Category: analog

Buddhism has been a religion and philosophy open to change and modification. I believe it’s one of its real strengths. Adaptable, malleable and able to reach people on their own terms. It’s one of the things that made me become a Buddhist. And every once in a while, I am reminded of just how open to modernization Buddhism truly is. And this new prayer wheel technology is just too cool. Amazing. I’ll take ten of them, please.

My sister and her family arrive today for a weekend visit. So a housecleaning was in order. This being summer, the cats are, of course, shedding. With a few recent 100F-plus days, I think the process has sped up. A lot. The amount of cat hair I removed from the house would easily qualify as a third cat. The sheer amount was really something. Both impressive, depressing and icky. Bye bye third kitty.

So I stopped by Wells Fargo today to ask them to remove me from all their mailing lists (I still get “As a selected account holder..” mail, even though I closed all my accounts there more than a month ago). While waiting to be helped and perusing the product brochures, I was shocked by something I saw.

Wells Fargo probably decided to try to accentuate a multicultural corporate image. Nothing wrong with that on face value, but be careful, people.

On a brochure for their “Prime Rewards Program” is a cover photo of three seated Buddha statues. Doesn’t strike you as a big deal? How would you feel about a picture of a crucified Christ being used to sell credit card bonus programs? As an active Theravada Buddhist, my reaction was much the same a Christian’s might be to seeing Jesus used to hawk goods.

Goodness, people. How did this ever get past review, never mind into the bank branches? Simply appalling.

Especially so as the product is distinctly contrary to Buddhist ideals. “Have more stuff! Get more things! Become attached to self and property!” Great.

The Japanese maple that was pollarded to the point of being unrecoverable has finally been terminated, and its successor is taking root in a pot for spring planting.

Last fall Kristine asked a guy that does landscaping at VGTI (where she works) to come by and trim back some shrubs near our windows and a Japanese maple that was beautiful, but had a few branches that overhung the driveway that needed tending. The deal was he would be here at 2pm, and she’d show him around.

She ran some errands, got home just before two to find the Japanese maple gone. No exaggeration. It now stood about six feet from the ground and had no leaf-bearing branches left. Just trunks. Pollarded to death. Argh.

So this week, hearing tree work in the neighborhood, I got the remaining trunk brought down. Saved enough for a Yule log, and the tripartite lower stump for a table base. They’re curing on the patio. Enough of the maple.

The replacement is here; a lovely Ginkgo biloba “Saratoga” clone. It’s about a meter high, and just today I got it into a very large container to encourage rootball development and growth. It is, of course, male, as the female ginkgo produces a smelly, mushy fruit. I love ginkgos, and am thrilled to have a chance to start one off. The Saratoga variant apparently is not as tall as the standard ginkgo, which is perfect for this spot next to the driveway.

We’re working on adding stump-removing chemicals to the exposed stump of the maple. In a few months it should be ready to be covered for the winter, saturated, and the ginkgo set about four feet from the old site come spring. At which point an English walnut I have will go into that big container as an ornamental.

I’m Tom Bombadil.

Years ago I worked for the Group Actuarial unit at CIGNA. Actuaries are the people that determine rates and risk. They’re big players in insurance, and becoming a full actuary instantly makes you an officer of the company at most places. Needless to say, I am not an actuary; I supported their efforts with my systems skills. I got to speaking about actuaries with an IRC chum today. If you want to know what distinguishes actuaries from statisticians in my mind, read on …

Actuaries use statistics. Actuaries need to be good statisticians. But there’s a “real world” aspect to actuarial science. It looks something like this:

ai: I wanted to be an actuary for a while.

ai: I really like statistics a lot.

strex[a] considers what he should do to be “productive” with the rest of the day

ai strex[a]: I strongly recommmend masturbation.

mneptok: and statistics.

mneptok: “4 out of 5 cumshots missed my eye”

mneptok: “7 of 10 were not blanks.”

mneptok: now

mneptok: this is where we separate statistics from actuarial work

mneptok: statistics would say that if 1 of 5 cumshots hit the eye, and 3 of 10 were blanks, that statistically eventually you would get a blank that hit you in the eye.

mneptok: actuaries know better.

I simply do not understand what is going on with the lack of ability of many adults to comprehend simple, clear information. A posting I made on Craig’s List leads to this rant.

Need a freezer? We’re getting rid of one that we got with the house. Here’s the listing on Craig’s List and in case that disappears, here’s the text:

FREE Freezer and Puzzle!
It’s a stand-up full sized (i.e. “refrigerator sized”) Manitowoc freezer for FREE! You haul it.
We inherited this item when we bought the house. Looks to be in good condition, but the interior needs a cleansing. This being the case, we haven’t plugged it in.
Comes with free puzzle, “Does this freezer work or not?” Won’t you find it in your heart to give this nice unit a home?
this is in or around Beaverton, OR

Best e-mail thus far:

Do you have a picture or can you send me one pls.

A large and ominous bees’ nest and I went head-to-head Monday. I am glad to report that I am still here, and the bees are not.

Last week Kristine spotted a large and ominous bees’ nest hanging right outside our front door. Like, right outside. We have some jasmine on a trellis beside the front door, and some wasp-y things had made their papery residence there.

If I was well versed in my apiology I could tell you what these things were. But my gut tells me honey bees don’t build paper. These looked like yellowjackets, and had the standard wasp wings. And the nest was about as big as a cantaloupe. Gotta be a couple of hundred bees in there. Two feet from your head as you enter our door. They had to go.

This is one of those occasions where I find myself setting aside my Buddhist inclinations in the pursuit of practicality. Maybe if they had been honey bees I would have made a half attempt to find an interested apiary. Not so for wasps.

