- Probably because I don’t work that much in the realm of historic images, I did not know that scanned or photographic copies of public-domain images are also in the public domain, at least in the US. I’ve been gathering scans of pre-1923 artwork for possible use on book covers for several years now, but the uncertain origin (and thus the copyright status) of most of the copies themselves has given me pause. I guess it’s time to end the pause and hit Play.
- We’re currently in peak season for noctilucent clouds, which are high-altitude ice-crystal plumes of mysterious origin. Because they’re so high, they reflect sunlight long after the land beneath them is in night-time darkness. NLCs are appearing farther south recently for reasons not understood; predictably, it’s been ascribed to global warming, but some research indicates that southward excursions of NLCs are a proxy for low solar activity, which we’ve certainly been seeing the last couple of years. (Spaceweather has been covering NLCs a lot in recently weeks, with good photos.)
- Here’s an R2D2-shaped toilet paper cozy. Hey, why is this any weirder than the crocheted teal-yarn poodle-nose cozies that my Aunt Josephine used to keep her toilet paper in?
- I have a strong affection for Nebraska, and here’s an interesting article about abandoned farmsteads and structures in the western Great Plains portion of the state. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- A chap named Julian Beever may be the real master of 3-D sidewalk art. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for putting me on to him.)
- We’ve now had cheap desktop CD-R burners for at least ten years, and the lifetime of the media is supposedly about that. Here’s a reasonable article on optical disc longevity that isn’t from an industry source. Has anybody noticed any burned (not stamped) data discs from the 90s going bad yet?
- When we lived in Arizona, I used to climb an elderly neighbor’s thirty-foot-tall grapefruit tree to help her get the high-hanging fruit. I was in my early forties and that was the last time I ever climbed trees on a systematic basis. If I had to do it again, I would probably stay on the ground and build something like this.
- Has Bucky Fuller’s Cloud 9 cities concept ever been used in SF? There’s not much to be found online about them, but in brief, he was talking about geodesic spheres as much as several miles in diameter, each containing whole cities that could float via thermal lift by virtue of as little as a degree or two of temperature delta between inside and outside. I’ve been imagining Cloud 9 spheres made of drumlin parts (with possibly a Hilbert drive ring around the sphere’s equator) and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t already seen the idea used in fiction, given that Bucky wrote about it in 1960.
travel
Odd Lots
Baby Farm Animals and Other Sillinesses
We pulled into Crystal Lake last night after all the usual 1100 miles, with three adult bichons and an eight-and-a-half-week-old puppy in the hold. Redball is looking for two permanent names: A kennel name, and a call name. Kennel names are nominally unique (if often complex and sometimes ridiculous) and are how individual purebred dogs are listed in breed databases. QBit’s kennel name is Deja Vu’s Quantum Bit, and Aero’s is Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. Jackie’s kennel name is Jimi’s Hit the Jackpot. We went through a lot of ideas on the way out (Nebraska is good for such things) and floated possibilities like Jimi’s Morning Cloudscape. As for call names, well, that’s how you call the dog for dinner. Short is good. One of my favorites, after listening to him fuss halfway across Iowa, is Riesling, or Reese for short. Hey, he’s white and he whines. (Ceaselessly.)
We’ll figure it out. The trip was uneventful. We played my mix CDs, and when the thumping hi-hat intro to Barry Manilow’s 1981 cover of “Let’s Hang On” started to rise, I cranked up the volume and yelled, “Let’s disco!” I was being silly, but Carol took me at my word, and for the next 2:57 I watched my spouse do an absolutely pure disco routine without ever leaving the front seat of the 4-Runner. Carol has an amazing gift for dance improv that she almost never gets to exercise. I remember back in 1975 when she stood up to a friend’s wedding, and I watched in awe as she and one of her sorority sisters did a near-acrobatic dance improv to a George M. Cohan medley, all in long dresses and high heels, with the wedding party’s pink parasols for canes, in front of what must have been three hundred people. Thirty-four years later, well, she still has it.
