Yesterday I watching CNN for about an hour from 8am to 9am absorbing the coverage of the . The coverage was the typical, blanket ghoulish video that CNN has perfected with helicopters following the white van that carried Schiavo's body to the ME's office. That I have come to expect.

What I didn't expect was how skewed the language and the guests were in favor of the "Culture of Life" crowd. For one thing, they continually refer to the wishes of the family, as in the judge's decision went against the wishes of the family. Family has become such a loaded word in this country that it's inexcusable for CNN or anyone to editorialize that one group, the parents, represent the "family" while the other, Michael Schiavo, does not, especially since legally the opposite is true.

Then there are the guests. At one point Darren Kagan was talking to Jesse Jackson, phony publicity seeking Christian hypocrite and Tim LaHaye, author of the Christian Revelation wet dream books, Left Behind. Maybe the people at CNN thought that since Jesse is a Democrat and LaHaye is clearly a Republican, that they had some editorial balance. The problem is that both of these folks support the "family", as in Terri Schiavo's parents.

This is bad enough but when Kagan asked what lessons can be learned from this situation and Tim LaHaye responded about how the major lesson learned here is that people (all people) need to make peace with Jesus Christ before the end of their lives, she didn't say anything. I mean nothing. No response whatsoever. At very least she had the obligation to point out that not all viewers believe that.

Posted by andrew at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night as I was driving home from work I was listening to All Things Considered. There was this discussion about Johnnie Cochran OJ's lawyer who passed away yesterday. One of colleagues, Connie Rice, came on to speak to Robert Siegel or Michelle Norris, I can't remember. What I do remember is Ms. Rice heaping praise on Mr. Cochran and then saying something that made me sit up and think. She said that what made Johnnie Cochran special was his "Human IQ", his ability to see a jury and immediately understand and connect with them. This is a great skill to have for anyone (not connect with a jury, but with people). Why it made me prick up my ears is that it is a skill that I completely lack.

Posted by andrew at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've completely given up on the Americanized version of The Office. I tried to watch it again last night, and I couldn't get through but a few minutes. They got they painful part right. I was cringing the whole time. It's just not funny. Not at all. It's just impossible to watch.

I have been investing my TV time with a far better endeavor, watching the HBO series, The Wire. I hadn't even heard of the The Wire until a friend from my ski house lent me the DVDs for the first two season. I've watched the first season. Now I'm hooked.

The Wire is a crime drama focused around a homicide cop in Baltimore, Jimmy McNulty. He's a hard nosed, hard drinking divorcee who would be something of a cliché were it not for the fact that he's willing to buck to system in order to get police work done. And in The Wire, that system is broken.

There are elements of corruption, cronyism and incompetence that you see in other cop dramas, but what underlies The Wire is careerism that drives criminal and legal decision making and forms the subtext of the series. Sergeants want to be Lieutenants. Lieutenants want to be majors. Majors want to be commissioners. The Commissioner wants to move into politics. The lawyers want to become judges. Judges want to be reelected. I can't remember seeing this as the focus of any other series on TV. Not Hill Street Blues. Not NYPD Blue. Not anything that I can remember. McNulty is constantly swimming upstream against a sea of decisions made by cops, commissioners, lawyers and judges who want to move up the latter rather than right for justice. This conflict makes for great drama.

The cast of The Wire has no major stars, but the acting is exquisite. I wonder how HBO can routinely fashion ensemble casts of such high quality. It makes me believe that there is a seam of great acting talent out there that most of us are just simply not aware of. You certainly don't see much of it on over the air television. Or it could be the dearth of great writers, on which HBO seems to have a minor monopoly, makes good actors look bad. I haven't really thought about it enough to make up my mind.

I love watching shows on DVD. I don't have HBO and probably won't have it anytime in the near or distant future, so it's convenient for me to be to rent or borrow the DVDs and watch them at my leisure. Beyond that, the ability to watch show after show with no commercials or waiting is the way all TV should be viewed. Then I can back and really enjoy this cinematic creation that the magicians at HBO have pulled out their the hat.

Posted by andrew at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You know how the ancient Greeks believed in the pantheon of gods? Zeus, Hera. Apollo. Athena. et al. For thousands of years, people built temples and worshipped at the altar of polytheism. And not just the Greeks. The Romans. The Vikings. Many other civilizations, too. Nowadays we look at that on their beliefs s quaint "mythology". We read their stories as children. And some of them are great. Not just because they are great literature, but because they impart certain values and reflect upon human behavior. But make no mistake, this is just mythology.

I believe that the same will be said of these generations of monotheists. Christianity is just mythology writ large and in your face. The greatest story ever told? Maybe. But just a story. That's it. It's becoming problem at the moment because the people who believe that that New Testament is not just a story, but rather the unaltered word of god are emboldened by the current political climate. It's becoming a problem because these people are trying to take this mythology and force their mores on the rest of this country and the world. It's not just Christianity, by the way. Militant Islam is doing the exact same thing, just using different methodology.

What makes the story of Jesus so insidious is that he was actually alive. He is an historical figure. Of that I have there can be no doubt. He was a rabbi, a carpenter. He preached in Jerusalem. You can go to Israel. You can visit his birthplace. You see where he lived. You can see, roughly, where he was crucified. I did. I cycled around the Sea of Galilee. I visited Capernaum where he lived. I stopped at the Church of the Beatitudes where he supposedly gave the sermon on the mount. I explored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I saw the faithful carrying crosses up the Via Dolorosa. It's all amazing. There's no doubt about it.

However, and this is a big however, I believe that the man in reality bears little resemblance to the man in the gospels. I don't know whether the teachings of Jesus actually happened. I do believe that they are generally good things. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Do under others... And if most people followed even those two basic tenets of the Jesus' philosophy, the world would be a far better place, but they can't even manage that.

I believe that the apostles, in their zealous drive to legitimize Christianity developed stories about Jesus, such as the resurrection, so recently celebrated, and the walking on water business, and the loaves and the fishes, amongst others so that potential converts would be drawn to the new religion by the apparent divinity. It was a far easier sell and they were great salesmen. Maybe the best ever.

Their message might not have been received right away, but it's being heard loud and clear right now. I'd love to see what their reaction would be to all they wrought. I doubt in their wildest imaginations could they have believed the extent to which the word of Jesus which they largely fabricated has spread. I think Samoa would knock them for a loop let alone South America, the Philippines or most of the rest of the world. Anyway, I digress, but I think you see the point I'm driving at.

America is going through a dark age at the moment where reason is losing ground to religion. As someone who is sitting on the sidelines, I can only hope that what I see going on is only a short term trend and that the backlash that whips us back to the sanity of reason will be sharp and harsh.

Posted by andrew at 08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

He wouldn't fucking eat that ham steak for one thing.

Posted by andrew at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I didn't ski much yesterday morning. I got to the mountain early and it was cold, nasty and windy. Normally this isn't a problem. I can tough it out. But I left after only a few runs. Here's why.

It was really hot in the afternoon on Saturday. The snow was getting soft and toss all over the mountain by skiers and snowboarders. Overnight, it freezes into unnatural shapes that are very unfun to ski. Resorts like Heavenly try to solve this problem by grooming or running big snow cats over the snow to smooth it out. And it works, but in the early morning, when it's still below 32F, the stuff is still rough to ski.

