... who to vote for in the primary.
I like Ron Paul. I mostly like how he highlights the schizophrenia inherent in the coalition structure of the Republican party. His Honor, the good Guiliani, also illustrates the prostitution of the evangelical vote to her wealthy capitalist-Republican spouse. I wish them both the best in that endeavor.
On the Democratic side, there are a couple of principled choices, and a couple of strategic options. Kucinich, Richardson and Dodd are good, principled policy choices. Richardson could do the veep thing. None of them are likely contenders.
The real choices are Clinton, Obama and Edwards. I could live with any of them in a general election.
I voted for Edwards in the last primary. His message is solid. I still like him.
I like Hilary well enough, but she has allowed herself to be coopted by big money. She is also forced to appear a little too hawkish on national security issues to counter the "woman as soft" criticism. She has moved a little beyond my comfort zone in these two spaces. I still think she is clear thinker when she is allowed to think.
Obama is a refreshing change and he seems honorable. He has about as much experience as Edwards. He has pizazz. I think he is "for real."
Gore-Edwards? I like the sound of that. Alas, no comfort there. Al has just joined some venture capital firm. I wish he had invested in the election instead.
We have pretty good choices this election cycle.
I
wish
more
of the choices
were
real.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
I have not been cold...
...for the past three winters (2004-05 through 2006-07). There is generally an early cold snap in October in the southwest corner of North Carolina where we keep the camper. I have fortuitously been in the mountains in mid-October during each of the past three years when that cold snap hit. It is not an Arctic blast, but is usually 30 degrees or colder, which is very cold in the open wind on top of a mountain.
The furnace in my camper has suffered an odd inconsistency. A mouse chewed through a wire on on the camper's heater in 2004-05. I waited nearly a year to have it repaired. The camper heater worked and I had a battery in 2005-06. The marine batteries I use were dead for October cold snap in 2006-07. I was essentially without heat for two of the three years.
The sky is clear and the stars are infinite when winter pre-announces his arrival in early autumn. The black-violet mountain sky carpeted with diamonds is beautiful beyond what the jewelers in the city could imagine. I stood on the deck outside the camper to watch the sky sparkle and let the cold whip me for as long as I could stand it, for each of those three years. I was not cold for the rest of the year during those years when I did so. I have traded my heavy coat for a lighter jacket.
I cannot be certain that facing winter in this way is the solitary cause for me not being cold all year long; I have a much thicker layer of fat than when I was younger. I believe this Old Man Winter Therapy is the primary reason.
I wrote this poem by candle light in my camper - trying to warm up by lighting candles and running the gas stove and oven.
meeting winter
How can you know Winter
if you have not stood on
your porch and met him?
Face him briskly by,
his scratches raking your face,
down your back,
rigid wicked shivers wrack your spine.
The night is clear.
The sky is wide open.
The greatness is greater,
the beauty more beautiful,
than the pain of the cold.
Winter tries with his screeching calls
to wrench this pleasure from me.
All rocks slide down the hill,
eventually.
For now, I greet the old man,
coming over the hill with his creaking bones
and his cane,
flailing at the leaves with his
unpredictable breath
this way, or not, in the wind.
He nods at me a prescient nod,
long knotted hair and silvery beard waving,
and continues on his crooked way
driving his icy winds
across this mountain top.
Later I retire
to contemplate
this poem.
I am in California this year, so I missed the Old Man when he went bolting over the North Carolina mountains.
I hope
I
have
somewhere warm
to go
after
I see him
again.
The furnace in my camper has suffered an odd inconsistency. A mouse chewed through a wire on on the camper's heater in 2004-05. I waited nearly a year to have it repaired. The camper heater worked and I had a battery in 2005-06. The marine batteries I use were dead for October cold snap in 2006-07. I was essentially without heat for two of the three years.
