Indiana Woman Now World's Oldest Person

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Edna Parker, 114, of Shelbyville is now the world's oldest person. There was a Japanese lady who was also 114 that finally kicked it, leaving Ms. Parker with the honor. The story doesn't give the birthdate of the Japanese lady, so I don't know how much it took to beat the competition up to that point. I wonder if there is a prize? I mean, other than living. After all, honestly, this new 114 year old looks okay for her age, but I can't imagine that it would be easy to live that long. Some morning I already feel ancient and I'm barely past 40. I mean, come on, 114? Hmmm. The interviewer in the story has asked some of these oldest people about the secret to long life and they've said things like "sleep a lot." Maybe this is because when you sleep, you are sort of dead, so every hour of sleep subtracts an hour from your expected time of death. If that's true, how many hours would you have to sleep until you'd go into the negatives? Would you have to start getting younger at that point? I might be onto something here. Some of you young medical school students should consider this as a dissertation. Who needs Oil Of Olay? Stay awake for only 1 hour per day and reverse the aging process entirely! Anyway, I digress. I think the interviewers generally ask the question in a format like: "So, what is the secret to a long life?" Maybe these old people don't even really know the secret, but they have to say something. More likely, they DO know the secret and they just aren't saying it. If you asked them more directly, though, they'd admit it. Like, has anyone asked this 114 year old lady if she is a vampire? I bet not! Has anyone asked her if a mad scientist actually crafted her from other body parts and then used lightning to bring her alive? I bet not even that question. You've got to be more direct with these people - you can't just ask them for the secret. That's like asking the guy with the nuclear button for the password to make the nuke go off. He's not going to tell you, period. But if you start guessing and you guess right, while he might not come out and say it, he'd look so shocked you'd know you got it right. Who would have thought that the pass-phrase to arm the nuke was "Naked Ladybug Speaks Vogon Poetry Better than a Jewish Toaster?" Honestly, that's probably really it. If you are near the buttons now as you read this blog, though, please don't try it. Or if you have to, please email me first so I can have an affair in order. I mean, get my affairs in order. Sorry, I think at my advanced age I might be catching dementia. Darn those nursing home vampires who won't share.

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Something fun to do

If you want something fun to do, check out this set of games at www.limbo.com. I heard about it on the news and a couple of people said they had won several prizes playing. They said that at first glance it looks like luck, but that there are strategies. I'm not sure about that and haven't won a darn thing yet, but it is a fun way to pass a bit of time over lunch or whatnot. Later!

How do you know When to see a Doctor for Insomnia, what to do Naturally/At-home and what to do if your Insurance doesn't cover Insomnia.

Includes information on when you need a doctor instead of over-the-counter treatments. When is an inability to sleep well or at all a sign of a serious health condition? How to use natural and other home remedies or over-the-counter remedies, and also what to do if you don't have insurance or your insurance doesn't cover sleeplessness. This article by Kate Bhaga is really useful for those who need to know about these things.

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A beginner's guide to birdhouses

A guide to building a basic birdhouse, but includes measurements and specifics to build a house for a specific species of bird. This is a pretty neat little article considering that it's just a few hundred words but it gives you plans to build houses for several different species of birds and includes some neat tips. It tells you the best way to hang the house, the best places to hang them for bluebirds vs. other types of birds, and neat additions to make the house more functional. Enjoyable and useful and even with the variety it's a simple enough project that you could do it with your kids.

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Hi-Tech Gadgets for the Classroom - from E-Chalkboards to Remote Controls

It is pretty cool that there is help for teachers who want to use more technology in the classroom (not just computers) and especially those that can help shy students, those with learning or other disabilities, and regular students who need a new challenge. Instructors can use all kinds of cool stuff like "Smart" boards that replace the old-fashioned blackboard and let them draw and write digitally among other things. There are also big-scanner devices that let you scan even large books and see the text huge so you can turn any library book into a large-print book for students with vision problems. Then there are radio frequency remote controls that can be used by the students to press a key for an answer for anything from a pre-test quiz to a full exam and even numeric answers to math questions that are on paper or up on a board somewhere. The remotes can also help if teachers want to do a class participation thing like "Why does this painting make you feel a certain way?" and the students can answer by pushing a key instead of talking out loud. I don't know about you, but as a kid my head spun during those kinds of things. In fact, that still happens to me! Anyway, if you are an interested instructor or student, check this story out.

