Halloween 2006

All right ... I'm still not sufficiently recovered to fully vent my bile re: this past weekend, but rest assured those responsible will be fully taken to task in a later blog entry. I will say, as covered over at that other blog, the highlight of the trip was seeing longtime DCV blog reader Joe L. during the third hour of our detention at J.C. Penney's portrait department.

Instead, I will distract my attention w/ a recap of tonight's Halloween festivities here. APD went as the Weather Wizard who is a HeroClix character. The get up consisted of his weather map sweatshirt (provided by Gm D many years ago), a bandanna w/ a tornado on it, and his baseball pants (?). Oh yeah, and gloves that say soccer on them. No pictures were taken. He said three treat-dispensers pegged him as a meteorologist, which didn't bother him much, but does leave me a little concerned. Which channel has the weather dude who wears baseball pants?

OK, here's a countdown of Top 5 APD treats received tonight:

#5 I thought these would be #1, but there were only 9 of these in his overflowing bag.

#4 There were 10 of these.

#3 You know how we call football, soccer & the rest of the world calls soccer, football? Well, that pales in comparison to how we call the #3 treat this, but the rest of the world thinks this is this. I think that may be the most single fascinating thing of this entire blog to date. I think Americans would like these better if more of us knew the rest of the world was mistaken in what these are. Either way, there were 12 of these in the bag.

#2 The candy that taught us all that sometimes accidents can be good things. 14 were received, or about two days worth of calories for a averaged-sized adult male.

#1 Is there anything else that was first created in 1896 that is still the most popular item in its category in 2006? A whopping 17 were received.

You Tube link of the night: snippet of Relient K's new song, Devastation and Reform, performed live in Houston. Their new album, Five Score and Seven Years Ago will be released on 3/6/2007, and if this song is any indication this could very possibly be the second best March 6th ... ever.

World Series ratings (& why they don't matter)

I will blog about our trip north to see Mojo tomorrow. Rest assured, my grievances re: the trip will be fully aired. Until then ... some miscellaneous thoughts. OK, one picture.

If it's late October, the only things more prevalent than ridiculous halloween costumes, are the scores of articles documenting how poor this particular year's World Series ratings were (e.g., this one). Most of the articles written lamenting the dropoff in viewership are written by diehard baseball fans who try to use the poor ratings in an attempt to shame baseball into making it more like it was in the 1950s (e.g. afternoon games, fewer rounds of playoffs, fewer commercials, fewer pitching changes, starting in early October, etc.) I'm in favor of all these things as well, but it's tilting at windmills to think any of 'em are coming back. Of course, the ratings do not matter. Unlike during the classic 1975 Red Sox - Reds world series (why is there a DVD in his pants is my question), there are a just-short-of-infinite number of entertainment choices these days. There are more than three television networks, (though only one really matters). You can customize your own radio stations (here's mine). You can watch promotional videos from New Zealand's travel bureau. It's different then when I was young, then you had to hope the things you liked were popular, or you would never see them on TV, radio, etc. Now everything is available. And accordingly, everything has a smaller piece of the pie. America is way more diverse than it was in the 70's. Some people prefer Bollywood films, Brazilian soccer, or TV personalities learning to dance. I wonder if given all this individual variety whether we have enough in common any more to come together as has happen in our past. But to get back on track, low World Series ratings are ok by me. Low ratings yields less TV money which could yield a multitude of good things (e.g., less TV influence, less extravagant salaries, no more sites like this, fewer happenings upon Pete Rose hawking stuff on QVC, etc.) As it is, I get 4 different ESPNs as it is. It'll be a long time before the games aren't available to those of us who still like it just fine, even if it's not perfect.

Nice to have "c-lo" added to the growing list of DCV readers. He requested a You Tube link to each of the Top 30 songs in the countdown. In place of that, as a solid downpayment upon when I get more proficient at this, I will provide a single You Tube link to a video for a song that's not even on the countdown. It is a different song from Jars of Clay who holds our current #1 spot w/ a different song. The song is "Work" and it's even better than "Dead Man (Carry Me)". The video's pretty cool. I've been meaning for a while to write a review for "Good Monsters" but am still cautious dating back to the last time I wrote an album review ... in the finest high school newspaper in central St. Matthews. I was writing a review of the album Worlds Apart by the progressive Canadian rock band (& Rush wannabes), Saga. I had rented the album from the library. Enjoyed it thoroughly & wrote a glowing review. And in the only piece of feedback I ever got from an Echo article was from some kid in the cafeteria, "You like Saga? You're a fag." So, I'm sorry. No more reviews. I'm still healing. Until then, here's a review of Good Monsters that I liked and hereby endorse. Line of the album: "Not all monsters are bad but that ones that are good never do what they could."

