Everything is on fire. 3200 people were ordered out of Paradise as the wind-stoked wildfire tore through, incinerating anything in its path. The shelters are full. The firefighters are exhausted. A heat wave is forecast. Nothing can be done except hope and pray. What did we do to deserve it? Nothing. When will it end? No one knows. What more can be done? Little more, as nearly everything has been tried. The governor can only say: "Our brave firefighters are doing their best!" so many times before the fatigue sets in and the best cannot be done.

But there are things a fire will not burn. No matter what heights the flames reach, they will not singe your resolve. No matter how deliberately they burn, they only clear the view to the horizon. An inferno brings nothing but dissonance, but from the human soul, only consonance. You may stand and watch the fire take it all away, and you may say that it is all in God's hands, but even God cannot touch your resolve to keep moving away from the flames, moving to a place where you and God mingle indefinitely -a grateful place of searing ardor no senseless wildfire could ever find. Then the fire will move on to destroy and devour and leave cold some other place, and having made its name known, will be easy to recognize when it returns.

~

They took it! They took it. The Family Supercomputer. Who took it? The GENIUSES at the Mac bar. The geniuses told me it may be a bad video card, maybe a bad logic board. Well, I'm no genius but even I knew that.

So, before you mock me for owning a Mac, consider this while you wait for the SAVANTS at the PC bar (oh wait, there aren't any?): I've never claimed the Mac to be a superior computer. It's got its problems like all the others. I do consider it to have a superior operating system, however. I have all the same problems PC-users have getting mine up to speed but I can fix them in half the keystrokes. Are these things irritating and confusing? Yes. But where the PCs are always asking technical questions, the Mac never does. It either handles it on its own or explains and walks you through it in something more akin to that oft-used and handy parlance: Common English.

Anyway, the thing came on the other day and it looked like a bad day on a snowy, desolate landscape of Hoth. Then, after I got it going, it wouldn't wake from "sleep", which is an affliction going around the house these days. It was under warranty so I took the thing in, and they said they needed to keep it for a few days, so here I am on the old-and-busted model. I picked it up off the floor, blew the dust off it, cranked the flywheel a few times and it fired right up! It's a sweet little model. Some day it will be downstairs in the kitchen as a recipe hub. A fine retirement.

I guess these bad video cards are making their way into a lot of computers of late. The forums are all describing the same things. I suspect that it may have something to do with the recent model upgrades and the new operating system, but what do I know? Some folks have reported getting their computer back from the GENIUSES with a faster video card. One can only hope. (oh please! oh please!)

So I made an appointment at the Mac Store and hauled the beast in. The crowd hushed and parted as I made my way to the back of the store and hoisted it up onto the bar. It was the biggest thing there. A genius was assigned to me.

The geniuses are very friendly. Still, they admonished me for not shelling out the $250 for the 3-year extended service contract last November, but then I admonished them with the plain fact that the hardware is covered for a year and the "service" only gives me tech support over the phone which is more time-consuming and less educational than actually googling it off the net. Then they kindly informed me that the hardware is only covered for a year and the service plan lasts three years and I told them yeah but I get four years of hardware service if I sign up at the end of October. Silence.

"What seems to be the trouble, then?"

"Oh. It doesn't work."

"All right, let's take a look." Two other guys shadowed him as he began to hook up the peripherals. "Don't mind us!" they said. "We're just shadowing!" They had clipboards with quizzes on them. Geniuses in training, no doubt.

Wanting to avoid all the usual jabber about things I already know (this happens to me in Home Depot and the Toyota Service Center all the time) I explained that I already performed the Disk Utility multiple times, including re-installing the system software, repairing all the permissions, zapping the PRAM, resetting the SMC, and pissing on the spark plugs. Nothing worked. "Did you try taking out that third-party memory you installed and then booting it up from there?"