I do need to set something straight here before too much longer. I got a note from one of my long-time readers just before setting out, asking me how it was that I wrote a book about baby farm animals. I’ve been asked this before, and the simple answer seems somehow inadequate: I didn’t. However, if you google “Baby Farm Animals by Jeff Duntemann” you will get plenty of hits on all the new and used book sites. Don’t order it on the strength of my reputation. The book exists, but in fact was written and drawn by the formidable Garth Williams, who is better known for the art in Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. A little digging revealed an error right at the source: Bowker’s ISBN database, which somehow got Williams’ book listed under my name. That single booboo has by now propagated into virtually every significant bookselling site on the Web. I think it’s hilarious, but if I were Garth Williams, I’d be seriously annoyed, or at least I would be if I weren’t dead. I sent a note to Bowker, but don’t expect the error to be corrected any time soon.
Ah, well. As I’ve said before, better Baby Farm Animals than The Story of O.
Notes on the Journey
We rolled back into Colorado Springs at 4:30 PM this afternoon, right into the thick of a whompin’ thunderstorm that was rapidly flooding streets on the west side of town. When we left, there was snow on the daffodils. Now summer is in full roar. I wonder sometimes where spring went. No matter; we’re back in our own house, and tonight I can sleep in my own bed. In the meantime, a few notes on the trip that admittedly may be a bare half-notch above sock-drawer reports:
- Trucks were not speeding on I-80. In fact, they were often going 5-8 MPH below the posted limit in states where speed limits apply identically to all vehicles. (This has not been our experience in past trips.) One wonders if trucking companies are strapped enough by the flagging economy to tell their drivers to back off on the lead foot a little and save on Diesel.
- There were an appalling number of deer lying dead on the side of the road in central Iowa. In fact, I’m guessing that the nation’s deer held their village idiots’ convention just east of Des Moines this year. We saw twenty-five or thirty in a fifty-mile span of Interstate.
- Near Lincoln, Nebraska we saw a convoy of six or seven black SUVs marked “National Severe Storms Laboratory” with a rack of the damndest geegaws on top of them, and a mobile radar unit bringing up the rear. I took some notes, and found out once I got home that this was part of the Vortex2 project, which has been getting much coverage on the Weather Channel. The vehicles in question were part of a “mobile mesonet,” which gathers data on winds out where tornadoes happen. Even the weirdest Texas Bugcatcher never had anything on those!
- I must be getting really old. Faced with paying $9.95 for one night’s Internet access at the Sheraton Iowa City on Saturday night, I said “no thanks” and went to bed.
- And you know what? Nothing of value was lost.
- Lake McConaughy was higher than we’ve ever seen it. In fact, the lake is starting to put feelers back into the upper reaches of Martin Bay, where the less-than-half-full lake hasn’t been in over eight years. The dogs romped in shallow bath-warm water between low dunes, and we ran them along the beach until they dried out. The flies haven’t come out yet, and a wonderful time was had by all.
There’s much to be done this week, as there always is after five weeks away–and we’ve got the Colorado Springs dog show next weekend. Quite a few bichons are entered, enough so that the show will be what they call a “major.” Aero needs a second major win to get his championship, and this may be the one, if we can spiff him up sufficiently and get him to behave in the ring.
And I have a book to finish. But “finish” at this point really means putting the icing on. The cake itself is done.
Bichonicon, Day 3
Things kicked into high gear today at the Bichon Frise National Specialty here in St. Louis. The seminars are over and the judging began bright and early at 8:30 AM. There are quite a few different classes: Puppy dog (and here, “dog” means “male dog”) puppy bitch, junior handler, open dog, and open bitch, among others. Carol showed Aero in the Amateur Owner/Handler class, where he took first place. The class is for people like us, who buy a show-quality puppy and do the show circuit but do not breed dogs. We own Aero and Carol handles him (meaning that she takes him physically to shows and runs him around the ring) but we aren’t doing it for money, hence “amateur.” There are professional breeders and professional handlers, though how much money can be made there is a seriously open question. Just about all of us do it for love, and a few of us (very few) make a buck or two here and there. (Just like fiction writing, no?)
Carol almost got second place in the Winners Dog class; the judge had Carol take Aero around the ring a second time and was clearly considering him, but then someone else got the red ribbon.
