Memorial. Day.

When my grandmother was in the nursing home I visited her every day, if I could help it. Just brief visits after work, mostly, and longer stopovers on Saturdays. But every Sunday we would get together and go to Mass at the chapel that used to be in the nursing home. Afterwards I would linger for a while, taking her to lunch at the dining hall and then maybe going outside for a while if the weather was nice.

A lot of the time it was just me and a handful of other regulars making their visits. Occasionally a new face would show up, looking confused and embarrassed as they tried to figure out what was where in the corridors of the nursing home. But most of the time most of the residents were alone, attended to only by the staff.

Most of the time.

Mother's Day, Easter, Christmas, and other major holidays, you couldn't find a parking space in the lot. The halls were crammed with visitors there to do their duty and assuage their guilty consciences for abandoning their relatives to the care of strangers the other 364 (or 363, or 362, depending on the visitor) days of the year.

Yesterday the "special intention" of the 11:30 Mass was for my uncle who died three years ago this week. I took my Mom there. Afterwards we decided we would go to the cemetery, as we have been doing after Mass every week since my aunt died. We made a few stops, before and after the cemetery, and maybe I'll tell you about those later.*

At the cemetery we could barely make it down the narrow roads that thread through the gravesites. Cars, cars, and more cars were everywhere. Graves that had been neglected all year were being tended to by people who probably had a hard time locating them. Traffic through the cemetery was suddenly a major issue.

OK. I'm not complaining about the fact that these people were there. It's a wonderful thing, going out to pay respect to your beloved dead, particularly those who gave their lives in service to their country. It's a wonderful thing to remember your Mother one day each year. Your Father. Veterans. To give thanks once a year.

But what about the rest of the year? Is it such an effort to acknowledge these things one day each year that we spend the rest of the year recovering?

Yes, I know. Busy. Things to do, places to go, people to see. What's the profit in stopping at a gravesite, visiting some senile old codger in a nursing home, acknowledging the sacrifices made by Veterans both living and deceased?

Today is Memorial Day. Today give a thought to those who gave their lives because the United States of America told them to, and they said "yes." Today remember those who made that ultimate sacrifice to keep our nation free. To keep America from collapsing from the chaos and anarchy that would rise if they were to turn their backs and say "I know I pledged to serve, but I choose not to." Remember them today.

And try not to forget them the other 364 days of the year.


*How the hell does one gas station justify charging $4.05 for gas when the place across the street is selling it for $3.95 and the two places a mile down the road are selling it for $3.89?

Mars, baby! RED ROCKS!

Images from NASA Phoenix
Mission page, May 25, 2008.
Images are from MARS!

The Phoenix lander has begun relaying images from its landing site in the North Polar region of Mars. This is exciting stuff! So many Mars missions have failed, one way or another, that there's an added sense of accomplishment on top of the fact that we are currently looking at images from ANOTHER! FREAKING! PLANET!

All this for the low, low cost of $420,000,000. What's that, you say? $420,000,000 is a lot of money? Nonsense! Conservative estimates put the cost of George Bush's Discretionary War at twenty million dollars an hour. So the cost of this mission amounts to twenty-one hours of the "War On Terror." We spend more money each day on war than we did on this entire freaking mission.

So, yes. $420,000,000? Totally, totally worth it.

ANOTHER! FREAKING! PLANET!


Also see:
NASA's Phoenix Mission page
University of Arizona's Phoenix Mars Mission page
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy
- First light pictures from Phoenix
- Phoenix has landed!
The Planetary Society Weblog
Title reference: Paraphrase from Dave Chappelle's "Black Bush" skit.

Some dreams; and Sunrise, sunset

Let's see: I had a dream last night that featured the Geico Cavemen, or maybe the variants from the Cavemen TV series. It was apparently part of a Perry Mason-style lawyer show, where one of the Cavemen was on trial for something, and the other two Cavemen, one of them himself a lawyer (though not Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer), were among the spectators. At the climax of the story the two of them rose out of their church pew-style seats to interrupt the trial, at which point everyone else in the courtroom was shocked to discover that there had been two other Cavemen in the courtroom in addition to the defendant. They then proceeded to do a series of poses for a model shoot, and their clothing - both had been well-dressed, and the lawyer Caveman had been dressed appropriately for a lawyer in a courtroom - was transformed to gray bodysuits with black squiggly designs on them. This may or may not have been influenced by me seeing a few minutes of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes before I went to bed.

