Living In the World, Not on It

There truly is nothing you can't find on ebay! It began so innocently - well, as innocently as anything with me and shopping can be. I began with looking for Old Farmers Almanacs. I bid on the first one - from 1968 - and thus began a couple of months of bidding on many, many Farmers Almanacs. I have almost all of them from 1850 - 1900, then from 1954 to current. I have some from the early 1800s - 1814, 1816... but then it is spotty. Same with the period between 1903 and 1955 - I have some of the 40s, but only one from the 20s and maybe none from the 30s. I just loved getting them, coming home and finding a new thing waiting for me that is not a bill or junk. (I'll be honest, I get far more junk mail than bills, which is good.) For a short time, maybe a month or so, I did very little to no shopping. I was holding on to money. Then around Thanksgiving I had the idea to look up bank notes. Wow! There are a gazillion bank notes! I keep wanting to get a US bank note from prior to 19...

Usually it is so easy to immediately judge these people, but I must admit that these families really beat the normal horrors that show up on this. It was a really refreshing and pleasant surprise. The producers are obviously finding more and more diametricly opposite to create more tension. Often by the end of the show a couple of lessons are learned, but during the show a lot of the value is destroyed by the fighting that occurs between these husbands who suddenly have "wives" that are totally alien to their normal lives. Mostly it is good, and it brings a new point of view to overly and under-structured families. On the other hand, pairing the party-animal, pampered, useless wife with a army sargent (I know that is spelled wrong...), straight-and-narrow, rod-up-his-ass man who primarily works and doesn't have much household involvement. That is a recipe for disaster. This time, there was the Blankenships, from [I forgot]. The other family was the [whomevers], from [I f...

Oh, now, wait! You don't think I was out drinking, do you?! Whew! Anyone who knows me knows I'm not ever going to engage in a night of drinking - especially alcohol! No, that is not what I meant. And it was not like going to my family's Christmas soiree and watching my uncle get hammered. Nor was it like going to the dinner in early January in a wine cellar (OK, I felt a little uncomfortable with the others' drinking, but hey, I wasn't keeping me up nights... ...figuratively or literally. Last night I did not get to bed until 0400. It was hideous. We had two contractors come to the house. One is someone I know and he is a great person (and very good-looking!) and he and his partner are extremely knowledgeable. They took a million measurements and did all kinds of scoping and then spent two more hours talking to us about different options. And this partner! Holy cow! A Norse god - that's what I told Luis. Kevin is medium height, good shape and a face that invite...

Sometimes one gets lucky and the reality show is not total drek. I really did not have a high opinion of The Apprentice . At first I thought this is a publicity stunt to just show what an ass Donald Trump is. I was right, but it still turned out to be a pretty good show. So this season it was the celebrity version of The Apprentice ; ten "celebrities" (and here I use the term rather loosely) are brought in to make money for their choice of charity. They each had their different charities. Some made money for their charity and some did not. The contestants: (in order) Tiffany Fallon (2005 Playboy Playmate of the Year) - A totally unmemorable woman who may be hot but so what? And I hate to say this, but Playmates are 1. a dime a dozen, 2. being Playmate of the Year 2005 doesn't make you business savvy, 3. being a playmate doesn't confer intelligence or interest in anything. And I do know one or two playmates - this is not one of them. Nadia Comaneci (Olympic gold-medal ...

Please let me live and educate someone - anyone! I seem to be surrounded by the unbelievably stupid. They are everywhere. On the telly especially, I suppose - the television attracts really abysmally stupid people. Without writers, this was underscored by the incredible amount of the incredulous - all serving themselves up for the lowest common denominator! I sound like Charles Emerson Winchester III (brilliantly played by David Ogden Stiers, one of my personal favourites - see Doc Hollywood ) from M*A*S*H, but honestly it is staggering how dumb John Q. Public is. I am always saying that television panders to the lowest common denominator, which is really low. And reality shows are the living proof. Tonight we watched Wednesday night's episode of Wife Swap - talk about the lowest common denominator! This is it. They find one family that is intelligent, has an overdeveloped sense of micromanagement of their kids and a big house - usually immaculate. The other family is usually uned...

