My 1996 Corolla is apparently okay. I just need to keep running it for the next fifteen years. 😉
“F*** Me, Ray Bradbury”
(Very NSFW, due solely to repeated F-bombs in the chorus.)
GoddessJ sent me a link to this video, with the comment “someone who truly appreciates SF.” Apparently so.
(There was a picture on the blog she discovered this on, of Ray Bradbury watching it. Apparently he got quite a kick out of it. As well he should… when I get to be ninety years old, I want pretty young things writing songs like this about me too! 😉 )
I Hate Moving, Redux
I’ve said it before: I hate moving. But with any luck, I won’t be saying it again. 🙂
Our experiment at renting out our old place ended a few months ago. Some of you know the details; for everyone else, I’ll just say it was a minor disaster, and it took more than a month to clean up the place. We aren’t giving up on the idea, but we’ve soured on that house. We’ve also got nine years of equity in it, and the value has gone up significantly in that time, so we’re selling it.
Soon after we put it on the market, GoddessJ started looking for a new place. This one is okay, but definitely not what we want, and she didn’t want to live here any longer. (And I wasn’t too enthused about it either.) She found what looked like the perfect place for us through the Internet-accessible real estate “multiple listing service,” just a couple minutes away by car, and half a dozen others to consider as well. We arranged to see them all… some we liked and several we didn’t, but the first one she’d found was far and away our favorite, even beating out noticeably more expensive locations. I’d made a list of the features we wanted (and didn’t want) in a house, and it had all but one of them, as well as heart appeal.
The price was a problem. It was significantly over-priced for what it was worth, to the point that it had been on the market for months with hardly any offers. The owners had had it built for them forty-six years ago, and had put a lot of value into it since then. They were also the owners of a flooring company, and had put in tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardwood flooring too (it’s all hardwood flooring, or expensive ceramic tile in the bathrooms and laundry room — why not, if you’re getting it at cost?). Unfortunately the value they’d added didn’t translate to equally higher value in the housing market, and they were having a hard time accepting that. We put in a low offer, and managed to dicker them down to a price that was almost exactly what it was worth (even though, we later discovered, they’d already rejected higher offers).
The last month, trying to work out all the details, has been pretty stressful. It was an open question, right up until the day we were to take possession, whether we’d even get the loan. But it all worked out in the end.
Last weekend, c-square and W helped us pack up our library, and we (mostly GoddessJ) have been packing the rest of our stuff this week, in addition to fighting off a nasty cold. On Friday we stripped the wallpaper out of two of the rooms. (The previous owners had had a huge piece of furniture in one of them, and it had been there so long that they’d wallpapered around it instead of moving it; once it left with them, we didn’t have much choice. And this was the old seventies wallpaper… very nasty to remove.) Yesterday our friend S, GoddessJ’s cousin A, and A’s husband J came over to get the grand tour and to help us paint those two rooms, plus another where the leaving owners had removed a huge wooden mural. It’s a good thing they were there too, because even with their help and the whole day to work, we only managed to finish two of the rooms and part of the third — GoddessJ and I will need to finish the last of it ourselves today. We also need to finish packing up, because the movers will be here bright and early tomorrow morning. (The cats are going to be visiting GoddessJ’s parents during the move this time… we don’t want a repetition of the last move.) And then, of course, there’s the unpacking stage.
The end result should be worth the effort though. The new place has three times the square footage of the one we’re currently crowded into. It also has a garage… it’s the first house with a garage that I’ve ever owned, and that’s one of the features I’m looking forward to the most, as strange as that may sound. Or maybe not so strange, given the snow that we generally get in winter, and especially the amount that it looks like we’ll be getting this winter. Having a garage will drastically reduce the amount of snow I’ll have to remove from the car over the course of the season.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, this will be the last move we make until we’re too old to want to deal with stairs anymore.
We’ll be off-line tonight, and most of tomorrow until the technician hooks up our new place for Internet service (which will be in the afternoon if all goes according to plan). I’ll set up a delayed post to appear tomorrow morning, and I’ll post again on Tuesday if everything’s good. Wish us luck!
“The Mystery Spot”
If I ever get out California-way, I’d like to visit The Mystery Spot, the site of a “gravitational anomaly.” It’s a set of optical illusions, as explained here, but apparently it’s amazing even if you know exactly what’s going on. For someone like me, it sounds like a really good time.
“‘Is this science, or literature?'”
