This evening was the annual pumpkin carving party. As always, it was a blast. I carved a moose. And not just any moose, but the moose from the cover of my new book. I have a picture which you can see here. It’s not great. Hopefully Loren’s camera will give us a better rendition. Mine doesn’t do dark very well.

This morning, I witnessed an amazing display of fluid dynamics that could probably not be repeated if I tried.

As I was pouring milk on my cornflakes, the milk landed in a bowl-shaped flake, and reversed the flow of the milk up, out of the bowl, and all over the counter and floor, in such a spectacular cascade that none was making it into the bowl.

Yeah, that’s the whole story. Sorry if you were expecting more.

Last night I wanted to get a movie. And, darn it, it was rent one, get one free night. I hate it when that happens. So I watched Fight Club, and A Beautiful Mind.

Fight Club was one of the odder movies I’ve seen in a while. Probably the strangest since Being John Malkovitch. One of that that I know I missed stuff the first time through.

A Beautiful Mind was beautiful, and heartbreaking, as well as being a fascinating movie. John Nash is truly a fascinating man. More about him here, in his own words.

I sent a response to the “Please do my homework” note, sarcastically asking if he was asking me to do his homework. Apparently the sarcasm didn’t communicate, as he sent me a grateful response, his work so far, and a request to tell him how to do the rest of it.

For those who missed the connection, I have written Perl modules for the calculation of the day of the week based on the “doomsday” algorithm. It was primarily an academic exercise, as there are more efficient ways to do this calculation. I was just interested in the algorithm.

But the code was in Perl. My experience with assembler is mostly restricted to knowing how to spell it. I did spell it right, didn’t I?

I’ve had people send me “please do my homework” email before, but never have I had anyone be quite so unabashed about it. Check this out:

Next Friday, according to the calendar Sarah brought home from school, is School Record’s Day.

While I understand that, for most people, the use of an apostrophe means “Look out, here come’s an s!” I expect a little more than that from a school. I’ve been seeing an alarming number of glaring gramatical errors in documents sent home from school.

Either Wednesday evening, or Thursday morning, I did something unpleasant to my back. I first noticed this while trying to get into Rocinante on Thursday morning. Climbing into a Jeep requires a bit of gymnastics on a good day. Trying to pull my left leg up into the Jeep, my back started screaming.

When I got out at the school bus stop, I almost couldn’t get back in, and it took me about a minute to take the handbrake off. When I got to work, I was pretty sure I would not be able to get out at all. But, being the loyal workaholic I am, I got out, almost collapsing in the process.

Sensible people would have gone home by this point, but I figured I’d at least check the schedule to see who I’d be ignoring by going home. And, of course, I was promptly sent to a customer site.

So, it was mostly getting down into a chair, and standing back up again, that were the problem. Once I was standing, I was mostly OK. So I tried to do desktop and server maintenance without ever actually sitting down. But after about an hour of that, I gave up and went to the doctor.

Seems I have a spinal bifida. It’s not clear that this is the source of the problem, but it’s just something the noticed in the xray. A spinal bifida means that there’s a bit missing from one of my vertebrae. This is often congenital, although it can be caused by trauma. But, I can’t seem to come up with anything I did that would have caused this, other than just generally being out of shape.

I feel a lot better today, but I’m still not particularly comfortable. Perhaps I’ll take this afternoon off and rest. I don’t want this to get any worse. Plus, I’m on 3 different drugs, and am feeling rather loopy.

This week I’ve been listening to “Sacred Love”, Sting’s new album. While most times, new work by familiar artists takes me some time to grow into, this almum immediately has struck my fancy. It has a lot of stuff on it that is very recognizably Sting, along with some interesting new experimentation.

My favorite track, hands down, is “Stolen Car (Take me dancing)”. In this short song, he paints a picture of three people – well, four, I suppose, but one (the owner of the car) of them doesn’t really count – tied together by a stolen car. Each of them says the same words, but we get very different picture of each. It’s the kind of short story I like – one that is economic in words, and leaves you to fill in a lot of the details yourself.

Another track that is very appealing is “Inside”, the opening track. Unfortunately, the ending feels very contrived. He does the “rhyming words that end in ‘ate’ trick” for the last 20 seconds of this song for no particular reason. This has been done, even with the same words, in a number of other songs, and this kinda ruins the track for me.

I’ve looked at several other reviews, and most of them don’t seem to care much for the album as a cohesive unit, and I think I agree with that somewhat. There’s no unity. There are some great tracks. And, indeed, I find myself playing tracks 1 (Inside) and 6 (Stolen Car) repeatedly, while ignoring a lot of the rest of the album.

So, did I contradict myself there? Maybe a little. For you Sting fans, it’s worth picking up.

Aye, thou art welcome, heaven’s delicions breath!
When woods begin to weear the crimson leaf,
And the suns grow meek, and the meeks suns gro brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, ‘mid bowers and brooks,
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.

William Cullen Bryant (1794 — 1878)

Today seems to be The Day for stupid remarks on NPR. I feel I’m forgetting one, but here are two that struck my fancy.

As I become more and more baffled about the US role in Iraq, and why we want to dump 87 BILLION dollars there this gem came up. They were talking to a political scholar in Iraq – someone who understands the Iraqi people and their politics in a way that we never will, and he said the following: “If the new constitution is written under the gaze of the United States, the Iraqi people will not accept it.” Meaning that, even if one accepts the notion that we freed them from tyrany, we don’t think like they do, and so a constitution that we write will not mesh with their beliefs and needs. A very reasonable thing to say, I would think. But, in response to this, NPR commented “This is the sort of sentiment that will have to be overcome in order for the process to move forward.”

Overcome.

As though they are wrong, we are right, and we must persuade them of this before any progress can be made.

Here’s an analogy, for those of you who like analogies. The French helped us (the United States of America) to overcome the British in our struggle for independence. That was very nice of them. Should they have written our constitution? No, of course not. This is no different. These people have the right to create their own form of government, and we have the responsibility to give good advice, but then to get out of the way.

OK, here was another stupid remark.

The prime minister of (somewhere – I actually missed where) is making his daughter go to work at McDonalds. Seems a very reasonable thing to do, even if it wasn’t politically motivated. But he said that he was protesting a news story of a 13-year-old who had turned to prostitution in order to pay for her party life and dance clubs. So, he wanted his daughter to work for an income, even though he is one of the richest people in the country. All sounds very reasonable.

OK, so here comes NPR’s brilliant comment. “The report did not include comments from the daughter.” What annoys me about this remark is that it seems designed to disparage the prime minister, imply that this was done against the wishes of the dughter, and was a cruel thing to do to her. All without actually saying this, or presenting any real data to support it.

There were some other really stupid moments this morning, and most of them were in Mandalit del Barco’s remarks about voting machines in the pre-election electronic voting going on in California. She talked about the easy-to-use voting machines as though they were the most complicated thing she’d ever encountered. When she was talking with an election official about voting early, she actually said “you are encouring people to vote early and vote often.” And she generally went out of her way to act as though she was shocked at seeing 135 options for the position of governor.

The entire story could be summarized as “California is encouraging voters to vote early, technically as Absentee Voters, in order to reduce congestion on election day.” But, they made it into a 10 minute discussion of Mandalit del Barco’s inability figure out a touch-screen voting machine.

I tell you, if she didn’t have such a cool name, I’d tune to a different channel when she starts talking, but I just love to hear her say her name.