How Come...

...nobody ever told me how totally awesome the remade series of Battlestar Galactica was?!  I mean, I liked the original, being a gangly teenage nerdoid and all: lots of fun memories watching Starbuck blasting the evil Cylons to pieces.  But this new one just blows it away, and methinks the new Starbuck is a definite upgrade, hubba hubba.

Reminds me of another one.  What was the name of it?  Remember?  There was a moonbase, and some kind of explosion blasted the moon out of orbit and hurling through space.  All the walls of the moonbase seemed to be made out of plate glass, and they had spaceships called "Eagles" that always seemed to be crashing or otherwise failing at the most inopportune moments.  It had to've been the crappiest sci fi series ever produced, and I remember loving every second of it.  Even tried to make a lego replica of one of those fitful Eagles.

Oh, yeah, I remember now.  SPACE: 1999.  HAHAHAHAHA!

UPDATE: If you've not seen the new BSG and might be inclined towards renting and watching it, I'd suggest that you rent the miniseries that inspired it, first.  There's a whooole lot of backstory that is explained in the the miniseries....

Here Comes Finn

Finn Attacks!

Next week I'm going to be driving down to Seattle to spend a few days with Laura, who is flying in for some class or seminar or something, I dunno.  That woman takes a lot of classes.  And she's got a lot of letters and titles after her name to show for it.  Whatevs, it's going to be FunTime2000™!

A month after that, she's moving up to my town, bringing with her that little fella up above, who will henceforth have the chance to attack not just her helmet (lower right), but also my helmet (upper center).  With his laser eyes.  Guesses about how fast his butt was wiggling at the moment that shutter closed are welcomed.

I see these things as very positive developments, and I'm looking forward to knocking Finn over on a more regular basis.  You wanna stand up, little cat?  No way.  I'm going to push you over.  What're you going to do?  I weigh more than ten times what you do, and I have to maintain the social pecking order.  You lose, blackfurryman.  Until night time, that is, when you leap upon me every five minutes.  Hence we shall call a truce: I don't knock you over, and you don't wake me up.  (Fat chance of this cease-fire holding very long....)

But I'm probably going to end up leaving the fireplace burning a lot for that little guy, knowing how much he's going to miss his Colorado fireplace (upper right).  A guy can't go from warm soaks in front of the stove every day, to cold floors underfoot, it's just not fair.

Exactly.

A Good Reason to Drink

So, this is just silly, but perhaps it might make you laugh. Well, if you can get past the initial blithering.

Stuck inside on a rainy afternoon, a guy needs some kind of project to keep occupied.   What I'm up to is using cabbage to figure out the pH of my garden soil, because I am trying to produce blue flower blooms (which need relatively acidic soil).  Someday I'll post this wonderfully cheapo (and accurate!) cabbage solution, but right now I'm laughing about hydrogen.  I dunno why I'm so curious about chemistry; perhaps it's simply generalized  geekery.  At any rate, for some reason I know that sodium hydroxide, water, and aluminum, when combined, generate hydrogen.  Sodium hydroxide is common lye, aluminum is the everyday beer can, and water is a relatively common chemical -- bihydrogen monoxide -- that can be found pretty much anywhere.  I've even got some spigots in my house that it comes out of.  Mix'em together, and what do you get?  Fun.  Pure, unmitigated, fun.

Sodium hydroxide is a strong (read: caustic) base.  It's a white solid, which when combined with water results in Na and OH ions in solution with the H20.  When adding aluminum, there is an exchange of oxygen atoms that results in a free H2 which bubbles out as a gas.  Basically, the aluminum dissolves and hydrogen comes out*.

When I was an undergraduate, a buddy and I made a hydrogen generator this way: get a five-gallon plastic bucket, drill a hole in the lid, put a pipe in the hole, and then dump lye, water, and aluminum into it.  We had pre-prepared several balloons made of trashbags taped together, and filled them all with the resulting hydrogen (which comes out fast and furious, mind you).  We had also preprepared a bunch of slow fuses from paper towels and a homemade solution (no reason to describe that, don't want y'all to get arrested†).  We filled a bunch of balloons, tied on fuses, and let them loose from his balcony.  After lighting the fuses, naturally.  It was amusing to watch them float up and away, and then explode over the city.  We probably did about ten of these, and then got the idea of cutting apart and taping together six trashbags to make an enormous überballoon.

