Fast Fiction

Not those kinds of characters ... The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator has just posted a new record on the road to recreating the works of Shakespeare through random keystrokes:

16 letters from “King Richard II” after 24,115 billion billion monkey-years on 11 May 2004. “KING RICHARD. OlazZtssi0cwX?QDjqkP9r]xfaBmlVU]e…”

matched

“KING RICHARD. Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, Brought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son, Here to make good the boist’rous late appeal”

Pretty soon we’ll have a whole block of dialogue.

Yes, I give up. There will be no new spiffy three column format. Two tries and I can’t get it to work.

So gentle readers, you’re stuck with this. Maybe I’ll change out the colors and do a new header graphic. But there’s no additional content bar in the near future. Maybe I’ll feed the buzznet photos in.

Sigh.

UPDATE: I’ve signed up for Bloglines - a one stop place to read all my favorite blogs via Atom or RSS feed. It seems that this is the way blogs are going anyway, so who gives a damn about the design?

I signed up for classmates.com some years ago. I’m not sure why. I was never particularly close with any of my classmates at Mechanicsburg Area Senior High. But I was curious what happened to some of them (the writer in me) and so I check back. Problem is that I’m not a gold member and I refuse to fill out a profile so I really can’t find out anything out about anyone except the fact that they signed up.

Well, lately there has been an outbreak of all new spam. Or pranks, I haven’t decided.

It started with a classmate signing in under the name Penis, Enlargement. Today I logged in and someone two years after me graduated under the name Well, Hung. I don’t recall him. Nope, looked through the yearbook and there is no Well, Hung fellow.

I’m getting frustrated trying to make that other design work and I wonder if it’s the limitations of designing CSS for so many different browsers.

So, I went and got another skin with three columns (because I’m damn determined on that!) and put it here to test. Obviously I haven’t fleshed out the design quite as well as the last one. So, good folks, let me know what you see. (I know the blogger banner ad intrudes ... but it won’t on fast fiction since I’m an ad-free space.)

I’ll start populating it a little better soon, maybe I’ll work on it tonight. I’m not sure I’m keen on the colors, but the trick at the moment is finding a layout that doesn’t get all wonky on Macs and Netscape.

I’m hard at work creating a new template for Fast Fiction. You can preview it here. Obviously the content isn’t there, so it’s hard to judge. I’m still working on moving over all my links and reordering things a bit. I haven’t figured out how to use the “blogger profile” feature yet, but I can roll these things out in stages.

If you visit the test site, please let me know if it looks okay on your screen and with your browser. I don’t have that many computers to test on. I need to know if the three column thing is working. I think it comes down to the fact that the center column can’t have an image in it that’s wider than 325 pixels or else it messes up the columns beneath it (but I can always make the images popups for larger versions, which will make the page load faster anyway). But that’s only an issue for folks with small monitors (or small browser windows). I’ll have to populate a few more mock entries to see how it really works. And of course my real archives take up a lot more room.

Any of the internal links on the site obviously point back to fast fiction instead of implementing the template on my archives, so if you click on them and get back here, don’t be surprised.

I found the skin on BlogSkins.com and it was designed by Michael Kelly (NaKaithus).

I’m thinking of redoing my header graphic, too. My screen at the office is 1152x864, so there’s a lot of room on the right of the top graphic. I think if I make a very wide one with little of interest past the 800 pixel mark it would look decent, but then folks with narrow monitors would get a scroll bar on the bottom. I’m not smart enough to do something that shifts bigger and smaller like blogging.la ... I also may be changing the background color to something darker but leaving the side bar fill that steely grey. Any thoughts? Please?

UPDATE: I did change the background color to a light purple-gray. I like it, it makes the white appear a little brighter. Let me know if you hate it. (I’m a big fan of purple.) I duotoned the header image (and lengthened it a bit for wider screens) and now I’m trying to deal with the overlap issues (it appears that way on Netscape as well). Thanks to everyone for their comments. Keep checking back and let me know if I’ve fixed it.

Perhaps the obsession with writing a novel in a month has worn off. The challenge is gone. I know I can do it, I’ve done it three times.