There was a storm coming in. I wasn't all that cold, but it was windy, especially at the top where you could see the clouds whipping the mountain from west. The high winds shut down the Sky Express lift on the California side, effectively trapping skiers on that side of the mountain. Since there's no other way to get from the California side to the Nevada side, legions of skiers skipping church were jamming the Canyon Express lift. Lift lines were getting insane by 9:30. I didn't want to wait in crazy ass long lines to ski on snow that was less than ideal.

Plus my knee was still tender from a wipeout the previous day. I didn't want to push it. There's more snow on the way and more than a month left in the season. There didn't seem to be much sense is making it worse.

Days Skied This Season: 18

Posted by andrew at 07:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I shouldn't be surprised as I watch the Christian Jihad in America weave its nefarious way from one aspect of society to another, but this "debate" over evolution is shocking. I just saw a report on the NewsHour about the so called conflict over Evolution. I have no idea how PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown could keep a straight face listening to high school students in Kentucky talking about how evolution is just a "theory". That kills me. It just a fucking semantic game put into the heads of these sad, sad victims of the absurdist right wing religious agenda makers.

A theory in science is not like a theory you or I might have about, say, why people in this country are such fucking idiots. (I have a theory that people in this country are devolving, by the way). It's not a hypothesis. A theory is an explanation of a set of related observations or events based upon proven hypotheses and verified multiple times by detached groups of researchers.

Relativity. Gravity. These are theories. A theory is more like a law than a hypothesis, which is like a hunch based on previous observations. Thusly, Evolution, based upon a set of related observations based on proven hypothesis is a theory. In fact, a scientific theory is even more complex than a law. While a law governs a single action, a theory explains a whole series of related phenomena, such as, um, Evolution. There is no debate in the scientific community. None. It might as well be the fucking written in stone.

Unless, that is, you're an idiot who thinks that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, carbon dating is complete rubbish (perhaps even a theory) and that man was placed on the earth full form, like Adam and Eve. Someone exactly like Kevin Ham, who's building the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, as if people in this world needed another reason to think Kentucky is Darwin's waiting room. Why is this necessary, you ask? Well you can find the answer right in their handy FAQ. It turns out that our increasingly anti-Christian country must return to a belief in the authority of the Bible and be presented with the life-changing Gospel message. Evolutionary indoctrination has undermined the Christian foundations in America.

Our increasingly anti-Christian country? Is that some sort of joke? It's like these people are living in a bizarro world where the exact opposite of reality is happening. For more laughs go here or here.

Then there's the whole Intelligent Design scam. Basically Intelligent Design says that some "Creator" (not god, don't say god, but something omnipotent like god) created everything in the universe. Why? Well, darn it all, the universe is just too fricken complicated for it to have "evolved" to its present state. This is just a well funded attempt to try to hijack science in the name of religion and force creationism back into the classroom. Will it work? The fact that it's being talked about on the NewsHour is enough for me to want to keep my unborn children out of the public education system.

One thing is for certain. There's very little intelligent design evident in the classrooms in Kentucky. I weep for anyone who graduates from high school in this country and does not believe that Evolution is as true as Gravity, as true as the Earth revolving around the Sun. Clarence Darrow must be spinning in his grave.

Posted by andrew at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The poor little island of Nias can't catch a break. It got hammered by the tsunami last December. It's probably barely recovering and it' been hit by an 8.7 magnitude quake that has killed around 2000 more people.

I spent almost a month on Nias back in 1995 when I was traveling around Southeast Asia. The island is so isolated. You have to take an overnight boat from Sibolga on the west coast of Sumatra to get there. And getting to Sibolga is no picnic, believe me.

Most westerners are drawn to the perfect waves of Lagundri Bay in the southern part of the island, and I was no exception. It was heaven waking up to 90 degree weather at sunrise and padding out into perfect sets in 90 degree water. The fact that my room cost 25 cents a night was a bonus. I would have paid twenty times that. Maybe a hundred.

It's hard for me to believe that it's been 10 years. I had a great time there and it wasn't all about the surfing. The people on island are about the nicest, most genuine you could hope to meet anywhere. Nias has an ancient culture that has all but been untouched by modern society. I only hope the damage has been overstated and that most of the people are ok.

Posted by andrew at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a beautiful morning here in South Lake Tahoe. The sun is out. Ice is breaking up on the keys and water is flowing out to the lake. Canadian geese are flying around. I'm going to celebrate the resurrection, naturally, by hitting the slopes. Hopefully the faithful will be in church, rolling eggs and eating non-kosher foods with family and friends leaving the mountain open to us nonbelievers.

Posted by andrew at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I drove up to Tahoe with Russell in the afternoon on Friday. We cruised up. No snow. No rain. No traffic. It was a blessing after the nightmare of last week.

When we got to the house, it was empty. The only person here was Russell's brother Justin, visiting from Vermont. It was strange. The house isn't always packed like last weekend, but there's usually a handful of people. Not yesterday. We made dinner (bison burgers and steam artichoke), watched a movie (Love and Death) and crashed.

Russell normally skis at Kirkwood, but since no one was here (Jake and Lindley did show up after midnight), he decided to come with me to Heavenly. It was going to be an epic day. It was sunny and we've had more than 7 feet of new snow in the last week. 7 fucking feet. This is just the season that will not quit.

Russell hadn't been to Heavenly in years, so I toured him around. We were having a great time on empty runs until we hit the cat track to the Nevada side and Russell started having problems with his feet. His orthotics weren't fitting right and they were jamming into the bottom of his feet. He was miserable.

So he headed down to get his boot situation fixed and we made a plan to meet at the gondola at 1 or if that didn't work out, in the bar at the California lodge at 4. I was bummed. We were having a great time, but if you can't ski, you can't ski. I guided Russell to the gondola and headed back to the California side. It was only about 10:15.

So I skied solo for the next couple of hours, cruising the perfect soft snow all over Nevada. Around 12:30 or so I headed back to midmountain where the gondola drops skiers off. I was early so I skied a few runs on the 6 person Tamarack lift. There's a little terrain park under the lift. I taking the short lift up and shooting down through the terrain park. There's tons of little jumps. It was fun as hell until I took off on one, got way back on my skis, almost landed on my ass, and when I tried to save it, I hyperextended my right knee. I could feel a tweak of pain in the knee. I got up. I wiped the snow off my glasses. I headed down and found Russell waiting for me at the little barbeque place outside the gondola.

He'd already eaten lunch and I wasn't all that hungry. I just needed to rest and stretch out my knee. I felt good enough to ski in about half an hour, but it never really felt right. I was tentative. No more jumping, no more hard carving turns. It wasn't that bad, but it was the worst skiing injury I've had since I fell and bit my lip when I was 14 or so.

We returned to the house around 4:30. I whipped up a blender full of banana daiquiris and washed that down with a few beers. By the time I hit the hot tub, I pretty numb. I couldn't feel anything let alone my knee.

I should be able to ski tomorrow, but we'll see.

Days Skied This Season: 17

Posted by andrew at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Through the always interesting site of web designer Mike Davidson, I came across a new site called Our Media, which looks really promising. Here's a blurb from their mission statement:

Create. Share. Get noticed. That's what Our Media is about.

Our Media is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We'll host your media forever - for free.

Video blogs, photo albums, home movies, podcasting, digital art, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, audio interviews, digital storytelling, children's tales, Flash animations, student films, mash-ups - all kinds of digital works have begun to flourish as the Internet rises up alongside big media as a place where we'll gather to inform, entertain and astound each other.

Sounds good, no?

