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?