We had a pretty intense hailstorm that started yesterday afternoon and ran for a few hours. I have a lot of green tomatoes still on the vine outside. Today I brought some in. They’re all dented and pock-marked now. Here’s a closeup:
Now here’s a completely different tomato. This one didn’t get damaged. Anyhow, this is just one single tomato, not three conjoined tomatoes. I call it the rumpshaker.
I grew up in the 1980s in Texas, watching stuff on TV like the The Day After and Damnation Alley and lots of other bad post-apocalyptic sci-fi schlock. Meanwhile, my parents took us to a church that was very focused on Christian eschatology*, so my childhood daydreams revolved around on how I would survive in the inevitable supernatural, post-armageddon war zone. I used to imagine how buildings would look when they were all burned out and destroyed and possibly occupied by mutants.
I’m sure that’s why I’m so into growing vegetables now. I’ll be ready with my basement full of turnips when the shit goes down.
One of my college professors argued that Christianity at its heart is a religion about redemption in the afterlife, and if the ancient Jews weren’t so miserable under the Romans, the religion never would have caught on. Even today, it appeals to people most often that are at the end of their rope.
I suspect a similar dynamic applies with all these doomsday preachers. People like talking about the end of the world because these scenarios offer them hope out of whatever mess they’re stuck in currently. For example, as a delinquent 7th grade kid, I knew that if we went to war with the Russians, or if a meteor crashed into the Earth, or if a super-virus plague broke out, or if aliens landed and started harvesting our life force, I wouldn’t get in trouble for not doing my world history homework, so on some level, I wanted it to happen.
[*] has very little in common with Christian scatology. It’s just a pretentious word that means what the religion believes will happen at the end of the world.
I just finished using a form on George Voinovich’s site to let him know my thoughts on this banking crisis.
I’m not adamantly opposed to the bailout in theory. I get the idea that the some market activities have external consequences. But I also get that this administration always says “trust me!” right before shit gets really, really bad. If we’re going to do a bailout, let’s do it in a boring and well-thought out way. I want to make sure that this bailout buys us enough safeguards and regulations so that we’re never faced with this crap again.
The villains on k5 have a pretty good discussion about this bailout. I like this comment:
Just about the only way that it would cost 700 billion to get with two chicks is if one was Natalie Portman and the other one was a clone of Natalie Portman. Even cloning a human probably wouldn’t get you particularly close to 700 billion but you might be in the same ballpark.
Ha ha.
Anyhow, I also went to Sherrod Brown’s website and read his statements from today’s hearing and I really like his angle. I’m not too worried about letting him know how I feel since he’s already there.
I also liked how Sherrod Brown has RSS feeds for his site, and a pretty nice looking color scheme. Maybe that’s because he just got there.
UPDATE
Another fine Ohio politician, Marcy Kaptur, is also on the right side of this:
I’m going to do my decorators are fun! talk at PyWorks in November, bright and early Thursday morning, November 12th.
In completely unrelated news, my neighbor called the county health department because they saw a rat and the inspector says we have a bunch of burrows in the overgrown woodsy part of our yard in the way back. This might be just the argument I need to convince my wife to let me buy a blunderbuss so I can hunt the little monsters down.
Last week I switched to git from svn + bzr and so far, it’s gone really well. I’ve gotten fantastic help from the people in #git on irc.freenode.org. I love being able to pull and push code across branches without really being careful. In subversion, I always needed to count revisions exactly, and make sure I never repeated, or else I’d end up with a big mess. And git is really fast, too. Even checking the status for my code tree seems like it goes faster than with svn, but maybe I’m imagining it.
I’ve been writing triggers and stored procedures in postgreSQL recently, using both plpgsql and plpythonu. Some tasks were vastly simpler to write in plpythonu and others were easier in plpgsql. I’m working on a real post that describes what I like about each language.