Already I've found something I really like. I haven't seen music videos in ages, I don't even know where to go to find them these days. MTV? No. VH1? Nope. Our Media has got them though.

The featured video is from an artist named Sam Bisbee. Ever heard of him? No? Me neither. Doesn't matter. You should check out his "You Are Here" video.

Like I've said, I haven't seen a whole lot of music videos lately, so I don't know how revolutionary this one is, but I've never seen anything like it. The whole video is shot looking down at a coffee table while a pile of pictures, taken at short increments, is stacked (or sometimes removed) on the table. The effect is almost like looking at video, well, maybe like looking at video with every other frame removed. It's totally cool. And the music isn't bad either.

I'm not prepared to say whether or not Our Media and the power of the Internet is going to sweep Mr. Bisbee into the national consciousness, but I wouldn't be surprised. Check it out tell me what you think.

Posted by andrew at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you don't love Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, you've either never heard of him, you have no sense of humor, or you're a conservative (probably the latter).

His latest effort rips into the President Bush's propoganda machine(here, too). I've blogged about this issue here and here, but nothing I could ever write could match the impact of a Tom Tomorrow This Modern World comic.

Posted by andrew at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"I'll trust people and I'll trust people to make decisions for their own lives."
-- George Bush, Hypocrite

I've been wanting to stay above this whole Terri Schiavo business, but I can't any longer. I'm a firm believer in euthanasia, so my feelings about this might be skewed because of what I see as hypocrisy from the right about the whole sordid matter, but here I go anyway.

For longest time Republicans have been the party of States' Rights. This philosophy hit a road block in the Gore v. Bush election where a Republican majority on the Supreme Court overruled the Florida State court simply because they didn't like the verdict. The jurists invoked the equal protection clause, which is a joke, because if the Supremes were serious, you'd to have invalidate the entire election based on lack of equality. That obviously didn't happen. What did happen was an abrogation of Republican States' Rights ideals in favor of a preferable judicial outcome.

This is the exact same thing that is going on in the Terry Schiavo case. Forget that this woman deserves to die. Forget the utter selfishness of the parents. Forget the paradox of the right to lifers who fight vigorously for the death penalty and yet oppose the right to die with dignity. Look only at the States' Rights issue.

Congress has no business getting involved in this. The President has no business getting involved in this, let alone turning around from a vacation (did he really need another vacation?) and waking up in the middle of the night to sign legislation that moved the Schiavo case from the state court to the federal court for no other reason than he didn't like the result of the state court ruling.

Despite the efforts of our esteemed legislature and executive branch, it looks as though Terri will finally be able to drift off into the sweet hereafter. The biggest problem I have with this whole thing, is here we have this great opportunity as a country to benefit from the tragedy of this family by having a national discussion about death, about dignity, about euthanasia and about the rights of our citizens. But will we have it? Of course not. Because we are children. And like children, we will take the lowest road possible. Mrs. Schiavo will be used a political tool to divide people instead of a loadstone to unite them.

As for me, if I'm in a persistent vegetative state, I don't want to live. If I need a feeding tube or a respirator to survive, I don't want live. If I have no brain function and am on life support, I don't want to live. I don't want suffer that way. I don't want to be burden on my family or the health care system. I just want to be cremated and have my ashes dumped into sea at Port Campbell on Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia.

Anyway, don't listen me. I'm a fool. Listen to the good people at Get Your War On. At least then you can have a laugh while you ponder the utter stuipity of this whole damn fucking thing.

Posted by andrew at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I hate bugs. I hate mosquitos. I hate centipedes. I hate roaches. Ants, spiders, flies, anything creeping or crawling or buzzing. They should be eradicated off the face of the earth, as far as I'm concerned. I hate them all. Except ladybugs. I don't know why this is. They are just bugs like everything else. They have spindly little legs. They creep all over the place. They fly off without notice or warning. I should hate them. But I don't. I actually like them. I don't mind if they walk all over me (as long as it's just one). I was thinking about this as I saved a ladybug from the crosswalk around the corner from office as I was walking to lunch. If it was a spider in the crosswalk, I would have walked on by or crushed it underfoot. But it was a ladybug, so I stopped in the middle of the road, put my hand on the ground to entice it up, and placed it in the plants opposite the sidewalk.

Posted by andrew at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At 9:30 tonight NBC is premiering The Office, a remake of a BBC series of the same name. I'm skeptical that it's going to be any good. I'd go as far as to say it's probably going to suck. I'm going watch it mostly out of curiosity.

I like Steve Carell, of Daily Show fame, who's playing the boss. His deadpan humor is right on. If the show fails, it won't be because of him. It will be because of the nature of the show and the poor translation of humor from across the Atlantic.

I'm a huge fan of the original English series. Ricky Gervais, who co-wrote the show and stars as the clueless boss David Brent is, as my buddy John would say, sublime. He's like watching a car wreck. You don't know what he's going to do or say next, you just know it's going to be awful and you can't stop looking. It's the fine line between humor and revulsion that makes the Office work. It's for exactly this reason that I doubt the Americanized version will. The show is far too subtle for an American audience.

There's also no laugh track in the original series, and I'm told that NBC has left it out of the remake as well. How this will go over will be interesting. My feeling is that most people won't know when to laugh, partly because they've never had to know and partly because they just won't get it.

NBC has cautiously ordered only 6 episodes for the American The Office. Hopefully, I'll be wrong, the show will great, critics will love it and there will be enough groundswell of support from the fans of the original that NBC will have a keeper to replace the whole in their lineup left by Seinfeld, Frazier & Friends. One of the sad things about the original BBC series is that it only lasted 2 seasons and 12 shows. If the NBC series is a success, we might see office hijinks for years to come.

Posted by andrew at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

After the heat of last last weekend, I had thought winter was over, we bypassed spring and went right into summer. But Mother Nature is playing tricks with us this season. Right when the ski season looked done, she dumped down several more feet of snow in the Sierras. Amazing.

Of course, I didn't know the snow would dump so hard when I left Alameda on Saturday evening. It was a beautiful, clear albeit windy day in East Bay. I knew it was snowing in Tahoe. It's the reason that I decided it was worth it to head up for one day. But who could have foreseen this blizzard?

I left the house a few hours before sunset and right when darkness settled over Northern California, the rain came down in sheets. I was just east of Sacramento. As I headed up into the hills along the 50, the rain slowed down, and I ascended into a sea of fog so thick that I missed the exit for the IN-N-OUT Burger in Placerville. I had to settle for a bag of beef jerky from the German St. Pauli Inn near Pollock Pines.

I came through the fog well before Southfork and the rain was coming down all the way to around 5000 feet. Just past the little hamlet of Kyburz snow was coming down hard. Chain control was in effect and I was waved through the checkpoint in the Subaru, laughing at the poor souls with 2-wheel drive who had to stop by the side of the road to put on chains. But then it was slow going from there. Despite the rain and the fog, I had made great time so far because there was no traffic. But now I was stuck behind bechained vehicles meandering up to the summit at a somnambulant 25 MPH. I put the Subie into 3rd gear and settled in for the long haul.

I made South Lake about 8:30. The house was packed. There was no parking in the driveway, so I pulled, white trash style, into the area that last weekend was our front lawn, but now was covered with about 6 inches of fresh white snow. It seemed like a smart idea at the time, but I would come to regret it.