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There are several on-demand publishing sites out there, but look at this:

All too often, authors are lured by a low upfront cost - but, it's not the publishing fees that ruin your profit, it's the book printing costs! If you think your book will sell 100 units or less, then going with the least expensive book publisher is your best choice. Plan on selling some books? This is the site to look at.

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It Just Sucks!

It's Sunday morning and I woke up with more energy than usual. The sun was shining but it was still cool out. I was excited because we bought a wheelbarrow yesterday and I had knocked down some wasp nests (using a katana, of course) in an area of the yard that I wanted to do some cool stuff with. My muscles were slightly sore from some of the outdoor work I did yesterday and they felt kind of good, so I dressed for working, put on my leather gloves, pocketed my good knife and a charged battery for the weedeater and headed outside.

What a beautiful day! I hadn't really even started yet, but we'd had to move an old kennel away from the area that I wanted to work in so I was checking the high weeds in that square to see if I could use the weedeater or if I'd have to work with hand shears. In a matter of a second I went from upright, whistling, and pleasantly warmed by the sun to down on the ground in stunned silence. Apparently some dog who had long ago occupied the now-missing kennel had dug a deep hole in a corner, but the tall grass had obscured the hole well. My foot was deep in the hole at an ugly angle and I had taken most of the fall to one knee and a shoulder. I lay there for a moment and decided I felt no serious pain, just bruises and I gingerly pulled my foot out of the offensive hole. I got up though favoring the foot a bit. It didn't seem that bad. I took a slight limping step or two and still seemed okay. Good, I could get right back to my energetic mood and get to work. So, I picked up the hand shears and took a much firmer step toward the grass further from the hell-hole. When my full weight landed on that foot a bolt of pain shot up to my knee and I was down on the ground again, thankfully not stabbed my shears. Appparently this was a bit worse than I'd thought. Now my ego was bruised as well. I crawled back upright and half hopped and half hobbled back to the house. I tried to be quiet and not wake my partner, but my now swelling foot was more aware and the bit of weight I had to apply to limp inside elicited grunts of exertion and pain.

Well, to make this long and stupid story short, now I'm sitting in my recliner with foot propped and ice on it (at the insistence of my silly significant-other who does not realize how certain I am that I will magically heal by myself within an hour.) Not only that, but she announced that two doors down they are having a garage sale. I LOVE garage sales! I could walk there in two minutes! With that news, I thought the ice had probably cured me and I got up and tried to move toward my shoes. Even with a heavy and stupid looking limp, I couldn't put quite enough weight on the foot to walk in any way that made me look other than a semi-quasimodo thing.

I know, I know, this should be great news! I'm a writer! I love to read. I like computer games. now I have the whole day as an excuse to do that stuff. BUT I whine to you, daring blog reading- I didn't WANT to do that today! I wanted to play outside! I had a new mailbox to install, a chicken coop to do some repairs on, and a pic-nic table to fix up for my new sitting area!

Then there is the other side. How hurt am I? My family is known to be great whiners (as you can see) but strangely we whine about things like the price of butter -- when it comes to actual injury or illness we are both stoic and somewhat dumb. My own grandmother broke her hip in the middle of the night but proceeded to crawl to bed and lay there in pain for the night, then get up in the morning and halfway fake horrible arthritus pain (not broken hip pain, she said) and drag herself into the kitchen with my grandfather's walker. There she cooked him eggs and sausage for breakfast and then went back to bed. She attempted to get away with convincing other family visitors that she had a slight cold that had her stuck in bed, but they would have none of it. My grandma loves to go to Dillards with my mother, and she would never say no to that over a tiny cold. So, after literally forcing her to the hospital they discovered a badly broken hip and all my grandmother had to say was that the weather was too hot, she didn't approve of the president's latest announcements on our national defecit, and the neighbor's dog had crapped on her lawn again on Tuesday. Oh, she griped, but not a word about pain or the horrible night and morning she must have had.

