Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • The Ha Ha Train

    Max gets to ask questions every night as part of his bedtime ritual. It’s fun, sometimes funny, and tonight was pretty rambunctious. Max also has three paintings on his wall, a plane, sailboat and a steam engine.

    Max likes to ask me how trains work. The usual answer goes something like, “Well, that big red part is the boiler. There’s a lot of water in there that is heated up by a coal fire. That turns a turbine, which turns the wheels, which makes the train go forward.” Yeah, that’s pretty much it. But, tonight, Max asked how the Ha-Ha Train works. This was a new one. Here’s my answer.

    The Ha-Ha Train runs on laughter. There’s no engine, just a car with comfortable chairs, cold drinks, and lots of popcorn and candy. There’s a comedian who stands at the front of the car telling jokes. When people laugh, the train goes. When they don’t, it stays still. When they’re laughing really hard, the train chugs along, “Chuckle, chuckle, HA HA. Chuckle, chuckle, HA HA,” down the tracks it goes.

    This answer was followed by tickling, which made Max go “Heeee heeee heee heee, heh heh heh heh,” and me go, “Chuckle chuckle, HA HA.”

  • Putnam Investments Commercial Music

    I love it when I can pick out the songs used in commercials. You know that new Putnam commercial with the picture frame flying around the office? The commercial’s fairly forgettable, but the music isn’t. It’s from Lemon Jelly‘s great In The Bath, which is on their peachy-keen Lemonjelly.ky.

    I have two of their albums, the one mentioned above, and Lost Horizons. I can’t recommend them highly enough. They’re loopy, happy, goofy fun. Definitely check them out.

  • Good Times, In A Bathroom

    SXSW was too much fun. It was so fun, we even had fun in a bathroom! How we got everyone in there, I’ll never know. I think I met and had at least a cursory conversation with all but two of the people in the picture. I was going to post my gigantic list of folks I met, but it’s been a couple weeks now, and, I don’t know, I just haven’t done it.

  • Welcome Back, P&T!

    The 2nd season of Penn & Teller’s show premiered this week! Thank goodness. I was starting to get cynical…

    Speaking of cynical, I’ve stopped checking some of the feeds in NetNewsWire. I won’t give you the list, but they’re all political, and I just can’t take it aymore. Just like during the war, I had to shut it down for a while. It’s just too much partisan stupidity, all at once, and all poisonous. I know they won’t miss me.

    Who? It doesn’t matter. I’m just tired of the bile, the partisan screwing of facts. It’s time for a break. I, again, have some time before I have to vote. It’s not even convention time yet… I can only imagine how ugly things will get.

  • Rejiggery

    Just because I still don’t feel well, but wanted to change something, I’ve redone the main page of the blog. The last couple days aside, I’ve been writing much longer posts than I used to, and the front page has been getting much larger than I would like. In an effort to make the page smaller, and allow me to post gigantic posts without any more guilt, there are only two full posts on the main page, followed by the ten most recent posts’ titles and short excerpts. I also removed the “recently” block from the menu on the right. Your comments are welcome…

    I also feel a redesign coming on. I’m not sure when I’ll have time or feel well enough to tackle it, but I am thinking about it.

    Have a good weekend, and don’t get sick like me. It sucks.

  • Sick, No Blogging

    Sick, sore throat, headache, body aches, sinus pain. Thanks a lot, Max.

  • A Little Shout Out to Composer

    Composer is usually pretty painful to work with, but I realized today that it’s my old laptop’s fault. Composer works like a charm on my swanky new G5 (oh yes, I did not tell you the story of the swanky new G5 – it will have to wait). Composer’s extremely responsive in redrawing tables and other clumsy elements when it has two, count ’em, two 2ghz G5’s to do the calculations. And no, I’m not using Composer to write anything that’s going to see the light of day. It’s a word processor replacement to update a requirements document (using a template I have to use). I hate rules.

  • Musical Mood Swings

    Be forewarned, today is “Kevin the tired, aggro, jaw-juttin’, angry white guy” day. I’m listening to Name of the Game, rockin’ out with my head bouncing and my lower jaw sticking out in the only dance us white guys know how to do.

    No, really, there’s no excuse for staying up late, getting up early, and coming into work before anyone else just to get some work done uninterrupted without that frickin’ guy saying “You’ve Got Mail” every minute, or thirty IMs hitting me at once asking me to drop everything and help them. Today, nothing is good enough. No one is up to par. You all suck and don’t know it, which makes you suck even more.

