Two more pix

Another black-eyed susan. I know I already posted one yesterday, but they grow in wild abundance around my house and give me lots of opportunities to practice macro photography. This one was not edited at all, unlike the one I posted yesterday, which I cropped and adjusted the colors a little to make it brighter and deeper. This one is SOOC (straight out of the camera), with some tiny feeding insect on it.



Here is another of my cameras, a Pentax Spotmatic F, mid-70s era (Pentax stopped making the Spotmatic in 1976, and I think the F model was the last of the variations, or nearly the last).  Of course this one is fully manual with no zoom capability.  I also have an early-90s era Minolta but the Pentax has more character.  When I get roped into taking pictures of some family event, I usually load the Minolta with 100 or 200 ISO film and use it for outdoors, and load the Pentax with 400 ISO for use indoors without a flash.

My wife and I purchased the Minolta when we were first married so we would have a good camera for preserving memories.  The acquisition of the Pentax is more storied.  Back in the early 90s one of my cousin-in-laws was busted for possession of an illegal substance that starts with "m" and of course all his property was confiscated by the state as part of their war on drugs racket.  Everything, that is, except his boat, which was docked at Canyon Lake and was therefore overlooked since he didn't offer any information about it.  This camera was in the boat.  He gave my dad the boat and all its contents in return for bailing him out of jail.  My dad wasn't really interested in learning how to properly use the camera so he turned it over to me (my dad kept the boat).  I was able to gather from reading a book on photography that this camera had a light meter and required a battery for the meter to operate, so I took it to a camera shop that used to be on Gulfdale to find out what battery I needed.  The original battery that this camera used is no longer made because it was made with mercury, and had a kind of odd rating of 1.3 volts, but the guy there had already worked on this model and made a small conversion that allowed it to use a modern 1.5-volt battery of the same physical size, which didn't cost me very much at all.  I was able to download a pdf of the original manual recently, which was nice.

I'll have to ask my wife where all our photos are stashed.  I might be able to find a few that are fit to be scanned and shared.

New camera and some sample pix

I have been almost desperate for a decent digital camera for some time now, and have been doing a lot of research and deciding how much I could afford to spend. Today I got a Canon Powershot SX150 at Best Buy. The price had been marked down to $149. This is only a wild guess, but I think the price reduction on this one must be because it's about to be replaced by a newer model. Original price for it was $249.

I still have a lot to learn about using it--by the way it's definitely not a DSLR, but it's somewhat more sophisticated than a basic point & shoot. Anyway, you can expect there to be a lot of gratuitous amateur photography here in the future.




 I think this guy is a Texas Spotted Whiptail lizard.  I just got lucky and spooked him into some leaves as I was walking down the driveway.  I took several pix of him, and in this one I caught him with his eyes closed.  Blinking?  The way this camera works in auto mode is it uses optical zoom until the optical zoom is at its maximum, and if you keep zooming from there it switches to digital zoom.  I try to stay away from digital zoom but this one still looks pretty good even with some digital zoom involved.




 Indian Blanket.  This one and the one below I cropped for a better aspect.




Black-Eyed Susan.





This is my favorite for today.  By the way, anyone want a puppy?  We have three, all male, two black and one brown.

I'm really happy how sharp these turned out.

Poured what over the topic?

link

Okay, but

What if you have a door that you can lock without a key?  Then you'll just lock yourself out of your house.  Also, why on earth do you keep your shoes in the refrigerator?*



*Let's avoid the obvious quip:  "so he'll have some place to store his keys."  Thanks.

Yikes

Click.  Design your own settings if you want.  This map is based on a ground zero of the Tower of Americas, with a bomb the power of the first U.S. h-bomb.  Try the presets and see just how piddling the Nagasaki bomb was compared to what's possible now.

A good improvised terrorist bomb would utterly destroy downtown.  And that's no exaggeration.

A great xkcd comic

Even if you don't usually read the web comic xkcd, I recommend checking out this one, because it's quite imaginative, uses very clever rhymes, and is also funny.

I'm not really familiar with the"modern major general" song, although I have heard it, so I just used that "Super***" song.  Sing it out loud to yourself and it will be even better.

Bad analogies

My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning has some of the worst analogies written by high school students.

Except...I really like #6.  I think I might steal it someday.

Christopher Bowes official video: David Tennant's Hands

Christopher Bowes is the lead singer of Alestorm, the pirate metal band which I've mentioned before.  This is completely different.  Bowes goes into crooner mode while playing along with an electronic organ.  The full album is available for a free legal download; link at YouTube.  I got quite a good laugh out of this.

A rare post about art

As great a work of art as da Vinci's The Last Supper is, it has always seemed somehow awkward to me.  Just now I have realized why.  I suppose Leonardo wanted to get everyone's faces in the picture, and that's why it is the way it is, but doesn't look a little too much staged?

It's like when on a TV show, there's always one side of the table that is vacant:  the side toward the camera.  It's easier to film that way, and let's face it, no actor on a TV show wants to sit with the back of his head toward the camera.  That's what Da Vinci's painting looks like to me.

I just realized this because I have just seen The Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist by Nicolas Poussin.  Doesn't it look so much better?  A close, secluded, poorly-lighted room rather than that bright, airy space of da Vinci's.  And let's face it, if you were one of the apostles, wouldn't you move your seat somewhere nearer Jesus if you saw that one whole side of the table was empty?

Signs

Clearing out some work pix.

I'm familiar with the phrase "cleft of the rock," but I'm not sure what a "clift" is.

Intrust?

And some big flower that I thought I'd grab with my phone.

I've been looking (online) at some digital cameras, and pretty much decided what I want.  I had intended to get one on Monday, but unfortunately the repair to my car is taking longer than expected and I'm going to be grounded pretty much all week.  The good news is the warranty is paying for the fix.  I don't intend to take a camera with me when I'm working, but I am planning on combining my new hobby of geocaching with some photography (my intended other new hobby).

I also dug out the old Pentax Spotmatic that I acquired some time ago and got a new battery for the light meter.  I had also intended to have a roll of test film developed by now to see how it does, because I haven't used it in a long time, but I kind of ran out of things to photograph around the house.

I like the old Pentax because it's completely manually operated.  The digital camera I'm looking at has plenty of automatic functions but can be switched to manual, and also has a macro mode.  I'm hoping the car will be ready by Friday, so maybe I can do something Friday afternoon or Saturday.

Today's internet idiot: Jacinda Frost

Maybe the spammers are now able to strip plain text emails from web pages now, I don't know.  And I'm sure they don't care how stupid they look sometimes.  But this one definitely gave me a chuckle.

The article in question, if you recall, was about heavy metal music.

Griff the Invisible (movie, 2010)

Australian, 2010, 90 minutes, PG-13 (for violence, I guess). I watched this movie today (Netflix streaming). A strange little tale of Griff, a socially crippled young man with super strength who, with his new and unexpected girlfriend Melody, tries to develop a suit of invisibility to further aid him in his crime-fighting endeavors.  Melody, meanwhile, is convinced that with the right frame of mind, she should be able to pass through solid walls.  Griff is also tormented by a bullying co-worker and aided in trying to live a normal life by his older brother.

Eventually, Griff is able to become invisible and Melody learns to pass through solid walls.

