One For The Books
Hello World,
I suppose it would be obvious to anyone by now that I have absolutely no pull whatsoever with the weather control people around here, because things have certainly not been going to my liking and that's putting it mildly. After ten days of drenching rain in our little corner of paradise, I discovered that my bird feeders had gotten all moldy, even the ones that hang up on our porch and out of the rain. In the house, we had leaks in places that we didn't even know we had places, and the den looked like an exhibition of performance art, constructed from a variety of buckets and basins, soggy newspapers and plastic bags over the furniture. When I accidentally kicked over one of the cats' water bowls in there, I said to Bill that it was really carrying coals to Newcastle, and then some.
So you can imagine our surprise last Saturday, when we awoke to find all of this strange yellow stuff coming out of the sky right in our yard, and not a drop of rain to be seen. I told Bill to call the Police, in case it was space aliens landing or something, but the Police brushed us off by saying that there was no such thing as yellow stuff, and the anomaly we were witnessing was just a temporary lull in the normal weather, which would surely be more rain. But they were wrong, the yellow stuff kept up all day, and it was a glorious sight to behold, and I don't mind saying, a welcome change after the recent deluge.
Fortunately, there is good news on the weather front, at least according to Bill --
===================================
In other news, hurricane season is over! It has to be -- they just used the last name on the list!
(from AOL news - abridged to fit the extent of my interest)
Updated 05:23 AM EDT
Cayman Islands Brace for Tropical Storm
Wilma May Threaten Gulf Coast as Hurricane Later This Week
By JAY EHRHART, AP
GEORGETOWN, Cayman Islands (Oct. 17) - Tropical Storm Wilma formed south of the Cayman Islands on Monday, tying the record for the most storms in an Atlantic hurricane season and following a path that could potentially menace the U.S. Gulf Coast later this week as a hurricane.
Wilma is the 21st named storm of the season, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. The only other time that as many storms formed since record keeping began 154 years ago was in 1933.
===================================
They went on to say that the 21 named storms ties a record, the 12 hurricanes ties another record, and the 6 severe hurricanes in 2005 set a new record in that category. As to what happens with the name if there is another storm after Wilma, Bill said what they do is start over again at Alpha, then Beta, etc. I said, "No, they don't! They can't say that's what they 'do' when this happens, because it's never happened before. If there is another storm after Wilma, and they call it Alpha, then that will set the precedent for any subsequent time this happens. But they can't say that's what they 'do' if they've never done it before."
Of course, I realize I'm a stickler, and we want to thank AOL for their coverage and information about the situation with Hurricane Wilma. (I don't know about anyone else, but I've been singing the theme song from "The Flintstones" ever since I first heard about Wilma last week, and you can believe by now, I'm pretty tired of it.) But it was also on October 17th, that the AOL Welcome Screen surprised many of us with this screaming headline --
===========================
Braves Pushed To Brink
Astros Ride Oswalt in Game 3
===========================
I had to wonder if it was me, or did AOL step into their Way-Back machine for that story? According to our friends at mlb.com, the Astros beat the Braves 7-6 on Saturday, October 8th, to take a 2 to 1 lead in the series. So this headline from ten days later, long after the Braves had been eliminated from the playoffs, should have raised some eyebrows among the Welcome Screen crew, and not just at my house. In fact, it might even be considered a reasonable expectation that someone would have checked that for accuracy, along with everything else on the page, before they post something for all the world to see that makes them look like they have no idea what they're doing. Or, at least that they don't know what day it is.
Of course, as we all know, and God help us, things can always be worse. Earlier in the week, I told Bill that I couldn't send him any email from work, because as the young man in our crack IT department explained to me, "The Internet is down." Here I'm thinking that would surprise some people! And not the least of which was Bill, who was connected to AOL at the time, and the Internet seemed to be right there where he left it, and chugging along as usual without a care in the world.
Bill also told me that he heard back from the woman who complained that she had received the wrong amount of decals. (" ... you'll be pleased to know Karen McKay was able to figure out she needed 10 additional decals. I have a sneaking suspicion the quantity is somehow related to her personal 'digital' calculators -- the ones with the rings on them.) I said that people who have trouble with numbers obviously can't be considered illiterate really, so I think they should be called "innumerate" instead. And I don't mind saying, their name is legion ... oh wait, I forgot, they can't count higher than ten without using their toes.
