Category: Life

Watching football the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten a heavy dose of this particular commercial:

Message: Chinese laptops make espionage easy.

Really? I guess Lenovo’s exciting ad agency doesn’t remember this:

The United States government is planning to spend roughly $13M USD on computers from Lenovo. The company, famous for buying up IBM’s PC manufacturing arm, is working on a deal with the US government to produce roughly 16,000 computers. Just recently, the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) has requested that Lenovo be probed for any concerns about possible spying, eavesdropping or worse.

The supposed problem presented by the USCC is that the 16,000 computers are being built by a Chinese-mainland company. The USCC argues that a foreign intelligence like that of the Communist Party of China (CPC) can use its power to get Lenovo to equip its machines with espionage devices. Lenovo has strongly declined that it is involved in any such activities.

We bought a box of the miniature cereal boxes as a treat for the boys. It’s like a hotel minibar for children, and it yields the same gluttonous results.

My beautiful wife, who was once the Health Minister of the Alliance of Free Blogs, was astonished. “That’s six hundred calories,” she said.

Well, yes. They are boy children, and they consume about two thirds of a box of the new and improved 12 ounce boxes of cereal each morning, so, yeah. Wait until they get about twelve and fourteen.

Good god, man, the United States is an imperialist nation.

You don’t see us measuring things in kilometers, do you?

So I was discussing homonyms and homophones with the lad today, and I started thinking about words that are both homophones and homonyms. That is, words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings for the same spellings.

Speaking to a six-year-old, an early example that arises is butt which has two meanings (to hit with the head, the backside) and has the same pronunciation as a word spelled differently (but).

So I’ve been kind of zoning out of conversations and whatnot over the last two days as I run through words in my head. I got row (roe). My beautiful wife contributed ball (bawl).

A bit of a word on the homonyms: I disqualify slang words or meanings that are obviously related, like dough (doe), where dough’s meaning for money is because it uses bread as a metaphor or tie (Thai) because the men’s neckwear is called that because you tie it. Although one could argue that the Twin Ion Engine acronym is a different meaning, but it’s a fictional thing and an acronym and not a proper noun, which is okay. You see, the rules are in flux.

Sorry for injecting that virus into your brain’s clock cycles.

I guess I’m on a diet since I bought thin-sliced bacon by mistake. Some percentage fewer calories than the thick-sliced bacon I normally buy.

Why, it’s almost like health food.

I see Roberta X.’s moon over Roseholme Cottage and raise her one moonset over the Jones place:

I didn’t have time to mount my camera on a tripod for the shot as I didn’t have much time between deciding to take a photograph, getting the camera, and getting the photo, so it really doesn’t capture it adequately.

On the other hand, add this to one of my accomplishments in the 1:15 for this morning. If you can call it an accomplishment.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. X.

Hey, readers of The Adventures of Roberta X., I have a novel available called John Donnelly’s Gold that’s exactly like I Work on a Starship, except it’s not in first person, the main characters don’t actually have a job, there are no starships involved, and it’s a comic heist novel where four laid off IT employees seek revenge on the CEO of the company that laid them off. So it’s exactly the same in that it’s self-published. Roberta X. herself said of the novel, “it, too is quite an adventure and one that will have you wondering how it all turns out until the very end.” Also, it’s the only place in the world where the names Brian J. Noggle and Larry Correia are mentioned together unless my nephew talks about his annual Christmas gift.

My most productive hour and fifteen minutes of the whole day comes between 6:15, the time the alarm rings and preparation for school begins, and 7:30, when I load the children up into the truck for school.

In that magical period, I get the following done:

• Make breakfast for the children (really, it’s only pouring cereal and milk, but).
• Make lunch for the children (sandwiches, fruit, snack in a sack).
• Empty the dishwasher (if dishes are clean).
• Load dishwasher (if it’s empty and there are dishes to load).
• Make bed; sometimes, I’ll change the linens completely.
• Shave and dress.
• Start a load of laundry.
• Fold a load or two of laundry if available.
• Clean up children’s breakfast dishes.
• Get children dressed, enforce tooth brushing, get their assorted gear sorted and loaded.
• Brush teeth.
• Sometimes check a blog or two.

