Swan Lake

    (Not the ballet.) On the short list of really good ideas is not found driving somewhere that takes an hour to reach when rain is due in an hour with the object of nature photography. I had some irrational urge to visit Swan Lake/ Iris Gardens in Sumter, 40 odd miles east of here. It's a really lovely place when the irises are in season. Unfortunately, the last day of July is not included in that period, at least not this year.
    Of course, it's still a lovely place without the irises, and fortunately the rain was very, very short-lived. It made for a very nice walk and good for my fragile psyche what with all the negative ions from the waters of the pond (OK, lake), creek, spillway, fountains, swamp and for that matter the rain. And the mosquitoes were much less fierce than most of the watery places I've visited lately. I was able to get some fairly interesting pictures, including a luna moth clinging to a cyclone fence. (Apparently this is normal luna moth behavior. I was worried.)
    OK, I would have rather had a beautiful day, but since I didn't have one it was nice to get a change of scene. And I wanted to know if there were any irises this time of year and I probably would have been somewhat peeved had I wasted a pretty day to go find out there weren't. Also they now have a Chocolate Garden (a bunch of plants with chocolate in their name or chocolate-scented blossoms) and a Butterfly Garden (with which the butterflies were not cooperating). For some reason, the entrance to both parking areas said "Bus Entrance Only" but I just ignored this and didn't get ticketed, towed or arrested. Goodness knows where civilians were supposed to park. Regardless, it was a good and fun visit, good for badly flagging morale.

Accidental steampunk

    Or maybe retroactive? I read a lot of John D. MacDonald and Dick Francis. The former died in 1986; the latter survived until much more recently, but his best work covered most of the same years. It's kind of weird as a person born in 1962 who is generally technophobic to see how much like retroactive science fiction '60s and '70s novels are.
    I'm sure like everything else I've mentioned this already, but it's surprisingly jarring to run into "Hey, I gotta find a pay phone" as a plot point or industrial archaeology type references to computers. My favorite was the early '80s Dick Francis novel that revolved around a gambling program saved to cassette tape. The novel fast-forwards to 1995 when it's no problem at all to find a computer that reads cassette tapes. Everybody remembers that, right?
    Buffs might enjoy MacDonald's televangelist novel, "One More Sunday," which features a lot of cutting edge 1984 computer technology and predictions about the near future. (Does anyone remember bubble memory?) MacDonald and Francis were both pretty obviously gadget junkies, and of course both were really, really rich and could thus indulge this habit. And I'm sure their ideas were in tune with the technology writers of their time. It's just really, really hard to predict the ways of future technology. I'm reminded of the awesome (but apparently apocryphal) Bill Gates quote about 640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody. I'm sure he meant bubble memory.

Dad burping again

    Dad unfortunately has resumed his constant burping, to the point where I'm not sure he's eating. This started some time before Thursday morning and continued through Saturday afternoon. At that time, I told him he needed to talk to a doctor or nurse and that he needed to consider returning to the nursing home or declare himself homebound and get in-home health care. Because of his severe hearing problems, I expect that he missed the first part (the important part) and got the second/third (less important) parts. All of which is extremely depressing. Long time followers of his adventures know that the last time he couldn't stop burping it led to endless hiccuping to the point that he couldn't breathe. There has to be a way to avoid all this misery.
    I'm taking him to a dermatolgist appointment this afternoon. Hopefully the problem has resolved itself. Hopefully.

Hey! Wikipedia came through!

    A long, long time ago, there was a borderline novelty hit by a garage band called The Standells. It was about Boston and was called "Dirty Water." That long time ago was 1965. At another more recent long time ago, somebody remade it. And remade it. And remade it. I would swear that I could remember versions for Columbia and for Philadelphia and maybe other cities I passed through on the bus or train. I remember thinking at the time that if they did one for Columbia, they must have done one for everybody!
    Fast forward to not a long time ago. I looked it up and couldn't find anything about the cover versions. Or maybe I thought I did. Today I looked it up again and Wikipedia came up trumps. (Assuming that's good; like I know anything about Bridge!) A neo-garage outfit (I'm not making this up) out of London called The Inmates did a London-oriented cover, then did 200 more to send out as promos to radio stations across the US. (Wikipedia says "many," but if they did Columbia, they must have done at least 200.) This was in 1979, and the record became a minor hit in early 1980. I was hearing the promos for years afterward. Certainly that was the early part of the '80s, but it was definitely after January 1980.
    Occurs to me that the band were ahead of their times. Because that particular publicity stunt was hardly likely to pay off in 1979. People hearing the promo about Columbia SC or Jackson MS are going to want THAT record, not one about London. If anything, they would probably be less likely to buy the London version. It's not like anyone in 1979 could put out a double-sided single for each town with the London version as the "A" and the Columbia version as the "B." But today, a garage band with time on its hands could market a 99 cent download of an "A" side and batch it with a free download of whatever town's version the buyer wants. Hey, it could work!
    Mind you, my other brilliant "Dirty Water" connected idea, doing it as a medley with "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" ("Aw, Lake Superior you're my home!"), might be in slightly poor taste. Too soon?
    PS: It being Wikipedia, nothing's perfect. They have the original record coming out in 1965 but written in 1966. Neat Trick Department!

