July 2009

Woah.

I just woke up from a dream that I was the President (of the United State of America, tyvm), and that I had to perform my own brain surgery because no qualified surgeon would acknowledge that I even needed brain surgery. Fools!

Thing went much better than anyone had any right to expect, although it transpired that I had not planned for the re-attachment of a removed skull fragment . Working with a traumatized aide, I found a nice, sterile home for said fragment in a padded FedEx overnight pouch. “That”, thought the president, “will do until I can get to a surgeon”. (Surely even the quacks at Bethesda would agree that I needed that procedure!)

But in the interim, I had to perform some public Presidently duties. Understandably, I was unable to hide my open-brainedness. Some around me began to express (haltingly at first, then in more strident tones) concerns about my fitness for office. It was not clear whether these concerns stemmed from my alarming physical condition or the fact that I had performed my own brain surgery in the first place.

As I was waking from my dream, President me (who admits that, sure, it looks a little “crazy” and people can’t be blamed for talking et cetera) was allowing himself to be persuaded that, in all likelihood, he was a raving loon.

(That didn’t stop Nixon from serving the better part of 6 years! Ba-dum bum!)

To be fair to my administration’s critics, the results of my surgery looked a bit more like this picture than my description of a mild trepannation might suggest—with the top of my skull clean off (skin, hair and all) and my superior, better-than-average, more-than-usual POTUS brain pulsating for all the world to see. One of the funnier moments of my dream (there were so many!) involved my aide trying to fold the FedEx envelope containing the top of my skull so that it would fit in a jacket pocket, and I’m all like “dude, wtf? [laughtrack titter] That’s. My. Skull! [laughtrack roar]” I think if it were a sitcom, that would be my catchphrase.

Most photographs don’t adequately portray the magnificence of the

See original: The Big Corona

Americans are notorious for their ignorance of global issues and international news.  This may be because Americans aren’t interested or it may be that our news outlets feed us fluff and focus us only on the U.S.  Probably it’s a vicious cycle.

Dmitriy T.M. pointed me to some stunning evidence of this phenomenon.

The cover story for Newsweek magazine’s September 2006 edition was “Losing Afghanistan” in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.  It was “My Life in Pictures,” a story about the photographer Annie Liebovitz in the U.S. (via):

The cover story for Newsweek magazine’s October 2006 edition was “Global Warming’s First Victim” in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.  It was “Off Message,” a story about Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s sexually suggestive emails and IMs to teenage boys (via):

The cover story for Time magazine’s April 2007 edition was “Talibanistan” in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.  It was “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public Schools” in the U.S. (via, also see Time):

See original: American Vs. International News: Time And Newsweek

AT and I spent the first half of our week off doing little more than reading and, in AT’s case, knitting. Oh, and playing Rummy. It was the best. Here are a few pictures from our time in Horse Cove (outside of Highlands, North Carolina).

Daisy (L) and Olive came with us. They spent most of their time off-leash, but getting them to sit still for a picture required a moderating influence.

From the front yard, looking down the driveway. This yard is the cleared space at 10 o’clock from the lake in the map at the end of this post.

There’s the house itself as seen from the road winding down to the creek.

Here’s the “lake” in the middle of the cove. It mysteriously drained last summer. It appears that the contractor who refurbished the spillway 15 years ago laid a new pipe through the dam and, rather than filling the old one with concrete, he just covered both ends with dirt. Which, predictably, was insufficient. It was still a lake when the satellite image now showing in the map below was taken.

Someone really got their 4th on.

There’s the road back up to Highlands. For a decade, Ian and I put several days a year into stacking creek rocks into a series of little dams in that stream. I always suspected we were not alone in this endeavor, and it looks like work continues apace. This picture was taken looking West-Southwest in the field near the bottom right of the map below.

There was too much moisture in the air for taking pictures of the night sky, and the only shot I ended up keeping was this one, where I accidentally moved enough to trigger the motion-sensing flood lights that I never did figure out how to turn off.