    Oh, crap, how did Clocks and Trouble get in my cock-out-rockin’ playlist? Augh!! Now I love everyone, and I’m sorry for all the insensitive things I said. I never meant to cause you trouble. I never meant to do you harm. Damn you, Coldplay!!

    This post brought to you by deadlines, work, documents I have to write using Word, people constantly walking past my door and looking at me, and the letter P

  • I Would Refute It, But It’s True

    Guess who’s number one on Google for “greatest pot roast“? Yup, me again. And unlike the last time, I’m not refuting this one. Not only is it true, it truly is the world’s greatest pot roast. Really, no kidding.

    The best part is that the recipe, with minor alterations, works for pork and chicken too. Just modify the bouillon used to marinate and baste. Oh, and if you don’t own a crockpot, you should.

  • There’s Enough Wrong to Go Around

    Michele says it’s all the Left’s fault. The Left is violent, and we’re going to cause all sorts of violence in August. Yeah, some people probably will be violent. But, it won’t be because of their political point of view. It’ll be because they’re prone to violence. And to say there’s no violence on the Right is misleading. It’s not like everyone on the Right is peace loving. Let’s look… We have the whole militia movement, from the Right (Michele is dropping “far”, so I will too, just to keep the vocabulary the same) which spawned Tim McVeigh. He killed a lot of people. There are the followers of Fred Phelps, from the Religious Right, who probably count in their number the guys who killed Matthew Shepard. If not literally, at least figuratively. Fred wants to put up a monument to Matthew’s murder. We have Pat Robertson, who went so far as to ask the Almighty to kill off some Supreme Court Justices. We have Hitler. He’s the poster boy for the Right, right? Oh, and we have Stalin. Oh wait, he’s from the Left. He killed twenty million people, which means that the Right has a ways to go in catching up, right?

    I’m not trying to make light of all the people who have died at the hands of maniacs from both ends of the political spectrum. I’m really not. But, if we’re going to play tit for tat for all the violence attributed to people registered to a political party, we’ll be here all night, tomorrow, the next day, and may never stop. We’ll end up hating not only each other, but ourselves in the end.

    I’m on the Left. I used to be on the Right, drifted to the Center, and am now drifting Left. I am not prone to violence. Most people I know, and all the ones I hang out with on both sides, are not prone to violence. They come from both parties. They’re the vast sea of people in the middle, the people who vote quietly without fanfare or protest, and live their lives the best they know how.

    What I feel happening is the silo-ization of our culture. We tend to hang out with people who think like us. It makes us comfortable. We can now consume all kinds of media now without ever having our reality challenged. On the Right, you have Fox News. The Left has CNN (well, according to the Right – I don’t really see it, but I’ll accept it for this analogy). On the web, you can read Daily Kos or InstaPundit and never leave your political comfort zone. This didn’t happen until very recently, and I think it’s causing all sorts of problems. When people who all agree get together, it forms an echo chamber. The dialogue escalates, because there’s no reason to think you’re going to hurt anyone’s feelings or offend anyone. Everyone agrees! We’re all pals here! We can speak freely! Then, the other side comes in, is shocked, and then goes back to their little corner of the world, and the force of language escalates again. It’s a death-spiral, that I fear will end in the complete death of political debate in this country.

    I tried (and failed) to fix it over at nonDependant. I wanted a dialogue. It didn’t really develop, mostly because I wasn’t sure how to keep it going or develop it. I think someone with Michele’s personality and fire could start it. If we want to fix it and stop the violence before it starts, we need to stop yelling and start talking. We need to stop laying blame and start finding solutions.

    I know this is getting long, but I want to confess something. I listened to a good part of Richard Clarke’s testimony before the 9/11 comission. I was good and fired up, angry at Bush, like the good Lefty that I am. Then, I read Reid’s post about the testimony, and the switch flipped. It doesn’t do anything positive to lay the blame for 9/11 at anyone’s feet. It doesn’t matter now. There were things missed all over. Everyone made mistakes, and it doesn’t do any good to second guess that now. It’s more important that we fix the problems that remain, together.

    We need to stop preaching to our respective choirs. The preaching is turning into shrieking, and isn’t doing anything to fix things. We need to turn around, shake hands and talk to each other: about our problems, about our respective solutions, about our dreams, our lives, our families, and our communities. It’s time to get a little uncomfortable. Hi, my name is Kevin. I’m a Lefty. Nice to meet you.