That’s a pretty quick moving hour and fifteen minutes, but it’s full of productive tasks, aside from the check a blog or two bit.

Yesterday, my next hour included:

• Go to the supermarket.
• Change linens on children’s beds.
• Make breakfast.
• Eat breakfast.
• Tap out a couple of blog posts.

Somehow, the day’s list of accomplishments runs downhill from there. I mean, I did some work and I checked some blogs, but sitting at my desks leads to a uniform experience where time just passes and only a few bullet points get done, not all of them salutatory (you checked Instapundit again? You played Civilization again?)

If I had the same focus as I have that, well, not first hour of the day–I’m often awake for an hour before the alarm rings, an hour unfocused because I’m “waking up,” I would be a millionaire. Or I would feel much more content with what I do every day. But.

The reason I’m so efficient in that hour is that I do it six times a week (including Sunday, where “church” replaces “school”), so I’m very efficient at it, having drilled in it for a couple of years now. The remainder of the day is much more fluid and changing, so I can’t have developed that efficiency and productivity that yield the (same daily) bullet points of accomplishment in them.

I guess I need to make a daily set of bullet points of accomplishment each day beyond those seventy-five minutes and then to work earnestly to ensure that they’re meaningful and that I recognize x hours of paying work, a single bullet point or a couple of lines on a time sheet, are valuable, too. Also, I should get some things done away from the computer to break it up and have, if not dramatic impact, at least some visible sign that I did something besides checking LinkedIn or Twitter.

Well, there’s the alarm. Time to get something done.

We’ve reached a point in our lives where we’re actually decorating for Christmas. For a while, we’ve put up a Christmas tree, since we had a family. But we’ve gone past that now and into putting little Christmasy tchotchkes around the house. Well, the living rooms. We’ve not hit that middle-of-life suburban point where we swap out artwork on the walls–unlike a certain aunt of mine–but we do put up mementos. Mostly it comes from me, of course, with my personal-relicophilia. If my mother put it up on the shelf once when I was young, it represents a Christmas tradition going back throughout the centuries. Now that the number of people with whom I’ve shared actual Christmas traditions from my youth dwindles, I need these silly little memory triggers to make sure I remain increasingly depressed during the Christmas holidays. Now, what was I saying before I was rummaging through the junk drawer for single-edged razor blades?

Ah, yes.

So now that we’re doing the little knick-knackery for Christmas, we spread them out on hearths, on bookshelves, on the piano, and whatnot. We disperse them so that when you look, you might catch a little bit of the spirit or whatnot. However, at the end of the holiday season, when we take down the decorations in early January, we don’t always get all of the bric-a-brac back in the boxes. For a week or two, we’ll find another something here or there. A sleigh. A pine cone. A stuffed Christmas tree. Something that had faded into the background over the course of the month that our eyes skipped right over it when it was time to de-Christmastiate.

If we found it in a couple of weeks, we’d still have the wherewithal to pull the boxes out of the most remote storage location in the house, which we always reserve for Christmas gear (although at Nogglestead, it’s a small closet beneath the steps, where we have to bend and twist to get the things out, but it’s not as bad as the attic at Old Trees). But after enough time has elapsed, we sort of let it go and either tuck the tchotchke into a drawer or just let it hang out for the year.

This year’s Straggler of the Year is a little elf-bearing-gifts on the clock:

My Nana gave me that a couple years ago, sometime after my first son was born. I think it came with a little boy doll that she gave us to decorate his room. For a while, it did, but after we left Old Trees for Nogglestead, the doll moved to the basement and the little elf rightfully became a Christmas decoration. Well, it would have, if we put it away after Christmas.

But atop the clock, it’s outside the normal range of the eye as it travels through the room. I sort of hid it a bit behind the clock’s facade for much of the year, but now that it’s appropriate again, he’s stepped out.

Hopefully, one of you will remind me sometime in January to pack him away this year. Undoubtedly, though, next year we will have a different winner of this annual award.

Good god, man! Have we unlearned so much as to unleash this upon our young again?

Purple pants? Must we repeat everything of the 1970s again?