About half of the house went out for dinner. The rest, including half a dozen guests from Colorado were playing Trivial Pursuit in front of a roaring fire. I grabbed a beer from the balcony and joined in. I'm pretty good at Trivial Pursuit. I might have a lousy memory, but I can almost always conjure up the useless pieces of information (what's the capital of Chile? Who counted himself out in May, 1968?, etc.) Plus, you know, I read, listen to the news, and was the beneficiary of damn good secondary education. Anyway, pretty soon the drunks fools around the table were giving me shit for being a ringer and knowing all the answers, which I didn't, just the right ones. They said, how the fuck do you know all this? I said, didn't you people go to college?

Dinner was pathetic. Some of the girls went to the store and came back with a bag of frozen potstickers and a box of cheese tortellini. Not exactly the primo stuff the guys cook up (black bean chicken, shrimp fajitas, polenta, poached salmon, grilled marinated rib eye). The girls in our house are a sad lot.

We played poker after dinner and I went to sleep, at least tried to sleep around 1. There were about 19 people staying in the house, so there were bodies everywhere. I tried first to sleep on one of the downstairs couch, but it's a pullout, and someone had taken out the mattress and put it on the floor, so I kept sinking into the heart of the sofa and couldn't get comfortable. Right about the time that I moved to the floor and started to get comfy, Ed, his brother Hans, and buddy Craig came in. They were stinking drunk. You could smell them. But they quickly disappeared upstairs and passed out on the floor. Then the electricity went out, which was a blessing at first since it killed the orange street lights that stream in through our front window, but within a few minutes the alarm starting going, releasing a horribly high-pitched, repetitive and unbelievably annoying beep. That was about 3am. Ben got up, found the Leatherman in the dark, ripped the alarm from the wall and cut the wires. Silence. I went back to sleep, or tried to go back to sleep. Before I could drift off, some of the Colorado guests came downstairs to catch their early morning shuttle to the airport. I tossed and turned. Before I knew it, the sky was getting light. I never did get back to sleep.

In the morning I made myself oatmeal and had a cup of green tea to perk up. Most everyone was headed for Kirkwood. Ed, Hans & Craig, all hung-over came with me to Heavenly. Outside, it was still snowing. The Subaru was covered (see above). We dug Kristen's Jetta out of the snow and put on chains so she could take her friend Karen to the airport. The four of us hopped in Ed's massive truck and headed up to the mountain.

I really wanted to get up there early, to be at the base at 8:30 when the lifts open, to make fresh tracks for the first time this year. Despite all the snowfall we've had, because I've only skied on weekends, I've missed most of the powder. I've caught a little here and there between the trees, but nothing like what I skied in Vail last year. So I wanted to be there early, but it wasn't to be. It's hard when you're dragging 3 drunks up to the mountain. We had to stop at Safeway for them to get breakfast. Then they had to wait in line to get lift tickets. Hans had to run off to buy goggles. By the time were going up Gunbarrel, it was already 9:30. There were tracks and skiers everywhere.

But there was also snow everywhere. So much of it that most people didn't know what to do. Beginners, skiers and snowboarders alike, were stuck in what looked like 18 inches of thick powder. We went up Powder Bowl and came down under the lift. It was great. Snow was falling. The powder was deep, deeper than almost anything I've seen. But it was hard work, slogging through that much snow and by the time I got the bottom of Power Bowl, I was feeling it in the quads already. It was just to one of the those days.

High winds kept the Sky Lift closed which meant we were stuck on the California side with 3 main lifts open. That sorta sucked, but wasn't a real problem until just after midday when the crowds turned the lift lines into a forced 20 minute break. But by that time, we had half a dozen runs under our belt, were all beat and needed to grab some lunch.

On one of the rides up the 6 person Powder Bowl life, we were joined by this 8-year old girl snowboarding with her mom. This girl, Jade, started giving Hans a hard time about his gloves, these old mauve and fuchsia leather things from the 80s that he was wearing because the last time he was skiing, he got so drunk at the end of the day that he forgot his gloves and his helmet in the back seat.

So Jade, this little 8-year old, is saying, look at those "girly-girl" gloves. Where did you get those? All the way up the lift. Her mom is telling her to stop being a smart ass, but through clenched teeth, because she's trying hard not to laugh. Ed, Craig and I are delirious. As we get off the lift, Jade is saying, wait girly-girl, I want to ride with you, wait, wait. We take off. When we get back to the Powder Bowl maze, Jade and mom are nowhere to be found. But by this time, the lines are long, so before we get to the front, Jade comes swooping in under the lines with mom in tow and joins us. Hey girly-girl, she says to Hans. See I told you I could catch. And then she just goes nuts. Girly-girl! Girly-girl! I want to ride with Girly-girl! I'm in pain because I'm laughing so hard. Hans is smiling and trying to pretend that it's not happening. Her mom is trying to get her to stop, but, nothing is going to deter Jade. Looks like Hans has got himself a new girlfriend.

At lunch, Ed decided it would be a good idea to head down, get in the car and drive over to the Nevada side. Normally, I would be down for that. It takes way to long to gear down, get over there, about a 15 minute drive, gear up and get back on the slopes. But my legs were killing me, so I the idea of an even longer break was welcome.

So we went down Gunbarrel, hopped in the car and drove to Nevada. On the way over, the hazing of Hans continued. Craig had brought up these two-way radios and he had been calling Hans, Hey Girly-Girl, you got your ears on? over. Poor Hans has a new handle. He took it well, but I think this one is going to stick.

Over in Nevada, we found parking at the Stagecoach lodge right near the lift and geared up again. It was colder over in Nevada. The snow was a little better, there were fewer people, but most of the lifts were closed because of high winds and my legs were completely shot. I skied 5 or 6 more runs and hit the pub for a Kahlua & coffee.

Back at the house, we ordered some pizza, grabbed some beer and hit the hot tub. Glorious. I tried to hit the road just about 6:30, but when I went to move the Subaru, I got stuck. I was shocked. I've never been stuck in Subie. I even jammed down into 1st gear, but the wheel just spun around. So I had to fetch the damn snow shovel and dig myself out. I was cold. I was wearing regular leather shoes. I took way too long and I felt like an idiot. By the time I got the Subaru on the road, it was after 7, darker than steer's tuchus on a moonless night, and snowing like a bitch.

The ride over the summit was a slow nightmare. The roads had been plowed, but not recently and there was a bechained oldsmobuick making 25 MPH blocking my way. I couldn't see any of the lines on the road, so it was hard to pass, and when I finally did, I just came up on another slow ass car. It was exactly like the ascent in reverse. The snow stopped falling around 5000 ft. and turned into driving rain that was easier to drive in, but still treacherous around the curvy turns of Highway 50. It took me almost two hours to drive the 60 miles to Placerville. By the time I reached Alameda, it was after 11 and I was so beat I barely acknowledged the cats before I crashed on my feather bed.

It was a crazy weekend. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

The rain has been coming down steadily here in the Bay Area and, amazingly, the snow continues to dump in the Sierras. So I'll be in Tahoe again. I can't wait.

Days Skied This Season: 16

Posted by andrew at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John & Betty, and Betty's brother Benj (in the background above), came over to Alameda on Sautrday afternoon for lunch. And what do I do when I have friends in from out of town? Take the cat out for a walk, of course.

It was Fil's third time out on the leash, and she didn't do too bad, considering all the company, the distractions and the gale force wind blowing off the bay. She did get freaked out by some ropes that were banging against the side of the one of the aparment buildings in my complex, which caused her flip out like a juiced-up bucking bronco, but she mostly loved it, eating up all the attention, along with the grass, and was just thrilled to be outside and away from her shithead brother.

