Can You Name Them All?

For my DF8 Friends and The Cap'n

This what I am talking about.

Bottom to top:
Hand Sliced and Buttered Marble Rye Toast
Golden's Mustard
Havarti Cheese
Leaf Lettuce
Tomato
Kosher Salt
Turkey
Ham
Salami
Cappicola
Soppresetta
Home Made Refrigerator Dill Chips
Fresh Ground Pepper
Minced Red Onion
Alfalfa Sprouts
Mayonnaise

Nothing makes me happier.

Miss J went to go see her sweet Maw tonight, so Wylie, Miles and I had us a guy's night. We started off with some video games and cartoons, then we had a feast of mac and cheese with fried bacon. With an hour or so to kill until bed time, Wylie suggested we have a jam session. Miles replied, "Yeah, come on Daddoe, let's start a BAND!!"

So I got my acoustic guitar, Wylie choose my mandolin, and Miles brought a mystery bugle. Our rule was, when a song is done, pass your instrument to the right. Whoever felt like singing was the band leader.



Here is a recording of our grand finale. It was written by Miles and features him on mando and lead vocals, Wylie on mystery bugle, and The Dadoe on guitar and backup vocals. The title of the song is, Eat Spinach All Day. Be sure and notice Wylie's note of punctuation at the end.

From me to Albert Gore

My best buddy Dan sent me a link to this really cool Sound Pressure Decibel Level Chart. It starts with the quietest sound ever measured and works its way up to the loudest. The first entry reads:

-80 UNDERWATER NUCLEAR SUBMARINE MICROPHONES LISTENING TO SHRIMP CHEWING ON FOOD AT 100 METERS DISTANCE

Now that is pretty quiet, right. As it moves up the list, some of the louder things tend to sound familiar:

116 HUMAN BODY BEGINS TO PERCIEVE VIBRATION IN THE LOW FREQUENCIES

117-123 HOME STEREO SYSTEM, A VERY LOUD AND POWERFUL 200-2000 WATTS

120-130 FRONT ROW AT A ROCK CONCERT- UP TO 200 REFRIGERATOR SIZE SPEAKERS AND 50000-300000 WATTS OF CLEAN, FULL FREQUENCY SOUND

125 DRUM SET-ONLY AT THE MOMENT OF STRIKING, CONTINOUS LEVEL

127 HUMAN TINNITUS (RINGING IN THE EARS) BEGINS

That seems about like my experience. Sit on the front row of a Rock and Roll show, or sit next to a loud drummer in band rehearsal and the low frequencies will make your pants legs vibrate. Also, your ears ring that night and maybe the next day or two. (If the drummer was Lee Susky.)

Things start to get real loud after that.

148 HUMAN VIBRATION VERY UNCOMFORTABLE AND SLIGHTLY PAINFUL

149 HUMAN LUNGS AND BREATHING BEGINS VIBRATING TO THE SOUND

150 ROCK CONCERT “THE WHO” TWO 10 STORY STACKS = 144 DOUBLE REFRIDGERATOR SIZED SPEAKERS

I love The Who, but I am not really sure why you would want a concert experience to be very uncomfortable and slightly painful, let alone VERY UNCOMFORTABLE AND SLIGHTLY PAINFUL. On the other hand, having my breathing vibrating to the sound might be kinda neat.

(Side note: Once in college I was rehearsing with my band, Electric Church, at the HSU Phi Lamb house during the summer break. We were under the influence of moderate amounts of various mood enhancers, and mostly working on 'Jam in E' for about 40 minutes at a stretch. There was this old ceiling fan in the room. One of those big ol' heavy ones that vibrated back and forth at a moderate tempo. After about an hour of rehearsal we realized that no matter what tempo the song started, soon enough the ceiling fan would be playing quarter notes for us.)

Now this is the part for Al Gore. The loudest sound ever recorded on the earth.

310 KRAKATOA VOLCANO ERUPTION-1883 A.D.

• CRACKED ONE FOOT THICK CONCRETE AT 300 MILES
• CREATED A 3000 FOOT TIDAL WAVE
• HEARD 3100 MILES AWAY
• SOUND PRESSURE CAUSED BAROMETERS TO FLUCTUATE WILDLY AT 100 MILES INDICATING LEVELS OF AT LEAST 170-190 DB AT THIS DISTANCE
• EVEN WHEN SHOUTING IN SOMEONES EAR, COULD NOT BE HEARD AT 100 MILES
• CAUSED FOG TO APPEAR AND DISAPPEAR INSTANTLY AT HUNDREDS OF MILES
• ROCKS WERE THROWN TO A HEIGHT OF 34 MILES.
• DUST AND DEBRIS FELL CONTINUOUSLY FOR 10 DAYS AFTER BLAST.
• PRODUCED VERY COLORFUL SUNSETS FOR ONE YEAR
• EJECTED 4 CUBIC MILES OF THE EARTH
• CREATED ANTI-NODE OF NEGATIVE PRESSURE AT THE EXACT OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE EARTH
• SOUND COVERED 1 / 10 OF THE WORLDS SURFACE
• SHOCK (SOUND) WAVES “ECHOED” AROUND THE EARTH 36 TIMES AND LASTED FOR ABOUT A MONTH!

