Category Archives: Paul

February 1, 2022 · 23:51

So, February, Let’s Talk

January’s gone, welcome February.

You’re a short month, and I don’t say that in a derogatory way! To me it’s a huge advantage, since you don’t have to hang on as long, stretch out the misery. You can do great things, get in, get out, be a hero!

You’ve got that whole “love holiday” thing going on! Tough to screw that up, am I right?

Yeah, tomorrow there’s the “groundhog thing” and we’ll all be quoting Bill Murray all day, but that’s not a bad thing! Just go with the flow and maybe play a little less Sonny & Cher, if you know what I mean.

So, focus, get ‘er done, you can be the favorite month of the year! Hell, with a little effort, you can be the favorite month of the last two and a half years!

It’s your big chance, February!

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Filed under Farce, Paul

January 31, 2022 · 23:56

Bye Bye January!

What, only seven minutes left in the month? Wow. And I’ve got a “239 days in a row” posting streak going.

Not my best look, but appropriate.

This is what happens when you accidentally hit some button without knowing it while picking up the phone to read some message. I don’t know that I could duplicate this shot for a million dollars, but sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the right time, or vice versa.

Captions?

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January 30, 2022 · 23:23

My Weekend – January 30th

I hope you all had a pleasant and relaxing weekend. For me – mixed results.

I got a lot of work done on a project for the CAF SoCal Wing, and while it’s “work,” and a fair amount of it, that whole gig is wrapping up so the sooner I get it done the sooner I can reclaim a bunch of my time, so that’s a net good thing.

I checked my car periodically to see if it will work, i.e., let me shift out of “park.” In six or seven checks over the last two days, it locked up three times, the rest of the time was fine. Anyone want to bet that once I get it to the repair shop this week it won’t do it AT ALL for the repair guys to diagnose?

The Kings are on the road and playing well! It’s a pleasant surprise. Perhaps they have a legit chance to get into the playoffs for the first time in about four years. They lost in an overtime shootout yesterday in Philadelphia but won today in Pittsburg.

We did not go to space today, for the fourth day in a row. SpaceX is trying to launch a satellite but after three days of lousy weather today was perfect. Right up until the point where a cruise ship sailed into the restricted area where debris could fall if there was a failure on the rocket, so the launch got scrubbed at T-0:33. They’ll make a fifth try tomorrow.

Then, of course, after a roller coaster ride of a season, where at one point we were 3-4 and folks doubted we would make the playoffs, let alone win our Division, let alone make it to the AFC Championship game, but we had turned it around to the point where we were favorites to go to our third Super Bowl in a row, getting to here with that mind blowing last second comeback and overtime win last week – after all of that, we choked after building an early 21-3 lead and lost in overtime this week.

Yeah, that sort of sucks. A lot. I’ll live, I’m an adult, I understand that 31 of the 32 teams all finish the season with a loss, I remember that there were years and years when an 8-8 season was a triumph and we never even fantasized about making the playoffs at all, and now we’ve been in the AFC Championship game for a ticket to the Super Bowl four years in a row, we’ve cashed that ticket two of those four years, and we won the Super Bowl in one of the two appearances. (*deep breath*) Nonetheless, this stings.

After a bit of “destruction therapy” (crushing soda cans for recycling, they make a very satisfying “crunch” as they collapse into little hockey puck sized bits of jagged aluminum) it was time to go out with the old:

…and in with the new.

Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in sixteen days! (Assuming they can settle the lockout/strike issues by then.)

Let’s hope that the week ahead will be productive and non-stressful for all. (HAH!) It’s time for the stress levels from politics, COVID, and “life” to back away from that red line on the meter.

 

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Filed under KC Chiefs, LA Angels, LA Kings, Paul, Photography, Space

January 28, 2022 · 23:20

Those Blocking-The-Carl’s-Jr-DriveThru-Lane Blues

I was headed out to pick up dinner. A quick drive about a mile and a half to the Carl’s Jr drive through. Not a sign of trouble on my horizon.

