Tonight would have been a good night to win the Lotto. Alas, we did not.
April 2005 Archives
The afternoon & evening:
- Mowed as much of the back yard as our wimpy mower could handle before the battery gave out; we'll have to finish up tomorrow. We talk about buying a new mower - bigger, more powerful, self-propelled if we can get it - but for now we're still using the old one.
- Spent two hours at the library, trying to find various Feltys and Maurers in various censuses; didn't find any of them. (Clearly they were abducted by aliens.) The years-long remodeling project at the Urbana Free Library is finished: they're having the official dedication ceremonies tomorrow. (I told the librarians that I wouldn't be attending: I'm afraid of crowds.)
- Bought some groceries. The grocery store is in the middle of a big remodeling binge: everything is moving to a different aisle, and some departments (e.g., the bakery) are getting a complete makeover. I think the idea is to encourage impulse buying, as people find themselves wandering down the wrong aisle in search of what they really want.
- Had a quiet evening at home with Jennifer and Jacob. Jake & I watched some trashy television (Cops) and part of an old Fred Astaire movie.
And now it's time for Mr. Jacob's bedtime stories....
Before leaving for Lake of the Ozarks, I packed the chargers for all my electronic toys - iPod, Dell Axim, camera. But I never used them: batteries last longer than they used to, it seems.
When we came home - two days ago - I pulled the tangled mass of wires from the suitcase and dumped it on the floor next to the computer. This morning I finally worked up the initiative to plug everything back in. (This requires rather more crawling around on the floor than I generally feel like doing, hence the delay.) My toys are recharging as I type.
Now it's nearly noon, and there are chores to be done, but I am wasting time at the computer instead of doing something productive. What a slacker I am....
We've been on vacation this week: Monday night, Jacob went to stay with the grandparents in Normal; Tuesday, Jennifer & I went to the Lodge of Four Seasons (at the Lake of the Ozarks); Thursday night, we all came home.
Pictures were taken. Some of them may appear here, someday.
Another Sunday afternoon, another few hours in the library, looking in the census data for the twelve (or possibly thirteen) children of Jacob and Katherine (Ziegler) Maurer.
I filled in a few gaps in my data - mostly things I'd forgotten to write down the last time I was in the library - and noticed a few others:
There's no sign of John Maurer or Mary Ann (Maurer) Gillihan in the 1910 census. Lillie (Maurer) Felty is missing from the 1920 census. Harry Maurer is absent from the 1900 and 1930 censuses. It's possible that they were all missed by the enumerators, but it's also possible that I'm not looking in the right places.
Harry Maurer was 18 in 1900; perhaps he was drafted to fight in the Spanish-American War? (No sign of him in that database, either. But it's an interesting possibility.) Was he in jail? (He'd still be in the census.)
Where was Mary Ann (Maurer) Gillihan in 1910? She married Everett Gillihan in 1908; in 1920, they were living in Posey County, Indiana. (They moved back to White County for the 1930 census.) Perhaps they were in Indiana in 1910? Must investigate further...
Where was Lillie (Maurer) Felty in 1920? She and Isaac Newton Felty didn't separate until April 15, 1920 - three months after the 1920 census was taken. So, in theory at least, they should appear together. But I can't find either of them, nor any of their children (Wilburn, who died in the 1925 tornado; Eileen, Wilma and Sylvanus Jacob).
More library time will be required to sort all this out.
Several times throughout the day snowflakes were visible in the air.
Three days ago, the high was 81°; today, we get snow. Crazy weather.
Noticed that CityDesk has been publishing articles it's been told not to publish (recent obituaries, that sort of thing); decided to fix the problem by deleting the entire site from the server and re-uploading it.
But now CityDesk is having problems doing that. It trundles a bit, it uploads some files, then starts complaining about receiving errors from the ftp server. (Does it say which errors? No...)
So: I've deleted everything, again, and am re-uploading everything, again, this time with passive FTP enabled. (Good for firewalls, according to the documentation.)
If I have to, I can always do the upload manually. But I'd rather not.
(Update: passive FTP seems to have solved the upload problems.)
The old K-Mart at Prospect & Bloomington has been reborn as a Home Depot; the grand opening was this week, so this morning we went to check it out. (Along with everybody else in town, it seemed.)
Lots of home-improvement toys there, but I think I will wait a few weeks before going back: let the novelty wear off and the crowds thin out a bit.
Did a little genealogy this evening, assembling a table of information about the twelve children of Jacob Maurer. Putting ages & birth dates from various sources in tabular form makes the inconsistencies really stand out. And the points of agreement, too.
