“Black and white pictures have shades of gray, no colors.” Daniel gave me a long look.
“Dad, are you obfuscating me?”
I almost choked on my malt.
My son Daniel turned twelve last week. We had my twelve-year-old self over for some cake. He was glad to come. February, 1982, was a cold month...
“You know your children better than I do. Please tell me in a million words or less about their passions and their strengths. How do you think their story will be written in the future?” Wow, I thought to myself, it’s been a long time since I had to write a theme for school.
I came up with 14,038,358,400 sliders required to reach the moon and back.
“You forgot the ones for lunch,” said Daniel.
Oops. I came up with 14,038,358,404 sliders.
I could hear the sharp intakes of breath from my companions across the room. Cichy was making this odd gurgling noise. It was either a sinus condition or a large parasitic worm was preparing to crawl up out of his throat and eat my face.
I don’t make many impulse buys, but my co-worker noticed the nosecone sticking out of the plastic bag as I put it in the trunk.
“What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll save it for my kids.”
The first job I got out of college was the position of “Assistant Manager” at Radio Shack. It sounds more glamorous than it actually was. We had two types of customers: the know-it-all customers and the know-nothing customers.
It occurred to me this was a case of too much information. We’ve trained telescopes on the moon for four hundred years. We’ve sent spacecraft past it. A dozen men have walked on it. When you can go to a museum and inspect a piece of the moon up close, what can you discover with a standard set of eyeballs from a quarter million miles away?
I’m a Unitarian Universalist. We have a set of seven principles that help us with questions of morality. The death penalty bumps up against four of them at least. Despite that, I do have a nagging suspicion there are certain acts that so violate societal norms that – yes, they should merit death. But I can’t say – specifically - what they are.
I figured this was the perfect time to set up Microsoft Excel to play “The Name Game”. It promises “there isn’t any name that you can’t rhyme”. This is done by selectively changing the first letter of the person’s name.
T-Rex smiled, showing rows of long white teeth. “I mean I have a good sense of humor. Tyrannosaurus Rexes were known for their sense of humor.”
While the original satellite burned up over the Pacific Ocean in 1970, a group of engineering students and scientists at Montana State University at Bozeman were inspired to build a new version of Explorer 1.
Now I hate to use the phrase “back in my day”. It makes me sound old and crotchety. But – dagnab it! – we stood out in the whipping wind and waited in line like a human snow fence for an unheated school bus
For every team that wins, another team has to lose. At some point in the season every team (with the possible exception of Detroit) did the math and figured they had a shot at something worthy of printing on a T-shirt. But a lot of these items would become sadly unnecessary come January.
I am somewhere between 1 minute and 6.8 x 10^15 minutes old; you’ll forgive me if I don’t answer with greater precision. My age is irrelevant. It’s inaccurate at best and breaks down laughably as you get technical about it. It’s a measure of how long I have been an individual entity, nothing more.
I knew there had to be a way to do this. I even – sort of – remembered doing it when I was around Daniel’s age. That was the problem; I hadn’t done it in the thirty years since. I couldn’t even think of what the concept was called to look it up. In the end, it took two hours, three adults plus a lucky find online to figure out the answer.
I have run into that issue, living in towns Microsoft Word didn’t consider real. If I accepted spell check, I currently reside in Bleeder, Illinois. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than my previous address in Hangover Park.
We looked over the directions and Daniel got to work… eventually (this was Winter Vacation after all). He finally came up with about a dozen articles, a few ads and even a letter to the editor saying the colonists should protest the tea tax by drinking more alcohol (signed “a tavern owner”).
It wasn’t like he was cutting in line. I was still a few steps away from the register. Still, there is a certain protocol that should be followed when you are in the lead position in line. The guy had gas, but decided to read through the newspapers in the wire rack next to the counter.
Since everything was coming out of the fridge anyway, I thought I would spend some time deciding what would go back in. I chose an arbitrary cut-off of January, 2009. Anything that had expired since President Obama took office would have to go.
General Motors has come up with something they hope will add to the visceral thrill of owning a sports car (other than dropping the $75,000 MSRP). Starting with the 2011 Corvette, potential owners can help build the car themselves.
In case you’ve been living on another planet (or perhaps one of its moons), Avatar is a big budget blockbuster chock full of spectacle that marketing folks at 20th Century Fox have been telling us will change the way we see movies forever more. Normally, that kind of hyperbole is – well, hyperbole. However, in this case I have to agree.
It’s easy to be critical of something. It’s more difficult to offer constructive criticism. After watching Avatar, I thought the plot and characters were bland and predictable. Here are some ideas I came up with while watching the movie. Mr. Cameron, if you’re reading, please don’t be angry.
the first transmissions were short wave and medium wave bands (AM radio). The good news is signals in these areas of the spectrum bounce off the ionosphere and allow listeners to tune in from around the world. The bad news is the signals never make it through the atmosphere, so alien listeners would be out of luck.
