Summer road trip: One month away!

Last year during the first week on June, I drove to the Grand Canyon on the motorcycle.  This year, I think I'll take the same week to do a trip  with Mt. Rushmore as the main goal ... however, in planning the trip, it looks like it will also have the Devil's Tower and Old Faithful as stopping points.

Underworld Molepocalypse

We woke up this morning to the horrific site of three dead baby moles on our driveway, just inches from a hole in the ground.  No idea what's going on in the underworld, but it sure was gross (Laurel made me "be a man" and clean them up, which I did while sort of whimpering and retching a lot, but in a manly way).

My new camera: 0 megapixels

I just received something I've been wanting for a long time -- a Camera Obscura:

Here is a sample "photo" from the camera obscura (it just displays an image of whatever you're pointing at, to make it easy to trace and draw -- that's how they did art back in the olden days; a lot of what you see in museums is the result of folks sitting in darkened rooms with more tracing paper than real talent):

You just "point and draw" -- that is, you just plop some tracing paper on the glass and make a sketch, no memory card required!  If you need to focus, the front end of the box with the "lens" slides in and out.  The effect you see on the screen is a ghostly full-color image with a weird sliced-up 3D effect (you can see several different flat focal planes, giving the impression of turning the world into a parallax side-scroller video game).

This, plus Laurel's loom (not to mention Dave's new as-yet-to-blog-about affinity for paper notebooks and fountain pens with real inkwells) -- are the Stewarts becoming a low-tech, luddite family?  Well, not really, I think we've just run out of electronics to buy.

That's a bit eerie

It just occurred to me that Barry Corbin is in War Games and John Cullum is in The Day After.  They worked together (playing Maurice and Holling) on Northern Exposure.  And their shared love interest on that show, Cynthia Geary as Shelly Tambo, was on The Love Boat: The Next Wave, but I guess that doesn't have anything to do with anything (except that it was a bomb ... get it?)

The day after war games

I hope "they" aren't trying to tell us something -- the movies The Day After and War Games are both on TV tonight.  Of course, even though I have it on DVD, I have to watch The Day After over War Games as I prefer sad endings ... but which is the better movie, empirically? Let's break down the data:

Category	The Day After	War Games	Winner
Star	Steve Guttenberg	Matthew Broderick	DA
Co star	Non-crazy John Lithgow	Ally Sheedy	WG
Nostalgia	University of Kansas	Dial-up modems	DA
Realism	Persian Gulf skirmish unleashes nuclear bombs	Tic Tac Toe game saves the world	DA
Ending	Jason Robards cries in hellish KC landscape	Geek gets girl	Tie
Type	1983 TV movie	1983 theater movie	DA (for doing well with what it had)
Places I've actually been	University of Kansas	Ally Sheedy	Hey-oh!

I guess it's the The Day After in a close race.

20 years later

Kansas finally won another championship, only 20 years after the one that I witnessed locally ... the sad thing is, I wouldn't have even looked at the score except I was bored and decided to watch the last 5 minutes of an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" that I'd already seen, and was surprised to find the final score of the Kansas/Memphis game on the screen instead. I can only imagine the chaos that is happening on the Lawrence campus now -- it was certainly a night to remember 20 years ago!

How we won the war

Smoking
Originally uploaded by Seattle Dave.

Maybe this is why we can't seem to win in Iraq and yet won WW2 quite handily -- no one blows smoke directly into their 3-year-old daughter's face anymore. And we call that progress.

Dumb Guy on Rockin' Rollercoaster

Dumb Guy on Rockin' Rollercoaster
Originally uploaded by Seattle Dave.

It took me a while to get my scanner hooked up, but finally here is a scan of the "dumb guy" riding Disney's Rockin' Rollercoaster. (It's amazing -- this super-old Mustek 1200CU scanner that I got at Costco for $49 more than 8 years ago that barely worked on Win98 can still be made to work on a modern Mac OS X machine via software written for Linux called SANE + a lot of patience. Phew!)

One simple rule for making me watch your TV show

Put Kaley Cuoco* in it! Although I'd probably watch a show called "Stare at a still picture of Kaley Cuoco while buying crap from advertisers," the show "The Big Bang Theory" is all that is available right now. I got hooked on it via random YouTube clips, which is exactly what they intend to have happen. Now I've got the whole series, so far, downloaded via iTunes.

The sad thing is that I know at least five real people like each of the main geeks on the show, and even one real-life smokin' hot woman who hangs around with geeks for no reason (I married her!)

* turns out she has the same birthday as me, which means she really is a Sagatarrius as stated in the show.