The shadow geniuses-in-training raised their eyebrows. I admitted I hadn't remembered to try that. I had been assured that the RAM would work perfectly in this model. The guy nodded condescendingly, like he'd seen such insolence before. He pulled the RAM out and put it in a little baggy, handing it to me with an upturned nose. "The heat sinks on these are obviously too small." Well, obviously.

He hadn't even booted the thing up yet and I suddenly had that sickening feeling that it was going to work just fine. It must be a named condition in science, where you drive the car down to the mechanic and when you get there you pray that it still makes the bad sound so everyone can be in agreement. The genius clicked the on button and...

"Brrunngg!"

Oh, great. There was the spirited, coming-online sound (now immortalized as the Wall-E startup chime) and we waited as the spinning ball stretched and loaded. Everyone leaned in to the screen and just as I was about to panic defensively -there it was: Hoth.

"Whoa." And everyone leaned back.

Shadow Genius #2 mentioned to Shadow Genius #1 that he had seen something similar right before the power source had "blown-up" in his old Mac Pro. "Blown-up?" I asked. He made an interesting explosion noise with accompanying gesticulation. "Smoke was coming out of the housing. My ears rang for a day," he said. And I thought Macs were supposed to be so great.

The genius said they'd have to keep it for a few days, which was okay by my ears. He asked me if my hard drives were all backed up and, of course, they weren't. He chided me, asked me to sign here, said they'd have it back good-as-new-in-a-day-or-two. They needed my password and for a moment I wished it had been "upyours2", like I use for all my Internet accounts, but oh well. I signed it over and thanked him, he handed me the power cord ("Keep this. You'll need it later.") and I turned to go before I heard, "Wait!" and the DVD drive opened up with a disc inside. It was Ratatouille. "Is this yours?" he smiled. Okay genius, bring it down a notch.

They tried to sell me backup hard drives and iPhones on my way out. I resisted the temptation and made my way past the hoardes with my power cord, my cartoon movie, my memory in a baggy, and what was left of my dignity. Everyone stared. Outside in the mall, a man walked up to me and -I kid you not- asked me if there was a "Radio Shack" nearby. I told him I had no idea. "Oh," he said. "I saw you with the power chord and thought..."


~

So our wild plans for a glorious 4th celebration, the Little Ditchman's first real fireworks experience, were shelved for something much less grandiose. The reasons had to do with recent exhaustions and the general longing for "time at home" -which I put in quotes not as a sarcastic reference but as a denotation of the idyllic setting it promises -and usually delivers- when I get around to it. Note to self: Home is great. Tis a lovely place. Should spend more time there.

We'd been building up a few ideas in the head of the Little Ditchman in an effort to teach her anticipation and an understanding of the difference between the present, the near future, and the distant future. It's a tricky set of concepts for a two-year-old, this temporal construct we reside in. If you state that something is going to happen tomorrow, say, and she doesn't know what "tomorrow" even is... well, it could happen anytime, then! You see, tomorrow is what happens after today, after we sleep, and then tomorrow becomes today. And tomorrow happens over and over and over again, but it never really comes, because then it's today. And then she asks about grandma's party, where she gets to eat cake, but, uh, no, that's next week. To a two-year-old, next week is like a thousand successive tomorrows. You may as well never get your hopes up for the eating of cake.

The Big Plan was to take the old boat out into the harbor and "wear our lifejackets" as the Little Ditchman was forewarned, and then there was going to be some fishing, a barbeque on the boat at sunset, and then fireworks(!) but, alas. Lack of extra deckhands and the price of gas and the busy workweek prior to it all got in the way. We were tired before it even started. Luckily, we had also told her that we were going to see Wall-E, so it was a cinchy replacement. She munched popcorn all the way into the second act, at which point she promptly fell asleep.

