Riders on the Storm

Well, the weather refuses to stop being a topic of discussion. There may be various traits defining Midwesterners, but talking about the weather has to be a dominant one.  Why? Probably because we get all seasons here – sometimes in the same day.

Driving home Saturday night was quite interesting since it was in a torrential downpour the likes of which I’d never driven in before. I thought the storm in Nova Scotia I drove in back in 2005 was impressive, but this topped it. Visibility was blizzard like with ten feet being the norm from Hokah to Yucatan. At first, I thought I’d gotten myself into hail, but it turned out the rain drops were simply huge. In the reflected glow of the headlights they looked like luminous hailstones. Thankfully, there were not or the car would be a mass of dents right now.

The drive also was the first time I’d experienced the Subaru Outback hydroplaning on all four wheels. With it being such a reliable mountain goat and with new tires, it was surprising. Good thing I’ve had a little experience steering a boat.

The current forecast is for heavy rains and potentially severe weather today and tomorrow. Yay. Like the garden needs to be more saturated than it already is. We are going to need a monster truck to navigate in it at this rate.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to edit the screen captures from Citizen Kane between storms today. It’ll be an even bigger task to weed them out, since I took far too many for a review!

Health 6-20-2011

Another Monday where I’m slow moving because the weekend takes it all out of me. But it was a good weekend, so I’m willing to pay the piper.  Pain index was high at 7 again, better today. I’d say I’m at 4-5 so far. Lower back is the main culprit but a slight headache is present. 

Being a human barometer, I could tell the weather was going to be bad today.

Them Changes

The old layout was looking dated and was always meant as a stop gap, but ended up never being changed. So looking around at Blogger’s templates, I realized they’d changed completely. Time to change things, methinks.

This is also a stop gap template and I may create a new background from my own photos if I find something that will work.  My concern is keeping the bandwidth down to speed loading. While dialup may be all but gone, I still believe in optimizing! This new background for the text will be easier on the eyes as well, another concern.

If I could figure out a way to make an easy on the eyes scheme with one of these pictures as a background, I would:

It is hard to beat the local scenery in Houston County. Since I took these, I have the larger originals that I can edit to the size needed.

But I doubt I’ll get around to it.

Health 6-17-2011

Since I’m trying to keep some kind of record of my health, I decided on a title format for it. Not remotely creative, but highly practical.

Been having a large increase in lower back pain dating about a week before the shingles outbreak. What’s bad about it is that it is stretching down the legs and is clearly a pinched nerve problem. Pain levels in general are still much higher since the outbreak with headaches becoming an almost daily occurrence.

Managed to do a 2.5 mile walk today – it has been a long time. Went better than expected, but barely dragged myself home once I hit the hill back. It took me over half an hour to stop shaking, which is worse than usual.

Pain levels are ranging from 5 to 7 out of 10 since the shingles. It looks like I need to rededicate myself to a daily meditation routine rather than a semi-regular one. Weather has not helped with storm systems bothering my back and joints.

An Era of No Trust or Too Much Trust?

I find myself pondering on how we live in an increasingly confusing time for most people. With trust in governments foundering world wide and growing here in the United States, uncertainty in the future is increasing the distrust of authorities. Well, that and their corrupt actions with Weiner being only the latest public figure to go down in flames. But on the other hand, there is still too much trust in the wildest of conspiracy theories and even more insidious to my thinking, the so called “experts” on any given subject.

The inability to sort fact from fiction has become something of a hallmark of our entertainment driven culture. Reality television is often very scripted (often at a pro wrestling level of sophistication) for one example. Hollywood has always distorted history in favor of drama and that has continued unabated in its junior sibling, television. 

Watching Citizen Kane and the accompanying documentary, talking to some friends about the new Area 51 book, and reading various stories in newspapers that spin facts into fiction has me thinking hard about people’s ability to discriminate what really is going on. I had hoped the worldwide Web would make it easier to find out the truth about things and it has to a very limited degree. With arm chair and accredited experts willing to make stories up out of whole cloth and/or lie to promote an agenda, there are far too many unsubstantiated “facts” available on the Internet. To counter this, it takes skill and an understanding of logic to sort out what is factual versus what is not. That’s a big problem.

Most people don’t make or have the time to dig deeply into a subject even if they knew how to. Human tendency is to leave work to others and then listen to an expert in the field. This is easier and far more convenient than jumping into trying to understand an unfamiliar subject. Add in the catastrophic failure that is our public education system that churns out illiterates from our high schools and colleges when we desperately need critical thinkers… Ugh.