Which reminds me of a dream I had several weeks ago that has somehow managed to not get washed away just yet. This was a dream about vampires - not a frequent dream topic for me. In it, vampires were something like the Mafia: everybody knew they existed, everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew one, but nobody wanted to acknowledge their existence lest they attract unwanted attention. So everybody just looked the other way while the vampires preyed on the edges of society. Most of the vampires in the dream had a thuggish, ganster-ish appearance about them, and were generally pretty scuzzy - unwashed hair, stubbly whiskers, their clothing occasionally looking a little shabby. One part of the dream that stands out was a vampire larder - a room where badly-beaten, half-dead humans were kept, to be pulled out whenever the vampires felt a bit peckish. And there wasn't a sense that these vampires were simply sucking blood; they were pretty much just tearing living people apart and eating them. Fun stuff.

Okay. Enough. As a reward for getting through all that, why not enjoy some photos?

Here is the sky shortly before sunrise on Tuesday. In this first photo, the sky has that glowing-ember quality it sometimes gets when the clouds are just right.

The sky started to lighten pretty quickly, the deep red-orange lightening to an orange-yellow.

One effect I especially liked - and I'm glad my camera was able to see it, too - was the gray/pink mottling throughout the sky. The ornamental weather vane on the peak of my neighbor's roof gives you a good idea of what part of the sky I'm looking at compared to the other photos.

So that was Tuesday morning. On Sunday evening I was over at my house across town shortly before sunset, and I got this image of the steeple of St. Mary's church rising above the rooftops of the neighborhood.

There's something very poignant about this view of the old church with its forward-bent cross on top, situated at the highest point in the city.* This is my church; my family has always belonged to this Parish. But like so many other Parishes in Northeastern Pennsylvania it is in constant danger of closing. This is partly due to a shortage of new priests, partly due to a contraction in the number of parishioners in local Parishes, but mostly due to a massive reallocation of Diocesan resources to the parts of the Diocese that have seen a population explosion thanks to the post-9/11 relocation of thousands and thousands of New Yorkers to the border regions in the Poconos, some of which are technically still part of the Scranton Diocese. Capturing this as the setting sun casts shadows of houses upon other houses and lights up one face of the steeple as the others remain in relative darkness just adds to the poignancy.

Also, that cloud is pretty cool.


*I think this is the highest point. There may actually be a point a few blocks away that is technically higher.

Youtube Weekend: Lemonheads, It's A Shame About Ray

Last month I posted about a McDonald's commercial that used a theme that sounded an awful lot like The Raconteurs "Steady, As She Goes." Now Chrysler Chevrolet is running ads for a Memorial Day sale that use a whistling theme that sounds an awful lot like The Lemonheads' "It's A Shame About Ray." While I can't find the Chrysler Chevy commercial online, the video by The Lemonheads is on YouTube:



And how cool is this? It's an embeddable version of the video...posted by Rhino Entertainment! Way to go, Rhino!

UPDATE: Someone else got a video of the Chevy commercial the hard way. Listen for the music under the announcer. Here it is:


Assuming this sampling wasn't done with the blessing of the band and/or the copyright holder, this wouldn't be the first time this song has been...ummm, treated to an homage. Listen to the opening notes of Foo Fighters' "Big Me" to see if you can hear a resemblance.

Rainbow over Nanticoke, May 22 2008

It's been raining off and on the past few days. Yesterday it was off long enough that I was able to mow my entire lawn across town, but today conditions were unstable enough that I didn't even bother to start on my mom's.

As I drive home each day I get a brief panoramic view of the Southern Wyoming Valley, courtesy of the removal of several large culm banks a few years ago. This afternoon I saw knots of clouds and rain dotted throughout the valley with the sun shining through from the other side. Somebody's getting a rainbow, I thought.

An hour ago, that somebody was me.

This rainbow was huge and unbroken, and featured a nearly-unbroken and very visible secondary rainbow, with the dark Alexander's Band between them. I happened to take a closer shot of the brightest part of the right side of the rainbow. In this closeup view you can see the interior or supernumerary rainbows - additional bands of color below the "innermost" violet.
You can see the secondary rainbow more clearly in the close-up view below. Note that the order of colors is reversed with respect to the primary rainbow.

