8 a.m. Monday – .55 inches
• 8 a.m. Monday to 8 a.m. Tuesday – 1.1 inches
• 8 a.m. Tuesday to 8 a.m. Wednesday – 1.7 inches
• 8 a.m. Wednesday to 8 a.m. today – 1 inch

So we got 4.3 inches of rain from this miserable four-day rain event.

But you only have to glance at the TV this morning to see that it could be worse, much worse.

The closest we got to a tornado was yesterday when one was spotted south of Jonesboro that tracked northeast and did some damage in Lake City.

That’s nothing compared with the nearly 200 fatalities and the mile-wide tornado that stayed on the ground for an estimated 200 miles across Mississippi and Alabama, destroying whole towns as it went. One report had debris from Tuscaloosa falling out of the sky in Birmingham, about 50 miles to the east.

And we’ll be dealing with the flooding for weeks. The Mississippi is at an all-time high flood level, as are some tributaries in Arkansas.

So I’ll just shut up about our 4.3 inches of rain that quickly ran off to become someone else’s problem. It’s a beautiful morning and I’m going for a motorcycle ride.

See for yourself

Go to the White House web site and download what is purported to be President Barack Hussein Obama’s honest-to-God birth certificate.

Here’s the link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

Now open it in Adobe Illustrator. Click window>Actions>Links and behold the nine layers of alterations made to the original document.

I’m absolutely stunned that they could be so amateurish and sloppy.

And even if you don’t have Illustrator, notice that the green background pattern was added and is not part of the original document because it doesn’t follow the curve of the page on the left. And that was not the name of that hospital in 1961.

But you’d better move quickly before they discover the mistake and replace it with a version where the history has been scrubbed.

Real-time stormtracker video

If you’re a stormchaser or a weather junkie, you’ll enjoy Severe Studios.

The site features real-time streaming video from storm chasers.

Attention, Walmart shoppers!