Meanwhile, it is a big assumption to trust that an expert really does know what he is talking about in the first place. We have a lot of theoreticians espousing theories as proven facts or science all over the media. That’s how we get specious junk science such as anthropogenic global warming, mercury in vaccinations causing autism, and Keynesian financial stimulus packages. Note that all three have had proponents with a financial interest in their theory being accepted.

On a lesser, but still disturbing level are conspiracy theories that have gained considerably traction. Examples include Obama not being born in Hawaii, Trig Palin being Bristol’s child, the CIA being behind JFK’s assassination, AIDS being created by the US to wipe out Africans, and any number of chain emails that end up in your inbox. It seems like there is rarely a week that goes by that I don’t see some easily disproved thing in an email. But woe be unto you who try to counter with the truth!

The more dramatic the lie, the more easily it seems to be believed. And once that lie is believed, the harder it is to convince someone of the facts. I know a lot of good people who believe things that are completely untrue and get very upset when informed otherwise. Not upset at being deceived, but at me for challenging things. I admit that I’m burned out on trying to straighten things out and don’t try to as much as I once did.

So people are putting a lot of trust into untrustworthy things even as their trust of institutions dwindle. It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a law of conservation of trust, where trust lost in one thing has to be transferred to another. We are choosing to trust in things we shouldn’t as a reaction to having our trust in institutions broken.

One thing is for certain, I’m seeing a lot of fear in people’s eyes these days and it really shows up when you start bringing up facts. It may simply be that people are running away from reality.  With a culture mired in perpetual adolescence, I really shouldn’t be surprised by this. So the moral of the story is that we need to be more skeptical and really devote attention to the things that matter. We have entered a time where running away may not be an option for much longer.

In Which I Write About Non-Disastrous Weather

It is nice to talk about the weather and not be complaining. The sun is shining and it is around 65 F out as I type this out.  Or more accurately, typo this out – thank you Windows Live Writer’s spellchecker. A week ago we were suffering from high 90’s and hit 100 on Tuesday with humidity to match.  Today is supposed to hit 75 F with 51% humidity which makes it nearly an ideal day, especially since it isn’t raining.  I’ve had enough rain this year to make me think I live in Seattle.

Snooky, our resident white cat, is wanting me to hold her again. This happens many times a day and she can get quite persistent about. The suggestion to go play outside was ignored, so I’m ignoring her in return.

But back to the weather! It has been a strange year with spring barely making an appearance and the transition to summer being abrupt. So it is nice to have temperatures as low as we are having at the moment. Well, nice for humans, not so nice for plants in the garden or crops in the field.  We hit 48 F for a low yesterday and are seeing lows in the 50’s.

From what I’ve been reading, wheat and corn crops are in trouble this year, so expect shortages and price increases. The wet and low temperatures have set back planting badly in the Midwest, while drought and flooding down south are adding to the woes. Not quite disastrous, but worrisome nonetheless.

Last year, I didn’t get to enjoy summer very much thanks to my health and I’d hoped for a better year in getting outside. So far that hasn’t worked out between health and rain. On good days it rains, on bad days it is sunny out and it seems I can’t win. I am turning into a literally whiter shade of pale.

At least the mild temperatures will allow some more time in painting miniatures and models upstairs in the un-air conditioned work room!

Misleading Ads and Dayton’s Shadow PAC

Starting this week, I’ve been getting targeted ads in several places I visit on the Net.  They all say “Tell Sen. Jeremy Miller to stand up for the middle class.”  Next to the white text on a somber black background is a poorly dithered grayscale portrait shot of Jeremy with a “Click to learn more.”

Click on it and it takes you to a dishonest video attacking Senator Miller and extolling our rather strange governor’s plan -- which isn’t a balanced budget but instead features massive spending increases.  It is fascinating seeing a rookie Republican State Senator come under attack this way. To me, it shows he is doing a good job at being fiscally responsible in a very bad economic situation. That’s more than I can say about Governor Dayton as he’d rather have a shutdown than not pander to the special interests that got him elected.

This soak the rich campaign shows how utterly out of touch the socialist Democratic Party people have become. You will never hear someone talk about how a poor man gave them their job… Wait, there is one way for that to be true. Overtax and over spend and pretty soon everyone will be poor except the politicians and unionized government workers.  Technically, the public is supposed to be the employer, right? So if we are all poor… Well you get the picture.