The sky is clear and the stars are infinite when winter pre-announces his arrival in early autumn. The black-violet mountain sky carpeted with diamonds is beautiful beyond what the jewelers in the city could imagine. I stood on the deck outside the camper to watch the sky sparkle and let the cold whip me for as long as I could stand it, for each of those three years. I was not cold for the rest of the year during those years when I did so. I have traded my heavy coat for a lighter jacket.
I cannot be certain that facing winter in this way is the solitary cause for me not being cold all year long; I have a much thicker layer of fat than when I was younger. I believe this Old Man Winter Therapy is the primary reason.
I wrote this poem by candle light in my camper - trying to warm up by lighting candles and running the gas stove and oven.
meeting winter
How can you know Winter
if you have not stood on
your porch and met him?
Face him briskly by,
his scratches raking your face,
down your back,
rigid wicked shivers wrack your spine.
The night is clear.
The sky is wide open.
The greatness is greater,
the beauty more beautiful,
than the pain of the cold.
Winter tries with his screeching calls
to wrench this pleasure from me.
All rocks slide down the hill,
eventually.
For now, I greet the old man,
coming over the hill with his creaking bones
and his cane,
flailing at the leaves with his
unpredictable breath
this way, or not, in the wind.
He nods at me a prescient nod,
long knotted hair and silvery beard waving,
and continues on his crooked way
driving his icy winds
across this mountain top.
Later I retire
to contemplate
this poem.
I am in California this year, so I missed the Old Man when he went bolting over the North Carolina mountains.
I hope
I
have
somewhere warm
to go
after
I see him
again.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Bear Hunting is...
...primarily a social activity.
The Bear Hunters in North Carolina use a range of tools and technology that would seem to minimize the bear's chances. The social component is the most interesting. I will leave the social aspects of the hunt for another article. Here I want to review the tools of the bear hunt.
The main components of the bear hunt are:
The dogs
The truck
The dog cage
The electronic tracking collar
The marine band radio
The training season
The baiting process
The rehearsal
The hunt.
The dogs. Bear hunters have dogs. The dogs are kept in circular dirt pits with a box in the middle. The circumference of the circular dirt pit is pi * twice the length of the chain attached to the dog tethered within it. Most hunters have multiple circular dirt pits with a dog in each. The bear dog wealth of any hunter is equivalent to the total number of circular dirt pits on his property.
The truck. Every bear hunter has a pickup truck. Not all of these trucks are Fords: Only 99.7% of them are Fords. All of them have four wheel drive. The quality of these trucks ranges from the 2012 model F350 diesel quadcab with monster tires and an elevator to the cab at the high end, to the 1962 Ranger rust bucket with manual spindles to engage the 4WD at the other. The pickup truck is not so much a source of pride as a source of identity. No one in Star Trek brags on their version of the transporter. It is just something that exists to transport.
The dog cage. Every pickup truck has a dog cage in the bed. Every dog cage has a platform on top, and a holding area below. The platform on top has a ring, hook or other aperture for tethering a dog on a very short lead. The dog balances on the platform connected to a lead during the slow ride down the road searching for bear. The dog on top is, coincidentally, the lead dog.
The electronic tracking collar. Each dog wears an electronic tracking collar. Each dog collar has an attachment that broadcasts a specific signature. Running dogs are tracked from various strategic locations in the mountains. An experienced hunter, using a device that resembles an old fashion television antennae fastened with alligator clips to an even older set of head phones, will know the exact location of dogs miles and miles away based on the strength and direction of the signal received at one of the strategic locations. [Ed: I am honored to own a knob that is a central and strategic point for signal reception.]
Hunters exchange very complex series of numbers with other hunters on the radio to uniquely identify dogs. Nothing is written. The hunter with the antennae listens to the signals transmitted from the dog collars. He mentally translates a series of longs and shorts to match the collar identification numbers previously provided to him over the radio. The ciphering and communication processes are pure magic to observe. The antennae man will alert other hunters as to the owner and location of the dogs. The hunt will converge in the newly discovered location.