It's been a blustery night: current temperature 41°, down from 65° at 1:00pm; steady drizzle of rain since 4:00pm; wind from the northeast at 5mph with gusts up to 15mph. I'm glad to be indoors.
The lawn is growing at an alarming pace. By the time it's dry enough to mow, it will be too tall to mow. Perhaps we should rent some sheep.
The BBC reports:
A copy of the original Electronics magazine in which Moore's Law was first published has turned up under the floorboards of a Surrey engineer.
David Clark had kept copies of the magazine for years, despite pleas from his wife to throw them away.
Now the couple are celebrating after collecting the $10,000 reward which was offered on eBay by chip maker Intel.
Once upon a time, I had an enormous collection of old magazines. A few years ago, I recycled them all (since the libraries weren't interested).
It's just as well - they weren't the sort of magazines that people would offer $10,000 prizes for.
Cloudy, drizzly & chilly this morning. The cloud cover is almost low enough to qualify as fog.
Gave Jacob a blueberry Pop-Tart for breakfast this morning. This turned out to be a mistake, as he doesn't like blueberry Pop-Tarts. All the way to daycare, he did his best to eat only the crust.
By the time we got to daycare, he had blueberry goo everywhere.
MSNBC reports that Benedict XVI now has an email address.
Do you suppose spammers will flood his inbox with Viagra ads?
Sputnik recorded about 44/100 of an inch of rain between 5:00pm and 7:00pm. Sometime after 9:00pm, it started raining again: another tenth of an inch or so, with a little lightning & thunder for entertainment.
The power never did go out.
The power is flickering a bit. Nessus has big capacitors, but no UPS: time to shut down.
Thunder & lightning this evening, beginning a little after 5:00pm. Occasional cloudbursts, but overall not much in the way of rain.
Poor Jennifer brought home a bag of lawn chemicals: our home-maintenance project for the evening. Alas, the instructions say not to apply if there's rain in the forecast.
Maybe this weekend, then.
CNN reports:
A steady stream of the faithful and the curious, many carrying flowers and candles, have flocked to an expressway underpass for a view of a yellow and white stain on a concrete wall that some believe is an image of the Virgin Mary.
It's true - the Virgin Mary, having nothing better to do with her time, has elected to appear in the salt / mineral stains surrounding a crack in a retaining wall on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. Hundreds of idiots people, also having nothing better to do with their time, have gone to see it.
Last year, it was a grilled-cheese sandwich. This year, a water stain. What's next?
"Euww, what's wrong with that homeless guy over there?"
"Sure is a nasty case of ringworm he's got, isn't it?"
"Say, that patch on the back of his neck looks just like...the Virgin Mary!"
"It's a miracle!"
Update, May 6th:
CNN reports that some spud wrote BIG LIE across Our Lady of the Underpass. He's been arrested for vandalism, and IDOT has painted over the stain (since it had been defaced). CNN did not say what became of all the candles, icons & other offerings that had been left. Landfill, probably.
I suppose the Virgin Mary will have to find somewhere else now to manifest.
Update, May 11th:
Turns out there's a word for this phenomenon: pareidolia.
Added some ultrasound pictures to the (newly-renamed) Code Name Samuel page. Grandmas, start your web browsers.
(There was a moment of panic when we couldn't find the second picture, but it turned up safe & sound after a brief search: it was in Mr. Explorer, ever since we took it to Normal last Friday to show the grandparents. Oops.)
Habemus papam, etc.: Pope Benedict XVI was elected today.
The Office Update site said nessus needed some updates, so I clicked the Sure, go ahead button.
The update utility downloaded everything - zippy fast, thank you DSL - trundled a bit, then asked for Office 2000 disk 1. Um...it's in the closet, somewhere. Rummage rummage rummage...ah, found it. It trundled a bit more, then asked for the Outlook 2002 disk. Another trip to the closet, more rummaging, and the updater was at last placated.
I've heard of people who copy their Office CDs to the hard disk, and install from that. It would certainly simplify installing patches & updates....
Rok Hrastnik offers the following inadequately-proofread vision of Hell:
Just imagine a Darth Vader blog, where Vader "talks" about his life, his feelings, his views and so on, set in the Star Wars experience. This would be a unique opportunity for the consumers to deeply explore the character and get to know it in completely new ways, but remaining faitful to the "orinigal".
Hm...
Tuesday: Cleaned & rebuilt the light saber again this morning. Still coming up red. I want green, darn it. Or blue. Or even purple, like Mace Windu had. Anything but red.