This explosion was so loud, so amazing, so destructive, that it not only warrants all caps, but an exclamation point too!

I am pretty sure that this represents more pollution than human kind can put into the air, even with our grandest doomsday machines. Notice this it caused pretty sunsets, not the flooding of Manhattan.

I have just arrived home from Juneau, Alaska, where my wife and I spent a lovely week as the privileged guests of Mr. and Mrs. Gottschlich. The lovely Tracy is a lifelong friend of my sweet wife (Miss J. spent her formative years in Juneau) and this was the second time that she has invited us to visit. Our friends have a lovely house, a lovely family, a lovely town, and an amazing way with hospitality.

Our last visit to Juneau was in July; the time of year that tricks people into moving up there. It was 75 degrees, sunny, cool, with 20 or so hours of daylight every day. This visit, in April, was the exact opposite. It either rained a steady and thick mist, or dropped giant snowflakes the whole week. The temperature hovered around freezing. It never really looked like daytime.

I am not the outdoorsman that I was when I was younger, but still, you go to Alaska, you have to get out and hike, right? So I did. I made two nice hikes, about two miles from our friend's house, both at a lovely US Forest Service park that surrounds the Mendenhall Glacier. I hiked there a little bit last visit too. This is what it looks like in the summer:

Pretty, huh. A gigantic glacier swoops down from the Juneau Icefield where its retreat has left a beautiful lake. To stand at this spot in July and take a picture feels like standing in front of a huge air conditioner vent. My host, Mr. Gottschlich works for Temsco in the summertime and leads groups of tourists on Helicopter tours of the Glacier. Nice gig!

This is the same spot in April:

As you can see, the lake is totally frozen, the mountain tops are covered by snow clouds, and you wish you would have worn a warmer coat.

The day this picture was taken, it was actually warm enough that it was raining instead of snowing, and the ice on the ground was melting. I hit the trail and managed to make it about a mile and a half when I ran into this:
Hard to tell from the picture, but it slopes uphill pretty steep, and right to left pretty steep. There is a steady stream of meltwater running across the icy path, and nothing on either side of the trail to hold on to. I decided to retreat and come back another day.

Finally, on our last full day in AK, Miss J decided to spare me another trip to Fred Meyer and let me go out in the woods again. Lucky for me, this is what I saw when I walked outside:
Frisbee sized snowflakes. The trail will not be icy today! The only problem was the footprints were snowed under and I had a hard time following along. Here are a few pictures of things I noticed along the way:

Frozen Waterfall

Moss Covers Everything

Glacier and Waterfall from above

Nugget Creek Trail

East Glacier Trail

This is looking almost straight up at the sun shining down the side of the mountain

Moraine Ecology Trail

This was a covered spot on the trail with a park bench where I sat and caught my breath.

Camille Paglia does an amazingly succinct job of breaking down the primary season today on Salon.com

The old-guard feminist establishment has also rushed out of cold storage to embrace Hillary Clinton via tremulous manifestoes of gal power that have startlingly exposed the sentimental slackness of thought that made Gloria Steinem and company wear out their welcome in the first place. Hillary's gonads must be sending out sci-fi rays that paralyze the paleo-feminist mind -- because her career, attached to her husband's flapping coattails, has sure been heavy on striking pious attitudes but ultra-light on concrete achievements.

The angst and fury boiling on talk radio, from both hosts and callers, have been truly operatic in drama and intensity. It's been a riveting spectator sport. But this eruption would come as no surprise to longtime listeners. What the mainstream press has failed to realize is that nationally syndicated hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, have always drawn a very firm distinction between their views and those of the party establishment in Washington. They have consistently maintained, and supported it in detail, that they are conservatives first and Republicans second. They have fiercely denounced the party when it has strayed from conservative principles. McCain, who has co-sponsored liberal legislation and courted and flattered Beltway journalists, has been a longtime target.

This disarray among Republicans, which may depress voter turnout or even spawn a protest splinter party, offers a fantastic opening to Democrats, if the party can only seize it. The galvanizing energy aroused by Barack Obama's thrilling coast-to-coast victories gives Democrats a clear shot at regaining the White House. However, the three-faced Hillary, that queen of triangulation, would be a nice big gift to Republicans, who are itching to romp all over the Clintons' 20-volume encyclopedia of tawdry scandals.

