I Know What She Means

Frozen Bozos in Europe

Dara and I have been vowing to do more getaways, but with some of the traveling I'm doing, we're trying to see how mixed business and pleasure trips work. I am focused on work when working, to the point that if I stay home and work, Dara would just as soon I be at the office instead. Even with the last trip to Florida before my business trip, the weight of the upcoming work hung over me like a cloud. So, we're trying it the other way around this time. I have a set of meetings next week in Amsterdam, followed by Copenhagen and then Geneva. Dara and I are going together to Amsterdam on Monday. I am taking off to Copenhagen on Thursday, while she continues the tourist scene there and then meets me in Geneva on Friday. At that point, work is supposed to be done for a week! It's off to the French Alps on Saturday, to the Chamonix valley and Mont Blanc, about an hour and a half away from Geneva. We'll see about some snowboarding (I can't decide if I'm up for this recommendation from a French colleague) and soaking up some of the famous apres ski atmosphere. The world cup downhill starts there on Friday, and since we are not competing and couldn't get a room anyway, we're taking the train to Paris on Thursday for a whirlwind tour. Then it's back home.

The End of Hunting

I have read the article Steve blogged some time ago. It was interesting and informative although I doubt Christina Larson is much of a hunter she has certainly done some research and crunched some numbers. Where I live there is plenty of land to hunt on, both private and public. There are all kinds of hunters and most fall way short of Tony Dean when it comes to principles and philosophy about land managment and hunting. I love watching those ESPN hunting shows where guys view 50 or 75 animals before carefully selecting their victim then shoot and kill a once in a lifetime trophy all before lunch then squeeze in some world class trout fishing and call it a day. If Tony is so worried that hunting will become a pastime for the elite he should try hunting public land all season. It can be exciting but there is more to it than a pay hunt. Game goes where the food is, making private land ie orchards,corn fields rich grasses, exct more productive. Given a choice people will go where they can have the most success killing wild game. My experience with private land is the more game there is, the more the owner wants to charge for a lease. Regardless of all the wildlife managment and land lease contraversy hunting is great fun, for the average hunter your success rate is tied more closely to the amount of time you are willing to spend in the woods and your scouting ability ,than where you hunt. Unless you get invited on ESPN Outdoors.

Books

I may pick up Conspiracy of fools for my next read the subject interests me but I usualy get bored with too much detail of financial trickery. I read a couple of books some time ago about the insider trading scandal that took over wall street and found them fairly interesting but hard to get through. I recently read Ship of Gold which Steve favorably mentioned and Al commented he enjoyed it, after purchasing Shadow Divers Amozon also recomended it. I found it to be a great read and would reccomend it to anyone as well. Steve the book you mentioned about the guy moving to New York to raise dogs seems borring to me also but I heard that guy interviewed on the radio and his character and persona on air was enough to spark some interest. He expressed a keen interest in his dogs but seemed to be well grounded in the reality of proper training. He also had some kind of ability to see things from a dogs point of view and it wasn't as warm as fuzzy as most people think, statements like "give me a week and a case of liver treats with your dog and he will forget you ever existed" were shocking to a host who previously stated she didn't think she could live without her best freind and pet a golden retriever.

The geek squad I'm not

Computers are great when they work ! When they don't ,around here they just lay around and collect dust or serve as a hat rack. Today I blew off the dust and spent several hours debugging my broken puter. It was touch and go for a while when I temporarily lost even the things I had managed to preserve before it broke, in the end I think I have prevailed over a cluster of problems infecting my system. It was the automotive equivelent of removing the air filter messing around with a few loose screws cleaning everything up then putting it back together to find that you somehow fixed evrything. I don't know exactly what I did but I'm thankfull for my luck. And just in the nick of time it seems I have quite a backlog of computing to do. I really missed the blogg and the family interaction. It looks like I have a bit of reading to do to catch up.

Book Review -- Conspiracy of Fools

I'd been waiting for Kurt Eichenwald's book on Enron, Conspiracy of Fools, to come out in paperback, and it just did. Weighing in around 650 pages plus 80 of notes and appendices, you might want to practice your clean-and-jerk before picking it up. It's well worth it, though, if you're interested in what really went on at Enron. It started as an interesting idea -- a pipeline company forming a marketplace for buyers and sellers of energy to replace the traditional "buy from producer, mark it up, pipe it to utilities, mark it up, deliver electricity to consumers" cycle. That transformed Enron from a pipeline company into a financial marketplace. Add a dollop of arrogance, a heap of incompetence, a healthy dose of criminality and greed, mix together with a side of conflict-of-interest, and then ask your combination accounting and consulting company to keep things on track, and you're well on your way to the biggest bankruptcy in America. Ken Lay comes out as the chief fool in this book rather than the criminal mastermind. We'll see soon enough how that defense works for him.