I grabbed my 20 year old (and 20 years unused) lacrosse stick and stood in the screen door propping it open with my foot. I slowly introduced the head of the lacrosse stick above the nest. Once it was overhead, I swooped down and scooped as much of that diabolical cantaloupe into the head, quickly flicking downwards and pulling myself and my lacrosse stick inside-the-house-wards. There was a great buzzing. A cloud of angry, now 85% homeless bees swarmed around what remained of their once ominous paperloupe. I watched them for a time, chortling to myself as the odd bee or five bounced impotently off the screen on the door.

I then hurried around to the back door, went around to the front of the house where the garden hose is attached; a dozen feet or so from the enraged swarm. As I loosed the directed jet of nozzled water upon them, I thanked Goddarwin for the opposable thumb as opposed to the venomous sting.

I had to hose and then chemical the site a couple more times before the remaining bees either got the message or were sent to their reward. Quite persistent, poor doomed things.

Note for future incarnations. If you are small and venomous, avoid clustering around the large, intelligent creatures. It freaks them out.

Best news headline of the week:

Globe caught with pants down: Paper duped into running porn photos. … Clipping from a Boston Globe story accompanied by staged, hard-core porno shots.

I’ll bet Jayson Blair could make up a great story about how this happened.

It’s been my intention to try to steer clear of political issues here. If you know me personally, you know my politics. If you don’t, you’re probably not that interested. I don’t find myself surfing the web in search of the random political rants of unknown individuals. That having been said, I’m going to deviate, slightly, from this unwritten rule today.

If you’ve drawn breath in North America any time in the last three decades, you’ve heard of Doonesbury. The comic strip Garry Trudeau started at Yale is consistently both anti-establishment and humorous.

Most of the time. Sometimes Mr. Trudeau gets a bit more serious, as he did this week in a strip where longtime regular BD gets seriously wounded in Iraq.

This is, to my mind, poor form. Not because I’m one of those people that thinks citizens must blindly or even happily obey the whims of a current administration. Not because of my personal politics, or because I’m directly involved with the conflict. My beef is that Doonesbury is a comic strip. While the comic/cartoon medium certainly can create serious, thought-provoking art (check your newspaper’s editorial cartoons), Doonesbury isn’t usually in the serious genre. It’s widely circulated as entertainment and people read it for an irreverant, offbeat, humorous look at issues.

This subject stirred up some response on the MFI Forums this week, you can read the meat of my objection there. Whether or not you think the war is a good idea or bad idea, righteous or wrong, informed or misguided, Mr. Trudeau, you are a public figure that writes humor. The family of a KIA soldier may pick up the newspaper after hearing the grim news and turn to the funnies for some distraction. How will they feel? Did you think about that possibility? If you want to make these kind of statements (and by God I’ll defend your right to do so), I think you should demand your strip be run in the editorial section. You can’t yell “FIRE!” in a theater, and I think that if you want to be humane, you can’t yell “PURPOSELESS DEATH!” on the funny pages.

As they say, “Hate the game, not the player.” A little nod to the individual as you deride the situation into which they are placed is the truly humane thing to do.

This is my kamma this week. Thus far.

Yesterday (a Monday, naturally) I awoke to what I thought would be a normal day in my humdrum unemployed life. I decided to clean the birdcage, which had developed one of Squeeps’ distinctive green poop-piles. Lovely.

This birdcage is not what one might call sturdy. Since I bought it six months ago I have had to replace cheap tabs with twist ties. These are the tabs that hold the whole thing together. And I found myself having to discipline the bird not to gnaw at these new twist tie “toys.” The bottom plastic pan just fell out once while I was carrying the cage by the top handles, denting the newly restored hardwood floors. Grr.

So as I’m lifting the cage down, it swings, bumps against my knee in a firm, but not “bending over with pain oh God my knee oh the agony” sort of way. But the bars of the cage bent, two more connector tabs broke and steam came out of my ears because it hadn’t hit that hard. Made worse when I tried to bend one of the bent bars that the bird could have pushed his head through and it broke. Augh!

Squeeps’ travel cage is very well built, a product of Quality Cage Company here in Portland. So I called them up, wanting a cage that would fit the existing base. No way to tell on the phone, of course, so off I went to far eastern Portland with the caster-wheeled base. They have a lovely 20″x20″ cage, which I purchased but which would not fit in my car. Back home. Kristine leaves virii and microbes cooking at work and we drive back and get the cage. Squeeps loves it, there is much rejoicing and I can heartily recommend you buy a cage built by Quality Cage. This thing is a tank, and very livable.

Onto doing four loads of laundry, barbecueing chicken for dinner, completing an Apache 2 install, finishing the yard cleanup and getting the lawn recycling to the curb as well as 50 pounds of household trash. Yay, that’s a lovely kammic kick for a Monday.

This morning I awake, make coffee and hit the garage for a smoke and a call to Scot Hacker. Hey! There are the six lawn and leaf sized bags of returnable bottles and cans we keep moving as we need to work and unpack. They’ve been staring at us for months, but they never leave. I have contemplated just grabbing someone that’s asking for change at one of the highway entrances, but that’s creepy. Some guy pulling up in his car and saying, “Oh, yeah, I got money. Get in and …” No thanks.

I finish the smoke and phone and head back inside. Start an e-mail and almost immediately the doorbell rings. A twenthirty gal is standing there, and asks if I would be able to help her sister get her electricity turned back on in any way. Oh heck yeah, I could. Jam myself, this lady and six lawn and leaf sized bags of returnable bottles and cans into my car and drive the 2 blocks to Winco. Perfect.

Here’s sincerely hoping someone gets their power turned on, that maybe I helped in some way and a little nod from me to the Forces That Be saying, “I got that one.”