John McCain's courage under torture during the Vietnam War deserves everyone's gratitude and respect. But as a national candidate, the stumpy, uptight McCain is a lemon. Oy, that weaselly voice and those dated locutions and stilted intonations. Who needs a weird old coot with a short fuse in the White House? This isn't a smart game plan for the war on terror.

Miss J asked me to share five weird things about myself. Unfortunately, I am perfectly normal. Therefore, here are five fun facts!

1.)I have a built in thermo-nuclear heat plant in my body. I radiate heat like a gas grill. Even on the coldest nights of the winter, I cannot get under more than one blanket. Pajamas are a complete waste for me; I can never sleep in more than a t-shirt and boxer shorts. In the summertime I sleep on top of the covers with two fans pointed at me. I start sweating at the least amount of exertion. I never put on a coat. Yet, oddly enough, I smell great!

2.)I am a musician and a music lover, but I have no interest in 99% of contemporary artists. There is nothing on MTV, VH1, or CMT that I want to hear. Indie Rock makes me want to put my fingers in my ears. Most of what passes for Jazz these days is elevator music. Most of what passes for Country is (for the male vocalists) bad rock sung in a cornpone accent or (female vocalists) songs that were cast-off by Celine Dion. Contemporary Christian is like bad modern Country, but without the fake accent and fiddles. Thank God that Sting, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, Dwight Yoakum, Ricky Skaggs, Bruce Hornsby, Buddy FREAKING Miller, John Scofield, Bela Fleck, and other all-time favorites are still making records.

A few exceptions to prove the rule: John Mayer, John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, Ryan Adams.

3.)I love to cook, and I have a lot of classical cooking knowledge and a few skills. I can make some fancy-smancy meals. But my favorite thing to prepare and eat is sandwiches. Big sandwiches with lots of stuff inside - that are almost too big to bite into. Today for lunch I had a sandwich with spicy mustard, homemade pickles, Swiss cheese, leftover pork loin, tomatoes, alfalfa sprouts, rice vinegar, and mayo on sourdough bread. As usual, it was the shiz.

4.)I refuse to ever make a car payment. I drive jalopies that I either pay a small amount of cash for, or are handed down to me from family members when they are too old and unreliable for them to drive. Right now I driving a ’96 Buick Regal that was my mee-maw’s, then my mom’s, and now has a quarter of a million miles on it. Sometimes it does not start for weeks, and I am stuck bumming rides everywhere until it magically heals itself. I still prefer this to a car payment.

My last car was a 93 Chrysler New Yorker/5th Ave. I gave $1200 for it. The next morning on my way to work a lady ran a stop sign and hit me in the side. A week later I got an insurance check for $1200. FREE CAR!! Who cares if it has a huge dent in the side and one of the back doors does not open. After a year or so, My mom passed down the Buick and I gave the Chrysler to my Hippie Brother-in-law. He drove it for a week; when suddenly the radiator came completely apart while driving down in freeway. By the time he got it to the side of the road, the head was cracked. It never ran again.

5.)Any time I sign a guestbook at a wedding, or a funeral, at the door to a government building, or am asked to sign a petition, or fill out a visitor card at a church – I always put “Jerry Garcia, Haight St. & Ashbury St., San Francisco, CA 94117”

I would be really interested to see what wierd things The Dude, Janna, and Currey would confess to . . .

At the blog Doodlemonkey there was a contest to determine who was the best elusive beast, Bigfoot or The Yeti.

The Yeti won, 1 vote to 0. This was a huge upset and led to one of the most interesting comment threads in the history of blogging.

I am so proud to have set my Father-in-Law straight on the true meaning of Kwanzaa.

Fun review of Joel Olsteen's new book on Slate.com today. It is always interesting to read a secular review of a religious book.

Indeed, if you bracket all the scary, irresponsible health-and-wealth cheerleading that jolts through Become a Better You, this exurban image of God the indulgent dad is among the more troubling features of the gospel according to Osteen. For it turns out that the divine hand turns up everywhere, at least in Joel Osteen's life. God upgrades his reservations to first class on a long international flight; God spares his car in a water-planing wipeout on the Houston interstate; God allows Osteen and his wife/co-pastor, Victoria, to flip a property "for twice as much as we paid for it" in a once-sketchy Houston neighborhood; God swings a critical vote on the Houston zoning board to permit Lakewood to move to its mammoth Compaq Center digs—and God even saw fit 35 years earlier to ensure the engineer who designed the ramps leading to the Compaq Center provided easy parking access for Lakewood. This is a long, long way down the road from the inscrutable, infant-damning theology of this country's Calvinist forebears—it is, rather, a just-in-time economy's vision of salvation, an eerily collapsible spiritual narcissism that downgrades the divine image into the job description for a lifestyle concierge. Lakewood and Osteen seem to keep God so preoccupied it's a wonder He can ever find the time to stock his fridge or whip out His wallet.