So, back to ME, since I am stuck sitting here I thought I'd catch up on the blog by complaining about the dent in my old mailbox and the tomato worms that are bothering my garden. After this perhaps I'll try to work on a feature article that I have a deadline on, and maybe play a good round of Jade Empire. I could read some Harry Potter since I've been wondering about the later books. I could do some celebrisurfing (another hobby of mine) and see what's up with good old Paris, Lohan, and the unforgettable Spears. Ooh, ooh, I almost forgot! I haven't watched anything on Youtube or Glumbert lately. I need to see those. I also need to watch Pirate Master on Innertube since CBS did the stupidest thing in the world (to me) and pulled a reality show that wasn't THAT bad and only 5 espisodes from the end. I've heard Innertube isn't working too well, but maybe with all this time on my butt I can figure it out. Oh yeah, I have the DVD of Black Snake Moan from Blockbuster Online. Wow, this might be a good day after all. Ok, thanks for the therapy, dear Blog Diary today! Since I usually try hard to give you some useful information on most of my entries, this being an information blog- I'll offer a recommendation. If you've never used GIMP, check it out. It's a free alternative to Photoshop and I've been messing with it. Works on Linux and Windows and it seems pretty nice. You'll find it at www.gimp.org if you want to see. Wish me luck- I'm sure that just writing this blog has now healed my foot so I'm also now going to try to walk on it again. Later!

Am I the Only Book-Lover Who Hasn't Read the Harry Potter Novels?

I'm a total bibliophile and I even admit I'm a total book addict. I keep books that I won't read again. I read books again that I have no reason to read again. I steal books from the library because I MEANT to take them back but.... I love them. I need them. (Please don't tell - you other bookaholics know how it is!) I also admit openly that I mostly read garbage. Oh, I've spent my time with the classics and I do truly love them. I spent 10 years in college (getting a 4-year English degree) and it was mostly an excuse to read. I adore Faulkners "Sound and the Fury" and Hemingway's "Travels with Charlie" (which is under-rated) and I occasionally still read some so-called literary fiction that is contemporary like Alice Walker or Alice Hoffman or Alice Jones. Ok, I don't know of a writer named Alice Jones but I was hung up on Alice for whatever reason.

Still, maybe it was those years in school to blame that thrust me into the wild and dangerous world of genre fiction. Maybe it was just meant to be. I don't really know. But now, what I read most is horror, medical thrillers, occasional mysteries, a bit of humor if it's superb (like Douglas Adams - and YES 42 IS THE ANSWER.) I even indulge in a little sci-fi and fantasy but I'm really picky about it. Back to horror, by the way, I consider myself picky there too though I read lots of crappy horror in search of better stuff. Actually, too, lots of the horror I love the most isn't really classified right. Have you read "Watchers" or any of the "Odd Thomas" books by Dean Koontz? The BEST. Of course, it's true- if Dean wrote the text on a toilet-paper package I'd have to buy it. I also like some stuff that my reading friends seem to skip right over like F. Paul Wilson. How can they not love Repairman Jack?

So, what was my point in this ridiculously long post? Um.... Oh yeah! Harry Potter. I read the first book just to see what the big woo was about. I liked it. I read half of the second book and it's well-written and I can't say I didn't like it - I just didn't finish it. Not even sure why. After that, like an evil non-reader- I stuck to the movies. I liked those too though I haven't seen them all yet. I really enjoyed the first three except for the part where Ron does that awful thing with the slugs. Eeewww. Being a book-lover, though, I just feel a little guilty here. I don't have interest in standing in long lines to be the first to get the next book. I'm not that concerned with who will die in some book that I guess hasn't been written yet? I kind of got lost on that debate. And, to be really terribly honest, the Rowling lady seems a little snotty to me. Didn't she like write her name on some statue in a fancy hotel room where she wrote a book? Isn't that kind of snotty to think that her signature would be so cool it was okay to deface someone else's property? Maybe I'm all wrong about her and if someone ever buys all the novels I haven't finished writing yet I might turn into someone awful. Anyway, I just wondered if I'm the only one.