Check this out: Isn't that neat! I was waiting for this, since I'd bid on and and won a lot of candles and other items and had for the last two weeks, been hovering in the mid-90s. Of course, now I won't see a new star until I have done 500 transactions... and since I am only a buyer, there is no reaching that point for quite some time. So from 27 September, when I first logged into ebay until 27 March (I reached 100 yesterday or maybe the day before), I have purchased items from over 100 people. When you buy ten items from a seller, you received ten different feedback blurbs, but only one credit. That means I've probably purchased around 150 items. First it was Old Farmer's Almanacs... then in October I discovered bank notes. Through the holidays I was a huge purchaser of bank notes. Then in February I became an inordinate shopper of candles - the fragrances that are no longer made! I also found a few jigsaw puzzles that I had to have. And now, Smurfs (don't as...

A language is the soul of its people. This is nowhere illustrated more profoundly than in the Yiddish language, the language of Jews of eastern and central Europe and their descendants. A tongue full of wit and charm, Yiddish embodies deep appreciation of human behavior in all its colorful manifestations. The word Yiddish comes from German Judisch meaning Jewish. But it is not the same as Hebrew, even though it is written in Hebrew script. Here's what Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer had to say about the language in his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "Yiddish language - a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics... There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand a...

At some point I should be able to log in for an extended period. Four drunks in five days is notable! Maybe tomorrow night when I'm on shift. Nothing like waiting for the next call and blogging! At least I know my four dedicated readers will enjoy it (as will I for the pleasure of publishing the sheer, screaming ludicrous nature of people! I miss writing as it is. Six days without a word is WAAAAAY too long!

Guest wordsmith Matt Ball (veganpa at comcast.net ) writes: Growing up, I was a big fan of Carl Sagan, and I dreamed of exploring the universe, expanding the frontier of human knowledge and vision. I started my college to become a rocket scientist, with the plan of working for NASA. But fate intervened on the first day of college when I met my roommate, a big, strong guy, who was not shy about explaining his vegetarianism or what hidden realities my eating meat supported. After a false start, I went vegetarian - I simply found the cruelties of meat production too severe to continue to rationalize away. Shortly thereafter, I met Jack Norris and started learning more about animal exploitation in this world. I decided I needed to do more than be a vegetarian. With ten other activists, Jack and I held a three-day Fast for Farm Animals in front of a Cincinnati slaughterhouse (three days being the amount of time farmed animals often go without food before slaughter). (This week's guest w...

March 18, 2008: Saturn: jewel of the solar system, taker of breaths, ringed beauty. Even veteran astronomers can't help but gasp when they see her through a small telescope. Red Alert: Saturn's rings are vanishing. Around the world, amateur astronomers have noticed the change; Saturn's wide open rings are rapidly narrowing into a thin line. Efrain Morales Rivera sends these pictures taken through a backyard telescope in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico: "The rings have narrowed considerably in the last year," he reports. "The Cassini division (a dark gap in the rings) is getting hard to see." Four hundred years ago, the same phenomenon puzzled Galileo. Peering through a primitive spy glass, he discovered Saturn's rings in 1610 and immediately wrote to his Medici patrons: "I found another very strange wonder, which I should like to make known to their Highnesses…." He was dumbfounded, however, when the rings winked out little more than a year later. W...

This is a really cool image: This is a real image of the sun, but it's been run through a program to change the colour. Pretty cool, huh? This is not something you would see in space. Stars come in a multitude of colours, but not green. They come in white, yellow, orange, red, blue and black [holes], but I don't think there are any other colours. Our sun is yellow but it began as white and has been slowly cooling over the last... I don't know... 600 million years? It will be many, many more years before this sun uses up its seemingly endless store of helium. I found this great Web site - spaceweather.com. It has a lot of great astronomy information, such as: "Scientists track solar cycles by counting sunspots -- cool planet-sized areas on the Sun where intense magnetic loops poke through the star's visible surface. Counting sunspots is not as straightforward as it sounds. Suppose you looked at the Sun through a pair of (properly filtered) low power binoculars -- y...

I SO love this: "San Francisco - The notorious spammer authorities dubbed "the king of spam" is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion. Robert Soloway, 28, had already been found guilty of spam charges in several civil cases -- Microsoft won a $7.8 million judgment against him in 2005 -- but had avoided paying fines in those cases. The criminal charges to which he pleaded guilty on Friday followed his arrest in 2007 by the U.S. Justice Department. He was arrested on criminal charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in May 2007. In a 2005 discussion group post, Soloway bragged , 'I've been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars and have had my business running for over 10 years without ever paying a dime regardless to the outcome of any lawsuits.' That year, Soloway raked in more than $300,000 from his spam operations, according to his plea agreement. Soloway has avoide...