Funny how the Alliance for a Better Minnesota is a union funded PAC out to help Mark Dayton. Are they looking out for the best interest of the people of Minnesota or their own pocket books? The answer is pretty clear.

Senator Miller is standing for the middle class, the people who have to balance their budgets and don’t have infinite credit to borrow from.

Comic Books and Economic Realities

Back in high school, I was a serious collector of comic books. Financial problems for the family compelled me to sell off my collection for a pittance in 1987 and that always haunted me.  But after reading this article at The Weekly Standard, I don’t feel so bad now.

It is a very good article on the perils of speculation and what happens when the bubble bursts. The lessons of it apply to many types of industries and even government programs.  Loose credit is a dangerous thing when it artificially boosts business with nothing concrete to back it up. 

The money quote of the article:

As painful as it was for some of us, the comic-book bubble teaches two important lessons. First, bubble-mania is not always the fault of buyers and sellers. Sometimes it’s caused by intermediaries. Second, sometimes markets don’t “come back.” People who owned blue-chip comics took a hit in 1993. People who owned modern-era comics were wiped out, the value of their collections never to return.

That’s something to keep in mind. The same thing happened to baseball card collectors around the same time period. As mentioned, housing may see the same results and that will take a lot of banks down – not to mention people’s futures. Go read the whole article.

Oh and I had that #1 issue of The New Teen Titans too.

The Last Airbender

or How to Completely Screw Up an Adaptation

Watched The Last Airbender, the live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series, last night on DVD.  If I felt flippant, I’d say I was recovering from the trauma.  But the truth is that the movie isn’t just bad, it is also utterly boring.

Listing the cons first:

The casting was terrible and the actors looked like they had no clue as to what they were doing in the movie. Wooden doesn’t begin to cover it with only the actor playing Soka even looking like he was trying. But I’m not going to blame the cast for it.

The directing by M. Night Shyamalan was absolutely terrible. Not only did he fail to get the best out of the actors, the camera shots ranged from pedestrian to very bad while the pacing was glacial. Which was an amazing feat given how much stuff was shoved into the film.

The fights were terrible and slow. Not just slow motion bits, but the actual fights took forever for each move to be executed.  The bending took way too many moves to make an element “bend.”  One scene in particular typifies how ludicrous it got:  a group of Earth Benders do an elaborate series of moves that takes a small eternity to make one small rock the size of a melon fly through the air. Oy…

The effects were okay, but suffered from “look at me, I’m in 3D!” syndrome.

The ending was 180 degrees from Aang’s emotional state in the original material. Instead of being utterly enraged, out of control and becoming an object of terror, he was made a pure serene pacifist. But that also reflects the lack of lessons learned that made the series so endearing.

That leads to the lack of character development in the movie. Avatar was heavy on character development and well defined personalities, neither of which are present in the movie.  Aang gets the worst of it. He was a stubbornly irresponsible kid always looking to have fun and constantly laughing in Book 1: Water. Here he is presented as a guilt ridden and morose boy. When you botch the main character, you blow the whole concept.

Finally, there was no sense of adventure or fun. Part of the appeal of the cartoon series was exploration and discovery. There was none of that in this as it was a race from plot point to plot point, often with dull voice over narration. How the movie pulled off being shallow and too serious is something I can’t quite comprehend.

The Pros:

None.

I’m going to stress again that I don’t hold the cast responsible. With a better script and director, this could have been something special. Instead it is a boring mess that was tedious to sit through. The movie bombed at the box office and deserved to.

M. Night Shyamalan’s career has to be viewed as a cautionary tale. I can’t recall another director hit such heights only to completely fall apart as a story teller. It is hard to believe the same man directed The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs.

The Last Airbender is not even worth renting to make fun of. Go watch the television series for a real treat.

This Is Tuesday, Isn’t It?

When I got up, I could have sworn it was Wednesday, the hardest day of the week to spell.

It is going to be blazingly hot and humid, so I’ll be working on reviews for the blog.  Fractale Episode 7 will most likely be finished today, while Citizen Kane is on hold until I watch the documentary on Disc 2.  Then I’ll get on the half a year delayed TRON: Legacy review. At least I’ll be able to include screen captures now.

