Category: Uncategorized

Here are all the pictures I use in the blog’s banner and how those pictures came to be.

Biltmore Estate
In May 2018 we had a Peace Corps reunion in Asheville and went to the Biltmore. They had some Dale Chihuly glasswork on display including these two boats.

Munich and Prague

In May 2018 I went with Bob, Eric and Andrew to Munich and Prague. The first picture is the New City Hall from St. Peter’s belltower while the second is from the Theatine Church in Munich, while the others were taken in Prague including some subway art and pictures of the Charles Bridge and the art nouveau Svatopluk Čech Bridge.

California

For my 50th birthday in 2015, I took a trip to San Francisco. San Francisco has a couple of great bridges including the Golden Gate bridge and the Bay Bridge.

I drove south of San Francisco to Monterey and beyond that where the Pacific Coast Highway runs along some beautiful coastline, including this picture and the Bixby Creek Bridge.

In that same area is a great state park called Point Lobos State Reserve which lets you get up close the shore.

Cozumel

On Mom’s 75th birthday cruise, one of the stops was Cozumel, Mexico. We hired a van and stopped at a beach with some neat rock and a blowhole that wasn’t working due to low tide.

Colorado National Monument and Arches National Park

In September 2013 I drove a U Haul truck out to Salt Lake City and we stopped by these two national parks. This first image is Colorado National Monument, a panorama image from the Grand View viewpoint:

And here is a shot from Arches National Park of the South Window:

Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

In May 2013 I went out to Salt Lake City and visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. This first picture was taken at Golden Spike where they have replica trains and replica train tracks from the completion of the transcontinental railroad:

Later that day I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats and took this picture:

Also at Bonneville I took this picture of the sun setting over Nevada:

In Grand Teton National Park I took this picture of the Tetons from the Willow Flats area:

On the Cascade Canyon hike from Jenny Lake, Susan said she liked the texture of this log:

Then in Yellowstone, I took this picture of the Sapphire Pool hot spring:

Also in Yellowstone, I took this picture of travertine terrace formations at Mammoth Hot Springs:

Ireland

A lot of pictures come from my July 2008 trip to Ireland (gallery). In chronological order, they pretty much tell everywhere I went. We started in Dublin, and while Susan’s choir was practicing, I walked down to the River Liffey and took pictures of a lot of different cool bridges. This is the Mellows Bridge. I uploaded this picture to Wikipedia.

Leaving Dublin and heading south, we stopped by the Rock of Cashel, a hill with some old churches on top of it. This is a neat picture, not as good cropped as at full size.

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I never watched the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory, but recently Channel 17 (used to be TBS but is now WPCH, Peachtree TV, and has different programming than TBS) has started airing two episodes a day Monday through Friday. With a DVR it is easy to get every episode and WPCH has been very considerate by airing them in order separated about halfway through the four season run. I have been watching for a month but can’t possibly keep up with so many episodes, thus filling up my hard drive. But there are less than 100 shows so it only takes 9 weeks of recording to get everything. I am getting pretty close, and I have been able to delete one of the timers since it has caught up with the shows I recorded with the other timer. Plus the show is still airing on prime time so I get the most recent season once a week.

It’s a pretty good show, about 4 science geeks and a normal girl. It is usually pretty dumb with it’s oversimplified exaggerated portrayal of nerdom, but occasionally brilliant. And it comes up day-to-day, with a person at work pointing out a parallel with a group of us who eat lunch together at designated places for the day of the week, which the nerds do for dinner (and you have to admit that it is pretty geeky to do that for dinner).

Several episodes have included the song “Soft Kitty” which the weirdest science geek, Sheldon, likes to have sung to him when he is sick (in one episode, the girl offers to sing the song to him when he is sad after feeling betrayed by his friends, but he points out that “Soft Kitty” is only for when he is sick, and there is no song for when he is sad, concluding “I’m not a child”).

Soft kitty, warm kitty
Little ball of fur
Happy kitty, sleepy kitty
Purr, purr, purr

I looked this up on some wikis about the show. They pointed out (I don’t know how they know things like this) that the song is real, though it is called “Warm Kitty” and reverses the kitties in the first and second lines (“Warm kitty, soft kitty” and “Sleepy kitty, happy kitty”). Maybe the writers of the TV show changed it to avoid copyright problems (don’t know if that would hold up, since it’s still obviously the same thing), but I do think they improved it. “Soft kitty” is a much funnier name for the song and it seems appropriate to end on “sleepy kitty” if the idea is to put someone to sleep.