But how about a weekend?

I got an email yesterday and lo and behold a project out of India is doing just that this weekend. It’s not limited to novels either, it could be plays or screenplays or even graphic novels. I can’t quite decided whether I’m up for it, but here it is, in case you have 58 hours free:

PRESS RELEASE, MAY 11 2004
INTERNATIONAL CONTEST PITS WRITERS AGAINST THE CLOCK
————————————————————-
(Bombay, May 11, 2004)— The Great Mahakali Write-A-Thalon is an international literary contest that is spreading like wildfire. It is powered by an honour-based system, and no cash prize or money is being spent. And yet on Tuesday night it was the 6th fastest information spreading in the weblog community, including such luminaries of the digiratti as Jason Kottke.

This is why it is special. It started as a mere weekend binge between four friends. Now, scores of writers from more then seven countries including India, the United States, Norway, Ireland, and Japan, will each attempt to write an entire novel, poetic epic, stage or screen play, from scratch.  They have a weekend—58 hours, to be exact. This includes heavyweights like Tom Bradley in Nagasaki, and Mike Atherton in London.

Set rolling by Bombay columnist, Rohit Gupta, the Write-A-Thalon is generating massive interest amongst publishers, film producers and writers as far afield as New York and Bombay. Amazed at the response his weekend game has generated, he says,“This reminds me of the Memespread Project. Like a virus! The best part is the quality of writers who are snowballing us. For a zero-commerce operation, this is somewhat phenomenal.”

Nicole Hughes of Plastic Sugar Press has agreed to critique and review five of the top peer-reviewed novellas. “The main reason I was attracted to this project is because it goes so much against what we are taught about how to write”, says Hughes. “Ninety percent of the manuscripts I review suffer from a very constrictive and self-conscious quality. I think a lot of writers edit way too much in the beginning of the process, and don’t trust their craft enough to take real risks. This project is about complete and total submersion in the work, merging our objective and subjective realities, and creating a true intimacy between writer and reader.”

Jagmohan Bhanver, President of the Writerís Society Of India says, ìI expect to see some really high power energy unleashed during the course of these three days.î Other event partners like Frog Books, J Sughand Productions, Oxford Bookstore, Crimson Feet Magazine and the Industrial Theatre Company will review the best manuscripts with a view towards publication.

Writers interested in taking part in THE GREAT MAHAKALI WRITE-A-THALON(14-16 May 2004) should contact Emmet Cole and/or Rohit Gupta at their respective e-mail addresses—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)—as soon as possible.

Contest Website:  http://www.geocities.com/micereign/ 
Contest Co-ordindators
Rohit Gupta (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) www.writers.net/writers/rohitgupta
Emmet Cole (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) www.emmetcole.com

Okay, maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but Blogger changed over the weekend. I was thinking of changing my template, but this throws a huge monkey wrench in those plans, as they now have a profile. There are new templates, of course, but I’m not sure if I wanna use something that everyone else is going to have in a few days.

I’m still looking for a good three column layout - column one is linking and archives, column two is content and would be flexible width and column three is photos and additional content like a profile and maybe other longer-term content.

Oh, and it turns out this is my 133rd posting. I’ve written over 30,000 words via Blogger. Most are for this blog, but a goodly number (probably 5,000) were also for the Ojai Playwrights Conference Blog, too.

The best thing I can tell so far is that “blockquote” is now available on the toolbar. Used to be I had to hand code that and I was too lazy so I never used it. Yay!

As a spam aficionado (well, connoisseur, really), I like a good story about someone who tries to play the spammers at their own game.

The Nigerian 419 Scam is not so much spam as an elaborate shell game ... I have $38 million for you, will you give me $40,000 to help you get it?

Well, here’s a fellow how may have tried to beat them at their own game.

I was intrigued by these little fellows I’ve been seeing on my hollyhocks. They look like weevils to me. I really don’t know much about insects, but I knew enough that when I googled weevils + hollyhocks I would find my answer.

Lo and behond, what I’ve got living on my hollyhocks are called ... hollyhock weevils.

