Theodore strikes back

While we were bopping around on the road to Boise and back, Theodore, my unwelcome Mountain Beaver, was given free reign to restore his burrow entrances in my backyard.  So yesterday was the first time I actually had an opportunity to get out there and renew my efforts to discourage him from turning my backyard into a Mountain Beaver condo with multiple entrances.

I filled a couple of the worst holes with a couple of bags of used kitty litter courtesy of my three cats. I topped off the holes with large rocks and some concrete stepping stones. This morning Theodore was back. He didn't try reopening the holes I'd plugged with cat litter, but he did pop up in a new hole almost on the path to my garden shed. And despite all of the information I'd read about Mountain Beavers being nocturnal and rarely seen, Theodore was out there in plain site actively burrowing away.

I grabbed my camera and snapped several shots (using a zoom because I'm not going to test the "aggressive behavior" info I've also read about). They are a bit blurry, but you can get an idea of what Theodore looks like.

This afternoon I ventured through the gate to continue my project to reclaim the overgrown slope in my backyard. Once again I plugged up Theodore's new burrow entrances with large rocks and yet another concrete stepping stone. I then proceeded to battle the Horsetails, ivy and other assorted weeds that have taken over the landscaping, keeping a machete within reach in case Theodore wanted to talk about kitty litter. But he didn't make another appearance. But I imagine he's still there plotting his next move.

Nutz to you

Since I am dissing on things related to our recent road trip, I might as well express my disgust for Hummers. Give me one good reason why anyone outside of Iraq needs to drive around in an armored troop carrier. They are big, ugly, bad for the environment and obnoxious.

To add insult to injury we saw one in one of the dink towns we were passing through on our way to Idaho that had a handicapped permit hanging on the rear view mirror and what looked like chromed testicles hanging from the rear bumper. Turns out there is a company called "Thatsnutz" that sells trailer hitches in various colors that resemble a scrotum.

This is wrong on so many levels.

I have never understood why people need to try and make up for their inadequacies and insecurities by owning muscle cars,  big trucks or vehicles that cost as much money as the GNP of many third world countries. It reminds me of the old joke that asks what is the difference between a Porsche and a porcupine: the porcupine has the pricks on the outside.

If a person is defined by the car they drive then they must a a pretty pitiful life.

I also despise bumper stickers, mud flaps with sayings like "Mean and Nasty" on them and antenna balls.

And don't get me started on gold trim packages.

Who Walmarted?

I am not a person who goes to Walmart. Even if I put aside the various accusations of how they treat employees or drive small businesses out of business, I just can't wrap my mind around shopping at Walmart. Maybe it is because I associate Walmarts with trailer parks and other symbols of America's great unwashed masses.

Don't get me wrong, I am not an elitist in the sense that I want to shop at exclusive boutiques. I just prefer to shop at places that don't reek of stale popcorn and have clientele who resemble extras in a Night of the Living Dead sequel.

But we were in Hermiston, Oregon, a burg half way between our home in Washington state and my birthplace in Boise where I was taking my family for a reunion of sorts. And our hotel was a block or two away from a Walmart and we needed a few items. When you are traveling with toddlers, you tend to put aside minor aversions to places such as Walmart for convenience sake. After all, I was also a stranger in Hermiston and no one I knew would actually see me set foot in a Walmart.

.In a fashion, Walmarts are not that different than a Target. But for some reason, a Target seems less seedy and consumption obsessed. Walmarts seem like the next generation of K-marts, the tawdry mega stores of my childhood. I come from a generation familiar with blue light specials and bags of submarine sandwiches for a $1.00. So you would think I wouldn't be bothered by a seedy Walmart.

This wasn't the first time I'd been in a Walmart. I think I mentioned that I took my family to one near my home town around Christmas when I was searching for a replacement for my white artificial Elvis Christmas tree. Since I'd bought the original Elvis tree at a K-mart, I figured Walmart would have a suitable replacement. But after encountering a bedraggled rat in the Christmas tree section of the store, I quickly herded my family out of the place.

I didn't see any rats in the Hermiston Walmart. I kept scanning the floors for them, however. I was tempted to interrogate the greeter about rodent infestations as we walked in, but he seemed totally focused on his one primary task, trying to appear cheery and welcoming while being paid minimum wage.

And speaking of the greeters at Walmart, I had this idea some time back. Walmart should start building senior residences into their stores. It's a genius idea, really. They'd have a built in workforce who could work their in exchange for room and board. After all, the stores offer medical services, eye exams and crappy food.

But I digress.

I wish I could say that I was pleasantly surprised by my visit to Walmart. But I wasn't. We wandered through aisle after aisle of merchandise that I'm sure was cheaper than most stores. But then again it was generally crap that no one really needed. There were tons of flat screen televisions and DVD players beckoning to a clientele that on a whole didn't appear to be able to afford food let alone cheap electronics. Regardless, Walmart offers up the American dream at discount prices.

We grabbed the stuff we came for and dashed out past the bleary eyed greeter into the daylight. I was anxious to get back to the hotel and go swimming. I had this uncontrollable  urge to immerse myself in water. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with having spent time in a Walmart.

Now cough

I realize that no one really wants to hear how you are feeling despite the automatic, "How are you feeling" greetings you get when they walk by your office and you sound as if you are trying to cough up a major internal organ. What they really want to ask is, "Are you infectious and why don't you go lock yourself in a sound proof room where you won't disgust and annoy the rest of us."

I know this because this is what I normally think when I ask someone how they feel. Now that I'm the disgusting coughing one hacking up phlegm and killing forest after forest worth of tissues, I realize karma is a major bitch. I also realize that medical science has not progressed much from the days of bleeding and applying leeches.

