Last night's dream included... Hillary Clinton campaigning door-to-door for the upcoming presidential election. I was at the home of my childhood, mowing the lawn (though I apparently owned the house now, and my parents had moved on), and Hilary Clinton just walks right up, nonchalant, with no entourage and no paparazzi. Just a quiet day in the suburbs where she's getting the word out that she's running for office and would like me to vote for her.
Wacky.
In the Land of the Boring and the Waiting (for other people's things to happen) comes the ponderable: Hearing. We learned early on as kids how people (at least with more or less normal hearing) determine where a sound is coming from... that one's brain, through a high-resolution internal timer can tell that the sound arrived at one ear before it arrived at the other, and thus determine whether it is to the left or right of the direction the head is pointed. It's not too much of a stretch to also say that distance can be inferred by the difference in strength of the sound. i.e. If the sound is far away, the difference in distance between your ears is small, so they should hear it the same. But if it's close, the distance between your ears is more significant and the softening of the sound over that distance is noticeable.
But what about front to back and up and down? In this model, ears are point receivers and there's only two of them. There's a plane of symmetry, and since we can't rotate the fleshy flap of our outer ear (like a deer) a sound in front should sound roughly the same as the sound in back. So how do we know? Surely you can tell when a sound is in front or back, right? So how do we do it? Any audiologists out there want to shed some light on the matter?
And then there was this... Windows apparently eating itself.
Ah, the circle of life.
Having become tired of my chronic low-grade packrat-itis, I finally made good (or, at least better) on my intention from years ago. My intention to use the Automatic Document Feeder on the scanner I got and scan in all that paper that I've been hanging on to for so long, but thought would have some use (i.e. in the event of a banking collapse, IRS audit, survey of electricity prices from place to place, etc. etc.) Think of it as the Paperwork Reduction Act of 2007.
Yes, they were silly reasons to not throw out all that crap, but at least now I have a clear conscience about it. Digitizing years of stuff, and then shredding like a madman. I'm not sorting or anything, just jam it all in there and burn to DVD. Think of it as a digital shoebox. Along the way I must have tripped the thermal overload on the shredder a dozen times while shredding so much that it filled up 6 packed paper grocery bags with crosscut shredded paper. But now it's mostly gone, and when new stuff comes in, it can go straight to the digital shredfest.
But as I made the keep/scan/shred decisions for a lot of things, it was like a walk down memory lane. And along the way, what did I find? The time, she's a-movin'. The letter to the Chicago Police from after my car was broken into ... that was 2001? And I lived here at this address? I haven't lived here in *this* apartment 6 years, have I? Sheesh. And exactly what was I saving all those blank checkbook deposit slips for? Maybe 'til I had a shredder to shred them with. Those long trips to Ireland, my lost passport, my transcript from the Uni... they seemed only yesterday, but it was a long, long, time ago (relatively).
It ain't exactly over - the tough spots that I've been avoiding are still looming: Car crap and medical/health insurance. Stuff that is all sorts of shapes, so a pain to scan, but don't want to throw it all out at once because there might be some weird billing or history thing that could crop up. Besides, having the dossier on my self or car would be useful later on, methinks. Right? (or is that just the kind of thinking that gets me file drawers full of crap?)
The other benefit from the "clean bench" policy? I'm finally doing something about the dustables. That bunch of stuff that I thought would be appropriate to rescue from Grandma's house after she died, but that has only sat on a shelf collecting dust, annoying me with it's dust collection ability. Sure, I need to remember where "my people" are from and the ornaments of culture, but it doesn't mean that I need to keep boiled egg cups and uselessly small wine glasses to be able to do it.
What was I waiting for all that time? And the other waiting? What's with that? ahh... but that's probably better suited to another time and place.
So it's late, and a micro-nap earlier this evening seems to have put me into a state of sleeplessness. So I'm up, and tossing and turning, and wondering about that gouge in the space shuttle tiles.
