SAT 23 JUN 2001

Thought for the Day
"I drink to make other people interesting."
-- George Jean Nathan

Freedom of Choice

More Goodbyes
Creative Dynamix bids farewell to Carroll O'Connor, best known for his portrayal of the loveable balding bigot Archie Bunker on the '70s TV series All in the Family. Also gone is bluesman John Lee Hooker, whose music was highly influential on later bands such as the Doors, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Both of these creative talents will be greatly missed.

Blame the Media
A preacher wanted to raise money for his church, and on being told that there was a fortune in horse racing, he decided to purchase a horse and enter it in the races. However, at the local auction, the going price for horses was so high that he ended up buying a donkey instead. He figured that since he had it, he might as well go ahead and enter it in the races. To his surprise, the donkey came in third!

The next day the local paper carried this headline: PREACHER'S ASS SHOWS. The preacher was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in the race again, and this time it won. The paper read: PREACHER'S ASS OUT IN FRONT. The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the preacher not to enter the donkey in another race. The paper headline read: BISHOP SCRATCHES PREACHER'S ASS. This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the preacher to get rid of the donkey. The preacher decided to give it to a nun in a nearby convent. The paper headline the next day read: NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN. The Bishop fainted. He informed the nun that she would have to get rid of the donkey, so she sold it to a farmer for $10.00.

The next day the headline read: NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10.00. This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the nun to buy back the donkey, lead it to the plains, and let it go. Next day, the headline in the paper read: NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE. The Bishop was buried the next day.

Thought for the Day
"Minds are like parachutes: most people use them only as a last resort."
-- Ben Ostrowsky

For Anyone Who's Ever Had Their Car Blocked In...

Updates
Added FiDo to the Photo Album. Also, made a sidebar link to the Rocket Flight Log.

Sun Fun

Solstice at Stonehenge

Today is the longest day of the year, and thus the longest day of the "true" millenium so far. In England, over 14,500 people attended the solstice celebration at Stonehenge. Meanwhile, in Africa, there's a total eclipse of the sun. A great day for fans of siderial phenomena.

Eclipse in Africa

God's Vacation
God is tired, worn out. So he speaks to St. Peter, "You know, I need a vacation. Got any suggestions where I should go?"

St. Peter, thinking, nods his head, then says, "How about Jupiter? It's nice and warm there this time of the year."

God shakes His head before saying, "No. Too much gravity. You know how that hurts my back."

"Hmmm," St. Peter reflects. "Well, how about Mercury?"

"No way!" shouts God. "It's way too hot for me there!"

"I've got it," St. Peter says, his face lighting up. "How about going down to Earth for your vacation?"

Chuckling, God remarks, "Are you kidding? Two thousand years ago I went there, had an affair with some nice little Jewish girl, and they're still talking about it!"

Thought for the Day
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
-- Albert Einstein

New Summer Fashion Statement

The Internet Comes Alive
It was either Saturday or Sunday morning, June 9th or 10th, when I got up and walked into my office and saw my internet friend Jane sitting at my computer. Even though I knew quite well that she and her family were visiting, I wasn't quite awake yet, and it was a very freaky experience. Here was someone I usually talk to through cyberspace actually sitting at my desk at home. After I got over the initial surprise, I thought to myself, "Wow! The iMac really does make the internet come alive!"
Later on, after coffee, I got better.

Warning Labels for Beer
The FDA is considering additional warnings on beer and alcohol bottles, such as:

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may make you think you are whispering when you are not.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol is a major factor in dancing like an asshole.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may cause you to tell the same boring story over and over again until your friends want to smash your head in.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may cause you to thay shings like thish.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may lead you to believe that ex-lovers are really dying for you to telephone them at 4:00 in the morning.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may leave you wondering what the hell happened to your pants.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may cause you to roll over in the morning and see something really scary (whose species and/or name you can't remember).

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol is the leading cause of inexplicable rug burns on the forehead.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may create the illusion that you are tougher, handsomer and smarter than some really, really big guy named Chuck.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may lead you to believe you are invisible.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may lead you to think people are laughing with you.

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may cause a disruption in the space-time continuum, whereby small (and sometimes large) gaps of time may seem to "disappear."

WARNING: Consumption of alcohol may actually cause pregnancy.

Thought for the Day
"Oil prices have fallen lately. We include this news for the benefit of gas stations, which otherwise wouldn't learn of it for six months."
-- Bill Tammeus

More Bull

Surreal mechanical cows (Orange County, NC)

There's already another picture of these guys below, but hey, they're just so cool....

Knowledge is Good Those interested in conservation of our natural resources might want to look into the continuing depletion of one of our most precious global assets -- gravity. Or you might wish to peruse a scientific treatise on the properties of germanium, as related by an investigator without access to reliable laboratory equipment. Anyway, whatever you do, don't clone Hitler. It would just make things worse. (Thanks to Doyce and the Stick for a couple of these references.)

God Bless Us, Every One
One night, a father passed by his son's room and heard his son praying.

"God bless Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma, bye bye Grandpa." The father didn't quite know what this meant, but was glad his son was praying. The next morning, they found Grandpa dead on the floor of a heart attack. The father reassured himself that it was just a coincidence, but was still a bit spooked. The next night, he heard his son praying again.

"God bless Mommy and Daddy, bye bye Grandma." The father was worried, but decided to wait until morning. Sure enough, the next morning Grandma was on the floor, dead of a heart attack. Really scared now, the father decided to wait outside his son's door the next night. And sure enough, the boy started to pray.