Old-time radio dreaming again

    Last night in my sleep I listened to Burns and Allen (or if you prefer, George and Gracie). While I didn't have nightmares, I had endless weird, vivid dreams. Nothing that I would have expected George and Gracie to produce!
    Eventually I wound up in a situation where my brother had found a very large house on a very small (one lane, in fact) brick street, something like Charleston south of Broad or Old City Philadelphia. The house had a cellar entrance opening out to the sidewalk like you see in New York and there were so many leaves falling I needed to sweep them off. So I was looking everywhere for my yellow broom and saw somebody up the street with one and thought he had taken mine. But then I noticed that mine was in my right hand.
    Years ago, I listened to all the Burns and Allen shows. If there was anything like this in there, I think I would have remembered. Something I ate, no doubt.

Sic transit fish days

    Not to suggest that I might be in any way going sane or anything like that, but after four years of inexplicably eating fish (usually haddock, potatoes and broccoli) every Monday and Thursday, I'm letting this practice go away. The idea, to the extent there ever was one, was to get some of my iodine in a form other than tablets or iodized salt. That, and I got to like haddock, potatoes and broccoli. But it's kind of a pain in the butt keeping the haddock and potatoes in stock, or anyway the potatoes, which tend to go bad quickly. I'll probably amp up my broccoli consumption though, as that's what I've been enjoying most about fish day lately.
    I keep saying that this blog is just a syntax exercise. If anyone out there is still reading it, I'd appreciate any comments about my use or overuse of the New Yorker comma. (I think more educated people call it the Oxford or Harvard comma, but that may be something different.) What I'm talking about is trying to fix my run-on sentences by separating clauses and sub-clauses with commas, in my case like a religious observance. (See?) I guess I could fix this by going all Hemingway and shifting to short, punchy sentences, but I think a part of me would die. Run-on sentences are part of me, dammit! But maybe I'll ease up on the run-on-and-on sentences.

And ANOTHER thing

    Of course if I had any sense or editorial smarts, I'd just append this to the earlier whining and moaning about drive-throughs. But if I had either of those attributes, there would only be about 20 posts on this blog, though they would be a LOT longer.
    Again, it's nothing earth-shaking, nothing I'm up in arms about. But for all these years, I thought that I couldn't reach the drive-up ATMs because they had been positioned for the convenience of people in SUVs. But nooooo! Yesterday, I was behind a guy in an SUV who had to get out to use the ATM. (You'd think being behind an SUV at an ATM would happen pretty frequently, but my bank isn't terribly large or popular.) So apparently instead of making up their mind whether to inconvenience customers in cars or customers in SUVs, my bank (at least, maybe all of them) just left the ATM at the walk-up height in order to inconvenience EVERYbody! Which is really dumb, but what's maybe dumber still is how much better I feel about not being slighted in favor of SUV drivers. Crazy, huh?

Memory is cell-phone dependent

    I did a string of joky exchanges via text with a friend today. I have the disheartening sense that I did them all before. Not that this is against the rules or anything, but I really don't like repeating jokes if I can at all help it. I have the strong sense that I did them before on the previous (and dumb) cell phone. It's just weird to think that a new cell phone erases everything from your mind. I don't remember changing typewriters all that often, but I've certainly changed computer keyboards without as far as I know forgetting what I had typed on the previous one. Maybe it's a smart phone/ dumb phone dichotomy. Or maybe I'm just over the hill.
    Yesterday's dessert fiasco turned out not to be one. In fact very much the opposite. I took a recipe for chocolate macaroons but due to my continuing hostility to caffeine, turned it into cocoa butter macaroons. Problem was that the writer of the original recipe thought that the macaroons would solidify after 10 minutes cooling. It seems unlikely but maybe they would have. Mine didn't solidify after several times ten minutes. However, after I had given up and thrown them all into a big tupperware bowl, I had an inspiration and put them in the refrigerator. Suddenly, from mess, macaroons! So next time I'll put the whole pan in the freezer and see how that works out. I expect dreamy.