How to Back Up Your DVD Collection

A similar blog entry was on here earlier but with a promise to include a link to a more in-depth article. So, here it is, the totally 123 guide to backing up your DVD movie collection using just free software. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/303482/tutorial_backing_up_your_dvd_collection.html

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How to Troubleshoot a Network Using Various Commands with PING

Many know how to use ping and an IP address to just check one thing, but this article can give a beginner another jump forward in using other PING commands to troubleshoot a network.

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What It's Really like to Have All Your Teeth Extracted - at 39 Years Old?

Ever wondered what it would be like to have dentures, especially if you aren't that elderly? How much does it cost? How much pain is involved? What happens during and after? This is an interview with someone who had it done at age 39. You can find the full article by clicking on this blog title or checking out the feed to the right, but overall this is a pretty interesting topic. I've thought about this a lot given my own situation and this was encouraging to me. Hope you might find it helpful.

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I'm so close, and I missed the Bag 'O Crap

Well, I've admitted a few things on this blog and you might have figured out that I'm a shameless reality-show junkie, that I like some 80's music, and that I sometimes wash the coffee pot at work 12 times before making coffee because I think it might be tainted. Until today, though, I haven't admitted that I'm a woot watcher. Yes, it's true. I don't think I have the disease as bad as some- I've never stayed up all night during a woot-off. (Though I have stayed up until 1AM to watch a woot off, and I have set the alarm for 6AM on a Saturday to check a woot-off.) I've also missed every bandolier of carrots to date. The last woot-off I was watching pretty closely, since I really wanted one. I was at work one day, still monitoring. I was asked to help with some testing in another department, so I figured I could take a woot break for an hour. There was no way there would be a Blinged Out Cabbage while I was away from my desk.

I showed up in the testing room and noticed that one guy was studying his PDA pretty hard and I accused him of watching the woot-off on wi-fi while we technology-deprived folks could not. He admitted it, but he said that this one had been non-stop for days and he didn't expect anything special. We were involved in the meeting and I had halfway forgotten about it when this guy leapt (literally) from his chair and bolted out of the room. A couple of people expressed concern for his health, but I knew that all that was wrong with him was the sudden need for crap! Sure enough, he came back in minutes later and announced that the Braille on Cookies had come and gone. I swore that the next time, I would be there for Woot! After all, I'm only a few miles from the Woot folks - right in the heart of the Dallas, Texas metroplex! It is like team spirit to be a wooter here!

So, this morning I get to work and sleeply open my browser and the random bag of crap was gone. Over. It started at midnight last night, and it was gone in minutes as usual. So, since I didn't get one, I figured I'd rave on my blog about it. I hope it's all just bags of crap! Wait, it is bags of crap... Oh jeez, never mind!

Would you stand on your head if a police officer told you to?

I try to keep my rants at a minimum, but this story just tugs at me today so I'm going to blog about it. To give credit where credit is due, I got the majority of my information about this issue from http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/228029/4/ so feel free to go there and view the original article.

In a nutshell, this is about a 70 year old woman who'd never been in any trouble with the law and found herself injured by a police officer when she balked at being interrogated over watering her lawn. Maybe she should have been more forthcoming, maybe not, but I see more and more stories like this in the news these days and it is starting to weigh on my mind. This woman was approached by an officer that was hired by some sort of neighborhood association, and he was annoyed that her lawn was brown and patchy. She was apparently freaked out about being closely questioned by a cop, so she asked if she could call her son to come over. The officer wanted to know her name, and she didn't give her name, wanting to call her son first. So, when she didn't volunteer her name, the officer tried to cuff her. She'd never been arrested and was frightened and freaked out some more, so this younger male officer got rough with her. She ended up getting hit in the nose with handcuffs, falling to the ground, injuring her leg and just generally getting banged up. She was taken to jail without receiving medical attention. When a supervisor at the jail realized that the situation might have been better handled without an arrest, the woman was released and went to the hospital for treatment. Her physical injuries were minor, but its likely the she will be afraid of and never trust a police officer again. And, I quote what she says she learned from this:

"If the policeman tells you to stand on your head, do it," she said.