I gave John my camera, so we could document the event. The pictures kinda suck (sorry, mate). Totally my fault though. I should have told him to stand between me and the sun. To be fair, it's hard to think on your feet when your walking your cat. It's hard to do anything else, like, for example, keep a straight face, or assure your friends and neighbors, that you're not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Posted by andrew at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Last night was the first Friday night I spent in my own bed since the first week of the year. I hung around town to see some friends, John & Betty Baboujon, who I haven't seen since before I moved to Vail last year. When I was down in LA for after I came back from Samoa, they were living in Paris. When I was down there again two weeks ago, they were visiting family in Sydney. So it was well worth killing a ski day to have dinner with my jet-setting friends in Buglingame last night and lunch in Alameda today.

But it's been snowing in Tahoe. The 50 is closed to cars without chains or 4WD with snow tires (Subaru, I call upon your powers!). Anyway, I'm off in a few minutes. I checked the Heavenly webcams and it's looking nasty as shit up there, but the prospect of even a few inches of powder tomorrow has me aching to get my tuchus up there.

Posted by andrew at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by andrew at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back in November, I wrote about the benefits my consulting company was offering. They were really expensive, at least for the top tier, but the basic coverage, including dental was reasonable, so I went ahead and signed up.

The company has online registration and I tried to sign up, but the first time, it didn't work. I selected all my options, reviewed my selections, and everything seemed fine. But when I went back in to check, the system was telling me that I hadn't signed up for anything. So I did it again, went through the laborious process of their labyrinthine site, and this time it seemed to work. However, later in January, when I was talking to a benefits consultant on the phone about another problem, he said that I wasn't signed up for dental.

I was shocked. I knew I had signed up and I told him this. He said there was nothing I could do. The open enrollment period was over. I would not have coverage. I said that was totally unacceptable and asked to speak to his supervisor. The supervisor was trying to console me and said that he would start an investigation to find out what happened and they would get back to me.

A week later, he had not gotten back to me. I called in again and found out that, in fact, they had made a mistake, I had signed up, and I would be eligible for dental benefits, which was good, since I had already gone to the dentist.

However, the news was all not good. I had two choices. I could have my benefits start on January 1 and be covered, but have to pay for the 2+ weeks where the company said I wasn't covered, which I didn't think was right considering they had made the mistake, or I could start my coverage on February 1st, not pay for time not covered, but then my past visits to the dentist would not be covered. What I wanted was for my benefits to start Jan 1, but for the company to reimburse me for the lost time. It was a small amount of money, but there's some principle involved here. They said I could write a letter of appeal to that affect. I did. My appeal was turned down unceremoniously. They said I could be covered from Jan 1, but would have to pay 60 dollars or so in back premiums which would be deducted from my paycheck. Fine. Whatever.

Then I went to dentist again to get my first filling. I was told by the receptionist that they contacted Met Life and I wasn't covered. Meanwhile, I received a bill from my dentist for close to 300 bucks. I was fucking pissed off. I called my company. They said, I should be covered. There must be some mistake. They would handle it. And they would expedite it so that I could get my group number within 24 hours. Fine. Whatever.

A few days later, I got my group number from Met Life, called my dentist and gave it to them. They said they would resubmit. I thought this was over. Everything should be covered, right? No.

Today I got an email from Met Life:

Dear Andrew,

This message is to inform you that a dental claim is now available for viewing online. You will be able to see dental claim and payment
details for:

Andrew Hecht

You can review this Explanation of Benefits online at any time, and print it out if you'd like!

Ok. Cool. I'm in the system. Everything is groovy. Then I looked more closely at the statement. It said:

Total $284.00
Total Covered $0.00

Then under "Additional Notes", it says:

1: EXPENSE INCURRED PRIOR TO EFFECTIVE DATE OF COVERAGE.

I tried to stay calm. I wanted to call my company, reach through the phone and strangle the shit out someone. Whatever benefit to my health I was receiving by signing up for "benefits" from my company was being far outweighed by the level of stress this was causing me.

I called the company again and they said they would take care of it after initially telling me that my benefits didn't start until May 1st. I think they're trying to give me a cardiac arrest.

Posted by andrew at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I finished skiing on Sunday, I drove down to Tahoe and saw that the Chevron at the bottom of Ski Run Blvd was selling regular unleaded, supposedly the cheap stuff, for $2.65/gallon. The stations near my house in Alameda are more reasonable at $2.35/gallon, but still far above the national average and way, way more then what I remember paying when I lived in Atlanta back in 96-97 when you could find places that would sell you a gallon for less than 90 cents.

How much is gas going for in your area?

Something needs to be done about this. Not because Americans must have cheap gas, but because the high price we're paying at the pump with its direct relationship to the record $54/barrel price is further entrenching illiberal dictatorships and oligarchies in the Middle East that our current foreign policy is trying to topple. It's not going to matter what happens in Iraq or Lebanon if oil rich states like Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to reap massive oil revenues.

Isn't it time we started a national effort to find alternative sources of fuel? Experts estimate that it's going to be a multi-trillion dollar industry not to mention the major shift in geopolitics that will occur when the demand for petroleum bottoms out or positive effects on the environment (it was over 70 degrees in Tahoe and snow was melting all over place).

It seems to me that the president has a unique opportunity to challenge the industry, the country and the world to bring about an energy revolution. But will he do it? No. Ironically he's in the pocket of the same energy companies that will benefit by being at the forefront of alternative fuel technology.

While energy companies should be pushing ahead with more experimentation, auto makers like GM are rolling back highly successful electric car programs and destroying all the EV1 vehicles. At the same time, demand for gas guzzling (and highly profitable) SUVs is shrinking in direct proportion to gas price hikes.

GM is a cornerstone of the American economy. It represents about 1% of the entire GDP. If the company's profitability goes down, it will have an adverse affect on the entire US economy. The jobs at GM are high paying. For each of these jobs at a GM factory, roughly 9 support jobs in the community are created. So if GM needs to lay off workers, it will have wide ranging ramifications around the country.

And sales isn't GMs only problem. They have massive, multi-billion dollar unfunded pension liabilities. It's so bad that the S&P is considering dropping their bond rating to junk. That would have tragic effects on the US Economy.

What the fuck does this all have to do with gas prices? GM is in trouble. Their sales are down and their fiscal situation is dire. At the same time that they should be investing heavily in alternative technology R&D, they are dumping their EV1 program. I believe if they reversed this decision and embraced electric and hybrid technology, it would stimulate other automakers across the board to do the same to keep up. This is turn would drastically lower demand for petroleum, would reduce gas prices, would eliminate the need (in the mind's of certain republican Senators and the president) to open ANWAR to drilling and would place America firmly at the forefront of one of the most promising technologies of this century.

Sorry, I went off on a bit of rant there, but I think you know what I mean.

Posted by andrew at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Here's an interesting discussion from Jonah Goldberg over at the National Review Online about how the state of Wisconsin is considering open season on feral cats. The reason: they kill too many birds. As Goldberg so aptly puts it, "some people want to give granny a shotgun so she can kill Sylvester before he gets Tweety Bird."

Kill the Cats

They're dangerous freeloaders
March 16, 2005, 7:43 a.m.

Wisconsin is considering allowing the hunting of cats. Not cougars or mountain lions or tigers on the loose but putty-tats: Sylvester the cat. Morris the cat. Garfield.

