Year: 2008

Chinese Propaganda Posters

Remember those photos from 3 weeks ago where I could stick your picture into different Russian scenarios? Well, I thought I’d hit the jackpot along the same lines when I read this RSS feed headline from Photojojo: Be a Socialist Hero! Your Photographed Face as Mao?s Special Helper. Trouble is that this isn’t like PhotoFunia where you upload an image and through magic you instantly get your manipulated image back for free.

With Maopost.com you send them a high resolution jpeg of your portrait and they actually paint your face into a copy of a Chinese propaganda poster. Ain’t free though, $179 for 15 x 24 or $199 for 21 x 32 (shipping extra.) At Maoart there are over 1500 posters to choose from. I kind of like this one: Work To Build A Powerful Navy.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 311

Bones

One of the TV shows in our Netflix rotation is Bones, it’s like the X-Files on valium. It’s got a handsome FBI agent, a pretty female doctor that have polar opposite personalities and they solve crimes, there is even some underlying sexual tension tossed in. But Bones involves bodies in various states of decomposition not UFOs and monsters. And it is more like the usual approved for the widest TV audience possible than the ground breaking series the X-Files was.

The one thing that always annoyed me about the show was the intro. As the theme music played (Massive Attack must have a deal with Fox) they showed a montage of the characters in scenes from the show as the actor’s names are flashed on the screen. Trouble was, they weren’t in sync, David Boreanaz’s name over the image of Emily Deschanel, etc. Annoying.

We received Disc 1 of Season 2 last week and I guess I wasn’t the only one who found that practice bothersome, the names and faces now lined up.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 308

Ralph Kramden’s Got Nothing On Me

Today was a busy day to be a member of the MMC. First up, in the morning, was bowling. Followed by lunch. A short break and then the Sno Cap Drive In’s 44th Anniversary Celebration.

I hadn’t bowled since Moses was in Middle School, so I was a bit rusty bowling a 5 in the first frame and an eight in the second, but then tossed 2 strikes in a row and manged to surpass my goal of scoring 100 by fourteen. In the second game I somehow rolled 4 strikes (including a turkey) and a spare ending up with a score of 155.

Look for me on the PBA Tour soon. 🙂

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down yet again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 308

My Cancer

Back in March of 2006 when Donna was first diagnosed with breast cancer, we did what most people do when given news that they had a serious illness, we scoured the internet looking for information. Then I went one step further and started hunting blogs of breast cancer patients/survivors. I found several, read a lot, but didn’t link any for continued reading. That is until I found My Cancer. Found is not entirely accurate, to tell the truth I think someone pointed me to it, because I probably wouldn’t have found it because it was hosted on the NPR website.

It chronicles the trials and tribulations of being a cancer patient. Leroy Sievers had successfully beat colon cancer 4 years earlier, but as the disease sometimes does, it returned. This time it had metastasized to his brain and lungs. Leroy, life long journalist and producer (most recently for Ted Koppel’s Nightline) was asked to write a blog about his life living with cancer. The doctor’s gave him a prognosis of six months to live. My Cancer was full of insights into the “cancer world” and Leroy’s way with words touched a lot of people, he had a penchant for being able to eloquently express what other citizens of that world could not. Soon the comment section became a gathering place, sort of a town hall, for people who have or had been touched by cancer.

Sadly Leroy passed away a week ago. He wrote something in the blog right up until the very end. I’m going to miss him, because for every weekday for the past two and a half years, I have looked forward reading Leroy’s posts in the morning.

For the last couple days his wife has been posting to the blog. I’m not sure if she is looking to continue doing that forever, although for a while, it would be a nice continuance of the spirit of the blog to hear the caregiver’s side of the story.

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 304

TDTVS Warm Up

If you look over in the side bar you will see a countdown to Season 5 of Lost. Right now it stands at 147 days. That is based on something I read that said the first show of the new season will air on Thursday, January 15th.

Because I can’t for the life of me remember exactly how things ended up at the end of season four, I do remember who was residing in the coffin, but most of the other stuff is hazy, I figured that maybe I should rewatch the last few episodes of season four before season five starts. Well, hell, if I’m going to watch some, why not all? So if there are 82* episodes so far, if I back up 82 days from January 15th I should start a single episode a night on Saturday, October 25th. Let’s stretch it out a bit more…how about watching one episode each weeknight? Five gazinta 82, 16 times with a remainder of 2. That gives me a start date of Tuesday, September 23rd. Let’s take a day off between finishing watching season 4 and the start of season 5, for party planning, and start watching the show on Monday the 22nd. That even has a nice symmetry because the show originally premiered on September 22, 2004.

So every weeknight from 9/22/2008 until 1/13/2009, including Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Years, I will watch an episode of Lost. I’ll use the title of that episode as the title of that night’s post and if I’m really creative I’ll relate something in that episode to something that happened that day.

*Lostpedia list 82 episodes while Wikipedia lists 83 because they count last season’s finally as two separate episodes. I think that if they aired on the same night, one after the other with no credits between them they are one episode, so I’m treating it as such. Eighty-two it is.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 301

Where’s The Car?

We rode the tandem to work today and the Emperor spent the day in the air conditioned luxury of the garage at home. The ride in was great, because it is our early week we started riding at a few minutes before 5:30 AM, there was zero traffic and the temperature was 70° with a little bit of fog. The ride home wasn’t too bad, even though it was sunny and 90°.

Donna and I took our usual walks around the perimeter of the parking lot all three times today and each and every time we came to the far corner I would see that empty parking spot and for an instant wonder what happened to the car.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 299

Work Bench

Looking for another quick “photo = post” again and again it needs enough explanation to make me write a post anyway. This was my workbench at AIMD at NAS Meridian (MS) around 1980. I can picture it’s location in the overall shop, but can’t for the life of me remember what piece of equipment I worked on at it. Notice the model of the Starship Enterprise NCC 1701A from the recently released Star Trek The Movie hanging from the ceiling. You can also see a black spider hanging down, so it must have been coming up on Halloween.

Less apparent are two small egg shaped airplanes hanging there as well. I haven’t thought of those in ages and now searching the internet looking for them I realize I should have held on to them because they seem impossible to find now. Called Eggocentrics, they were made by a company called IPT and they produced a whole series of them based on commercial airliners in the 70’s. I of course couldn’t leave well enough alone and modified them into military aircraft, one of which was of the EA-3B I flew in while at VQ-1. I can’t remember what the second one was, but I think it was of an A-7 from one of the attack squadrons off the Midway.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 299