On the evening of October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched into low Earth orbit. Sputnik 1, like most technological products, is not quite the marvel it once was. Even at the time in 1957, it was designated by its creators as the “simple satellite”.
Grandma had her finger on the pulse of the town. While the names changed from letter to letter, the circumstances were always the same… and they weren’t good.
"How does it feel to be ten?" I asked.
"I'm not ten yet," he told me. "I was born at night, so I'm still nine until tonight."
I ended up inflating the balloon to Daniel's specifications. It ended up a little bit larger than I would have made it myself, but I thought it was manageable. I was wrestling with the end and trying to knot it up when I noticed Daniel was standing with his eyes closed and his hands across his ears.
“Listen to this,” she said. “This is history. You’re going to remember this for the rest of your life.” She was right.
“But it was Saturday when we went to Chicago,” said Daniel, yawning. I nodded. “And now it’s Sunday. It’s tomorrow.”
“Saturday and Sunday are the names of actual days,” I explained. “Today and tomorrow are descriptions.”
The price of refills was going up from 59 cents to 79 cents. That didn’t sound like much on a Pepsi by Pepsi basis, but it was an increase of almost 34 percent.
“How do you have five points?” I asked. “I thought each basket was worth just one point.” Daniel explained the shots he took while demonstrating counted because “they were educational”. I didn’t remember that rule at the outset, but let it slide.
there is still a small market for horse drawn carriages. I’ve seen them downtown. I’ve seen them at weddings. Where do the Amish get their wagons? I’d ask them directly, but there don’t seem to be too many Amish online.
The reality is it’s easy to get lazy and it’s easy to cheat. The weather in Belvidere averages “rotten” with occasional lows in the “crappy” and “downright nasty” range. It’s very easy to look out the window and come up with an excuse not to take a long walk in the park.
The TRS-80 version of ELIZA struggled to make conversation from whatever words could fit into 4,000 bytes of memory. It was like having a conversation with a Magic 8-Ball.
You can imagine my surprise when – come 2:00 in the morning – I had no thunderous blasts rattling the window, no debris raining down on the roof. In fact, I didn’t hear anything: no hooting, no whoo-ing, no profanity. Even the hair band music that thumps off the siding of the houses in the cul-de-sac behind us was silenced.
Out of the eleven people in line with me, seven of them were men. Yet we had no representation on the magazine rack. Maxim would be nice, but I understand it’s a “family store”.
While things I see have given me nightmares, it’s my sense of hearing that seems to dig deeper into my brain. Certain sounds instantly generate that primitive fear “fight/flight” response.
David loved to argue. He was passionate if not always correct. I learned a lot from arguing with my brother (mostly that it was pointless to do so).
Daniel’s nose is crinkling now. I wait for the stoplight by the bank to turn green for my lane, so I can head down the main street of Belvidere… ironically not called Main Street (that’s two blocks over).
I don’t know why they call them “sleepovers”; sleep is the last thing on anyone’s mind. I had many sleepovers when I was a kid. Meka had a few herself. Despite this, we agreed his friend could spend the night.
I pulled the plastic off a fortune cookie and handed it to him. Daniel extracted the ribbon of paper and read it intently. I heard a low “Yes!” from across the table.
“What does it say?” I asked. At first he wouldn’t tell me; he thought fortune cookies worked like wishes upon a star.
I said I wanted a “hippie wedding”; to be barefoot in a meadow, maybe take our vows by a stream. Meka was on the same wavelength. She thought it would be nice to get married with a few friends and close family in her parents’ backyard.
She passed on the canned fruit cocktail I had poured out. It was in heavy syrup (and when they say heavy, they mean heavy; it was essentially fruit flavored gravy). I guess she didn’t care much for the guava nectar either. It was imported from Mexico and the only kind of juice I could find in an actual tin can. Most beverages are in aluminum cans these days
I came out, a gentle rain was falling. People all around me were running past. I took my time however. All the groceries were bagged in plastic and I’m not made of sugar.
Jack Benny created one of the first “sitcom families”. It consisted of Jack and the regular cast along with a number of frequent minor characters, including a put-upon sales clerk that seemed to work at every store Benny visited.
After forty-four ounces of pop and a few minutes rest, I was ready to head home. Daniel took the lead again and led me down a “short cut” he remembered from his travels. I should have known better…
Daniel showed me cracks in the wood. There was a chip missing where the baby slide used to be attached. Water will get in and that means “freeze cycles”. This is a favorite mode of destruction from the show.
While the Trieste was technically traveling only seven miles, round trip conversation time was fourteen seconds; five times longer than the lag the Apollo astronauts had when they were on the moon.
Finally, I started getting an actual error: Invalid Subscript Reference. That wasn’t too helpful. The official definition of the error was a subscript reference was not found.
December 8, 2011
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