The marine band radio. Bear hunters in the southwest corner of North Carolina, and the southeast corner of Tennessee use marine band radios to communicate. They have abandoned Citizen Band (CB) radios because, they say, the mountainous terrain dramatically reduces the CB's effectiveness. Different social groups stick to specific channels, but the scan feature is widely used to monitor the high traffic channels. Ever the voyeur, I can scan and monitor a wide range of territory and broadcasts from my camper on Bird Knob.
The training season. The states of North Carolina and Tennessee allow "hunting" but not killing during the two phases of the training season. The first part of training season must occur (or at least originate) on private property. The second part of training season eliminates this restriction. Training season primarily allows bear hunters to test and train the bear dogs. Some dogs "just won't hunt." Other dogs run away never to be seen again. A few dogs demonstrate themselves to be capable lead dogs.
The baiting process. A primary feature of the training season, but not the regular season, is baiting. Some bear hunters put out various sweet or fat based concoctions to attract bears. Bears, according to some hunters, prefer acorns to all other naturally occurring foods, and "follow the acorns". Even so, no bear's keen sense of smell can resist a pail of sugar water or M&Ms, a platform of stale doughnuts, or a five gallon bucket of lard. You cannot safely feed hummingbirds in bear country. The lard leaves a convenient and easy trail for the dogs to follow.
The rehearsal. The baiting process during training season is a type of rehearsal with two actors. Usually the food is put in a place that does not make it easy to attain. Sometimes one of the electric collars is used to trigger a timer so the bear hunters will know what time the bear is feeding. A bear will check back once he finds a meal, often at the same time each day. Thus is trained the bear. During training season, the hunters encourage the dogs to chase and tree the bear. They must not shoot the bear. Often, once the bear has been treed, the hunters leash the dogs, walk 100 yards away, and wait for the bear to descend from the tree. They then let the dogs free to chase and tree the bear again. Thus is trained the dog. One must wonder if the bear is not thereby also trained to understand the cost of a bucket of lard is simply the annoyance of being chased up a tree by dogs. The bear cannot know that the price increases dramatically after the last day of the training season.
The hunt. The very essence and origin of the hunt features a hunter driving his pickup very slowly down untraveled roads, looking for signs of bear crossings into and out of the woods and ditch lines, with the support of the dogs, who provide their own olfactory barometer of the existence of bear and other wild life. The best hunter sees the bear's trail through the ditch even before his dogs smell it. The radio chatter is constant. The scanner locks on to channels where there is action. Hunters converge on an active scene with speed and intent.
Bear hunting
is
primarily
a
social
activity.
The Bear Hunters in North Carolina use a range of tools and technology that would seem to minimize the bear's chances. The social component is the most interesting. I will leave the social aspects of the hunt for another article. Here I want to review the tools of the bear hunt.
The main components of the bear hunt are:
The dogs. Bear hunters have dogs. The dogs are kept in circular dirt pits with a box in the middle. The circumference of the circular dirt pit is pi * twice the length of the chain attached to the dog tethered within it. Most hunters have multiple circular dirt pits with a dog in each. The bear dog wealth of any hunter is equivalent to the total number of circular dirt pits on his property.
The truck. Every bear hunter has a pickup truck. Not all of these trucks are Fords: Only 99.7% of them are Fords. All of them have four wheel drive. The quality of these trucks ranges from the 2012 model F350 diesel quadcab with monster tires and an elevator to the cab at the high end, to the 1962 Ranger rust bucket with manual spindles to engage the 4WD at the other. The pickup truck is not so much a source of pride as a source of identity. No one in Star Trek brags on their version of the transporter. It is just something that exists to transport.
The dog cage. Every pickup truck has a dog cage in the bed. Every dog cage has a platform on top, and a holding area below. The platform on top has a ring, hook or other aperture for tethering a dog on a very short lead. The dog balances on the platform connected to a lead during the slow ride down the road searching for bear. The dog on top is, coincidentally, the lead dog.
