Howling Wind MP3

Sleep driving.

During most of the ads on television for a medicine, a company implores viewers to consult a doctor about conditions which may benefit from administration of their drug. The AmbienCR folks have dropped the term doctor in favor of prescriber, indicating that it’s not necessary to see a qualified physician, just someone with a prescription pad and bad penmanship.

Way to go, guys. Two thumbs way up. Excuse me while I hit up my prescriber for some Oxycontin and medically necessary weed.

I rarely, if ever, hear members of other religions making mention of their faith in general conversation. No references to Vishnu or Pan, Allah or Buddha, Thor, Aphrodite or Zeus. There’s no injection of other random insights into our personal natures either: No comments about sexual orientation or position, political leanings, thoughts on capital punishment or favorite mixed drinks we might have recently overindulged in. Probably because these things are personal and could easily be offensive to others within earshot.

So while I believe everyone should have the right to believe in whatever they want to believe in, it would be better in practice to keep random religious zeal. and images of the virgin Mary on toast, close to the vest, only to be exposed when the topic of conversation truly warrants it.

Don’t make me pray to Joe Pesci and bring down his wrath. High gas prices would then be the least of our worries. Amen.

Before I started reading, I figured I’d have some good fodder for a blog post about all the irrational, ugly, maniacal, hate-filled things he said. But the further in I got, the more I realized there would be no way to quote anything from the document. Not because I’m afraid of the things in it, or because I worry what others might think of the vitriol, but really because nothing in the paper is worthy of reprinting, in any context whatsoever.

The upshot is that Winrod is being accused of being anti-Semitic, and he claims he is not. Then he spends five very tightly packed pages explaining that when he says he’s not anti-Semitic, he really means he’s anti-Jew, and that Jews are not Semites, but they are all child molesters. Not just a few of them, ALL of them. So says the Talmud. [Insert examples from scripture and other sources ad nauseum here.]

I personally am a huge proponent of free speech, so I guess I can’t fault Winrod for using it. However, I’m pretty sure any putative omniscients can see through a bluster of semantics. I don’t wish to lower myself to his level and pass judgment, but I do hope his Lutheran beliefs include a hell for the truly evil full of fire and torture, and that sociopathic bigots like him get what they deserve.

Oh, it turns out there is one part of the paper worth mentioning. It’s at the bottom of the last page. It reads: “THE WINROD LETTER, published monthly. Subscription: $15.00 per year. 50 copies of this issue: $10.00 p.p. The Winrod Letter…” Either there’s a market for this sludge, or his gall simply knows no bounds. In either case, color me appalled.

10. Gazing down the length of a river tightly hemmed in by overhanging trees in full autumn colors

9. Observing the intricacies of the planet from the peak of a lonely mountain

8. Stopping to listen to the almost tangible hush while walking or skiing through a forest during a heavy snow

7. Swimming in a clear lake during a late summer rain shower

6. Inhaling the recognizable but indescribable scent in the air that announces an imminent thunderstorm

5. Noticing the day each year when all the winter-bare trees and fields are finally green again

4. Embracing the isolation of a vast expanse of terracotta desert

3. Watching the sun sink below the horizon, when the horizon is a foreign sea

2. Standing in a wide-open field of waist-high grass facing eyes closed into a warm southwesterly breeze

1. Looking straight up at the sky at 2:00am on a moonless night and seeing the soft white arc of our galaxy stretch across it

Thanks for taking the time to read. Please comment with your own observations as I’d love to turn this into an ongoing discussion, or at least a list I can refer to when I need a little inspiration.

My Slingbox came yesterday and I had it hooked up and running in a matter of fifteen minutes. So what does it do? It’s actually like a media trebuchet. You load up your DVD player, television tuner, satellite DVR or cable connection, pull back the handle…and let it fly. Where does it land? Well, anywhere you have a Slingbox client. That could be a MacOS or Windows desktop, Symbian device, Windows Mobile smartphone or PDA, or a select few PalmOS devices. This means you can watch all the stuff you have piling up on your video recording devices at home pretty much anywhere you go. Using a somewhat kludgy but effective interface, you can even control your video devices remotely so that you can select the shows you want to watch, change the channels on your TV, and so on.

Now for a little bad news. Some smartphone clients are not supported and others can be flaky. Unless your wireless coverage area is pretty good, the video performance is going to be choppy. PalmOS support is weak at best, and most people think the regular client interface is terrible. Sometimes you have to do a little tweaking to get things to work properly. Just make sure you check the compatibility list and realize that your mileage may vary.

There is no Linux support at all. But thanks to Google and some dedicated hacker types, I was able to find documentation and supporting libraries which will help you install the Windows Slingbox client under Linux using Wine. I personally can’t stand a network device that you can’t configure without a client, and this is one of those devices. Slingbox’s support department and technical documentation isn’t the best, either. However, if you’re even slightly computer savvy and have a half hour to kick around, you’ll easily be able to get the Slingbox up and running and be on your way to enjoying watching your TV and recorded shows anywhere you go.