Seems that it’s breeding season for them. Or maybe they’re just horny little buggers. It was hard to not find them coupled up like this.

Anyway.

Cool.

I love google.

I’ve really gotten into digital photography lately. And now I’ve found some places online to obsess over it.

First is DPChallenge.com. It’s a great site, with real photographers and each week they have an open challenge on a particular assignment. Photos must be taken during that week and then there is a week of voting and commenting. It’s a lot of fun and I enjoy the structure of it and community.

The other one is Worth1000.com, which is known more for their photoshop contests. But they also have photography contests and they allow any photo to be used, not just ones shot in the last week. I’m not as keen on their site. It’s not very pretty and not terribly intuitive. But there’s always a bunch of contests going on. So, one competition came up for “Nature Negatives” which requested nature photos that were inverted. Well nature photos, I’ve got thousands!

I dug through and found one that actually looked good as a negative image and uploaded it. They give you 10 “credits” to start, which are entry fees. Most entry fees are 2 or 5 credits but this one was 10, so I was taking a huge gamble. If I didn’t win one of the jackpots, I’d never be able to play again.

Before and After

Lo and behold, my photo won! Whee!

Every once in a while someone finds me through google. Well, a couple of times a day. But it’s often searches like: Cybele or Nanowrimo novel or fast fiction blog. Things you’d expect this site to come up as a result.

Yesterday, late last night someone searched for “Lifespan of Pericles”. The result is 218 items. This site is the 36th one listed.

I’m hoping after I post this I come up as the first!

UPDATE: This morning someone did a google search for 958,399,000,000,000,000,000 and my site came up first. I’m not quite sure what they were looking for.

Oh sure, Will encounters spectacular dangerous wildlife on his treks in the hills.

Me?

I was threatened by a goose.

We took a hike up in Malibu Creek State Park. It was a short hike, about a mile and a half (though it was damn hot). We arrived at Century Lake and found a shaded spot with a fallen tree to sit on right at the waters edge. Off on the other side of the lake were two geese. A large female and a smaller male that we decided was probably her offspring since he was a little small and young to be breeding.

Well, they made their way over to us. We were tickled, we were going to get some great photos. Not only did they swim right up to the bank near us, the climbed out onto the muddy short. Not two feet from us. I’m not just saying “two feet” I mean, two feet. There was no zoom used to get any photos. They were right there.

I’m not sure what they wanted, but every time I moved, the big female would look at me and hiss. She’d open her mouth and stick out her tongue and hiss at me. I had bare feet, so I kind of retreated. Of course The Man and Amy (my sister) made fun of me for being scared of the goose, but come on! What’s normal about a wild goose that comes right up to you from across the lake and hisses at you and tries to eat your hat?

I’m thinking about changing my blog template. I think I’d like a three column format. The first two would be like they are now archives and linky love on the far left - main content in the middle. I’d like the far right to have a little more alternative content, maybe stuff that doesn’t change as often, like new CDs I love and some photos I’ve taken.

Any thoughts?

This template is just an adapted one from Blogger (a looong time ago) but they don’t offer anything three column anymore (or anything even remotely interesting, btw). I’ve been looking over at blogskins, but it’s just so tedious to go through their lists ... nothing is sorted by column structure.

Had a few blogging.la friends over last night. This necessitated cleaning the deck upstairs, because we haven’t used it yet this season. So I spent the morning working on getting all the leaves off and dusting the furniture and bannister to get rid of that black LA crud.

The unpleasant surpise of the morning was finding that not only did the raccoons still live in the avocado tree, they’ve been using a corner of my roof as a toilet. There’s a huge pile of raccoon crap there. I’m not quite sure what to do with it. If I get rid of it, the raccoons are gonna think that I’m their slave.

The other finding is that a bunch of wasps or yellow jackets (I’m unsure) have started a nest in the umbrella.

I’m not equipped to get rid of it myself, since my allergy is just a little too risky. I’m not keen on using pesticides either, since we eat off that table. I’m sure we’ll figure out what to do eventually.

First, let’s start with I have feelings of bitchiness, I have taken no bitchy action, made no bitchy comments.