The electronic tracking collar. Each dog wears an electronic tracking collar. Each dog collar has an attachment that broadcasts a specific signature. Running dogs are tracked from various strategic locations in the mountains. An experienced hunter, using a device that resembles an old fashion television antennae fastened with alligator clips to an even older set of head phones, will know the exact location of dogs miles and miles away based on the strength and direction of the signal received at one of the strategic locations. [Ed: I am honored to own a knob that is a central and strategic point for signal reception.]
Hunters exchange very complex series of numbers with other hunters on the radio to uniquely identify dogs. Nothing is written. The hunter with the antennae listens to the signals transmitted from the dog collars. He mentally translates a series of longs and shorts to match the collar identification numbers previously provided to him over the radio. The ciphering and communication processes are pure magic to observe. The antennae man will alert other hunters as to the owner and location of the dogs. The hunt will converge in the newly discovered location.
The marine band radio. Bear hunters in the southwest corner of North Carolina, and the southeast corner of Tennessee use marine band radios to communicate. They have abandoned Citizen Band (CB) radios because, they say, the mountainous terrain dramatically reduces the CB's effectiveness. Different social groups stick to specific channels, but the scan feature is widely used to monitor the high traffic channels. Ever the voyeur, I can scan and monitor a wide range of territory and broadcasts from my camper on Bird Knob.
The training season. The states of North Carolina and Tennessee allow "hunting" but not killing during the two phases of the training season. The first part of training season must occur (or at least originate) on private property. The second part of training season eliminates this restriction. Training season primarily allows bear hunters to test and train the bear dogs. Some dogs "just won't hunt." Other dogs run away never to be seen again. A few dogs demonstrate themselves to be capable lead dogs.
The baiting process. A primary feature of the training season, but not the regular season, is baiting. Some bear hunters put out various sweet or fat based concoctions to attract bears. Bears, according to some hunters, prefer acorns to all other naturally occurring foods, and "follow the acorns". Even so, no bear's keen sense of smell can resist a pail of sugar water or M&Ms, a platform of stale doughnuts, or a five gallon bucket of lard. You cannot safely feed hummingbirds in bear country. The lard leaves a convenient and easy trail for the dogs to follow.
The rehearsal. The baiting process during training season is a type of rehearsal with two actors. Usually the food is put in a place that does not make it easy to attain. Sometimes one of the electric collars is used to trigger a timer so the bear hunters will know what time the bear is feeding. A bear will check back once he finds a meal, often at the same time each day. Thus is trained the bear. During training season, the hunters encourage the dogs to chase and tree the bear. They must not shoot the bear. Often, once the bear has been treed, the hunters leash the dogs, walk 100 yards away, and wait for the bear to descend from the tree. They then let the dogs free to chase and tree the bear again. Thus is trained the dog. One must wonder if the bear is not thereby also trained to understand the cost of a bucket of lard is simply the annoyance of being chased up a tree by dogs. The bear cannot know that the price increases dramatically after the last day of the training season.
The hunt. The very essence and origin of the hunt features a hunter driving his pickup very slowly down untraveled roads, looking for signs of bear crossings into and out of the woods and ditch lines, with the support of the dogs, who provide their own olfactory barometer of the existence of bear and other wild life. The best hunter sees the bear's trail through the ditch even before his dogs smell it. The radio chatter is constant. The scanner locks on to channels where there is action. Hunters converge on an active scene with speed and intent.
Bear hunting
is
primarily
a
social
activity.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Steriods are illegal...
because the little old ladies of the Prohibition Era raised sons who now control TAC, the IOC, the USOC, as well as the NBA, NFL and MLB and other sports regulatory bodies.
No one can dispute how fast Ben Johnson ran. Nor Marion Jones. You cannot take a record back. That is absurd.