Or do they?

I gave it 4 stars.

Today's movie watching

Netflix has recently gotten a whole bunch of streamable documentaries--or rockumentaries--in a series called Classic Albums.  Today I watched the one about The Doors eponymous first album.

I agree with one of the commenters at Amazon:  there is some "filler" with contemporary musicians commenting on how influential, ground-breaking, etc., etc., ad nauseum this album was, and I don't care what they think, either.  Those minutes could have been better spent with additional background information or commentary by the people who were actually there when it happened.

That said, there is still a lot of great background information from those people who were there:  the three surviving members, producers, and others of the time.  Some of it I already knew, having read books and seen other documentaries about them, but some of it was new to me, such as how they actually developed the songs on the first album, from scratch, as it were.

Then I started watching another one about Fleetwood Mac's Rumors but got interrupted.  Once I finish it I plan on watching the one on Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast, then Rush's 2112.

I also tried watching Anvil:  The Story of Anvil, but it was kind of boring.  At times they almost ventured into Spinal Tap-like comedy, but knowing that this was a real band just made it sad and embarrassing.

I almost want to buy this

Glorious Majesty - Music for English Kings and Queens (Diamond Jubilee Edition)

Everyone should have some music for English kings and queens in their collection, shouldn't they?

Anyone remember these?

Well, if you've read this blog for a while, you know that I sometimes remember old songs from my childhood and look them up on YouTube just for fun. I don't know why I thought about this, but it got a lot of play on KKYX back in the CB craze days.


And the sequel.

Weekend update: geocaching

My son had his first campout as a Boy Scout this weekend (he enjoyed himself--mostly because this time he didn't get rained on) and my wife and daughter went shopping Saturday, so I was left to myself.  I threw some essential odds & ends in my backpack, filled up a water bottle and went to nearby Jackson Nature Park.

This isn't a very well-known park, and it's mainly just for hiking and seeing lots of wildflowers during spring time.  I had never been there before, even though it's only about a 20-minute drive from my house.  I went there this time because there are six geocaches there and I wanted to get some time in learning the hobby without anyone bothering me.  I was there for nearly 3 hours and I had the park to myself the whole time.

And I had fun, going at my own pace and doing what I wanted without having to take breaks for kids who have to go to the restroom every 15 minutes.  I found 4 of the 6 there.  One of the two I couldn't find just had me completely stumped; I couldn't find any landmarks that looked like there would be a cache hidden there.  The other was supposedly in a hole under a large rock formation.  I've lived my whole life in this area without being bitten/envenomated by anything significant, mostly because when I was very young I decided I wouldn't stick my hand into dark holes under large rocks.  So I poked around with a long stick for a few minutes and didn't find anything, and let it go at that.

One of the ones I did find was in a hollow tree, the hollow of which went all the way to the ground.  I examined it carefully with my flashlight before reaching in for that one, because I've found copperheads in such places more than once.  By the way, I've known of several people around here that have been bitten by a copperhead, and every one of them was bitten on the hand.  That should tell you something.

I'm taking some vacation next week, and with Fiesta Friday coming up I'll have good, long vacation.  I'm going to do more geocaching during that time.  I've been checking all the parks in the area and those are the places I'm going to try, where I can poke around without being bothered too much.  It looks like Espada park should be a good place, and it's fairly cache-dense.  I've been to the mission itself before, but I've never explored the park so that should be fun.  I'm also going to start taking a camera with me so I can maybe get some decent pictures.

In fact, the entire mission trail has lots of caches on it, although some of them might be gone/buried now because of all the construction going on along the river.  I decided to start with Espada because it's the most remote and isolated.

Jackson Nature Park has a port-a-potty and a water fountain at the entrance; those are the only facilities.  Also a couple of picnic tables in the same area and occasionally along the trail there will be a bench in a shady spot where you can take a break.  So if you ever want a nice place to take a hike without many other people around, I recommend it.  I'll be going back there to try and find those two other ones sometime, but I'll probably take the kids with me next time.  I also want to see it during fall and winter.

FYI, pretty much every "park" in S.A. has some caches in it.  I say "park" because some of these are very small.

I've also been scouting a few places where I can hide a cache of my own.  I just want to get more experience in the hobby and see what other caches look like before I hide any myself.

For some reason this word struck me as funny

From San Antonio Remembers:

1908
The mayor and police officials today agreed no hoodlumism would be permitted during the carnival this year. They outlawed the small whips, loud horns and confetti of former years.

Hoodlumism?  Not to be confused with hooliganitry.

New Alestorm official video: Death Throes of the Terrorsquid

I had mentioned this one previously but at the time there was no actual video for it.  Now there is--just released this week is "Death Throes of the Terrorsquid."

I don't think the word "video" does this one justice.  Let's call it a short film, instead.



I think the "black" section perfectly fits the story as it progresses.  I'm still trying to figure out the keyboard with the broken D key, though.

Derek Riggs interview

Derek Riggs is the artist who created many Iron Maiden album covers.  Read the interview here.

Japan clearly ignored my plea about that weirdness thing

Read this.  Click the link on the page to view some of the items.

Impressive diagram

Disguised as a comic at xkcd.  Follow the link, then click the graphic to enlarge so you can read all the fine print.

Freakishly horrifying

This.  It doesn't matter which video you watch for an example.  I watched only two, but I'm pretty sure they're all the same.

If you've ever wanted a perfect example of the "uncanny valley," this is it, and it doesn't even involve robots.  I wish it did.  Then maybe it would be less scary.

P.S. Okay, Japan?  We give up.  You are the weirdness capital of the entire world.  Now can you please back off already?

The density of metal

click to enlarge

In case you didn't click on the most recent update at Eat the Music, here's one that's worth reposting.  Someone took all the "country of origin" information listed at Encyclopedia Metallum and created this color-coded world map of the number of metal bands per 100,000 population.

I'm not surprised at seeing Scandinavia as the most dense.  If they changed this to only doom/death/gothic metal, I'm guessing they would have to come up with a new color for that region.

And Canada is more metal than the U.S.  Go figure.  As far as that goes, most of what people think is "metal" in the U.S. is only rock metal, not metal metal.

Comments on Bleach

Well, I've been watching Bleach in the future (of what's being aired on Adult Swim) on the free version of Crunchyroll with my Roku.  I have only three episodes left until the end of the series.  366 episodes in total.

No one who reads this blog watches this show, I guess.  Too bad.  It has been one of the most enjoyable series I have ever watched, and it has kept me interested even through the occasional somewhat more boring parts (for example the Bount arc).  There has been a lot of "filler" and plenty of digressions (for example the one-off episode when the Soul Reapers spent the day at the beach--including heavy emphasis on several female Soul Reapers choosing, and subsequently wearing, their beach attire), but the overall story is about a renegade Soul Reaper captain named Aizen who wanted to destroy the Soul Society.  This main story ends before the full series end--the final story arc is sort of a coda.  The picture above is the form Ichigo is forced to take to fight Aizen.  It's called "the final getsuga tenshou."

I don't want to give away any spoilers, but between the end of this story arc and the beginning of the final arc there is a gap of 17 months during which Ichigo lives as a normal human with no Soul Reaper powers.  And then stuff starts happening again.