They say it goes all the way through the outer heat shield tile. I'm thinking that's a bad thing. (...but I'm no rocket scientist. [ba-dum])
Gets me wondering about the odds these days. There were 5 shuttles at one time. Two of them became spectacular fireballs that the crews didn't survive. Now about those other 3... I'm wondering at what point NASA starts working on a new design. It's clear that the shuttle is necessary/important (i.e. servicing ISS, bringing astronauts home) or else it wouldn't be flying. But at what point do you say that the vehicle is past its prime? And if, heavens forbid, this shuttle doesn't make it home in one piece, that means there'd only be 2 left. Which makes the notion of a orbital rescue somewhat dodgy indeed.
Missions are planned until 2010 in order to finish assembling the ISS - and it also seems that it's almost all shuttle flights that are sending the goods up there. A couple Russian trips, but mostly shuttle.
Did you know that the Russians had a space shuttle too? Golly, it sure looks a lot like the NASA version. Rumor has it that there was a bit of engineering sharing between countries on this one. I guess it makes sense in the realm of "both nations are participants in the space station and there should be redundant vehicles."
But definitely something of a different approach to getting it pointed at the sky by assembling it horizontal and then lifting it into position. We'll never really know which is a better launch procedure - Buran's shuttle only flew once. It apparently was capable of totally unmanned flight, including landing, and it seems they were even almost finished building the second one, but the program was discontinued, and what's left belongs to Kazakhstan.
And in the free-association that goes on in the wee hours of the night/morning, the two things that come to mind when I hear Kazakhstan? Borat and Vino. The former made me feel sorry for the people mocked in the movie. The latter, not as much - I can't decide whether it's the continuing variety of doping cases or the stupidity of his particular one that's making me feel numb to it.
Though it's become quite popular and all the kids are doing it these days, I don't presume to have the patience or attention span to brew beer at home. Not to mention that there's tons of breweries out there doing a fine job and I can get a variety of their products at lots of local places.
But what I can't get my hands on, that I do so enjoy? Mead. Yeah, like what the Vikings and other such hearty folk be drinkin' while they be pillagin'. There's the Redstone Meadery that I almost went to when I was out in Boulder last summer. And of course, there's probably lots of meading going on among those SCA people, but I just don't go that way. The thing is, my true motivation is essentially financial. Redstone's meads are about $20/bottle. That's ridiculous. Especially when it goes down really smooth and eaaasy.
So I went out and bought 12 lbs of honey, some yeast, a carboy (big glass jar), a big stock pot, some stoppers and whatnot, and off I go. The mix has been bubbling away fermenting their little yeasty hearts out on the counter for a couple days now. The unexpected discoveries? Damn if it doesn't take a long time (hours and hours) for 3 gallons of almost-boiling liquid to cool off (I'll have to get me a must/wort chiller). Oh yeah, and holy crap... talk about luscious sweet floral scents - when you have steaming honey/water mix, all these remarkable scents come off it. At one point when cooling, it was even "buttery". I kid you not. Like sweet, but luscious... butter.
Along the way, one thing I don't get riled up about much: interstate commerce laws applying to internet wine sales. But I gotta say, whoever is drawing the mascot over at Free The Grapes? Splendid work.
Shackles The Bondage Grape. How many mixed messages are there in there? Who cares. I just love the little hands, and fighting stance, and grumpy frown, and chin but no nose. He's like Hoffa, on the town square, fighting for freedom and a living wage. But he doesn't have a megaphone.
And he's a grape.
Crapola. Haven't been too bike-thusiatic the past week or so, until this weekend. Went for a couple hours of ridin' in the dirt out at the Poto yesterday, and was all ready to be pavement-ey this morning. But it looks like it's gonna rain all damn day. Fricken-frack.
It's what I can't have that I want the most right now - dry pavement.
Seen today while at a stoplight - the UPS truck that comes around the corner, to encounter the Fedex truck also doing rounds in the same neighborhood... the tap-of-the-horn-tip-o'-the-cap, the bleep of the hey-howya-doin'...
It's like a real-world version of Sam the Sheepdog and Ralph the Wolf punching in (or out) for the day.