I went to Kroger with my new renter, David, last night. He really keeps up with food and has strong feelings about all the garbage that people eat and how just about everything is marketed (what he calls propaganda). I had some DiGiorno pizza coupons and Kroger had those pizzas on sale. Looking in the freezer section, they had a Deluxe version of pizza that includes chocolate chip cookie dough for a dozen tollhouse cookies. Pizza and Cookies! I knew I had to get them to show David (who was off shopping on his own).

Once we got back to the car, I showed him the box. Not only are these two things that David can’t eat since they have gluten (and an extra sore point is that people with Celiac disease tend to agree that pizza is one of the things they miss the most), but the idea of combining two things with so many calories that are so bad for you in one box is just amazing. David was suitably outraged. We imagined there must also be a Saturday morning ad campaign to go with this product, telling kids to go ask their parents for Pizza and Cookies for dinner. What a product.

Vanderbilt football is a lesson in humility. The team is just never that good and seems to be the official Homecoming team of the SEC, since opposing teams can count on a win against us. Mom invited me to come up to Athens to watch the Vanderbilt-UGA game on Grant’s TV, but why would I want to sit through hours of agony as my team loses? This week Vanderbilt plays Arkansas, ranked No. 10 in the country. I wasn’t even paying attention to football today until about 3:00. Flipping through channels I was surprised the Arkansas game was on TV, but there was a commercial so I got online to check out how bad we were losing. Very much to my surprise Vanderbilt was up 28 to 20 over Arkansas at the end of the third quarter. Of course, I checked it again to see if I had read it correctly and yes, that was the case.

I flipped back to the TV and Vanderbilt even had the ball. The first play I witnessed was a screen pass to the left and Vanderbilt got a 30-40 yard gain to get inside the Arkansas 20 yard line. Holy cow. The next play the quarterback kept the ball and ran straight ahead into a wide open field, getting a first down inside the 10 yard line. A running play tacked on another few yards, now inside the 5 yard line. Vanderbilt is about to go up 15 points over a ranked team! How can they mess this up, I’m thinking? How about fumbling the ball? Next play, Vanderbilt fumbles the ball. I turned the TV off before the Arkansas player could run it all the way back into the end zone. For a Vanderbilt fan, this is good defense: turn the TV off before the other team can score. Turns out Arkansas went for a 2 point conversion and tied the game. The game is still on, but the ending is certain. I only had to watch 3 plays.

Michael Lewis was on The Daily Show this week. He has a book out called Boomerang about the global financial crisis. Essentially it is a compilation of feature articles he wrote for Vanity Fair about Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California. He also wrote The Blind Side which was made into a movie with Sandra Bullock and Moneyball, another non-fiction book turned into a movie that has just come out and stars Brad Pitt.

For each article he goes to the country and reports on what he finds out. It is a pretty funny picture of each country (I’ve read the Iceland and Greece articles so far) plus gives you a lot of details about their economic troubles. Nothing complicated or technical, but still good information, if a little superficial (which he admits). The articles are almost more of a travelogue than news article. He says about two Greek tax collectors that although they are both whistle blowers fearing for their jobs, they can’t stand each other. He writes “This, I’d be told many times by other Greeks, was very Greek.” In Greece the government workers were making 3 times the average private sector wage. However, he also points out that in the private sector most people list themselves as self-employed and report almost no income in order to avoid taxes. If the tax agency investigated, you could just bribe them to leave you alone or fight the charges in court which would take forever. Knowing the court battle would take forever, the tax agency generally would just give up.

He started the series with Iceland where he talks about these really aggressive Icelandic fishermen giving up fishing to become investment bankers and ruining the country by taking the same kinds of risks as investment bankers that they took as North Atlantic fishermen. He points out that Iceland is just this really, really sparsely populated country and everyone knows everyone else. He asks a guy if he knows Bjork. He says of course he does. Everyone knows everyone in Iceland. And the guy adds that not only is Bjork a bad singer, but so is her mother.

He has also covered Germany who loaned out most of the money and are now stuck with paying most of the bills. Ireland is another place where the speculative bubble burst in a big way. And just this month he has written about California where the people insist the government stay in operation but also keep refusing to allow the government to collect taxes.

Vanity Fair only gives you a teaser of the first article on Iceland. But I found a PDF version here and a web version on a Congressman’s website, though it is missing the last paragraph.

• Iceland Wall Street on the Tundra, April 2010
• Greece Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, October 2010
• Ireland When Irish Eyes Are Crying, March 2011
• Germany It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!, September 2011
• California California and Bust, November 2011