I live on a quaint street and have nice neighbors. They’re damn neighborly. Of late, the neighbors seems to be breeding and many have toddlers. (They also have dogs and cats, but that’s for another post, I guess.)

Folks like to walk their kids around the street (it’s a circle) and the kids will walk or be carried or sometimes ride little bikes of scooters. One family likes to come to the front of our house and either play in our yard (which is all pebbles) or ride their little scooters up and down our front walk.

Our house is like this: we’re pretty close to the street, about ten feet from the sidewalk. The whole front of our house is low windows. We keep our blinds open, anyone can look in and see us watching TV or chatting in the living room. It’s obvious when we’re home, we’re sitting right there. The house has a little walk down to the front door, and a walk that goes the length of the house (under the windows).

One of our little neighbors likes to ride up our front walk on his razor scooter and back and forth in front of our windows. If the windows weren’t there, he’d be five feet away from me. (Okay, he’s maybe three years old, I don’t hold him personally responsible for this behavior.)

This irritates me. It irritates the dog too, and that probably is part of my problem. But I don’t think that my front yard is everyone else’s playground. It’s not like the kid came by and did it once. The kid has come by on three occasions that I’ve noticed (because the dog will tell me if I’m not in the room) and with two different parents. I understand folk’s dog wandering into my yard. I removed the lawn because I understood that too well and replaced it with lovely pea gravel (which just thrills the kiddies, it seems - and the dogs seem to be fine with it as well, I’m not sure the kids know they’re playing with urine glazed pebbles).

I’ve not said anything to anyone other than The Man (who thinks, likely rightly that I should get over it). But I wonder how this family would feel if I took a book and went and sat on their front stoop and read for a while. I’m not sure they’d get my point, and I’m sure I wouldn’t feel any better for it.

I don’t want to put up a fence. The fence in the back yard is fine, we all have dogs and it keeps the peace. But I don’t want to be walled in.

Maybe those motion sensor sprinklers would do the trick? Please advise, gentle readers.

We’ve been ordering from Rambutan Thai since they opened last year, since they’re just down the street.

I love their food, love their presentation and they deliver quickly. The dishes are a nice balance of spice, flavor, quality ingredients and portion. They’re packaging is pretty good too, served in reusable plastic containers that are sturdy enough to eat off of, instead of re-plating for eating at home.

Last night we took a walk down the hill in the waning heat to grab some dinner inside for the first time.

Rambutan is on Sunset Blvd. just past the Silverlake Blvd. underpass in an unassuming stripmall, next to the ultra-packed super-trendy Pho (which can cause parking problems). The interior is lovely. Maroon silk upholstered walls, bar in the back, comfy seating that’s not too close together.

We started with Soju drinks. I had a white dragon which is Soju and white cranberry juice. I think it needs a little lime. The Man and Amy got a Mosquito Bite, which is a mojito made with Soju with a little sugar cane garnish. Robin had water.

Our appetizers (‘cuz I was hungry!) were the spring roll (basil, carrots, cucumbers, tofu in a rice wrapper - my favorite), crab rolls (a little salty and tough) and garlic shrimp (yum!).

Everyone ordered a salad. It was hot and no one wanted hot/spicy food at the moment. But I’ve tried lots of other stuff there. At the moment my favorite is the Ba Mee - angel hair with grilled chicken. It’s very light and the chicken is always done to perfection.

The oddest part though was when we ordered the drinks, mine and Amy’s were brought right away. The Man had to wait for his Mosquito Bite. Everyone else seemed to get their drinks in the room but him. It might have been a full eight minutes before he got his. I’m not sure why. Then when our food came, the server brought out the first two salads. Then mine. The Man sat there salad-less - another full five minutes before they brought his out. It’s not like we came in and were bitchy or anything. Heaven knows during our kitchen upgrade we were ordering once a week, they should be grateful for our support for five months straight.

Other than that, the food was great and the ambiance relaxing. The music seemed to be taken straight from my iPod (Portishead, Massive Attack, Air, Hooverphonic & Moby), the lights were very low (making it hard to read the menus ... I’m getting old). When we finished and left, we found that it must have cooled off a full 20 degrees, which was a relief, considering the hike of five flights of stairs up the hill back to the house.