Then we grabbed some old meat out of the fridge and wandered over to the neighbors to see what they were doing. I burned my arm on the unfamiliar barbeque in front of twenty strangers and pretended nothing happened. Upon our arrival the Little Ditchman noticed the other kids playing on a SlipnSlide out on the grass and we had barely made our introductions when she turned to mommy and said, "Mommy. Go get my swimsuit." Mommy did, and while she was running up the street the Little Ditchman stripped down to her skivvies and refused to put anything back on until Mommy returned with the swimsuit. So there I was with a naked little g!rl, introducing myself to strangers, right before I burned my arm.

Later, in the parking lot of a strip mall, we sat in the back of a minivan and watched the local fireworks burst overhead, pulling our legs in from time to time for the passing cars looking for parking spaces. It was fun. The Little Mermaid was playing in the backseat and we had to shut it off mid-Under the Sea and force the groaning kids out to watch the heavenly illuminations, but after a few forced "oohs" and "ahhs" they came around. Local radio synchronized some music with the fireworks and the tinny sounds of "I'm Proud To Be An American" spilled out onto the asphalt and as I sat there, looking over at my beautiful wife with our child in her lap, the two of them staring up at the colored bursts and crackles beyond the fluorescent streetlamps and power-lines, I thought, I am proud to be an American, and for a fleeting moment, it felt like a real holiday. A holy day. The kind where, though your cup is already full to the brim, just a few drops of magic are added by fate and the bounty of good fortune runneth over.

We were lucky to be born here. Every day in America is a good day.



~

Happy 4th of July! This is the day the Declaration of Independence was sent to the printers, who forthwith lost the original copy. (Can you believe it? Some things never change.) Congress voted in favor of the declaration on July 2nd, and then, in congressional fashion, spent a few days revising it. Much to the chagrin of Thomas Jefferson (who wrote it) they ended up cutting nearly a fourth of the text, including a section critical of the slave trade, then the changes were agreed upon and it was off to the printers and into history itself.

A few weeks later, on July 19th, most of congress got together and signed the nice parchment copy of the thing that everyone recognizes nowadays. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania stood in the back and refused to sign it -the only one. He had his reasons but he knew better, stating bluntly, "My conduct this day, I expect will give the finishing blow to my once too great and, my integrity considered, now too diminished popularity." He was the one who argued the most with John Adams on July 2nd, moving Adams into a passionate display that ended in the vote. John Adams was stoked! He went back to his lodgings and wrote to his wife:

"The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore."

It's interesting to note that he says "from one end of this continent to the other". The man was a visionary, even though he got the date wrong, and by "illuminations" we can be sure that he meant "fireworks".

Anyway, the image up top is what came back from the printers on July 6th. They also printed up a German version:


John Adams died on the 4th of July, exactly fifty years later. Amazingly, so did Thomas Jefferson. They were, at the time, the only two surviving signers of the Declaration, living through a little more than a fourth of our country's history. I picture them on their deathbeds, 1826, wondering about their legacies, with the thudding and booming of fireworks outside in the distance.

So they put "July 4, 1776" on the page because that's the day everyone was satisfied with the wording. If you don't know what the Declaration of Independence says, well, you should read it. It goes over all the reasons why the colonists don't like King George, and why they feel they have the right to ditch him as their leader. Among the reasons:

"He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Seriously, what a ripe bastard! Such perfidy! Actions "totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation"! You read that and none of the history that followed should come as a wonder.

We had declared our independence, but we still had to fight for it. On July 9th, George Washington read the Declaration to his assembled troops in New York, where they awaited the combined British fleet and army. (I would like to have seen that!) Later that night, American troops destroyed a bronze-lead statue of King George that stood at the foot of Broadway on the Bowling Green. The statue was melted down into bullets for the American Army.

We lost New York in the battle that followed, but won that war.

Thank God.

In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security...

~

Again with lawn-chair-and-helium-balloon-guy!