Before I get into anything else about this particular case, I want to mention that I've also recently heard of a number of cases where individuals personating officers actually tried to harm people. Here is one of the worst examples:

"On a cold January night in Fort Collins, a murderer impersonated a police officer. He caused Lacy Miller, a 20-year-old young woman, to pull her car over. She thought it was a traffic stop. This coward preyed on her trust. And he brutally murdered her."

When I hear cases like these on the news, I often hear that the local police department recommends that if you have any reason to be concerned about a situation involving an officer or possible officer, ask the officer to follow you to the nearest police station where you will cooperate with further questions. Okay - so - this Ms. Perry from Orem, Utah suggests instead that if a policeman asks you to stand on your head, do it. And she has good reason to suggest that, obviously, since her encounter with an officer (and it's also more shameful that he was a real officer) led to her being injured and jailed, all for wanting to call her son for some help in a frightening situation and wanting to cease to have any conversation with the officer until she could do that.

What would you do? Would you stand on your head, if told to by a cop? If not, would you risk being roughly arrested and injured, possibly jailed - or - possibly have worse done to you by an impersonator or a rogue?

Sometimes, it's a scary world.

Books on Becoming an Expert

Just a quick note on a topic I wrote about a few days ago. You can find some good books on Amazon to expand your knowledge on this subject by going here:
Becoming an Expert

National Novel Writing Month - Nanowrimo

There is an exciting phenomenon that is called “Nanowrimo” by it’s followers, short for National Novel Writing Month. If you are a writer of any kind and you haven’t check this out, you really should. Most of my published work is non-fiction, though like many article writers, I have a long-term desire to write fiction. It’s such a primal thing, to tap into those creative juices and go! And, probably like some others out there, I have a couple of manuscripts sitting half-done. They were attempts to write full-length fiction novels that I never quite finished. My therapist thinks this is due to fear of success. I think that this could be slightly correct, but I think it’s off a bit. If success meant getting paid well to do what I love, I don’t think I truly fear it all that much. I do have some fear of the limelight, but that’s another story… What I really think, though, is that I’m afraid of the re-write process. Maybe afraid isn’t even the right work. I dread the re-write process. I like the writing process for the most part, though I do sometimes get tired of working on the same project for too long. I enjoy the research process, though it sometimes feels scary since I might do all this “free” research that never turns into anything publishable and feel that I’ve wasted all that time. Still- the bottom line is that you are not going to have a shot at publishing a novel or a book-length non-fiction work if you don’t ever finish even the rough draft of one. To me, that is where Nanowrimo can be a lifesaver.

The goal in Nanowrimo is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. For many writers, this sounds downright impossible. If you actually look at the math as well as the success of the program, it works. To write 50,000 words would mean completing approximately 175 pages. That means you’ve got to write about 1667 words a day every single day. Give or take, that’s about 5-6 pages per day. I would be that during school, you’ve crammed the writing of a research paper into a few hours and written way more than 6 pages in a fairly short time. Probably not GOOD pages, but pages nonetheless! Even many well known writers would say that their first draft is a piece of crap anyway, so why worry too much about good in the beginning? Instead, get that fetal book on paper. Get the whole thing created, with all its fingers and toes. To actually write that number of pages every single day for 30 straight days, you won’t have time to worry about much beyond its basic form. The beauty of it is, though, that at the end of a feverish month of writing, you will actually have a book.

The other cool thing about Nanowrimo is that you can go about it a couple of different ways. You can pick a month (they suggest that you really do start on the 1^st day of a month) and you can do it on your own. The creator of Nanowrimo has written a book to guide you through the process one bit at a time. It’s called “No Plot? No Problem.” Or, you can do Nanowrimo with the entire nation in the month of November. This can be very exciting and writing groups will pop up everywhere with people trying to get that book finished in that month. I would still recommend the “No Plot? No Problem” book even if you plan to write along with everyone else in November. The book can really get you through some dark spots. I only discovered this project a few months ago myself and I bought the book and tried it on my own once and made it only halfway through a manuscript again. But, I want to try it again in November with the crowd, and since I’m thinking about it now I wanted to share this with you. You’ll find the official Nanowrimo website at www.nanowrimo.org so check it out and think about it. If you decide to do it before November, feel free to comment here and let us know how it goes! I’m sure I’ll be blogging about this again when I try it again. Happy writing!

