I’m baaack!

I pondered what I should blog about my first post back from a six month plus hiatus. There are so many issues to choose from, health care (which was the subject of my first post way back in Nov., 2003), education, the economy, socialism in America, Obama’s approval polls, well, as you can see, it’s a rich target environment.

But there’s an issue more pressing that these, something that affects each one of us.

How do we refer to the next several years?

I’m talking about speaking rather than writing because you can put it in writing anyway you want. But how will we SAY it?

None of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 nor their shortened forms, roll of the tongue like 2001-2009.

Of course, we used the entire year in 2000 and could repeat that again for the next 11 years. There are elections next year, so will we call them the 2010 elections, the oh-ten (not exactly the same as ‘01-’09 but close enough), or simply ‘10?

We like to shorten things when we can, but will these years be short-able? 2010 is only three syllables, but the rest are four or more, one more than we usually use for years when we’re talking, except in rare cases.

I’ve tried saying “10″ a few times and it just doesn’t feel comfortable. Will it become more so with practice?

Only time will tell.

Anyway, I’m back.

Filed under: After hours , Blogging

Drinking Right Alert

From Real Debate Wisconsin.

I’ll be there about 7:30.

Filed under: After hours , Drinking Right

On the “To Do” list today

1. Install closet organizer.
2. Start work on the carnival.
3. Update my coin collection.
4. Continue work on taxes.

Probably a couple of other things will sneak in there.

Oh, like doing a dinner and a movie with my daughter and son-in-law.

Filed under: After hours , After hours

Edgar Allan Poe at 200

UPDATE: The famous ‘Poe Toaster’ returned to mark the writer’s 200th anniversary, just as he has in previous years.

To mark the 200th anniversary of writer Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, a mysterious visitor again placed three red roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac at Poe’s grave in Baltimore before quietly slipping away.

The curator of the Poe House and Museum, Jeff Jerome, said about 50 people waited outside the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church, hoping to catch a glimpse Monday of the elusive man known as the “Poe toaster.” The man returns each year in the early morning darkness on Poe’s birthday.

Edgar Allan Poe was born 200 years ago today. The New York Times has a slide show at the link above of original manuscripts featuring Poe’s writing.

Poe was a troubled man for much of his adult life and that shows through most of his writings. He had a large influence on the detective fiction and science fiction genres, and his works have endured.

Filed under: After hours , Edgar Allan Poe, literature

Ditch 10 friends, get a Whopper

Got ten friends on Facebook you wouldn’t mind getting rid of? Burger King will give you a Whopper if you do. If you drop 10 friends, and you’d probably have to do this after getting one of those ubiquitous Facebook apps first, you will receive a coupon for a free Whopper. As a bonus the 10 friends you drop will receive a notification that they have been sacrificed for a sandwich.

“It’s all meant as tongue-in-cheek,” said Tia Lang, director of media and interactive for Burger King. “I mean, if I had 300 friends, there are probably 10 or so people I’m not so close with. But overwhelmingly, we see people getting the joke.”

Unless you were one of the 198,850 unwitting victims tossed into the flame-broiled abyss as of Monday evening. As I was.

Well done, Burger King. You have simultaneously crushed my ego and valued the worth of my friendship, nay, ex-friendship, as one-tenth the cost of a Whopper.

So have you wanted an excuse to clean out some dead wood among your friends on Facebook? Here’s your chance. And you’d get something in return.

Maybe I ought to make friends with all those lefties on Facebook after all.

Filed under: After hours , advertising, Burger King, Facebook

The art of sleeping in a treehouse

Part 3 of Danna Harmon’s Jungle Diary is up at the Christian Science Monitor web site. To catch folks up, Ms. Harmon has been trekking the Papuan jungles searching for a remote tribe that may still practice cannibalism. Prat one and part two links are at the beginning of the article.

My interest? I spent 21 years off and on, in a remote area on the eastern side of the island, the nation of Papua New Guinea. I want to compare notes. My looks can be found here and here.

First quote of note,

[In the evening we] hang out entertaining one another and eating beetle larvae (them) or sandwich cookies filled with pineapple cream (us) until bedtime.

Cookies are great but I don’t think beetle larvae are too bad, either, especially the younger ones. Melt in your mouth good almost.

The next passage tells about what you’ll find in a house,

The scenes within are usually chaotic, filled with chatting, coughing, and spitting, as well as babies crying and small pigs and dogs making a racket.

This includes church services, which, as you might guess, makes them exciting.

Then,

I sit with the women of the family who are topless, wear skirts made of sago fiber, decorate their hair with tiny mice bones and tails, and wear dog’s teeth as necklaces [very valuable to them, if they're anything like the group we lived with]

Another one,

Bedtime happens at about six, when it suddenly becomes pitch dark. I try reading with a flashlight for a while, but the light attracts bugs that go flying directly in my eyes, and I give up.

Mosquito nets don’t even help, especially with the “no-see-ums,” the little biting bugs that are vitually invisible. We also used to wrap ourselves with white sheets to better see the “mozzies.”

