On my ghost radar

Although I don't really believe in ghosts, I have always been a sucker for a good ghost story. I guess it is human nature to want to believe that we don't just end when we die. If I knew for certain this was it, I probably wouldn't spend so much time on the treadmill and I'd have that bacon cheeseburger I craved in my last whiny post.

But I digress.

Since I don't have an iPhone and only recently got a Blackberry that approaches smart phone status, I have been blissfully unaware of the multitude of apps out there. But Blackberry App world is slowly introducing me to the multitude of possibilities out there to waste time with my phone without actually using it as a telephone.

Enter the Ghost Radar app.

Ghost Radar is created by a company called Spud Pickles (a company name you have to trust) and claims to turn your smart phone into a ghost detector by measuring electromagnetic fields, vibrations, and sounds. In short, Ghost Radar claims to analyze the quantum flux. I have no idea what quantum flux is, but it sounds pretty paranormally.

When you fire up Ghost Radar, you see what looks like a radar screen with constantly changing numbers in three of four quadrants. The fourth quadrant occasionally shows what appear to be random letters being typed by apparently dyslexic spirits. Occasionally colored dots appear supposedly indicating paranormal activity. Blue means a little activity. Green means more and yellow means even more. Red means look over your shoulder.

The really eerie part of Ghost Radar is that out of the blue (or green, yellow or red) words pop up on the screen and are spoken with a voice synthesizer. This startled me at first because I downloaded the free version that comes with virtually no instructions. Apparently you have to pony up 99 cents to get the premium version that tells you how to use it. I had to Google the thing to learn that the words are supposedly triggered by entities using your smart phone as a translator.

Most of the time the thing just spouts gibberish not unlike you hear from strangers sitting on the bus. Mine just said "fish", followed by "couple." Then "lying." One could interpret this as someone lying about the couple of fish they caught. But who doesn't lie about catching fish.

Occasionally the thing spouts things that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I was sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the station. I turned on the Ghost Radar. Almost immediately red dots appeared and the thing said "nuts." I was staring out the window at some graffiti that read "Hot nuts."

Coincidence you say. That night I took my phone into my daughter's room. After I read her stories and tucked her in, I sat in a rocking chair until she fell asleep. I turned on the Ghost Radar. Dots appeared. And the thing said, "Tim." I turned it off.

Okay, I think the thing just scans your phone and finds data. Of course my name would come up. But I've read other people's experience with the thing and some claim that it says the name of people in the room with them. It is pretty unnerving.

I've just asked the Ghost Radar how I should end this blog and I'm waiting for an answer. Wait for it...here's the first word: "recently." Okay. Wait, here's the next word: "sang." Hmmm. Oh, there are lots of red dots now. The last word is coming. This should be good: "butter."  The spirits have imparted these final words, "Recently sang butter."

Eerie.

Pound of flesh

You need to burn 3500 calories to lose a pound. In theory to lose a pound a week, you would need to reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories per day or burn an extra 500 calories a day. Of course, you can do a combination of the two (i.e. god forbid, reduce your calories and exercise more).

Why am I stating the obvious that you can find anywhere on the Internet or plastered on the headlines of magazines on the racks at the grocery store checkout? Because I have once again stepped up my self imposed efforts to lose weight. I say self imposed, but at my last check up, the doctor noted that my weight was up and suggested I might be "over fueling." Her suggestion was punctuated by the lab results. My cholesterol was up along with my blood sugar levels.

My immediate reaction was self loathing (not a healthy reaction). There was also an epiphany about self delusion. A few years ago after an examination to get life insurance I was forced to acknowledge that I was at an unhealthy weight. So I did something about it. I altered my diet and increased my exercise. I lost 52 pounds.

Once I was at my "healthy" weight and could wear jeans with a 31-inch waist and still breath, I assumed I could ease off the strict routine of diet and exercise. So I allowed myself occasional lapses of eating not so healthy food (i.e. stuff that actually tastes good). And I stopped weighing myself. Now granted, I didn't go crazy. I still worked out for an hour a day and avoided the worst food choices like fries, ribs, hamburgers, and pizza. But my workouts became lower energy. I just used the elliptical machines and stopped running on the treadmill.

Instead of passing up the constant snacks co-workers would leave out at work, I'd start nibbling here and there, especially as the holidays approached. I told myself a little bit here and there wouldn't hurt. I noticed my clothes weren't feeling as loose and I couldn't really wear jeans with a 31-inch waist anymore. Even my 32-inch waist pants were a bit snug. But I kept looking in the mirror and telling myself that I didn't look like I was gaining weight.

 That's when the doctor pointed out that I had gained 20 pounds by over fueling my body. This was about a week before Christmas. I kicked up the workouts a notch and started running again (which I hate with a passion). I also stopped snacking and cut out many of the remaining foods I like (bread being a major one). The good news is that I can once again wear my 31-inch waist pants and I've lost the 20 pounds.

 The bad news is all I really want to do is eat. And the temptation is there now that I have lost the weight again to just ease off. But the reality is that I'd just be back where I started. I want to be very clear that the weight thing isn't about vanity. Since men at my age are essentially invisible it doesn't really matter what I look like. It's more about my health and a desire to see my young children graduate from college.

 Though I have to say I am sick of reading about the top 20 worst things for you to eat which coincidentally are also on someone else's top 20 best things for you to eat list. I've come to the conclusion that nothing is good for you. Diet soda apparently can make you fatter. Non-fat products have more calories and bad things in them. Natural foods generally are kept natural through chemicals. Comfort foods comfort you by sending you into a food induced coma.

Being healthy sucks. I just want a bacon cheeseburger.

It's Groundhog's Day (again and again)

Once again groundhog Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow on Gobbler's Knob so we can expect six more weeks of winter (which near as I can tell pretty much coincides with the first day of spring). And once again I post a photo of my face Photoshopped on the face of a groundhog and post about Punxsutawney Phil.

I appear to be stuck in this point on the space time continuum somewhat like Bill Murray in the classic film Groundhog's Day.

Coincidently, I rewatched Lost in Translation last night. It is one of my favorite Bill Murray films. It has nothing to do with Groundhog's Day so I'm stuck in another digression.

Ironically, when I began writing this post, the title was "It's Groundhog's Day (again)." Turns out that I used that same title two years ago. So I really am stuck in the whole Groundhog's Day phenomenon of repeating myself.

I think age and having small children has something to do with it as well.

Regardless, here's to six more weeks of winter.

Knit picking

Someone gave my daughter a small knitting doll for her birthday in October. It was an odd little wooden spindle thing that had metal hooks on top that you wound the yarn around to theoretically knot things. The instructions were vague at best and there was no way my five year old was going to figure them out (especially since she can't read). So I set out to master the damned thing.

After several failed attempts, I was rewarded with a tube of knitted yarn shooting disturbingly out of the bottom of the doll. The useless instruction provide no information, however, on what you are supposed to do with the knitted tube once you produce it. So cool as it was to knit something this way, it left me curious about how one actually knits something with real knitting needles that don't involve yarn shooting out of a wooden doll's butt.