Forgot how to cook

    Either that or my taste buds have gone to heck. Lately all my cooking tastes terrible or worse, doesn't have much taste at all. Of course, this may reflect eating in restaurants more often. Or it may reflect choosing new ingredients badly. Or I may be going too light on spices after the recent "too dang many cloves" incident. I'm particularly disturbed because I went to my go-to dish (that's redundant, isn't it?) turkey chili with quinoa and it came out super-bland. What appears likeliest is that my big problem comes from not cooking as often. Between my new love for lentil stew every day and eating out more frequently, I'm cooking so much less of the time that I'm forgetting how to do it. Maybe it's finally time to write down some recipes. Naaaaaw!
    My first try at gluten-free macaroons was a true fiasco, so I'm going to try again with more honey and hopefully an actual recipe. Fortunately, I know where to get the professionally-made ones if this one is a fiasco, too. If I ever get it right, I'll no doubt post the recipe here. I apparently have no problem writing recipes for desserts; it's just main dishes where I have a block. Go figure.

Always grateful when bad stuff isn't very bad

    Dad had an appointment with the dermatologist today regarding what was probably another spot of skin cancer on his face. Unfortunately, that was what it was, but it was a quick excision. It was big enough to require stitches, but I'm sure Dad very much preferred this, because he didn't at all enjoy last time when he walked around with an open wound for a month. Don't know what the doctor was thinking that time! He's seeing a different dermatologist now.
    Similarly, while the rains have been an almost daily occurrence and while last night's were almost biblical in scale, we've had remarkably few ill effects. My friend Gypsye had a power failure last night and a tree fell against her house last week, but damage was minimal. Many, many other trees have fallen around town, but so far I've heard of a lot of miraculous escapes but little in the way of awful results. Hopefully we can keep this up, and ditto with the dermatologist!

I caught the malefactor!

    I know who (or what) bent my radio antenna! OK, I don't really, but it made for a funny photo. I got back from today's hike at Congaree National Park (complicated by a cloudburst occurring upon my arrival, but those by definition are brief) and there was this giganterific Mothra-related dragonfly on my radio antenna! I shot a picture, which is on Facebook. If you're not on Facebook, take my word for it: it's a picture of a dragonfly on a radio antenna. The rest of the car is missing from the picture, which makes it confusing even for me. But I sort of dug it.
    Mosquitoes down there are so overwhelming that even I will be taking a few days off from visiting. (I've said that before, haven't I?) It occurs to me that even with a tripod, panoramic photography would be pretty tough under those circumstances. Granted, with a tripod you can pan the camera to the proper position, slap away mosquitoes, shoot picture, and repeat as needed. But I'm not sure that I wouldn't be so distracted by the dang bloodsuckers that I would move to the wrong position anyway. I don't normally have mosquitoes lighting on me unless I stop walking. Lately they have been doing so, but not frequently. Today it was almost constant. If anyone reading this is in or around Columbia SC, you can give Congaree National Park a miss for the next week or so. I kept meeting families with young children and/or dogs, and all the people were wearing short sleeves. I hope they were all bathing in DEET, 'cause otherwise they're probably down a pint. Unless they all brought their own dragonflies.

Details, details

    I probably don't apologize enough for boring readers with the minutiae of my life, but what the hell? It's my blog, and if I want to blither about plaquettes of Madras shirts, I guess it's my right. Have I mentioned lately that this is mainly a syntax exercise? Regardless, I was very pleased and fairly surprised that my bright idea of letting my Madras shirts air-dry rather than putting them in the dryer actually did lead to planquettes much less wrinkly. It isn't as good as ironing, but neither is it as tedious and annoying. (Also impossible without getting an iron and an ironing board. Though if I wanted to be ultra-anal, I could move everything off my two folding card tables and put one facedown atop the other with Madras shirts in between. But I don't think I really do, do I?)
    OK, I admit it; I just wanted to use the subject line, "Details, details." But I did have another point relatively germane to the topic. As I can't seem to stop mentioning, I continue to be obsessed with trying to photograph nearby Congaree National Park. While it's true that the mosquitoes make this difficult, they aren't the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the views are infinitely lovely and the photographs aren't. And it occurs to me that this is because our eyes are smart and our cameras are not. In other words, you CAN see the forest for the trees, but your camera can't. I'm looking at these insanely lovely reflections in the waters, but there are so many trees large and small in the way that the camera utterly fails to capture these... details, details.