The aim is to prevent the mass killing of birds by cats, mostly of the feral — i.e., wild - variety. In other words, some people want to give granny a shotgun so she can kill Sylvester before he gets Tweety Bird.

I'm more of a dog guy, but I like cats. Nonetheless, a cat massacre makes more sense than you might think.

Let's start with the big picture. If you know anything about American environmentalism, you know that Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is a secular saint. Time magazine named her one of the "100 People of the Century." In 1992 a highfalutin panel of distinguished experts named Silent Spring as the most influential book of the last half-century. "More than any other (book), it changed the way Americans, and people around the world, looked at the reckless way we live on this planet," writes Philip Shabecoff in A Fierce Green Fire, his history of U.S. environmentalism.

As the name suggests, the thesis of Silent Spring was that the birds were dying from the ravages of DDT and other pesticides. The chemical was found to thin the eggshells of some species of birds, most notably eagles and falcons — which, a pedant might add, are not particularly known for their contributions to melodious springs.

Carson's science was deeply flawed, partly because we've learned a lot more since then and partly because she was interested in scoring ideological points. She asserted, for example, that DDT was a carcinogen in humans, which isn't true. For a thorough debunking of the Rachel Carson myth, see Ronald Bailey's "Silent Spring at 40" in the June 2002 issue of Reason.

Anyway, while Carson's cancer scare was a big deal, the part of the book which has kept Silent Spring on the shelves is the bit about how spring would no longer bring a symphony of songbirds.

Well, the inconvenient truth is that cats kill more American birds, particularly songbirds, than DDT and pesticides ever did.

Wisconsin is considering allowing residents to shoot feral cats in part because a respected study found that felines kill between 7.8 million and 217 million birds in Wisconsin alone. Data from a Michigan study suggest that some 75 million birds are killed there just in the summer alone.

Estimates for how many birds cats kill in the United States vary almost as widely. The lowest estimates are around 100 million and go up to the 2.5 billion, though the consensus seems to hover around half a billion. What this leaves out, of course, is that many vulnerable bird species are particularly threatened by cats (and, alas, sometimes dogs as well), a non-native predator that often kills small animals for the fun of it.

Cat defenders say that this is all bogus. If cats didn't slaughter the birds, natural predators would. Maybe, but they are, uh, natural predators, and nature's a big deal for environmentalists, right? Or have I been reading the wrong magazines? They also claim that losing habitat to development is a bigger threat than cats. OK, but even if that were true in some places, why should that get cats off the hook?

This raises an important insight into what is really going on here. The objection to DDT and pesticides has a great deal to do with the fear of technology and material "progress." For example, Carson's memory is still invoked regularly by the anti-pesticide movement today. Anti-pesticide activists claim that some 67 million birds die every year from such chemicals. In other words, compounds that make food cheaper and more abundant for everybody kill between 10 and 20 percent of the number of birds killed by cats every year. And yet, environmentalists are terrified of making cats a major issue, because it will split the movement. An official at the World Wildlife Fund calls the cat issue a "third rail" for environmentalists.

Whether DDT was as bad for birds as Carson and her heirs claim is still the subject of great controversy. What is not controversial is that the bans and regulations Carson's work implemented came with real costs. In the Third World, malaria continues to kill millions because Carson-induced DDT phobia. The bias against pesticides produces lower food yields with no proven benefits for human health.

Meanwhile, the contribution of feral cats is 100-percent aesthetic. We like kitties. This raises an outrageous double standard. Dogs - our closest allies in the animal kingdom - can be shot for harassing wildlife or livestock. But free-loading cats are protected when they massacre birds for sport. Where's the justice?

This isn't to say that there aren't other important reasons why spring is becoming more silent. But the loss of habitat, pesticides, and the advent of wind power all bring significant social benefits. While tolerance for the multitude of feral, often diseased, wild cats is pure, spoiled self-indulgence.

Posted by andrew at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got an email this morning from a recruiter looking for an interactive producer for some company in Connecticut. What would it take for me to accept a job in CT? I don't think there's an offer in the world that would make me move there. They'd have to double my salary and give me 5 weeks of vacation to start for me to even think about it. I mean, shit, who really wants to live in Connecticut? Martha Stewart?

Posted by andrew at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My wrist has been giving me fits lately. It's the start of what could be become a serious repetitive strain injury. So I called the occupational therapy office. They sent someone down to my cube to do an ergonomic evaluation. She came around 10 in the morning and watched me work for about 15 minutes. I felt a litter self-conscious since I didn't really have anything to work on. I just screwed around in Photoshop. After 15 minutes, she decided that my monitor was too high and lowered it, that my keyboard was too high and lowered and that my chair didn't have enough lumbar support and she changed it. She also recommended a natural keyboard, you know one with the keyboard split down the middle and angled out so your hands don't lay flat. She also said I needed a larger mouse, one that supported my hand and required my whole arm to move.

Then in afternoon, I went into the occupational therapy clinic and had an examination. No carpal tunnel, which is good. Just minor tendonitis. The nurse gave me an ace bandage, an ice pack that I need to use three times a day and instructed me to take a break every for 2-4 minutes and stretch, which is going to be hard to do. I get into these zones where I'm working and I become so focused on the project at hand that I lose track of time. I'll try though.

I've had very bad RSI before, so it's all a little worrisome. Just after I finished my year abroad in Australia, I went to work for a teleresearch firm in South Melbourne doing hard core data entry. I worked 9-10 hours a day without much of a break for 5 months to save money for my trip to Southeast Asia. I was young and not too bright and didn't really consider my health at all. My desk and chair were not all that comfortable and I spent endless hours hunched over a keyboard constantly looking back and forth between the documents I was entering and my monitor. When I was done, I had these shooting pains in my left shoulder that persist to this day, but only when I do really heavy lifting. That was about 10 years ago.

So I need to nip this little health problem while it's still minor. I already feel better with the ice and the ace bandage. Hopefully when the new keyboard and mouse come, it will all become a thing of the past and I go on like it never happened.

Posted by andrew at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My forearms are sunburned. That should tell you everything you need to know about hot it was in Heavenly this weekend. Winter, for what it's worth, is essentially over. Snow is melting all over the place. I came down from the hill after a day of skiing to find people picnicking by the lake, strolling around in shorts, walking dogs and doing all manner of things that one does not normally associate with winter. The days of dumping snow are over, perhaps. It could snow more this season, April showers and all, but it's hard to believe when you see people driving down HWY 50 in an open convertible.

Our lease on the house runs through the first week of May. I might have to start bringing my mountain bike up there to get some exercise. There's still a good base of snow, but the coverage is getting weak in places and if this 50+ degree weather keeps up for any length of time, the whole mountain is going slide ride down into the lake.

Days Skied This Season: 15

Posted by andrew at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This solicitation arrived in my inbox the other day:

Dear Andrew,

We have reviewed your resume on Monster.com, and if you are interested
in pursuing a career in teaching Latin or Greek, we encourage you to
complete our online candidate application.

Carney, Sandoe & Associates is an educational recruitment firm that
places teachers and administrators in private, independent and like-kind (charter, magnet, pilot and merit) schools across the nation. We have placed over 14,000 teachers and administrators in independent schools since 1977.

CS&A currently has hundreds of Classics teaching positions available
NATIONWIDE (as well as every other subject area). All fees are paid by
the client school; personal and professional placement services are FREE to the candidate. Teacher certification, though helpful, is NOT
essential to becoming a candidate.

Apply online at www.carneysandoe.com/application.htm

In order to become a candidate with CS&A, completing the online
application is a necessary step. Please feel free to contact me with any further questions.