The Slingbox site is a little obnoxious with all of its flash videos and such, but it does have enough good information to get you going. I’m a little bit of a Johnny-come-Lately to the technology, but I’m sure there are lots of others out there who haven’t partaken of it yet either. I’m not usually one to advocate proprietary technology, but it’s always nice to come across something that actually just works and isn’t a colossal pain in the ass to set up. So if this technology is something you need (and for anyone with a DVR, I would recommend it) save up a few thousand pennies and pick up a Slingbox. I think you’ll like what you see.

So we’re in Joplin, Missouri the other night, out and about to get a bite to eat, cruise the town a little bit and discover just how dark and dyspeptic southwestern Missouri can be on a Saturday. On the way back home, the conversation turns to a foray I had with Windows Vista, experimenting with Media Center extensions and importing all of my ripped music so that it can be played in our game room wirelessly via the Xbox 360 there. That’s pretty cool stuff–for Windows.

At some point, one of us mentions the idea of streaming movies using the same method, and somehow Pretty Woman gets tossed into the mix. At that point, my brain fired several unrelated synaptic pulses at once and a conversation between the two halves went something like this:

LEFT BRAIN: “Pretty Woman? Not really, I can’t say that Julia Roberts is anything to look at.”

RIGHT BRAIN: “I agree with you there. She’s no Angelina Jolie.”

LB: “Wait, what did you say?”

RB: “I said Julia Roberts is no Angelina Jolie.”

LB: “Holy crap!”

RB: “What?”

LB: “I can’t believe this. Seth MacFarlane just helped me solve a crossword clue I’ve been stuck on.”

RB: “What the hell does that have to do with Angelina Jolie?”

LB: “Well, I just saw the Star Wars episode of Family Guy the other night. And at the beginning, they do a spoof of the scrolling text seen in the original. You know what I’m talking about?”

RB: “Yeah. So?”

LB: “Well, towards the end, he mentions that Angelina Jolie appears nude in a film called Gia, and recommends that everyone go out and give it a watch.”

RB: “Let me guess, Gia was the answer?”

LB: “That’s right. Clue: Angelina Jolie role, answer was three letters with middle letter I. I know I could have looked it up, but I sure hate to cheat myself out of a crossword puzzle solution.”

RB: “You’re pathetic.”

LB: “Tell me something I don’t know.”

So there you have it. You never know what you’re going to learn in the next few minutes. And just because Family Guy is sophomoric, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching. Family Guy–program it into your DVR. Go. Now. I’ll wait.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but it seems to have been sometime between the Boomers and Generation Y. I don’t want to single out Generation X as the source of all the trouble, but let’s posit that there’s a huge amount of overlap. When I was younger, I got to go outside quite a bit. But outside meant in my neighborhood out in the woods or in a neighbor’s back yard so that we could yell, play kickball, fight mock wars and do all the things that kids do when their parents tell them to “take it outside.” And we did get to go out in public with the ‘rents, to public places, like movie theaters, playhouses and restaurants. However, I remember that things were a bit different then.

Were I or my brother perfect children? Not that I recall, but a line seems to have been crossed somewhere. We weren’t allowed to run freely about a busy restaurant while our parents occasionally glanced around wondering where we were or made a lame attempt to reign us in with a barely audible reprimand. We weren’t allowed to go out to a 10:00pm movie, never mind go to one, raise a ruckus and get away with it. And we surely weren’t allowed to talk back to another adult, swear, use all manner of rude gestures, or leave the table with uneaten vegetables.

There is an appalling lack of discipline and personal responsibility in our culture today. At some point it became taboo to paddle a child by way of demonstrating what’s right and what’s wrong. At some point it became OK to sue big businesses and family members for our own negligent or careless behavior. At some point it became the norm to label children with nebulous social disorders and medicate them into submission rather than identify children as children and realize they need structured upbringing and guidance.

There is an undercurrent of fear growing slowly but steadily because we’ve silently given away most of our ability to fend for ourselves. It comes to light rather starkly when you consider events like Columbine or the current state of air traffic security or when third graders conspire to kill a teacher in Georgia. Child-on-child violence is escalating, older kids seem to have no moral compass or fear of death, and parents want to wash their hands of all of it. And I scope all of this as a trend, not as a de facto standard. Are there good parents who are bringing their children up properly? Yes. Are there good children who will go to school and grow up to be doctors, scientists, teachers, laborers and good members of society? Yes. But there’s work to be done.