So I bought myself a "teach yourself to knit" kit and began to teach myself how to turn a ball of yarn into something useful. Fortunately the instructions were a bit better than the ones for the knitting doll that poops out yarn. I sat down with my needles and a ball of yarn while I was in the playroom watching my children and started following the lessons in the book that came with the kit. I felt pretty smug when I "cast on" the first few stitches. It took me awhile to realize that this was only the prelude to knitting. The next lesson was actually learning the "knit" stitch. This was followed by the "purl" stitch.

For days all I did was practice casting on, knitting and purling. Finally I took the plunge and started actually knitting something. And the simplest thing to knit seemed to be a scarf. So that's what I'm doing, knitting a red scarf for my 5-year old daughter because she wanted a red scarf and she is very forgiving when it comes to what it will look like when it is finished.

I have been working on it for about a week now. And although my speed is picking up as I work on it, I still don't anticipate it will be done for a couple of months. But I have to tell you, as unmanly as knitting a scarf sounds, it is a pretty therapeutic activity, especially when you are doing something like watching your kids fight or watching television.

I watched the NFC and AFC championship games yesterday while knitting and the irony of watching football and knitting did not escape me. Though I remember watching football great Rosey Grier on talk shows openly confess that he knitted in his spare time. And at the time he was a pretty hefty and aggressive lineman. So that gives me some cover.

I also knitted while I was watching the first episode of Spartacus, Vengeance on Starz last night. And if you aren't familiar with the Spartacus mini-series, it is about as violent and pornographic as you can get on mainstream (albeit premium channel) television. The only real downside to knitting and watching football of gladiator shows is remembering whether the last stitch was a knit or a purl. But in the long run, my daughter won't know or care.

Once I've completed the scarf, I may tackle knitting a hat. But I'll probably have to knit another scarf. When my 3-year old son saw I was knitting one for my daughter he demanded I knit him a blue one. Maybe I knit one for his birthday. That will give me about a year to work on it.

Snow Buddha

Some would say the Buddha is meditating on the state of enlightenment. I kind of think he was wishing he was in Hawaii instead of in my back yard. I know that is where I wished I was. Well, maybe not Hawaii. Maybe some place in Mexico or the Caribbean. I don't mean to diss on Hawaii, but I wasn't overly impressed when I visited there several years ago. Apparently the Aloha spirit only applies to mainstream tourist parts of the state. If you wander off the beaten track you risk being beaten by the locals who pretty much resent everything about the tourists but their money.

But I digress.

Two days of snow has fallen and is now in the process of melting. And melting snow is about as depressing as a Christmas tree the day after Christmas. It has lost most of it's appeal.

I stayed home the second day of the storm. It snowed the entire day. Fortunately we didn't lose power so we stayed relatively warm except for the hour or so we ventured out to play in the snow and take a photo of the Buddha hunkered down in a snow bank. My kids were thrilled. Though it wasn't the good kind of snow that you can bring a Frosty to life from. This snow was powdery and icy.

After several hours of sitting inside watching children's video tapes and breaking up fights, cabin fever began to set in. I began to really understand the Donner Party.

There is a certain irony in the fact that we feel trapped and isolated when we can't jump in our cars and drive to the local supermarket. Forget that we have telephones, the Internet, television, DVD's, MP3 players and countless other diversions. Human nature is to dwell on the one thing they can't do in a sea of choices.

I would not have done well had I been born pre-20th century.

To show my independent spirit, however, I fired up the grill and cooked steaks and chicken on my deck. Fortunately the snow had stopped falling by that time so all I had to contend with was the freezing temperatures and my kids throwing snow at me while I turned the meat.

But now I am back in the office watching the aftermath of the storm melting and morphing into gray slush on the streets below. Hopefully this will be the only snow storm of our winter in Seattle.

But again, at least we don't live in Chicago. What would we have to talk about except for unseasonably warm weather if it wasn't snowing.

Winter of discontent

In the land of rain, snow is the great boogeyman. We cringe at the frozen cousin of our normally liquid nemesis. A single flake can shut down schools and reroute buses. A snow storm is the stuff of legends here and the news media scrambles to give them names like Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon.

Everyone here says they know how to drive in snow and the problem is everyone else. The reality is no one here knows how to drive in snow beyond pushing the button on their all wheel drive.

If you really know how to drive in snow, you don't. Because the main rule is don't try to drive up or down a hill. And everything in Seattle is either on top of a hill or at the bottom of one.

Since I work for public transit and take a train into work every day, I don't get the luxury of staying at home because I am snowed in. I can walk to the train station from my home, so unless the trains aren't running, I have no valid excuse to stay home. If the trains aren't running when it comes time to go home I will truly regret my dedication.

I am also regretting my decision to watch a movie last night about mutant cannibals living in the subway tunnels in New York City. It is just a little too similar to what it is like being on a train platform with a bunch of snowbound commuters panicking that they may be stranded in downtown Seattle. I checked the lunchroom refrigerator to get an inventory of what lunches have been left in there in case I'm forced to spend the night and need to ration food supplies. If that happens, there is a jar of olives in there that has my name on it.

I do wish I could be at home with my wife and kids building a snow man and enjoying the fun side of Snomageddon instead of watching buses jack knifing on the roads outside my office window. Chances are the rains will return by Friday and I'll be lucky if I can put together a slush puppy.

Oh well, at least I don't live in Chicago.

I'm with stupid

The heck with news about the economy, war and disaster, I honed in on breaking news on Yahoo about  a "Man with incredibly weird name arrested in Wisconsin." Now granted, the man, Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop, did have a stupid name. But it wasn't as if it was given to him. He changed it from Jeffrey Drew Wilschke.

The man was arrested not because he had a stupid name, but for being drunk, possessing drugs and carrying a concealed weapon. But the real stupid thing about this stupid story was that the journalist (and I use this term loosely) goes off on a tangent about a study out of Canada that shows people with stupid names don't do well in life.

I suppose Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop would probably agree. I can only imagine what he goes through trying to make an airplane reservation on line. Though I don't imagine Zopittybop-Bop-Bop has ever been out of Wisconsin.

I would have never read this story if it hadn't have popped up on Facebook as an article my nephew had just read. So I have to marvel at how the Internet has truly changed my life. A few years ago I would have had to had read about this while standing in line at the supermarket staring at the headlines on the National Enquirer. But I might have missed it even then while being distracted by a story about a boy trapped in refrigerator eating his own arm or a photo of Elvis appearing on a meat locker in Australia (happy belated birthday BTW to Elvis wherever you are).

Speaking of stupid, I wonder what Harold Camping is up to these days.

Another 365 days

Technically 2012 is another 366 days since it is a leap year. But in the grand scheme of things, a year is just an artificial constraint established by mankind to keep track of how long they have before they expire. And come to think of it, it would be nice if we came with an expiration date so we'd less likely fritter away time like we have all of it in the world or horde it for some indistinct time in the future when we think we can enjoy it better.