I got a postcard about my high school reunion. I had half-hoped that we were just a bunch of slackers (as our generation is sometimes defined) and that we would flake on having a reunion at all. (Note: I’m not even sure if I am a GenX - I feel more like something called a Late Boomer, which makes more sense since my parent’s weren’t boomers).

Here’s the conflict. I haven’t kept in touch with a single person from high school, let alone anyone from my class. My interaction with my high school friends is limited to an afternoon with my best friend at the time (who was two years behind me) two years ago when she came to town. A Christmas card from her last year and silence from me (I’m so bad about that stuff). In my early high school years I didn’t have many friends, I kept busy with an after-school job and swim team and the various drama groups (competition drama and school plays). I hung with a few kids, but no one particularly close. I dated in high school, but had no serious boyfriends until my senior year and even that didn’t last very long. I did not go to the prom. I chose, instead, to go to the Wallops Island Marine Consortium biology class field trip that weekend.

I went to my ten year reunion. I stayed for all of an hour and saw a few people there I knew but I was generally uncomfortable because it seemed that these people remembered their teen years and each other far better than I did. But ten years isn’t a very long time after high school anyway. I was only two years out of grad school so the whole school scene wasn’t that far behind me and I didn’t have much of a career yet and there were some people there who had kids in grade school already. Our lives were so vastly different. I lived on the West Coast and it seemed that most everyone else stayed in the area.

So, do I go and feel more like an outsider than I did when I went to school? I have nothing to prove to these people, no one thought I was a loser (a little weird, but it’s not like I left school with that “I’ll show them!” attitude). I was teased and harassed horribly in junior high by a pack of girls and another pack of viscous guys, but that all pretty much disappeared in high school when I went on to the honors and advanced placement classes and they ended up dropping out or going to VoTech.

Will I remember any of these people? Will they remember me? What would I say to them and would I care about anything they had to say to me? I’m curious what happened to some of them.

It’s in October, which isn’t a bad time for me to go back to Pennsylvania. My sister just bought a new house and it’d be nice to see it. October in Pennsylvania is very pretty - the leaves changing and wonderful apples. The reunion isn’t even in Mechanicsburg, it’s in Allenberry (Boiling Springs) - it seems odd that there’s no place in our actual town to have a reunion.

A recently released report says that poets die young. James Kaufman of the Learning Research Institute at California State University at San Bernardino compiled this report for the Journal of Death Studies (didja know there was such a thing?), Kaufman studied 1,987 dead writers from various centuries from the United States, China, Turkey and Eastern Europe and came up with the following breakdown:

Poets: 62 years
Playwrights: 63 years
Novelists: 66 years
Non-Fiction Writers: 68 years

What I find curious about this study (and I haven’t read it, because my issue of the Journal of Death Studies seems to be lost in the mail) is that it covers hundreds of years of data ... let’s face it, poets are not what they used to be. It also seems that the study sampled known or possibly well-known professionals (maybe folks that biographers would have bothered to follow for their whole lives). Poets do tend to get well known earlier, because building a body of work does not take as long as novelists or playwrights (this is just guessing on my part). I can name five poets off the top of my head that died in WW I and not one playwright.

I don’t know, I think a bit more work could have been done on this sample to adjust for longevity during the writer’s lifetime. If you’re gonna count someone like Emily Dickinson then I think you need to take into account the average lifespan in 1886 would have been about 68-70 and she died at 56. Robert Frost lived to 89 and died at a time the average lifespan in North America was about 73.

And cause of death ... serving in the armed forces, epidemics, suicide, auto accidents, natural causes ... I need more info. Are poets more prone to drowning or suicide? These are the interesting stats I need to see broken out. Especially since it seems that playwrights fare little better than poets. Maybe I’ll become a journalist.

When we last left our brilliant typing monkey community, they could scarcely put two letters together. Now they’re boldly stringing words together.

Yes, I just checked back with the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator (infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters will eventually create the complete works of Shakespeare) and we’re up to 15 characters.