I place the order, talking to the “Charlie Brown’s teacher” voiced machine in the driveway. We’ll see what we actually get.

I’m second in line, waiting my turn. No worries. The guy in front of me leaves and I drive up and stop at the window.

I have to get my wallet out, so just to be safe I put the car in “park,” keep my foot on the brakes. Do the minor league contortionist thing, get out the wallet, fish out the cash.

I get my change, a medium and a large drink, ask which is which. Later we’ll find out that he got it backwards, but maybe that was just a side effect of the timeline shift to the other, less friendly timeline…

It takes a bit because there’s a custom burger being ordered. There are several cars lined up behind me by the time my bag o’ food comes.

I get everything settled, reach over to go home…

…and the car won’t shift out of “park.”

What am I doing wrong?

Foot on the brake, it won’t go unless that’s depressed. No problem there.

I’m pushing the release button on the gear shift, right? Again, no problem. So why can’t I move the shift lever?

The honking starts. I have my food, the folks behind have been waiting a while, let’s go!

Try turning the car off, then back on. No problem. Foot on brake, gear shift button pushed, and … no joy. I’m stuck in “park.”

The guy in the Carl’s Jr wants to know if there’s a problem with my order. Nope, just a problem with my car.

The next five minutes or so are chaotic. There’s a lot of angst. Confusion abounds.

The Carls Jr folks finally send someone out to the parking lot to get the five or six cars stacked up there to back out, drive around to the parking lot, and come in to get their food in the lobby. One of them has an anatomically improbable suggestion for me. Creative, but unlikely.

Folks in the restaurant are coming to the window and trying to give me advice and suggestions. “Make sure that you have your foot on the brake!” Thank you, good one, I know that, learned it early in the ten years and 85,000+ miles I’ve had the car. Have I tried…? Yes, yes I have, but thanks!

It’s time for reinforcements. I can’t even get out of the car, since the driver’s door is up against the little shelf at the pickup window, and the passenger side door doesn’t have much more clearance on the other side, where there’s an automated car wash attached to the Shell station next door. I’m starting to wonder if I’ll have to try to see if I can put the top down (I’m driving a Volvo convertible) without hitting the roof of the drive-thru in order to get out.

Call AAA. They want to send a link to their app to deal with this. Sorry, that’s bullshit, I’m having a moment here and I want to talk to a human who can HELP!

I finally get someone, explain the situation. They’ll send someone. They have a whole list of places where I can be towed where I can get special AAA discounts on service, would I like one of them?

I haven’t had time to spend two seconds thinking about where I want to get towed to. It’s after 18:30 on a Friday night – who would be open? Let’s just get towed home, keep it simple for now, buy time to think about what to do next. Okay, they’ll be here in something like 45 minutes to an hour.

WHAT? Okay, I’m not going anywhere…

And through it all, I keep questioning myself. Why would the car just break like this? It hasn’t been acting up, nothing got spilled into the gear shift lever box, there wasn’t any big, nasty sound. Maybe it’s me just blindly and unconsciously doing something really simple and stupid wrong and I can’t see it?

User error located between the steering wheel and the bucket seats?

Then begins the routine of having the Carl’s Jr folks ask if I’m making any progress, turning the car off and on a few times, pumping the brakes (I know there’s an interlock switch on the brakes, maybe that’s gone flakey), smacking the shift lever a couple of times (percussive maintenance!), getting nowhere, turning off the car, and waiting for the Carl’s Jr folks to come back and ask if I’m making any progress.

What’s that saying about insanity being where you do the same things over and over and keep expecting a different outcome?

After a dozen or two rounds, nine minutes elapsed time according to my phone calls to AAA, no one is more surprised than I am when I start the car smoothly shifts out of park like there was never any problem at all.

There aren’t any of the Carl’s Jr folks at the window, so I’m not going to waste any time waiting for them to come back so that I can say goodbye. (I’m sure they’ll remember me, if not for the stupid broken car, then for the head-to-toe Chiefs clothing.)