I imagine there are a great deal of television programs and movies I wouldn't watch if I knew exactly how much time I actually have left. 

But I digress.

I used to do a year in retrospect blog post with snippets of various posts I have written throughout the year. But that was back when I still fancied myself a blog superstar and still harbored the fantasy that I was a hair away from being discovered and going big time. I'm not sure what big time in the blog world actually is, but I was sure it was my destiny.

Ironically, if I were to look at my 2011 year in blogging statistically, I would discover that my most read post was A great authoritative new and positive blog post about you that you can retweet for free. It was merely a semi-scathing review of a book about social media marketing and the top ten words you should or shouldn't tweet to get reposted. And I'll be damned if using those words apparently worked. The post outdistanced my most read post ever about whether or not clams were really happy.

Now I've come full circle to my original comment in this post about people frittering away time like we have all of it in the world. Google, the primary way people end up reading my posts, is a perfect example of people with way too much perceived time on their hands.

One thing I didn't achieve in 2011 was writing my thousandth post. I fell 25 posts short of achieving that milestone. I'm thinking if I time it right, I could write my thousandth post on February 29 and see if I can cause a rift in the space time continuum. Or at the very least I can hope to cause a minor skin abrasion. I doubt it will get the headlines that a chimp claiming to be Tarzan's Cheetah did when it died.

Oh well, one must at least aspire before they expire.

The Cheetah Conspiracy

A Florida animal sanctuary has reported that the chimp who played Cheetah in the 1930s era Tarzan movies has died, but are they really trying to make a monkey out of us? Some experts are disputing the animal sanctuary's claim since they have no documentation that the chimp really was "the" Cheetah. Plus, if it was the same chimp, that would make it more than 80-years old when it died. Chimps rarely live more than 50 or 60 years.

The director of the animal sanctuary claims Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller gave Cheetah to the sanctuary around 1960 but all of the records of the donation were destroyed in a 1995 fire.

How convenient.

 Adding fuel to the fraudulent flames are some Hollywood accounts that suggest a chimpanzee by the name of Mr. Jiggs played Cheetah but died in 1938.

 So who was this mystery chimp who pretended to be Cheetah all of these years? And why would Tarzan call his chimp Cheetah anyway when his name for his son was boy? Why wouldn't he have followed the same naming conventions and call his chimp, "chimp?" And if Tarzan had kept a pet Cheetah, would he have named it "chimp?" And technically, Tarzan was supposedly raised by apes, not chimps, so shouldn't he have hung out with a young gorilla? Or would that have caused a jungle scandal? Which begs the question as to what was the true relationship between Tarzan and Cheetah? Did it change drastically when Jane came on the scene?

All of these questions will remain unanswered. Because whether or not the Florida chimp was the real Cheetah, the chimp who played him has definitely gone to that big tree house in the sky.

And chimps can't talk even if it wasn't dead.

Christmas spirits?

We just got back from a weekend in Victoria, B.C., the capitol of British Columbia, Canada. It's located on Vancouver Island and is about 2 1/2 hours from Seattle via ferry (in our case the Victoria Clipper). We went to celebrate my wife's birthday and enjoy the decorations the city sports for the holidays.  We stayed at the Chateau Victoria Hotel.

The first day there, we went to the second floor to use the newly remodeled indoor pool. While walking through the hallway to the pool, we all distinctly heard the squawk of a parrot. There were some offices on the floor so I assumed the hotel kept a pet parrot and thought nothing about it.

A few days later, we were in the lobby and I noticed a framed article on the walk about a Victorian mansion that had been torn down to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel. The mansion had been the home of an eccentric recluse named Victoria Jane Wilson. She grew up in the mansion and apparently rarely left it. Her only companions were a variety of birds including a parrot named Louis. When Victoria died, she left her estate to Louis with instructions that he was to live in the mansion until he died. The mansion became known as the Parrot House.


Parrots, however, live a long time. Some life more than a hundred years. And Louis was one of them. But greedy developers eventually figured out a loophole to get Louis out of the house and he died in the late 70s at the home of the mansion's former gardener. The mansion was torn down and the Chateau Victoria was built. And the rooftop restaurant was named the Parrot House at first, but was recently renamed View 18.

The story made me think about the parrot we'd heard. So when we were in the hotel shuttle headed back to the Clipper terminal for our return trip home, I asked the driver if there was a parrot kept at the hotel. He shook his head and said no, but he suggested it might be a ghost and brought up the story of Louis. 

 When I returned home, I did a Google search about the Parrot House and found a few articles recapping what I already known, but no stories of a ghost parrots. Though I did run across a few accounts of employees at the hotel thinking they encountered Victoria Jane Wilson. 

 So who knows what we heard on the second floor of the Chateau Victoria Hotel. But the next time I stay there, I'm bringing crackers.

In god particle's we trust

A headline caught my eye the other day online: ‘God particle’: Scientists close in on evidence of Higgs Boson existence. Apparently, the Higgs boson particle, named after U.K. physicist Peter Higgs, was created at the beginning of the universe and in theory allows other particles to have mass (substance, not a religious ceremony...though you would think a god particle would be open to the whole mass concept).

 According to the article in the Washington Post, Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research have narrowed where the particle can be found and hope to eventually prove that it exists so it will no longer be the equivalent of the Tooth Fairy to physicists. Apparently the hints found in their research could lead to proof of the god particle's existence by next October (which could very well coincide with another doomsday prediction of religious nut job Harold Camping).

Apparently,  finding the Higgs Boson would be the "discovery of the century" in particle physics, a "never-before-seen subatomic particle long thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe." I wonder if the first scientist to actually discover the particle will be surrounded with news cameras and be asked what he or she will do next. I kind of hope they'll say, "I'm going to Disneyland!"

I doubt this will happen, because I don't get the sense physicists have much in the way of senses of humor. Regardless, I'm not certain what discovering the god particle will mean other than confirming the basic principles of standard particle theory (I know I've been losing sleep over this). A more interesting question is what it would mean if scientists determine that the particle doesn't exist after building a $10 billion dollar lab to find it. I imagine their response at that point will be, "that sucks." That would be my response.

Why do Christmas lights burn out when they aren't being used and other mysteries of the holiday season

I am not a handy man. I'll get that off my less than hairy chest right up front. I would just as soon pay someone else to be handy for me, such as hang Christmas lights on my gutters. But I am not an overly wealthy man, either. So I must hang Christmas lights myself.

And I am not trying to suggest that hanging Christmas lights on your gutters is a complicated task, either. It just requires a great deal of logistical planning and manipulation of ladders and hooks and lights that I'd just as soon not engage in. I am not even sure how or why stringing lights on the outside of your house became closely associated with the birth of the baby Jesus. It's not as though the Bible said something like "Behold they wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manager beneath some pretty bitching LED icicle lights."

I'm pretty certain the Bible never uses the phrase "pretty bitching" anywhere. At least not in the King James version. Though I'm not a Bible reading man either.