I can no longer recognize reality

    Whatever you do, NEVER get sucked into playing with panorama photography software. (What? What did you think I was talking about? Oh, well I'm not so hot at recognizing other forms of reality either. But that's not what I'm talking about today.) My phone, as I may have mentioned here and there, has a surprisingly sophisticated panorama function. However, it requires one to stand very still for a few seconds several times and requires smooth panning skills that I have only imperfectly mastered. More to the point, the location where I most want to shoot panoramas, Congaree National Park, is overrun (or flown) by astonishing numbers of mosquitoes. Personally, my dedication to panoramic photography does not run to risking exsanguination.
    Thus, today I brought along the Nikon, which I can point and shoot with a bit of preliminary preparation. I can't quite sneer at the mosquitoes, but they don't get too big a bite out of me. I shot four pictures which I thought would make a panorama. Back home, I fed them into the panorama software which came with the Nikon, but no go. The four pictures came out as a combination of two. I was disappointed but saved the result, since it was still quite cool looking. I then started combining sets of two adjacent pictures out of the four. One set came out very well, but another combination was so ridiculous it clued me that the software isn't all that great at finding where pictures overlap.
    The software took the left end of the left-hand picture and tacked it onto the right end of the right-hand picture. In other words, it got everything completely wrong. This also tipped me that my first result was probably not as good as I had thought. So I checked the first saved panorama against the second one. In both, the right-hand portion of the panorama was identical. But the left-hand section was different. Apparently the first panorama was a mashup of the very left-most picture with the very right-most, while the second one was an actual reflection of reality, a panorama composed of the third and fourth pictures, i.e. the two to the right. I really couldn't tell by looking at them which was real. It was more than a little trippy. Needless to say, I like the imaginary panorama better.

TMI: Cat edition

    You were warned! But it isn't too bad, I swear. You can still bail out though; I won't be hurt or anything.
    Don't you hate it when you have a great anecdote and it's too gross to share? In this case it's also too short for blogging and perfect for Facebook or Twitter (although I do not as yet tweet), but is definitely too gross for either. But I swear, it isn't all that bad! But you can still bail!
    OK, all it is is that my small companion sometimes has trouble with constipation. Possibly relatedly, she also has trouble with cling-ons. To get them off, she will scoot her butt along the carpet. This is probably the grossest part of the story, actually, and is also why her name is sometimes Scooter. Because I'm not very interested in having kitty poop either on my carpet or my bed, I come after her with a piece of toilet paper and try to pull the poo off.
    She wants no part of this and runs away and/or hides. The funny anecdote part of all this rigmarole is that she went and hid under the bed such that her head was under the blanket (as toddlers will cover their eyes and say, "You can't see me!") and her butt sticking out. I'm afraid that I was laughing too hard to take advantage of the situation (I got her later when she was at the food bowl, distracted by eating) but it made my day. OK, I'll try to make that the last defecation anecdote for the year.

Crepe myrtle

    I appreciate that my brain damage can't possibly be of interest to anyone but me, but of course to me it's of paramount importance. Whenever words disappear, I get worried. Particularly when they're very easy words and very familiar. I don't know about where you live, but around here there's a tree called the crepe myrtle. It has lovely pink flowers. They seem to be running particularly riot this year. I don't know if that means that the trees love the rain or that they're simply tolerant to it, but either way it's a very good summer for crepe myrtle.
    This is a quite familiar tree to me because it is one of my dad's favorites. When he was in the nursing home and barely ever went out, I was trying to get him an electronic picture frame with a slide show of the outside world, which would have featured a lot of crepe myrtle pictures. I never got around to it because his rooms were short of electrical outlets and of wall hangings, so I couldn't figure out how to get it somewhere he could see it.
    But as far as I remember (obviously not very far) I could remember the name of the tree at the time. Now it takes me several tries and sometimes some minutes to recall. Unhelpfully, my brain keeps supplying me with the suggestion, welsh rarebit. This obviously is very much like crepe myrtle in that it has three syllables, two words, and both vowel sounds and consonant sounds. But otherwise not so much.
    I find it more than a little worrying, what with having had a mother who died with senile dementia after a long, long decline. OK, a little worrying. If I start trying to fry up a crepe myrtle, THEN I'll find it worrying!

Un-ouch

    I am thrilled to report that my back has decided for reasons of its own to quit hurting. I would be even more thrilled if I had any idea what those reasons were. For instance, if the improvement were due to me buying new boots, that would be very cool. But unfortunately for that idea and fortunately otherwise, my back got better before I bought the boots.
    I have often thought that my back pain might be psychosomatic, associated with stuff that I'm afraid to do or afraid that I might not be able to do. If that is the case, well, apparently I'm not afraid anymore.
    More reasonably, it might easily be at least partially a result of stress. I am somewhat less stressed out than I have been in recent months, so maybe that's all that's allowing the improvement. But hell, while it would be nice to know the whys and wherefores so I might know what to do next time around, I'm very, very happy to be damned nearly pain-free for a change. So once again, yaaaaaay!