I really enjoyed Eichenwald's previous book on the Archer-Daniels-Midland price fixing scheme, The Informant. Sure I know it might sound boring, but both books are cases where real life is more astounding than anything you could make up. When you look these up, I see Amazon serves up a suggestion of A Civil Action. Great book. If you're in the frame of mind, you don't want to miss Barbarians at the Gate either.

Next Big Game?

Garrett has a way of predicting the next big thing. Of course, if he was really conscious of it, he wouldn't have the right touch. At some point I've lost count of the things I had no clue about, thought were unappealing when he told me about them, and then turned out to be the next big thing for people his age. Not that he's ever said, "Dad, this is going to be BIG!" mind you. So, when he came home with the Guitar Hero video game the other day, I thought I should at least let Keith know. And here I am, suburban rock star.

As Garrett explained, the vendor of this game came into the store to show it off. Everyone thought it was a bit stupid, and besides, this wasn't some big name video game company. Later on they tried it and decided it was completely addicting.

It's basically like Dance Dance Revolution (the flammable version of which I talked about before. As a song plays, color coded blocks move down the screen. As they cross a certain line in time with the song, you have to play the guitar by holding down the colored fret on the neck near my left hand while "strumming" the lever below my right thumb. There is an extra bar hanging off to make exotic noises and get extra points. If you hold the guitar vertically at the right time, you score more, which enhances the illusion of actually playing. Hit the notes correctly, you get points. Miss them, you lose points and eventually "fail" the song. The action takes place in smoky bars or other venues, and your adoring fans cheer you when you do well. If you look closely at the picture, you'll see one of my shy groupies in the lower right hand of the picture.

Keith, you and Dan might want to check this one out. Of course, the guitar controller makes it even more expensive than the usually exhorbitantly priced games. The music ranges from oldies but goodies like Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple to things Garrett is into, like Franz Ferdinand and Queens of the Stone Age.

Class Day Speaker

For those of you planning on coming to my graduation, they just announced our Class Day speaker - Anderson Cooper. The Class Day activities take place at 2pm on Monday, May 22nd.
Also, for anyone curious about my current knitting project, I've completed one of each of the type of blocks I intend to use for my afghan and promise a picture as soon as I can figure out how to get them to lay flat for me...

Tom Daschle

While I realize it must be the equivalent of going to see Benedict Arnold speak for certain members of our esteemed readership, I thought I'd mention that we have higher brow taste than Gallagher around here, too. Last night Dara and I went to hear Tom Daschle talk as part of the Peninsula Speakers Lecture Series. Okay, so someone gave us the tickets, but that's beside the point. You know, it must be like a drowning man coming up for air for a (former) liberal politician from South Dakota to visit someplace like the SF bay area. I mean, what can the guy say wrong around here? Probably his biggest round of applause was when he spoke about the NSA wiretaps and the Congressional authorization provided to the President right after 9/11 -- and the fact that they explicitly limited the extraodinary powers to use overseas, and refused domestic authorization. In spite of that, this reporter has to say that the Republicans are in no danger of being swept out in a fever of Daschle supporters. John Kerry is definitely Mr. Charisma compared to Daschle.

Apres Gallagher

The birthday cake.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

FaceBook

I know Kyla is a fan of Facebook. I actually don't think facebook.com existed when she started at Yale, but they had a Yale version of the "face book". Like Google, it has evolved into a verb: when someone says they're thinking of setting you up with their friend, you facebook them to see what they look like and find out who their friends are. So, I thought maybe Kyla would enjoy this story (courtesy of BoingBoing again):

As far as Kyle Stoneman is concerned, the campus police were the ones who started the Facebook wars. "We were just being, well, college students, and they used it against us," says Mr. Stoneman, a senior at George Washington University in Washington. He is convinced that the campus security force got wind of a party he and some buddies were planning last year by monitoring Facebook.com, the phenomenally popular college networking site. The officers waited till the shindig was in full swing, Mr. Stoneman grouses, then shut it down on discovering under-age drinking.

Mr. Stoneman and his friends decided to fight back. Their weapon of choice? Facebook, of course.