I hang lights on the outside of my house not because of any religious significance or symbolism, but because my neighbors do and I have kids. Peer pressure and parenthood are two major forces in life to reckon with.

Regardless, I spent the better part of two and a half hours on Sunday on my roof stringing white, LED icicle lights along my gutters. This was my second year decorating with lights. Before that we lived in a two-story house with a roof so high off the ground there was no way I could even reach the gutters with my ladder let alone string lights. Last year I dutifully moved a step ladder along the gutter pushing on small plastic clips designed for stringing Christmas lights. It was a finger  (and mind) numbing experience. When I took the lights down last year, I left the hooks up thinking it would save me tons of time this year.

Not.

I decided to just climb up on my roof this year to save the hassle of moving the ladder six or seven times along the gutter to place the lights. So I hoisted up about five sets of lights onto the roof, plugged the first set into an outdoor outlet and began pushing the light wires onto the plastic hooks. But I discovered that a year of being out in the elements had rendered the small plastic hooks extremely brittle. So as I pushed the wire into them, 90 percent of the hooks snapped off.

So, I went back down the ladder and retrieved a box of new hooks I'd purchased but hadn't used the year before. As I'm climbing back up on the roof, I notice that the gutters are pretty full of leaves. I decided that as long as I was up there I might as well clean the gutters. So back down the ladder for gloves and a trowel. I went back on the roof and slid along the edge of my roof scooping out soggy piles of leaves and debris.

Even in real life I digress a great deal and branch off on tangents from my original tasks just as I digress here in my blog on a multitude of topics. But I digress.

With gutters clean, I got back to the lights. The first set went up fairly smoothly. Then I plugged the second set into the first one. One section of the set didn't light up.

Okay, these are the same lights that were working fine when I packed them up a year ago. They have been sitting untouched in a plastic bin in a closet in our basement until I carried them upstairs after Thanksgiving. How is it possible for any of them to burn out when they weren't being used? And what ever happened to the promise most lights have about the others staying lit when one burned out? I had a two-foot section that wasn't lighting up.

So I grab all of the remaining lights sets and climb down the ladder and sit in the hallway with a bag of spare bulbs determined to find the burned out bulb and then to test the other light sets just in case before going back on the roof. I start swapping out light bulbs one at a time (missing the old screw in type that have been replaced by these pop in mini-bulbs). When I get to the last bulb, I discover the reason it is not working. It has snapped off. I replace the bulb and all of the lights light up.

I plug in the next string and sure enough, another two-foot section doesn't work. I check all to be sure there isn't just another broken one and I find a single unattached wire dangling from the section of lights that aren't working. But not being the handy man type, I have no idea where the loose wire should be attached, so I chuck that string of lights into the garbage.

I plug in the last string of lights and once again a two-foot section of lights doesn't come on. I inspect each one and discover one that looks black around the base. I swap it with a good bulb and all of the lights come on. Maybe I am handy after all. I declare myself a genius to my three-year old son who is playing with a miniature nutcracker and a sheet of bubble wrap. He ignores me.

Before I go back to the roof, I ask my wife if she'd like me to clean the skylights while I'm up there. She hands me a squeegee and a bottle of Windex and tells me not to break my neck. I climb back up the ladder with the light sets, the squeegee and the Windex.

I clean our three skylights without tripping and falling through them. While walking from skylight to skylight, I discover what appears to be a large beef rib bone on the roof. I stare at it like one of the monkeys in the opening scenes of 2001 A Space Odyssey and then toss it into my front yard.

Finally I return to stringing lights and waving at my neighbors while silently cursing them for forcing me to dangle on my roof just so mine won't be the only non-festive house on the block. I place the last string of lights along the roof line and discover I am about two-feet short of having enough lights to reach the other side of the house. But since I am not a handy man, this is good enough for me, because something tells me if I go buy more lights I will find myself trapped in a tear in the time space continuum hanging lights forever.

I climb down the ladder, put away all my stuff and admire the handwork of a non-handy man. Later that evening, after a matinee of Happy Feet 2 and dinner at a local dive, my family huddles in front of our dark house while I fumble with the extension cord to light up the house. I finally get it into the socket and my LED icicles blaze brightly enough to land a 747.

My five year old daughter stares at the lights for about 5 seconds and then looks up in the sky and says, "Look papa, the moon!"

It was one of my proudest moments.

The Timbuktu stops here

It figures that I write about time and then I run out of it. This is particularly ironic considering the infinite nature of time and space. But it doesn't seem to be so infinite when you are trying to cook a turkey and explain to a five year old what happened to its head and feathers. It's kind of one of those Soylent Green moments.

But I digress.

When I was a kid, the time around the holidays ticked away at a painfully slow pace, especially during that period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now I blink and a week passes. I suppose it is because all I had to do as a kid was wait and all I seem to do as an adult is try to keep up.

Before we had kids, I used to plan trips around the holidays to avoid some of the madness. I got engaged to my wife on Christmas morning on a cruise ship docked near St. Thomas. A video of a fireplace crackled on the stateroom television. Now that was a Christmas.

Christmas now means perching myself on a ladder trying to stretch icicle lights along the gutter and praying they all light when I plug them in. I have resisted buying one of those inflatable Santa's for the front lawn. There is only so much stuff you compromise on before you have to admit you've become white trash. Besides, I find the sight of the inflatable things depressing when you see them deflated like road kill during the day.

But I digress yet again.

I'm not sure why you race through time faster as you age, glancing frantically over your shoulder to see what you missed. It's probably because you've crested a hill in the spacetime continuum and are headed down the slope with worn brake pads.

I'm also not sure what would happen if you just stopped. Or maybe I do know what would happen if you just stop to avoid the inevitable destination of Timbuktu. But perhaps it won't be Timbuktu at the bottom of the hill. Most likely it's just another hill.

Life is funny like that.

Time traveler

There was no football game on when I was working out the other day so I was forced to watch PBS. Fortunately it was one of their rare non-fund raiser days and they had a program on that wasn't about cheese making or men sitting around in a circle beating drums trying to find their inner children. It was Nova -- The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time.

 I have to admit, I am a sucker for theories on time. So as I climbed/jogged to nowhere on the elliptical machine, I was engrossed in the program that attempted to explain in semi-layperson's language what time was (not what time it is, because does anyone really know what time it is).

The most fascinating thing about the program was that it debunked our standard perception of what time is. We always describe time as passing or as Steve Miller sang, "slipping, slipping, slipping into the future." But according to Einstein, time is more like space. It flows in all directions at once.

The other thing the program pointed out was that time and space co-exist in something known as the spacetime continuum. So where we are in space affects where we are in time. The program described the concept of "now" as being a single slice of the spacetime continuum. But no one's slice of spacetime is the same, so everyone's experience of now is different. Apparently an alien living in another galaxy experiences a "now" that is 200 years ago in my time.

And the speed at which we move also impacts time. When something isn't in motion (i.e. slumped in front of the television) time clicks away at a normal speed. Scientists confirmed this by taking two Atomic clocks synced to the exact same time, placing one on a jetliner and leaving the other one on the ground. The lucky clock was flown around the world on the jet. When it returned it was no longer synced to the clock that had stayed still. It was a few microseconds behind.