Our friends have done well too: Mary Provost (who draws the show logo cartoons) took Reserve Winners Bitch with her new puppy Mona Lisa, and Laura Pfab’s daughter Kirsten won Junior Handlers with their new adult dog Ron Stoppable.
I’d say more, but it’s late and I’m getting cross-eyed here. Everybody had a good time, and although Aero’s blue ribbon did not come with any points, we’ve learned a lot about grooming and showing from the old pros here. Everybody says that Aero almost can’t avoid becoming a champion–he just needs to hit a few more shows and keep his tail up. I think we can do that. We will certainly try.
Tomorrow is our second shot in the ring, and then it’s back home to Chicago up I-55.
Bichonicon, Day 2
Last night was the awards banquet and rescue auction for the Bichon Frise National Specialty show here in St. Louis. All the bichon powers from the Denver/Springs axis were gathered at one table, plus a couple of old friends from as far away as Pittsburgh. As that sort of dinner goes, it was exceptional: We had roast tenderloin of beef, with new potatoes, carrots, and string beans. (I gave my string beans to Carol, but the rest of it was spectacular–even the carrots.) The weakest part of the meal was the cheesecake dessert, but that was certainly workmanlike, and we all enjoyed the meal immensely, at least on the merits of the food.
I admit, I was something of an outsider. All but one of our tablemates were women, and most of them had attended a seminar on dog reproductive health and whelping earlier that day. I like puppies a great deal, but I’m not passionately interested in seeing them happen in Technicolor and real time. And of course, the old pros at the table all had their own whelping hax, honed over many years of ushering new puppy life into the world. Much was said about the “stuck puppy” problem, which is about what you think and can be fatal. I was hoisting a nice, medium-rare chunk of tenderloin on my fork when one of the venerable whelpers at the table offered the wisdom that “you can insert your index finger into the bitch’s rectum and re-orient a stuck puppy…”
Some mental images take a minute or two to remove from one’s head. I seized that opportunity to set my fork down and head for the men’s room, hoping that we’d be on to something better by the time I got back.
And we were. The rest of the meal was uneventful, and we nibbled our cheesecake while the raffle prizes were awarded (generally hand-made bichon crafts) and the auction conducted, for the benefit of the national Bichon Frise Rescue group.
This morning was a quiet one for me; Carol wanted to watch the Obedience and Rally events, and I mostly kicked back and read a book, unless one of our friends was in the ring. Obedience is just that: tests to see how well a dog listens and obeys relatively complex commands. Rally is peculiar; it’s basically close-order drill for dogs, with dog and handler working through a course of various commands like 270-degree and 360-degree turns.
I fetched back lunch and snacks as needed, and held QBit down while Carol practiced shaping the hair over his rump. (QBit does not like having his butt fussed with. Maybe he’s heard too much about those whelping seminars.) By midlate afternoon all of our friends had had their turns in the ring, and we went back to our room and napped for an hour. We caught a quick supper outside at Panera (or St. Louis Bread Company, as they call it here) in gorgeous if slightly humid weather. Carol is now bathing Aero, and after she dries him, our more experienced friends will be over to the room here to offer advice on getting him brushed and scissored into championship form.
Aero hits the ring tomorrow eleven-ish, and whereas he’s in pretty good shape overall, he is competing not against two or three other bichons (as he often does at smaller dog shows) but well over a hundred. Carol’s putting her back into it and we’re hoping for the best, but much depends on how well Aero “baits”; that is, how focused he is on Carol with a piece of bacon between her lips. Aero doesn’t bait easily, and he tends toward rowdiness. The dog show thing for him is a glorious opportunity to wrestle with his own kind, even (or especially) when he should be daintily prancing around the ring. He’ll get his chance, and I’ll be on the sidelines, taking movies and praying that nobody nearby is in heat. Sex trumps even bacon–but you knew that.
I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Bichonicon, Day 1
We got here last night seven-ish, and had time to lay on our backs on the bed and just decompress after the 330-mile blast down I-55. Carol washed QBit earlier this morning, and is now “tipping” him (snipping off the small “tips” of his hair that stick out beyond the general contours of his coat) just for practice. Aero’s up next, as he will be in the ring both Friday and Saturday and needs to be at his absolute best.