Geoffrey Norman writes on National Review Online about the year in sports scandal:

In basketball, it wasn’t drugs. Not this year, anyway. The NBA’s scandal involved gambling which, in big-time sports, can be lethal. It doesn’t take many players to fix a basketball game, as several point-shaving scandals in the college game have demonstrated. And even a casual follower of the game can appreciate how much a referee who is in the pockets of gamblers could influence the score and make sure a team comes in over, or under, the line. Well, it turns out the NBA had a ref who gambled and got in over his head. Ten years ago, that might have been fatal to the game. But this year, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Perhaps because a ref can only fix the results of the games he actually officiates. So the corruption wasn’t systemic. Or maybe — and this seems more likely — the fans have simply become accustomed to a certain amount of scandal in sports. News that the New England Patriots were doing a little illegal spying on opposing teams seemed predictable and amusing. Of course they were, and wasn’t it just like Coach Bill Belichick to go for any edge, even one that eventually got him fined half-a-million dollars and cost his team a draft choice.

And that, in fact, might be the big sports story of 2007: the end, not of illusions, but of disillusionment. After all, in order to be disillusioned, you need illusions. The kid who pleaded, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the White Sox had fixed a World Series for the benefit of gamblers was honestly dismayed. He believed, quaintly, in the integrity of the game.

Tony Trischka, Steve Martin, Béla Fleck - The Crow

25

Learn about Ultrasound technicians

Christopher Hitchens destroys Mike Huckabee today in this piece on Slate.com. Speaking of Article VI of the constitution:

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is. My right to say and believe that is already guaranteed to me by the First Amendment. And the right of Huckabee to win the election and fill the White House with morons like himself is unaffected by my expression of an opinion.

NEA Says Teacher Pay Improving in Arkansas

The running joke in Arkansas whenever national rankings in education, wealth or other categories were released has always been "thank God for Mississippi." Arkansas often ranked at the bottom, one step above its Southern neighbor. But in the latest National Education Association rankings of teacher pay, Arkansas outranked all its regional neighbors and climbed four spots from 36th in 2004-05 to 32nd in 2005-06, the year used to compile the report on the 50 states and Washington D.C. The average Arkansas teacher salary was $42,768; the national average was $49,026.Alabama ranked 44th, Louisiana 45th, Mississippi 41st, Missouri 42nd, Oklahoma 48th, Tennessee 34th, and Texas 35th.

All of my life I have listened to Arkansans bitching about how underpaid our teachers are. Does this mean they will stop? An Arkansas teacher would have to move at least two states away to be paid more.

I work as a bar keep a couple of nights a week at a tiny neighborhood Italian restaurant. Last week one of the servers was at my bar inscribing "Merry Christmas" on the top of tickets that she was preparing to deliver to a table. Another server walked by, saw what she was writing, and became incredulous. "You can't write Merry Christmas! You might offend someone! What if they are Jewish? You have to write Happy Holidays." This even though the owner of the restaurant stands at the door greeting all guests with a hearty "Merry Christmas" this time of year. (And the waitress confessed that she had witnessed said table exchanging Christmas cards.)

I said to the two servers, "Let's do a little thought experiment, shall we? If you were to visit a kosher deli and the owner wished you a 'Happy Hanukkah' would you be offended, or even surprised?"

No, they confessed.

"And what kind of restaurant is this?" I asked.

"Italian," they answered.

"And where does the Pope live?"

For some reason, my sister and I have taken to texting each other random song lyrics throughout the day. The challenge is the make the other laugh out loud. My best message so far was this:

Dit dit duun, dow – ROW. Dit dit duun, dow – ROW, Dit dit duun, dow – ROW. Lit dit dit dit dit dit dun – TEQUILA!

And I held the lead for a long time, but Jenni went for the win the other day with this gem:

If dat duddy dida dun na na du wit dose METTY DABIS DYES.

People have started to ask me lately if I were ever going to post again at this blog. I can only answer yes, but you never know when, how often, or if it is going to be worth reading.

Now that I know that people care, I will try to make more of an effort.

We will see . . .

You Are Animal

A complete lunatic, you're operating on 100% animal instincts. You thrive on uncontrolled energy, and you're downright scary. But you sure can beat a good drum. "Kill! Kill!"

The Muppet Personality Test