Here’s where it stands: 15 letters from “Pericles” after 958,399,000,000,000,000,000 monkey-years.

The text the monkeys produced: “[Enter GOWER.] ?2IDzPN9sq6V ;e’?nGI3&?3 La”“0 ...”

matched “[Enter GOWER.] [Before the palace of Antioch.] To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come; Assuming man’s infirmities, To glad your ear, and please your eyes.”

Okay, they’ve got a ways to go, but what do you expect for only 958,399,000,000,000,000,000 monkey-years of work?

This morning I posted my 11th entry for Blogging.la. I thought more about this entry, more about what the point was, trying to achieve more of an essay than just the random musings that I usually do.

I know there’s some talk on some blogs about bloggers being the new reporters, but I’m not prepared to go there. I might make a good critic though. But I’m never going to be an expert at anything, so I’ll always be just giving my own opinion.

In other news, Bloggger asked me to sign up for GMail today. So I did. I have no idea if I want to have such a service that inserts context sensitive advertising, but you know me, I can’t refuse a new email address. Really, I’ve got gobs of them.

UPDATE: I sent myself an email from GMail to my regular DSL address and it’s been 10 minutes and I still haven’t gotten it. This does not sound like something that would cause me to endorse the service.

I don’t know how to get out of this hell I’m in.

The phone number I have at the office used to belong to the Travel Department here on the lot. That was years ago but someone out there still prints it out on call sheets or contact lists. So at least once a day someone will call and ask me questions about restaurants in Chicago or red-eyes to NY or to complain about their seating assignment.

I can actually handle that. The number of calls over the past two years has gone down, so I feel like it might actually end someday. (It’s especially sad when someone calls to talk to Laurie and says they’re her friend and I wonder how good a friend can they be if they didn’t know she changed her number or maybe changed jobs more than two years ago.)

Right now I’m getting calls for Warren. Lots of calls for Warren. Five calls a day. From collection agencies.

Now, if you’ve ever gotten a call from a collection agency, you know how this goes, they don’t believe you. They just keep trying back at other times, hoping to trick Warren into answering the phone. It ain’t gonna happen. Warren don’t live here. (Well, if he does he might be sleeping on my yoga mat under the desk and eating my pretzels I keep in the bottom drawer.)

If the calls from real people aren’t bad enough, I get calls from computers telling me to call because of some “very serious business matter.” If I’m at my desk and I get this call, I hang up. No one wants to listen to a computer. If someone wants to talk to me, call me, don’t send a call computer to do your dirty work, lazy bastard.

I’ve tried to get my number off these lists. I’ve tried being mean and fierce. I’ve tried explaining that I just got the number, that this is a large company and I don’t know who Warren is, if he ever worked here at all. None of this seems to work, of course. I’ll just have to wait until someone gets bored chasing Warren.

It also makes me wonder if Warren isn’t out there just putting down any old made up number. Or maybe Warren is Laurie’s ex and this is his cruel joke on her only I’m caught in the middle of their vicious break-up.

Hell, maybe Warren has something against me. Maybe Warren is my enemy.

Right now, I’m giving Warren the benefit of the doubt and figure it’s the collection agencies that are the enemies. Don’t worry, Warren, I’ve got your back. They’re not getting any info out of me. Make good use of your head start.

I don’t know who is writing the filler text for spam these days, but I applaud their ability to combine words. It’s quite inventive and I thoroughly enjoyed this writer’s passage included with a promotion for debt consolidation:

“Any tabloid can share a shower with turkey for, but it takes a real movie theater to of bodice ripper.defendant behind bowling ball, pocket beyond, and hand for satellite are what made America great!”

So, writer, I solute you.

Mr. Syndromes is challenging other bloggers to ask him three questions. Anything and he promises to answer.

I am in on this as well. So feel free; post three questions.

This’ll be a novelty on my site ... possible revelations of personal info!

Bored because your favorite blogs haven’t been updated recently? Just look at them through this excellent pornolizing filter. Any site with text.

Yes, any site. (Probably not a safe link at work.)