Worst ending to softball season ever

Monday: Law Office #3 loses 18-3 in less than 4 innings vs. #2 Fossils. Dolberry only bats once in the slaughter & pops out to LF. Also had an E5.

Tuesday: TarHeel Mortgage #5 loses to #1 seed (24-13), then immediately falls in loser's bracket game (21-14). Dolberry had his best game of the week in G1 when didn't bat & only played catcher for a few innings. In G2, I went 0 for 2, inc. a few embarrasing fouls where I almost missed the ball. (Good "d" at 2B, though, for a change.)

Wednesday: Law Office loses to #4 seed 21-11 after being tied at 11 thru 5 innings. Dolberry exited game for ER after a needless, shoulder dislocating, diving stop on an IF single from the 2nd batter of game.

Recap: 4 games, all loses, no hits. I need to get better at this, if I'm going to keep doing it.

(Got a ride to the ER. Shoulder spasmed a few times, but not as bad as usual, then while registering at the hospital, it popped back into place, saving us some $. I was able to get back to the game before it ended. Fine now. Hard to sleep, though ... achy & stiff.)

NOAA's Waterloo?

Mildly humorous story today as an environmental group staged a protest at NOAA headquarters claiming some scientific debate on global climate change is being surpressed by NOAA management at the behest of the Bush administration. This has been percolating for a while and is well summarized here.

I won't get into the politics of that. The interesting thing to me is the nature of NOAA management these days. It can be argued that four of the top six NOAA managers are ex-military. The administrator is a Vice Admiral. He's flanked by a Brigadier General, a Captain, and another Brigadier General (whom I've met & who is a nice guy). None of the four are meteorologists by degree. (Even the general counsel is noted as a Civil War buff.)

While I respect the military & ex-military (one in particular) & realize there's a long history between meteorology & the armed forces, this seems a little excessive to me. Plus, I don't understand why they still must be referred to by their military titles. (Dad, if you can explain this to me, I'd appreciate it.) It seems to me CEOs, deans, even U.S. Presidents shed their titles when they move on from the organization where they earned those titles.

What puzzles me most though is w/ this many ex-military officers, how were our HQ invaded by a group of treehugging wackos armed with nothing more powerful than strongly worded pamphlets on eco-friendly paper? Then, after having unfurled their flag in our territory, were allowed to retain the high ground for over 4 hours before being removed by ... a cherry picker. For heaven's sake, a cherry picker. Unacceptable. Acceptable means of removal would have involved water cannons, rubber bullets, and/or smoke grenades. It's time for a change in Silver Spring. Paging Stormin' Norman.

Crazy Day

Barkley's been getting sicker. Barely moved yesterday. Can tell back legs are going. She has a hard time hearing too. This morning we woke up to find she bled overnight on our bedroom carpet & APD's carpet. We took her to the vet, expecting the worst, but the vet was pretty nonplussed & after blood work concluded some pain medication & antibiotics (for the wound) would do the trick. She ate well though today & even gave the Papa John's guy whatfor when he dared ring the doorbell. Regardless, there are going to be some hard days ahead, I believe.

Today was also Grandparents Day at APD's school. Great to have Gp C there, but sad sad memories of missing Gm M. It was on this day last year, that she really started to slip, having to be rushed to hospital kinda incoherent.

On top of all that Gp C's car died at Grandparent's Day & had to be towed back to Pittsboro, which may end up costing as much as the vet visit.

Today was also my volunteer day at Apex Elem doing my "Plot That Storm" thing in the morning, then tried to fit a full day of work into the remaining half day. By the end of the day, the Dolberries were wiped out.

Apex Fire II:

Under the category, "funny if not kinda sad", a barrel of sodium metal burst into flames yesterday after the water reactive substance was allowed to sit out in the rain. This has slowed down the cleanup.

Thanks to the good folks at: http://www.jtbaker.com here's the lowdown on our friend sodium metal:

SAF-T-DATA(tm) Ratings (Provided here for your convenience)
Health Rating: 3 - Severe (Life)
Flammability Rating: 3 - Severe (Flammable)
Reactivity Rating: 3 - Severe (Water Reactive)
Contact Rating: 4 - Extreme (Corrosive)

Not something you want to ingest. "Will react immediately with saliva to cause serious burns and possible local combustion and even explosion of hydrogen in the mouth or esophagus." I checked ... this is not how Pop Rocks works. Interestingly, according to snopes.com, General Foods had to conduct a major PR campaign in 1979 to assure a worried public that you could not blow up from mixing Pop Rocks and soda.

