In the Headlights

Taking a Flying Leap

Well, it's Leap Year. And today is Leap Day.   Along with all the mundane stuff about adding an extra day to February every four years to make a 366-day year, leap year is the year when traditionally, women can propose marriage.

According to Wikipedia, this is thought by some to have originated with St. Patrick or St. Brigid of Kildare in 5th century Ireland.  However, it doesn't seem to have been attested until the 19th century, so the myth probably originated after then.

Some nervous men limited the tradition to one day a year, leap day. Women whose proposals are refused are entitled to compensation.  Wait until the legal community hears about this.

Women who miss this opportunity, will have another on Sadie Hawkins Day, November 15, created by Al Capp for the Lil' Abner comic strip.  Sadie was the homeliest girl in Dogpatch, and eventually took the initiative.  Eventually, it led to a yearly footrace in which the town's bachelors were pursued by the unattached women.  Today, there are Sadie Hawkins Dances to which women can invite the slower men. 

Happy Leap Day!

[Image from Lil'Abner.com]

A Fairy Tale to Live By

Vivian gave me this.  It applies pretty well to her, and me as well.  She went through an acrimonious divorce a couple of years ago, but at least came away with a sweet little boy, whom she adores.

Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl "Will you marry me?"

The girl said "No!"

And the girl lived happily ever after, and went shopping, dancing, camping; she drank martinis, there was no one to tell her she shouldn't. She always had a clean house.  She didn't have to cook if she didn't want to (especially to the specifications of someone else), she did whatever the hell she wanted, never argued, didn't get fat, travelled, and had many lovers.  She didn't save money, and had all the hot water to herself.  She went to the theater, never watched sports, never had to wear lacy lingerie that went up her butt.   She had high self esteem, never cried or yelled, felt and looked fabulous in sweat pants, and was pleasant all the time.

THE END!

Sounds good to me...wait, it IS me!  Somewhat, anyway.

[Image from fishboy]

Across the Universe

Stryder sent me a YouTube link to a music video called "Across the Universe", with Joe Cocker singing "Come Together".  It's directed by Julie Taymor, who is also known as costume director for the Broadway musical, "The Lion King."  Taymor has won two Tonys out of four nominations, and an Emmy, so she's definitely a force to be reckoned with.

"Across the Universe" is also a movie, directed by Taymor. It is the story of a group of friends finding their way through the minefield that was the 1960's.  Love, war, activism.  All set to a Beatles soundtrack.  Could be worse.  In addition, Stryder said the movie was excellent.  As did the person who posted the comment on the imdb site.  My sense is that the movie is not for everyone, but that it will rock those who lived through the period.  I just added it to my Netflix queue, and moved it to the top.  At the rate I'm going through movies, it would probably be a year before I got to it, otherwise.

Meanwhile, get your fix watching this great video.

Little Bundle of Joy

My cousin Julie has a soft spot in her head...er...heart,  for animals.  A friend of hers recently had some kittens that needed a home.  They're adorable and sweet.  But Julie already has her quota of pets and couldn't take them.  She has, however, offered to try to help them find a home, and will pick them up and drop them off anywhere.  Particularly since they live near the nuclear power plant and you need special clearance to get on the premises.

Here are pictures of the kitties:

There's something really strange about human teeth and eyes in a cat face, isn't there?  Yeah, lips, too.

Marital Blitz

Laura shared these quotes from husbands about wives with us:

"When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her."--David Bissonette.

"After marriage, husband and wife become two sides of a coin;  they just can't face each other, but still they stay together."-- Sacha Guitry.

"By all means marry..If you get a good wife, you'll be happy.  If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."--Socrates.

"Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them."--Anonymous.

"The great question...which I have not been able to answer... is, 'what does woman want.'"  Dumas.

"I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me." --Freud.

"Some people ask the secret of our long marriage.  We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week.  A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing.  She goes Tuesdays; I go Fridays." --Anonymous.

"There's a way of transferring funds that's even faster than electronic banking.  It's called marriage."--Sam Kinison.

"I've had bad luck with both my wives.  The first one left me.  The second one didn't."--James Holt McGavran.