The resulting balloon, once filled, was far too large to release off the balcony.  The fireball was going to be epic!  So we floated it downstairs, to his car; stuffed it in, and drove it across town to a ballfield.  I still laugh at how stupid we were, driving across town with the equivalent of the Hindenburg in the car.  But we got to the ballpark and set it loose (fuse aflame) and watched it float off into the nighttime sky.  As we were watching, waiting for the fireball, I happened to glance over my shoulder and saw a police car pulling into the parking lot.  I immediately said "COP!" and we both started walking towards our car, in an extremely guilty/suspicious fashion.  As it turns out, the cop had to make a turn in order to approach us, such that his back was towards the drifting balloon.  As he got close to us, he briefly hit his siren, and then ran his lights.  We stopped, and turned.  As we turned, he was getting out of his cruiser, and we saw the dying remaments of the HUGE hydrogen balloon explosion in the distance -- which he saw reflected in his side mirror.  He spun around, but it was too late: it was gone.

He started asking us standard questions: what are your names, what are you doing out here, etc.  On his radio, we heard the dispatcher report: "All units, report of another fireball over Broadway."  Both of us were trying desperately not to break out snickering.  The cop was about to get our information and possibly even take us in, when a new report came over the radio, "student on the rampage in XXX hall, all available units please respond!"  The cop warned us about illegal fireworks, gave us back our IDs, and sped off in his car.

And so that's how some drunken idiot saved my bacon, 24 years ago.

†Okay, I know that you're just DYING to know how to make a slow fuse.  One word: saltpeter.  Now go google it yourself.  (That wasn't an option in 1985, when we had to figure this stuff out all on our own!)

*Hydrogen is really an amazing atom.  It can leak through solid metal walls, because it's so tiny.  It's the most prevalent substance in the universe.  Certain large-scale rotating machines are filled with hydrogen (instead of ambient air) because a one-atmosphere-pressure of hydrogen is easier to move (turn) than ambient air, which is laden mostly with much heavier nitrogen, and that makes a real energy savings after a year of turning.  It can also escape the gravitational field of the earth: if you create hydrogen as I once did, without blowing it up, it will one day leave the solar system, all on its own.

Not Really a Non Sequitur

The mountains were clamped in a mineral silence that made the pastoral gaiety of my moment seem as fey and foolish as a dream.

I've been looking through old pictures tonight, from expeditions both solo as well as group, towards summits that I achieved or failed, gave up upon or surrendered to, soldiered through or anguished over, all part of a consistent narrative over the last 30+ years of my life: one spent in high and faraway places punctuated by too-long droughts amongst the mundane.  It's been quite the journey.   I keep the traces of everything else, too, not just those old images.  I never throw anything out: all the old letters, pictures, even hastily scrawled notes, they all go into safekeeping.  Why? For moments like this, to remember the complex tapestry that is the past, and to know again what it was that has made me into the man I am now.

Sometimes I think that I should just make a huge bonfire: destroy all those saved things, and perhaps roast a bratwurst or two at the same time.  But what a shame that would be, I always think.  To reject the past, and to willfully forget (for forget we all do, absent these physical tokens of what once was), seems like the worst kind of self-hate, particularly in a time of personal transition -- which I think this might be.

But that's not really what's on my mind right now.

No, what's on my mind is that in about a month and a half, Laura will be moving into my house as an interim step between moving from her city to mine.  With her come two pretty awesome cats, and therein lies the problem.