Bad radio = good dreaming

    Maybe not good dreams, mind you. But not bad ones, and lately that's a big plus. A couple of nights ago I was listening to one of my favorite old-time radio programs overnight, Suspense or Escape I think, and had astonishing nightmares. I mean the kind where there's a guy coming to kill me and I'm plotting to kill him first. So maybe suspense isn't the best thing to listen to while you're sleeping. (Then again, I think that was also a day I went to an MSG-heavy Indian buffet, which may well have had more bearing.)
    Regardless, for the two nights since then I've been playing a show called "Lights Out" overnight. I think I blogged about it towards the beginning of this blog, back when I was listening to old-time radio all the time in the day time as well. It was a show written by Arch Obler and was very well-received back in the day. I can't see it. Mr. Obler was obsessed with internal monologues, and tended to let them degenerate to pointless babble a fairly high percentage of the time. Also the show was supposed to be terrifying, but tended more to be merely tiresome and unpleasant.
    However, it has the great advantage of being largely recorded at a constant volume level. Thus, playing it back when one is trying to sleep is unlikely to lead to sudden spikes that will wake one (or at least me) up. Anyway, nightmares have been kept at bay so far. The only disadvantage is that if I wake up in the night anyway, it still doesn't make for very entertaining listening while I'm trying to get back to sleep. But I mean it isn't terrible; just not all that outstandingly great.
    Arch did have one wonderful episode starring himself. He had done an awful lot of shows featuring Irish cops. In this one, he imagined a monster which then started killing everyone he knew. The police were called in and when they found out who he was, one said, "He's the guy who does that radio show where all the cops are Irish." Of course, this cop was Irish, too. Well I thought it was funny!

I'm pretty sure they didn't do it

    I went back to Congaree National Park with no worries in particular about my radio aerial. (As I mentioned the other day, on my last visit some idiot bent the antenna to the point it nearly broke off. No doubt a mischievous and very smart squirrel.) I just bought new boots, so my primary concern was to break them in and see if they were less slidy on the wet boardwalk than the old ones were. When I arrived, though, it was pouring so rapidly my concern was not getting too soaked.
    There were a couple of cars in the parking lot already, which was something of a reassurance. Neither of them were black SUVs, which is what the vehicle in the lot was last time around when I arrived which was no longer there when I returned. I realize that this is no proof that the SUV driver bent my antenna, but there is a certain presumption in that direction.
    Because of the heavy leaf cover, you can walk around Congaree NP in a rain storm and hardly get wet. Or anyway not too wet. The iPod committed suicide fairly early (not a fan of rain, apparently) so anyone possibly offended by my singing along to it had nothing to worry about. The park was inundated to a really astonishing degree. It was crazy mad lovely. And it may have been all the negative ions from flowing water and falling rain but I was walking around with a silly grin for no reason that I could explain.
    Eventually I encountered a pair of women, or a woman and a girl. One had white hair and one brown; I really couldn't guess their ages. The white-haired one lit up when she saw me, saying, "Another person!" I got a kick out of it. It didn't mean anything except that she was probably surprised that a little rain was keeping everybody away from a national park on a pleasant (temperature-wise at least) weekend morning. But it's nice when anyone is glad to see me. I immediately thought, "I'm pretty sure they didn't bend my radio antenna."
    By the time I was walking out again the sun had emerged and I grinned even more. I met a family group with two dogs; while you aren't supposed to take dogs on the boardwalk it was kind of hard to criticize them with the dog trails under water. I saw the white-haired lady and her daughter (I assume) again on the way out. The former was photographing the flora and or fauna. The latter was spinning her umbrella. Just trying to look innocent, the evil antenna benders!:)
    But the real payoff to the story is another tale of just how dumb I am. I spent a lot of money on three Madras shirts from Target, not a bright move for a boy who doesn't like to iron. However, getting the one I'm wearing today wet in the rain straightened out the plaquette, and it stayed straight after it dried. So I think in future I'm not going to put them in the dryer but instead will let them dry on the hanger and see if that works better. Well hell, it's not like I'm going to take up ironing!

Unfriended again

    My Facebook friend list went down by one again. I would freely admit to being crushed and bereft, but I just don't think that that's the case. I do check to make sure that it wasn't one of my actual friends who unfriended me; if it were, I would certainly be hurt and puzzled if not quite crushed and bereft. However, what depresses me about being unfriended is not the unfriending, but rather that there are people out there on whom I've made enough of an impression for them to want at some time to be Facebook friends, but who (or whom) I simply can't remember the minute they drop off the list. Hell, I'm supposed to have total recall! What's up with that?
    Also I'm more than a little bewildered, because I actually make an effort to be inoffensive on Facebook, or at least compared to real life. I do sometimes use the odd cussword, which I think may have led to the previous unfriending, and I'm clearly a liberal Democrat, which may have led to others. And hell, I'm boring and verbose, but on Facebook you can just set it to Ignore all updates. So yeah, a little hurt, a lot bewildered, but mostly bummed that I can't even remember who the person might have been. Unfriend, I'd gladly apologize if only I knew to whom and for what.

I won! I won!

