The Daily Diversion Archive For May, 2004

Friday May 7, 2004

Jeez am I cranky.

I'm going to blame no motorcycling for my nasty mood, but it's probably something else. It's just easier to fixate on two bikes that are broken and not fixing themselves (DAMMIT!) than it is to figure out what's really eating on me.

And that's pretty much all I have to say right now.

Tuesday May 11, 2004

So just what the hell were those weirdos thinking over there at Abu Ghraib? "Hey Bill, let's get a bunch o' these Eyerakis, strippem nekkid and makem do that human pyramid thing." Um... No. Does any of this stuff strike anyone as just a bit weird? You know, if it were me guarding those prisoners, I think I'd just leave them in their cells to rot.

I think that soldiers who are capable of this and are tried and convicted of abusing prisoners should be registered as sex offenders here in the states. You'd think that someone in that crew might have blown the whistle before the naked pyramid thing.

Can you imagine it: You get back from chow to resume your shift guarding the prisoners and what do you see? Prisoners loose and being forced to pile up in a pyramid. I'd have torn every one of my co-workers a new one and reported each one. Frankly, these idiots have disgraced the country, their branch of the service and themselves. Suicide would be the right thing to do.

Now for the real creepies...

So, what is it about muslims and killing hostages? Daniel Pearl? Nicolas Berg? That Italian guy? What the hell is their problem? This latest one, Berg, they beheaded with a knife. A KNIFE! What the fuck? I suppose it's to send some kind of twisted message. That's why they have it on video. You know, I don't feel nearly so bad about our soldiers screwing up at Abu Ghraib now. I figure these yahoos are going to be tried and go to jail for what they did. Justice. The five fuckheads behind Nicolas Berg are not going to be tried for anything. If there's any such thing as luck, these jerks will be killed by our lads in some ill-advised challenging of our forces on the ground there in Iraq. What's more likely to happen is that they'll either blow themselves up, have their head exploded by a sniper's bullet or be bombed to paste when they dare meet with more than 6 of their fellow travelers.

I know we shouldn't howl for revenge, but I'm howling and I'm really sick of this crap.

Thursday May 13, 2004

I had a lovely day today. I never work on my birthday. I had a spactacularly bad day many moons ago when I worked on my birthday and I since then I can only think of one day when I didn't have it off. It's one of my deals. Sarah took the day off too and we went and did some stuff.

I got to sleep in until about 8 or so. We had a quick breakfast and after the nanny showed up we went to our local Chry/Ply (um, wait... How Chry/Dodge) dealer to test drive a couple of cars. First up was the Chrysler Pacifica. Celine Dion ads aside, it was a fairly substantial car that had nice road manners and enough power to get out of its own substantial way. I really liked the manumatic, but I wasn't totally thrilled about its response to my inputs. Upshifts were delayed a good second after the input. This led to a couple of fairly aggressive flights into the upper rev ranges. I was hoping not to piss off the salesdude for reasons I'll detail in a bit.

The Pacifica was a bit short in the leg in the driver's seat for Sarah and a bit low in the roof for me in the passenger seat. Visibility around the car sucked, but was offset somewhat by large mirrors. It had a decent amount of pickup as I mentioned earlier and the interior seats and panels folded every which-way to ultimately produce a flat, if sloped towards the rear, cargo area. It handled pretty well, but Sarah didn't like the fact it sort of pushed (understeered) somewhat going through corners. It felt as if the body was fighting the wheels over which way to go.

In all, this would be a great MDU (Mileage Disposal Unit) especially if a person needed four seats or a large, flat area behind them.

The second car we looked at was a Chrysler 300. No, not the 300C unfortunately. I had read a nice review in Automobile that said the 300C was the bomb-diggity and so we pressed our time allotment to take it literally around the block. The car felt good, but had an acre between the steering wheel and the base of the windshield. Although the car was comfy, the low roof line and the looong front dash seemed to be custom made to make Sarah car sick.