I can tell you that the raindrops that formed this rainbow were closer than the mountain in the distance, which is the Southern border of the Wyoming Valley...
...but behind the house in the background. Note that the apparent location of a rainbow is dependent on the position of the observer, and a resident of that house would not be seeing an extreme close-up of the rainbow, but rather a different rainbow with a right "end" in the forest beyond her house. (I actually ran into her as she walked her dog past my house. She also got photos of this rainbow.)
(By the way, there is no pot of gold in that house. I checked.)

What not to play for customers on hold

A few years ago I had to call the IRS to get a little error straightened out. Turned out the reason my tax refund had not arrived yet, a month after I had filed, was because they had mistakenly applied my entire refund for that year as a pre-payment for the next year's taxes.

I didn't have much trouble getting that resolved, though I did get put on hold at one point. While I was on hold I heard one of the worst possible bits of hold music: "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg, from Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt .



Not that this is a bad song. It's a good song. A great song. A stirring, frenetic, fist-pumping bit of music that was once anthologized on a disc called "Classical Thunder." It's just not the sort of thing to put people in a relaxed, patient, happy-to-be-on-hold state of mind. Especially when they're on hold with the IRS.

Crank x 3, and a Graffiti followup

My most recent letter to the editor was published (in its entirety!) today in the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice. Now the good people of this area know that I am not only the sort of person who writes letters to the editor, but also that the contents of the funny pages figure high on my list of things to write letters about.

My Graffiti post prefigured an article in today's Times-Leader about some playgrounds in Wilkes-Barre being vandalized to the point that members of the local Crime Watch are recommending that they be shut down.

“And the filthy stuff written on (the equipment) is unbelievable,” Raup said. “We couldn’t get it off. We used acetone stuff, and ripped our hands apart, and it wouldn’t take it off.” Raup said the graffiti, which includes drawings of male genitals and explicit four-letter words, is written in marker.

Of course this article includes photos of the vandalism, including some of the graffiti - mostly just tags. But I'm sure that has the perpetrators bursting with pride. They're probably running around their schools going "Look at this! I did that! My work is in the paper!"

I hope the bastards boast a little too loudly and get caught. When their parents are paying to replace the playground equipment and repair the damage, maybe they'll have a chance to reflect on mistakes they made raising their children.

Stupid nice weather

It was supposed to rain today.

Well, it did rain today, mostly while I was at work. It rained a little on my way home, too. But by the time I got home it was very nice. I changed, grabbed the tree wrap and tub of sticky goo that I bought yesterday, along with some disposable gloves and one of those wooden ice cream spoons that comes with those little prepackaged cups of ice cream, and went out to set up caterpillar barriers on the trunks of my cherry trees. After some trial and error, I had two horrifying crawling insect death traps set up. I'll feel less bad about this when I'm dealing with Gypsy Moths.

I didn't spray my trees or any of my neighbors' trees with Bt because it was supposed to rain. Rain would just wash off the little Bt bacteria and their caterpillar-specific toxins, and I don't feel like wasting good bacteria.

But it didn't rain. Still hasn't. So I might have been able to get in at least a few hours of caterpillar exposure to the toxic bacteria-covered leaves.

I tend to believe short-range forecasts more than long-range ones, and plan my life accordingly. If the lawn needs mowing but it's supposed to rain, I'll plan on doing things indoors - and I'll keep on doing those things even if it doesn't rain. Pretty stupid, I suppose. Or maybe it's just a cheap excuse to give myself a day off now and then.

I mowed my lawn across town on Wednesday, and my mom's lawn Thursday and Saturday. With the recent rain/sun cycles the lawns have needed mowing at least once a week. I'll try to get to the lawn across town the day after tomorrow, and then my mom's lawn the day after that. Everything can slide forward a day or two without causing too much disruption.

Unless it rains, of course. Rain could postpone things indefinitely. The grass grows best with alternating rain and sun, so a few days of solid rain could slow the growth down long enough to get me off the hook for a few days. We'll see what the forecast says. If they're calling for rain, I might just kick back for a while and take it easy.

Even if it turns out we have nice weather.