Back in 1994, when I founded Wordsmith.org on a Pi Day (March 14), I had no idea that one day we'd be celebrating its quadridecennial. Here's what the last 14 years look in numbers: So far we have sent out 3,782 unique words and 297 AWADmail compilations to 640,000 present subscribers in 200 countries, that is more than 1.6 billion pieces of email. Well, this week we're seeing all things 14. We'll feature words that are 14 letters long, and define each of them in 14 letters. acritochromacy (uh-KRIT-o-kro-muh-see) noun Color blindness. [From Greek akritos (undistinguishing) + chroma (color).] tintinnabulate (tin-ti-NAB-yuh-layt) verb intr. To ring; to tinkle. [From Latin tintinnabulum (bell), from tintinnare (to jingle).] tinctumutation (tinkt-myoo-TAY-shuhn) noun Change of colour. [From Latin tinctus (a dyeing) + mutation (changing).] Brobdingnagian (brob-ding-NAG-ee-uhn) adjective Of gigantic size. [After Brobdingnag, the fictional region where everything was enormous...

Craters come in all shapes and sizes, some more bizarre than others. Recent photos of Mercury have revealed two new categories of crater that scientists are puzzling over how to explain. When NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft flew by the planet Jan. 14 it snapped pictures of several craters with strange dark halos and one crater with a spectacularly shiny bottom. "The halos are really exceptional," said MESSENGER science team member Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "We've never seen anything like them on Mercury before and their formation is a mystery." Two of the craters are located in Mercury's giant Caloris Basin, a thousand-mile-wide depression formed billions of years ago when Mercury was struck by a comet or asteroid. The larger of the two is about 40 miles wide. Both craters have dark rims or "halos," and one is partially filled with an unknown shiny material. Chapman offered two possible explanations f...

The talent scout who turned down the Beatles has long been credited with committing the music industry's biggest gaffe. But Dick Rowe's billion-dollar boo-boo has been beaten to the top spot on Blender magazine's list of the "20 biggest record company screw-ups of all time" by the failure of record companies to capitalize on the Internet. The major labels took top dishonors for driving file-sharing service Napster out of business in 2001, instead of figuring out a way to make money from its tens of millions of users. The downloaders merely scattered to hundreds of other sites, and the industry has been in a tailspin ever since. "The labels' campaign to stop their music from being acquired for free across the Internet has been like trying to cork a hurricane -- upward of a billion files are swapped every month on peer-to-peer networks," Blender said in the report, which appears in its newly published April issue. Rowe came in at No. 2 for politely pas...

Discovery of Uranus Herschel's music led him to an interest in mathematics , and thence to astronomy . This interest grew stronger after 1773, and he built some telescopes and made the acquaintance of Nevil Maskelyne . He observed the Moon , measuring the heights of lunar mountains, and also worked on a catalog of double stars . The turning point in Herschel's life was 13 March 1781 , while he was living at 19 New King Street, Bath, (now the Herschel Museum of Astronomy ) when he made the first sighting of the planet Uranus . This made him famous and enabled him to turn to astronomy full-time. Naming the new planet Georgium Sidus, Latin for "George's Star", in honour of King George III also brought him favour (the name didn't stick - in France, where reference to the British king was to be avoided if possible, the planet was known as 'Herschel' until the name 'Uranus' was universally adopted). That same year, Herschel was awarded the Copley...

The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event was the large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time, approximately 65.5 million years ago (mya). It is associated with a geological signature, usually a thin band dated to that time and found in various parts of the world, known as the K–T boundary . The event marks the end of the Mesozoic Era, and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era. Non- avian dinosaur fossils are only found below the K–T boundary and became extinct immediately before or during the event. Mosasaurs , plesiosaurs , pterosaurs and many species of plants and invertebrates also became extinct. Mammalian and bird clades passed through the boundary with few extinctions, and radiation from those Maastrichtian clades occurred well past the boundary. Many scientists theorize that the K-T extinctions were caused by one or more catastrophic events such as massive asteroid impacts or increased volcanic activity . Several im...

...at the blog! I cna't keep my eyes open. Time for bed!

I downloaded some wonderful images from my camera, some of the just-past-full moon, right after the eclipse (the next day). I am always fascinated and besotted by the full moon. It's amazing. If you look closely at it, the lower left hand portion is not really round. The moon is only full for a moment and then begins to wane. People never realise that. Tell me that this isn't the most beautiful face in the world! This dog loves attention and we love to give it to him. You just can't help it! We had a lot of rain over the weekend and as usual, Wayne was underwater in the lower quarters. We went to Costco on Sunday and this is the sight. Even though the lines are bright and clear, they are under at least eight inches of water. It's quite amazing.