After more than two weeks of coughing, wheezing and making sounds that kept conjuring up the phrase "death rattle" in my disease obsessed brain, I gave in and made a doctor's appointment. There are far too many things I'd rather do than go to the doctor than I could list in a thousand blog posts. But you can only put up with the disgusted looks and comments of sympathetic coworkers and family members who suggest you go to a doctor or float off on an ice flow before you break down and visit the doctor.

I wasn't optimistic that the doctor could or would do anything to help. After keeping me waiting the prerequisite 20 minutes in the exam room she came in and immediately asked, "How are you feeling" which has an even worse translation when coming from a doctor. It essential means, "How long do I have to listen to you whine before I can simply bill my $200 and send you on your way to let what ever crude you'd come down with runs its course."

The doctor did immediately decline shaking my hand and kept a good six feet between me and her. She listened to my symptoms and reluctantly said, "Let's take a look" as she donned rubber gloves and picked up her instruments to peek into my ears and nose and listen to my lungs. She proceeded to check and inform me I had post nasal drip and a bad cough.

My four year old had made this diagnosis days earlier without the benefit of medical school.

She then told me that it was probably started out as a viral thing and may have turned into an infection. So she gave me a prescription for some antibiotics with the caveat that they may or may not help and an inhaler that might help the cough. Then she told me to come back in a week or so if things didn't get better.  I walked out shaking my head at my gullibility for once again going to a doctor assuming they were actually going to offer up a cure rather than a guess.

Regardless, I have been taking my pills and breathing my inhaler and I have to say I really don't feel much better. But when people make some comment about my hacking and sniffling, I can confidently say that I've been to a doctor. They seem relieved since this indicates that I must not be contagious.

Then when they are away from their desks, I go and lick their telephone receivers.

Pee de resistance

I jokingly suggested that an online site selling predator urine to ward off pesky little animals like a Mountain Beaver might be called predatorpiss.com. I was wrong. The site is called predatorpee.com. It is a company in Maine that specializes in selling urine for all occasions. If you have any questions, you simply email the pee-man for answers.

Of course one of the first questions I had was how you go about collecting bobcat, coyote, mountain lion or fox pee. And the pee-man obviously gets this question a lot because he has page dedicated to pee collection. Apparently you don't have to approach animals in the wild with a specimen jar. The urine comes from zoos and wildlife refuges where apparently they have figured out a way to collect urine.

I can't resist saying that collecting predator pee would be a profession where you are required to be pissed off all the time.

Stop, I am killing me.

Regardless, I'm not ready to plunk down $23.99 for 12 ounces of Bobcat pee to piss off Theodore, my Mountain Beaver. Theodore, by the way, did unplug one of the burrow entrances I'd covered up and plugged with stones. I was tempted to pee in the burrow while growling like a bobcat, but my wife frowns on that type of behavior. I am, however, considering shoveling used kitty litter into the hole. God knows I have ready supply of that with three cats in the house.

I think there may be a reality program in here somewhere: Man versus Mountain Beaver. I could dress like Ozzie Osbourne and mutter unintelligibly while pouring jars of urine down Theodore's burrow. I think I could milk if for two or three seasons before being bumped off the network and being replaced by the Pee-Man and his day to day exploits in the predator pee business.

I live a rich and full life.

Golly Wally, is that a Mountain Beaver?

If you are like me (and I assume most people), you have probably never heard of a Mountain Beaver. The ironic thing about a Mountain Beaver is that it doesn't really live in the mountains and it isn't a beaver. It is actually more of a prehistoric rat without a tail that one author described as looking kind of like a furry football with claws and teeth.

Apparently the Mountain Beaver hasn't changed much in 40,000 years. The only thing they seem to do is burrow and eat vegetation -- primarily ferns, rhododendrons and tree bark (which is probably why they got confused with beavers). They need to live near water because their kidneys haven't evolved in 40,000 years either so they need to drink the equivalent of 2/3 their body weight each day.

Lewis and Clark were some of the first people to write about the Mountain Beaver after being sold a couple of robes made out of their fur by local natives. Like much of the world, Lewis and Clark never actually got to see a Mountain Beaver, just their fur because they are very shy critters and fairly anti-social. This may because they also have the nasty habit of eating their own poop so they don't get invited to many parties.

Why do I devote so much precious blog space to an evolved animal from the rat family? Because I have met a Mountain Beaver.

We just bought our house about a year ago. And one of the cool but high maintenance aspects of it is that although it doesn't have a backyard, it has a forested section that our deck overlooks that slopes down to a creek. The forested property had been landscaped at one time, but has more or less been reclaimed by nature  over the years before we bought the house. I decided to re-reclaim it a couple of weekends ago.

Little did I know that my little patch of wilderness would be considered a Club Med for the average Mountain Beaver. It has ferns, rhodies, trees, a creek and lots of soft dirt for burrowing. And until I started clearing it away, it had plenty of ground cover to shield the many entrances to the Mountain Beaver's burrow from prying eyes.

It didn't take much clearing of ivy and horsetails to uncover the first burrow entrance. If you aren't familiar with horsetails, they are ironically also a prehistoric throwback, but from the plant world. They resemble a horse's tale (thus the name) but come apart in sections when you pull on them. They don't spread through seeds, but through spores. So I have a prehistoric rat and prehistoric plants thriving in my backyard. What's next, T-Rex?

Anyway, I assumed the hole was a gopher hole, (albeit for a big gopher ). So I throw a couple of rocks in it and cover it with dirt. Then I go about my futile effort to pull out ivy and horsetails. The following weekend I take up the gauntlet again. When I go through the gate, I discover that the burrow has been uncovered and the rocks pushed out. I begin get a bit edgy about an animal big enough push out a fair sized rock. So I throw a bigger rock down the hole, cover it up again and place a larger rock on top.

After finishing my day's weeding, I'm standing on my deck looking over the slope and I see something move down a few yards from the original burrow entrance. I watch for a minute and sure enough I see this brown animal the size of a football pushing out dirt and brazenly piling it up around the entrance of a new hole. It seems oblivious to that fact that the sun is still out and it is exposed to prying eyes.