It's building up to a great ending, although my greatest fear is that there will be questions left unanswered, for example, why did Ichigo's dad quit being a Soul Reaper and go to the world of the living to live as a more or less normal human?  Well, there's three episodes left and maybe that question will be answered.  And I suppose Ichigo and Orihime will never get it together.  Another question I have is why did Uryu's father not take any action when Uryu continued to help the Soul Reapers?

So they're still a few seasons away from the end on Adult Swim, and they're involved in one of the digressionary story arcs right now, so you can start watching it and still see all the great climaxes to come.  In fact, I haven't seen what they're airing right now, because I would have to get the Crunchyroll pay service to watch that far back.  Netflix has the first 109 episodes, in English, so if you have Netflix you could watch it there.

Well, that was...unexpected

Got home today to find a message on the answering machine.  It was my wife, who said, "I left the Avon order on your computer--it has to go in today.  Also, could you download me some Freddy Fender songs and burn them to a CD?"

Yes.  Yes I could.  I suddenly realized that I need some Freddy Fender on my playlist, too.

My daughter has been saving all of her Christmas and birthday money for a long time now, and actually got a job during spring break with a cousin of my wife's, which got her more money.  She was able to order for herself a used iPod Touch, and she is becoming increasingly anxious for its arrival.  She's going to be gone Friday and Saturday for a church function, so I told her, "If it comes on Friday when you're gone, don't worry, I'll be sure and play with it for you Friday night."

I walked 6.96 miles today.  Overall average speed only 1.8 mph.  Lots of dirty meters.

Your life or your lupins, m'lord

More bluebonnets that aren't bluebonnets today.  I had a mandatory OT day today, and found these up in the Great Northwest.  First picture:  purple.  They didn't come out all that well because I was just using my phone camera, but they are light purple.

This next picture are some regular bluebonnets, from the same yard, for comparison.

And then another shot of the purple ones.

There were also some red ones mixed in.

And these were directly across the street from all the previous.  This didn't come out well, either, but I would describe this color as "dry corncob."

So anyway, my wife got called in to work early today and I had to pick the kids up from her workplace.  On the way home we attempted to find four different geocaches, and failed at all four.  However, upon getting home and checking the logs at geocaching.com, two of them have been stolen/tampered with for sure and I have suspicions about the other one.  The last one I think I can find if I have another go.  I had misunderstood the hint about it and now I think I know exactly where it is (more or less).  By the way, geocachers have a lot of special slang terms, and they have a verb for when a cache has been stolen by a non-geocacher (which is the noun form of the same word).  You can look it up if you want, but I'm never going to use it because it sounds so stupid.  I think for our next foray I'll hit a nearby park so we can take our time and snoop around without a bunch of (term that I'm never going to use because it sounds so stupid) watching us.

At the least I did get in some good practice on using my new GPS receiver.  If you want to see what kind of I got, click here.  It's not the fanciest model, but it's fun playing with.  I ordered it from geocaching.com, so it came pre-loaded with 100 caches nearest to my shipping location (my home address).  It has enough memory to hold a lot more than that--I think according to the manual it can hold 400 caches if you don't have anything else taking up memory (like waypoints, tracks, routes, etc.).  I also got a set of travel bugs, which is something geocachers use.  Whenever I get around to hiding my first cache, I'll use them.

This unit also has a trip odometer, which is something I was particularly interested in using.  I tried it out this morning on my meter routes.  By playing around with it for the last couple days, I figured out that I can suspend the trip odometer by simply turning the unit off.  I needed to be able to do this because I often have a full route in one place and then a partial route in another place.  I have also been really curious about how fast I walk.  By watching it as I was actually walking, I found that my standard pace is 3.5 mph.  A "brisk" walk for me reaches close to 4.5 mph.  I also did some sample jogging between meters a couple of times and found that my short-distance jogging speed is 7.5 mph.  So on today's routes I found that I walked a total of 6.76 miles.  I spent 2 hrs, 40 min moving and 44 min stopped (standing still).  It would have been quite a bit lower than that on the stopped time but my partial today was pretty dirty and I had to spend a lot of time cleaning off meters--my stopped time on the full route was only 22 min and I had to spend the same amount of time stopped on less than half as many meters on the partial.  The thing I was most curious about was my overall speed, which holds into account all the stopped time as well, and my overall speed was a mere 2.0 mph, even though I was moving at a pretty steady 3.5 mph between meters.

I'm going to keep doing this on all my routes so I can see how they measure up.  You see, I consider what I did today to be pretty much my easiest foot route.  I won't be surprised if some of the harder ones are close to 10 miles total distance.

Covers: Seven Bridges Road

So there you have the earliest version of "Seven Bridges Road." It was written by Steve Young, and recorded by him for the first time for his 1969 album Rock Salt and Nails. As far as I know, Steve Young hasn't had any major hits of his own performance, but he has written some famous songs--other than this one. For example, "Montgomery in the Rain," which was recorded by Hank Williams Jr., and "Lonesome Orn'ry and Mean," recorded by Waylon Jennings.

Some technical stuff about Seven Bridges Road. This original version is in the key of B major. It's in 3/4, or at least some kind of triple time. The tempo is about 87 bpm, and it runs about 3 minutes and 40 seconds. The key the song is pitched in isn't really that important, though, because the artist usually pitches a song to his or her vocal range. So what I mean is, the key isn't usually a part of that artist's interpretation, it's more a matter of practicality. But as we get on down the road we'll find one artist who made a major change to this song and turned it into what we usually hear today if we're listening to classic rock radio. But we'll get to that later.

"Seven Bridges Road" was released three more times during the following four years. In 1970 it was released by the Manfred Mann of folk music, the woman who can't stand to let a good song go unruined, that's right, ladies and gentlemen: Joan Baez. From her 1970 album One Day at a Time.



For the most part, the lyrics of these various versions weren't changed in any significant way, except for this one. So, whereas Steve Young says, "There are stars in the southern sky, southward as you go. There is moonlight and moss in the trees down the seven bridges road," Baez says, "There are stars in the southern sky, if southward as you go. There is moonlight and moss in the trees. On the seven bridges road I go."

This is nit-picking, I guess, but since it's my blog I get to nit-pick. Baez' version loses some strength and coherence. Her first statement makes sense, but then she says, "There is moonlight and moss in the trees. Period. On the seven bridges road I go." Okay, Joan? Where are we now? Is the moonlight and moss here? Or is it on the seven bridges road? Do we follow you on the seven bridges road to get away from the moonlight and moss? What's going on here? Anyway, she ends every one of these stanzas with "On the seven bridges road I GO" which just annoys me. Another small change she made was to the verse, "like some lonesome child." Ms. Baez sings it, "like a motherless child," which I suppose resonated more with her folk audience who were already familiar with the song "Motherless Child," famously performed by Richie Havens at Woodstock.

The male accompaniment vocals are by Jeffrey Shurtleff, who performed with her often back then (also taking the stage with her at Woodstock). He recorded a few albums of his own but never got really famous, and at present doesn't even merit a page at Wikipedia.

Technical stuff: key of A, 3/4 time, temp about 99 bpm, a little faster than Steve Young's original. "Countrified" by adding a steel guitar, most prominent there at the beginning and again at the end, which I must admit I kind of like.