Becoming an Expert

Hello blogworld,

I've got a new article out which offers tips for anyone who needs to seriously brush up on a topic in a hurry. With my writing and other commitments I often have to quickly prepare for an article, paper or talk on something that I know a little about but need to know more. Sometimes I have enough info to give a talk on a topic, but I want to be extra-prepared in case there are questions afterwards. Other times I just feel that my knowledge isn't quite well-rounded enough and I want to flesh it out. For personal use, I developed a system that I could use. It can take a few hours to a couple of days depending on how much you need to know. While I often retain a good amount of what I learn, the system is primarily designed to help you commit the information to short-term memory. This can also make it handy for students who need to cram for an exam. Basically, it involves immersing yourself in data, taking good notes or orally committing the information to memory. To read all the steps and try it for yourself, check out the article at:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/293668/how_to_become_an_expert_fast_on_any.html

Making a DVD on a Budget:

I'm in the process of writing a more in-depth article on this subject so hopefully it will be up soon. In the meantime, I wanted to offer some thoughts on this subject. When I bought my first CD burner (a long time ago!) was amazed at how easy it was to create backups of my CD collection to take in the car. Advances in burning technology also came quickly.

When I got my first DVD burner, I expected the same. Perhaps a few hang-ups over recognized the burner hardware and some glitchy-ness when copy protection causes me issues with legally backing up my own stuff. What I was surprised to find is that it was much more complicated than that. I had trouble finding good software to do the job efficiently. I had some luck with some commercial programs like Nero and CloneDVD but after the trials ran out I hadn't had so much success that I was sure it was worth buying them. My knowledge about DVD's was rudimentary and I had trouble figuring out why a DVD could appear to hold three times as much as data as a burnable DVD would hold! Anyway, I ended up going through quite a bit of trial and error to find a process that I've finally become fairly happy with. Not only that, but I found a process that requires only freely available software.

In a nutshell, for those of you who just want to poke around, try downloading two very nice utilities. The first is DVD Shrink, which is just a wonderful program. It will read your disc and shows you what is on the disc including divisions between menus, the full movie, extra features, and so on. Then it lets you customize what you want to do with your backup. For space or quality you can choose to leave out portions of the original DVD. DVD Shrink will also compress the output file(s) for you so they will fit on your DVD R. The second utility that I use is called "ImgBurn" and I use it after I've used DVD Shrink to store my movie as an .ISO on my drive. ImgBurn can be set to burn at different speeds and does a fantastic job. Using these utilities along with high-quality DVD's (not just the cheap coasters you can buy on sale) I've had very good luck with this method. As soon as I have time to finish the full article on this I will put a link here as well. If you need extra info on this topic, check out these books on Backing Up Your DVD. Happy burning!

Recommendation for Locating Great Older Versions of Software

I've got another blog entry in the works this morning, but even while prepping that I realized that there is one site that I use so much when I need a particular piece of software. Sometimes the software isn't around anymore and other times the older versions just seem to work better for me than the newer. When that happens, I go to www.oldversion.com. This website is an absolutely fantastic resource. They have tons of software, no ridiculously long ad-filled registration process, and I hope they stick around for a long time. If you haven't seen this site and you are looking for older versions of anything from MSN or Yahoo Messenger to Bearshare to Sygate Personal Firewall (a definite favorite) or Virtual PC - this site probably has it. I hope this is helpful!

Other Online Info

From time to time, I like to recommend a particular bit of content out there on the vast web. Today I'd like to recommend a recently-discovered writer, Kate Bhaga. Check out the funny gardening article that made me laugh!
http://www.helium.com/tm/436633/whole-thing-started-noticed

The Evolution of Human Intelligence

I’ve been reading a book recently called “The Dragons of Eden” which is self-billed as “Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.” It’s quite an interesting little book, and not so pithy that it becomes no fun to read. Then again, I was already interested in this sort of thing, so I might be unusual in enjoying a read like this- who knows? It has a preface from Darwin that talks about how much Charles himself would rather be descended from a heroic little monkey than a merciless and savage tribal human from times past. I rather like monkeys, but I’ve seen enough Discovery channel videos to know that quite a few of these primates are fairly violent and merciless as well. I don’t think that necessary points toward or away from evolution and it doesn’t really make me feel like I’d rather be evolved from one group or another; I think it just points out that Charles Darwin didn’t watch the Discovery channel. (Before someone comments, I’m kidding!)

