Inside North Korea

Infiltrating North Korea is a fascinating series by Neil Woodburn.

And so, one drizzly afternoon last October, I found myself in the Pyongyang Airport waiting for a guide to take me into town and unveil this planet's most mysterious nation over the next five days--the maximum amount of time an American is allowed in for the games. Unless, of course, something goes terribly wrong--a fear made all the more real when my guide confiscated my passport and ticket out of the country and turned them over to the police for the entirety of my stay in North Korea. I wasn't going anywhere if the government didn't want me to. It wasn't until I returned to the airport terminal five days later that I was finally reunited with my only means out of the country.

Those passportless five days turned out to be truly extraordinary and worth every moment of my will-I-get-out-of-here-alive fear. Over the next two weeks I will be sharing with you this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel back in time and personally witness the communist regime, cult of personality, totalitarian lifestyle, and oddball reclusiveness known as North Korea. It ain't Paris, but I think you'll love it nonetheless.

I just started and am still reading through it, but had to take some time to recommend it.

Crunch!

Blind luck helps archer make one-in-a-million Robin Hood shot:

An archer has achieved a one-in-a-million feat of marksmanship after splitting one arrow with another. What makes the shot even more remarkable is that Tilly Trotter is blind.

[...]

Her husband, Tony, is crucial to her success, telling her how near her shots are to the target each time she shoots.

"He isn't allowed to tell me to aim left or right before I let loose an arrow," Mrs Trotter said. "I can only make my own adjustments to my aim before I shoot."

I am not boasting when I say that I did that once. It was very annoying, destroying a perfectly good arrow. Luck, good or bad, depending how you look at it. But then of course, I'm not blind.

I've also had to repair fletching a few times from very near almost-misses. Sigh. It's been so long since I've practiced archery. Gotta get back into it when the house move is over. I packed up my bow a couple of days ago.

When humor is too accurate to be humor

Sometimes in pursuit of humor, Cracked hits the nail on the head. Here's one article that hits a lot of nails. Start here to read The 5 Most Ridiculously Over-Hyped Health Scares of All Time:

See, what many people don't know about DDT is that the person who discovered that it could be used as a pesticide actually won a Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Because it was kind of effective in fighting malaria. When spraying of DDT stopped in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), malaria cases rose from 17 in 1963 to 2.5 goddamn million in 1969, an increase of approximately a bajillion fofillion percent. And to this day, the mosquito remains the deadliest killer Mother Nature has to offer, with a confirmed 2 million kills per year.

And the clueless feelgooders are trying to fight it by supplying people with sleeping nets, because killing mosquitoes is too cruel.

Not here, folks

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

Seen everywhere. Up 0.1% since yesterday, so I must conclude there are some false hits.

Kitchen table blogging

The last horizontal surface suitable for placing a computer upon and sitting down at is our kitchen table. Every other desk and table has been packed away. We got some help over today (my dad, my wife's brother and dad) and packed up the Three Big Things: sofa, antique desk, antique chest of drawers. Still plenty of room in the pod for beds and the kitchen furniture. What's left in the house now can be packed up by my wife and I in half a day or less. The antique desk was purchased by my wife. The chest of drawers was built by my great-grandfather some 70 years ago.

Oh yeah, my dad also took our upright freezer over to his house and plugged it in on his front patio.

This will most likely be the last Friday night I have to sit and read blogs and smoke a pipe for a while. I think the forced hiatus will be a good thing, although I'm going to feel terribly out of touch since this is how I get most of my news.

I'm going to turn comment moderation on until further notice since I won't be able to monitor the blog every day.

I will be taking my laptop with me and I might be able to check in briefly now and then. Mostly I'm going to be re-learning how to use Melody Maker software, which is what I used to write a few gospel songs a few years ago. The last time I had to use the start-over disk to get this computer rejuvenated, I forgot to save all the files for the songs. Fortunately I had uploaded the pdf files so I was able to retrieve them, and I'll be re-writing them again so I have digital versions that I can revise and export midi files from. I might even try a little writing, but my dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?) have been packed up, and I'll feel crippled without them.

One of my biggest and prettiest hickory trees is going to have to come down so they can get the new house in, which is a shame, but I guess I'll have plenty of barbecue wood from it, so it won't be a total loss. My favorite tree, another very tall and straight hickory in the front yard, will be able to stay. I always use its shade to barbecue under during the summer. Another smaller hickory just behind the house will be able to stay also. After it's all over, I'll throw a few hickory nuts in the empty space left by the big tree that will be removed, so maybe in a couple hundred years someone else can enjoy another big hickory tree.

We actually have a lot of hickories on this place, but the one that has to come down is one of the biggest. Too bad it's not just another blackjack. At least one and possibly two post oaks will have to come down too, but then I'll be needing firewood for the fireplace, so they will be put to good use.