I'll bet Krusty Brand Boom Rocks © uses the sodium metal.

Here's a picture of APD & I post-toxics inhalation. They say the antennae will fall off in a few weeks.

Dolberry Giveaway!

All right, in an attempt to increase blog traffic, the Cheery Vanilla staff have decided to run a promotional giveaway. Free ... to the first responder in the comments section ... a Torino 2006 Playstation 2 game. This game, according to the back of the box, allows one to "experience the chills and thrills of competing in the Olympic Winter Games." It won the prestigious "Poor" rating from the IGN.com reviewers. It currently retails for $6.49 on e-Bay.

APD & I won this as part of an NBC Olympics promotion. During the Torino games, one could play these skiing & bobsled games online. If you finished in the Top 3 of an event on any given day, you won a prize: 3rd place was a NBC Olympics hat, 2nd place was the Torino 2006 game, 1st place was a $100 VISA check card. Since both APD & I have somewhat obsessive personalities, we got pretty good at the game after about 2 weeks of mostly non-stop wasting time on the internet, er, practice. We ended up getting one 2nd place & two third places.

Harder than that was actually claiming the prizes. We got called by the independent verification firm three times to ensure our eligibility for these prizes valued at (approximately) $14.63. They came in the mail today. Picture shown above. The hats are sweet, but alas we do not have a PS2, so not much point in keeping the game.

Someday I hope the time spent on this blog will payoff as grandly ...

Softball Update

We're in the tournament (Cary A/B fall league). We are #3 seed in a 7 team tourney. We won last night 18-7, despite my cool 0-2 off the bench. Play the #2 seed tomorrow night (who narrowly edged #7 seed 18-17).

Here's a picture of Cherish & APD, just so this entry wasn't a total waste of time.

Apex Fire: debate over impacts still smolder

It's been a week since the Apex diaspora of 2006. We were some of the estimated 4,000 to evacuate (out of some 17,000 asked to evacuate). The post-fire fallout may ultimately be more interesting than the fire itself.

The usually excellent News and Observer will have a big article tomorrow on the now controversial Environmental Quality facility and how it has quietly existed in Apex for several years & how it all went wrong last week.

It's been a confusing week though for us residents though, given the mixed messages re: the long-term impacts. On the side of "No worries, mate ..." were the EPA and NC environmental testing which concluded that little toxic material went outside the facility's boundaries. On the side of "Not so fast ..." were the independent consulting firm results that showed mercury and heavy metals in the filters of a nearby facility (kid's gymnastics) and the chair of the NCSU toxicology department who encouraged everyone to thoroughly wash everything that was outdoors that night and replace all filters.

It's hard to know what to think. However, my already-sufficiently-addled-without-the-help-of-toxic-chemicals brain has settled upon two main conclusions.

First, government regulation continues to be a good thing. Probably the single biggest downside to my job is constantly being engaged into conversations (while off duty) about "big government". Some people feel there are too many regulations, taxes, laws, government workers, entitlements, etc. (Ed. note ... it is NOT MY DOING. Your vote counts the same as mine.) But, the need for these things was brought home for me again while watching Scott Maris (EQ VP of something) deflect IMO valid criticisms of a hazardous waste holding facility not having: a) a fire suppression system and/or b) 24/7 on-site staff. His simple contention was (paraphrasing) "we weren't required to have those things". It seems fairly clear that in a functioning citizenry that there will be times in which various groups have competing, equally understandable, interests (e.g., profit vs. safety). All parties are best served when there is an agreed-upon, clear set of rules governing these situations. Please note that all future debates that Dolberry is goaded into on this subject will be accompanied by an airplane spin toss, a back rake, and possibly ... an atomic drop.

Second, ignorance continues to be bliss. It was nice not knowing EQ was storing mercury and nitroglycerin less than a mile away. It would be nice not to know that there could be residual toxics in the dust that continues to accumulate on our treadmill. I'll bet there are thousands of things that I should be glad I'll never know.

One thing I don't know is if ignorance = bliss, does bliss = ignorance; and if so why is Dolberry so happy? Wait. Don't tell me.

Dolberry's Top 20 Songs (Week of 10/13)

I'm a longtime countdown geek. In high school, I would tape Sunday morning countdowns off the radio while we were at church & keep detailed logs of the results. On Sunday nights, while doing my homework, I'd dial in a often static-strained WLS out of Chicago to listen to their Top 10. Then I'd merge all the countdowns I had tabulated w/ my own personal Top 20 to create a composite countdown using some needlessly complex weighting formula. On Monday I'd bring my results in and let my friends know the results. (I imagine there was a lot of breathless anticipation.) Believe it or not, there was one other guy who did the same thing. (Pablo, hope all is well.) Yep, it was a real American high school. Presumably, there was a different, larger, cooler crowd that traveled in orbits different from mine.

