Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Fear Itself

    The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good… What worries you masters you. — John Locke

    I found that quote in an article in the Post Magazine called Fear Itself, by Gene Weingarten. It’s an excellent review of terror, and our reaction to it, as human beings, Americans and how it compares to a country completely besieged by terror.

    Life is fleeting, and death is always too close. As a country, we’ve collectively been faced with our own mortality in a shocking way. It’s been almost three years now, and that realization of our own possible end is always there, whether it’s a vague terror warning, or an airline flying just a little too low near work.

    I was thinking about John Mohammed this morning, and the terror he created around here. I remember standing at the gas station around the corner in the middle of the spree, and looking into the face of an older woman and seeing terror. She was just getting gas, something we’ve all done a thousand times or more. But, the simple act of filling up our tanks had been turned into a gauntlet.

    Well, I give up. I’m not going to live my life concerned about the evil some nebulous, undefined and vague threat may carry out. In most cases, those who are victims of terror couldn’t have done anything to prepare differently that would have saved them. They were just doing every day things, like getting gas, going to work, getting food or meeting friends,when their lives were taken from them.

    We should fight terror. But, “terror” is an emotion. The only way you can fight it is by not being afraid anymore. The only way our government can fight it is by not frightening us anymore with vague warnings we can’t do anything about. The only way our government can really fight terror is to fight the sources of terror, not the emotion. To fight terror, we have to provide hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless,and freedom to the enslaved. And by freedom, I don’t mean dropping bombs on them.

  • Blogging Histories

    Oh no, I’ve been found!! Two old pals from high school stumbled over here today, and now I’m reliving the last year and a half of high school, realizing that it was more than a decade ago that I graduated from Vicksburg High School. Time flies…

    And then I started thinking about how to describe the last eleven years of my life, what I’ve done, seen and how I’ve changed. I can’t really do it. Other than the highlights (getting married, two kids, job, moving to VA), how to do you write up your life in an e-mail?

    I do have a record of the last four years though… since July of 2000, I’ve been posting nonsense on this site. I just went back and re-read some of the stone-age posts, and they’re frightening, both for their brevity and well, just not saying anything. I didn’t really get the hang of blogging until April of 2001, and then I just couldn’t stop. The first post I made that isn’t completely embarassing to re-read is my ode to my favorite non-uncle. Pretty much the next year of posts is forgettable… until we get to my post on JenWords. Ahhh, memory lane. All this stuff I would never have remembered if it weren’t all here in the archives waiting to be dug up again (and the old meme’s, like my 26 things).

    This is why I love blogging. It’s better than journal-writing (to me), because it’s public. I can share who I am with everyone. Yes, there are limitations (self-imposed) on what I say, but I don’t think that hides who I am, or really how I feel about things. I don’t change who I am, or how I feel while writing – I might tone it down or change names, but the feelings remain the same.

    And I rarely talk about sinus infections anymore – that’s progress.

  • Not Talking, OK, I’m Talking About It

    I was going to write about politics and the tactics of the Bush campaign (and their pals, who aren’t coordinating even though they share at least two members… because that would be illegal, and no member of the Bush Administration has ever done anything illegal… oh wait, they have), but I just can’t. I’m too upset about it to write coherently. Everyone else is doing a fine job of debunking the out and out lies of the Swift Boat Vets for Complete BS. But, people are still paying attention to what happened 35 years ago instead of focusing on the mess GW has gotten us into in our own country. Over the past three years, the number of uninsured Americans, and Americans living below the poverty line has increased every year. The tax burden has shifted from the upper class to the middle class (according to the non-partisan CBO, no less). The new jobs created this year average \$9,000 dollars less a year than the jobs they replaced. Over 900 soldiers have died in Iraq. 60,000 people have been injured in the conflict. There’s now news that children as young as ten were abused in Abu Ghraib, and two new reports out this week move the blame up the chain from a “few bad apples” on the scene to the bad apples in charge in the Pentagon. So… the news is really great for our country, and our President still thinks we’ve “turned the corner”. Yeah, we’ve turned a real nice corner, right into a dark, dead-end alley.