As noted in the Automobile review, the plastics needed a bit of work. The car had that brushed-aluminum look that just didn't agree with me that much. Sure the aluminum panels were plastic for the most part, but it was just a bit OTT (Over The Top). All they had in stock was the base model 300 with the base engine. Our little tour around the block included a bit of I-94 and I have to say that if you're thinking about one of these cars, go for either the mid line engine or the big-ass hemi thing. The little one had a bit of punch, but it had to be thrashed to do anything with it. True, there were three large adults in the car, but I had to flog it on a downhill on-ramp to get it to do much at all. It reminded me of the sort of pick up our '86 Camry had with its 4-banger: The punch was there--sorta--but you really had to flog it to find it.

The 300 also had odd steering. It didn't seem to want to return to center and that made for some small scares when I steered it like my other cars. It wouldn't quite return to center so I found the car moving off toward the curb on right turns like the one out of the dealer's parking lot. Visibilty was not that great either and there was this huuuge hood in front that really drove home that this was a big car. Even though the car wasn't all that big.

We bid the sales guy good bye and headed to a local institution by the name of Serlin's Cafe. I hadn't been there in a while and the breakfast of Steak and Eggs was just what the doctor didn't order, but suited both Sarah and I just fine.

We stopped back at the house to take care of some feeding Gus issues and headed out again to a couple of antique stores. I'd have to say that the antique mall on University just west of Lexington on the north side of the road has never really impressed me. Not to get too odd on you all, but it seemed to me that in a Feng Shui way, this place is kinda like the ass-end of the body of stuff. Most of the stuff here just seemed to me to be the stuff that was left around and either donated to Goodwill or sold wholesale to "antique" dealers. Sarah really put her finger on it when she responded to my flaky-ass Feng Shui theory with the assertion that most of the stuff at that place seemed to be the kind of stuff that was left over in a house when the owner died. She added that the dead person was only of modest means as well.

That place really isn't an antique store. I'd bet that 99.999% of the stuff there was made in the 20th Century and probably the majority of it was made after 1950. Not antiques. I've been there twice and I've yet to find anything that really rung my bell. Not only is it not antique, but not that desirable, either. Sure there were some cool things there, but places like this really piss me off when I'm out looking for antiques. Most of the stuff there is pretty mundane, worn, quotidian, overpriced, uninspired, ordinary and, well, used. And not antique in the slightest. Judging by how much stuff I recognized from the first time I was there, I'm guessing that most of the stuff isn't that desirable, either.

That said, we did buy something there. We bought the little Fisher-Price telephone pull-toy that both Sarah and I had as children for Gus.

I think I'll call places like that Junk Shops from now on.

After we left there, we went over to Fairview and Selby to the couple of antique shops there. The place on the south side of the street was cool in a totally chaotic way. The place was a riot of chair legs and large pieces of furniture. It was really cool and had a lot of real, honest to goodness antique furniture, but it also had some junk. The place on the north side of the street was better in the junk to antique ratio than the place on University, but still pretty junky. Sarah got a work call (Hi Amanda!) so we left and headed back home to feed Gus and change into nice clothes for our dinner out.

We went to Zander Cafe on Selby in St. Paul. I like this place. This was our third time there and it was good. My special was a bit less than I'd hoped and my favorite escargot dish was a bit more salty than I remembered it, but the recommended wine kicked ass and my dessert totally kicked my butt around the room. It was a poached pear with carmel sauce and vanilla ice cream in an almost candy/toffee bowl. It was great. We had a glass of dessert wine as well. The service was excellent.

I got a new toy this week. I won't call it my birthday present because, frankly, I'd hoped to spend more money on myself. Anyway, TiVo is currently offering its Home Media Option for free for a while. They're trying to get people to sign up for this for-pay service so they're giving out a free try. To take advantage of the features of HMO, you need a network adapter for the TiVo unit. I ordered a nice Linksys unit last week and it came yesterday. I plugged it in, configured it and then installed the server and publisher programs on my .mp3 server in the basement. It worked just like that.

From what I can see, HMO does what I'm doing with my other laptop on the stereo downstairs--serves .mp3 files wirelessly to a device with which I can listen to them. It does more, though. It also serves pictures (also something I configured my laptop to do) and through the HMO, you can schedule your TiVo to record stuff from the web.