I'll use my phone to take some pictures if I can, and post them when all this is sorted out later on.

But every time it rains, you're here in my head...

Cloudbusting at the Beijing Olympics:

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, "We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced." August is part of Northeast Asia's rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven't always been successful, Qian claims that "the results with light rain have been satisfactory."

So they are blasting the skies with silver iodide and frozen CO₂ instead of orgone energy, but who can look at that photo and not be reminded of Wilhelm Reich?

Ballistic Vest Test

Legions Fate has performed a fairly exhaustive test against a PASGT ballistic vest. He even shot a couple of arrows at it.

Well worth reading and filing away for future reference. Plenty of good info, and lots of pictures.

via Rustmeister

Rule Five

A firearm is not a substitute for a cordless drill.

via Reformed Chicks Blabbing

Happy birthday to me

One-handed, locking knife and saw blades. Now I'm ready.

Next year, I think I'll get a Crunch.

Restaurant report

This evening we went out to eat. I can't remember the name of the restaurant, but it's the one in St. Hedwig that's located at the intersection of FM 1346 and FM 1516 (east of San Antonio out FM 1346). Even my dad was impressed: "That's the first time I've eaten at a new restaurant and not been disappointed in a long time." High praise indeed from my dad. He had their catfish plate.

I had a dish called Southwest Chicken something or other. Grilled chicken breast covered with Monterey Jack cheese, sauteed onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, and crumbled bacon. Onion rings and green beans on the side. The food was excellent except for the onion rings and the waitress kept my tea glass filled. If a waitress can keep up with me on iced tea, she's really on the ball.

Next time I'm going to try their Chicken Marinara, grilled chicken breast covered with marinara sauce and grilled mushrooms.

Stay away from the onion rings, they aren't all that great. Otherwise, I recommend it.

Here comes Peter Ph'nglui

Napolean XIV was ordered from Barnes & Noble

Yesterday we packed up all the records. It took a while. I think in my future office I will have to set up a turntable just so I can listen and continue to digitize my old records.

With some things, my memory is terrible. Mostly because it's something that I just don't care enough about to let it take up valuable memory space. Records are different. I can remember where I bought almost every one of them. I can usually remember the face of the cashier who rang me up at the record store (and the name in one case--Bianca). But there are a few that had me stumped.

I grabbed a stack of records and the one on top was from GTR.

I have a GTR record? I didn't know I had a GTR record. Why do have a GTR record?

I don't even remember any of their songs. But once the chaos settles down and I start getting things back in order, this will be one of the first I play to see if I can remember.

Kids

Today during some down time I showed my 9-year-old daughter the basics of Excel. She thought it was pretty cool how you could reference cells. When I showed her how to reference a whole other worksheet, you'd have thought she had just discovered fire or something.

Within 15 minutes she had figured out how to create graphs.

I further impressed her by showing her some conditional formatting.

Come to think of it, the when I first started using Lotus 1-2-3 (for DOS, of course), I thought it was pretty cool, too.

Sometimes kids are so easy to impress. I'll miss being able to do that when she gets older.

Way behind...

On reading blogs, and it doesn't look like I'll catch up soon.

We've been busily cramming a storage pod that was dropped in our driveway. I'll be glad when this is over.

Triggering queen genes

Of interest to apiophiles (I may have just made that word up). An explanation of how royal jelly creates queen bees, thanks to some Australian researchers.

Texas CHL 2005 numbers released

Buckeye Firearms Association has the info. As usual, it shows that holders of a Texas CHL are much more law-abiding than the average (cough) citizen.

Don't look at the light!

I watched Big Trouble in Little China again tonight. Who knows how many times I've seen this movie. It remains one of my favorites, and I'm sure I'll watch it again sometime.

My daughter has, unfortunately, grown up in the age of remakes and sequels. When the movie ended, the first thing she said was, "Did they ever make a number two?"

"No." I told her as I tucked her in. "All the best movies never have sequels."

"So it just ended with a mystery with that monster climbing up from under his truck?"

"Yep. It's just a mystery, what happens next."

And the last thing she said as I turned out the light: "They gotta make a number two!"

What "ATF" really stands for

Jed at FreedomSight has discovered another meaning for "ATF."

Disgusting, but not surprising.

Better

The persistent headache I've had for about a week has tapered off significantly today. The minor cold front brought a rain, which was not so much rain as it was very thin mud because of all the dust in the air. Must have been an allergic reaction to something in the dust.

It looks like I'll still have internet access until around April 4 or 5.

State Visit

Zero seconds because there was no "out" click to provide a time measure. No "in" click either, for that matter. Just a direct page load to the slide show that made me semi-famous for a few minutes.