I finished my second week of teaching. I’m really happy that my students are interested in learning more than just HTML and CSS — they want to learn how to process form data, rather than just design pretty forms. So next week, I think we’re going to get into PHP basics, with the ultimate goal being teaching them how to use CMS stuff like WordPress and Joomla for bigger projects.
Finally, it looks like that other Matt Wilson turned up in Berkeley, CA. I’m glad he’s safe.
So, I used to love going to Micro Center. I would always find a bunch of old books I wanted to read, or I could pick up a new cheap component for my crappy frankenstien desktop, or I could just wander and look at all the fancy new laptops. It was always a fun place to kill time.
Now it seems like I go there and then leave, empty-handed, in a worse mood than when I came in. I’m like a drug addict realizing I can’t get high any more no matter how much junk I take.
Today I went there while my wife bought a gift nearby at Babies R Us. First I was disappointed that they shrank the “discount books” wall down to just a tiny shelf. Then I asked and found out they didn’t have any GSM modem stuff. They didn’t have any swipe card readers or thumbprint scanners either. They didn’t even have the neat new open source router. Total waste of time.
Here’s what Micro Center does have:
If you need those things, go nuts. Anything else, just order it online.
This is the first year I planted any flowers. I bought a sack of gladiolus bulbs from the big box hardware store. They’ve been really fun to watch.
I never dug up a few of the onions from last year, and they survived the winter. Now they are making seeds at the top of each shoot. Onions and carrots take a few years to be able to reproduce.
I have a lot of respect for these onions now. They’re able to repel the hordes of rabbits in my backyard, they survived a freezing winter, and now they’re getting ready to spawn more. It’s a good thing humans and onions are allies.
Corn is doing well too, despite a late start and seed that is two years old. Last year, some critter in a single day ate all twenty stalks down to the ground. I think it was a deer that somehow found its way into my back yard. I’ve seen deer on Fairmount blvd in the morning, so it’s not impossible.
I spotted this cicada relaxing on one of my tomato stalks. He’s in the center of the picture, on the left side of the wooden stick. This photo doesn’t show his colorations well. His wings are iridescent like a dragonfly’s wings, and his shell is really shiny turquoise.
When Charlie was just learning to speak, he and I talked about what sounds we would hear. When we heard cicadas in the trees, he would say “train”. I guess they reminded him of trains. Now we call cicadas train bugs.
What else — this year, I’m growing brandywine tomatoes (some heirloom variety) and I’ve got plenty of of fat green ones. Brandywine tomatoes have pleats sort of like pumpkins.
In between rows of corn, I planted pumpkins and beans. Rabbits destroyed all the beans, but they ignored the pumpkins, and the vines now all have big orange flowers. I found two bees inside one flower.
Finally, I’ve been letting our 14-year old cat out into the backyard a lot to sun herself. The rabbits stay away when she’s around.
So, yeah, gardening is pretty fun.
The Columbus Metro Library offered a fantastic location for us. Wireless internet, multiple meeting rooms, one room with about 30 workstations, etc. Really great location. A $15 donation makes you a “friend” of the library, and gets you a 15% discount at the coffee booth.
Catherine Devlin led the charge of organizing this conference, and she did it amazingly well.
The slides from my decorator talk are available here. I’ll be breaking them down into a series of blog posts with a lot more commentary, so stay tuned.
We’ve had the same three movies in our house for a REALLY LONG TIME.
I’m sure all three of these films are great. But they also seem really heavy and serious. I have enough stress in my own life that I don’t want to absorb fictional stress also. So every time my wife and I have two or three hours to relax, we end up watching something else, like Andrew Zimmern chowing through a plate of horse penises.
| Papa John’s 23-cent pizzas |
That Papa John’s is in my neighborhood!
The Cleveland nerdocracy is goin’ drinking. Ideas will be discussed. Schemes will be hatched. Envelopes will be defaced.
Andrew Kavanaugh seems to be leading the charge.