No, the cats aren't the problem.  They're pretty cool critters, these two, and endlessly amusing.  (Granted, I have threatened in the past to roast Finn, the kitten, in the oven, and subsequently to eat him whole, but that's just my way of saying that he's super freaking cute.  So I don't communicate well.  Sue me.)  Here they are, as a matter of fact; Finn is the little black fella with the white-tipped tail, and the other is Zooey, who has the sweetest cat personality that I've ever encountered, even while she's kicking Finn's ass for swatting at her tail:

No, the problem is that since they're cats, they're going to do catlike things.  And so it should be: I'm smart enough about these things to realize that you don't change someone, be they cat or human; rather, you adapt to them.  Cats like to jump on things, chew things, and generally be catlike.  I think that I've managed to cat-proof most things (move the orchid up to a high window, put the coffee plant in another high window, keep the doors to the office with all its delightfully chewy wires closed, etc.) but there remains one last issue: the couch.  I haz leather couch.  (The couch pictured above is not mine.) And I have yet to find a good way to keep it in relatively good shape, but I'm pretty certain that I'm not the first person to have faced this quandary so I'm betting that there is a solution out there.

So what do I do?  Cover the whole thing in plastic?  Move it to the garage for a while?  Invest in strategically placed scratching posts?  Spray it with deer urine?  Someone who used to read my old ranting must stumble across this and have a good idea, right?

On a completely unrelated note, I've just discovered Teh Awesome™ that represents the Monty Python channel on Youtube, and I believe that I can now die a truly happy man.  Seriously, if you can't laugh at Monty Python, I really have to worry about you.

"Why people who have not committed any punishable offense listen to country/western music is absolutely beyond me. Reminds me of my favorite line in Python: 'Where's the pleasure in that?'"

-- John Cleese

Also

What is with all the bloggers that I used to know making their blogs private?  Weird.  So you've collected enough readers now, and are happy with your online community?  What a shame.  If I ever block outside voices, please someone kill me.

Hasta la Vista, Facebook

Social networking is weird, and I think I've decided to bail on it.  Perhaps I'm turning into a Luddite, or something, I dunno -- but the whole thing rubs me wrong.  It's like everyone is hardwired into everyone else and we've joined a cliquey bubble in which everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and as dutiful narcissists we obligingly update our statuses regularly.  It's changing the dynamics of how people interact with each other in a way that I don't think I like, and turns otherwise normal individuals into gossips and peeping toms.

In a fit of pique, I deleted every update or wall post on my facebook page.  I was pleased with the result, as it was refreshingly blank.  But then there is that awful "news feed," and the right-hand bar with random things from friends' pages: I can't clear all that stuff, and I really don't want to know that a person that I've not seen in ten years spent the morning vomiting.  Seriously, why do people post this stuff?

So vaya con gatos, facebook, as a friend would say: I'm not going to play there anymore.  Don't even get me started about twitter -- my eyes just about want to roll right out of my head even thinking about it.

EDIT hours later:
Okay, so I'm weaning myself.  Can't just cut the cord outright.  In the meantime, it's friday night and I'm inside on the computer writing code for a potential future business venture.  Lame.  But there's no place like 127.0.0.1.  (Or ::1, if that's the way you swing already.)

Gah!

Wow. So. I started this thing up as a new ranting outlet a while back, but apparently lost control of work and life for a while, and so here it has sat, as lonely as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Wait, that wasn't the right simile. Anyway. In my defense, it was high summer when I restarted, and summer in the greater Seattle area pretty much kicks ass† to a degree you would not expect given how much winter can suck donkey balls. And the donkey balls, they get sucked, you mark my words. It's only october, but winter is coming on strong: it was as dark as a duck's butt tonight at 6:30pm when I got home. Yeah, there's the right simile.

My last ranting endeavor on blogger was mostly a place to vent about my trainwreck of a girlfriend at the time, which turned out to be a useful (and therapeutic) thing. Bloggers and online people tend to be insightful and opinionated, or at least empathic. That was all pretty useful. I'm not back here to try to regain that former community (which grew rather larger than I wanted) -- although Enigma seems to have found me already (hi Enigma!) -- but rather to return to the regular self-examination that I seem to have lost lately, and hopefully recover some of the outside insight. Heh. I like that. "Outside insight." I'm fuckin' genius! Also, too.

I don't have the bipolar girlfriend anymore. Nor do I live in that same city. I haven't climbed a serious peak since a (failed) attempt on a moderate route on Rainier two years ago, and I haven't been invited on an expedition since then, either, so there are no new pictures of insane mountains. I do have this:



There is much to be said for calm water, endless seas, and new beginnings.

†One does not waste amazing weather sitting inside on a computer. No, one does not.