We have to reclaim our grip on reality. We need to have the freedom to discipline our kids, and we have to use that freedom. Discipline doesn’t mean corporal punishment, necessarily, it simply means impressing upon a child what is right and what is wrong. The method is irrelevant: religion, logic, life lessons, hard knocks, or a combination of all of the above are effective when used judiciously and consistently. Kids need to stay in school and schools need to teach them something. Kids need to be imbued with respect and humility and shown that it’s not a weakness to exhibit both. If we don’t go back to living up to our responsibilities and taking charge of the life courses we provide for our children, fear and violence are going to escalate until it’s uncontrollable and we tie our social fabric into an impossibly complex knot.

I had heard in the past some comments from others about the fact that Southwest has made it very clear they have a problem with overweight individuals. I’ll call us Fat Fliers. It didn’t take long for the agent at the ticket counter to start making a scene about the fact that we are, clearly to her, Fat Fliers. We were greeted amiably enough, had our bags weighed and our IDs checked–pretty standard stuff. And then it began. We were first told that due to our weight and Southwest Airlines policy, we were required to purchase an extra ticket each because we could not fit into a standard airline seat.

Now, I know that I’m overweight. I am also a frequent traveler. Because of this, I know that I’m not SO overweight that I can’t fit into an airline seat. So I got obstinate. I made it clear that I was a frequent flier and that I knew without question that I could fit into an airline seat. The same is true of my girlfriend. At this point, the agent relented somewhat, though she told us that more than likely the gate agent would give us the same spiel about having to purchase extra seats. I asked her, “I’ve been told this flight is already full. What happens if we wind up purchasing these extra seats?” Her reply was that the gate agent would request passengers to re-schedule their flights and if no one did so voluntarily, two folks would be unsuspectingly bumped. I found it hard to believe their corporate policy would perpetrate a further disservice by kicking two innocent bystanders off a perfectly good airplane. I suppose if anyone deserved that fate, it would be we, the Fat Fliers. But so far, no matter how narrow the aircraft builders have tried to make the cattle-car seats on these modern aircraft, we can still sit in them reasonably.

We also found it ironic that several of the other patrons on the plane sitting within earshot were complaining about the small size of the seats. These are people who are less than six feet tall and under 250 pounds. If a “normal” person is complaining about an airline seat, I’m not sure overweight people are the problem.

Near the end of our conversation with the ticket agent, she told us that “most airlines” were “adopting a similar policy.” Well, I’ve flown twice since on different airlines and no agent of either one made any comments about our weight, height or anything else for that matter. In fact, American and Midwest were both extremely friendly and extremely accomodating.

We’ve got another trip on American coming up, and I’m definitely going to take notes. Airline travel has become a problematic affair for customers and airlines alike. I suggest that Southwest take another look at their corporate policy and bring their customer service up to par with the other major airlines. I realize that everyone is cutting expenses, slashing budgets and doing whatever they can to provide as much service as possible for as little overhead as possible. That’s no excuse for leaving sanity behind and publicly harassing paying customers. For now, we’ll simply travel with those that treat us best, even if it costs us a little more.

I am lucky enough to have someplace else to go where there is power, heat and water, but most who live near me do not. Our entire town and surrounding area is without power and the local power company says a conservative estimate is one week for the power to be out. Luckily there are lots of churches, shelters and good people around with plenty of goodwill. Generators are rolling in, along with help from power crews from as far away as St. Louis, south central Arkansas and even Minnesota. With any luck, things will be back to normal sooner than expected.

In the meantime, here are a few images I snapped last night when I went back home to try and hook up a couple of portable generators to keep my house with enough power to save our water lines and food as the temperature continues to fall and the power stays out. Unfortunately, the borrowed generators I had didn’t start so we’re still completely in the dark. Maybe tonight we’ll get lucky and they will or the power will return. Judging by the slew of power lines down across the road, I’m not hopeful.

In order to get from the main road, about two miles away, to where I live you have to go through a maze of ice covered roads strewn with fallen trees. In many places, only a pickup or 4×4 can get through. Where there used to be two-lane county roads, now there are only three-quarter lane ice-filled tracks.

As you drive further up the road, you can see things like this fence which is on the pasture across the street from our farm.

All of the following pictures are of what used to pass for our front yard, including some close-up images so you can see the thickness of the ice covering. Some of these are better seen in a dark room. The flash is trying to pick up a large area and sometimes I used my truck’s headlights because there are no other light sources for many miles.

For a quick sense of scale, the blue shape in the picture below is a full-sized riding lawnmower under a tarp.

If you’d like to see more pictures, you can visit my Gallery2 pictorial. You’ll also find a movie there that we took driving around town. We’re not sure how much you can see because there are no lights anywhere except for one bank that had a large generator brought in. Keep an eye out for the ice covering everything, the downed and low-hanging power lines across the roads and in peoples’ yards, and all of the trees that have fallen, many destroying personal property and town infrastructure.

Good luck to everyone who has been affected by this storm, and I hope the power comes on soon for all of us.