Birds, Bt, and another milestone

This weekend has been OK. Finished mowing the lawn yesterday. Hauled out some compost, and put a bag of leaves into the composter. This was one of about six bags of the leaves I raked up last December 12. I bagged them and then discreetly used the bags to insulate the cat shelters that are dotted around our property. As Spring turns into Summer, this insulation is no longer really necessary, and there will be plenty more next Autumn.

I also refilled the bird feeders for the first time this year. I'll have to make this seed last, because I can't afford to buy sack after sack for the winged gluttons. If only the cats would eat the birds, we'd really be able to cut back on the costs of feeding the animals in our backyard ecosystem.

Today I took a drive out to the Dallas Agway to buy Bt. I think the girl working the cash register had a better idea of how Bt works than the clerk working the floor did. (Bt is a bacterium that needs to be ingested and is poisonous to caterpillars. You spray it on the leaves that they eat and after they eat enough of it, they die. It is not a contact poison, and simply soaking a paper tree wrap with it will not be effective.) I also bought a fabric tree wrap and some sticky goo. This will go around the tree trunks and catch the little bastards as they head for the leaves. It will also be effective against Gypsy Moth caterpillars in a few weeks.

I needed a new hose-end sprayer to apply this stuff to my trees, and my neighbors' trees. Agway had several models for $12 - $15. Kmart had one for over $10, and another one for $8 that came pre-filled with some Miracle-Gro product. (I don't use that stuff.) The new Ace Hardware by my house had them for under $5.

My car hit the 288,000 mile mark as I pulled into the Ace parking lot. These are "official" miles - I was driving without a functioning odometer for most of January. I wonder how much longer I can keep it going?

The gas surcharge

I got my first car back in 1992. For the first 24 years of my life I was able to get along without a car, getting rides from other people or riding a bike as necessary. But in 1992 I got a job at a place over 33 miles away, and I needed a car. Not just any car. A good, reliable, affordable, and fuel-efficient vehicle. I got a used 1990 Toyota Tercel and kept it until its engine blew in 1996. (The replacement 1996 Tercel is the car I am still driving today.)

Having a car was great. I could now get from point A to point Z very quickly. If I wanted to see a friend somewhere far away, I just hopped in the car and - bingo-bango - I was there. All stuff most people take for granted. But this was all new to me.

One Sunday morning I was up early and getting ready to meet a friend at a record show later that morning. I think the show opened at 11:00, so it must've been around 8:30 when I decided to take a quick run to the Poconos to visit some friends before the show. I jumped in the car, zipped up on 81 for a bit, then turned onto 115 and rode that down to their rented house near Split Rock Lodge. I popped in, said hi, hung out for a few minutes, and then zipped back up 115 to meet my friend at the record show. The ride was a good 45 minutes down and about 40 minutes back. About 60 miles round-trip. Just for the heck of it.

Back then, gas was just over $1 a gallon, and nobody thought much of going for a joyride on a Sunday morning. Today, with gas at $3.75 a gallon, I don't do that sort of thing quite as often. That same trip would set me back $7 in gas alone. A visit to my friends in their retreat in the southernmost reaches of the Pocono plateau costs more like $12, not counting Turnpike tolls. Visiting friends in New Jersey costs around $18. And driving to and from the Baltimore / Washington area is over $40.

Once upon a time the cost of the gas used to visit my friends would have meant nothing to me. But times have changed.

A new Ace Hardware moved into an empty location at the Hanover Mall just outside of Nanticoke two weeks ago. While it's nice to have such a place within easy reach - Nanticoke's two hardware stores went out of business shortly after Wal-Mart moved into the area - I find they don't have a lot of the stuff I need. Well, I was able to get some bird netting there, almost by accident. But they had never heard of the sophisticated technology known as a "rain barrel", nor did they have anything specifically designed to be used as a composter. And when I called today to ask if they had any Bt for use against tent caterpillars, they said no - but pointed out that they had plenty of insecticides I could use on them instead. I said thanks, but no, thanks.

The Agway in Dallas doesn't have rain barrels, either - at least the girl that I asked last year had never heard of such a thing. And any composters they have are probably overpriced. But they do have Bt. If I don't do something soon, my cherry trees may be completely defoliated. I'll just have to bite the bullet and spend the $4 in gas on the round trip there and back again.