Category Archives: Over the Transom

A Billion Seconds Here, A Billion Seconds There

Posted on by

This evening just after dark, a bright full moon was visible – which has since been clouded over. It’s an apogee moon, which I learned from the ever-useful timeanddate.com. It didn’t look particularly small, but when I saw it, it was still near the horizon.

I also learned from that site that I’m getting fairly close to being 20,000 days old – one of the timeanddate.com calculators will tell you how long it’s been in weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds between two dates, such as your birth and right now. I have a little more than two years to go before that curious milestone. With any luck I’ll make it. Thirty thousand is no sure thing, though.

In my case, I’m also more than 1.6 billion seconds old, or roughly 27.6 million minutes. As the surfers say, tempus fugit, dude.

Quantill’s Graves

Posted on by

Odd discovery for the day: the remains of William Quantrill seem to be buried in two different places. I was looking at the Wiki page devoted to the notorious raider and noticed, without apparent explanation, pictures of two gravestones for the man, one in Ohio, another in Missouri.

I looked into the subject a little further and this article has some explanation of it. Through a series of convoluted acts of skullduggery on the part of his mother and others, parts of Quantrill ended up in two different places, one close to where he grew up, the other close to where he made his name.

Reminds me of the two gravesites for Daniel Boone, but in that case there’s a dispute about where all of his mortal remain are – Kentucky or Missouri. In Quantrill’s case, the two states seem to have divvied up the distinction of having his final resting place.

Calendar Oddities

Posted on by

Snow today, beginning in the morning, finally enough to obscure the grass. At about noon, Lilly asked her device – which has a male-voice version of Siri – Is it going to snow a lot today? Male-Siri said, “It appears to be snowing.” Guess it knows how to look out the window.

On Saturday a cheap 2014 calendar arrived from a company we do scant business with. I like it for its completely eccentric choice of special dates.

It’s got some presidential birthdays, of course. In order: McKinley, FDR, Lincoln, Washington, Jackson, Madison, Jefferson, Grant, Kennedy, J.Q. Adams, Hoover, Benjamin Harrison, Eisenhower, TR, and Wilson. Not a bad selection, but Benjamin Harrison? Well, he did ink the bills for six new states. And… even I have to look up the details of his administration. Maybe the calendar maker is a fan of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

Other calendar oddities include mentioning the first national election (Jan. 7, 1789), Alexander Hamilton’s birthday (Jan. 11, 1757), “Edison’s Incandescent Lamp Patent” (Jan. 27, 1880), Henry Longfellow’s birthday (Feb. 27, 1807), “Peary Discovered the North Pole” (April 6, 1909), “Dewey’s Victory at Manila Bay” (May 1, 1898), Col. Lindbergh’s NY to Paris Flight” (May 21, 1927), “Hawaii Annexed” (July 7, 1898), “Panama Canal Opened” (Aug. 15, 1914), “Monroe Doctrine Announced” (Dec. 2, 1823), “South Pole Discovered” (Dec. 14, 1911), and “Wilbur Wright’s 1st Aeroplane Flight (Dec. 17, 1903).” That’s right, aeroplane. It’s good to be up on to-day’s latest technical marvels.

Standard federal holidays, as well as an assortment of popular days (Ground Hog Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.) and Jewish holidays are noted. V-J Day is noted on Sept. 2, but V-E Day isn’t mentioned. (I learned elsewhere that “Victory Day” on Sept. 2 is actually a state holiday in Rhode Island; see “A Few Interesting Facts…” ) The Wright Bros. (one, anyway) and Lindbergh made the cut, but no space flight of any kind did, manned or unmanned, Soviet or American. You’d think they’d be space for the first Moon landing at least. Hawaii annexed but why not the purchase of Alaska? Longfellow but not, say, Walt Whitman?

Ah, well. We each live according to an eccentric calendar.

Eddies in the Data Stream

Posted on by

Gray, misty day. But not that cold. Not yet. But it will be soon.

And when is the age of individually tailored on line advertising going to arrive? I hear about that, but haven’t seen it much on my computer yet. Over the last few days, for instance, banner ads have been appearing on one of my email accounts to persuade me to attend — well, let’s just say a Vegas concert by a has-been singer I never liked or followed or cared about in any way. I’ve never been to any concert of hers, bought any of her records, or watched her on TV.

This is the best data mining can do? Maybe it’s just an old-fashioned, everybody-gets-to-see-it ad.

On the other hand, I’ve occasionally done comparison shopping for motel rooms, and later seen ads appear on unrelated web sites for those very brands. The thing to do, then, is searches involving sites you have no real interest in, and see what happens. Mix it up some. Guns & Ammo one day, the Socialist Worker the next, and maybe High Times thrown in for grins.

Front-Yard Biomass

Posted on by

December got off to a mild start. Warm enough to spend time outside yesterday raking leaves without complaining about the cold. But I did think about the suburban leaf-removal custom with increasing skepticism.

“When we remove the leaves from our yards, we’re actually interrupting the natural process that allows the return of beneficial nutrients to the soil,” writes one Matt Higgs in the Peterborough Examiner, which is published in Ontario. “When the process is continues on its own, worms, bacteria and a host of other tiny organisms feast on the leaf matter, outputting rich organic material lawns thrive on.”

Ah, my sentiment exactly. But then he goes on to recommend mulching the damn things. Or worse (in terms of effort), composting. The goal here is to rationalize doing nothing, and those suggestions don’t help.

In the end, we compromised. “We” because I had Lilly help me. “Compromise,” because we did a crummy job. The front lawn clearly isn’t carpeted with leaves any more, but there’s a sizable residue.