Anyway, those were great memories.

One year, the local radio station had a contest to guess the year's Top 3 songs. Ha. Guess? Dude, I wrote them all down. Every single week. Even though my musical tastes had matured somewhat & the station had shifted to Adult Contemporary. I'd spent the better part of a year listening to that hideous Kenny Rogers / Dolly Parton duet, but now it was all going to be worth it. OK, so the prize was only a $500 gift certificate to a local jeweler, which I had no use for. I was going to give it to my mom & hope I could get like 10 cents to the dollar in real money. Even bigger, was the winning. I was going to win a major local contest. There was very little doubt. The only question was how they would assign points to the songs for various weeks. While I enjoyed the creation and calculation of obtuse formulae, I suspected, rightly, that the radio station would keep it simple. I mailed in about 5-6 "guesses" based on various scoring schemes & then waited for New Year's Eve for the annual year-end Top 100 ... and glory.

I'd gone ahead & calculated the Top 100 (assuming a simple #1 = 30 points, #2 = 29, ..., #30 = 1) and for the first few songs, everything was great.

#100 - some lousy Little River Band song. Yeah! I knew that.
#99 Sheena Easton. Check. (turn radio volume way down)
#98 The fourth single of that Hall and Oates album. Heh. Heh. Easy money.

But then somewhere early on, in the 90s, a song was off by a place or two. Then I'd get back on track, or more appropriately the countdown got back on track w/ my results. In the long hours of that New Year's Eve (12/31/82?), probably alone in my room, I figured out the discrepancy. The jerks at W-whatever had defined the year differently than I had. I'd guessed the scoring system, but I hadn't figured on the first countdown of 1982 being the one from the last week of December 1981. Of course, most years it wouldn't even matter. As long as the Top 3 songs were safely in the middle of the year, or just not in that "first" week, I'd've been ok.

Well, as you've certainly guessed by now, that wasn't how it worked out that year. My entry of 1-2-3 was actually 1-2-4. My alternate guesses based on alternate scoring systems were like 1-3-4, 1-2-5, 2-3-4, etc.

As it approached midnight when they were to name the lucky winner my only hope was that no one guessed the Top 3 and that they'd award the prize to whoever came the closest; that is, me. At the time, I was pretty sure my entire 1983 was riding on this moment.

So, before the #1 song the DJ says ... "nobody guessed the Top 3 songs of the year." (yeah!) "So, we had a blind drawing from all the entries and the winner was ..." It was somebody other than me.

This put me off countdowns for a long time.

Actually, until right now. Here's my Top 20 for the week of 10/13/06. (Special thanks to APD for his help w/ this.)

Hey. Welcome.

Of all the teachers I had in nearly 20 years of school, the one that I remember the best was (maybe not surprisingly) one of the last ... Tetsuya Theodore Fujita. Dr. Fujita had a fascinating and exceptionally productive life. His skillful reconstruction of severe weather events (tornadoes, microbursts, hurricanes) through aerial photography greatly increased the understanding of these phenomena. By the time I made it to the University of Chicago, Dr. Fujita was winding down. He had quit taking on doctoral students and IMO was being edged further to the fringes of a faculty that was shifting, or had shifted from, away from the observationally-based research (e.g., Horace Byers, Roscoe Braham) that had built the department's reputation. He still had his lab and he still had a small staff and I never detected even a trace of bitterness re: his status as he entered into his last decade of life in 1988.

He was, by far, the most human of all the U of C faculty, at least from the perspective of this lowly grad student.

He tended to speak in proverbs; and the ones he enjoyed the most popped up frequently in his classes on satellite meteorology. My two favories were:

1. "My way's better. What you think?" - The brilliance of this was he truly believed his way was better, but he was just insecure enough to want some nobody grad student to acknowledge it.
2. "Monkey write Shakespeare. You no write Shakespeare." - The theory here was the long-standing concept that 1,000 monkeys sitting at 1,000 computer terminals, over 1,000 centuries ... would eventually randomly write something brilliant. Dr. Fujita didn't think my odds were as good as the monkeys (follow link for my all-time favorite commercial - the "pointer" one).

So, as I start this blog, I do not set out to beat the monkeys. There probably won't be anything that approachs the brilliance of Shakespeare, let alone the brilliance of that monkey commercial. It will likely be a rather vanilla recounting of events/issues/things that I find interesting. Per the name, I intend for it to be cheery as well. There's enough depressing stuff on the internet. If nothing else, it'll be good mental exercise to write.