In other news, everyone knows that I'm not much of a game player, never have been, and the idea of people spending hours in front of their computers playing games has never made any sense to me. But I stumbled across a game from our friends at pogo.com called Bookworm, and I have to admit that it really caught my fancy. It's true that for the hard-core gamer, it fails the first test of Internet gaming, namely that you only play against yourself, you don't win anything, it doesn't remember you the next time you play, and there's no way to know how well you're doing compared to the top score attainable. But it's a free game and one doesn't like to complain, in fact, there may very well be a paid version of the game that addresses all of these issues. I found it deceptively seductive, and unknowingly spent hours late into the wee hours of the morning, making words out of random "Scrabble"-type tiles, while trying to keep the occasional burning tiles from setting fire to the library. I would finally get so groggy that I would find myself making words like VRAEJ and QUUWIH, while overlooking perfectly adequate words like BENT and DOVES right under my nose. I retired with the rank of Master Librarian, which for all I know, might be the first step up from Total Moron, before you get into the more accomplished grades. But I had fun with it, and would recommend it to anyone with time to waste for no purpose.
I'd like to close with an anecdote from one of my favorite authors, Emily Kimbrough, and if you haven't read anything by her, you should definitely run, don't walk, to your nearest purveyor of used books and snap up anything of hers, especially "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" and "Forty Plus and Fancy Free." She is a treasure for all ages, and I can't get enough of her. I just love this encounter from one of her lecture tours, out of "It Gives Me Great Pleasure," another one of my favorites --
===================================
A HOTEL IS NEVER LIKE HOME
I changed from my traveling clothes to wrapper and slippers, and when the ginger ale came, I settled down to enjoy it and the mail from home. Before I went to bed I did a little light washing and was put out to find that I had been given a bathroom with a shower, which I abominate, instead of a tub. It was too late, and I was too undressed to change, but there was no hanging space for the wash, not so much as a door to the shower over which to drape my pretties. They hung nicely, however, over bars of the coat hangers in the closet, and I went to bed.
[After her lecture at the local university the next day, she is escorted back to the hotel by one of the professors, and is surprised and chagrined when he makes a passionate declaration of his affection for her, which she tries to graciously but firmly refuse.]
Then I walked away and looked out the window, partly because I thought that would make getting away less awkward for him than if I watched him, and partly because that is what women on the stage and screen do.
Looking down at the street, though not very successfully, because the Venetian blind was down, I heard him walk heavily across the room, open the door and slam it. Simultaneously with my turning around, I heard a thrashing, tramping sound in my closet. The door of the closet opened violently and he burst out. He did not look at me, and I had nothing that seemed appropriate to say, but as he covered the four feet between the identical doors, opened the one into the hall with a force that very nearly took it from the hinges, and stormed through it, I saw, pasted down his back, three wet rayon stockings and a net brassiere.
===================================
Anyone could see that there's no way to improve upon that!
I suppose it would be obvious to anyone by now that I have absolutely no pull whatsoever with the weather control people around here, because things have certainly not been going to my liking and that's putting it mildly. After ten days of drenching rain in our little corner of paradise, I discovered that my bird feeders had gotten all moldy, even the ones that hang up on our porch and out of the rain. In the house, we had leaks in places that we didn't even know we had places, and the den looked like an exhibition of performance art, constructed from a variety of buckets and basins, soggy newspapers and plastic bags over the furniture. When I accidentally kicked over one of the cats' water bowls in there, I said to Bill that it was really carrying coals to Newcastle, and then some.
So you can imagine our surprise last Saturday, when we awoke to find all of this strange yellow stuff coming out of the sky right in our yard, and not a drop of rain to be seen. I told Bill to call the Police, in case it was space aliens landing or something, but the Police brushed us off by saying that there was no such thing as yellow stuff, and the anomaly we were witnessing was just a temporary lull in the normal weather, which would surely be more rain. But they were wrong, the yellow stuff kept up all day, and it was a glorious sight to behold, and I don't mind saying, a welcome change after the recent deluge.
Fortunately, there is good news on the weather front, at least according to Bill --
===================================
In other news, hurricane season is over! It has to be -- they just used the last name on the list!
(from AOL news - abridged to fit the extent of my interest)
Updated 05:23 AM EDT
Cayman Islands Brace for Tropical Storm
Wilma May Threaten Gulf Coast as Hurricane Later This Week
By JAY EHRHART, AP
GEORGETOWN, Cayman Islands (Oct. 17) - Tropical Storm Wilma formed south of the Cayman Islands on Monday, tying the record for the most storms in an Atlantic hurricane season and following a path that could potentially menace the U.S. Gulf Coast later this week as a hurricane.
Wilma is the 21st named storm of the season, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. The only other time that as many storms formed since record keeping began 154 years ago was in 1933.
===================================
They went on to say that the 21 named storms ties a record, the 12 hurricanes ties another record, and the 6 severe hurricanes in 2005 set a new record in that category. As to what happens with the name if there is another storm after Wilma, Bill said what they do is start over again at Alpha, then Beta, etc. I said, "No, they don't! They can't say that's what they 'do' when this happens, because it's never happened before. If there is another storm after Wilma, and they call it Alpha, then that will set the precedent for any subsequent time this happens. But they can't say that's what they 'do' if they've never done it before."