My mother had a grand mal siezure last night and Ray called 9-1-1. The neurologist had told him not to bother taking her to the hospital, but I have to say that sounds like bad advice to me. She usually has small, localised seizures that last a short time (maybe 30 seconds) and this time, according to Ray, she had a grand mal seizure, with the whole nine yards - all kinds of muscle spasms and long-lasting. He said seven to ten minutes, but I have no way of knowing how true that is... time is a funny thing when someone you love is going through that. But I do believe that it was more severe than normal. Also, she does not have siezures that often. This was odd in all ways. So I met them at Chilton Hospital and went to Fast Track 8 on the four-hour plan. How that is fast track I just don't know. They were hopping there - there were calls coming in all the time. I saw several different EMS teams. Her nurse, Tameca, was very sweet. She's tall and pretty and showed Ray where Ma'...

Every time I try to login to Blogger, my laptop goes completely crazy! It opens a million window, redirects without success and puts me through all sorts of torture to get to my dashboard. It is becoming too annoying to log on. I did log in at work a couple of days ago to post something about astronomy and it worked just fine. It has to be with my laptop. I wonder if it is something I unwittingly downloaded or if Facebook did something or what. I can't honestly tell you how I managed to log in this time. But any attempt to get something through to Blogger has been unsuccessful as well. It is very annoying. Hopefully I can get this working soon.

I've been watching so many M*A*S*H episodes lately, I should really know what they are writing about: The Korean War was an escalation of border clashes between two rival Korean regimes, each of which was supported by external powers, with each trying to topple the other through political and guerilla tactics. In a very narrow sense, some may refer to it as a civil war , though many other factors were at play. After failing to strengthen their cause in the free elections held in South Korea during May 1950 and the refusal of South Korea to hold new elections per North Korean demands, the communist North Korean Army moved south on June 25 , 1950 to attempt to reunite the Korean peninsula, which had been formally divided since 1948. The conflict was then expanded by the United States and the Soviet Union 's involvement as part of the larger Cold War . The main hostilities were during the period from June 25 , 1950 until the armistice (ceasefire agreement) was signed on July ...

The Saturnian moon Rhea may have a tenuous ring system consisting of three narrow, relatively dense bands within a particulate disk. This would be the first discovery of rings around a moon . The discovery was announced in the journal Science on March 6 , 2008 . In November of 2005 the Cassini orbiter found that Saturn's magnetosphere is depleted of energetic electrons near Rhea. According to the discovery team, the pattern of depletion is best explained by assuming the electrons are absorbed by solid material in the form of an equatorial disk, which contains within it several denser rings or arcs, of particles perhaps several decimeters to approximately a meter in diameter. Voyager 1 observed a broad depletion of energetic electrons trapped in Saturn's magnetic field downstream from Rhea in 1980. These measurements, which were never explained, were made at a greater distance than the Cassini data. On November 26 , 2005 , Cassini made the one targeted Rhea flyby of its p...

I think it has finally stopped, but it has been raining all day, and not just raining and drizzling. In fact, there has been no drizzling... either hard rain... or torrential downpours! If it was as mild as drizzling, I've missed it. I suspect at least three inches of rain fell between 1500 yesterday and around 1530 today! It's still grey and crappy here. I know that there is a possibility of snow but not enough to matter. It is very March here. I like the change of seasons, but I'm not crazy about this depressing weather. It's grey, dark, wet, chilly. Not exactly outdoors weather. I want to be outside again. I've been inside for what feels like ages. I want to drive home from work with the sunroof and windows open. I love that feeling! So any time the weather is ready to change, I'm ready for it!

Have you ever asked yourself "If I can postpone something why can't I prepone it?" Well, you definitely can. It's just that sometimes we are not aware of the word. Prepone is an everyday word in India, where meetings, elections, weddings, movie releases, exams, court cases, and more are preponed all the time: http://google.com/news?q=prepone%7Cpreponed%7Cprepones%7Cpreponing This week's collection features five words that are lesser-known counterparts of more common words. prepone (pree-PON) verb tr. To reschedule an event to an earlier time. [Modeled after the word postpone, from Latin pre- (before) + ponere (to put).] nocebo (no-SEE-bo) noun A substance producing harmful effects in someone because it is believed to be harmful, but which in reality is harmless. [From Latin nocebo (I will harm), from nocere (to harm). Modeled after placebo (I will please).] dystopia (dis-TO-pee-uh) noun An imaginary place where everything is very bad, as from oppression, disease,...