My wife opens the gate and walks down the steps past the burrowing critter and it doesn't stop pushing dirt out of the new entrance. Its as if it was making a point of showing us that no matter how many holes we covered up, it could dig new ones. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had lifted a furry paw and flipped a middle claw up at me.

That night my wife does an Internet search. She has apparently heard rumors about something called a Mountain Gopher. Sure enough, the few photos of the "elusive" and rarely seen Mountain Beaver is the creature burrowing on the slope behind my house. As with most information on the Web, I find a smattering of information, mostly regurgitated versions of the same text stating that a Mountain Beaver is basically a prehistoric rodent with a pissy attitude an no tail that is rarely seen and often misunderstood.

One official Washington State site provides helpful suggestions on how to discourage a Mountain Beaver from living in your backyard by being a bad neighbor. This involves filling up every burrow entrance you can find with old newspapers or used kitty litter (I'm not sure how this will faze an animal that eats its own crap). They also suggest wadding up old rags soaked with bobcat or coyote urine and shoving them into the burrows with a coat hanger. Apparently you can purchase bobcat and coyote urine online or at local trapping stores. I don't think Walmart carries it but if they do I'm sure the urine would sell at a very reasonable price. I haven't done a search for online outlets, but I imagine the companies have names like predatorpiss.com or badassurine.biz.

They also suggest that you can trap the Mountain Beavers, but chances are if you kill one, another one will move into his or her old burrow since the Mountain Beaver real estate market is pretty competitive.

For now I just filled in five or six of the burrow entrances with rocks and dirt. I can tell you that I was a bit nervous on Sunday while I continued clearing the ivy and horsetails waiting to be leaped on by a disgruntled Mountain Beaver. Being savaged by a feral Mountain Beaver is not the way I want to go out. For one, it would sound pretty pitiful on the evening news:

Anchorperson Jennifer: This breaking news, an Edmonds man was attacked today by a Mountain Beaver in what was described as a dispute over kitty litter and bobcat urine. Never heard of a Mountain Beaver, Steve, have you?
Anchorperson Steve: Not much Jennifer, but I hear they are more vicious than the elusive Jackalope.

So far I haven't seen any signs that Theodore (that's what I've decided to call my Mountain Beaver... it was Beaver Cleaver's real name on the Leave it to Beaver series) has unplugged the burrow entrances I filled in on Sunday. But I know he is down there, probably watching old Rambo videos plotting his revenge.

In the meantime, I'm going to go run a search for bobcat urine and hope I don't get in trouble with my IT department for surfing "blocked" Web sites.

A slice of melon collie anyone?

I have always leaned more towards bittersweet melancholy rather than saccharine-laced nostalgia. I would say it is a middle aged thing, but I pretty much have always felt this way. Maybe it is because my soul, if not an old one, is a middle aged one and has learned to recognize irony over many lifetimes.

It's not that I am feeling particularly melancholy. I was just looking at one of the stat counting programs that loosely identifies who is looking at what on my blog. For the most part people drift in using Blogger's "Next Blog" function. I pay little attention to them. They are tourists looking for giant balls of twine along the Information Highway.

The second highest traffic comes from people doing Google searches. I pay almost no attention to them either because the generally are looking for porn or help eliminating vermin from their crawl spaces. Or for some inexplicable reason they want to know why clams are supposed to be so happy. My blog post posing the burning question, "Are clams really happy?" remains my number one visited page. I hope these people find closure after reading my essay on the subject.

The most interesting visitor's to my site are the ones who seem to navigate deliberately to my blog. I imagine they may have once been visitors from category number one or two, but were curious enough to come back. Regardless I clicked on one link to the archives of my May 2006 blog posts. I was quite prolific in 2006. I began reading some of my old posts. One of the curses and blessings of being middle aged is being able to read something you wrote five years ago and basically have little or no recollection of writing it. It is really quite refreshing.

At the risk of sounding conceited, I was quite moved by some of the things I'd written. This is where the melancholy comes in.  In a post written ironically about Blogger's "Next Blog" function I wrote:

My forays into Blogger's "Next Blog" feature this last week has made me wonder. What are we looking for? Do we expect to stumble onto some blog out there with the answers? Would whatever power that motivates life's direction use blogger.com as the forum for unlocking the key to existence? Is this all some fantastic DaVinci code where the pieces to the ultimate puzzle are hidden in the detris of mindless blogs about paint ball strategy or minutia about American Idol winners?

I don't think so. If there is an answer in the blog world, I think it may be a collective one. Perhaps it is just that we are all trying to look inside by turning ourselves inside out in a blog post. It's as if the computer has become our confessional and we sit waiting for affirmation that we are not alone in our sins of being human. We want to know that it is okay to not always know where we are going or if it is the right direction.

I think it is human nature to always look for a sign that we are not alone.

Now that may be a load of crap, but it is pretty profound if I say so myself (and I do and did). But it was really this post that pushed my melancholy button. It was a post about a planned trip back to my birthplace, Boise:

I find it odd after living in Seattle for about 24 years to return to my birthplace. I realize Boise has changed a great deal in those 24-years, but I can't help but sense the time warp aspect of the place in my memory. I won't be staying at the house I grew up in although my mom has plenty of room. I refuse to sleep in the basement in my old room with the leopard-patterned paneling listening to the water pump run every 15 minutes. And after living with 250 premium channels on a HD bigscreen television, I can't bring myself to watch local Boise channels on a 19-inch television in my mom's family room while she sleeps in an easy chair. I also can't bring myself to shower in a bathroom the size of a telephone booth (I can't believe it was once shared by 5 people in one house). But the real reason I won't stay at my mother's house is that there really is no more room there because it is already too full of memories.