The hotel is about what we expected. Hotels willing to host dog breed specialties have certain common characteristics: They’re older, somewhat careworn, and ripe for large-scale rehab. The occasional piddle spot is acceptable, given a four-day full house at what I consider premium rates for an ever-so-slightly crufty property like this.
The faux-Swiss Sheraton Westport Chalet actually isn’t bad. We love the standard Sherton beds, and our room-service breakfast was nicely done, arriving hot and right on time. The Wi-Fi, though; aggghh! It’s $10/day, four days for $30…and it drops the connection every five or ten minutes. I have 48%-60% signal strength, which should be more than enough to maintain a connection. I can generally restore the connection by breaking and remaking association with the access point, which is a nuisance, but it’s better than nothing. It’s notable that I’ve had Wi-Fi problems at other Sheratons, especially in Des Moines, where I could never get the damned thing to work at all. (I got my money back.)
While we were walking QBit and Aero around the hotel earlier today, we passed a restaurant that ferdam looked like a Panera–except that it was called the St. Louis Bread Company. Once I had a connection again, I discovered that that was what Panera was called when it was created here in St. Louis in 1993. Restaurants in the St. Louis area still bear that name.
As for the show itself, things are still being set up. The opening banquet is tonight (dogs do not attend, which in one sense is a shame) and for the rest of the afternoon everybody’s likely to be in their rooms or out on the lawn grooming the contestants. We’ve already run into most of the people we know in the bichon metaverse, though alas, neither QBit’s nor Aero’s breeders will be attending.
One final unrelated item: Several people have sent me notes about the announced sale of Borland to Micro Focus. What this means for Delphi is absolutely nothing, since Borland sold off all of its programming language products to Embarcadero Systems in 2008. Most of what Borland still sells is StarTeam, a revision control system, which is evidently what Micro Focus wants.
It’s a quiet day. I’m helping Carol as needed, and when not needed, I’m quietly thinking about how I think about the things that I think about when I’m thinking. Being free means knowing your own mind, and making sure that no one and nothing receives your unquestioning obedience. If you can’t do that, you are not free.
Off to Bichonicon!
Carol and I are packing up for the dash down I-55 to St. Louis, where we will be for a few days, attending the Bichon Frise Nationals at the Sheraton Westport Chalet. Hundreds and hundreds of bichons in one hotel! Furballdemonium! As always, it’s hard to tell how often I’ll be able to post while there–hotel broadband is a very uneven phenomenon. I’ll try and get some pictures for those who can’t imagine it. (On the other hand, I know that most of you can imagine a lot.)
But in the meantime, I want to post more broadly what Jim O’Brien pointed out in a comment to yesterday’s entry. Spelled correctly in Irish, “oonchick” would be “oinseach”–not that I would have had a chance in hell of guessing!–and means what I think Sade meant: a person of pathetic and foolish stupidity. And although Jim had not heard the term “gomog,” a “gom” is Irish slang for idiot. I greatly appreciate Jim’s tips, and again, spelling is key: If you can’t spell it, you can’t find it.
And for quick grins, Domino is now pushing certified CarbonFree sugar! (Yes, yes, yes, I know what they mean. But multibilliondollar corporations should maybe filter their merchandising efforts for that species of completely avoidable howler.)
A Fine Day Off
Well, we got here late yesterday afternoon, as planned. Still, as relatively painless as the drive was, it took its toll. Somewhere in the Great Big Illinois Nothing along the western reaches of I-88, I started to get a scratchy throat. By the time we got to Downer’s Grove, I was sniffling–but there’s no way to blow your nose while attempting a transition onto I-294, trust me. Carol gave me a Zicam as soon as I could take one hand off the wheel for a few seconds, and half an hour later, we go to the condo intact.
That last forty minutes was some of the gnarliest driving I’d done since we left Phoenix six years ago.
We didn’t feel much like prowling for supper after a drive like that. My sister came to the rescue by ordering a take-out Italian feast from Salerno’s on Wolf Road in Mt. Prospect, and once a little of their superb chicken tetrazini went down the hatch, I was a far happier guy. Julie is walking now, and big sister Katie is very close to carrying on coherent conversations. Kids grow up fast when you’re not looking, even if you stop looking for only a month or so.