Physicists also believe that, in theory, going backward and forward in time is possible. To travel to the future, all you have to do is hop in a space ship and fly near a black hole and hang out for a few minutes. When you return to earth, 50 years will have passed and you will have only aged 5 minutes.

Travelling to the past is a bit more complicated. First you need to find a worm hole (an hole in a slice of the spacetime continuum that connects to another slice in the spacetime continuum). Then you jump into the hole kind of like Alice chasing the white rabbit and bam, you are in a slice of the past. Unfortunately you are at the mercy of the worm hole and don't have much control on where or when in the past you end up. My luck, I'd wind up back in the 70s again.

Physicists are skeptical about whether or not you could really travel to the past. They base this on the lack of visitors from the future milling about taking photos of your backyard and the dilemma of people travelling into the past and meeting themselves and advising against eating that marked down Sushi from the supermarket. I kind of pooh pooh these things as proof that time travelers don't exist. For one, if you are travelling around in time I don't think you'd broadcast it. I'm sure there are plenty of people in mental institutions that made this mistake. As for creating a paradox by meeting yourself and altering time, I think the many worlds theory of quantum physics could counter that one.

The Nova program indicated that scientists grapple with the question of how time flows when it is actually just one massive component of the spacetime continuum that makes up our universe. My guess would be that time doesn't flow, we do. Just living our lives makes us time travelers. We are passing through the slices of time, not riding in a river of it.

I would also conjecture that what people think are ghosts or spirits could simply be layers of the same slice of time overlapping giving us snippets of other times and time travelers. This wasn't discussed on the PBS program. It was just something I thought of in my own unscientific way without a mathematical formula to back it up.

Regardless, I think it is time to go.

Here in my car

I have never been one to be obsessed by cars. They have always been a basic source of transportation for me and that is all. I work in public transportation for heck's sake. But on a recent trip to Boise to visit my aged mother I encountered my perfect car.

I always rent a car when I go to Boise because it is not a public transportation friendly environment for visitors. But it is car friendly and having grown up there, it is easy for me to navigate. And Boise's airport is one of the simplest places to fly in and out of. I think it is because people rarely escape Boise if they grow up there so they don't travel much.

So basically when you step off the plane in Boise you claim your bags right next to the car rental counters and then step out the door and there are the car rental lots. I checked in at Hertz expecting to get my compact Nissan. The clerk did try to get me to upgrade for $10 more a day to an SUV, but I didn't have any plans to go 4-wheeling, so I declined. She had me sign the usual waivers and then handed me a key fob and rental packet and I was off.

It wasn't until I walked up to the assigned stall that I realized I had been given a full-sized car. It was a Dodge Charger. I didn't know much about a Dodge Charger other than they are considered muscle cars. This one was had a nice metallic gray finish and had the words "Hemi" emblazoned on it. I have no idea what a Hemi is, but I know it is man talk for "big engine."

I looked at the key fob I'd been given and sure enough it confirmed I had been given a Dodge Charger for the price of an economy car. I looked at the trunk and there was no key hole. Then I looked at the key fob and punched a button that showed a trunk opening and sure enough the trunk popped obediently open. I threw in my luggage and then went to the door and stepped into a leather interior that screamed "you are entering Nirvana."

I looked to put the key into the ignition and was startled to discover there was no key and no ignition. Then I saw the video screen flash, "Step on brake and push start button." I did so and another touch video screen lit up with various icons (map, radio, temperature, etc.). I felt around under the seat and found buttons that raised, lowered and moved the seat forward and back.

I punched on the radio and looked at the channel selection on the video screen. I selected Satellite and then scanned through various genre's of music. Then I put the car in reverse and watched a view of the space behind the car appear on the video screen. I backed up and listened to the Hemi hum.

Various sensors lit up on the side mirrors if a car approached in my blindside. And a digital read out of my speed appeared above the leather steering wheel. I punched in navigation and a map appeared showing where I was. I could also type in an address and the GPS would map a route for me.

I spent my three days in Boise never wanting to leave my Dodge Charger. The rental car attendant had to pry the key fob out of my hand and offer me a tissue to dab at my eyes when I dropped it off.

I never knew such cars existed.

Scary faces

In a Narcissistic moment of weakness back in 2006, I carved an image of my own face onto a pumpkin. Can you guess which one it was? In an ironic twist, squirrels ended up gnawing my pumpkin face off the next day.

I took it as a sign.

This year I carved four pumpkins: A skull, a pirate ship with a skull and cross bones, a zombie and one of My Little Ponies (I think it was Pinkie Pie or it could have been Rainbow Dash). Parenthood makes you do strange things.

It is the same reason I'll be dressing up like a pirate tonight. My three-year old son dictated that the entire family would dress as pirates to go trick or treating. He issued this declaration several weeks ago and since has stated that he wants to go dressed as a cow, a witch, a robot, a spaceman and a spider. But we had already invested in pirate costumes so we are forcing him to remain a pirate so we will be one big happy pirate family. Though I seriously doubt Blackbird went out pillaging and pirating with his wife and toddlers in tow.

 There is a plus side to all of this. I can dress as a pirate (which I secretly kind of enjoy) without being thought of as an idiot because people will look at my two young pirates and smile knowingly thinking I am only dressed as a pirate for my children and not because I am addled. I can also spout things like, "Where do pirates eat their lunch...ARRRRRRRRRRRRR-by's...RRRRRRRR" with impunity.

 We will all be sporting eye patches and my son and I will be wearing plastic hook hands. These are pirate trademarks. Because apparently pirates were getting eyes poked out and limbs whacked off on a regular basis. My wife also bought me a pirate shirt that I actually think looks more like something the artist formerly known as Prince would wear (though I think he is now calling himself Prince again because no one could pronounce the symbol he changed his name to).

 I won't be brandishing a cutlass because apparently this isn't proper behavior modelling for children and the local police frown on cutlass brandishing. There are more rules for being a pirate than I would have imagined.

 I'll keep you posted on how the pillaging goes. Happy Halloween!

Just when you thought it was safe...

Okay, I accepted going on Facebook was inevitable and I dabble with Twitter even though I think it is useless. I use LinkedIn for business contacts and I think I have a Plaxo account for some reason. I tried Foursquare but freaked that I was checking in all the time and people could track me. And I confessed to being on GetGlue because after all they give you STICKERS! I also have YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic, and Picasa accounts. Oh yeah, and I have a Google+ account that links everything.

So you would think I have no time left for any more social media sites. Not true! Just when you thought it was safe to go on the Web without having to join some new site, they bring you Tumblr.com. Tumblr is supposedly a combination of all of the other sites you don're really have time to keep up with. It allows you to blog, chat, post videos, post photos, post quotes, post annoying memes or just twitisms. Who in their right mind would join something that basically mimics every other social media site out there?