All the best,

Ben Cameron
Associate Director of Recruitment & Marketing
Carney, Sandoe & Associates

I'm not sure what on my resume, other than having studied Classics more than 10 years ago, would suggest that I'd be a good candidate to become a Greek & Latin teacher. They must really be desparate.

Posted by andrew at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good News. My new Lacie 250 GB Hard Drive arrived on Friday and I was able to completely recover all the files from the total meltdown that I had last week.

I used a program called EasyRecovery Professional which has to be one of the most useful pieces of software anywhere. Not only did EasyRecovery find all the missing files, most of which I could not find the other programs I tried, but it found over 520 gigs of info because somehow it is able to recover old, deleted files. So, the only problem I had with the program was to set up the filters in the right way so that when I dumped my files from my old drive to the new one, it wasn't overwhlelmed with deleted files that I didn't want.

Now all my movies, all my music and most importanly, all my pictures and personal files are restored and I won't have to deal with this again until hard drive number craps out on me.

Posted by andrew at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by andrew at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The weather is improving and the days are starting to get long enough so that there's a sliver of sunlight left when I get home from work. Today I decided I want to take Fil for a walk (I'd love to take Mak, but he'd freak out).

My mom had bought these harnesses for my cats when she had brief custody while I made a quick trip to DC and New York. I don't know if she ever used them. She might have told me, but I can't remember. I actually thought she was joking when she said she bought them. I've had them ever since I came back west, but never used them until recently.

Now, my poor cats, who grew up running around the jungles of Samoa, have been more or less under house arrest since they arrived in this country. They were living large in Sedona and had some brief ventures in the snow around Vail, but other than that, they've been locked safely inside the house. Well, there was the daring Halloween escape, but that was an anomaly.

This was the second time I took Fil out. The first time, I harnessed her up, carried her downstairs and she mostly flopped around on the ground like a demented ferret. She did some exploring, but went into kitty hysterics when someone walked by.

This afternoon, it was a different story. Sure, she flopped around a little, but once she got used to the harness and understood the lead, she walked right with me. We walked down the street to the bay and watched the sunset over San Francisco. She even came up to a complete stranger and let herself be rubbed down. I probably let her eat way too much grass, but she was in heaven being outside and I wanted her to enjoy it as much as possible.

We were out for about 45 minutes. When we came back to the apartment, what did Mak do? He tried to sniff her ass and then sulked off. The venture out took a toll on little. She crashed. Now she's curled in tiny ball, hugging her face and sleeping right next to me. She's hard not to love.

Posted by andrew at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally saw Ray last night. I enjoyed it. I'm a big Ray Charles fan. I thought Jamie Foxx was brilliant. But I don't think this was a great film. There was a few things that really bothered me. The lip synching for one. I know, I know. It's hard to ask Jamie Foxx to sing like Ray Charles, but the guy is so talented, it would have been much better to have him sing than to have Ray Charles' real voice incongruously coming out of Foxx's mouth. It just didn't fit. The other thing I didn't like was the archival footage of towns Ray would visit. It felt slovenly and lazy for the filmmakers to stick these shots in rather than try to recreate them. This wasn't like JFK where archival footage of all sorts of mediums moved the story along. In Ray, it just didn't work. It felt out of place. It was wrong. That said, I loved the one short shot of LA where you could actually a Red Car moving along the street. When I was growing up in LA, I heard a lot of stories about the Red Car, about how LA was different place before cars and freeways, but I had never actually seen any video, let alone color video, of the Red Cars in motion.

So, to sum up:

Ray Charles :: awesome
Jame Foxx :: brilliant
Ray :: not so awesome
Red Car :: excellent

Posted by andrew at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I got an email this morning from some freelance writer named Laura Vanderkam. She writes for something called The Washington Examiner and is looking to do a piece on "modern communication technology and the Peace Corps." Here's the email:

From:
To:
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:56:07 -0500
Subject: Peace Corps, blogs

Hello- I came across American Idle in the course of researching a piece I've been commissioned to write for the DC Examiner on modern communication technology and the Peace corps. (I'm sending this from my Reader's Digest account, but this piece is for the Washington Examiner).

It looks like you managed to keep posting on your website during your Peace Corps service. Was that difficult? Or were you in an area that had ready access to the internet?

I'd love to interview you about your experience- let me know if you'd be willing to help with the article-
Laura Vanderkam

917-XXX-XXXX
www.lauravanderkam.com

For all sorts of reasons, I'm not really interested in doing an interview, and I told Laura so and pointed her in the direction of dozens of other PCVs with blogs that will probably all be willing talk about their experiences.

I will say this, and Laura, if you're reading, feel free to quote at will. Not all Peace Corps countries are the same, but Samoa was fairly well wired up for a developing country. I had internet access at work, at the Peace Corps office and even had a phone installed in my house and could get online whenever I wanted. The connection was often murderously slow, could cut out at anytime and the electric grid wasn't exactly stable, but it worked well enough for email, posting to a blog and uploading the occasional optimized JPEG. I got most of my news from the web. I bought stuff on Amazon, Half and eBay. I was the victim of a nightmarish identity theft plot. Through the internet and my website, I was in touch with volunteers all over the world from Nepal to Mozambique and just about everywhere in between. It was fascinating to me to see how other volunteers were living and what their lives were like, both with the local culture and the Peace Corps bureaucracy. I also really enjoyed being able to share my experiences online, get feedback from friends and family and not feel so isolated. On the other hand, I joined the Peace Corps to be fully immersed in the culture of another country and it far too easy to escape online. Even though I could always go back to the village and hang out with my host family whenever I needed to get away from the "modern" Samoan world, I didn't do it nearly enough. But a lot of that was less about my cultural needs and more about not wanting to leave my kittens alone, a whole other story.

Posted by andrew at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For a long time now, one of my guilty pleasures has been a daily reading of Heather Armstrong's Dooce.com. Dooce is a blog that details the life of a lapsed Mormon who returned to Utah after being fired from her job in Los Angeles for her website.

Heather's site is very popular, for a good reason (great writing and brilliant photography) and lately she's been the subject of interviews and stories on ABC and AP amongst others. Every time she's featured in the mass media she becomes the target of what she calls Drive By Zealots.

Basically people come by her site and flame for all sort of reasons, as she says, "from people who hate Mormons, from people who hate me for ever being a Mormon, people who hate me because I'm not Mormon anymore, people who think I need to accept Christ into my heart so that I can live eternally in His Open Arms, people who CANNOT BELIEVE that it is legal for someone like me to have a personal website especially since my potty mouth is so full of potty, and people who have died, come back from the dead, and are delivering a special message to me from God that he is angry with me."

Today she has a post about one of more egregious emails she received. She enlists a team of friends to write responses. It's really quite funny.

Posted by andrew at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On the way up to Tahoe last Friday, I got a craving for a milkshake. I stopped first at KFC in Placerville, hadn't been there in years. They don't have shakes, it turns out. So on I went to McDonald's where I haven't been since I saw Super Size Me last November.

The difference in price between a small (or regular) and a large is only 50 cents, so I ordered a large chocolate shake. In my youth, I ate at McDonald's all the time. I ordered shakes all the time. There was one size. It was the same as a medium soft drink, pretty small in comparison to what shot out of the drive through window.