"God bless Mommy, bye bye Daddy." Now the father was crapping his pants. He stayed up all night, and went to the doctor's early the next day to make sure his health was fine. When he finally came home, his wife was waiting on the porch.

"Thank God you're here -- we could really use your help! We found the milkman dead on our porch this morning!"

Thought for the Day
"His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools: the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans - and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.'"
-- Terry Pratchett

Vacation Compilation
As you may have noticed, our daily updates are back after an unannounced hiatus of a week. For much of the last week, we were entertaining guests from Florida who are on their way to a semi-permanent relocation in Washington state -- Richard and Jane, and their two boys, Geoffrey (4) and John (2). We all had a fantastic time, and we couldn't have asked for better house guests.

Our company arrived late in the evening on Friday, June 8, so our adventures didn't really start until Saturday. In the morning we went out to Wal-Mart and got a little kiddie pool to keep the boys occupied. After their afternoon nap, we launched a few rockets, attracting the attention of numerous neighbors. (The rocket flight log has been updated to reflect these and other launches made over the past week.) Most of the flights went well, but the Hijax separated at deployment, and the payload compartment (which contained a blue plastic dinosaur belonging to the boys) got hung up high in a tree on the edge of the field. We recovered it a couple of days later in a rather creative way, which I will recount shortly. Later in the evening, we went out to Clarksville Station steak house for a fine meal courtesy of the Navy, after which we returned to the house and lit a very large bonfire in the fire circle. It burned out fairly quickly and was a real pain to get going again, but once we got it rekindled it burned through the night.

Launching the Heatseeker

Dinosaur in payload capsule, before the near-tragic shock cord separation

The "big ladies" at Reba & Roses

On Sunday, we visited Reba & Roses, a garden shop near Hillsborough. In addition to plants, seedlings, and garden statuary, the shop also features a lawn full of large, unusual sculptures. While we were there, we picked up a stone dog/gargoyle statue, and eventually decided to place it as a guardian of the Fire Circle. We have named it FireDog, or FiDo for short.

An atypical landscape in rural North Carolina

After spending some time at Reba & Roses, we continued to Maple View Dairy Farm for some of the freshest, mosty tasty ice cream in existence. The dairy store also carries fresh milk, butter, and cream. There were lots and lots of people there for a Sunday afternoon in the middle of nowhere, and most of them seemed to have children with them, so Geoffrey and John felt right at home.

View from the picnic tables at Maple View Dairy Farm

One of the first orders of business on Monday was to rescue the boys' dinosaur, which had been conserving oxygen and frantically radioing for help for the past two days while held captive by the rocket-eating tree. Since the tree had been mocking and taunting us by dangling the payload capsule in full view but far out of reach, we decided to take appropriate measures. This tree had to be made an example of.

The payload capsule dangles high in the evil rocket-eating tree

Using an axe and a hatchet, Richard and I went to work on the tree. After a few minutes of resisting our persistent blows, it finally yielded and fell. The capsule was removed easily from the now-low branches, and the dinosaur returned to safety with a hero's welcome and tickertape parade. The tree is still lying there, but soon it will be chopped into pieces and burned, in full of view of any other trees in the area that might be thinking about snacking on rockets. Later in the afternoon, we conducted a few more launches, this time at the airstrip behind Peaches' and Katie's house.

A launch and a recovery

Monday evening we relaxed at home, a raised a toast to the Stick with some West Virginia strawberry wine from the Forks of Cheat Winery -- the Stick himself had brought the bottle to our house last year, and we'd been saving it for a special occasion. It was a fine wine, "fleshy and full-busted" as a friend of mine likes to say. Actually it was light, fruity, and very refreshing.

On Tuesday, we took a road trip to Durham to visit the Museum of Life and Science. You could literally spend all day in this place and see something new every minute. There are exhibits on aerospace, weather, and virtual reality to name a few, and an "insectorium" full of all sorts of multi-legged beasties, including giant Madagascar cockroaches, enormous South American spiders, red-and-black assassin beetles, and (for some reason) tiny poisonous frogs colored in neon blues and yellows and reds with patterns of glossy black. I liked the frogs a lot -- they looked like they'd all gotten very professional paint jobs. But the most impressive exhibit was the three-story greenhouse that provides a habitat for dozens of species of large tropical butterflies. The air is hot and humid (as tends to be the case in greenhouses), but once your glasses unfog and you adjust to the thick warm atmosphere, it's like being in small corner of paradise. Butterflies of all colors flit and hover around exotic flowering plants, and if you're very still they might even land on your hand or your head, although we weren't treated to such intimacies ourselves. Outside there are other exhibits and hands-on activities, including a farmyard, a water-pumping game area, drums and cowbells you can bang on with sticks, and a full-scale Mercury-Redstone rocket like the one that first sent Alan Shepard into space 40 years ago. Fun for kids and grown-ups alike.

Now that's a rocket!

Tuesday night, Jane cooked us up an excellent meal of chicken stuffed with broccoli and cheese. She's quite the chef! After a delicious dessert of chocolate mudcake, the boys went to sleep and the rest of us stayed up too late watching old videotapes of Red Dwarf.

But all good things must come to an end, and on Wednesday morning our guests departed for Maggie Valley and points west. We wish Jane, Richard, Geoffrey and John a safe and interesting journey across this big country of ours.

Thought for the Day
"A formal education can sometimes be broadening but more often merely flattens."
-- Edward Abbey