Wednesday: The Emperor says he's too busy to help with my light saber. And he won't teach me how to shoot lightning bolts from my fingers: he says I'm not evil enough yet.
A bit hazy this morning, but still sunny & warming up quickly. Weatherdroids predict a high of 83° today.
People tell me there's been a lot of pollen in the air lately. That might explain the sniffles and congestion I've had since last week.
Spent some time at the library yesterday, tracing this connection:
- In 1893 and/or 1898, John W. Kingery married Caledonia D. Camp;
- In 1894, John & Caledonia had a daughter, Docia Kingery;
- In 1914, Docia married Walter O. Hines;
- In 1915, Walter & Docia had a daughter, Beulah;
- In 1978, Beulah married Robert S. Chastain;
- Before marrying Beulah, Robert was married briefly (1973 - 1978) to Dorothy Dean, my great-grandmother;
- Before marrying Robert, Dorothy was married to William Ralph Sturm, my great-grandfather;
- William Ralph Sturm's father, Jasper Sturm, had a sister named Sarah I. Sturm;
- In 1902, Sarah I. Sturm married John W. Kingery.
Got all that? There's going to be a quiz on Thursday.
Took Jake to the Gamma Phi Circus over in Bloomington last night. Grandma & Grandpa Miller were there, along with Amy, Scott, Natalie & Ryan.
This was our third time at the circus, and the first time Jake stayed awake until the end. The high point of the evening was...the $5 plastic light saber we bought him at intermission. Those people leaping about on the stadium floor - they were an occasional distraction from the light saber.
Numerous pictures were taken. They're still in the camera.
The iPod's song shuffler just popped up Promise from Alex Lifeson's solo album, Victor, released in...1996?
Has it really been nine years?
Around the nation, people are scrambling to finish their returns & get them postmarked by midnight.
Jennifer and I are not among them, having filed our returns (electronically) two months ago. The refunds (state and federal) have long since been spent and/or tucked away in the savings account.
So neener-neener, all you procrastinators.
Second ultrasound this morning. Again, the clinic was a bit disorganized, and we sat in the waiting room for most of an hour. But at least the technician was in the building this time.
Jake was there, fascinated by the machinery and the fuzzy pictures of his baby sister / brother.
The technician poked around for a long time, measuring various baby parts, then pushed the freeze-frame button and said, "There, see that? I think it's a boy." A boy? Really? "Well, maybe."
So maybe it's a boy, and maybe it isn't. Perhaps we will find out for certain during the next ultrasound, sometime in June. (Or not - this kid is quite the artful dodger.)
I believe I am catching a cold. In April?
Maybe I'm having a stupid day, but I can't see the point behind CodeSmith:
CodeSmith is a FREEWARE template-based code generator that can generate code for any ASCII-based language.
The tutorial example - a template that uses the .NET Schema Explorer library to generate a stored procedure to update a record in a database table - seems a little contrived. If you add or remove a column from the table, you'll be changing considerably more code than one little stored procedure. And templates won't help with most of it.
Maybe I have a prejudice against code generators.
Today's effort from the highly-paid professionals at MSNBC:
Pope's Tomb Opens
Not from the inside, I hope.
The genealogy society web site says:
Next Meeting: Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Joint Meeting of the CCGS and the Champaign Historical Society.
Pot Luck Meal: 5:30
Program: 7:00
The Influences of Local Geology on American Settlement in Champaign County
I don't know if they're expecting me or not. I never officially signed up or anything.
Dr. Richard C. Henry, Professor of Something-or-Other in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, has an idea: redesign the calendar so that the number of days in a year is a multiple of seven. March, June, September and December are thirty-one days long; the rest are thirty. The year starts on a Sunday, and any given date falls on the same day of the week every year. Instead of leap years, we have leap weeks - called Newtons - every five or six years.
Why does Dr. Henry want to tinker with something so fundamental as the calendar? He has to re-type his course syllabus every year, to take into account the changing dates, and he doesn't like it.
Perhaps Dr. Henry should invest in some syllabus-management software, and leave the calendar alone.
Rain overnight - nearly an inch, according to the NPR weather guy - and more rain this morning. (For once, I remembered to bring my umbrella.)
But the clouds are withdrawing to the east, so the sky should clear by lunchtime.
MSNBC reports that Andrea Dworkin died on Saturday.