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you probably know my stance on global warming. Or rather, my former stance: I wasn’t precisely a skeptic, but I wasn’t convinced, because the evidence that was being put forth smelled fishier than a tuna trawler.
As it turns out, my doubts were well-founded, but wrong. And oddly enough, the thing that finally convinced me was “the Climategate affair.” That’s right: a bunch of scientists got together claiming expertise in global climate change, out-and-out lied about the science to convince people that it was an urgent reality, got caught doing it, and that actually convinced this former-doubter that it was really happening. How did that happen?
Simple. I doubted because I know how the scientific method is supposed to work, and it was painfully obvious that these scientists weren’t playing by it. Their results couldn’t be independently checked because they refused to provide the necessary data, which almost certainly meant that the data didn’t exist or didn’t indicate what they claimed that it did. If it had, they would have shared it. They claimed that they didn’t want to share it because skeptics would try to poke holes in it. HELLO! THAT’S WHAT THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS ALL ABOUT! Other scientists are supposed to try to poke holes in your conclusions. It’s only when many try — and fail — to do so that those conclusions start to assume a mantle of legitimacy.
But when they were exposed, and the real science sorted out from their bogus stuff, the truth finally started to become visible. And the truth is that it’s happening, and human activity may or may not be responsible for it. Either way, it’s nowhere near as dire or as immediate as they were claiming that it was.
The investigation is still ongoing, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be done any time in the foreseeable future. And thanks to the lying scientists disgracing the entire field in the eyes of many, if it turns out that we are responsible for climate change, any real action on it may be delayed for years. Even if it’s 100% humanity’s fault, there’s still time to prevent it from becoming a catastrophe, according to the current (and real) science — but we may have to act pretty quickly, and on a large scale. We can only hope that the rogue scientists didn’t poison the public (and the politicians) against the idea too much.
“Too Little, Too Late: The Feds call for IPv6”
I’ve talked about IPv6, the “new” Internet addressing standard, a few times here. It’s a fairly geeky subject, but since it’s one that underlies the entire Internet, it’s kind of important. Apparently the US government just woke up to the problem. A little late to the party, guys.
“News stories about stupid young people make old people feel good”
As I’ve mentioned before, my adoptive father listened almost solely to country music, by preference the old-school “my pickup broke down, my wife left me, and my dog died” kind. And being a very selfish person, he had no problem with making the entire family listen to it during interminably long car trips, while he smoked like a chimney as well, with his window opened a mere crack to let enough of the smoke out that he could still see the road — he didn’t want to miss the music, I suppose.
(As you can probably guess, he was a really cheerful person. As you can probably also guess, we got along famously. And the two preceding sentences were dripping so much sarcasm that I’ll be scrubbing the rug for ages to get it out. Oh well.)
Anyway, I’ve always listened to the lyrics of songs, as much as the tunes, so I did learn a thing or two from the music. Fortunately I managed to forget most of them. But one of those things was brought back to me when I read this article, along with the tune that I learned it from (and haven’t thought of in probably a quarter-century). With a little prompting from the bit I recalled, Google turned up a name and these lyrics:
Jesus was a Capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoesLong hair, beard and sandals
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we’d just nail him up
If he came down again’cause everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to meEggheads cussing rednecks cussing
Hippies for their hair
Others laugh at straights who laugh at
Freaks who laugh at squaresSome folks hate the whites
Who hate the blacks who hate the Klan
Most of us hate anything that
We don’t understand’cause everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me
(Jesus Was A Capricorn, Kris Kristofferson)
Who needs science, when it’s just rediscovering what country music songwriters knew decades ago?
“Unhearit Gets that Song Out of Your Head with a Catchy New One”
Our friend Interrobang calls them “earworms” — those catchy little jingles that get stuck in your head and just won’t come loose no matter what. This site promises to kick it out… by replacing it with another one. Not exactly what you were hoping for, but hey, at least it’s a new tune. 🙂
“Collection of amusing 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND errors”
You don’t need to see his URL. This isn’t the page you’re looking for. Move along. 😉
“Fly steers mobile robot”
What will they think of next? 😉
On a different subject, I picked up a nasty cold somewhere. It struck very suddenly yesterday evening and took me down for the count. I slept in discomfort for nearly twelve hours last night, and I’ll probably go right back to bed after having a bite to eat. I’m treating it with large glasses of orange juice and some medicines that GoddessJ recommended — and if you know my aversion to using medicine on myself most of the time, that’ll give you a clue how uncomfortable it is.
C-square, I hope it’s the one that you and the missus have already had.