 I would, of course, because even after seven years of blogging unnoticed, I still live in a fantasy world that the reason why my blog hasn't busted into big time (i.e. Google Blogs of Note) is because I haven't done enough to promote it. So if I post on the Dizgraceland fan page on Facebook, Tweet on my Dizgraceland Twitter page, post a photo of a each post on Dizgraceland at Twitpic, mention I'm thinking about Dizgraceland on GetGlue, and now regurgitate everything on Dizgraceland at Tumbler, eventually I will go viral and people will subscribe for .99 a month to my blog on Kindle (which makes no sense since they can read if for free on the Web) and I will get massively rich and quit my day job.

I will also get gigs on Conan, Letterman and Leno. Maybe I will have my own t-shirts and Judgement Day calendars. Hell, I'll have a whole merchandising line. Dizgraceland will become a household word kind of like Justin Bieber (which is actually two words).

My whole "going viral" scheme is fed by the fact that you can connect all of your social media sites. This means when I post on my Dizgraceland Facebook page, it generates a Tweet on Twitter which is captured by GetGlue as well. Ironic it also appears again on my Dizgraceland blog. I have basically created one single social media organism that essentially feeds upon itself. This is exacerbated by the fact that I essentially have the same followers/friends/tweeters/gluersniffers and Tumbler's on all of my social media sites. And most of them don't really care whether there is a new post about Judgement Day on Dizgraceland or that I am also listening to Jake Shimabukuro's song Dragon on Jango while watching the latest episode of Boardwalk Empire (which was pretty darned good I might say though a bit graphic in the violence department).

But I digress (a line that will have to be on one of my t-shirts that you'll be able to buy via my blog store...these will be quality shirts mind you...not those three for $5 crap ones you buy on the beach in Cabo that shrink to the size of a dog sweater after one washing).

I haven't really decided who I want to play me in the Dizgraceland television series. At first I was thinking maybe Pierce Brosnan or Richard Gere, but let's face it, Father Time is winning the foot race with both of them. Plus I think someone like Jesse Eisenberg would be more appealing to the younger demographic the show would appeal to. But I'm also thinking that he is a bit too bohemian nerdy. So I'm going to insist that Jake Gyllenhaal play me. If he tries to screw us in contract negotiations then the back up can be Adrian Grenier from Entourage. That show is off the air and he's probably looking for work. Of course Mark Wahlberg could probably pull it off, too.

Now all I have to do it is sit back and go all viral! In the meantime I'll keep checking in on GetGlue. Did I mention you get free STICKERS!

Just another Doomsday

So here it is Oct. 21, 2011, the day Oakland based preacher Harold Camping predicted would be the end of the world after his flubbed prediction that the rapture would occur on May 21, 2011. What the 90-year old Camping didn't specify was which time zone the end of days would take place in. Because it is now May 22 in some parts of the world and there is no end in sight.

Since this doomsday doesn't seem to be working out for Camping either, I wonder if he is going to fall back on December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, as the next scheduled doomsday. But since Camping is 90 and had a stroke in June, odds are he won't last until the end of the world anyway.

When Camping does meet his maker, I hope the first thing said to him is, "Hey Harold, we've got this pool going about the end of the world, want in on it?"

I have no sympathy for Camping. What arrogance to predict the end of the world. If believed in sin, that would be right up there. And Camping's punishment should be having to live forever...waiting for the rapture.

What would you call the White House if it was yellow?

That's what my five-year old daughter asked me when I called home from a recent business trip to Washington D.C. I of course told her I supposed it would be called the Yellow House. She proceeded to ask me what it would be called if it was red, green, or blue.

All good questions.

It was my first time in the nation's capitol. And I have to admit it was kind of surreal seeing all of these things I'd grown up seeing photos of like the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Monument and of course, the White House. I was particularly moved by the Lincoln Memorial having been fascinated by his life since I was a boy.

I also visited Ford's Theater and the house across the street where they carried Lincoln after he had been shot by John Wilkes Booth where you could see the room he died in.

The park ranger at the house pointed out that none of the furniture in the house, including the bed in the room where Lincoln died, was the original furniture.  But she assured everyone that it looked a lot like the furniture that was there when Lincoln died, including the short twin bed that was way too small for Lincoln's six foot plus frame. Apparently Lincoln spent his final hours with his legs hanging over the end of the bed.

A bed like the one Lincoln died in.

Not a dignified way to go I must say.

It struck me, after sheepishly waiting in line to tour the house and then marching up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial the next day, that Lincoln would have probably been a bit mortified by the whole thing. I think he was basically a simple man and having people tromping through the room he died in and taking photos of the bed that he didn't really die in would have made him more than a bit uncomfortable. And I imagine he would have been embarrassed by his statue in the monument as well. Not that he didn't warrant a monument (though he does have his face on the penny and the five dollar bill.

The theater box at Ford's Theater where
Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth.

I was a bit mortified myself at the gift shop in Ford's Theater selling Lincoln shot glasses, Lincoln Rocks t-shirts with Lincoln holding an electric guitar, Gettysburg Address neckties and Lincoln bobble heads. You could even buy licorice jelly bean bullets. Ironically Ford Theater's tag line is "Where Lincoln's Legacy Lives On."

To add insult to injury, there was a Hard Rock Cafe just down the street from Ford's Theater. Perhaps this explains the "Lincoln Rocks" t-shirt.

After visiting Ford's Theater, I walked through the National Portrait Gallery a few blocks away. Again I was blown away seeing the actual portraits I'd seen in history books over the years. And once again I was moved by a portrait of Lincoln and his actual life and death masks.

I spent the next day exploring museums, monuments and memorials. Americans are big on monuments and memorials...really big monuments and memorials. I saw the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Monument, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial and the newest Memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. that was being dedicated the next day.

The World War II Memorial

The Franklin Roosevelt Memorial

The Jefferson Monument

The spot at the Lincoln Memorial where
Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

I have to say, it was all pretty overwhelming. It is difficult to squeeze a couple of hundred years of history into a day and a half. But I'm glad I had the opportunity and I plan to take my family to Washington D.C. once the kids are old enough to appreciate what they'll be seeing. But I imagine my daughter will still ask me what they'd call the White House if it was yellow.

Transported for life

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
 Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
 The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
 Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" 
 --Emma Lazarus, Inscription on the Statue of Liberty

Apparently, from the early 1600s through the beginning of the American Revolution, the UK used to transport criminals (major and minor) to the American Colonies as punishment. Once the colonies began fussing over taxes on tea and such, they stopped with the logical conclusion that if they shipped any more to America, they'd simply join forces with the Colonial Army thrilled with the opportunity to point a gun at their jailers. Beginning in 1788, they began sending their prisoners to Australia instead.

I sometimes wonder if that is how my ancestors migrated to America. Not that I have uncovered a great deal of criminal activity in my family tree on my forays into genealogy.  Though one of my cousin's wife did shoot her five-year-old son with a shotgun before turning the weapon on herself. This left a lasting impression on me because the five-year old was only a day older than me and I had played with him on occasion. I do recall my mother describing my cousin's wife as being high strung. I would describe her more as being a few marbles short of a full bag.