    OK, maybe I am going to talk about it. Why am I voting for John Kerry? I’m tired of having a President and Administration I have to fear. What Bush touts as his greatest strength: his leadership, has gotten us into the most trouble. His “decisiveness” has led us into a war we didn’t need to fight, into a deficit we’ll spend decades repairing and a “war on terror” that’s not addressing either the causes or sources of terror.

    John Kerry is intelligent, competant and steady. He doesn’t have the personal failings of Bill Clinton, or the incompetancies of George W. Bush. He has more foreign policy experience than almost anyone who’s ever held the office, and will be an effective Commander in Chief. He may not be spectacular, exciting or interesting, but he’s competant and reasonable, which is more than we have today.

    How sad is it that we’re talking about what happened, or didn’t, in Vietnam? Why do we care? I wasn’t alive then, so I surely have no horse in the race of who deserves the medals they have. I do know that anyone who volunteers to serve his country in hostile territory earns more of my respect than someone who didn’t. Someone who was awarded three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star has more of my respect than someone who didn’t. Whether John Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968 or was just “really close” means nothing to me. I don’t care. Our President has failed us miserably when we needed an effective leader the most. His bravado is only matched by his incompetance. Look at where we are… occupying a people who will not rest until we’re gone or dead, fanning the flames of the very terrorism we’ve vowed to stamp out, dealing with an economy that’s losing good jobs and replacing them with inferior ones, building a deficit that towers over any in our country’s history, and a military that is guilty of war crimes and torture. We shouldn’t be here. Look at what George W. Bush has done to us. He doesn’t deserve to be our President anymore.

  • Lovely Desktop Space Saver

    For you lucky Mac people, here a great little app that’ll help save your sanity as you deal with all your open apps. Hide them in tabs with Sticky Windows. I just found this today… where have you been all my life, Sticky Windows?

  • A Little Angel

    A Little Angel

    Does it get better than making a baby smile? I don’t think so…

  • Truth and Profanity

    Amen. How often we forget to be amazing… (OK, I forget).

  • Why Not Do It Now?

    Reading this post about the Plame Affair from Josh Marshall made me wonder about something. Does the Bush camp run the risk of this exploding right before the election if they don’t come clean now? I think at this point everyone accepts that someone high up in the Administration leaked Plame’s name, and the only thing keeping that person from being publicly fingered is the fact that the Administration won’t budge, and the journalists involved are protecting their sources. This has been going on way too long, and the longer it goes on, the closer to the election we get. Now, I don’t have a problem with this blowing up in the Administration’s face as Mr. X gets marched out of the West Wing in handcuffs, but you’d think the Bushies would, wouldn’t you? It should be clear to them that this isn’t going away, and it’s going to come out eventually. Why not take their lumps now when they can reasonably hope that people will forget about it before 11/2?

  • The Best Weekend Ever

    I took yesterday off (mental health day). I was originally going to take Max to see the new Thunderbirds movie, but he balked at the last minute, so I went looking for something else fun to do. I posted the picture already, but now I have time to tell the whole story. I spied the Loudoun County Farm Products Guide (I don’t remember where I picked it up), and started looking. Originally, I wanted to go visit the Chile Man because he’s only open on weekdays, but Max didn’t seem too excited about sampling 3,000 varieties of peppers and herbs. Then, I spied it, Great Country Farms. They have a website and everything. The list of things you could pick was amazing, and it looked like they had some other stuff to do as well. Boy, did they. Here’s how it went:

    1. Park, go into country store, pay the \$2.50 admission, get map.

    2. Try to guess the number of pounds the “average” American eats every year so we can get a prize. I guess thirty-five pounds. Max guesses twenty-five. We’re both way off. Americans eat an average of 125 pounds of potatoes every year. So, for being such miserable guessers, we get a yellow squash.