So for a little more technical stuff before we go on to the next recording. You may have heard the old saying "three chords and an old guitar." Well, this song is written in only three chords, although they aren't the same three the old saying refers to. The basic chord progression is from a I chord to a flat major VII chord, to a IV chord, and back to I (which gives the whole song a kind of "falling" or at least "going down the stairs" feeling--a mood of sweet resignation). Unlike many old country and folk songs, there is no V chord anywhere to be found in this song. The middle bridge ("Sometimes there's a part of me") part simply goes back and forth between I and IV, if my ears don't fail me. But, the different artists didn't always do it exactly the same. It got a little more interesting in 1971.



That's Rita Coolidge from her 1971 debut album Rita Coolidge. She slows it down even slower than the original at about 77 bpm, but still keeps it in 3/4 time. Her version is the longest I know of: a combination of the slower tempo, the orchestral instrumental breaks, and a long fade out during which she repeats the title line several times, finally finishing up with a tenor sax solo on the fade-out, which I also like. I think this version moved the song more out of the country/folk category and toward more of a pop sound.



Steve Young re-released the song in an almost identical version to the original in 1972 on his album Seven Bridges Road. Same key, same tempo, same time. The biggest difference I can hear is that the string accompaniment was lowered an octave and is a little more prominent throughout the song than on the original.



This one probably sounds more familiar to most folks. It's from the 1973 album Valley Hi by Ian Matthews. Here we have the pattern that most of us are familiar with: an a capella beginning and, perhaps more significantly, the time has been changed to 4/4. Matthews sings it in the key of D with a zippier tempo of about 97 bpm. This is my own personal favorite version. I like the atmospheric spaciness of the guitar (played by Michael Nesmith, by the way) and the way Matthews' voice often "falls off" at the end of a phrase.

And then no one recorded this song for a while...



Until the Eagles performed it live and recorded the performance for their 1980 album, Eagles Live. Although in their introduction to the song they claimed to have learned it from Steve Young, their rendition is a near carbon-copy of Ian Matthews' version. Same key of D, same time of 4/4 (like Matthews and unlike Young). The a capella parts at the beginning an end are close to Matthews' tempo of 97 bpm (Eagles tempos of about 94 and 96 respectively), but with a slightly faster internal section of around 115 bpm, perhaps more fitting for their rock-oriented audience.

Several others have performed it since then. I don't know if any of them have actually committed their performance to a recorded album and I mostly don't care to find out. You can look them up on YouTube. Alan Jackson, Keith Urban with Sugarland, Keith Urban with Lady Antebellum, Keith Urban with Julio Iglesias,* G-d knows who else. All of them who I've heard are essentially just copies of the Eagles version, which itself is a copy of the Matthews version.

There's only one more version that I know was recorded and released as part of an album, and here it is.



From Dolly Parton's 2001 bluegrass album Little Sparrow. Pitched in A♭ for Dolly's vocal range, once again in 4/4 time. A quite slow tempo of 87 or so bpm for the beginning--reflecting Steve Young's original--which rockets up to a flying 150 bpm for the rest of the song. Anyone who reads this blog for very long will soon know of my penchant for bluegrass and I have nothing to complain about regarding this version of the song.

So...that's what I've learned about this song because a long time ago I heard Ian Matthews' version on the radio and liked it more than the Eagles version, and went hunting for information about who sang it and what they did.



*For the humor-impaired (and I know you're out there): that was a joke.

A good day and the flashlight I smashed

My son got his Arrow of Light and crossed over tonight, making him officially a Boy Scout.  One bonus is that now our meetings will be on Tuesday night, to coincide with Girl Scouts, which means I don't have to go back into town at night twice during the week anymore.  Woo hoo!

Also my GPS receiver came today.  I was hoping to fire it up and play with it a little, but I don't have any spare batteries for it.  I have a couple of batteries in my work truck from when I smashed my flashlight the other day, so I can mess around with it tomorrow.

Now, about that flashlight.  It was one of these.  I saw it at Wal-Mart and thought I'd give it a try because it has a pocket clip.  As you may understand, I often need a flashlight in my job.  I already have one small light (a Coleman) but it doesn't have a clip and I have to stick it in my pants pocket.  P.S. Those flimsy canvas belt sheathes they make for these lights do not hold up to extended usage--the light itself will by far outlast its sheath--with the exception of this Black & Decker, because I smashed it.

I've posted a review of it at Amazon and you can read it once they approve it.  The problem was, the light wouldn't stay on when held in anything approaching a vertical position--which is exactly how I have to hold it to read meters.  I tried stretching the contact spring on the inside to improve the electrical connection but it would help for only a few minutes.  I finally got so p*ss*d at it that I destroyed it by hurling it violently at the street several times.  Then I noticed the batteries rolling away so I stopped long enough to pick them up and pocket them, then continued smashing the flashlight until I got bored with it.

So if you run across one of these somewhere, don't buy it, unless you plan on aiming it only at things that are on the same level as yourself all the time.

You are a Pirate

It was 1987, and I pretty much listened only to music that came out of the 70s.  After all, the 80s was the decade when all the music sucked*, and we were being subjected to Bangles, Starship, and frikkin' Bon Jovi.**  But something happened in 1987 that completely slipped under my musical radar, and which I discovered only a few days ago.

There was a German group called Running Wild, a black metal group who used (cough) "satanic" related lyrics and the usual black vocal style.  I guess things weren't going so well for them, or maybe they just had a sudden, brilliant inspiration.  They had already released two albums of black metal, when in 1987 they released an album called Under Jolly Roger, which was basically heavy/speed metal with lyrical themes about...pirates.

Dr. Oh's Octopodiform Deterrent

Found at My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning.

Sleep paralysis

This post at Oddee about sleep disorders brought back some unpleasant memories.  I used to suffer from sleep paralysis.  It would happen several times a year up until I was in my mid-30s, and then it kind of tapered off.  It's been a long time since it happened.  It was just like they say in this article:  terrifying hallucinations and all.  If you've never suffered from this, count yourself lucky, and I hope you never do.  It's no fun at all.

"My Girlfriend is a Gumiho"

Today I watched the first episode of a series that Netflix calls "My Girlfriend is a Gumiho," but which is also known (in English) as "My Girlfriend is a Nine-Tailed Fox."

I would normally steer clear of so-called "romantic comedies."  However, it wasn't exactly clear to me what kind of show this was, and as soon as I saw that it was not an American TV show--and furthermore, that it was subtitled--I was quite intrigued and watched it with interest.

It's actually a South Korean show.  Netflix has 16 episodes and they are all more than an hour long.  Every now and then, the subtitles annoyed me because they would stick in a parenthesized part to try and explain what the character meant; apparently we English speakers are too stupid to understand by context.  That's only a small quibble, however, and it didn't happen often.

It was funny.  It also had brief instances of terror and looming dread.  It's about a guy named Cha Dae-Woong who is tricked by a supernatural being called a gumiho into helping her escape a centuries-long entrapment.  He subsequently experiences a bad fall which should have killed him, but the gumiho (who uses the name Mi Ho), and who now appears as a beautiful young girl, implants a "fox bead" (or marble) into him using what I can only refer to as a "kiss-like contact" which keeps him alive but doesn't really heal him.