I tried to read one of her books, long ago, but got bogged down in chapter 2 and never managed to finish it. Later I donated it to the library, with a bagful of other books I didn't want any more.
smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com seems to be having problems just now. It's visible, but not accepting connections, which means we can't send email. (We can receive it just fine.)
SBC apparently believes their network will never ever have problems: their web site lacks any kind of network-status page.
Hm...perhaps if I drop the connection & restart it...?
Remember acoustic couplers?
If you wanted your computer to connect to some other computer, you picked up your telephone, dialed the number yourself, then stuck the ear- and mouth-pieces of the telephone handset into two rubber cups on a box connected to your computer.
These were used because AT&T owned the entire telephone system, all the way up to the phone jack on the kitchen wall, and customers were forbidden to plug anything into that jack unless AT&T had specifically approved it.
Then came 1984 and the antitrust decision. Now customers can use whatever telephones they want.
Cellular phones used to be that way. I remember getting a hand-me-down phone from my mother (thanks, Mom!) and transferring my existing cellular service to it. Sometime in the last two or three years, that stopped working: now, if you want cellular service from Company X, you must buy one of Company X's telephones. If you already have a phone from Company Y that you'd like to use, too bad.
There's no technical reason for this. After all, there aren't that many cell-phone manufacturers. One Kyocera K9 is much the same as any other Kyocera K9, whether you bought it from Sprint, or Cingular, or Virgin Mobile. It's just gratuitous incompatibility, customer lock-in and corporate greed.
Last year, we got number portability: change carriers, keep your phone number. Perhaps one of these years we'll get telephone portability. (Again.)
Drove up to Arlington Heights yesterday, to visit the grandparents & have a little more birthday for Jacob. (Including a second Spider-Man birthday cake. Jake was thrilled.)
Foolishly, I left my camera at home, hence have no pictures. Oops.
Had a quiet day today. Jennifer went to see a movie with one of the quilter ladies, while Jake and I stayed home. We were out in the yard for most of the afternoon, playing with the giant croquet set (a present from yesterday) and in the sandbox. I took numerous pictures.
Very warm today: sputnik recorded a high of - insert brief pause as I download data from sputnik - 81° at 4:00pm. First high in the 80s this year, I believe.
My CD collection, grouped by year:
Interesting that 1981 is now a local minimum, instead of a peak.
(There seems to be a little confusion among the loyal readership about this chart. The X axis is the year when the album was released, not the year I acquired it.)
A fella named Matt Haughey had the clever idea of copying an aerial photograph from Google Maps to Flickr, then using the latter's image-annotation features to tell stories about the neighborhood where he grew up.
The name 'memory map' was coined by Logan Ingalls, and it's the latest meme burning across the internet. The Flickr memory map pool contains (at this moment) 200 entries.
I won't be participating, as I don't have a Flickr account & don't really want one. (Flickr's image-annotations are exactly the sort of thing I want for genealogy, but I don't want to put my data on somebody else's server unless I'm sure I can get it back again. I'm irrational that way.)
60° outside, and it feels chilly.
Supposedly, the average snowfall for Champaign in April is half an inch, so it could be worse.
Flew a kite in the back yard, with Jacob. This was rather difficult, given the variable winds, nearby trees and my general lack of skill in kite-flying. (It's been thirty years, after all.) One of these weekends, we're going to try kite-flying in the big field at Meadowbrook Park: should be much easier.
Looked up release dates for a few albums, to fill in some empty fields in my iTunes music library. I want to do a histogram: number of albums vs. year of release. The last time I did this - twenty years ago, more or less - it was a fairly smooth curve, with a primary peak at 1973 and a smaller one at 1981. What will it look like now?
And now it's time for Jacob to have a bath.
On the Gentle Giant album Octopus (the only Gentle Giant album I have, and one that never made it into iTunes) there's a song titled The Advent of Panurge. I always wondered what a "Panurge" might be.
It turns out Panurge is a character in Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais. (The liner notes for Octopus probably mention this....)
...and cloudy, and windy, and a bit drizzly (though not enough to actually get anything wet).
It's time to purge my archives. I have a four-drawer file cabinet in the closet, full of old bank statements, utility bills, credit card statements, etc., etc. Over the years I've thinned the collection a little, but now is the time to be ruthless.
But what should I keep? Some papers (tax returns, etc.) we're required by law to keep for a certain period; with others it's merely a good idea to keep a few years' worth on hand.
The big categories are:
- Bank statements
- Credit-card statements
- Tax papers (income tax returns, property taxes, etc.)
- Other bills (utilities, car insurance, etc.)