Showing Unwanted Guests the Door

Posted on by

Gray and then more rain today, though not as intense as the storm of a few days ago. In fact I didn’t realize it was raining until I opened the back door to let the dog out late in the evening. Such is the isolation from the elements possible when you’re at your keyboard, the shades are closed, and various other electronic noisemakers are on in other parts of the house.

This is a good collection of sketches. I hadn’t seen some of them in many years, especially the Dirty Fork sketch. But I can’t take it seriously as a “Best of” Monty Python list if it leaves out the Spanish Inquisition and Spam.

Today’s main achievement was destroying a vexatious program that somehow or other installed itself recently on the machine I use to make my living — a program that apparently inserts ad hyperlinks on various words on various web sites I visit (including BTST). That by itself wasn’t so bad, but in the last day or two, the thing morphed into a monster, opening pages when I didn’t want them opened and (I figured out later) slowing the machine down intolerably.

Who, exactly, believes this kind of shenanigan is going to lead to higher sales of anything? Or is it simply an automated way of running up clickthrough totals? I don’t care, I’m just glad it’s gone.

Ugly Sweater

Posted on by

Wicked winds blew threw the Midwest today. Up here in metro Chicago, we only got strong winds and heavy rains for a while, plus unusually warm air. It was like a spring storm. To the south of here, some destruction — like spring tornado season.

Dressing up the dog wasn’t my idea. Dogs should be as naked as they were in the Garden of Eden, except for collars (surely Adam and Eve had a dog). Lilly spotted this dog sweater at some big box retailer recently, and now we have it. The dog’s only worn it once so far.

The label says it’s an Ugly Sweater brand pet costume, “for pets only,” made in China. The dog is wearing size M, for dogs up to 50 lbs. Fits most breeds, it says, including cocker spaniels, border collies, beagles, French bulldogs, and standard schnauzers. And, it seems, lab-basset mixes.

Lights No, Flags Yes

Posted on by

While driving along this evening I saw two houses with Christmas lights. Christmas lights all aglow here in mid-November. No, no, no. I can understand putting up the lights during the relatively warm days of November – even though it’s been cold lately – but lighting them? Let November be November, not some run-up to December.

Another thing I saw in the neighborhood: a flagpole flying the Hawaiian state flag, right under the U.S. flag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Hawaiian flag around here before. It’s one of the cooler state flags, with its Union Jack canton and red, white and blue stripes supposedly symbolizing the major islands. I wonder what the occasion is; maybe the homeowners were there recently, and brought it back as a souvenir.

I also wonder whether they’ll fly the flag on Hawaiian holidays. According to the always interesting Flags of the World web site, whose Hawaii page includes such details as an 1896 variation on the flag, state occasions on which to fly the flag include Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole Day and King Kamehameha I Day, March 26 and June 11, respectively. Also, the third Friday in August is Statehood Day.

And, of course, not everyone is happy about the Hawaiian flag, even though it was used by the independent kingdom in the 19th century.

Thursday Bits

Posted on by

In the mid-afternoon, a call center employee called me, pitching an extended service plan for a major appliance I bought about a year ago. That doesn’t count as violating the do-not-call list, I suppose, because of some verbiage in the sales agreement. She was about 15 seconds into her pitch when I offered up a curt “no thanks” and hung up.

My reasoning about most service plans and extended warranties and so on is fairly simple. If it were to my benefit, the company wouldn’t be offering it. The odds are I’d pay them to do nothing, and they know it. I know it too.

I saw about 20 minutes of Geronimo the other day – the latest in a long line of movies I’ve seen bits and pieces of. It’s vintage 1962, so while the Indians were portrayed sympathetically, the title character wasn’t actually played by an Indian. I recognized him at once: Chuck Connors.

His blue eyes weren’t the only Hollywood stretchers in the movie. In 1886, when the story takes place, Geronimo was already in his late 50s. Connors was about 40, and a buff 40 at that. The Apache warrior’s wife was played by an Indian, however. An actress born in Bombay.

Never mind. One of the U.S. cavalry officers looked awfully familiar. The one who wanted to let Geronimo surrender, rather than blow him up with artillery, as his commander seemed eager to do. Who? I thought for a minute. Adam West. A pre-Batman Adam West.

Here’s a lesser-known Geronimo story: as an old man at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

I had reason to be out briefly at about 11 p.m. tonight, under a near-cold, clear sky. I had to look for him and he was there, off in the southeast, large and rising over the horizon: Orion. Harbinger of winter in these parts. So are the chill in the air and the increasingly bare trees, but it’s good to have celestial cues, too.

Mommy SEO! Our Limited Supply is Very Nearly Gone

Posted on by

More rain through the night. It’s a good to be in a dry bed, drifting off to sleep, at times like that. The day was classic November gray.

The following arrived in the in box of an email system one of my clients lets me use. I dislike getting anything in that in box not related to the work I do for them, because the incoming volume’s high and it’s all too easy to lose track of something useful. So this is pretty much the definition of useless clutter, as far as I’m concerned:

I specialize in driving new traffic through Google+1 public backlinks and social network activity. I am a Mommy Blogger with a large Mommy Blogger network. If you have a website or product that fits well with Mommy Bloggers I can drive Mommy Blogger traffic your way in mass.

I would love to work with you and prove the results firsthand. To showcase my work I am glad to offer a one time [sic] package of 20 Google+1 backlinks or 100 new Facebook Likes to a website of your choice FREE of charge. You can visit my Mommy Blogger SEO website here…

Most of the men who went off to the goldfields in California or the Yukon or Australia or wherever didn’t make much, if any, money. The fellow who got rich sold them equipment and provisions.