So he's stuck with her.  He wants to get rid of her, but the only way he can stay alive is by having the fox bead within him, and to do that he must keep Mi Ho happy.  Being a fox, she is quite fond of eating meat, especially beef, and at the very beginning of this episode when he tells her he doesn't have any money left to buy her some beef, she suddenly turns from playful to deadly serious and tells him if he doesn't, she will eat him instead.  So you see what I mean by "terror and looming dread."

The episode ends with him basically telling her to get lost and leave him alone, but before he gets on a bus to take him to college, she tells him she will follow him, find him, show him what she really is, take the fox bead from him, "and then you will die."  She does exactly that, and the final scene is of her performing her special kiss to remove the fox bead.

Of course we know that she must give it back, because the series would have ended right there if one of the main characters had died.  I liked it.  I'm looking forward to watching it all the way through.  If you have Netflix streaming, check it out.

Those captchas

Is anyone still getting those impossible captchas when you leave a comment here?  I want to make sure they're turned off.

I just tried using the "audio" version instead.  It's even worse.

My first review at Amazon

I posted it last night.  You can read it here.

More smirking

In a follow-up to this, another update on what I have come to call "the Fiasco Texas incident."

This kind of lack of foresight isn't even unusual.  For example, a while back it was determined that we needed different shirts because our blue t-shirts aren't "safe" enough, so we were going to switch to neon green (or yellow--I never can tell) t-shirts.

However, if you wanted to wear your regular blue button shirts (which is what I always wear because I don't like to work in those t-shirts), that would still be okay.  For some reason, vividly dark blue t-shirts that you can see someone wearing from 200 yards away aren't "safe" enough, but dull blue button shirts that blend in with everthing are?  It makes no sense, but that's what we have been calling "management theater" because it makes it looks like management is doing something when they really aren't.

Anyway, the representatives from the clothing company came over and fitted everyone for their new t-shirts, and I thought I would soon be selling vintage never-to-be-produced-again, limited-supply and hardly-worn t-shirts on eBay because I have about 20 of them when suddenly the news came down:  the contract calls for blue shirts--we can't get any other shirts until the contract expires.  You'd think that someone would have noticed that before the orders were placed for 150 new shirts, but...nope!




So the order was cancelled.  I'm sure that by the time the contract expires, they will have moved on to some other bit of management theater and the shirt thing will have been forgotten.

Today's work picture

The Alamodome and the Tower against a louring sky.  Taken about 7:45 this morning.  Nice day today, with the cooler temperatures brought on by the cold front, but this route was badly flooded because of last night's rain.

Yet another train

Today I noticed I still had this one on my phone.  It's from March 7.  I also noticed that I never said where I had "filmed" the other two trains.  The first one was on E. Commerce at Sunset Station, the second was on the northern part of S. Presa, and this one was on Dreamland.  You'll have to turn your volume way up to hear the real-life soundtrack.

Great old advertisement

My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning (best blog name ever) has posted an old ad from 1895 for a furniture merchant?  I think?  Fantastic.  And funny.  I especially like the part about making someone feel like they "had been NOMINATED BY ACCLAMATION and DEFEATED UNANIMOUSLY."  I gotta use that sometime.

Covers: "Hurricane" by The Band of Heathens

I posted the original version of this song not long ago, here.

I recently downloaded a Noisetrade sampler for The Band of Heathens, a group I've heard a lot about but never heard. I'm pretty sure there are no radio stations in S.A. that would touch this music with a 10-foot pole.  Anyway, this song was on the sampler and I like it even better than the original, with its slower, heavier, almost ominous beat.  Here's a video of them performing it live.





You can download it free at the link below. You have to give them a good email address, which they will use to alert you to new samplers you might like based on your past downloads, once you get a history.  So if that bothers you too much, you lose out.  So far it hasn't bothered me.

Hypothetical post

Let us say, for the sake of conjecture, that I wanted to make my own collection that we will call "The Best of Bruce Springsteen" by downloading individual tracks that I am more likely to enjoy and avoiding some of his later work that I don't much care for.  Using his two "Greatest Hits" albums as a starting point, and (in the beginning at least), using only songs from before 1984, here's a list that might work.

Blinded By the Light
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)*
Born to Run
Thunder Road
Badlands*
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Hungry Heart
The River*
Atlantic City*
Dancing in the Dark**
Downbound Train**

*Songs I've never heard (that I know of) but fit the time frame.
**Songs from 1984 (Born in the U.S.A.) that I can still tolerate.  Actually I quite like "Downbound Train," which according to Wikipedia, really came out of the Nebraska sessions.

I used to know someone who was a fan of Springsteen's older stuff but hated Born in the U.S.A., which he regarded as a "sell-out."  Brer and Babel will know who I'm talking about.  (We spoke at length about this one night when no one else was around--at the old place on Nance Street.)  Lamentably, he is no longer with us, but I would like to put this together as my own small memorial to him.

Any recommendations for other songs that should go on this list?  I'm thinking "Dancing in the Dark" is too upbeat and optimistic for the list.  Any thoughts?

Weekend update

Yesterday I took a day off work so I could go with my son's Cub Scout group for a day hike.  We went to a nature park near Schertz on the Cibolo Creek.  I can't remember the name of the park, but here's a link to the location.  Just zoom out a few times to get a better view.  Now, if you have at least a 2010 map book (and possibly even older than that), it will show you the park as it is now.  However, since Google Maps is an electronic medium and therefore capable of being updated continuously, it is of course 14 years out of date--this place was a mobile home park that was destroyed in the flood of '98 and condemned against any future residential use.  In some places there are still address numbers nailed to trees where there must have once been a home--now apparently smack out in the middle of nothing.

Some of Omar still exists, as well as all of Lyndon and pretty much all of Lake View (the old street signs are still there).  However, the inner streets are all ripped up or in the process of being ripped up and replaced by natural wilds and hiking trails.  There are several places with easy access to the creek off Lake View, and you can go fishing there, too.

So we did our little hike, and an entire circuit of the park took us only 1 1/4 hours, but that was "other people" normal walking speed which felt somewhat restrictive to me.  On my own, I'm sure I'd have finished it in less than an hour, but what the hey.  So we took a break and were about to do it again when the Den Mother of the Boy Scout group my son will be joining mused, "I wonder if there's any geocaches in this place?"  She pulled out her smart phone, another guy there who was the father of one of the Scouts pulled out his smart phone, and it turned out they were both getting into geocaching and had GPS capability with the appropriate apps on their phones.  I had heard about this hobby several years ago and always thought it sounded interesting, so I was all for it.  We spent the next few hours finding caches.

Well, I think I have just discovered a new hobby.  I spent a while last night poring over geocaching.com and reading up on GPS receivers, and I think I will be using a small portion of our tax return to buy one that's suitable for the hobby.  I also read about many caches near my own home, and there are at least two that I'm pretty sure I can find without having to resort to GPS.

As for yesterday, we found 5 out of the 6 caches we searched for.  I think the one we didn't find was either washed away or buried by rain, because of the place it was supposed to be in.  The kids especially were extremely enthusiastic about the activity, and my son did find one of the caches on his own, which was nice.  I was thinking about going out today to see if I could find a couple, but he went to play at a friend's house and I know he'd be miffed if I went out without him, so I'll just wait.