The book gets fairly interesting once its gets into the actual chapters. It’s written by Carl Sagan, by the way, which might tell you something. It got me thinking right away about the whole intelligence thing and the function of the brain. I love to read (and write) about the brain – it is as mysterious to me as the ancient pyramids or the missing dryer socks. Sagan points out that humans have expanded their abilities by setting up ways to attain knowledge from outside our bodies and I do think this is quite a fascinating point. It seems obvious at first, but when you consider that many creatures on this earth have to rely on instinct and the current environment, it really is worth looking at more closely. It makes me think about where he is going with all this – that the ready availability of information is a huge aspect of our ongoing evolution.

Sagan also gets into quite a few other aspects of brain research that I find remarkable. He refers to some studies by MacLean who claimed that the brain amounts to something like three little computers. He says that each of these “brain computers” holds its own special intelligence. He goes on to claim that each of these brains represents an evolutionary step. At the part of the brain that he calls the “most ancient” is the spinal cord, the medulla, and the pons. It contains machinery for reproduction and self-preservation. Maclean says that he has done tests that show that a reptile with only this part of the brain is sort of like a car that is idling without a driver. The second portion has to do with the limbic system, which is theorized to contain the beginnings of altruistic behavior and therefore (to MacLean) a sign of higher evolution. The third portion is the neocortex. It is theorized here that the forebrain contains elements of initiative, caution, and deliberation. Maclean takes this as evidence of further evolutionary process in the brain.

It’s an interesting book even if you disagree with the presented theories. I tend to think that some portions are fairly large leaps from what we know to what the author hopes, but I find a great deal of value in speculation so this doesn’t particularly bother me. So, I pass some of these ideas along to you!

Have a nice 4^th of July!

Monday Morning

So, for this charming Monday morning, what to blog about today? There's a new article on my content site which you can check out if you are interested in doing some woodworking. This article is geared toward beginners. It should show up on my RSS feed (to the right of this page) or you can locate it right on my content page at http://www.lynnc.info.

Over the weekend I took my life in my hands. I feel that once a person is over 40, it's time to consider the things that you haven't yet done in life. Consider some of those dangerous thing that give you a thrill and make your heart race! I had a friend who went bungee jumping for one birthday and skydiving for another. Personally, those particular thrills are too mundane for me. I pushed the envelope. I bathed a cat.

If you've never bathed a cat, then perhaps you don't get what the big deal is. If that is the case, I encourage you to go outside right now and find one. Look in the alleys or in your neighbor's backyard. Preferably, look for a dirty cat so you'll be doing a public service as well as increasing your endorphins through this extreme sport. Try to find a cat that looks pretty wary (which shouldn't be hard) since you surely want to get the most out of this experience. Then, take it in and get ready to bathe it. You want to make this as nice for the cat as possible, so run some pleasantly warm bathwater and use a gentle soap that is designed just for cats. (Don't try that human baby no-tears stuff either - they hate that.) Get some antibiotic cream ready for yourself and make sure you are up to date on all your shots. Then, just jump right in and bathe the cat. I don't need to explain more - you'll see for yourself.

Happy Monday!

Media Gone Wild or Just a Drunk Janitor?

I was recently reading regional news for my area and read a short news article that said that an investigation was ongoing at a local high school. A janitor had found a bag inside a girl's locker and he belived that it contained the remains of a human fetus.

Police and forensics folks were brought in. By the end of my workday it was also splashed on local television station news. Human remains found in a schoolgirl's locker! Nothing much was said about the girl who had used the locker (like an explanation for what the bag contained or how it ended up there) and nothing much was said about what prompted the janitor to look in the locker. Since school is probably out there, though, I would think that the janitor smelled something icky and opened the locker. The girl may not have been easy to reach with school being out. Nevertheless it apparently took a few hours for experts to determine the exact nature of the contents of the bag.