I drive home, carefully, waiting for the next shoe to drop, while also desperately trying to call AAA back to wave off the scheduled tow truck. Fortunately, this must be a fairly common experience since there’s a relatively simple way to do this with just a couple of button pushes on the phone.

The mile and a half drive was uneventful. No sign that anything at all was so wrong just seconds ago.

Not for all of the tea in China would I shift out of “drive.”

I get home, park in the driveway, shift the car into “park,” set the brake, and shut down the car.

Out of curiosity, I turn it back on. Foot on the brake. Reach for the gear shift lever.

It’s locked in “park” like it was set in stone.

Whatever. I’ll mess around with it some time on Monday and if it starts, I’ll drive it off to my favorite repair shop. If not, well, I’ve got plenty of time to futz with it without blocking the Carl’s Jr drive-thru lane.

The food is cold.

And the guy did get it wrong. The Dr Pepper is in the small cup, the Diet Coke is in the big one.

Yeeeech!

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Filed under Distracted Driving, Paul

January 24, 2022 · 22:22

Würdle

I will *NOT* be posting any Wordle scores.

For those who have been blessedly sheltered somehow from this latest obsession, it’s a free phone app game where the goal is to find a five-letter word in less than six guesses. If you have a letter that’s correct and in the correct position, it shows green on the next line. If you have a letter that’s included in the secret word, but you have it in the wrong position, you get a yellow square. If you guess the word, you can post your score for everyone to see. Everyone gets the same word, one per day.

Okay. Whatever.

The game went viral about two weeks ago. Today I started hearing about bots that have been developed for Twitter to post the word immediately after the new game comes out for the day, thus spoiling it for everyone. I’m amazed it took so long for this to start.

There are strategies out there on picking your starter word.

Okay. Whatever.

There have been way, way too few good jokes.

But what got to me today was a news article on a reputable media outlet with lots of high-brow analysis of “what your starter word tells you about your personality.”

Lemme try this one…

My starter word is “I’m too busy to have time for this stupid game so bugger off!!”

I think that I know what that says about my personality!

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January 22, 2022 · 23:58

DIY Silver Lining #2

Earlier in January I posted a picture of a portion of my home office desktop, with two monitors showing live views of Tokyo and Venice. A comment from Jemima Pett suggested also watching live webcams from nature reserves.

Not to worry – I’ve got that covered.

On the left, the Cornell Lab FeederWatch Cam At Sapsucker Woods in Ithica, New York. If you don’t want to watch these birds, Cornell Labs has a whole lineup of other webcams around the world.

On the right, the Live Jellyfish Cam from Monterey Bay Aquarium. Again, if you don’t want to watch the jellies, there are a number of other webcams there, including the otters out in Monterey Bay.

 

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Filed under Paul, Photography

January 20, 2022 · 21:58

Venice And Sapsucker Woods

This finish line crossed

The race won for the moment

Time to relax, to read, to breathe – tonight

00:43:29 at the pond’s edge, no birds to be found at the feeder

But small critters occasionally scurry by for theft

Snow falling heavily

In Venice it’s foggy at 06:43:29, traffic slow and sparse

Across the canal someone’s television has flickered all night

Odd shapes flashing, occasionally recognizable, always foreign

As sea birds and gulls flash by in the mist like specters.

Los Angeles at 21:43:29 is cool and calm, another day entirely

Longing for travel and adventures, settling for far less again, taking what’s available

Tomorrow we begin again.

 

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Filed under Art, Paul, Photography, Travel, Writing

January 18, 2022 · 23:34

Taco Bell And The Morlocks

Sometime in the mid 1960’s, when it was a big freakin’ deal to have a movie shown on TV! It meant either NBC or CBS was showing it in prime time, and I had to finagle permission to stay up past my bedtime. A big hit for me with lots of long-lasting memories was “The Time Machine.” Made by George Pal and starring Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux in 1960, the pre-teen Paul was very impressionable and large parts of the movie scared the crap out of me. (It seems I wasn’t alone.)