...we get blown out to a call. At 2353, seven minutes before my shift ends. Totally unfair. I'm off to bed now (at 0130 - groan!).

I have 53 minutes left and counting down. We had two calls at the same location, the first for someone feeling sick. I turned to Luis and said, "Another stimulating call." He had a chuckle out of that. I went off to join the crew and head off to a sick patient. One thing you neve want to hear is a patient say, "I'm going to die." There are a lot of things that elicit scorn and upraised eyebrows on EMTs; this is not one of them. Few patients actually state that they are going to die to be overdramatic; when a patient states that, we take it very seriously. We have had patients who came up with perfect stats and stated that. They made the trip to the hospital and then code in the ER, dead nearly immediately. Someone told me about a man whose wife called and said that he "didn't look right". They checked his vitals, all normal. He was laughing and talking and joking the entire ride to the hospital and Bob could hear them in the back as he drove. As he...

Here's something interesting I was lead to on a fellow blogger's site (thanks, Mary!): Rhea, at Word Tangle posted a challenge that she had gotten from another blogger, who got it from another blogger... you know how it goes. It's a 'Six-word memoir' based on the idea that Hemingway was once challenged to tell a story this way. His apparently read: 'For Sale: Baby shoes, never used.' So the basic rules are to write your own, post on your blog with or without pictures, link back to the person where you found it, and tag people by commenting them. I don't know if I'll tag anyone specifically.... so if you read this and want to do it, feel free!" Wow. How would I do that? Mary's right, when she wrote, "Those of us with lots to say can't keep it to 6 words ya know!!" This requires thinking. Lots of thinking. In the meantime, hopefully YOU will read this and come up with something you can say in six words that sums up you as a memi...

Just when you thought we were out of the Dark Ages: "-From the transcript- Interviewer: Lunar and solar eclipses, sunset and sunrise, and the changing of seasons -- how would you explain all these phenomena, if the Earth is not round, as you claim? Fadhel Al-Sa'd: The sun circles the Earth because it is smaller than the Earth, as is evident in Koranic verses. Have you ever seen how the sun moves? I have seen the sun moving. The sun makes one move every 24 hours. What I say is based on Koranic science. He bases his arguments on the kind of science that I reject categorically -- the modern science that they teach in schools. This science is a heretic innovation that has no confirmation in the Koran. No verse in the Koran indicates that the Earth is round or that it rotates. Anything that has no indication in the Koran is false." Ye gods. I thought the Geocentric theory was stomped all over with cleats on in the 16th century, but it seems I was mistaken. Hard to imagine that...

FEB 27 005647.8& 53.403N 0.332W 18 4.7 109 ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM. . One person injured and damage to buildings in the Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire areas. Felt (V) at Barnsley, Bedworth, Beeston and Stapleford, Bentley, Beverley, Bicester, Boston, Brigg, Brighouse, Chesterfield, Chorley, Cleethorpes, Doncaster, Droitwich, East Retford, Eaton Socon-Saint Neots, Failsworth, Grantham, Grimsby, Heywood, Hinckley, Ilkeston, Kirby in Ashfield, Leicester, Lincoln, Long Eaton, Loughborough, Mablethorpe and Sutton, Matlock, Melton Mowbray, Mold, Morley, Oakham, Rotherham, Sheffield, Skegness, Sleaford, Spalding-Pinchbeck, Whitefield and Worksop. Felt widely in the United Kingdom, north to Arbroath, southwest to Falmouth-Penrynm and east to Great Yarmouth. Felt (II) at Gent, Belgium. Also felt at Douglas, Isle of Man; at Antwerp and Brussels, Belgium; and at Aniche, France. Now, there is something that you don't see evey day. England is not exactly a hotbed of seismic activity!

Last year in November, the staff began to wane, just as the moon does when it's past the full stage. The numbers began to creep down, heading ever more slowly toward the low times that January brings. I look forward to this time, once we reach October. It's been a long, fruitful and rewarding season, but winter brings (for me) a respite from the insanity that grips us all during the season. Now, as we head toward the longer days and lingering sunrises and sunsets of spring, all is right with the world. As much as I loved the waning numbers and closing of departments and different things that dropped (such as the payroll), I have begun to look forward to seeing old friends and the fun bustle of outings and members happily heading to the links like Stratavarius to his beloved violin. I miss a lot of the people who are gone on layoff: Mike, who always has great stories from his days of old on the force and now from his son's deployments; Marc, who always has a smile and a good...