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After being frustrated with my Ruger P94 being inaccurate, I’m going to tinker with it a bit.  Hogue finger groove grips are on their way, but I suspect the sights are off since I’ve seen reports of the exact same problems I’m having. Currently, I have to place the front sight dot on top of the rear dots in a pyramid layout to hit anywhere near what I’m aiming for.  While there are aftermarket adjustable sights for the pistol, the goal is the cheapest out to fix the problem.

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The deer ticks are out in force this year.  I’ve pulled at least twenty off of our white cat, Snooky. She is also shedding at a rate I’ve never seen a cat do before.  Of course, I would have to be wearing an old black T-shirt today.

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I’ve rejoined Netflix after two years of absence. With the current focus by the company being on streaming, to get DVD’s mailed added two dollars to the subscription. We only have a 1MB connection at the moment, so streaming looked like a poor option.  But being adventurous, I tried the streaming on a variety of movies to gauge performance.  The chief target is the low resolution of our old pre-digital television set.

First was an animated movie, Batman: Under the Red Hood.  I watched it on my PC and Netflix defaults to 720P in its attempts to stream.  Blocky to extremely blocky. Yep, time to check out the TV performance. It was entertaining, but nothing special and soon forgotten.

For a modern effects laden movie, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was selected.  Slightly better than VHS levels of quality were obtained, but with blocking becoming readily apparent during the more complex scenes.  Good movie, by the way – that surprised me.

Godzilla Raids Again, the second movie featuring the radioactive reptile, was chosen to represent older black and white films.  Performance was good enough, even if the movie was awful.  I assume this was the cut from the United States as it had all the monster scenes sped up to look like cat fights.

UHF was a test of a relatively normal movie (technically; it is insane otherwise).  Performance was okay with occasional blocking.  Still a lot of fun after all these years.

Finally, Brigham Young (1940).  An old school classic Daryl Zanuck production, it did just fine.  The movie itself was surprisingly good, if filled with historical inaccuracies and being very Hollywood. The sub focus on the United Order made it feel like a National Recovery Act film, but the acting was top notch and the script well done.  I may review this in depth in the future.

Final analysis:

Streaming to the PC is terrible at 1MB.

Streaming to the TV is much better.

Modern effects extravaganza’s and anything with really complicated imagery is going to perform poorly.

B&W movies of yesteryear work great.

Netflix streaming has better potential, but Hulu’s is superior for a lower speed connection.

We’ll be primarily using the DVD through mail option.

While I’d love to have a faster connection, it isn’t financially viable at the time.  I think 2MB would be adequate to the old TV set, but 3MB would be needed to the PC.

All I Have to Say on Rep. Weiner

Looks like the House will have more to say.

Pic and idea conveniently, if not shamelessly stolen from Ace of Spades.

Health and Attitude

I’m missing church for the second Sunday in a row and am not pleased with that.  Having lived with chronic illness for so long, the pain and discomfort bother me far less than the inability to do something I enjoy. For me, church isn’t a chore or a bore, but a place to get spiritually recharged by the Spirit and have a lot of fun.

Fun, you wonder?  Yes, I have fun at church. I love discussing the scriptures and practical principles of the gospel.  While there are a lot of people I’m fond of there, that and feeling the Holy Ghost are the main reasons why I go. I’m something of a purist when it comes to faith, so I do not mean to belittle my fellow Latter-day Saints – enjoying their company is a wonderful experience in its own right.

Heh, I wanted to write about how bad health doesn’t have to equal a bad attitude and I got sidetracked. It is a Sabbath day after all and still has my focus on God. Looks like I’ll be listening to conference talks, audio versions of the scriptures, and hymns here at home today.

But back on topic, or at least finally starting the topic!

I’ve felt physically terrible this week, more so than the usual thanks to the shingles flare up and aftermath. A lot of things I wanted to get done couldn’t get done.  So did I have a bad week?

The answer is no, not really.

Some people might think that strange and I admit it amuses me intellectually that there can be such a divorce between emotional and physical health.  Our current pop psychology influenced culture is so focused on victimhood and our medical culture on pushing off real ailments as being mental disorders that it has become an alien concept. Having had CFS for over twenty years now, I long ago recognized that I could enjoy things and be happy without feeling good physically. Thankfully, I listened to the old saying about taking pleasure in the simple things in life and took it to heart.