But I digress.

Though while I am revealing skeletons in my family closet, I do recall another cousin robbing a bank in California. I think it was a small bank, however. Other than that and a few relatives who have seen the inside of various asylums and mental institutions most of my relatives I've uncovered have been too preoccupied with scratching in the dirt or procreating to engage in criminal activities. I think crime in general would have required a bit too much mental effort on most of their parts, but that is just my educated guess.

Not that you had to be a criminal mastermind to get transported to America for life. Apparently all it took was "injuring" a bridge to get your behind thrown onto a boat for a one-way trip to New England and a life building roads for the state or sold into slavery. The punishment for returning from transportation for life was death.  In the long run, I think it was just the British way of weeding out the riff raff without having to build more prisons.

The funny thing is that I don't remember being taught anything about this in school. We were taught crap about how the pilgrims came to America seeking religious freedom from persecution in England. But the near as I can figure, they weren't really interested in anyone having freedom from religious persecution once they got here. I think the Salem witches would agree with me.

I don't imagine it would go over well if we had been taught the truth about anything in grade school. A book called Squanto, Enslaved by the British Before Being Screwed Over by the Pilgrims, wouldn't be politically correct as Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims. Squanto, whose real name was Tisquantum, was a member of the Patuxet tribe. He was kidnapped by one of John Smith's lieutenants who tried to sell him in Spain for 20 pounds. He was sort of rescued by some monks who tried to teach him about Christ. He ended up in London and eventually worked his way back to America only to find his tribe had been wiped out by a gift of the early settlers -- smallpox. He did help the pilgrims by teaching them how to plant corn. But they never really trusted him. Squanto/Tisquantum, died, apparently poisoned by another tribe who thought he was selling them out to the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims buried him in an unmarked grave (maybe along with some corn).

The odd truth about America is that rather than a melting pot, we are more of a compost bin. This would explain Emma Lazarus' line about "retched refuse on your teeming shore" and our strong urge to recycle. We also believe in liberty, especially when it comes to the truth.

Trust me on this.

Literature of digression?

Here I have been digressing for years and now I discover that there is actually a literary genre called the "literature of digression." Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne was apparently one of them. It was a 18th century novel written in nine volumes. The narrator digresses so much that the main character isn't even born until volume three. Now that is a digression.

I actually read Tristram Shandy in 8th grade. I thought it sucked.

But I digress.

I have never been fond of the term literature. It conjures up too many bad associations for me of literature students dissecting some author's works to determine how it ticks the same way a biology student would perform a vivisection on a rat. Neither the author nor the rat really take much pleasure in either act.

Not that I would consider anything I write as literature. Nor would I expect anyone to study it or perform a vivisection on it. When you peel away the layers of an onion you will typically discover an onion. So you are better off just eating it and appreciating that it is an onion.

I have never really understood why people get PhD's in literature. You shouldn't study literature, you should read it. It is not as if people with PhD's in literature actually end up writing great literature themselves. All they seem to write about is what some author was writing about. But if the author was any good in the first place, he or she wouldn't need some PhD to interpret what they were trying to say, now would they?

Of course, I am over generalizing as usual. I think it is nice that people can spend years and thousands of dollars getting an education to deconstruct the meaning of the harpoon in Moby Dick. The practical side of me wonders how in the hell they make a living with a PhD in literature. I like to read and write, too, but at least I majored in Journalism so people didn't ask me what I was going to do with my degree once I graduated. Most people assume literature majors are going to either teach or be barista's.

 I don't like poetry or creative writing (fiction or non-fiction) majors either. As a rule, I think poetry sucks and teaching someone to write creatively if they don't have talent is like teaching a cat to bark.

But I digress.

Personally, I learned to write by reading. To this day, I probably couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended upon it. But I know intuitively when something is wrong with one. And I don't need to sit in a creative writing class having eight other "writers" telling me how they would have written my story.

I think constructive criticism sucks.

But I digress.

I guess I've given up on the concept of writing fiction and being a great novelist anyway. I don't have the patience to craft three or four hundred pages of plot with believable characters that don't bore me. I'm better suited to crank out 1000 word blog posts without any deep meaning or point.

It's my art and I think I'll keep it.

Me, myself and I

I realize now the major social media faux pas I made the other day by posting about the music I was listening to on Jango. I think I reached a new low in hits on the post. Even the "next blog" people passed on it. I keep forgetting that no one really wants to read about me regardless of how fascinating I think I am.

I guess I got carried away by the wealth of music out there that I was totally unaware of. And if I were being honest to myself, I'd have to say I wanted to impress the world with my openness to cutting edge music regardless of whether I could pronounce the names of the musicians performing it. It reminded me of seventh grade when a  girl in my class expressed amazement that I said I liked listening to America's Horse With No Name. She told me that she would have thought I sat around listening to classical music. It was a wake up call that I needed to tweak my image in the "hipness" realm.

Part of it is also middle aged angst. There is a tendency to think anyone over 50 only listens to Tony Bennett. It doesn't help when I read my niece and nephew's Facebook pages and don't have a clue as to who or what they are talking about, especially when it comes to music and concerts.

Not that I ever was much on going to concerts. The last one I went to was the Wiggles. It was a pretty good show if you don't mind short songs that are about fruit salad. The first concert I ever went to was Boz Scaggs. He was playing in an exhibition hall at the Western Idaho Fairgrounds. Not many groups performed in Idaho at the time because there wasn't any place to perform. I remember Boz stating on stage that performing in the exhibition hall was not unlike playing inside a toilet bowl.

I did go through a brief but expensive stage when I moved to Seattle to go to college where I went to concerts every few weeks. Seattle has many more places to perform than Boise did. I remember walking the floor of Key Arena at Seattle Center marveling at the number of people openly selling drugs the same way a peanut vendor would sell his wares at a ball game.

One of my claims to fame is that I threw up at a Cheap Trick concert in the Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle. I wasn't drunk. I just had the flu and had shelled out big bucks for the tickets. I'd tried bolstering myself with Pepto Bismal, but that just turned my puke pink..  I watched the standing fans shriek and part as the pink river flowed down the sloping theater floor towards the stage. I didn't stay for the end of the show.

In my single days, I also went out a bit to see live music. I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform live at a club downtown once, not because I knew who they were, but because they were performing along with a local Portland band called the Crazy Eights that I liked. The only thing I knew about the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the time was that they had performed nude wearing only a single sock (and it wasn't on their collective feet). The were fortunately fully clothed when I saw them.

The best show I think I've ever seen is the Blue Man Group sitting in the Poncho Section at the Luxor in Las Vegas. I also saw their Complex Rock Tour Live at the Paramount Theater. I didn't puke at it.

Damn. I've posted about myself again. I don't think I'll ever get the hang of writing for you.