Sound neat? Yep. I'm going to give it a whirl and if I use it I may just consider getting it.

Monday May 17, 2004

Congratulations to Claus and Julia on their new baby boy!

The rest of the weekend was busy but nice. We did a major amount of work on the playroom downstairs and it's now to the point that we can think about what to do with the floor and what to do for furniture. I think we'll end up buying a cheap carpet remnant and having it bound to make an area rug to cover most of the basement floor. The idea here is to buy one cheap enough that we don't feel bad tossing it out next spring or whenever it starts to smell like basement.

The furniture will likely be a recliner from my mom and a nice futon couch (I know, no such thing...) in the center of the room. We're also thinking TV and other entertainment stuff on the cheap as well. Perhaps we'll even get another TiVo. The TV will probably be big, but we'll try to get one as cheap as we can. We have the Sony Vega 24" upstairs and I suspect it'll stay there.

I just finished Al Franken's book Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. You know, he has a good point in this book. A lot of the right wing pundits are getting a free pass on being fact-checked. It seems that all you have to do is to take something your opponent said out of context, take it the wrong way (literally vs. in context, change the word arrangement vs taking the quote as it was actually said, etc...) or even make some crazy-ass shit up, then have the chorus of pundits and commentators parrot the statement verbatim and all eventually even the mainstream media picks it up.

Suddenly Al Gore invented the Internet. Suddenly Bill Clinton did nothing to prepare for fighting Bin Laden. I'll even go a bit farther than Franken and say that there's some kind of party-wide group of chatterers in the Republican party that are on the lookout for these kinds of statements and who are charged with getting these statements into the media. Paranoid? Get the book, read it and decide for yourself.

Friday May 28, 2004

Congratulations to Jason and Karah on the birth of their new baby boy, London Avery!

Speaking of babies, Gus is growing like a weed. He's left 20lbs. in the dust and is probably closing in on 24". That's pretty big for 7 months. He's sure getting heavy. He's recognizing the dog and is finding Boo a constant source of big laughs. This is good. Boo still doesn't quite know how to take Gus, but they're getting along pretty well.

We're getting very close on the basement project. We have the carpets and one of them is already down. The basement looks nicely finished where the carpet is down. However, it makes the basement floor look pretty bad. I suspect we'll have to paint it sooner or later. I hope to have the other crap still in the way moved out to other parts in our house by the end of the day on Monday. That'll leave us with a nice, large play area in the basement. Hopefully, some furniture will be found that doesn't suck, won't break our savings account and that will do OK in the basement. We're leaning towards a futon couch mostly because it is probably the only large piece of furniture that will fit through the narrow basement stairway. Yes, I know that futon is Japanese for uncomfortable couch that turns into uncomfortable bed. However, we're looking for stuff that will survive a basement without getting full of mold. Granted, there's not much that guarantees a futon won't get full of mold, but the idea with a futon is to buy a cheap enough mattress that we can toss it when it does develop the stink of the underground. We used the same approach with the carpets. We got a couple of largish remnants bound into rugs that if they end up getting wet, we won't cry too hard when we chuck them out.

Having lived in a wet basement before and being an allergy sufferer, I want the basement to be able to be re-done on a whim (a fairly expensive whim, granted) so that I don't have to suffer when I want to hang out down there.

We dumped another two trash bins of stuff out to get where we currently are. Not included in that amount is the 20 or so cut-down cardboard boxes that we tossed this morning as well. Most of those were boxes left over from the move 2+ years ago. It's amazing to me that we still had boxes that were left over from the move, but that just makes it pretty clear that there are things one uses daily and things one uses yearly. One guess as to what was down in the basement.

Being that we've been pretty involved with our basement reclaimation project, we've not had too much time to do much of anything else.

Sunday May 30, 2004

The Twins won on Sunday. They hadn't been playing the best of ball of late, and find themselves currently 2 games back from Chicago. That's the bad news. The good news is that they're entering a 14 game home stand and they're getting all their injured players back except for Shannon Stewart and Joe Mays. Here's my prediction: Take this to the bank. The Twins will be in first by at least 1 game by the end of the home stand.