I was thinking about how I would bag on and mock this garbanzo-brained Darwin-tester when it occurred to me that I secretly envied him. I mean, imagine the rush you would get sitting there in your lawn chair, checking the altimeter and realizing you were rising too fast... and then the adrenaline shooting through your body as you precariously stand on the chair, preparing to bail out... and then the familiar wet warmth that fills your jeans as you lean forward, the chair shooting up behind you, and you flailing about for the rip cord... Well, happy 4th of July. You're a firework.

His name is Ken Couch, so it seems odd that he would choose a lawn chair, but go figure. I'm not sure how he got his wife's blessing on the third try -which seems the real feat here. He's "plenty confident" and he's bringing boiled eggs and chocolate for sustenance. Boiled eggs and chocolate? He's planned this? Oh, and jerky.

Anyway, he's got a corporate sponsor -which he'll need to pay the FAA fines. He also has five children. Now, before you go and chide him for being an irresponsible parent teaching his kids to act out on their crazy childish fantasies, consider that it may have been the five kids that drove him over the edge in the first place. I mean, seriously, five kids will make you crazy. I've only got one and I'm halfway there. Also, he has a chihuahua, which, in my humble opinion, he should take on the trip to use as ballast.

He will be launching out of the parking lot of the Stop & Go Mini-Mart in Bend, Oregon at 6:00AM on Saturday. (Think the cops will show?) There will be free helium balloons for the kids and Eastside Java will be serving Bellatazza coffee and lattes. God bless America!

Here's Ken's website: www.couchballoons.com. Check out the video.



~

The other Sean posted today a link to this website called Athlinks which is like MySpace for runners. I immediately signed up! It takes all of the races you've run and automatically plops them on a page for you, so you and others on the net can gaze in stunned awe at your accomplishments. If you're lucky, you'll get a few more races on there from other folks with the same name. Hopefully they're faster than you.

So I've signed up for YET ANOTHER free internet myfacebookspace service that asks for my bio and email address and whatnot. We are all marketing targets in this day and age, and I know that the more of these things I sign on to, the bigger those red circles get on my back. Ho hum, I'm not particularly bothered by it. Yet. You can't fight it son, they already know where you are! Thankfully, my Mac email filter sifts through all the junk pretty well. And I have one password that I use for all of these things. (It's "upyours2" if you wanted to know. It's six letters and a number, easy to remember, states how I feel, and I don't care who knows it. Want to hack into my sites? Go for it! If you have that much free time, you deserve the distraction. And I can always change it to "sukit4ever".)

The Athlinks site is kinda cool, though. I'm always sifting through my old running files to see how I performed and with what training strategy I used, so this is a nifty tool to keep it all in one place. I'm also interested in checking out my buddy's gear and their recent times and stuff, too, so it should be fun. Running is a communal event (some would argue that it's the communal event) so sites like this are good, I think.

Some people freak out about all the info that's on them out there on the Internet and it's an understandable concern. There's more than we realize, too, so if you're prone to anxiety about your identity then you're better off if you unplug the computer. I easily found a site recently that had every address I've ever lived at since 1987 and it was kinda helpful, actually, because I had lost some of those old addresses! It also had every permutation of name spelling, schools attended, various ages, and a few other mildly significant (and often incorrect) quantities. I've considered entering misinformation every time I'm asked, off by one or two data points, to throw off any future bill collectors or drunk dialers -but then I realized it's just easier to pay the bills and answer the phone.

Some people don't want to be found, I know. Some people want to live in stark anonymity and to them I say, how unfortunate for you that you were born in this age! As well, there's probably a website that flags everyone who is not connectable, thus categorizing them under the "probably problematic" heading. And then there are the people who want to be found, who would paint their names on billboards if they had a ladder handy. People who spend hours pining for celebrity and recognition -like it would increase their actual self-worth, without toughing out the difficult, thankless work of integrity itself.

And then there's the rest of us. You can find me if you look hard enough -and you don't even have to look all that hard. I keep my Social Security number to myself but other than that I don't have much to hide, and even less to impress. I'm over here going about my business in the suburbs, probably the most anonymous place in America, but sometimes I go looking for you, too. Who knows? In that vast cybernetic wasteland, we may find each other.