"Two secrets to keep your marriage brimming.  1)  Whenever you're wrong, admit it, and 2)  Whenever you're right, shut up."--Patrick Murray.

"The most effective way to remember your wife's birthday is to forget it once."--  Nash.

"You know what I did before I married?  Anything I wanted to."--Anonymous.

"My wife and I were happy for twenty years.  Then we met."--Henny Youngman.

"A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong."--Rodney Dangerfield.

"A man inserted an add in the classifieds:  'Wife wanted'.  Next day he received a hundred letters, all saying the same thing:  "You can have mine." --Anonymous.

First guy:  "My wife's an angel."
Second guy:  "You're lucky.  Mine's still alive."

Women, of course have their own slant on things.

[Image from Stock Photo.] 

Skin Tight

I was going to loan Skin Tight to a friend who was unacquainted with  Carl Hiaasen's wicked brand of black humor.

Before turning it over, though, I reread the first chapter, and was hooked.

This is one of my favorote Hiaasens.  The others are Tourist Season, and Double Whammy...his early stuff. I think his early success led him to write faster and more formulaic.  Many know him as the creator of Skink, the former Florida governor who eats roadkill.

This one, though, is a gem.  Filled with creeps and bizarre bad guys, it is the story of a very inept plastic surgeon, and the tangled mess he weaves trying to extricate himself from lawsuits and a homocide investigation.

He hires Chemo, a 6'9" 180 lb. geek with a cottage cheese complexion to take care of his woes.

The setting is Miami, where Hiaasen was, for years, a columnist and reporter for the Miami Herald before turning his hand to fiction.  He still writes columns for his old paper.  He's pretty cynical about his old stomping grounds and its inhabitants.

The hero is Mick Stranahan, a former investigator who just wants to exist in peace in his house in Stiltsville.  In his life, Mick has killed five men and married five women.  Enough to make anyone want to avoid him.  Yet he remains curiously unspoiled.  He is supported by some colleagues who go way back, and hunted by...some colleagues who go way back.

In typical Hiaasen fashion, things turn hilariously bizarre, bad guys are eradicated in very creative ways, and the urbanization and "development" of paradise is almost another character.

If you like Hiaasen, I'd suggest you go back and read his early stuff.  You're in for a treat.

[Sorry this is late.  Could not get the image link to work.]

Big Brother

I'm a pretty cautious person, to which end, I try to stay beneath the radar.  Or at least I don't pop my head up over the horizon if I don't know who's out there to take a shot at it.

What the heck am I talking about?  I blog under an assumed name.  I try not to be too radical in my blogging.  Even so, every now and then a colleague will send me an email with a link to a post of mine that they happened to run across.  Heck, I even pop up in Google searches of my own now and then.  So it's hard to have an internet presence and remain totally hidden and anonymous.  In fact, it's practically oxymoronic.  Or maybe just moronic.

But on some level, I can feel the dismay of Chez Pazienza,  a savvy, well-read blogger who had a promising career at CNN, until they found out about her blog.  She wasn't hiding it, she blogged under her own name, and quite prominently.  But her astonishment is palpable when the powers that be turned on her and invoked a vague clause in the handbook stating that any writing done for anyone other than the mothership had to be passed through their standards and practices department.  She admits her opinions were occasionally controvertial, adding that she never wrote about her job or employer.

More poignant is the fact that she took up blogging to pass the time and keep her writing skills sharp as she was recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Is there a made-for-TV movie in this?  Sarring a spunky Julia Roberts maybe?

But I digress.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

I find it chilling that not only did she get fired for blogging, but found out that CNN actually employs several people whose jobs it is to ferret out this kind of thing.

They probably didn't have to ferret very far.  Chez Pazienza is a featured blogger on The Huffington Post  .  They probably just browsed through this very prominent blog site over their morning coffee, which got spewed all over the screen when this viper at their bosom popped up.  Ultimately, someone from HR admitted to Pazienza that it wasn't just that she was writing, but "also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."

She goes on to add "whether a respected and loyal CNN producer of four years, like myself, could've gotten off with a warning had I chosen to write about, say, my favorite pasta sauce recipes, who knows."

(Damn...she's been reading my blog.)