Jango'd nerves

When I was a kid, I had a little blue transistor radio that I carried around with me during the summer. I'd twirl the tuning dial and hold it up in the air trying to get the best reception so I could listen to the latest songs that had made the charts. It was the 60s and the classic rock and roll songs weren't yet classics. Although I'm sure there was a plethora of music out there, my music world was confined to that small blue plastic box. And it seemed contained to a manageable number of musicians that I could at least name.

I hate listening to radio stations anymore not because I don't like music, I just hate listening to mindless DJ babble. Much of the music I now listen to now on my MP3 player is stuff ripped from my CD collection which was mostly stuff that I'd bought to replace my record collection which was based largely on music that I used to hear on my transistor radio.

I have to admit that I am woefully behind on the current music scene. I will blame part of it on having a couple of toddlers. You don't listen to much during the first four or five years of  raising children that doesn't involve the Wiggles or Raffi. My kids begin screeching in protest if we get into the car and the radio is playing instead of a soundtrack to something like the Princess and the Frog.

So when I stumbled onto a Web site called Jango.com (a free music site that plays any kind of music you want, relatively commercial free and non-stop), I was overwhelmed at the number of artists out there I've never heard of.  You start by plugging in the names of musicians you like and Jango shuffles through their songs and then starts adding songs from similar artists.

I started with a group I like called Zero 7. Before long I was exposed to groups like Beats Antique, Boozoo Bajou, De-Phazz, Massive Attack, Bent, Air, Bonobo, Kinobe and Thievery Corporation (fortunately, you can't judge a group by their name). Jango also gives you mini-biographies of the musicians. You fine tune Jango by clicking on a thumbs up for songs and musicians you like or a thumbs down for stuff you'd rather not hear again.

Did I mention Jango is free? Even when I had satellite radio in my car I had to pay to listen to the satellite stations on my computer. Plus I could never find anything I really liked listening to and it never customized the stations to me. Jango even lets me set up different 'radio stations' based on different genres of music all keyed off an initial artist I liked. If I'm in the mood for country music, I can start with the Dixie Chicks or the Civil Wars and get music similar to those musicians. Or if I feel like heavy metal, I type in Black Sabbath and chances are Iron Man will be cranked out.

My only complaint about Jango is that it overwhelms me at times. There are so many great musicians out there I don't really have time to get lost in one groups music the way I did when I was a kid and play their album over and over like I did with the Beatles.

Did I mention Jango is free? If it came in a little, blue plastic box and had static, I'd swear I was listening to my transistor radio again.

Sniffing GetGlue

This is my "Check-in Legend" sticker for checking in more than 250 times.

I needed another social media site to check into like I need a hole in the head. So apparently I needed a hole in my head. I joined GetGlue. GetGlue is a social media site that combines some of the worst characteristics of MySpace, FourSquare, Facebook and Twitter into one annoying place. Instead of checking into places like FourSquare, you check in to let people know what music you are listening to, television show you are watching, book you are reading or thing you are thinking about.

In theory, you follow friends on GetGlue the way you do on Twitter and they all know what you are listening, watching, reading or thinking and see these scintillating posts like, "I am watching House Hunters." You can also link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to GetGlue so all of those people are privy to these fascinating posts as well.

This just about violates every rule Dan Zarrella cites in his book Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas that will ensure people don't read or repost any of your stuff on Twitter (or anywhere else for that matter). Almost every check in you make on GetGlue includes the words Zarrella claims are the kiss of death for ever being read (i.e. listening, watching, reading, playing, thinking, etc.)

GetGlue strongly encourages you to enlist as many friends as possible to join. And they encourage you to follow as many people as possible on GetGlue. In that way, GetGlue is very much like Amway, Mormans and Nichiran Shoshu Buddhists.

The twist with GetGlue is that you are rewarded for checking in with "stickers" that commemorate the number of check ins, the topics you check in on most and other random things. Once you have collected at least 20 stickers, you can click on a button and GetGlue will mail you actual hard copy versions of your stickers. You can do this once a month. This is the brilliance behind GetGlue. It is human nature (especially for OCD people such as myself) to keep pressing a button as long as you get a reward. Never mind that it is a virtual "sticker" that means absolutely nothing.

Other than unlocking stickers for checking in, you can also unlock exclusive stickers for checking in to particular things, like movie premiers, season openers, new releases, concerts, etc. So it is a marketing tool for PR people trying to get the masses to create a buzz around their product. You can also earn discounts for merchandise for checking in on some things.

The drive to collect stickers on GetGlue has spawned a website called getgluestickers.com. The site includes  lists of exclusive stickers available and hints on how to unlock them (i.e. specific words or phrases you need to put in the comments box when you check in).

As of this morning, I have earned 78 stickers. I imagine by the end of the day I will have earned closer to one hundred.

But it's not a problem. I can stop checking in anytime.

Seasons

The rains have begun. I say this as if I were living in the tropics and monsoon season was beginning. Actually it is just fall in the Pacific Northwest. And saying the rains have begun here is a bit redundant.

Regardless, I sit at the window on my morning commute staring at the gray shore merge with the gray water and the gray sky. If you throw my gray hair into the mix, it can be a bit depressing.

Not that I intended to post about the weather. I despise conversations about the weather the way I despise inane comments to me from my neighbors, such as, "Washing you car?" when I'm standing there with a hose, bucket, soap and a sponge in front of my car. I am tempted to reply, "No, just about to have a sponge bath, care to join me?"

Small talk has never been my forte.

Regardless of the rain, the calendar still tells me that it is fall. And before I know it, it will be winter and another year will be tossed into the recycling bin along with the Christmas wrap. I swear time moves so much quicker than it did when I was a kid. Then a summer day lasted a week and Christmas was always agonizing months away. I looked forward to birthdays, too. And I always wished that time would move quicker so that I could grow up.

Be careful what you wish for.

 I could spout platitudes about "being as young as you feel," but I am reminded too often that you are "as old as you look." And  besides, after working in the garden pulling more ivy vines and filling up mountain beaver holes (yes, the little bastard has reemerged), I feel pretty old...physically anyway. My mind still wanders along clicking a stick against a fence and picking up leaves.

My 86-year old  mother tells me she doesn't recognize herself in the mirror. I know how she feels. I feel that way when I look at my hands as well.

I'm sure I've blogged about this before. That is another sign of aging...repeating yourself and forgetting that you are doing so. Forgetting in general is another problem. A couple nights ago I was watching an Adam Sandler film called Just Go with It  that co-starred Jennifer Aniston. Out of the blue Nicole Kidman made an appearance in the film. And for the life of me, I couldn't remember her name. I pictured all the films I'd seen her in, but I couldn't recall her name. I figured it would come to me. But the next morning, I still couldn't remember her name. I finally had to Google Moulin Rouge and read her name in the film credits.

I realize not remembering Nicole Kidman's name isn't a big thing (unless you are Keith Urban). But as bad as physically aging is, losing my mental faculties would be a major bummer.

Perhaps all of this is why I lean toward wanting to believe in some form of the Buddhist concept of spiritual rebirth. At least after a hard winter, I can always look forward to the promise of spring.