I was in bed by 9:15 and slept until 6:30. I’m still sniffling, but don’t panic: It’s the same damned cold I always seem to get after a period of intense stress and expenditure of energy. There’s a lot to do this trip, and I’m by no means done with my book, but I’m taking today off, and in a moment I’m going back to bed for awhile. If I can keep my butt in bed and not expend any more energy than I already have, the cold will be gone tomorrow morning. That’s the plan, at least. I’ll let you know how well I do.
If That’s a Wind Farm, This Must Be Adair
I pretty much know this route by heart. It’s gotten to the point where I know with complete certainty that when I see the York, Nebraska rainbow water tower, we’re at Mile 350 and thus three quarters of the way across the cornfields to Iowa. I know where the wind farms are. I know where the weird transparent barn is. I know where the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles is. (We stayed near there in Lexington, Nebraska last night.) I know where the really clean restrooms are. (Sapp Bros.) I know where the guy selling oil leases out of his back yard (which faces I-80) is; and I know his phone number: 1-800-DRY-HOLE.
Heh. Have I been this way before, or what?
Yes, we’re crossing the prairies again, on our way to Chicago for our younger nephew Matt’s graduation from the U of I School of Accountancy, and the Bichon Frise Nationals in St. Louis next week. We’re spending the night in Iowa City, right downtown at the dog-friendly Sheraton, which isn’t dirt-cheap but has marvelous beds.
We worried about the weather, but the weather’s been great: Sunny for the most part and completely seasonal. It snowed heavily in Colorado Springs yesterday morning as we were leaving, but once we got off the mountain things warmed up and dried out, and in the 850 miles since then we haven’t seen any wet pavement at all.
I’ve always liked Nebraska, but Iowa’s a great state too. We stopped outside of Des Moines to gas up ($2.09/gal) and when I went in to get some bottled water, the store clerk asked me if I’d like some free popcorn. She was cleaning out the popcorn machine according to schedule, and the boss always told her to dump whatever was left over before popping another batch. The boss was gone, and in consequence I walked out with an immensity of still-warm popcorn in a plastic bag. Carol and I munched until we couldn’t stand the thought of any more popcorn, and I think we put away maybe a quarter of it.
Carol brushed the dogs as I drove, and we sang along with the CD player and discussed how to evaluate the literature on nutrition and health. Driving this trip has become almost painless. It’ll never feel as good as sitting in my comfy chair reading a good book, but there are times when you just have to be somewhere, however it is to be done. We’ll be in Des Plaines by suppertime tomorrow. I’m not sure when we’ll be back. That’s how it goes with trips to Chicago. I’ll keep you informed.
The Last 290 Miles…
…were without incident, but not without irritation: Virtually the entire 200 miles to Denver I had to fight a 30 MPH crosswind, and I was very glad that our good bright sun had dried out the roads before we left Ogallala at 11:00 AM. QBit started getting kennel fever in the great big featureless nowhere that I-76 crosses in northeast Colorado, and Carol had to put him in her lap to keep him from chewing a leg off.
We took a short detour up to Lake McConaughy before setting out this morning, and found that the lake is now two feet higher than we’ve ever seen it, and higher in fact than it’s been since the now-fading drought got serious in 2001. Whatever’s been eating Nebraska’s climate seems to have gotten fixed somehow, and since our atmospheric CO2 level has kept increasing all the while, I can only conclude that–gasp!–climate changes all by itself, in ways that we simply can’t predict because, like the Wizard of Oz admitted in the basket of the Omaha State Fair balloon, we don’t know how it works.
Anyway. The short form is that we’re back in Colorado Springs, where last Thursday’s blizzard shows a bare few remnants in habitual shadows but has otherwise melted into the soil. The house smells like plasticizers (as it always does when we’re gone for a month) but the plants survived, and although we’re exhausted and will be digging out for a day or two, the trip is over and I can get back to work on the book. I’m a little late with Chapter 8, but I’m now 105,000 words in (of about 175,000 words total) and I suspect I’ll make the rest of the deadlines with a little scrambled eggs and caffeine.