I was handed a shake that weighed more than my female cat. It was at least 44 ounces of solid milk and "ice cream", and I'm guessing here, but it had to weigh around 8 pounds. It was absurd. I couldn't even finish a quarter of it. I don't know anyone who could, but there are probably many who try. Please, please, please tell me why does anyone need that much dairy and sugar?

Posted by andrew at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Anyway, I put up a from my trip around the Levant in 98/99. Between x-rays on the border between Jordan and Israel, being scanned in with a cheap scanner, being resized in photoshop before I knew what I was doing, and resized again by the funky Flickr software, most of the shots look like they were taken with a first generation cell phone camera, but there they are anyway for your viewing pleasure.

The Flickr software is pretty cool. The does distort the photos a smidgeon, but you can see all the pics in their beautifully glory .

Posted by andrew at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Take that, Sarah B. Hickman, you callous bitch!

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!

It's amazing that you can actually read this steaming pile of gobledigook, but there it is and the faster you read it, the easier it to comprehend. Fucking inconceivable. Now spelling might not be important to understanding, but it sure is you don't want people to think you're a complete idiot. Let the researchers at Cambridge suck on that for a while. Thanks to Jason for providing this little nugget.

Posted by andrew at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to everyone who's written in with suggestion about how to recover the data from my personal hard drive Chernobyl. I tried some that didn't work. And I tired this program called GetDataBack and it was mildly successful, restoring something like 83 gigs of stuff. The problem is that there was over 230 gigs on the drive. That's just not good enough. I talked to one of the several computer geeks in the ski house and he assured that the program he has, which cost 600 bucks and was purchased at the best of one of his clients will be able to recover 100% of the files, so I have my fingers crossed. I bought a new drive to replace this piece of shit I have, and with any luck, I will have all my files back in the next week or so.

Posted by andrew at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I channel surfing last night and I came across this show on KTEH (one of three PBS stations here in the Bay Area) that was showing something called Alone in the Wilderness. I watched for a few seconds as Dick Proenneke built a log cabin by hand and I was hooked in for the whole hour or so left in the program. Proenneke was 51 when he grew weary of the workaday life, packed it all in and moved to Alaska. He build a cabin on Upper Twin Lakes with a few basic tools and 40 bucks worth of material (mostly for the roof) and lived there for 30 years by himself.

The video is narrated by Dick, who must have filmed the whole thing himself, since he was up there alone only occasionally visited by seaplanes with rudimentary supplies. He builds just about everything he needs using the most basic of hand tools. He fashions intricate latches and hinges for his front door. He constructs a bear proof storage shed for dried meat. He builds a stone fireplace just before the onset of winter. He lines his roof and builds an underground refrigerator from insulating moss, he carves spoons and bowls out of wood, and much more that this. He is amazing as example of self-reliance.

Through his eyes, we see the seasonal changes in the high country. Bears come out of hibernation. Lake ices breaks and is carried away down the river. Plants and flowers bloom. Then the reverse happens in as the weather turns cold, ice forms over the lake, animals go into hiding.

His calm, matter of fact narration style is reassuring. He makes everything seem so easy, as if anyone could take off into the wilderness and carve out a life worth living. The exact opposite is true and the ease and mastery with which Proenneke carries out his self-assigned tasks is enough to leave someone like me feeling quite
inadequate.

Still, I'm fascinated and I'm going to find and read his . Check your local PBS station to see if the documentary is playing in your area.

Posted by andrew at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

Fil, my female cat has always liked to get up on the shower door when I'm taking a shower. It's one of her many endearing qualities. I even chose the apartment I'm in now partially because it had a shower door perch for Fil. But lately, she hasn't been satisfied with just hanging out and watching, she feels she needs to get into the cleaning act.

So Fil cantilevers her body out over the shower, latches onto my head with her forepaws and starts licking away. Eventually this is going to get annoying, but right now I find it adorable, especially when I see the look of determination in her eyes to get at my head.

Even better, when I'm getting ready to get out of the shower and put the towel around my neck, Fil jumps down onto my shoulders. This morning she was a little anxious, didn't wait for the towel and slipped off my back when she jumped down. I had to pin her between my back and the wall of the shower to keep her from falling to the basin and the peeling the skin off my back with her sizable talons on the way down. She was wet and freaked out after that little misstep, so who knows if she'll venture back.

Posted by andrew at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Is this what happens when wingers run every branch of our government or this just the logical ad absurdum conclusion to the Justice Department's endless domestic War on Terror in post-Columbine America?

Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding

A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Poole disputes that he was threatening anyone.

"It didn't mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn't mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn't mention no principal or cops, nothing," said Poole. "Half the people at high school know me. They know I'm not that stupid, that crazy."

On Thursday, a judge raised Poole's bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

Poole is being held at the Clark County Detention Center.

Is common sense is that shockingly uncommon? Forget that the "authorities" think this constitutes a felony and successfully raised this kid's bail because he's such a threat to society. If my grandparents did that to me, I might do something that actually is illegal, like burn down their house with them in it.

Posted by andrew at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Supreme Court heard two cases yesterday, one from Texas and another from Kentucky, about whether or not it's constitutional to erect monuments to the Ten Commandments on government property. Personally, I don't see how anyone could be offended by the Ten Commandments, so to me it's a non-issue whether they are displayed publicly or otherwise. What I don't understand is why this particular kernel of law from the Old Testament plays such a large role in the Christian world, while other Jewish laws are completely ignored.

The Decalogue is the cornerstone of Jewish law, not Christian law. As far as I know, there's no mention of the Ten Commandments in the New Testament. So why is it that the Ten Commandments has such a pre-eminent role in Christianity? There are tons of other laws in the Old Testament that Christians simply ignore. Christians do not keep kosher, but Jesus did. Christians don't observe the sabbath on Saturday, but Jesus did. Jesus was Jewish. He observed all sorts of laws, most of which are completely ignored by Christianity. So what gives?

I don't understand the neuroses of modern Christianity. I don't understand how you can cherry pick passages in the Old Testament that suit you, while blithely disavowing others. It doesn't make any sense to me. Perhaps someone out there can sort it out for me, but I doubt it because no one ever wants to comment on religion here.

Posted by andrew at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by andrew at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm having technological breakdown here. My external hard drive, my 250 gig external fucking hard has just stopped working. Yesterday it was exhibiting signs of an imminent crash. The drive was registering as "full", but some files weren't showing up. I tried to dig for them and the computer blue screened. Then when I brought the drive home and hooked it up to notebook, the drive would be there, but when I clicked to open it up, windows would ask me if I want to format the drive. FUCK NO I DON'T WANT TO FORMAT THE DRIVE.

So what can I do? I downloaded some file recovery software and it dutifully poured over the drive and found the files, but because the software wasn't registered (it was some trial version) it wouldn't actually recover them. I thought I'd wait to talk to Maxtor customer service, but they were totally useless when I called them this morning. I'll try again when I get home tonight, but I have little faith that I'm going to get all my files back.

Much of it, movies, music and other entertainment, is replaceable, but the pictures and the documents are not. I'm trying to be optimistic. I mean, shit, the files were mostly there yesterday, they can't just all disappear in an instant, can they? Well, they probably can, but that's the price we pay for living in the digital age.

Posted by andrew at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was on Bravo the other day and I just had to watch it even though I had much better things to do. The movie is now officially on the list of flicks that I will watch whenever, wherever it's on. The story, the accents, the characters, the editing and the cinematography, and the insane drinking scene after the boys are free and clear all make Lock, Stock a keeper. What movies can you watch again and agian and again?

Posted by andrew at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)