You can never really go back. But you can hover above it all, observing where you were. I'll wander from room to room staring at timelines of family photos on the walls, listening to my mom lecturing her dog about chasing the neighborhood squirrels. I'll drive around the town on autopilot remembering the pizza parlour that is now a tattoo parlour. And I'll drive by my grade school remembering those walks home, stopping to catch waterskippers in a drainage ditch in a distant time before kid's pictures ended up on the side's of milk cartoons. I may walk around the downtown or the mall, looking into faces, wondering if I'll see anyone I recognize. But they will all be new faces.

Then I'll return to my generic hotel room that could be anyplace in the country and wonder why I am a stranger in a place where I first drew a breath. And I'll try not to think about the time when my mother rejoins my father and the family home is merely a photograph replaced by multiplexes and townhouses.

And I'll realize that it is all inevitable and it wouldn't have mattered if I'd been crowned King instead of ending up a middle-aged bureaucrat commuting by train rather than a royal carriage. Because even kings have no control over time.

That's where the melon collie came dashing out of the past nipping at little Timmy's heels. The irony in all of this, is that thoughts like these are part of the legacy of me I want my children to read some day in hopes they'll understand papa a little better once I'm either gone or lost somewhere in senility. And they are buried in the May 2006 archive of a blog best know for explaining why clams aren't really so happy.

Yes, Alanis, it is ironic, don't you think?

My next stop

I have been dreaming a great deal lately. Or I suppose I have been more aware of my dreams lately. My understanding is that we always dream, we just don't remember them unless we wake up soon after dreaming. Regardless, I have been remembering more dreams lately.

The irony is that most of the dreams I seem to be having are related to anxiety about  transportation (I work in the public transportation industry). In my dreams, I always seem to be in another city trying to get somewhere. In one dream I was at an airport checking about a flight that had been delayed until the next day. I went back to confirm and missed the tour bus I'd been on and I was stranded there without my luggage or passport. It was night and I was desperately trying to find a way to get back to my hotel painfully aware of the seedy part of town I suddenly found myself in.

Last night I was trying to determine which bus stop to wait at to catch bus either to the airport or near to my hotel. I don't know which. But the anxiety was trying to determine where to wait for the bus. Nothing seemed to be marked clearly and everyone else seemed to know where they were going.

I have similar anxiety dreams about trains, except I'm not so much worried about getting on the wrong train (since they operate on a fixed track, odds are pretty much 50/50 that you are going to get on the one going in the right direction). In my train dreams, I'm worried about getting to the station in time to catch the last train.

I also have dreams about cruise ships and getting stranded in ports. Or I'm on ferry boats on the Amazon passing through hostile territory.

I don't really have anxiety dreams about driving a car. This shows you how ingrained public transit is in my psyche.

Though not all of my dreams are about transportation. I had a dream last week about an odd masked character living in the crawl space of a dream version of the house I grew up in. He only emerged at night and skulked about the yard. I finally confronted him with a baseball bat. But in my dreams, I never seem able to pack any punch when I attempt to protect myself with clubs or other weapons. Guns never fire and knives or clubs always dissolve or lose momentum. Not that I want to hurt anyone, but if the bogeyman is going to inhabit my dream house, I think I have the right to bean him. In this dream I scared the bogeyman so much, I began to feel sorry for him and told him he could go ahead in live in the crawl space (which really looked quite  cozy...he'd set up a bed and some bookcases). I even asked if he needed more blankets.

I don't put much stock in these dreams. I'm sure you could read all kinds of symbolism into them like lacking direction or fear of the Rapture. But I tend to think of them as my mind releasing day to day pressure through dream brain farts.

And speaking of brain farts, is it just me or does the latest round of Dairy Queen television ads (blatant rip offs of the Old Spice commercials) seem a bit freaky? I can't get this image of the bunnies with a straight edge razor giving the Dairy Queen guy a shave. If I start seeing them in my bus dreams I'm really going to wig out.

At my post

I'd like to think that, although my blog posts are pretty random, I am a pretty consistent blogger. I will have been blogging for seven years come this August. And I hope to post my thousandth post sometime this year (which will probably be as anticlimactic as Judgement Day was).

One of the anomalies of blogging versus writing a book is that people reading a blog (or stumbling into one) start reading from the end versus the beginning. I realize that is a very linear way of looking at it, but it is true. Although very few people actually read a blog for the first time and then jump back to the first post to catch up. This is especially true in my case. It would be a lot to expect for someone to read almost a thousand of my archived posts to discover how I got to where I am.

I've toyed with creating printed versions of my blog. I have created photo books using blurb.com, an online self-publishing system. I even began creating a book called the Best of Dizgraceland that I shelved because of the need to truly prioritize my very limited free time for things other than creating a vanity press version of a blog no one reads so that it can become a printed version that no one would read even if they were willing to plunk down the rather pricey cost of a blurb book.

It's not as though you would find a clear thread to define what it is I am trying to communicate with my blog if you read it from beginning to end (or end to beginning). You would discover that I repeat myself a great deal and harp on many of the same topics over and over (one of them being the frustrations of writing a blog no one reads on a regular basis).

I've recapped much of my childhood and climbed my family tree on more than one occasion. But I found that sharing too much information on the Web can be an unwise thing to do. So I stopped naively blathering away about everything as though I was writing in my diary oblivious that it could be read by anyone with an Internet connection.

I'm smart enough not to write about work. Not that I have any interest in writing about my work. I blog to escape from thinking about my work. I also don't write about my wife or children here. I write about my life as a father in another private blog locked away from prying eyes.

I don't write about being away on vacation for the same reason I stopped checking in on Four Square. Common sense tells us that it is better not to broadcast to the world when you are away from your house and for how long. You might as well tell thieves which rock your front door key is hidden under.

Taking away much of my personal life as topics for blogging has definitely narrowed the scope of my subject matter. Sometimes I think I have just run out of things to write about. And then some whack job like Harold Camping comes along and gives me fodder for several posts. I'd be up a creek if he actually got raptured.