Of course, I realize I'm a stickler, and we want to thank AOL for their coverage and information about the situation with Hurricane Wilma. (I don't know about anyone else, but I've been singing the theme song from "The Flintstones" ever since I first heard about Wilma last week, and you can believe by now, I'm pretty tired of it.) But it was also on October 17th, that the AOL Welcome Screen surprised many of us with this screaming headline --
===========================
Braves Pushed To Brink
Astros Ride Oswalt in Game 3
===========================
I had to wonder if it was me, or did AOL step into their Way-Back machine for that story? According to our friends at mlb.com, the Astros beat the Braves 7-6 on Saturday, October 8th, to take a 2 to 1 lead in the series. So this headline from ten days later, long after the Braves had been eliminated from the playoffs, should have raised some eyebrows among the Welcome Screen crew, and not just at my house. In fact, it might even be considered a reasonable expectation that someone would have checked that for accuracy, along with everything else on the page, before they post something for all the world to see that makes them look like they have no idea what they're doing. Or, at least that they don't know what day it is.
Of course, as we all know, and God help us, things can always be worse. Earlier in the week, I told Bill that I couldn't send him any email from work, because as the young man in our crack IT department explained to me, "The Internet is down." Here I'm thinking that would surprise some people! And not the least of which was Bill, who was connected to AOL at the time, and the Internet seemed to be right there where he left it, and chugging along as usual without a care in the world.
Bill also told me that he heard back from the woman who complained that she had received the wrong amount of decals. (" ... you'll be pleased to know Karen McKay was able to figure out she needed 10 additional decals. I have a sneaking suspicion the quantity is somehow related to her personal 'digital' calculators -- the ones with the rings on them.) I said that people who have trouble with numbers obviously can't be considered illiterate really, so I think they should be called "innumerate" instead. And I don't mind saying, their name is legion ... oh wait, I forgot, they can't count higher than ten without using their toes.
In other news, everyone knows that I'm not much of a game player, never have been, and the idea of people spending hours in front of their computers playing games has never made any sense to me. But I stumbled across a game from our friends at pogo.com called Bookworm, and I have to admit that it really caught my fancy. It's true that for the hard-core gamer, it fails the first test of Internet gaming, namely that you only play against yourself, you don't win anything, it doesn't remember you the next time you play, and there's no way to know how well you're doing compared to the top score attainable. But it's a free game and one doesn't like to complain, in fact, there may very well be a paid version of the game that addresses all of these issues. I found it deceptively seductive, and unknowingly spent hours late into the wee hours of the morning, making words out of random "Scrabble"-type tiles, while trying to keep the occasional burning tiles from setting fire to the library. I would finally get so groggy that I would find myself making words like VRAEJ and QUUWIH, while overlooking perfectly adequate words like BENT and DOVES right under my nose. I retired with the rank of Master Librarian, which for all I know, might be the first step up from Total Moron, before you get into the more accomplished grades. But I had fun with it, and would recommend it to anyone with time to waste for no purpose.
I'd like to close with an anecdote from one of my favorite authors, Emily Kimbrough, and if you haven't read anything by her, you should definitely run, don't walk, to your nearest purveyor of used books and snap up anything of hers, especially "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" and "Forty Plus and Fancy Free." She is a treasure for all ages, and I can't get enough of her. I just love this encounter from one of her lecture tours, out of "It Gives Me Great Pleasure," another one of my favorites --
===================================
A HOTEL IS NEVER LIKE HOME
I changed from my traveling clothes to wrapper and slippers, and when the ginger ale came, I settled down to enjoy it and the mail from home. Before I went to bed I did a little light washing and was put out to find that I had been given a bathroom with a shower, which I abominate, instead of a tub. It was too late, and I was too undressed to change, but there was no hanging space for the wash, not so much as a door to the shower over which to drape my pretties. They hung nicely, however, over bars of the coat hangers in the closet, and I went to bed.
[After her lecture at the local university the next day, she is escorted back to the hotel by one of the professors, and is surprised and chagrined when he makes a passionate declaration of his affection for her, which she tries to graciously but firmly refuse.]
Then I walked away and looked out the window, partly because I thought that would make getting away less awkward for him than if I watched him, and partly because that is what women on the stage and screen do.
Looking down at the street, though not very successfully, because the Venetian blind was down, I heard him walk heavily across the room, open the door and slam it. Simultaneously with my turning around, I heard a thrashing, tramping sound in my closet. The door of the closet opened violently and he burst out. He did not look at me, and I had nothing that seemed appropriate to say, but as he covered the four feet between the identical doors, opened the one into the hall with a force that very nearly took it from the hinges, and stormed through it, I saw, pasted down his back, three wet rayon stockings and a net brassiere.
===================================
Anyone could see that there's no way to improve upon that!
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:32 PM
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