I also checked some of the areas where I have regular routes, and it looks like I might have to spend a few minutes looking around when I'm working in certain places.  I have already thought of a good place near here where I can stash one of my own because it doesn't have one yet.

I'm looking forward to doing some of this because it will mean a hobby that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer or radio and I'll actually be getting some exercise--or maybe I should say:  even more exercise..  I've been wanting to get a GPS unit for a long time, anyway, and now I have a halfway decent reason.

The anomalous blue...er...pinkbonnet

Here's something I've never seen before.

As you can see from the bottom photo, the other flowers produced by this plant were regular blue bluebonnets, as were all the other bluebonnets in the area.

The cell camera didn't really capture the subtle nuance of this color.  It wasn't really pink, nor pale purple, but somewhere in between.  Curious, strange and amazing.  This was in the area of Nacogdoches and El Sendero.

H.P. Lovecraft obituary

Lovecraft died March 15, 1937.

Sing to spare your life!

I have to give credit to Amazon for coming out with some metal samplers that introduced me to bands and new genres of music that I probably would have never heard of otherwise.  I want to take this time to recommend one of their new metal samplers:  Napalm Records All Stars.  Sixteen tracks, 71 minutes.

It has a few bands on it that I'm already familiar with from previous samplers and my own investigating, like Arkona and Nemesea.  I also learned of two subgenres from this sampler that I previously hadn't heard of:  pirate metal and a capella metal.

That's right:  a capella.  The group is Van Canto, they're from Germany, and here's the video to the song that's included on this sampler.  This is so awesome, it makes chills run up my spine.  The only non-vocal instrument they use is the drum set.  Everything else is vocal.

The dreaded 4165

4165 being the route number for my regular cycle 11.  In the area of the northeast corner of the intersection of Rittiman & Harry Wurzbach.  Because we are having a wet spring, the overgrowth has already assumed jungle-like proportions.  It was murderously difficult today, and I expect today to be the last time I'm able to actually finish the whole thing until next October or November--unless it stops raining.  One halfway decent rain per month is all it needs to remain a nearly impassable mess.

Anyway, this sign has been there for two months now.  There's another one a few feet away from it in Spanish, and yellow "caution" tape which I climbed through because there's just no other way.

I think the "cleanup" is actually finished and these are simply forgotten signs.  I occasionally find such things in alleys.  I've picked up 2 spare traffic cones (which were later stolen from the street where I had them around my truck), and several of the small sidewalk-sized barricades.  You see, there is actually a specific barricade sub-department within some other department.  They go around putting out the barricades whenever needed, but they apparently never come back for them even after the work is finished.  So whenever I find abandoned barricades I just take them and use them to block #2 boxes in high traffic areas where the lids have been stolen.  Of course I have an ulterior motive for this.  When I do it I get to fill out a safety card and turn it in, which improves my "safety awareness" rating or whatever, which improves my overall performance for the year.

So, in case this wasn't obvious, they know I'm grabbing abandoned barricades because I report it every time I use one.  No one has ever told me not to, and I get safety credit for doing this, but I can't officially go somewhere within the company and have barricades issued to me for this use.  S.O.P., folks.

Another funny thing about this route today was a new(-ish) meter.  There's a place where they recently built a new mini-storage place.  Okay, so before it was there, the space it occupies was mostly empty with a few vacant shops or stores or something.  There was an old vacant meter there in a #1 box (rectangular like a #2 box but smaller).  That is, the meter no longer was being used and was officially shut off, therefore we call it "vacant."  Some time ago, the old meter was removed--and also removed from my Roadrunner (handheld computer)--and the box was empty for a while.  Last December a new meter was put in it, but the new meter never turned up on my Roadrunner.  Also, it was leaking and the box was always so full of water that I couldn't get a meter number off of it.  Last month I filled out a leak report and turned it in, simply giving detailed directions to the location because I didn't have any information and wasn't sure of the address.  So they fixed the leak.  This month, the water was low enough that I was finally able to get a number off of it.  So I called it in just to ask about it see what was up.  I was told that that meter was on a cycle 13 route.  "That's ridiculous," I replied, "when the old meter was here it was on a cycle 11!"  When I got back to the office I took all the information I had collected and told my supervisor about it.  The last time I saw him, he was sitting at the computer poring over the database, shaking his head and muttering to himself, "That's not right.  This makes no sense.  Something fishy here," and that kind of stuff.  Pretty funny.  Yet again:  S.O.P., folks!  Changing it back to my route where it belongs will be tricky.  A meter put on the wrong route but the right cycle is easy, and they fix those all the time.  But if it was put on the wrong cycle, that means changing it back to the right cycle also means changing the billing date.  The billing department hates that because customers hate it.  It means there's going to a short or long billing cycle for that meter and everybody has to change their schedules.  On the other hand, the storage facility has two more meters that are both for irrigation, and they are on my cycle 11, which means they're getting two different bills on two different dates (one for cycle 11 and one for cycle 13).  I feel like I actually accomplished something today by creating all this chaos and consternation.

Minor update

I am not abandoning this blog, first of all.  However, I am going to focus more on my musical fandom and am starting a separate blog for it over at Tumblr.  If anyone wants to follow it, there's a feed in the sidebar (which at this moment hasn't quite sorted itself out yet) or go to Eat the Music.  I'll be posting some of my music-related posts over there to get things started along with posting new stuff.

Tumblr is a different world from Blogger, but I've been playing around with it unofficially for a while now and I like it.  Biggest drawback so far is that establishing a blogroll for non-Tumblr blogs is a little tricky and thus far I haven't dug into the code enough to put them on the main page.  Anyway, the blogroll over there will be only for blogs I read that focus on music, or at least have occasional features about music.  If any of you who I regularly read make any music-related posts, I will most likely link to them from over there (Albatross' series on Iron Maiden is a good example--I haven't yet, but intend to).

I recently finally got caught up with creating my big playlist for loading on my phone, and now I'm going to try and make regular updates on free legal downloads that I find around the web, which I'll now have time to listen to soon after I get them instead of weeks or months afterward.

I will say that today I splurged and spent $5.99 on the mp3 download from Amazon for the 2011 remaster of The Wall.  I'm listening to it right now (so far so good), and will post about it soon over at Tumblr.

Eyewitness to strangeness

Albatross is probably going to so envy me for this.  This morning right about 8:00, as I was working, I actually witnessed a car crash into a house.  Of course I couldn't take any photos of it, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  If it turns up in a news report, it was the one at the corner of Cliffwood and Buckeye.

And it did seem kind of strange and inexplicable.  The home owner happened to be outside and also saw the whole thing, and she seemed strangely unperturbed by it all.

Not quite that free, thank you

(Smirk)

Click to enlarge so you can read this.  I made a screen cap instead of copying and pasting because I don't want it to be spider-able.

Your H₂O company throws this big employee picnic every year, which I have never attended because I am an anti-social b*st*rd and I don't care to spend my day off with a bunch of people I'm stuck working with all week.  Also, last year we had mandatory overtime on the day of the picnic, so everyone in our department had to work first and then go.  Screw that.