Once again they used the site, which is visited by more than 80 percent of the student body, to chat up a beer blast. But this time, when the campus police showed up, they found 40 students and a table of cake and cookies, all decorated with the word "beer." "We even set up a cake-pong table," a twist on the beer-pong drinking game, he says. "The look on the faces of the cops was priceless." As the coup de grâce, he posted photographs of the party on Facebook, including a portrait of one nonplussed officer.

See what fun GW would be, Kyla?

Don't Annoy Me

Okay, you can annoy me. But you better sign your name to it.

Yours truly,

- The Blogmeister

Smashup Comedy

Garrett and I both figured we were in for trouble when Dara got him tickets to see Gallagher and then managed to con us into going together. ("It will be a male bonding thing," she said sweetly.) The feeling of impending doom increased as we found our way to the 2nd row, right smack in front of the table used to smash things upon. The first 25 or so rows in the theater were covered in plastic, as was the entire stage and two levels of balconies on the side. Luckily we came equipped with cheap ponchos to wear. Those who hadn't come prepared could buy ones out in the lobby. And you needed them!

The show was a mixture of standup comedy and smashup comedy. He brought along dozens of pie tins and any number of foods to smash. The assortment included the traditional watermelons, but also mayonnaise, mustard, corn, beans, tofu, yogurt, mashed potatoes, rice, rice krispies, syrup, jello, apples, soy milk cartons and juices, and an array of canned items like pumpkin. As he assembled them, he explained the science of smashing things -- the shape and size of the pie tin, putting the "explosive material" in the middle and the shrapnel on the outside. In conclusion, about 15 people who were supposedly having birthdays went on stage. Instead of blowing the candles out on a cake, they gathered round as he smashed a white cake with mayonnaise on top, followed by a chocolate cake with chocolate syrup on top, followed by a pie of mustard. Then they all got to take turns smashing the remainder of the items as we ducked.

Garrett and I huddled in our ponchos, trying to avoid eye injury while at the same time trying to witness what were some spectacular explosions. When we were done, we left the ponchos there. The guy next to us had been to see Gallagher seven times before. He wore a tee shirt with a target on it, with no poncho. He and his girlfriend took before-and-after pictures of Garrett and me, so if they arrive in EMail, I'll share them.

In the end, probably the most interesting thing to come out of this experience will be seeing what Garrett gets Dara for Christmas next year.

Graduation Update

It seems there is no set limit on tickets, so the more the merrier for May 21st. That is a Monday, but there is also a Berkeley College (that's the all-important residential college Kyla's in) ceremony on Sunday the 20th. We made dinner reservations for Sunday evening at Mory's, shown above, with the expectation of seeing quite a few of you there!

Mixing Hunting and Politics

Keith, if you've managed to get back online (he told me he was fixing something last weekend), you might enjoy this article from the Washington Monthly.

This hunt for a spot to hunt is increasingly a part of the sportsmen's pursuit today. In the terminology of those who follow the problem, "access" is the buzzword phrase. "When you ask hunters directly what their biggest concern is, out of 20-odd possible choices, land access is most often number one," says Mark Duda of Responsive Management

Coming from a political rag, the article has its own slant (an opportunity for progressives, of course!), but not being a hunter myself, I learned a few things from it. There is quite a little storm brewing over paying for access, and the way it runs counter to hunting tradition here in the US.

Tony Dean, a sort of Walter Cronkite of Midwestern sportsmen, who mixes walleye recipes with political commentary on the popular "Tony Dean Outdoors" show, says he fears a day when hunting and outdoor recreation become pastimes of the elite, something only the well-to-do can afford to enjoy. "Our forefathers left a European system in which wildlife and land belonged only to landowners," Dean told me. "We don't want to go back to being like the Europeans."

Check it out.

Blustery Weather

This is a view of the eight lane highway between Sacramento and San Francisco that greeted Kyla and her friends on their return from a soggy snowboarding trip yesterday. They were routed off the highway onto the city streets of Fairfield and had to resort to Google Maps mobile on a cell phone to find their way out. While this was going on, under the rather thin disguise of wishing us a Happy New Year and expressing their concern for our well-being, Mom and Dad called up to gloat over the fact that the the weather they were seeing on television wasn't in Florida for once. Not that we didn't appreciate the concern and good wishes anyway ☺. We're all safe and sound here as the next storm from the Pineapple Express roars in this New Year's Day morning.