People should not take steriods. There is an argument to be made, however, that the label "performance enhancing drugs" is no more sensible than "death tax."
Anabolic steriods are training enhancing drugs. They allow athletes to train harder, and repair faster. Their use does not necessarily imply or result in enhanced peak performance.
Steriods constitute a health risk. We need some perspective.
We have a president who denies global warming. Insurance companies refuse to pay to help dying clients. North Carolina considers smoking a protected civil right[1,2]. Would the beef from Krogers pass a drug test for steriods?
I advise you to not use them.
I also advise us not to criminalize them.
Any substance will be much simpler to track if it is legal. (I would apply the same logic to other classes of currently illegal drugs, but that is a topic for another time.)
We should have steroid classes of events. We have age groups. We stratify winners based on gender. We have races for various special groups. Why not a "master men doper" 10k at the Crystal Palace?
It would be a sin to cheat, and enter into the non-doping class when you dope. We should continue to test. There would be little incentive to cheat like that if not for the little old ladies' sons who now run sports.
I need a champion for this cause.
I
wonder
what
Jack Kevorkian
is doing
these days?
No one can dispute how fast Ben Johnson ran. Nor Marion Jones. You cannot take a record back. That is absurd.
People should not take steriods. There is an argument to be made, however, that the label "performance enhancing drugs" is no more sensible than "death tax."
Anabolic steriods are training enhancing drugs. They allow athletes to train harder, and repair faster. Their use does not necessarily imply or result in enhanced peak performance.
Steriods constitute a health risk. We need some perspective.
We have a president who denies global warming. Insurance companies refuse to pay to help dying clients. North Carolina considers smoking a protected civil right[1,2]. Would the beef from Krogers pass a drug test for steriods?
I advise you to not use them.
I also advise us not to criminalize them.
Any substance will be much simpler to track if it is legal. (I would apply the same logic to other classes of currently illegal drugs, but that is a topic for another time.)
We should have steroid classes of events. We have age groups. We stratify winners based on gender. We have races for various special groups. Why not a "master men doper" 10k at the Crystal Palace?
It would be a sin to cheat, and enter into the non-doping class when you dope. We should continue to test. There would be little incentive to cheat like that if not for the little old ladies' sons who now run sports.
I need a champion for this cause.
I
wonder
what
Jack Kevorkian
is doing
these days?
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Bits of paper...
litter my world. I have written thoughts on scraps since my first year of college. I write ideas in the margins. I copy funny quotes, read and heard, at odd angles, on post-its and scratch pads. I have piles of notebooks dedicated exclusively to such nonsense. Some of my notebooks are over thirty years old. (Those who know me also know that I would never discard, well, almost anything.) [Ed. note: The oldest notebook I have is probably really only 27 years old.]
I found a small cache of scraps from my desk a few weeks ago. They were apparently transferred from my desk into a file folder for the move to California this past summer. They turned up during a frantic search for our ATV titles. (That is a whole other story.)
Most are not dated. Here they are -- exactly as they appear on the scraps.
"Applying an adjective to the word 'flexible' is another way to make apologies for any lapses in flexibility that exist." 18 April 1997
[Ed: I am sure I wrote this during a meeting or conference call.]
"Why do I care if anybody has sent me an email? Why do I care?"
[Ed: I sometimes tire of the expectations associated with email.]
"Most people confuse silence with agreement."
[Ed: Probably also a conference call note to self, though it is written in the margin of some Delphi code, my extension of the TStringList class.]
"(If) you say I've changed, I say how much the worse that I should stay the same."
[Ed: Written on the same scrap of Delphi code.]
Business card from my position as Director of Application Development at the Georgia Technology Authority.
[Ed: I left that position in 2003. My extension was 5282 - Java.]
Business card from a business I never really started: Data Analysis and Management. Circa 1995.
Conversation between two old men:
"Well, I ain't dumb. Hee-ow."
"Hell you ain't! You dummern hell."