Allow me to dictate a rule of fashion to you people who aspire to be something like men, except with sore thumbs not from hitting them with a hammer while trying to be something like a man (a real man has evolved to hitting the actual nail) but from playing video games all day (although some real gamers would say they’ve evolved to have strong thumb muscles that no longer get sore, with which I would quibble over the word evolve). At any rate, the rule is:

No purple pants unless you are a clown.

Which is a bit of a tautology. If you’re wearing purple pants, you are a de facto clown. And not a scary, nightmare-fodder clown. A clown like Shakespeare would have wrote about. A buffoon from, well, not the country in the modern case, but rather from some enclave in the city where they have Brooks Brothers stores and where women smile warmly and not in mockery when walking next to someone wearing purple pants. Although I am not 100% sure that the female model in this ad is not laughing at the model in the purple pants.

I’ll not be shopping there, thank you. I’m holding out hope that George Zimmmer hasn’t loaded Men’s Wearhouse with these things so I don’t have to deal with them in the event that I buy a good suit in the near future. I’d hate to have to (and by hate to I mean “would really love to but would be conflicted by the expense of”) go to London to get a real bespoke suit.

So my six-year-old asked me about cannibalism the other day. I’m not sure how it came up; maybe he was talking to Marc or something. More likely, he’d heard something about it at school, since he got the idea that some people practiced it. “What state do they eat their enemies?” he asked.

“They don’t do that in any state; it’s a bad thing, and there are better things to eat then people.” That’s standard Daddy lectures about natural history and whatnot. Then the Brian J. lectures about history kicked in, and the misinformation commenced.

“Did you know that cannibalism and Canada share the same root word?” I asked.

I don’t know why I do that to the poor lad; he trusts me, well, at least as far as possible, and now he’s got the notion that Canadians are cannibals.

On the other hand, there’s not a lot of ways that could go wrong. Certainly, we’ve never had Patch, my Canadian co-pilot from my testing days, over for an actual meal and probably won’t any time soon, so the boy won’t worry about what’s in the pasta’s meat sauce.

And, on the other hand, it could actually benefit the boy if, after the disintegration of civilization, the Manitoban tribe comes raiding out of the frozen steppes. He and his family will fight to the last to avoid that fate worse than mere death.

“Hey, Dad,” my six-year-old son said as I passed by his doorway this weekend. “You know that war we had with the British?”

“We have had two, not counting miscellaneous guerrilla skirmishing amongst them,” I said.

“The one with the fort?” He gestured at something atop his cabinet, formerly known as his changing table. “With the rockets.”

I stepped into the room and looked at what he had created.

Continue reading “Not 100% Accurate” →

Going into a gun store today is gonna be like going into a Walmart on the first of the month.

Except, you know, government forms instead of government money.

UPDATE: Apparently, Tam K. gets her scrying apparatus at the same place I do.

“Well, it’s time to go weed the pickup.”

Well, maybe you also have to be a little lazy to need to say it, too. Maybe you don’t even have to live in the country.

So I was at Walmart this morning, checking out the clearance rack for cheap shirts (because you can’t be a cut-rate Cary Grant if you’re paying a full ten dollars for a dress shirt at Walmart). As I got back into my truck with my purchases, I saw an older man, an older man not bent but hunched a bit walking slowly, not with a shuffle but with the short steps of age, eating a candy bar, and I smiled.

Because it’s a candy bar, and it’s a simple treat in the world where young, healthy (and slightly older, healthier) zealots want to purge everyone’s diets of sugars, gluten, and processed-whatever-this-week, and this man has bought a candy bar and he couldn’t wait until he got to his car or his home to enjoy it. Like a kid, he opened it right up and enjoyed a little bit of calorie-laden joy at 8:30 in the morning.

You know what? He’s probably earned seventy-five cents worth of nougat in his life. And he’s not afraid to take it, and he’s not afraid of anyone seeing him take a bit of a preemptory pleasure before the rest of his day begins.

And that made me smile.

(Yes, I know, it’s entirely possible that his one sack was full of bottles of whiskey and candy bars he bought with government assistance money. But come on, I’m trying to break my usual gloominess with a focus on life’s little pleasures, and just for once I’d like to think someone in the year 4bo earned it.)

So Paladins was right in my wheelhouse as a fantasy enthusiast, at least as much fantasy enthusiasts as I am. When I played Dungeons and Dragons (so long ago that I spell out the and now), I often played characters who were of the class Paladin. As you might know, gentle reader, the paladin is a holy warrior, a Crusader of sorts fighting for a mythical god or church.

