I was eating breakfast on Thursday when I heard a loud chirping sound from outside. It was similar to the squawk Terry makes when she’s been startled by something, so I took a look.
Looking out the kitchen window, I saw a wing flapping at ground-level behind the oak tree at the edge of my yard. My neighbors have an outdoor cat and, having found the remains of several birds in my flower beds, my first thought was that another bird had gone to that great nest in the sky.
The flapping continued for a few moments, and then a small animal darted under the fence and into the garden. A moment later, a large bird hopped up and perched on my chain-link fence.
I’m not sure if it was a hawk or a falcon (or really, what the difference is), but it was beautiful. At a distance of less than 50 feet, this is the closest I’ve ever been to a bird of prey outside a zoo, so while the bird studied my garden, searching for its errant breakfast, I took the opportunity to watch the bird.
A half-minute later, a squirrel (either very daring or perhaps not fully sane?) jumped onto the fence and startled, the bird flew away. But for that brief moment, my little corner Sprawlsville seemed a bit more connected with nature.

Just to get it out of my head:
I never metaphor-headed monster. Come to think of it, I’ve never metaphor-headed person either. And hey, monsters are people too. Particularly the four-headed ones. If you had four heads, you’d probably feel pretty monstrous too, what with all those people who had nothing better to do than stare at you.

Along with some other nifty stats, the program I use for analyzing the web site’s access logs is able to tell me what terms people typed into the various search engines that directed them to my little corner of the web. Unsurprisingly, the largest amount of my site’s search traffic is people looking for convention listings. But not all of them

Early last year, I discovered that a strange beeping noise I’d been hearing periodically was a malfunctioning smoke detector. It’s long been one of the more popular entries on Dividing by Zero, but until recently that only meant it was getting viewed 10 or 15 times per month.

In July, the most popular page on the site was an article Dave wrote about “‘Beat Me with a Stick’ Elmo and other great toys.” That had been a popular article for a while, so I wasn’t surprised to see it riding high during a wave of news stories about malfunctioning Elmo dolls that sounded like Elmo was literally asking to be clobbered.

In August, requests for the Elmo article dropped to only one the entire month. At the same time, requests for information about “Smoke Detectors Beeping” became the single most popular reason for search engines to send people my way.

I didn’t check the logs too carefully, but as of tonight, variations on smoke detectors account for 13-15% of the search traffic reaching my site.

And where there’s smoke… 🙂

Shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, AJ decided to give the tumor a name and think of it as a malevolent entity, separate from herself. The name she eventually settled on was Priscilla, personified as an overly perky, evil cheerleader.

AJ had a CAT scan yesterday. The doctors have declared Priscilla dead. AJ is now officially cancer free.

Joy seems like a good word for describing my feelings.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
            – Douglas Adams

I’ve run across this quote quite a number of times, and although it’s not always attributed to the same person, it does seem to most frequently find itself attributed to the late Douglas Adams and I’d very much like to believe that if it wasn’t original to him, then perhaps he was quoting someone else to whom it was original.

One of the stories told about Douglas Adams was that when Geoffrey Perkins first met him, he gave the impression that among other things, he was a man who was about to fall off a chair. The context doesn’t make it entirely clear why he was standing on the chair, but no doubt exists that in short order he did indeed fall off.

Part of the same story is that while he was writing the scripts for the original BBC Radio production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Mr. Adams would frequently hand the actors their parts just minutes before they were due to go on the air.

I never met the man, but I may have some small idea of what his life was like. I’ve been hearing a lot of whooshing lately.

I’ve added Ben Hur to the list of the AFI Top 100 films that I’ve seen.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Sometimes I’ve wound up enjoying “The Classics”. Harvey, Casablanca and Forbidden Planet are fantastic movies, worth seeing more than once. On the other hand, A Streetcar Named Desire was horrible — I turned it off halfway through. All I knew about Ben Hur was that it somehow involved a chariot race.
It definitely belongs in the list of “Classics I’ve enjoyed.” It tells the story of a man growing up in the time of Christ and in fact “bumping shoulders” with him on several occasions, including right at the time of the crucification.
Sadly, I don’t think Hollywood can make movies like that anymore. They’d want to trim the cast down to just a few main characters and make the whole thing fit into less than two hours — instead of the crucification, it would probably end with the death of Messala. You’d never find out anything about Judah’s mother and sister, much less their miraculous healing.
So I’m pleasantly surprised. Where I’d been dreading something boring, I would up being quite entertained. Maybe even uplifted.
You don’t get that with many films today.