What really scared me was when the air raid sirens went off and the peaceful, dull, childlike Eloi all went slack jawed and started marching zombie-like into the caves of the Morlocks, where obviously the Morlocks were going to kill them and eat them. We were living in Kansas City at the time (remember, huge Chiefs fan here!) and tornadoes were not uncommon for about six months of each year. When they got close, the air raid sirens went off to warn folks to take cover. Needless to say, the summers after seeing “The Time Machine” had a whole new interpretation of that!

Skip forward fifty-six or fifty-seven years, to 2022. You’re watching television and a Taco Bell commercial comes on:

  • There’s a beach party, a young lady skips off into the darkness to snog that sexy young dude in the dark. A buoy tips over, causing a “bell” to ring (the signature and no doubt trademarked Taco Bell sound), and your hormonal teenager turns into a zombie, leaves Boy Wonder on the beach wondering what happened, and she marches off to Taco Bell to get something disgusting.
  • A subway platform, a geek dude cosplaying some sort of elf warrior with a shield spies a geek girl with the exact same costume and shield. Their eyes meet, they step toward each other, her shield hits a metal trash can, we hear that “bell” sound, she gets glassy eyed and wanders off to Taco Bell.
  • Two dudes are going for the all-time high score in the universe on Dance Dance Revolution at which point the machine music makes that “bell” sound, they stop mid-game, and head off for some brodude Taco Bell munchies.
  • The high schooler with the purple hair is at the back of the orchestra with a pair of cymbals, waiting for her one big moment, when someone tips over a music stand, it hits the tuba, makes that “bell” sound, and half the orchestra wanders off in search of greasy ground beef and runny fake cheese.

Aside from the fact that I’m not a fan of Taco Bell’s food, all of these examples remind me constantly of one thing – THE ELOI!!! The protagonists in every one of these ads act exactly like the Eloi in “The Time Machine!”

So, Taco Bell’s advertising agency and marketing gurus, look how you’ve made me think of your food!

I’m about to have the romantic, hormonal, passionate night that I’ve always fantasized about and which I’ll remember for the rest of my life – until I turn into an Eloi and march into the Morlocks’ cave to be killed. And YOU’RE the Morlocks!

I’m a lonely geek who’s suddenly found my soulmate, only to have her snatched away into zombieland just feet away from my embrace. And YOU’RE the zombies!

You get the drift.

Obviously, I’m not the target market for these ads, both because of my tastes in food and because of my age (and probably a half-dozen or more other traits), but jeez louise!! Did NO ONE look at these ads and think, “Wait…maybe…”

Or, worse, did they look at it and think, “Whatever! As long as they spend money at our place!”

Go find a taco truck, or a mom & pop style Mexican place with real food. And hoist a margarita and a burrito to Yvette Mimieux, who passed away at age 80 this afternoon.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Entertainment, Movies, Paul

January 16, 2022 · 23:14

Playing With Cinematic Mode In A Most Meta Way

The iPhone 13 has a built-in video mode called “Cinematic” and there’s an ad running on TV where it’s demonstrated. I hadn’t looked up any instructions, but figured that Apple products are usually pretty intuitive, so I decided on short notice (the ad had just come on TV) to see if my intuitions were correct.

They were.

While recording the video in Cinematic mode, just touch the screen to indicate where you would like to focus. In this video, watch as the focus shifts from the soda can in the foreground, the KC Chiefs hat behind that, and the television showing the Apple iPhone ad in the distance.

This is pretty cool!

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Filed under Paul, Video

January 14, 2022 · 23:51

Wishing

Oh, to be out here someplace in a Goliath-class scout ship, a new system to explore, wondering which of the gas giants or Earth-like worlds we would explore first.

I may be excessively channeling my inner Calvin and Hobbes. Although my Hobbes is a stuffed dolphin, not a tiger, but all the better for exploring those water worlds!

This is not necessarily a bad thing, by any means, by the way.

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