And my favorite of this article,

In what seems like the middle of the night, I wake and watch the old men preparing sago patties on a smoldering fire nearby – spitting into their palms to knead the root. A mental note regarding eating sago patties from here on out is made. A little girl with evidence of a fungal skin infection has cuddled up near me. I pull my hand out of my sleeping sheet to see what time it is: 10 p.m.

Ah, New Guinea!

Filed under: After hours, Travel , Food, housing, New Guinea (island), Papua, Travel

Who knew there were so many kinds of mosquito?

The Christian Science Monitor has Jungle diary, Part 2 up on their website.

I could identify. For example,

The jungle is beautiful – filled with mangroves, sago palms, breadfruit trees, and thousands of different species of orchids. The thick insect life, upon which I mostly will harp from here on out, is astonishing. Papua is home to some 800 species of spiders, 30,000 kinds of beetles, and who knows how many sorts of mosquitoes. This is a place of frogs, bowerbirds, cockatoos, and parrots, where 120-pound flightless birds called cassowaries are king and wild pigs roam free.

Beautiful but hot and humid,

I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the pros and cons of my long-sleeved shirt – humidity and sweat dictate it should be off, mosquitoes eating me alive prompt me to put it back on. On breaks from considering this dilemma, I am focused on the delicate art of not flying off the wet logs we traverse into murky swamps beyond. With an annual rainfall of about 200 inches, Papua is one of the wettest, and muddiest, places on earth.

The scars on my shins will testify to those slippery logs.

And the most humorous for me? This bit,

And the Korowai? Our first encounter with a jungle member of this tribe is, shall we say, underwhelming. The man has a bone through his nose and is naked from the waist down save for what looks like the cap of an acorn, strategically placed. But he also sports a red T-shirt reading www.komodoadventure.com. Cut video. I am worried that this is not the real thing.

The Korowai is the supposedly cannibalistic tribal group they went to investigate. The “ignorant savage” version of the “bait and switch.” You may think there’s nothing going on upstairs, but these guys are sharp.

And the article ends with,

I miss the corner cafe back home.

Not quite as glamorous as National Geographic makes it look sometimes.

This part is short. Here is part one, and my post on it.

By the way, what is the most deadly member of the animal kingdom?

Filed under: After hours, Travel , mosquito, New Guinea (island), Papua, Travel

The Christmas Post

Mom made Christmas. Oh, Dad earned the money, but Mom did the shopping, wrapped the presents, filled the stockings and put them under the tree.

Mom was an “equalizer,” meticulously planning the shopping so that none of us four kids got more or less than the other. My brother and I were close enough to the same age that we basically got the same thing every year, cowboy outfits one year, bicycles another; I don’t know how they afforded it, but they did.

Christmas by Mom continued after we went to Papua New Guinea to work and live. She would make sure we got Christmas presents, even if it meant gathering them in June and mailing them in July! Because that’s what it took to get to us by Christmas.

Mom left us a few years back. Christmas just wasn’t the same for me for awhile.Especially being far from the rest of my siblings and my own family getting together at Thanksgiving added to it, too, I suppose.

But Christmas always turns my thoughts to Mom. There are many others for whom Christmas is not the joyous occaision it could be. I pray they find some comfort and joy in this season.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays for all my readers.

Filed under: After hours , Christmas

“Maps of War”

Being a map geek, this site is fascinating.

An example is this one, which shows the history of the four major religions of the world.

Filed under: After hours , maps

In search of Papua’s cannibals

From the first part of a 4 part article,

The sparsely populated island of New Guinea, the second-largest island in the world after Greenland, is divided between two countries: the independent nation of Papua New Guinea in the east, and the Indonesian Papua in the west – formally known as Irian Jaya. More than 75 percent of Papua is covered by impenetrable jungle, and is home to a wide diversity of plant and animal life, as well as an array of indigenous, so-called “primitive” tribes – many of whom have little or no contact with the world outside.

Believed to number some 3,000 to 4,000 people, the Korowai of southeastern Papua are one such tribe. They were “discovered” in the 1970s but remain isolated. They hunt with bows and arrows, subsist for weeks on roots and beetle larvae, are illiterate, and don’t wear clothing. They practice polygamy, believe in witchcraft, and live in scattered treehouses some 25 feet off the ground. They are also thought to be among the last people in the world to practice cannibalism.

In some respects, there is little difference between the eastern and western half of the island. When we moved into our remote location, our neighbors were the same as described here, except they had clothes and didn’t practice cannibalism. I knew some former cannibals, but never met a practicing cannibal. They liked the thigh meat.

Traveling into the jungle, it quickly turns out, is not only dangerous, time-consuming, and physically challenging – it costs a fortune. Who knew, for example, just how expensive hiring a motorized canoe could be?

Yes, expensive. Very expensive.

I look forward to the other parts.

Filed under: After hours, Travel , cannibalism, Papua