Anyway, it's a most interesting situation.  Is blogging a new frontier in free speech?  What does it say about the rigidity of a fairly cool but established media giant like CNN?  Are we all going to hell in a handbasket.  (Well, yes, but that's beside the point.)

[Thanks, Stryder, for this most interesting link.]

Happy Birthday, Sandy

For Sandy's birthday Wednesday, she, Kathie and I went out to dinner.  We went to a restaurant called 1171, which opened recently.  Kathie'd been there for another birthday celebration, but it was the first time for Sandy and I.

The decor was modern and warm, the service was friendly without being smothering.  They had Hendrick's gin, so I had a very good dry gibson, straight up.  (Thanks for driving, Kath.) 

The food was excellent.  Sandy and I had appetizers;  she ordered escargot, I had scallops and polenta.  The others had salads that were so big, I got to help with those.  For dinner, I got butternut squash risotto.  I've made risotto before, but it never turned out to be as good as wonderful as I'd heard it should be.  This was.  There was the option of adding a piece of protein, and I got a piece of ahi tuna, rare.  Yum.  Sandy had homemade spinach fettucine with scallops and shrimp, and Kathie got braised shortribs.

After splitting a decadent chocolate dessert, we left the restaurant in time to see the beginning of the lunar eclipse.  We opened Kathie's moon roof so we could watch it on the way home.  By the time we got back to my house, it was about half eclipsed.  It was beautiful to watch.  Strange that the edge being eclipsed seemed to have a fuzzy, ragged quality.  It looked like a mouse was taking bites out of the side of it.  Kathie speculated that it was because the surface of the Earth, which was causing the eclipse, is irregular.  Maybe the ragged quality was caused by the shadow of the Andes or the Himalayas.  I don't know, but it was neat.  It started clouding over after awhile, so I gave it up, but it was great while it lasted.

Nice of the moon to do that for Sandy's birthday.

[Image from Garden Detective]

I've Got Heartbeats by the Number

I wonder if it's true.  That we're each programmed to have a certain number of heartbeats.

1.5 billion.

Doesn't sound like much, does it?  A billion.  A thousand million.  And half again that.

Makes me want to slow my heart down.

I heard it on NPR a while back, and made myself a note on a scrap of paper.  1.5 billion.  Us, and the whale, and the elephant, and the shrew, and the wee timorous mouse.  Accordidng to this site  from Baylor University, the average human heart rate is 70/minute.  The mouse goes at 500/minute, the elephant a mere 28/minute.  I can't vouch for their facts, though, as they claim the African bull elephant can weigh up to 28 kg.  Hm.  I know a lot of people with dogs bigger than that.  A lot bigger.

Hard to know for sure, about the number of heart beats.  There are so many mitigating factors.  I mean, how can you do a pure scientific test.  Who ever gets the whole 1.5 billion.  At 60 beats a minute, it gives you 17,361.1 days.  Can't be right.  That's only 47 years.  I'm dead already.

But I find the concept that we're preprogrammed for obsolescence in a certain number of heartbeats interesting.  Other factors enter into it, of course:  disease, accidents, predators, how much time you spend with a high heart rate just burning those puppies up.

Might be why people who do cocaine tend to die young, and those on beta-blockers live long, even if they don't have as much fun.  Beta-blockers slow down your heart rate.

Why those animals with slow heart beats, elephants and blue whales, and tortoises live so long, and those with staccato heartbeats go in a flash.  Us, we're somewhere in between.

Makes you think about the idea that stress kills people.  In addition to raising hell with your cardiovascular system, it runs right through those heartbeats.

New leaf for me.  Meditate.  Take a beta-blocker.  Stop, smell the roses.  Fat chance.

[Image from Australian Fauna.com]

Photoshop: The New Reality?

L.C. shared these photoshopped photos.  I picked my favorites out of a big batch.  You'll notice most of them are from the best photoshop site there is: Worth 1000.  As in, a picture is worth 1000 words.  They have lots of very entertaining photoshop contests.  On the site this time they are asking for donations as their bandwidth costs are outstripping their revenue from Google ads.  If you live for this sort of thing, donate.  Or at least buy their book.

Cool stuff.  Wish I could do that.  Thanks, L.C.