People do.


~

Well, okay, it's July 1st. Halftime 2008. Let's check the scoreboard and see how we're doing...

Oh.

Moving right along, then!

If you live in California, don't use your cel phone without the proper geeky headset anymore. The new law goes into effect today. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was hurtling down the freeway at seventy miles an hour eating an In-N-Out burger and I decided that this was another one of those dumb laws that was really just a waste of paper and everyone's precious time. People complain when our legislators are on vacation all the time, but I say GIVE THEM MORE TIME OFF!

Oh sure, this will probably save lives and all. So would making a law that banned people from eating in their cars while driving, or texting on their cel while driving -which is still legal, by the way. Doesn't this all fall under the category of "distracted driving" which is already an offense? Okay, fine, whatever. I don't much like talking on the phone in the car, or much at all, anyway -so it's another good excuse to not answer the phone. (It's probably just some angry customer, anyway.)

Lileks' review of WALL-E the other day was a fine example of a good movie review, if you caught it. And, by that, I mean a good movie, well-reviewed. Movie reviews can be pretty tricky, if you've ever tried to write one, and I lamented a week or so ago that I struggle finding anything to say about films that I like. I'm just set back on my stump, usually, but if I sit and stew long enough I can come up with reasons why something works and this is what Lileks does. The trick, of course, is to keep it from sounding boring and pedantic, like a college course requirement, and to persuade someone to actually go see the flick.

Bad movie reviews (that is, bad movies, well-reviewed) are much easier to do -and much more fun. The point there being to persuade someone not to see the flick, save time, and donate the money to a worthy charity. An old friend and I keep in touch from time to time by exchanging the most recent sweet review of a bad movie, and laughing about it. It began with the L.A. Weekly review of City Slickers 2 from years and years ago. I still remember its opening line:

"Yee haw! City Slickers 2 is the rootinest, tootinest piece of sh!t this side of the Rio Grande!"

Lately, it seems, one of the worst films of all time has reached the theaters, Mike Myers's The Love Guru. I haven't seen it, but the reviews are excellent! Here's an excerpt from the review on Slate.com which is titled "No Love for The Love Guru" which has the capitalized sub-heading "WOW, WHAT A BAD MOVIE."

There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good... And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone. Watching The Love Guru ...is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room. In the course of those long minutes, Myers leads you on a journey deep inside himself, to the source from whence his comedy springs—and it's about as much fun as a tour of someone's large intestine.

It continues.

Some of the lowest moments involve Sir Ben Kingsley, who appears as Pitka's mentor, the permanently cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypudha. I've read that Kingsley, who was made a knight of the realm in 2001, often alienates the English press by insisting on the usage of his full title, even in casual social situations. If he's that concerned about maintaining his dignity, he might reconsider taking on roles in which people swordfight with mops soaked in their own p!ss.

Wonderful! Can't wait to not see it! Not convinced? Okay, here's the review from the New York Times:

To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

And this is, come to think of it, something of an achievement. What is the opposite of a belly laugh? An interesting question, in a way, and to hear lines like “I think I just made a happy wee-wee” or “I’m making diarrhea noises in my cup” or to watch apprentice gurus attack one another with urine-soaked mops is to grasp the answer. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not opposed to infantile, regressive, scatological humor. Indeed, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. Or maybe a glutton. So it’s not that I object to the idea of, say, witnessing elephants copulate on the ice in the middle of a Stanley Cup hockey match, or seeing a dwarf sent flying over the same ice by the shock of defibrillator paddles. But it will never be enough simply to do such things. They must be done well.

Fantastic! It is a vast, transcendent insult to write a review of a comedy that is funnier than the comedy being reviewed.

Meanwhile, in the comedy of my life, Mrs. Ditchman is yelling from downstairs that there has been a flood in the garage.

I must be going. (Wee-wee!)


~