The New York Times
The White House
The Onion (though it’s hard to tell)
Sean Bonner
The New Republic
FOX News
iTunes
Microsoft

Each time you enable the filter, it remakes the site, so you can use it over and over again, on the exact same material but get different results. Brilliant. (link via Mark at The Elegant Variation)

Well, not really the lawyers. I believe the idea would actually be to kill all the aggressive asswipes.

I was reading a fascinating article today in the NY Times (sorry, reg required) called No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture by Natalie Angier. It details observations of a tribe of baboons that lost its most aggressive members to hepatitis. It found that over subsequent generations, without the warring and snarly influence of the formerly dominant males, the culture of the tribe became more calm. The naturalists even took blood samples and showed that the tribe was generally less stressed.

“And if baboons can do it,” said Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, “why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.”

Of course the one notable thing about this tribe that even though some years had passed since those large aggressive males had died, the females still outnumbered the males, which indicates a primal shift of power.

Just something interesting to ponder. You can go ahead and make the connections of this post with anything else you want that’s going on in human culture at the moment.

I was working the front yard, weeding, because people are coming over tomorrow.

I found a moth. It was a huge moth, struggling in the tall alstroemeria. So I pulled it out, and it was huge. About two and a half inches long with a huge plump furry body. Its wingspan was at least 3 and a half inches, maybe four. It didn’t seem to want to leave my hand, but I cajoled it onto the Japanese maple.

Of course once I took its picture, I had to find out what it was. I found this:

It’s a hawkmoth. Probably a white-lined sphinx since its range and preferred food fits, but it could also be banded sphinx  or maybe the spurge hawkmoth. The adults feed on nectar. The can look like hummingbirds when they hover in front of a flower.

click on the photo for a larger version

I saw a link on PriusChat today to this article in The American Spectator’s Political Hay section: Kerry and the 2006 Chevette by Eric Peters.

I don’t even know where to begin. The guy is talking trash. He really doesn’t have any basis for his assertions either, which you know is one of my pet peeves.

It starts like this:
If John Kerry wins the presidency, most of us will be driving Chevettes—or the modern-day equivalent, at any rate. The Massachusetts senator has proposed jacking up federal fuel economy requirements for new cars to as much as 36 miles-per-gallon as part of his plan to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

He goes on to further contend that there are no mid-size cars that would be able to meet that. This is true. There is only one, and that’s the Toyota Prius and there won’t be that many manufactured this year. But the technology exists and is being implemented. Toyota plans a Highlander hybrid, Lexus will make a hybrid version of the RX330 and Ford is preparing a series of SUV hybrids and Honda is moving forward with a hybrid version of the Accord. They won’t be super efficient, but they’ll be loads better than they are now.

Also, the new CAFE standards will be enacted over a period of time. 36 MPG is not the goal for 2006.

Better get your V-8, before it’s too lateÖ

What do regular folks need a V-8 for anyway? Sure, you might wanna tow something occassional, but really, why does anyone need more than 200 hp for commuting?

But the idea of imposing top-down fuel efficiency requirements is not a new one. It has been tried before—during the energy crisis of the 1970s. It didn’t work then. And it won’t work now, either.

Just because it didn’t work then doesn’t mean that it can’t work. And lets face it, government imposed emissions reductions have worked.

Today’s cars and trucks are indeed more efficient than the cars of the 1970s and 1980s. But Americans drive greater distances as a result—burning more fuel each year than they did in pre-CAFE days.

These two statements linked together make no sense to me. The object here is to get more fuel efficiency, because people refuse to curtail their driving. No one, at least I don’t think they are, is saying that increased efficiency leads to increased use.

I think the reason we drive more is because of urban decay and the flight of the middle class to the suburbs, leading to insane commutes because people are afraid to live near where they work. You might also blame it on the collapse of worker/company fidelity. Folks are no longer employed by one company for life, so there is no reasonable way to live near your work. Most of the time it’s pure luck if you do.

CAFE requirements have also had unintended side effects—most notably the boom in SUV and pick-up sales—which now account for about half of all new vehicles sold.