    3. Go through the very cool Willow Maze, make Max be the leader so I can blame him when we get stuck (we ended up taking turns because whenever we had to turn around, whoever was in the back was in the front, and therefore the leader).

    4. Find the “giant slide”, which was really a big plastic tube mounted on a little hill. It was probably fifteen feet long, and Max loved it. Watch as the boy gets extremely dusty as he figures out at least a dozen different ways to go down the slide to achieve maximum dustiness.

    5. After a thorough dusting, we decide to go pick blackberries. We get two little containers and a plastic bag and head over to the berry patch. We have a great time sitting on the ground looking for the biggest, ripest, blackest berries. Max decides he’s much better at finding the berries than picking them, “because I squish them”, he says (with a really cute little hand gesture to go along with it).

    6. After filling up both containers, we decide to go pick potatoes, since I’ve never picked a potato before, and we both like digging. We hop in the truck, drive down a dirt road, stop, get out, grab a big man-sized shovel and get to work. Let me tell you, digging for potatoes is a blast. It’s like looking for treasure. We pick up what we thought was a potato only to have it crumble in our hands… a sneaky dirt ‘tater (Max loves that phrase now, and has been calling me a dirt ‘tater for the past thirty-six hours). After finding the best possible three pounds of potatoes and putting them in our plastic bag, we start heading back in the truck.

    7. Before we’ve got a hundred yards though, we spy the most gorgeous tomatoes I’ve ever seen. I have to stop. I get out, grab another plastic bag, and set out to teach Max how to pick a tomato. Here’s how we explained it to my mom last night: “You gotta get down there, grab the tomato and twist it. Then it comes off!” Yup, that’s pretty much it. These tomatoes are heavenly. They’re big, meaty and delicious. Best tomatoes ever.

    8. Then we drove back down the dusty dirt road, and Max got to do the “coolest thing ever in my life”… he got to sit in the front seat. Now, before you call a social worker… we were on a dirt road, going five miles an hour, he was in a seatbelt and there’s no airbag up there. Plus, he was so excited, I couldn’t take it back after I offered it.

    9. We got back to the “country store”, picked out some corn, paid for our twelve pounds of produce and started driving home. Max promptly fell asleep, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

    We had such a good time. The place has a lot of other cool things we didn’t do. We’re definitely going back!!

    In other local news, we’ve found the best apple pie ever. There’s a little place called Mom’s Apple Pie Company on Sterling Blvd. (they have two or three other places in the area too). They use local ingredients in their pies, which is really cool. Now, if that were it, oh well, it’s local. But, this apple pie is the best. The crust is light a flakey, with a great buttery taste. The apples taste like apples and not just cinnamon and syrupy goo. It’s just heavenly.

    Some day, I’m going to share my thoughts on supporting “local” businesses, but not right now. I’m too tired after this weekend. Satisfied, but tired (I stained our new fence today, and it actually looks good). I’m going to go to bed and dream of big tomatoes and dirty potatoes.

  • The Fruits of Our Pickin’

    The Fruits of Our Pickin’

    love you-pick farms!! We went to the awesome Great Country Farms in lovely Bluemont, VA today and had a great time going through the willow maze, down the giant slide, and then picking our own blackberries, potatoes and tomatoes.
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    We got the squash for guessing how many pounds of potatoes Americans eat yearly (on average). We were wrong (it’s 125!!), but we got a squash for guessing. Cool, huh?

  • Sinking In A Sea of Acronyms

    I’ve been spending a lot of time researching web services, and all sorts of XML-y acronyms. The one thing I can share from all of this research is that it seems like every single article written about web services, creating them and providing information about them was written with the express purpose of giving me a headache.

    I mean, really… can’t I just go back to trying to take over the world with my pirate ship? Do I really need a battleship built of XML documents that shells unsuspecting developers with objects, services and miles of tags? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.