"I'm dumb?"
"You're dummern hell."
"Damn. I'm hungry. Hee-ow."
[Ed: There's a kooky smiley face on the back of this one.]
"I'm sorry that my growing pains were so painful to others."
"By putting self as an object, I've created an infinite loop in any save routine."
[Ed: I'm not certain whether this referred to Delphi code or self actualization. Probably both.]
"We're such Gramma and Grampa types - we decided to skip parenthood and give birth to grandchildren instead."
"What would we talk about if other people didn't have any secrets?"
"Having control of your anger does not mean that one does not display it by shouting or even quietly slicing. Having control of your anger means that you understand its distant causes, its immediate causes, and the potential outcomes of those factors. We are just cogs in the great wheels of our anger. We should 'avail' ourselves to the solutions available to us."
[Ed: I might have read this somewhere. Or not.]
"A betrayal doesn't require an accomplice."
"Stupid people often ask other stupid people for advice. The unintelligent are pack animals, although this in no way impugns pack animals."
[Ed: That just feels like a conference call note.]
This one is my favorite. I don't remember writing it down, but I remember the event very clearly. My son was three or four years old when it happened.
"Michael sitting inside the shopping cart gets handed two cloves of garlic [and says]
'Now I can keep vampires away, two vampires at a time!'"
These
tiny bits
of paper
are also
the bits
that have made up
my life.
I found a small cache of scraps from my desk a few weeks ago. They were apparently transferred from my desk into a file folder for the move to California this past summer. They turned up during a frantic search for our ATV titles. (That is a whole other story.)
Most are not dated. Here they are -- exactly as they appear on the scraps.
"Applying an adjective to the word 'flexible' is another way to make apologies for any lapses in flexibility that exist." 18 April 1997
[Ed: I am sure I wrote this during a meeting or conference call.]
"Why do I care if anybody has sent me an email? Why do I care?"
[Ed: I sometimes tire of the expectations associated with email.]
"Most people confuse silence with agreement."
[Ed: Probably also a conference call note to self, though it is written in the margin of some Delphi code, my extension of the TStringList class.]
"(If) you say I've changed, I say how much the worse that I should stay the same."
[Ed: Written on the same scrap of Delphi code.]
Business card from my position as Director of Application Development at the Georgia Technology Authority.
[Ed: I left that position in 2003. My extension was 5282 - Java.]
Business card from a business I never really started: Data Analysis and Management. Circa 1995.
Conversation between two old men:
"Well, I ain't dumb. Hee-ow."
"Hell you ain't! You dummern hell."
"I'm dumb?"
"You're dummern hell."
"Damn. I'm hungry. Hee-ow."
[Ed: There's a kooky smiley face on the back of this one.]
"I'm sorry that my growing pains were so painful to others."
"By putting self as an object, I've created an infinite loop in any save routine."
[Ed: I'm not certain whether this referred to Delphi code or self actualization. Probably both.]
"We're such Gramma and Grampa types - we decided to skip parenthood and give birth to grandchildren instead."
"What would we talk about if other people didn't have any secrets?"
"Having control of your anger does not mean that one does not display it by shouting or even quietly slicing. Having control of your anger means that you understand its distant causes, its immediate causes, and the potential outcomes of those factors. We are just cogs in the great wheels of our anger. We should 'avail' ourselves to the solutions available to us."
[Ed: I might have read this somewhere. Or not.]
"A betrayal doesn't require an accomplice."
"Stupid people often ask other stupid people for advice. The unintelligent are pack animals, although this in no way impugns pack animals."
[Ed: That just feels like a conference call note.]
This one is my favorite. I don't remember writing it down, but I remember the event very clearly. My son was three or four years old when it happened.
"Michael sitting inside the shopping cart gets handed two cloves of garlic [and says]
'Now I can keep vampires away, two vampires at a time!'"
These
tiny bits
of paper
are also
the bits
that have made up
my life.
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