Yeah, well, let’s go ahead and include all consumer vehicles (those that can be driven with an ordinary license) in the CAFE requirements. End of story. They’ll come up with the technology right quick.

Does Kerry have another “plan” to deal with the unforeseen consequences of CAFE II?

Good question, Eric. I’m glad you brought it up and I will try to find out.

One consequence, though, is a sure bet. If the government imposes the draconian new fuel efficiency requirements Kerry is agitating for, the automakers will have to build smaller, lighter—and thus less safe—vehicles, just as they did in the 1970s.

Dude! Don’t get into safety. You can’t advocate these huge SUVs and then bring up safety.

The safety of the Prius, a rather light car, is pretty damn good. The NHTSA posted the results of their crash tests on the Prius just last week. It got a five star rating for the driver side and four for the passenger for head on crashes and four stars each for both the passenger and driver. These test were not done with the side and curtain airbags - an optional feature that well over 50% of Prius buyers opted for. Compare that with something like the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which got only three stars for front impact and four for side. Its rollover resistance rating was two.

What really needs to happen is some overall standards for bumper height. No wonder smaller cars (hell, even large sedans) do poorly when they tussle with a high-clearance SUV - their bumpers don’t match up.

While non-engineers such as Kerry like to talk in generalities about “new technologies” that will somehow allow us to drive mid-sized and larger cars that also manage to return the fuel economy of subcompacts, the fact is such technology does not yet exist—and may never exist. The internal combustion engine has already been refined to the nth degree and significant improvements in fuel economy will be hard to come by—or very expensive.

The gas/electric hybrid is now a proven technology. New low sulfur (cleaner burning) diesels can also be adapted for use in hybrids. They are very affordable. The diversity of fuels and technologies will actually help the US become less dependent on foreign fuel sources.

People need to stop for a moment and make positive choices.

Few Americans—excepting perhaps a millionaire such as Kerry—could afford a $60,000 family car, even if it can get 40-mpg.

Okay, I comfortably carry around three passengers (plus me) in my Prius. I’m getting 49 MPG. The car cost $22,000. The LEXUS Hybrid RX 400 will cost $60,000 or more. And you know what, lots of folks who aren’t millionaires buy expensive cars. It’s a mystery to me, but they do. It’s called being an American.

It has been estimated that about 2,000 people are killed every year as a result of the CAFE-induced “downsizing” of the typical passenger cars—which lost about 1,000 lbs. on average between the 1970s and the 1990s. All the air bags and crumple zones in the world won’t prevent a similar body count in the event Kerry’s proposal becomes law.

I’m curious where these figures came from.

But only if Kerry becomes president first.

Yeah, he’s powerless as a Senator to push through CAFE reforms.

I cross posted most of this to blogging.la. I don’t know what possessed me. I’ve been seeing
these billboards for Los Angeles bioterrorism preparedness and it made me wonder what the hell a billboard could do. Well, what a website could do. I thought I would provide a few excerpts from their FAQ.

[abridged for maximum humor]

1. Iíve been noticing billboards and radio ads about bioterrorism. What are they for?
    The billboards and radio ads are a reminder that the Los Angeles County Health Department is working to keep the public safe and healthy.
[they’ve been 100% effective at keeping foreign bioterror threats from Los Angelenos]

13. Should I buy gas masks for my family?
    No. Most gas masks do not protect against biological agents such as anthrax and smallpox.
Gas masks would protect against chemical agents (such as nerve gas) only if worn at the
time the agent is released.
[if you’re interested in chemical weapon terrorism preparedness, that’s a different department]

There you have it, fellow Angelenos ... stock up on aspirin and matches, some clean underwear and it’ll all be okay. The county will protect us.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I did do some photoshop magic to the billboard. You can see the original here. Mine is much better.

Yes, now that we’ve passed the Vernal Equinox, it’s aurora season. Okay, not so much in Los Angeles, but just in case you spot something odd after sunset, it’s because of an M2 Class Coronal Mass Ejection from sunspot 588. Confused? There’s no need for that. Space Weather explains it all.

Never seen the northern lights? Here’s a pretty cool gallery.

Photo by Roman Krochuk, Fairbanks, Alaska.