So, I'm not sure whether after almost seven years blogging, I've come to the conclusion why I do it. I don't harbor any fantasy that there would be a major outcry if I stopped. Pebbles don't make much of a ripple in a very large pond. But I stay at my post. There is a certain amount of satisfaction that I hang in there putting one foot in front of another.

Who knows, maybe someday I'll actually get somewhere.

Dis Belief and Dat Belief

I really don't intend to keep beating the dead rapture horse, but I continue to be baffled that people believed so firmly that the end of the world was going to happen that they drained their life savings and uprooted their families in anticipation of the end. Perhaps this is why I am not a religious person. I can't think of anything I'd believe on faith alone.

It's kind of like me wanting to believe in ghosts. No matter how many episodes I watch of Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel, I still haven't seen anything that would lead me to the conclusion that ghosts exist. It would be nice to confirm that something about us continues on after we die, but logic seems to defy it. How can anyone claim to be an expert in paranormal activity unless they have died and come back? At least at that point you could speak from experience instead of just making crap up that sounds good. Of course, no one would believe you unless they made a leap of faith.

It is that mysterious "leap of faith" that seems to be the foundation of all religions. If something defies logic like walking on water or parting seas, the preachers blame your doubt on your inability make that leap of faith and just believe. Unfortunately, that leap of faith too often leads to draining bank accounts and drinking Koolaid.

Having been raised a Christian Scientist I was often faced with the dilemma of not believing enough. When I got sick as a child, I blamed it on my lack of faith. My mother's disapproving looks and quotes from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy reinforced that I was lacking in the faith department and thus was bowing before the toilet puking my little guts out because I didn't believe enough.

To this day, I feel guilty if I am sick.

So do I shake my head in wonderment at the rubes who believed the end was coming on May 21, 2011 because they were idiots or because I envy their ability to just have faith.

I think it is a little of both. But I still think Harold Camping is a whack job, especially since he now claims Judgement Day did happen but it was just a spiritual judgement and that the world will still end on Oct. 21, 2011. In the meantime he won't give any of the money back to the poor souls he bilked.

Now that is a a sin.

I reckon this ain't the day of reckoning

I suppose I could take the high road and not gloat that the rapture did not occur and the chosen are still languishing here in coach with the rest of us sinners. But screw that. Na, nah, nuh, nah nah!

I mean the day was not with out apocalyptic overtones. My wife's car (which I drive most of the time) had a flat tire. There was a screw in it. And I couldn't get the lug nuts off so we called triple A and a bald tow truck driver with freaky big ear rings changed the tire and put on our spare. But it was one of those stupid doughnut tires that are like the tire from a Shriner's go cart. So I drove to a nearby Les Paul Tire where they told me we of course needed four new tires. So it wasn't Judgement Day, but it cost me almost $400 for new tires.

But I digress.

So I can't wait to hear Camping's explanation as to why this wasn't a day of catastrophe. Perhaps he'll say something like, "Did I say May 21, 2011?...I really meant May 21, 2012. That give's a whole year to rake in more money for our radio network for the next end of the world."

Too bad there is not a law that states you can only predict the end of the world once ( or twice in the case of Camping) and then you are forced to go on national television and tell everyone that you are a major Dick and shouldn't be trusted. Then you should be placed aboard a space shuttle and launched into space without a space suit to truly discover heaven.

Karma's a bitch.

Would the last person walking into the light please turn it off

I didn't think the world was supposed to end until December 21, 2012, but Harold Camping,  the leader of the Oakland, Calif.-based Family Radio Worldwide (an independent Christian ministry)  has calculated that May 21, 2011 is Judgement Day based on his reading of the Bible. Camping is an 89-year retired civil engineer, so he must be right. Though I imagine an 89-year old doesn't have much to lose when they say the world is coming to an end.

Technically, May 21, is the day of the Rapture when the righteous are taken up into heaven while the rest of us remain. The world doesn't really end until October. If this is true, I'm kind of looking forward to five months without the nutjob Rapture freaks pointing their holier than thou fingers at everyone.

Harold Camping doesn't predict that May 21, 2011 is Judgement Day, he guarantees it!

Camping apparently predicted the world was going to end in September of 1994, too. So we at least know he has some experience with these types of things. Camping claims that about 200 million people will be raptured and the remaining 97 percent of the population will simply cease to exist five months later.

The interesting angle to Camping's rantings is that the only way you can get on the rapture list is if god decided  before he created the world that you were going to be saved.  It doesn't matter what kind of good things you do or how much you pray, if you aren't on the list, you ain't getting into the rapture club.

So if everything is predestined by god, then what is the point of any of the hoopla about the end of the world? If it was all preordained then why are Camping and his followers driving around in vans emblazoned with "Judgement Day: May, 21, 2011?"  You can't recruit new members to a club that is already full.

If there were any truth to this crap, the ultimate irony would be that the rapture occurs and Camping and all of his followers were left sitting in their bunkers watching non-believers sucked up into the mother ship. Now that would be righteous!

Unplugged

On my way out of the office last night, I forgot my Blackberry. I managed without it on the commute home because I had my MP3 player and my Kindle. Then on my commute in this morning, the battery on my Kindle died. So I was left with my MP3 player and the view of the Puget Sound out the train window that I wrote my last post about.

I realize I wasn't totally unplugged since I had my music, but it was an odd feeling to be alone with my thoughts for the twenty-some minutes left in my morning commute. As much as I love my Kindle, I had to admit you never have to worry about the battery on a book dying.

So I stared at the water and the different birds feeding a flying about. I think the little ducks are Mergansers. And I saw a hawk and what I believe is a bald eagle. There was even some color in the scenery this morning since part of the cloud cover lifted and you could see blue sky reflected in the normally gray water.

