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After a wonderful few days of unseasonably warm weather, the temps dropped last night and remain in the 30’s today. Add a 20-knot wind and you have an unpleasant experience. I think I’ll head to Cozumel for a week!

… especially when you try it without a plane. Yesterday, when getting ready to go fly, I flew. Let me explain.

Never Again, and again, and again.

Attention, all who knew him: Miriam is putting together a keepsake memorial memento book, to contain all of the anecdotes from Bil’s memorial page on this site, along with other surprise bonus material. If you wish to contribute, you need to email your stuff to her right away.

“Dr. McCoullough, for the last time I am telling you: you cannot branch transfer to the Canadian Air Force.”

…a year after the genocide in Rwanda I went there. The story had been bothering me, which is to say that in April of 1994 a program of massacres began in Rwanda that ended up claiming the lives of 800,000 in a hundred days. People were murdered at a rate that exceeded by three times the speed the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. It happened in our time, in front of our noses, somewhat before our cameras. And it vanished very quickly. As soon as the blood was dry the story disappeared from the newspapers. Nobody really had explained it. When one read the papers it didn’t seem to me to make much sense. It was described as anarchy and chaos, which struck me as implausible simply because in order to kill at that clip requires organization, it requires method, it requires mobilization. It requires the opposite of anarchy and chaos. Mass destruction is not arbitrary, it doesn’t just come about willy-nilly. Those things interested me. So in other words, I felt the story was being told wrong, and casually and cavalierly, and that in some basic way a great calamity had happened which we were quite content to be ignorant of.

Remember the guy who always complained about his commute? He’s back.

Brenda & I drove down to Princeton, NJ today to see the film Hotel Rwanda. We had to drive thirty miles to get to a theater that was showing this movie, as the eighty screens within the ten mile radius of our home were busy with the rest of the shit that is out there.

At the airport today:

Recently, my friend Darryl admitted that his dog had a page on Dogster.com, and after the intitial shock of realizing that my friend’s dog had a website, I immediately went to google to check for the existence of a feline equivalent. Naturally, there was one. I immediately vowed to add Ms. Emma The Wonder Cat to the world of Catster, and tonight I finally got around to setting that up.

To me, the beach is a place to be avoided at all costs. From an early age, I can remember the beach as a place where a guy was expected to remove his shirt and walk around in public. As if that weren’t bad enough, you were then expected to haul large amounts of crap across vast expanses of hot sand, set up camp (camping being another thing I just don’t do well) and proceed to bake in the sun, or try to read a book while being subjected to the myriad distractions of screaming babies, overweight people slathering themselves with lotion, and people playing football on sand, when everyone knows you’re supposed to play football on a gridiron. Perhaps you might relieve the boredom by attempting to “enjoy the water”; this entails wading—shirtless, again—into the ocean, stepping on horrifyingly spiny deep sea creatures, and ill-fated attempts at surfing with a blow-up raft. You end the day celebrating your love of the beach with a spirited and self-conscious shower in an outdoor stall by the garage, blasting sand out of your ass and ears. You spend the rest of the evening nursing a raspy throat, owing to the gallon or so of salt water you swallowed while out enjoying the water.

For three years, this Powerbook has been my daily companion. I bought it in January 2002, with the hope that OS X’s UNIX underbelly combined with OS X’s typical Apple desktop friendliness would finally help me get over initial hurdles of learning Radiance. I was not disappointed.

Well, my friend Jeff uploaded his pictures from the 2004 Karaoke Madness Event I recently wrote about. While you can go directly there and snag yourself a fine snap of me blowing out my vocal cords, I recommend you also spend some time browsing Jeff’s other fine galleries. He’s very talented.

Karaoke! The word looks—to this english speaker—exactly like the scene that inevitably plays out every time I engage in the activity. It’s chaotic, noisy and, above all, fun.

You wake up on funeral day a jumble of nerves, hoping you got all your stuff laid out properly ahead of time. Laid out; now that’s funny!

Bil (yes, with one l) was a roommate of mine in college. He loved Stevie Nicks. He was a professional clown, with the big shoes, the red ball nose, the striped shirt, the magic tricks and balloon animals. He’d come home on Saturday afternoons, exhausted from yet another gig trying to get six year-olds to pay attention to him for a few hours, and slump into one of the many ratty couches we had arrayed around the living room/dance floor. He’d fling his feet up on the coffee table and let out a big sigh, but it was impossible to feel empathetic, because his feet were two feet long, got wider at the toes, and were bright red. He’d leave the clown shoes on, you see.

OK, what’s the deal here. This is not a drill. All of a sudden, my wireless connection at home, like, sucks. Blazing download speeds of 100 Kbps have been witnessed. Huh?

Just in case you were wondering if those massive Chrysler 300s can fit on a New York City sidewalk: they can, but there is little room left over for pedestrians. Very little.

Well, that’s the end of that. After enjoying two and a half years of Discovery Wings Channel—all aviation/aerospace, all the time—the Discovery Channel has called it quits. Instead of providing more general aviation coverage to balance the seemingly continuous wartime/warplane segments, they are going all bombs, all the time.

The vermin who seized power in 2000 proclaimed that the adults were now in charge. In fact, they are a gang of petulant, ill disciplined children. They have learned, however, to play on the fears of a timid country, on its desire for protection by a daddy figure, on its old preference for pretence over reality, on its reluctance to think for itself.