Current thoughts: tax papers, indefinitely; bank statements, five years; everything else, one year.
From the Carmi Times:
Jessie Fobar, 95, Carmi, died at 2:05 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, 2005 at Wabash Christian Retirement Center in Carmi.
Jessie Fobar was the wife of Chelsea E. Fobar, who (I believe) was the brother of Loy E. Fobar, who married Esther Maurer, who was the daughter of Jacob Maurer, Jr.
Funny how connected the world is, sometimes.
Radar shows a line of showers - nothing too severe, fortunately - coming in from the southwest.
My umbrella is safe & dry at home. Oops.
The Internet Anagram Server informs me that "Jacob William Rice" can be rearranged into "MICROBIAL JAW LICE".
Which is a pretty bizarre image, I must say.
MSNBC reports:
Americans will need passports to re-enter the United States from Canada, Mexico, Panama and Bermuda by 2008, part of a tightening of U.S. border controls in an era of terrorist threat, three administration officials said Tuesday.
I'm not in the habit of jetting off to Mexico, Panama and/or Bermuda, but I have been known to visit Canada now & then (specifically: 1985, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1994 and 1997).
Getting a passport now seems like a good idea anyway: before the government can roll out the RFID-equipped passports - i.e., the ones with the built-in chip that broadcasts your name, nationality & other information to anyone within fifty feet or so who has an RFID box.
No ultrasound today, alas. Seems the technician wasn't there. (Sick at home? Needed for an emergency at the hospital? Didn't feel like coming to work today? They never said.)
So we go back next week to try again.
Jacob was very disappointed. "I didn't get to see pictures of the baby," he said to his friends at the daycare.
What I wanted to do: download transactions directly from the bank, so I don't have to mess around with entering receipts any more. (Though I suppose I'd still have to set categories & such.)
What Money 2005 demanded I do first:
- Attach a .NET Passport to my Money data file - which means if my Passport ever expires, or is invalidated, or I lose internet access, or Microsoft loses interest in the Passport system (say, because everybody outside Microsoft fears and/or loathes it), all my financial data goes poof, no matter how diligent I've been about backups.
- Sign up for MSN Money Online - i.e., turn over all our personal financial information to Microsoft, and trust them not to give it away, sell it, or let anyone steal it. (Or use it to "personalize" Money 2005 with advertisements.)
The bank's web site will download transactions in some format that Money understands (OFX, I think), so I could use that and avoid Microsoft's driving-customers-to-the-web-portal business model. Perhaps I will.
(Memo to Microsoft: Money is not a web application. It is not a web portal. It is not a tool to drive users to MSN. It is a personal financial-management tool. Please stop trying to make it into something its users don't want it to be.)
Maybe I should just stick to entering transactions from receipts.
Looked up the White House on TerraServer just now, and discovered that the image has been altered: the roof of the White House has been obscured, along with the roofs of the two adjacent buildings.
I suppose the Secret Service and/or Homeland Security folks don't want bad guys to know what's up there.
CNN reports:
Vatican officials say it is likely Pope John Paul II will be buried in the grave once occupied by Pope John XXIII in the grotto beneath St. Peter's Basilica.
Once occupied? Apparently so:
In 2001, authorities exhumed John XXIII's body and entombed it on the basilica's main floor. His papacy was from 1958 until his death in 1963.
The idea of shuffling corpses around as if they were living-room furniture - "Let's have this one over there, please" - creeps me out.
The practice of packing the pious dead into random unoccupied corners of churches is even worse. How am I supposed to calm my soul & listen for the still, small voice of God when I'm worrying about who's under the floorboards?
The iTunes project is finished: with just a few exceptions, my entire CD collection has now been imported. iTunes reports 16 genres, 234 artists, 625 albums, 7115 songs, 27.28GB.
Only seven tracks were purchased from the iTunes Music Store; the rest were from my CDs. (So, yes, they're all quite legal. Thanks for asking!)
7108 songs in 93 days: that's just over 76 songs per day. No wonder Jennifer's been calling herself an iTunes widow these last few months.
(What were the exceptions? I skipped my five Procol Harum CDs, for some reason. I'll probably import them, one of these days. Also my copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which hasn't seen the inside of a CD player since the Reagan administration. And Lovenginear, a local band from the early 1990s. [Awful stuff.] Altogether about forty-five albums were skipped. I'm too lazy to produce a complete list. Sorry.)
It seems the Macromedia folks - should we call them Flashers? - having decided that Flash is a Serious Application Platform, not just a web-browser plug-in, figured that they needn't pay any attention to the browser's security settings.