It is hard to imagine a time anymore when we aren't wired to some device. Yet personal computers as we know them only have been around since the early 80s. When I graduated from college and entered the workforce permanently, we still only had typewriters. So we wrote memos instead of e-mail. And blessings of all blessings, our phones were wired to our desks so we couldn't take them with us. There was no voice mail, so phones were answered by receptionists who took a message. We also used flip charts and slide shows instead of PowerPoint presentations.

Even when personal computers began making an appearance, they were clunky things that we shared at work stations. Word functioned more like a typewriter and less like the dashboard of a 747. And Lotus 123 crunched numbers a functional if not fancy way before Excel became the peacock of spreadsheets.

Before we knew it, bulky laptops appeared. And on the music front, cassette tapes began to give way to Cd's. Telephones began to cut their umbilical cords. But they were the size of a walkie talkie and didn't fit in your pocket.

I couldn't even tell you when a PC became standard on every desk. But before I knew it e-mail made an appearance and memos disappeared. Receptionists stopped taking messages and little lights showed up on our phones indicating someone had called. Then screens appeared on the phones and we were able to see who was calling and avoid picking up the receivers altogether.

Finally, someone put in the Information Highway and everyone rushed to jump on this new way of communicating with people half way around the globe without leaving your desk or dialing an annoying number of long distance codes.

Palm Pilots were overgrown by Blackberry's. CD players were eclipsed by iPods which evolved into iPhones. The Androids began to evolve to battle the iPhones and choke the Blackberry's. Lap tops became netbooks and then ditched keyboards altogether to become tablets. People stopped talking on their cell phones and just started talking via Bluetooth earpieces. Then many just stopped talking and began feverishly texting. OMG!

During this evolution film photography went the way of clay tablets. Cameras went digital and then became phones. Computer programs were replaced by software which was replaced by applications and then by Apps. Floppy and hard disks grew thumbs. Then they evaporated into the clouds.

All of this has happened in just about 30 years. It is difficult to fathom what will evolve in the next 30 years. It begins to make Terminator I, II and III seem more plausible. After all, 30 years ago, who would have believed Arnold Schwartzenegger would have become the governor of California.

In all of our advancements electronically, have we lost the ability to just sit and stare out a window? I wouldn't say I have lost the ability to function without being wired in, but it was pretty damned odd not being distracted by anything but the sight of water, boats and birds.

But my Kindle is plugged in and charging. I've been reunited with my Blackberry and I'm connected with my desktop. I only wish I'd have had my phone with me to take a photo of the beautiful views I saw this morning so I could remember them and post them to my Facebook page.

Lost Horizons

I am one of the rare commuters whose daily commute is on a train that glides along the shore of the Puget Sound. Most people are stuck on freeways staring at the tail lights of hundreds of other cars or wedged into a bus seat, reluctantly sharing personal space with a total stranger who to often enough insists on providing TMI via a cell phone conversation.

I generally get a quad of train seats to myself and a window view of the Sound and the Cascade Mountains (if they've decided to slip off their robe of clouds). I also see a plethora of herons and an occasional sea lion. It is a view most people in land locked states would pay for. And I get it as part of my regular morning and evening trip to and from work.

Ironically, most of the people who commute on my train don't even look out the window. I have been tempted on more than one occasion to shake someone sitting on the water side of the train at a window who is sleeping and suggest that if they are just going to doze and not appreciate the view then they shouldn't sit by the window.

As beautiful as the view is, staring at the Puget Sound just isn't as mesmerizing as standing on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and getting lost in the horizon. Because when you stare at the Puget Sound, you are aware that it is a finite body of water framed by a mountain chain. The Pacific Ocean, however, gives you a sense of infinity and your own insignificance.

I was also struck by my view of the Sound this morning how devoid of color it is. Staring out my train window , I felt as though I was watching the nature channel in hi-def on a black and white television. The various shades of gray were beautiful, but I longed for some color.

Regardless, I am grateful for the water. Growing up in Idaho, I was surrounded by a sea of sagebrush. I would sit in darkened classrooms watching shaky films about life in the ocean and long to walk on a beach and explore tide pools. But the closest I ever got was Lucky Peak Reservoir, a huge man made lake just outside of Boise. The extent of life in that man made ocean was a large population of squaw fish and suckers (bottom feeding trash fish).

It was that longing for the water that pushed me northwest from where I was born. I don't miss the sagebrush, but I sure miss the sunshine. Seattle has been particularly rainy and gray this winter and spring. The rain is great for fostering lush growth everywhere, but without the sun, it is hard to tell that it is green and not a lighter shade of gray.

I suppose if I could have my way, I'd live in the Caribbean. But in addition to having to figure out how to make a living, I'd have to worry about the more than occasional hurricane. Every paradise seems to come with fine print.

I've even fantasized with living on a cruise ship. There is nothing like sitting on the balcony of a stateroom staring out into the vastness of the ocean that dwarfs even the largest mega liner. But again the fine print of cruise ship life would eventually eclipse the view. You can only dine on so many buffets and listen to Filipino lounge bands so many times before you understand where the phrase, "Ship of Fools" came from.

The thing about a horizon is that it is always on one. You stare at it knowing that it is always tantalizingly out of reach. But the best dreams always are.

Sit down comic

I think I would have become a stand up comic if I wasn't introverted and basically a very shy person. Though it is just those characteristics that make me want to tell jokes to avoid the awkwardness of communicating with people face to face. If I was to pick which Friends character I could relate to, it would be Chandler. I am definitely not a Joey. Though I imagine every Chandler does wish he was a Joey.

Unless you watch reruns of Friends ad nauseum the way I do, that analogy means nothing to you. And the only reason I watch reruns of Friends ad nauseum is because it is one of the few programs that is on during the hour I work out at the gym.

But I digress.

