Category: What the…?

Driving home last night, I’m making the turn onto the Glenn Jackson (I205) Bridge going south from Washington SR14 when I’m joined on the ramp by this thing merging onto the bridge coming the other way (from Vancouver). Hard to tell exactly how big it was (I know from the car behind it it was “OVERSIZE”) but it looked about 75 feet long. It may be hard to tell from the photo I snapped on my cell phone while I drove past it (shouldn’t that be illegal?) but it’s a blade from a wind turbine, apparently headed out to the wilds of Eastern Oregon.

In two hours, I’m going to be sitting down for my third shot at getting on JEOPARDY! The first time was almost exactly ten years ago, and I didn’t make it past the first screening, but they were still holding the tests in the studio where the show’s taped. A couple of years back — during the Ken Jennings reign — I tried again and made it to the second round, but was never called to be on the show. The tests that time were held in a hotel in LA. This time, they had an online first round, and the second rounds (where you actually play a mock game) are being held around the country; in my case, Portland, in a hotel right across the street from where I used to have an office.

For my family, 2001 is memorable for an entirely different reason than it is for most other Americans, and 6/11 is an earlier date we’ll keep in our memory. Because that’s the day a guy against whom police had refused to enforce a restraining order broke into the house of my 83-year-old grandmother’s caretaker, dragged her from her bed, and killed her with a shotgun. Her name was Margaret Baker.

Barbara and I were down in San Francisco the other weekend to visit Eric and Annie for Eric’s 40th birthday. On our last day, we wandered around Grant Avenue in Chinatown picking up gee-gaws. I just got around to going through the receipts; apparently one of the shops we visited was called Sophia’s Choice.

On 12 December 2002, two months to the day after a fall from a stepladder broke my leg and ankle, and about a week after my 41st birthday, I was making my way down the stairs at my office to where my wife was waiting for me with the car. At the bottom of the stairs (thankfully) I passed out. Barbara managed to get me to the emergency room, where several doctors and nurses spent 45 minutes trying to find veins for IVs (never easy on me under the best of circumstances), where I got a CAT scan, a sonocardiogram, and spent the night in the ICU after they’d confirmed that I had suffered a pulmonary embolism. More specifically, multiple embolisms, because I had a number of blood clots in both lungs. A week in the pulmonary ward, a year of blood thinner treatment, and I’d be good as new.

This photo’s from the Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery in Southeast Portland, where Barbara and I bought a cremation plot last month. That brown patch under my feet is our spot (the marker is not ours), which is just few steps from the plot of Oregon Gov. W.W. Thayer (1878-82).

Peter Sylwester passes on a fun (if bloody) piece of 3D animation from France: SuperMonks!

My web provider’s server statistics page lists search queries from referrer data in both full and individual word versions, and I check them out every now and again to see how people are getting to my site. Back in the early days of my moshplant.com site, it was kind of scary to look at, because I’d written an article about my search to find out what happened to the royalties for Mein Kampf, and adolf hitler usually topped the list. Close behind was a page containing a Quicktime movie from the 1996 Macromedia User Conference showing a number of the top Director developers sitting in close proximity which I’d titled “Hand Grenade,” on the basis of a remark that a single hand grenade could have taken most of the well-known names in the field out. Often, it seemed as if the people looking for the first term were close behind with a search for grenade.

So I was looking through just todays’s top search terms, and I see things like flash 8 video alpha flame movie, actionscript code geometric shapes drawing, and actionscript code geometric shapes drawing, all of which I can understand, because the first is something I wrote about for MAX and I have mentioned ActionScript and game development in a number of posts. director rss lingo, otoy, hunter s thompson and pictures? All easily understandable. The top search was for nate sassaman, and since I’ve mentioned the Lt. Col. from Aloha a couple of times, that’s completely comprehensible.

But when I saw the second most common search term on the list was the british army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren I really had to step back and think for a moment. That didn’t work, so I tried Google, and ended up in a post I’d written back in June of last year, not too many weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, which quoted George Washington on the treatment of prisoners (quoted in The New York Review of Books from Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer).

“…treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”

Prior to heading down to Anaheim for MAX, I spent a few days in Los Angeles with Barbara visiting friends and sightseeing. This time, we dropped in on a couple of cemeteries. Forest Lawn was extremely lawn-like, although I did stumble across Stan Laurel’s marker. Much more to our collective taste was Hollywood Forever, which had actual gravestones. And that was even before we came across Johnny Ramone’s marker. Oddly enough, we were only about a week late for what would have been his 57th birthday.

One of the things I like about driving around a city on vacation is the opportunity to see new business names. One particularly catchy sign jumped out at me this evening, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from Costa Mesa to Westwood, for a Vietnamese soup shop: What the Pho?

Setup: A well-armed hunter sitting in a recliner points his rifle at a moose on the TV in front of him, two women stand behind him in the doorway, one talking to the other.

My caption: “With the price of gas what it is, it’s cheaper than driving out to the woods.”

Now you can go and check out what the editors at The New Yorker chose for
finalists in their caption contest.