    I can no longer say that I never win anything. Last night, I went to a movie (Roman Polanski's debut, in Polish) screened by the movie club (P.O.V. Cineclub) curated by a friend of mine (Bradley). Afterwards, they held a drawing, and my ticket was pulled from the bag. I won a $15 gift certificate to one of my favorite Indian restaurants! So there!
    It was my second Polanski movie of the week, which I think brings my lifetime total of Polanski movies seen to, well, two. "Chinatown" screened Monday at the local repertory cinema; much to our surprise, there was a huge turnout. The two movies had at least a couple similarities: nice cinematography and bleak endings. And I guess there's a certain tendency on his part to treat his female actresses almost literally as mannequins. This was more the case in the first movie, but Faye Dunaway is also a little less than real-looking in "Chinatown."
    Of the two movies, I preferred the later one because it was more of a movie-movie. But I'm very grateful to the first movie for buying my lunch today. First time ever I made a profit on a movie!

Drivethroughs

    This is all about going around and around in circles, so if I've already posted about it, well, that fits. I've noticed more and more in recent years that there aren't any drivethroughs anymore. There are just drive-around-and-arounds. You nearly always have to drive completely around the bank or fast-food place in question, sometimes twice.
    I would say that it's a mystery to me, but I think I can see it. My best guess is that planners and zoners stopped granting permission for drivethroughs that customers could actually drive through, I suppose with the idea of calming traffic. What I don't see is how making us drive around and around achieves this. So perhaps that's the mystery.
    Of course it's possible that all banks and all fast food establishments just decided at the same time that they want to make their customers' day just a little more difficult and annoying. Sometimes you certainly feel that way when you're inside either type of business. But one has to assume that if they had any choice about it, at least one rogue would give a try to making the customers' lives easier instead. Or maybe that's just crazy talk.

Random violence

    This morning I went to Congaree National Park to take a short stroll. I would have happily taken a longer stroll, but as I anticipated, the park was almost totally inundated. About the only place to walk was on the elevated boardwalk, though Bluff Trail and short stretches of Sims Trail were passable. Spider webs on the elevated boardwalk were so numerous as to be almost unbelievable. However, I did recall from memory the old hiking book author trick of bringing my walking stick and swinging it ahead of me to knock down webs, so I didn't catch too many of them with my face.
    Unfortunately, I had a mild unpleasantness involving another visitor, or so I have to assume. When I got back to the car, someone had bent the radio aerial almost all the way down to the trunk, half-breaking it. Since I had opened the trunk to get my hat and walking stick when I had arrived, I know for sure that it wasn't that way before. Now on the trail, I will sometimes sing along to the iPod at the top of my lungs. It's certainly possible that some unseen person had taken offense at this. When I arrived there was only one other vehicle in the lot, so the person may have concluded that the only other vehicle had to be the loud-singing person that he wanted to strike back at. But somehow I can't see it. I think it was just some asshole being an asshole just because he's an asshole.
    It didn't cause any harm to performance; the radio works as well or as poorly as before. I don't think resale value is affected noticeably. I don't feel violated or damaged particularly, but I do see how wars escalate. If I had any way of knowing for sure who did it, I would feel a strong urge to slash his tires. I most certainly wouldn't do it, but I would definitely have the urge. A more constructive urge I'm feeling is to buy the park some "Parking lot is under 24-hour video surveillance" signs. Might help.

Coded message

    A million years ago at an airport, Boston Logan I think, a woman walked up to me and said, "Was the hat rack yours?"
    Now I've always thought that if I could have come up with a plausible reply, she would have handed me a dossier and my career as an international spy would have been well under way. But apart from silly ruminations such as this, I still wonder: what the hell was that all about? Granted that it was well before 9/11, but I'm pretty sure nobody was carrying hat racks on to airplanes back in the '80s, or even ever. Also if I had ever been near a hat rack (or a portable one anyway) I think I would have noticed. But I was so gobsmacked by being asked the question I have to assume that nothing of the sort was the case. I guess I might have looked just like somebody who had just been in the vicinity of a portable hat rack. I had a vogue around that time for dressing all in red, such that somebody on a plane with me once asked if I followed the Maharaja, but I had no idea what she was talking about. (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (which totally doesn't sound like something from Dr. Seuss) says Wikipedia.) But I think that was a different period and I doubt I was dressed particularly crazily.
    It'll just be another of those mysteries. This will be clear at least: The bonobos eat lasagna on Thursday. I'm sure you all understand.