I actually cringe when I have the gall to imply that I am indeed funny enough to be a stand up comic. Because as painfully self-aware as I am, I need to acknowledge that very few people who think they are funny are. I do know what I think is funny and I have been known to make people laugh on occasion. But I realize that doesn't in fact make me funny.

This always conjures up an anecdote of mine from college when I wrote a humor column for the school paper. When a professor in my philosophy class called out my name, a young woman turned around and asked, "Are you that guy who writes the humor column in the Spectator?" When I acknowledged that that was me, she said, "You don't look funny."

There are so many appropriate responses to that kind of statement, yet at the time, I couldn't think of a single one. She turned around and focused on the day's discussion of existentialism. I returned to staring out the window.

I realize I have told this story in my blog before, but it is not as though there are a steady stream of people reading every word I write on a daily basis. So in that sense, I could be a stand up comic doing a show with a different audience every night. I can keep repeating the same thing every day until someone actually laughs. I don't really have to change the material, just the delivery.

But I imagine I would get bored. 

I enjoy most stand up comics. I envy that they can spout obscenities like a teamster with Tourette's and people roar their heads off.  I also appreciate that many of them are so totally insecure about some aspect of their lives and they have chosen to use humor as their way to cope. I've always thought the reason I make jokes at my own expense is to beat others to the punchline.

Of course, not all humor is self-depreciating. Sometimes you have to make fun of people, systems and institutions just to dope slap them into not taking themselves too seriously. Humor can stick a pin in the pompous and restore the proper perspective on life.

Being comedic is just putting a different perspective on the tragic or in many cases the mundane.  I would much rather laugh myself into the grave than cry. So if I can't be a stand up comic, I can be a sit down one and blog my shtick. Because the way I see it, it's all a laughing matter.

Stating the obvious

I have avoided commenting on recent events in Pakistan because they border on the ludicrous and it isn't popular to express misgivings these days about the methods in which we dispatch enemies of the state. But, I think I would actually prefer if our government carry on covert operations covertly rather than make them something akin to real time reality television starring Gary Busey as a Navy Seal. Because I think it would have been less suspect if Public Enemy #1 just showed up dead and the US released a statement to the effect of, "Hmmm...we wonder how that happened."

Instead we are subjected to scripted rhetoric and half-truths about a "daring" operation that frighteningly seems to have been scripted by the same guys who wrote the Die Hard and Rambo films. The difference here being that no one let the bad guys go over their lines first and they didn't get the direction that they were supposed to put up a  fight.

I won't even bother to rehash all of the weird discrepancies the press has already rehashed to the point of making me want to vomit. But I do have to wonder about the notion that the focus of this seek and destroy mission (and I'm not naming his name because I don't want any Google traffic hits on my blog by right wing flag wavers) although unarmed was shot because he appeared to be moving in a threatening manner. Okay, if you were going to put up a fight and you were in a room with access to tons of weapons and you had a vague idea you were under attack triggered by the sound of helicopters (one of which crashed in your backyard), automatic weapon fire and 40 Navy Seals and CIA assassins tromping up the stairs, wouldn't you make your move for a weapon before the armed invaders crashed through your door?

I am also a bit disturbed that the house was then ransacked for computers, CDs, DVDs (that likely included some Netflix movies the occupants were going to return...possibly Die Hard I,II and III) and other portable electronics. It's a wonder the target's iPod playlist hasn't been published on the Internet.

A co-worker of mine did suggest that one of the good things that came of this highly-publicized execution was that it bumped the Royal wedding off from the front page. I will give them that.

But I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the afterthought being suggested by government officials that the death of this individual could increase the possibility of retaliation by his supporters. You think? Thanks for stating the obvious, because we all know that vengeance and violence is necessary to prevent further vengeance and violence. That is why we fought that one war to end all wars.

Wait, which one was that?

A royal pain

Just a day after my rant on the uselessness of news, the lead story on Yahoo News is "Britain celebrates monarchy as Kate, William wed." It hammered home the last nail in the coffin of journalism's integrity and credibility for me. Here are a few burning tidbits gleaned from the masterful prose of the "reporter":

The sighting of Middleton's wedding gown — the biggest secret of the day — prompted swoons of admiration as she stepped out of a Rolls-Royce with her father at the abbey. Against all odds, the sun broke through steely gray skies at precisely that moment. 

Her ivory-and-white satin dress — with its plunging neckline, long lacy shoulders and sleeves and a train over 2-meters (yards) long — was designed by Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen. Middleton's hair was half-up, half-down, decorated with dramatic veil and a tiara on loan from the queen. Her dramatic diamond earrings were a gift from her parents.

I especially liked a quote from Jennie Bond, reportedly a "leading British monarchy expert and royal wedding consultant for The Associated Press": "It's a dream. It is a beautiful laced soft look, which is extremely elegant. She looked stunning." Being a British monarchy expert and royal wedding consultant for AP seems right up there with being a groundhog trainer at the Staten Island Zoo in niche occupations. At least the groundhog trainer has something to point to at the end of the day.

The only thing that would have made the article more irritating would have been if the reporter had tried to weave in the economy and gas prices. Maybe something like:

Her ivory-and-white satin dress -- with its plunging neckline reminiscent of the current global economy...

or

The royal couple smiled broadly as they were driven to Buckingham Palace in the open-topped State Landau, a carriage built in 1902, escorted by four white horses signalling the frugal couple's efforts to cut back on driving due to soaring fuel prices.

What was even more pitiful about the reporting effort to me were the interviews with the sad people who flew halfway around the world to see the royal couple kiss on big screen monitors set up in Trafalgar Square.One woman from Columbus, Georgia proudly exclaimed, "I came for Prince Charles' wedding to Diana and I came for Princess Diana's funeral. We love royalty England and London."

How very sad.