Specifically, Flash allows sites to request storage space - by default, up to 100KB - on your computer. No prompts, no warning, it just hands over a chunk of disk space to any web site that asks for some. And it's persistent storage, still present & accessible the next time you visit the site. So all you people who thought you'd disabled cookies - too bad. Flash has its own independent cookie system.
Macromedia offers a previously-undocumented Settings Manager to disable this, but can they really be trusted?
NOAA reports 79° at 3:00pm. I haven't been outside since this morning, so I can't say whether they're right - but it seems unlikely.
(The NOAA's page for Champaign gives times in the Eastern time zone, instead of Central. Why it does this, given that no part of Illinois is in the Eastern time zone, is an enduring mystery.)
From CNN.com: "Soldier killed in Iraq to get Medal of Honor"
This makes it sound like robbers in Iraq killed a soldier in order to steal his Medal of Honor, which probably isn't what actually happened.
(MSNBC.com got it right: "Deceased Iraq vet to receive Medal of Honor".)
There's a nasty smell in the air this morning, rather like a barn full of livestock excrement. Maybe the farmers are putting down fertilizer?
Maybe people in town are dosing their lawns? It does smell a bit like the stuff we put down last year...
In H.R. 5822 (1992), Congress decided to designate the building at 125 South Grand Avenue, Pasadena, California as the Richard H. Chambers United States Court of Appeals Building.
I have no idea who Richard H. Chambers was. If Congress wants to name a building after him, that's fine with me. But the Library of Congress records four versions of H.R. 5822, as it worked its way peristaltically through the Congress. That seems excessive, for such a trivial action.
(Yes, I did just liken the U.S. Congress to a colon. Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart: their output is so similar.)
Clocks that changed by themselves:
- My alarm clock;
- The computer;
- The Dell X30;
- Two cell phones;
- The VCR.
Clocks that must be changed manually:
- Jake's bedroom clock;
- Jake's desk clock;
- Jennifer's alarm clock;
- Three telephones, one answering machine;
- Two digital cameras, one camcorder;
- Two cars;
- The weather station;
- The thermostat;
- The microwave oven clock;
- The stove clock;
- The stereo;
- The living room clock.
Every year, a few of these get missed, which means we don't have to change them back the following October.
(Also every year, I swear I'm going to switch a few of these to GMT, but I never do.)
The local newspaper has been sorely conflicted these last few days. They really want to plaster the local basketball team all over the front page, but this thing with the Pope keeps getting in the way.
The banner has become the boundary between the two stories: below, we get somber Pope news; above, we get they won again, let's all get drunk.
iTunes just finished importing disc 2 of Thing-Fish by Frank Zappa, which was the last remaining 192kbps album in my music library.
The conversion project is finished.
All that remains is to import (for the first time) the rest of my Zappa collection (eleven albums), and I'll be finished completely. Until I buy more CDs, I suppose.
"Blogger" is a stupid & ugly word, but MSNBC has come up with something even worse: "citizen journalist". They've even hired a few, to add local color to reportage on various stories.
(It's a clever phrase, really - at first, it sounds like "citizen soldier", which is a noble and respectable thing to be; but it carries less-flattering undertones: Amateur, it says. Not a real journalist. Just a pretender. Do the citizen journalists writing for MSNBC realize they're being mocked?)
MSNBC reports that the Pope has died. Requiescat in pace, Your Holiness.
Jacob had a birthday party this morning. Some friends from daycare came to the house, along with various grandparents, cousins, etc., etc.
There was much chaos. (There was also a Spider-Man ice cream cake, which was a big hit.) Pictures were taken.
When Papa's age was / will be various multiples of Jacob's age:
| 1000 | April 14, 2001 |
| 100 | August 17, 2001 |
| 10 | June 7, 2005 |
| 9 | December 15, 2005 |
| 8 | August 18, 2006 |
| 7 | July 11, 2007 |
| 6 | October 12, 2008 |
| 5 | August 30, 2010 |
| 4 | October 20, 2013 |
| 3 | January 29, 2020 |
| 2 | November 28, 2038 |
The medical bulletins from the Vatican leave me with the impression that His Holiness' labors and suffering will be over very soon - in hours, not days.
They emphasize his "serenity" as the end nears. I doubt that I would be so serene in his situation.
No practical jokes here, sorry. I lack the skill for such things.
Today he is four years old.
That's one thousand, four hundred and sixty-one days - which means he is exactly 0.09602 times as old as I am.