Shelf stability

    Was that a Jane Austen novel? Shelf stability, or rather instability, is getting to be a problem here in gluten-free land. My various experiments in pumpkinage are all kinds of fun, but there's little point in posting the recipes because the last two sets of pumpkin muffins have gone sour within five, maybe four, days. So the best I can do is some observations.
    You can follow the pumpkin muffin recipe that's easiest to find via Google, the one from Libby's, and make it gluten-free without too much pain. I substituted half and half gluten-free flours, flaxmeal (which I like) and brown rice flour (which I don't, as it makes for dry, gritty-feeling baked goods). I also used honey instead of sugar, but only a little more than a half cup, which is to say drastically less sweetener than Libby's was expecting. I did throw in a little box of raisins, however. Spices included ginger, cloves, Ceylon cinnamon and nutmeg; I'm really having doubts about nutmeg. It just smelled and tasted like mustard to me.
    Anyway, point of all this blah-blah-blah is that what I came up with was REAL good bread! It may be that following the Libby's recipe left it undercooked and that's why it's turning sour. I think I'm going to make a real effort to make it as bread, leaving out the raisins and most of the spices and cook it considerably longer and see if it keeps better. If so, I'll return with a more useful recipe. One of the volunteer taste testers recommended dates; I think maybe I could go for that. So point is, I haven't gotten where I wanted to go, which was a desserty pumpkin muffin, but I think I've come up with a really tasty pumpkin bread. If only I can get it to last longer than four days without having to freeze it, I mean.

Bristles

    The reason I don't wear a beard is because the bristles that grow just to the south of either end of my mouth are so painful. I realize that you can shave part of your face when wearing a beard, but the damned things are painful unless they're shaved off completely, and I tend to have difficulty doing that as a surgical operation on a tiny part of my face. (I'm not so good at taking off the middle eyebrow, either.) So I just shave everything and make that area an especial focus.
    I mention it not because I think there are millions out there wondering why I don't grow a beard, but rather because I'm bewildered why we would have evolved that way. What is the point of having painful bristles right at the corners of your mouth? We went tens of thousands of years before shaving came about (or millions if you widen your definition of who "we" are). The only thing that makes sense is that my thinking doesn't make sense: in other words, we only developed the sensitivity to having bristles there when we started shaving the bristles off. However, whenever I've grown a beard, the sensitivity never went away. Granted, I never wore a beard for longer than maybe six months, but that seems a fairly long time. Perhaps it'll just have to be one of life's little mysteries. Or maybe I should ask somebody who's worn a beard for longer than six months. Or I could wait until they bring back the Neanderthals.

Other. People. Aren't. Deaf.

    There's a very nice fellow who drives people to and from the dialysis facility for an elder transit service. Usually very nice. There's a blind woman who gets dialysis at the facility. Once when she was led out from the dialysis area to the waiting area to wait for her ride to arrive, the older gentleman started sharing stories about the blind guy who goes to his church. "He gets around great! You wouldn't even know he's blind!" I changed the subject as quickly as I could. I'm probably the last person entitled to criticize another person's courtesy, but I just could not and can't believe that anyone could fail to realize that this might not be the most sensitive topic to talk about within the hearing range of a blind person.
    Dad has a similar problem, probably complicated by the fact that he is in fact pretty nearly deaf. Tuesday, during our hour's wait to have him called back, a lady arrived who receives dialysis in the same bay as Dad. He said, loudly, "That WO-man will probably get called back before me even though I was here first." I didn't quite shush him, but again changed the subject. The line in the subject line came to me pretty readily, though.
    Today we had to wait twenty minutes, but that's nothing much to complain about. However, in that brief period, we went from a pretty if somewhat threatening day to completely overcast and raining. I even checked the weather radar during the wait and there was practically nothing showing. The weather lately is getting ridiculous. I think I'm going to test the performance of the Weather Channel app against my Magic 8Ball app and see which does better. I know which way I'm betting. ("Answer hazy, ask again.")

What is salad, anyway?

    A local chain restaurant has signs saying, "Try our famous salad with chicken." Now, this strikes me as very foolish advertising, since unless you already know what they're talking about, you're going to say, "Isn't that a pretty pretentious way to say 'chicken salad'?" What they're talking about is an ordinary dinner salad with a piece of either fried or baked chicken on top. As I say, kind of poor advertising when it doesn't convey anything to people who don't know about the advertised product already.
    However, it leads me to a question, what the hell is a salad anyway? Chicken, egg and potato salads aren't particularly like the more common kind with lettuce and more lettuce and some more lettuce and a slice of tomato and some other stuff. It's usually cold or at least unheated and involves some kind of dressing and some kind of vegetables. It's usually a side dish or an appetizer, but there are dinner salads that serve as a main dish. So what's a salad?
    (Whatever you do, don't look it up on Wikipedia; they say pretty much what I just said except for throwing in a gratuitous "heterogeneous.") But Wikiland did help with one or two suggestions: that green thing with all the lettuce is a "garden salad" or "green salad." This suggests that a salad is a cold thing with vegetables in it, though that leaves out how I used to make egg salad. OK, a cold thing with spices, dressing or both. I'm not sure if the root world is salt (as we all once learned about "salary"; the Wikis say yes). Maybe it's a cold, salty thing with dressing. But famous with chicken.