To most kids who play D&D, the Paladin is something like a televangelist with a sword. Unfortunately, a lot of kids who play role-playing games have a sort of slanted view of church-attending folk, so they don’t see a lot of depth in characterization within them. Paladins are always stuffy, self-righteous, and two-dimensional buffoons played for laughs as NPCs.

Which is sad. As I mentioned, I often played paladin characters as people, with quirks, foibles, and self-doubt.

• At GenCon one year, as part of this huge open game that took over one of the skywalks, I played a paladin of Tyr, the Forgotten Realms god of justice. This fellow was risk-averse to put it mildly, borderline cowardly in most situations where he could think about the risks involved in combat, but had the right instincts. So while he might shrink from a fight if he thought about it, but if confronted with danger without the chance of overthinking it, he would defend his faith and friends instinctively.
• In another one-off, I rolled up a paladin for a game and picked from the Forgotten Realms book the god of mornings and beginnings. This fellow carried a halberd, but he used it mostly as a walking stick as he jaunted along. Genial and genuinely optimistic, he didn’t have too much chance to do much before the fellows hosting the game ended the session so they could toss my friends and I to smoke some dope. I later learned my friends returned for another session without me–I had something of a reputation as a misanthropic ass even then–but that one session did lead to the halberd on my office wall as it was December, and when one of my guys asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said “A halberd.” So it was. But I was talking about paladins.
• Another character I played was not directly a paladin, since it was in the Dangerous Journeys system. Caryn was the third son of minor nobility in England, a ne’er-do-well brawler who hung out with the wrong people in the bars and whatnot until his older brother was killed Crusading. So Caryn, who did not like his brother, reluctantly takes his brother’s armor and goes off, indecisively, to avenge him with no clear plan in mind and no zeal to do it. He’s not a real paladin, just a Crusader, but he’s adopted the blandishments of churchliness and holier-than-thou behavior. Akin to the stereotype, but he doesn’t believe it, really. It wouldn’t have worked in D&D because the special abilities for the class come from belief, but in the context of Dangerous Journeys it was possible. Given the nature of the module we were on, I’d mapped out a character arc for Caryn to improve, become a better person, and maybe even a believer, but the hosts of this group, with which I gamed off and on for a couple years, (::cough, cough::) didn’t like me and forgot the character’s back story (he’s just a paladin, hey).

So, as I said, there’s a lot of room in the paladin class for interesting characters, but in most cases I’ve seen, that’s marginalized, probably because the normal D&D gamer doesn’t know a lot of healthy, church-going folk and only have their resentments and stereotypes of the same to draw from.

Dude, I just got called out by a presidential candidate. Who isn’t a Libertarian; Libertarians presidential candidates get involved in bar brawls all the time. But Republicans?

Ladies and gentlemen, John and Charles (I’m not saying that John is a lady nor Charles is a gentleman), I present to you the knob of the door leading from my dining room to the garage. I have not seen this doorknob since I moved into Nogglestead, three years and four days ago:

Look how shiny it is, unlike the other doorknobs in the house that have been grabbed by a variety of sweaty father mitts and, more importantly, pasta-encased little child mitts.

That’s why it’s so clean and shiny, you see; for the last three years, it’s been protected by a child proofing mechanism, one of those knob covers that spins freely unless you squeeze the tabs on the sides to make contact with the underlying knob.

But my children are four and six now, and we spent all summer with sliding doors open, and they know to operate those and never showed a tendency to wander out on their own. Additionally, we removed the protection from the knob on the front door earlier this year, as it not only flummoxed our children but also our house guests. The children haven’t shown a tendency to go get the newspaper or go out.

So one aesthetically pleasing step later, and our door knobs are free. But it’s a bit sad to an old sentimentalist like me. Because I recognize that any de-childproofing steps measure a portion of the past, of my life with babies and toddlers, is moving into the past and lost but for my memories. Although the times haven’t always been joyful or easy, it’s only the joy I’ll remember and miss.

Not enough to keep a ceremonial childproofing door knob cover as a personal relic, though.

Also, I give the shine on that door knob eight days, maximum.