Anyway, usually they rent one of the big parks in the city and arrange for all kinds of recreational activities for both kids and adults.  This year they decided to heck with that and just got super-discounted ticket prices to F**st* T*x*s.

As you can see, we have at least two certified scalpers among our ranks.  This has amused me greatly today.

Which one of these doesn't belong?

Click to enlarge.  I have my own answer as to which one of these doesn't belong, and why, but all answers are welcome.  Maybe there are multiple answers.

I think I somehow missed one thumbnail, but it won't change the answer anyway.

This is not logical

Top comment at YouTube: "i didn't come here looking for answers, but i left with many questions"

They can call it what they want...

But I call it:  48 Pictures that Prove the 90s Sucked.

Weekend update

My son had his Blue & Gold yesterday, which means he is moving on up to a full Boy Scout.  He had a rough patch there when he wanted to quit.  He said he was bored with it, although I suspect the reason was deeper than that.  Anyway, I half persuaded and half forced him to stick with it, and after last week's meeting he seemed to be revived.  I think he has more fun with it when I involve myself more.  So today we did an "engineering" project in which we made a "blueprint" of the house.  His den leader said it didn't have to be to scale, but there's no point in doing it sloppily, and it took us two sheets of graph paper taped together, but that sucker is to scale.  I think when he goes to Boy Scouts and gets to where he isn't constantly having to get something done to move up to the next level, he'll like it even more.  I wasn't able to be in Scouts when I was a kid, although I wanted to.  There was no organization where we lived, and we would have had to drive to another town for me to take part in it.  They did attempt it briefly one summer and I became a Webelos for a few months, but it never went anywhere.  I don't think the people trying to organize it really knew what they were doing.  I still have my old handbook, which I read from cover to cover more than once when I was his age.

Not much else going on here lately.  The weather has been nice, and this past week at work wasn't too bad with little rain and cool temperatures.  I got my numbers this past week, and I had 95 errors last year.  I don't have an exact number of total reads, but it's somewhere over 120,000.  My error rate put me at 14th in the department, or about in the middle.  They're going to a different method of ranking next year which considers more things than just errors.  They showed me that if we had been using that method for the past year, I would have been all the way up at #8--in the top 10!  So I'm hoping I can get even fewer errors this year--I already had a much better January than I did last year.  I also had 2 unscheduled absences last year (sick), so this year I'm going to try and schedule a "get well" day ahead of time if I feel myself getting sick.  I have plenty of what they call "personal leave" to use for this.  I get both "personal leave" and "vacation leave," which are two different things.  The vacation time has to be scheduled more in advance than personal time, and I can get paid back for up to 40 hours of unused personal leave at the end of the year if I want (otherwise it rolls over, and I've been rolling it over since I started).

Here's what I've been listening to via YouTube lately.  Arkona is either a folk metal or pagan metal (depending on who you ask) band from Russia, and they sing in Russian, but the music is so cool I don't really care.  The video below is one of their shorter songs and has some good examples of the folk instrumentation they use.  The title translates as "wall on wall," which is what that form of fighting is called, and is apparently a sport, I think.  Their lead singer, who calls herself Masha Scream, is one of the few female metal vocalists who both sings and uses death growls.  I don't think this track has any of her growling in it, though.

Worf, the punching bag

Of course, there was a good reason for this.  As a Klingon, he could take punishment that would kill a human.  So every time they went up against someone with superhuman strength, Worf had to be the one to get beaten up because it would have killed any other of the major cast members (excepting Data/Lore), and ST:TNG pretty much avoided the "red shirt" cliché that so afflicted TOS.*

I didn't mean to have two Worf posts so close together.  It just happened that way.



*I watched that Star Trek reboot recently, expecting to hate it, but I didn't.  I found it entertaining enough that I didn't consider it a waste of time, even though it leaned heavily toward the pastiche.  But the one "red shirt" scene really cracked me up.  As soon as I saw that guy, I told my wife, "He's dead."  "What do you mean?" she said.  "Just wait for it," I said.

I never had noticed this before

Poor Worf, he don't get any respect.

And yet, it moves

Click to enlarge.  I took several photos from my regular cycle 17 the other day, but most of them were for the video I'm planning.  This one is just because it creeps me out.  No one lives here.  The lot doesn't belong to either of the houses on either side of it.  Someone just uses it for storage.  (You can see the meter box at bottom left; except for a bad leak they had a few months ago, it never uses any water).  That statue is never in the same position.  I'm not saying it moves on its own, but...okay, I am.  I'm firmly convinced that this evil thing comes to life at night and roams the neighborhood, probably peering leeringly into children's bedroom windows.  It's evil!  EVIL, I tell you!

I don't like clowns.  Life-sized statues always kind of give me the willies.  A life-sized statue of a clown is just about my worst waking nightmare.  I always have the urge to scale the fence and run toward it with the hammer I have in my toolbox, except that I'm afraid I would make it only halfway across the lot before it turned toward me, eyes blazing and with a hideously friendly smile on it's face, and I would be found screaming senselessly and end up in a padded room on South Presa.

This is in a neighborhood off of Shane Road, not far from the "haunted" tracks.

TRAIN 2: The Crossing

I had to do a little audio editing/trickery for this one, which came out quite well and was enjoyable.  I'll have to figure out some excuse to do it more often.

I already have plans for making this a trilogy, but part 3 will be more ambitious.  I plan on filming about 2 minutes of "footage" tomorrow morning, in equipment-mandated 30-second increments, of course.

A video meme I just discovered

Here's a link to a good, and very funny, example.

Total Eclipse of the Heart (literal video version)

There are loads of these on YouTube, to find them just search for "literal video version."  I also watched one there for Aha's "Take On Me."  Boy, I can't wait to see more of these.

The 11 Doctors

Mental Floss has a good article running down the 11 canonical Doctors (Who, that is).

I think they forgot the "trusted companion"

Otherwise, great illustration. Forgot where I found this.  (Technically, the lightsabre isn't "supernatural help," but I guess it would otherwise be hard to illustrate the Force).

Another song from my childhood

This is one of those songs that has been lurking around in the backroads of my memory for a long time.  I liked it as a kid, but never knew who sang it or even what it's title was.  Yesterday I was thinking about it again, for some reason, and G00gled some of the lyrics and found it quickly enough.  (Leon Everette, "Hurricane").

But there was another one, a sort of country novelty song, that I've been looking for and can't come up with anything based on the lyrics that I remember.  It's a story about a boy named Leon Rhodes (I think?, maybe Leon Rose?) who played the bugle.  He went to church every Sunday, and the preacher there had an annoying habit of ending all of his sermons with, "Someday Gabriel's gonna blow his horn--I can almost hear him now."  So one Sunday morning Leon decided to play a joke on the preacher.

One day little Leon Rhodes took his beat-up bugle along
Climbed up in that hot church attic and waited for the closing song
Well, Reverend Jones ended his sermon in the same old way
Said a few words about Gabriel, cupped his hand up behind his ear
And he said,
Someday Gabriel's gonna blow his horn, I can almost hear him now...