Hey baby

    One of my very favorite songs is "4th of July" by X (the refrain to which starts, "Hey baby/ it's the 4th of July" in case you were wondering about the subject line). Not surprisingly, it sticks ineradicably in my head this one day of the year, which isn't any problem. But I'm slightly puzzled by what I call the "one song over" problem. This isn't a problem either, since I like the other song, too, but it's a little odd that I'm just as likely to have "You" from the same band and the same album stuck in my head instead.
    Maybe not that odd; I never owned the LP or CD but only the tape. So to hear one, I had to hear the entire side. Google indicates that "You" is the song before "4th of July" on the record. Damn that Jeopardy! memory of mine.
    Hope everyone out there has a pleasant 4th of July holiday and weekend. Here in dialysis lane, nothing is any different, but that's a relief compared to having to do MWF for a change. Tuesday was a nightmare; for some reason everything was fouled up and we had to wait an hour for no good purpose. Today of course will be even more lightly staffed, so we aren't optimistic. But often as not, when things look worst at dialysis land they come out the best. Hoping that that's the case today.

Range

    Since about age 12, I've been a bass-baritone. In recent years, though, I've had intermittent periods where I can hit high notes. At first, I thought this could be called singing tenor, but now I think it's just being a bass-baritone with range. I note that it always happens when I'm in a better mood. This reminds me that when one is not in a good mood, it's called being low. And you do notice that people in bad moods tend to speak in a lower than usual voice.
    It seems like this would be a useful diagnostic. I think it would have been helpful if someone besides me had noticed when I was a child that I had a strong tendency towards depression, and moreover that it often expressed itself in talking with a very low voice for a kid. Could all schoolkids be required to take chorus classes? Could the classes be taught by music teachers also trained in psychology?
    Mind you, I went to school 30+ years ago, before the advent of Ritalin. It's no part of my purpose to suggest that children should be more medicated. I guess I'm talking about a world that never existed, one where guidance counselors actually offered guidance or counseling. (In my day they offered study halls, more or less.) The only pill I think we should all be taking is the one I take nearly every day, iodine from kelp. I started about the time all this singing tenor started, too. What a coincidence!
    Maybe some day school nurses will hand out kelp tablets instead of Ritalin. It's a thought.

New series

    Andrew Vachss is the author of the Burke series of novels, a bunch of very, very hard-boiled books. However, he brought the series to a close a few years ago. Whether he did so before it got to the Burke vs. the World Crime League level (forgive gratuitous Buckaroo Banzai reference, if one can ever be gratuitous) is debatable. Even before he wound up the series, though, he would bring out non-Burke books with the promise that they were the start of a new series. And now he has a new novel out that also is supposed to kick off a new series.
    This one, "Aftershock," may really turn out to be a series-starter. It's like Burke got married and moved into a Norman Rockwell painting. And then starts killing anybody who might threaten his idyll. (Note: this would be a great idea for a novel featuring a particularly high-strung and Navy SEAL-trained Norman Rockwell.)
    The thing is, I have no problem with it not being a series, nor did I have any problem with the earlier ones being or not being in a series. I'm just wondering what the deal is. Does he or do his publishers think that we out in the hard-boiled peanut gallery will only buy books that promise to be part of a series? I can't imagine why; I mean people can count. Vachss is 70 years old now. For all that Ludlum is still producing novels in spite of being dead for Wikipedia knows how many years, I don't think Vachss' popularity or credibility would transfer particularly well to another author writing posthumous novels for him.
    I do kind of enjoy picturing a writing factory in New Hampshire like Solzhenitsyn had for a while there, but I don't think that Vachss would go for this either. His work is too important to him. http://www.vachss.com/

But Dr. Freud, what about the boring dreams?

    I've mentioned before that sometimes I have interestingly boring dreams, or rather, bewilderingly odd dreams in which next to nothing happens. Night before last I dreamed that I was in the usual cavernous building, this one large enough to hold a train station. This is to say that, while it was not a train station, a railroad ran through it and apparently the trains stopped there. What the building was, apparently, was some kind of trade school. Some kind of very, very limited trade school. They had two offerings but even in the dream I could only remember the second of them. This was training for very chatty people who wanted to become cab-drivers.
    There was an immense crowd clamoring to sign up. Lots of chatty people, I guess. I was at the front and held them all back. Only one person had been there before me, an older black fellow, so I let him go ahead of me while holding everybody else back with both arms. At first, we were at a wide counter but later it had transmogrified into a little booth manned by one guy who was ignoring us. While waiting, I noticed and read an invitation which also mentioned coursework in bank robbery. I couldn't help wondering what I was doing there since I had no interest in either driving cabs or robbing banks. The dream ended before I found out, so I guess I'll always wonder.