But the icing on one of the worst pieces of reporting I've ever read was this little gem:

And there is no small irony in the sight of Americans waking up before dawn (on the East Coast) or staying up all night (West Coast) after their fellow countrymen fought so fiercely centuries ago to throw off the yoke of the British monarchy and proclaim a country in which all men are created equal.

Excuse me, I need to go throw up now.

No news is good news

I mean that literally. I hate watching the news. I hate reading it almost as much. Because as impartial and detached as any journalist tries to be, they can't help but spin a story for the maximum psychological tweak of the ignorant masses' need to be afraid of the bogeyman.

I say this despite the fact that I have a degree in Journalism.

The only time I really watch television news is when I am exercising. I'll tune in the local news for five or ten minutes while I am waiting for either a rerun of Friends or the New Adventures of Old Christine to come on. And in that five or ten minutes you can bet I'll hear the phrase "soaring gas prices" or "sagging economy" several times.

Television news is the worst purveyor of fear mongering there is. I know it is over simplification to blame a down economy on how it is reported, but I firmly believe that people hear some reporter spouting doom and gloom about unemployment and housing markets (based on a few lines the reporter has gleaned from a 300-page government report on trends) and they over react, creating self-fulfilling prophesies.

If the news isn't spouting doomsday scenarios, it is spouting inane information about nothing. Yesterday one of the local news channels reported that you could buy a dozen doughnuts at QFC for $7 via a Groupon coupon. Give me a fricking break. How is that news?

I know it is ostrich like to not want to emerse yourself in worst case scenarios. But hell, ignorance really is bliss. What good does it do for the average person to know whether the Dow is up or down on any given day? And I don't need a news report to tell me the average price of gas is almost $4 a gallon. I see it when I go to the gas pump.

It makes you wonder what people did before mass media and the Internet. Would a world without a constant influx of information really be so bad?

Woodchucks don't chuck wood

"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could
if a woodchuck could chuck wood!"

Since my post questioning whether clams are really happy seems to garner the most traffic on my blog, I decided to tackle another burning question: If woodchuck's don't really chuck wood, why are they called woodchucks? I'm not even going to delve into the hypothetical question of how much wood they could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. That's just stupid.

First of all, a woodchuck is really just a groundhog. Groundhogs are most famous for Groundhog Day, a day (February 2)  when the animal is supposed to wake up after hibernating all winter, either see its shadow and run back into its den signalling six more weeks of winter, or not see its shadow and signal the beginning spring. I'm sensing there is not a great deal of science involved in this method of predicting the beginning of spring.

Groundhogs are not really hogs any more than they are chuckers of wood. They are more closely related to a squirrel than a hog, so we are dealing with an animal that is mired in misconception and therefore constantly dealing with identity crisis issues. This could explain why groundhogs are pretty aggressive creatures. Wikipedia states, that according to Doug Schwartz, the groundhog trainer at the Staten Island Zoo, "They’re known for their aggression, so you’re starting from a hard place. [Their] natural impulse is to kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. You have to work to produce the sweet and cuddly."

The most surprising thing I find about that is not that groundhogs are aggressive but that there is such a thing as a groundhog trainer. I imagine it is pretty much a niche market, but who am I to judge.

But back to the question of woodchucks and wood. If we take the name literally, it would mean someone or something that "chucks" or tosses wood randomly. When I was in junior high school and played basketball (extremely poorly BTW), we used to call guys who just chucked the ball at the basket every time they got it, "chuckers." This has nothing whatsoever to do with woodchucks, because I am digressing.

The name woodchuck actually comes from another misunderstanding of the Algonquian (a Native American dialect) word for the animals: wuchak. I'm sure that the Native American's were dutifully puzzled and the wuchak's equally annoyed when early settlers captured the animals and turned them lose on a newly chopped pile of wood thinking they were going to stack it.

History is so disappointing when you lift up the curtain and see who really is running Oz.

The Quantum Physics Network

Although I have a very rudimentary grasp of some of the theories of Quantum Physics, I am still fascinated by the mystical side of this branch of the sciences. It's why every now and then I write about the "many-worlds" theory that poses the possibility that there exist an infinite number of parallel universes in which every possible outcome at any given moment takes place. So reality as we know it in our universe only exists when we actualize it by observing it or participating in it.

I'm sure that this is an oversimplification, but for the purposes of a blog called Dizgraceland, I think it is adequate. Anyway, as I was standing waiting for the train the other morning I was thinking about how many channels of television I have on my FIOS network at home. When you combine the hundreds of networks offering hundreds of shows with the thousands of options available "On Demand" you have a pretty fair microcosm of the  "many-worlds" theory.

Think of it. We have created this electronic model of infinite universes that coexist constantly broadcasting scenarios that aren't really actualized in our world until we click on that channel. We become the godhead of our digital universe, clicking our way through the maze of channels, creating our reality, at least for the time we're in front of the television.

As I reflect on the many-worlds concept, I begin to understand how people can believe in the power of thinking or prayer or simply focusing on a goal. Because if all possibilities exist at any given moment, then you are highly more likely to achieve the one you want if you set your sights on it. Too often, however, we think of what we want and then start making lists of all of the possible obstacles that will prevent us from getting it. So instead of actualizing our ideal outcome, we randomize the realities, stacking the deck with many more negative outcomes than positive ones.

This model lives in my Quantum Physics television network analogy as well. If we randomly click through the channels, chances are 99 percent of what we see will suck. But if we use the channel guide and our DVRs, we can maximize our chances of watching something we like. We are "channeling" our realities into the direction we choose. It is your TV Guide to enlightenment so to speak.

Stop, I am killing me.

But semi-seriously, I like the idea that we can control some of the randomness of existence by choosing our path. And I'm not suggesting that you rigidly define from start to finish how your life should go. I personally have chosen a rather meandering path. But I do think this theory gives us the opportunity to choose positive paths and leave the negative ones to our infinite number of other selfs floundering around in the infinite number of other worlds or universes.