I should be sleeping right now, but my muse has even worse sleep habits than I do. (And that’s really saying something!) I’ve learned the hard way though, if a muse whispers an idea in your ear, it’s best to act immediately. Muses don’t like to repeat themselves and won’t give you the idea again at a more reasonable hour.
This time around, my muse gave me a new opening for the second dinosaur story. It’s a huge improvement.
I freely acknowledge that my reputation for not sleeping is more than a little deserved. Some of it’s choice. Some of it’s insomnia. But I really am trying to do better.
Contacting me at 1:00am to let me know there are changes that must be on the website the following morning before people go to work is not a good way to make me happy. Adding that the updates aren’t quite ready yet does nothing to improve the situation.
It all comes about because of the ages old problem of “stuff happens.”
But I’m getting tired of everything being an emergency.
One of the favorite tactics of spammers lately has been to take phrases from books, movies, or legitimate web sites and use them to disguise their messages. Part of the idea behind this is that if the phrasing is sensible (as opposed to random text) people will at least open the email. A second reason for using sensible phrases is that if the SPAM filters learn to recognize sensible phrases as SPAM, they’ll start to misdiagnose legitimate mail as SPAM with the result that people will stop using them, thus making it easier for the spammers to run their various scams.
One of today’s SPAM messages had this for the subject line:
And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
It’s been nearly 25 years since I first ran across The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a wholly remarkable book, from MegaDodo publications, one of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor. That particular entry talks about why so many humans (even the ones with digital watches) are unhappy and explains how nearly 2,000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone just started being nice to one another, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth finally figured out a way to make it work. And then the Earth was destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
That’s one of my favorite books and I’m appalled at this abuse of the text. The spammers have now officially gone too far. OK, they went too far a long time ago, but books like The Guide don’t come along very often.
I have a solution. It’s drastic, but it’ll definitely work and I don’t see any good alternatives.
From now on, anyone caught sending SPAM gets forced to listen to some old fashioned Vogon Poetry.
I’ve been counting my blessings the past week. Despite the apparent number of Apple devotees fawning over the iPhone, so far nobody’s made any attempts to persuade me that it has any vital features my current phone doesn’t also have.
I’ve considered writing about how it seems like a lot of hype for just another cell phone, but Tom Smith has saved me the trouble.
(Note to Apple execs: If you’d like to give me a free phone and a few months of service (3 – 6 seems fair), I’m willing to use it and give people my genuine impressions of the device. That’s a much better deal than you’ll get from most of the celebrities you usually give stuff to.)
It’s been many years since I committed my crime and it will be many more before my life-long sentence ends. There’s a saying that confession is good for the soul. Perhaps it would be best if the truth got out now. The recent explorations by Spirit and Opportunity indicate that the truth is about to be revealed anyhow, so there’s certainly nothing to lose…
We were stationed on a scientific outpost on the planet you now call Mars and one night, after ten of your centuries, the stress got to us and we threw a pretty wild party.
One of the other engineers (you wouldn’t be able to pronounce her name) got rather reckless with the mass driver and to make a long story short, that’s how the fifth planet got destroyed.
Over the next several of your decades, we all periodically took turns shooting the mass driver at some of the debris. At some point, it started getting more and more competitive to see who could come up with the fanciest shot (the “three dimensional billiards shot” which ended with two debris fragments orbiting Mars as moons with retrograde orbits was particularly spectacular).
On my last turn, I planned to fire a shot that would “slingshot” around your planet before traveling back out to the debris field where the fifth planet used to be. That’s when “The Accident” happened. The mass driver misfired, and instead of grazing your atmosphere, my shot hit your planet dead on, hitting it square in the middle of the large ocean.
Many of the dinosaurs perished from the initial shock wave, many more from the resulting mile-high tsunami. Most of the rest died in the long winter that followed.
The review board found the entire team guilty of negligence and sentenced us to live out the rest of our lives on your planet, face to face with the consequences of our actions. As humans measure time, that was 65 million years ago.
I’m so sorry.
The Moon’s orbit is decaying. This isn’t anything I’m responsible for, it’s been going on for as long as there’s been a Moon.
It’s worth explaining what that means. When you say that an orbit is decaying, folks generally think that means the object in orbit is going to fall on them. That is what happened to SkyLab, but not to worry. The Moon isn’t going to fall out of the sky. Quite the opposite really.
The orbit of Earth’s Moon is slowly expanding. Every year the Moon’s orbit takes it an average of 1 1/2 inches further away from the Earth. That doesn’t seem like much difference, but over time what that means is eventually The Moon will drift off into space (though not nearly as dramatically as in Space:1999).
Turning it around is also interesting. Looking backwards through time, every year further back, The Moon was another inch and a half closer. Ten years ago it was nearly a foot and a half closer. Looking back 65 million years ago, The Moon orbited at a distance of less than 10 feet.
That’s why the dinosaurs are extinct. They got clobbered.
Dad used to have a tradition where every Sunday after church he’d take his dog Hamlet for a run in the woods down along the railroad tracks. Dad would walk a mile or so along the tracks, and Hamlet would go four or five, running ahead, running back, crashing through the woods, and jumping into the creek. They’d come home after an hour or two and Dad would cook Hamlet a fried egg. It was a weekly ritual and one that they both looked forward to.
Wylie and I don’t have any railroad tracks nearby, but we’re working on setting up our version of the tradition. This afternoon we repeated our no-leash experiment and while Wylie did some sniffing around the yard, I pulled weeds in the flowerbeds and the garden, tied up the tomato plants, and did various other bits of yard work. About the only time I got nervous about Wylie being off the leash was when someone walked through the park behind the house with her dog. Much to my surprise, and completely unlike other dogs you see out in their yards, Wylie was content to just watch them go by.
I’ve fallen into a habit the past few weeks of going out for ice cream on Sunday evenings. When you bring your dog along, one of the fun things Bruster’s does is they’ll give you a free “dog sundae” (a scoop of vanilla in a dish with a milk bone or two). So tonight I took Wylie along.
Wylie seemed to enjoy going out for ice cream. Perhaps we’ll do this again too.
A former employer used to regularly accuse me of being overly cynical and negative. I’ve never agreed with that assessment. The world we live in does however require a healthy dose of skepticism.
Take for example this claim from the bottom of a carton of Diet Coke:
It’s true. Research shows that all beverages contribute to proper hydration. That means whether it’s your first can of the day or your afternoon pick-me-up, Diet Coke helps you stay hydrated all day long. So stick with the Diet Coke taste you love. Your body will thank you for it.
They even have a web site dedicated to this sales pitch.
I call shenanigans on this claim. Oh, I suppose the statement is true enough. There’s certainly nothing in it you can point to and say, “That’s a lie.” All beverages do contain water, and getting water into your body is what hydration is all about. But there’s some vital information missing.
Most Coca Cola products contain caffeine and caffeine is a diuretic. Putting it as politely as possible, what this means is that caffeine causes your body to lose water by causing you to visit the bathroom more frequently. I don’t know whether the net balance leaves you with more water or less than if you’d skipped the Coke; but if dehydration is a concern, a nice cold glass of water would be a far better choice.
So I don’t agree with the claim that I’m overly cynical. I’m just a little less likely to be taken in by a marketing pitch.