I do have my bad days like everyone else and loneliness is ever a challenge for those who are disabled by illness. But it doesn’t take away my capacity to enjoy things or appreciate how beautiful the world is. Once you allow yourself to feel the good on a regular basis it does wonders for your life.  When my life was first derailed by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I can safely say I didn’t see it that way. Anger, sadness, and bitterness dominated my soul.  But I’m a problem solver by nature and while I could never “solve” the illness, I did come to an understanding of what I could control.

That would be my attitude. Attitude matters in every facet of life and a bad attitude makes for a miserably difficult life. A good attitude makes for a happier, if still challenging, life. Even pain can be reduced by distracting yourself from it and there are good things that can do that. Helping others, reading something that makes you think, watching a movie that makes you feel good, exercising faith in God, and the simple joy of communicating with others for fun are all examples of things that are positive distractions.  There are many more.

At the moment I’m typing this, I hurt a lot through out my physical form. My body is being temperamental from my sinuses to my bowels and the itching isn’t quite gone from the shingles outbreak that has faded. I can’t go to church, which I enjoy so much. But I’m in a good mood.

Little things this week added up to having a good week for me even as I was frustrated by health induced limitations. While a tough month financially, I got through it and actually had discretionary funds for some bargains. My finances have improved enough I can afford to subscribe to Netflix again, get work gloves for when I have moments of physical ability to trim trees and bushes (rare, but I enjoy them), and obtain some used books I wanted badly. I even managed to get out and do some home teaching, get seeds for the garden, and groceries. My efforts to start writing again have born some fruit as I’m finding it easier to write blog posts. All are little things in life.

Gratitude.  That’s what is needed for a good attitude.

There is a LDS hymn, Count Your Blessings, that goes:

When upon life’s billows your are tempest tossed,

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,

Count your many blessings; name them one by one,

And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

To survive the difficulties of life, you need to be grateful for the good things in it you have. That may not be easy to do. In fact, I’ve found it takes active effort to recognize them.

Are you ever burdened with a load of care?

Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?

Count your many blessings; ev’ry doubt will fly,

And you will be singing as the days go by.

I can testify to the benefits of appreciating the little things in life. While I may not be getting any of the big things in life, a lot of little things do add up to something greater. Sadly, I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, so I’m not singing my way through the days. But I can do other things depending on how much energy I have on a given day – and choose to do those things. They carry over into the days I can’t.

In the end, I’ve chosen not to allow my health to keep me down. It is an active choice using my God given agency to take action (yes, I’m listening to Elder Robert D. Hales talk from October) by being grateful for and attentive to the little blessings in life. I am grateful to the Lord for what I have received.

I didn’t expect to give a testimony in this post, but it is fast and testimony in sacrament meeting on the first Sunday of each month. During these special services, members are encouraged to take the pulpit and give their testimony, or expression of faith. So I suppose it was something I was supposed to do even if I couldn’t make it to church.

When Too Many Rules & Regulations Kill

This is obscene.  Watching someone die for an hour because you won’t violate the workplace rules is morally and ethically wrong.  People will say he was killing himself so it didn’t matter, but the guy chose one of the slowest and easiest stopped methods he could. If that wasn’t a desperate cry for help, I don’t know what is. Oh and it was shallow water to boot.

I can’t help but think union rules were involved in the formulation of the regulations, given that this is San Francisco. The firefighters who were on scene are subscum. Wait, I take this back. That’s an insult to the lower varieties of scum. Their failure to act was truly evil.

This is also an object lesson of why one shouldn’t put faith in their government to save them or do the right thing. Sadly, the body was recovered by a civilian who swam out.  That says a lot about the direction the country is going, especially if you look to California as a model for the future.

Judging the Judge

Not talking about politics, but about the Taurus Judge handgun.  The idea of creating a short revolver that fired .410 shells for self defense sounded appealing when I first read about it, but the initial testing results I found on the Internet were not impressive.  To be effective, you needed to fire .45 long Colt out of it, not the shells and that kind of removed the reason for the firearm’s existence.  But it is a popular firearm and has branched out into carbine form lately.  Now specialty shells are being made for it and I’d hoped it would live up to its potential.

So Box of Truth revisited the Judge recently for further testing with a 3” barrel and the new rounds.  You can check out the results for yourself.  Me, I wasn’t impressed.  Maybe there is no potential to live up to after all.  For that size of a hand cannon, there should be more penetration.

I’ll stick to my .40 S&W Ruger P94, even if it need some work on its sights.