At this point Leon blows a little tune on his bugle, and "it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop."  So Reverend Jones shakily repeated his thing about Gabriel, and Leon blew the little tune again.  Then it goes something like:

Well, the people didn't waste no time gettin' out of that spooky place
The preacher rushed down from the pulpit with a worried look on his face
About that time little Leon Rhodes decided to save his hide
Took one step, fell down through that ceiling and he landed by the preacher's side

The preacher thinks Leon is Gabriel and he shouts something that I can't remember, and then:

...and he ran out the big front door
Far as I know that man's still runnin'
'Cause he ain't been seen no more

Then it goes on to tell how Leon grew up to be a great bugle player, and the song ends with a trumpet solo on the fade-out.  I'm pretty sure it was a trumpet, not a bugle, based on how I remember it.  Anyway.

If anyone reads this and knows what song I'm talking about, please let me know who sang it and what the title is.

Raze all the buildings and sow the ground with salt

I took these a whole month ago when I was doing a partial route on the other side of highway 281 from my usual cycle 15.  This route sucks.  I had a partial on it again today, but a different part, and I was even more lost today that I was last month.  I mean this route really just blows bloody raw chunks.  I hate this route.  200 meters took me longer to do than my full route on the other side of the highway.

I had intended to take a specific photo of something today, but I got rained on all day so I didn't have my phone on me.

Movie review: Subspecies

I watched this a few days ago.  It had pretty good ratings on Netflix and since I have a penchant for vampire movies, I thought I'd give it a go.

Oh man.  The acting was terrible.  It was made in 1991 but the little imp-things were about as cutting-edge as Jason and the Argonauts.  I realize that the Argonauts' special effects were cutting-edge for 1963, but 27 years later you'd of thought they could have improved slightly.

I had some hopes it would be a pretty good movie, because it was filmed on location in Romania and was produced by a bunch of guys whose last names all ended in "-escu."  The "bad" vampire looked good--I mean, bad, of course--his horrific appearance gave me hope right at the beginning, but when he ripped off his own fingertips and strewed them around so they could transform into those imp-things, I lost hope.  I fell asleep toward the end but I'm pretty sure the good vampire killed the bad vampire.  In any case, by that time I just didn't care.

Also the love interest was kind of creepy because it looked like the girl and the guy (who was the "good" vampire, of course) were brother and sister.  There were some nekkid br34sts, but frankly they weren't impressive enough to make up for the movie.

And now there's, what, five of these movies?  Good grief.  I would recommend dubbing them all onto an 8-hour videocassette and turning it on just as you go to bed.  That way if you're lucky it will all be over with by the time you wake up in the morning.

I can't believe they're just giving this stuff away

I'm back

Bet you didn't even know I was gone.  My internet went down yesterday and a tech came out today to see what was up.  We figured out that apparently, when the last tech came out here to do an equipment upgrade, he hadn't firmly seated the coax cable into its jack, which resulted in some intermittent problems until yesterday when my daughter must have nudged it with her toe and popped it completely out.  Today's tech dude went ahead and added a few tweaks while he was here, most importantly locking my system onto the antenna with the strongest signal.

I found this article somewhat interesting:  10 Most Bizarre Cargo Spills.  A couple of times I hauled about 33,000 pounds of masa from Laredo up to a restaurant distribution place on the east side, and I bet that would have made an horrific mess if it had spilled.  So now you also have some trivia you'll never need:  the most masa you can pack in a 53-foot trailer is right at 33,000 pounds.

Once I was hauling 26,000 pounds of toilet paper (again, the most you can pack in a 53-foot trailer).  That was the time I got stuck in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Wyoming for 2 days because of a winter storm.  Everyone was sitting there bemoaning getting stuck there (if you're wheels aren't moving, you aren't making money).  I broke in on the CB and said, "Well, I'm hauling 26,000 pounds of toilet paper, so if anybody needs some, it's ten dollars a roll."  I don't know if anyone thought that was funny or not.

Another load with the potential for a big mess that I hauled was 30,000+ pounds of cat litter.  There was another time I had a load of 16,000 pounds of empty cat food cans.  Not a big potential for making a mess there, but it seemed funny to me at the time.  That was my first trip into L.A, actually an industrial subdivision called Vernon, which I learned truckers often refer to as L.A., L.A.

Then there was the time I had a trailer full of Betty Crocker brownie mix.  Cases and cases of it, although I don't recall the weight.  One case got torn during unloading, so they said, "This one's yours."  None of the individual boxes had been damaged--only the big case box itself.  So I brought a whole case of Betty Crocker brownie mix home.  I thought we would never eat all that stuff.

I can't imagine how this would work, nevertheless, I am intrigued

I wasn't motivated enough even to write a weekend update this past week, but I remembered I still have a few work pix that I was saving for a rainy day.  This was taken early in the morning about 3 weeks ago, on my regular cycle 14 on FM78.  I was amused by the sign on the side of the truck.

I had a couple of opportunities for an interesting photo or two today, but unfortunately I had left my phone behind because I was getting rained on.

However I still want to mention something that I just discovered today and which has a website with plenty of pix.  I had been by this place before, but the previous times I had seen it, there were no signs up saying what it was.  It looked to me like a big hole in someone's backyard that had been fenced off to make a mini-park.  I'm talking about the Robber Baron Cave, slap in the middle of a fairly densely-populated area on Nacogdoches not too far south of Loop 410.  If you drive down Nacogdoches and you don't already know it's there, you'll probably never notice it.

The Warrior's Way

Watched this movie yesterday.  I enjoyed it a lot and gave it 5 stars on Netflix.

It's about a 19th-century assassin (ninja) named Yang who has sworn to kill all members of an enemy family, which he does until he comes to the last survivor:  a baby girl.  He suddenly changes heart and refuses to kill her, instead taking custody of her and caring for her.  This makes him a renegade and enemy of his own clan.  He tries to escape them by leaving the Orient and coming to the American West.

He goes to the small, crumbling town of Lode, where a friend of his had previously emigrated to.  His friend has since died, so he takes over his friend's business of clothes washing.  The town is almost dead, in the middle of the desert and isolated much like the town of Lago in High Plains Drifter.  Lode is home to a dilapidated amusement park and is populated mostly by carnies and sideshow freaks.  And, like Lago, it is periodically visited by a gang of murderous villains who terrorize the townsfolk.

Also among the townsfolk is a young woman named Lynne whose entire family was murdered by the gang about 10 years previous, and in fact Lynne herself had appeared to be mortally wounded at the time but miraculously recovered and now wants to personally kill the gang's leader, known as "the Colonel," to get her revenge.  Lynne had been given some rudimentary sword training by Yang's old friend and Yang continues some further sword training with her after hearing her story.

Of course the Colonel's gang eventually reappears, leading to a climactic showdown.  However, a large squad of ninjas who have been searching for Yang and the baby girl also appears.  The climactic battle scene is quite the showdown.

Part Kung Fu (the TV series), part True Grit, part High Plains Drifter.  All live-action but combat was definitely imitating anime.  The far backgrounds (horizon, sky) appear to be CGI, giving it a somewhat fantastic feel.  Humor, violence, mercy, revenge, love, heartbreak...it's all in there.

Bob and Ray on "Crooning"

I had downloaded several old "Bob and Ray" radiio shows a few days ago and this clip was part of one show, so I put it on YouTube so I could share it. It struck me as very funny.