In the early evening I heard a television news update and they announced that the contents of the bag had turned out to be - oranges. Yes, oranges. Dried out and rotten, to be sure, but still only oranges. No bones. No nothing, really. Just a leftover snack that didn't make it out of the end-of-school locker cleanup.

Now, I wasn't there so maybe my thoughts on this are quite moot. I'm also not even close to an expert on forensics or even biology. Heck, I was an English major! Still- I do watch shows like CSI and Bones. I even watched E/R until it seemed to dry out like old oranges. What I'm wondering is, didn't anyone notice right away that there were probably some discrepancies in the case of the human fetus? (That would have been a SCARY 'Nancy Drew' title, wouldn't it?)

I mean, one would think that if no one noticed a pretty bad smell in April or so when school was still in full swing, the oranges probably hadn't gone totally south by then. If they were starting to rot about then, they've had somewhere between 2-4 months of sitting in that locker. Perhaps an orange would dry out and turn black and slightly resemble a tiny skull? Personally, I'd think that it would collapse and look more like a dark moldy shriveled orange. I'm only guessing at what fetus remains might look like, too, based on my CSI/Bones expertise, but I would figured that if it was old enough to have a skull the size of a shrunken orange, it would have formed at least some basic bones. The most obvious one I'd think of is a spine which seems to be a distinctive feature in t.v. corpses of all ages and sizes. Maybe these were special oranges that were packaged with a free fake vertebral column?

Yes, I know, I'm poking a bit of fun at this and surely they did have to check it out. Truthfully, if I found something really weird in a locker I'd probably assume it was something ghastly as well. I have a great imagination. Sometimes I help with deconstruction projects for a local charity and each time we tear down an old building, I feel fairly certain that we'll find a body or a box of money or some other interesting thing. It never happens quite like that. So, yes, I might have thought it was a baby too. And, once that had been thought of, I'm sure an investigation had to take place. It did make me wonder a few things. Do school janitors have a lot to do in the summer? Maybe he WAS hitting the bottle a bit. It could have been a slow day for the local media too, and what a story! Great headlines if it had worked out! "Girl Puts Baby in School Locker!"

So, anyway, that's my thought-to-blog for this lovely Saturday evening. Now, off to watch a re-run of CSI.

Why Would You Grill Beans?

"Fish don't fry in the kitchen,
Beans don't burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin'
Just to get up that hill."

Theme Song Chorus - The Jeffersons

You know, I'd noticed something slightly funny about these lyrics way back when I used to watch "The Jefferson's" but it seemed to register mostly in my subconscious. It wasn't until recently when I heard it again that it finally bugged me. Why doesn't fish fry in the kitchen? (I've fried fish in my kitchen, though to smelly results and only years ago when I wasn't a vegetarian.) Why would you grill beans? I have this imagine of someone trying to balance all these little pinto beans on the bars of the grill and the beans falling through and getting burned that way... Yeah, I know, if you were camping or something you might put beans in a pot and cook them on some sort of grill. Cowboys probably did this a lot. But, did the Jeffersons really go camping all that much before they ending up "movin' on up?" Or maybe they were cowboys before he became a dry-cleaner?

So, that said, what does fish frying and bean grilling have to do with poverty (and rather proverbially the price of rice in China) and then moving on up? This is so interesting, really.

A friend of mine said that perhaps they were literally homeless and they put cans of beans on a kind of grill or trash-can with a fire in it. I admit, I've also put canned food on grills when camping and it does tend to burn the stuff on the bottom of the can. This seems to be a possibility. Once they moved up, they wouldn't need to cook canned beans on a grill and therefore the beans would no longer burn there. This is good, but it doesn't entirely clear up the fish part. If you'd been homeless and your fish was frying in the kitchen... No, wait, if you were homeless you wouldn't have a kitchen. Ok, well, say you borrowed a kitchen... So, you couldn't afford much food so you caught some mud cats in some pond and fried that fish in the kitchen. Once you moved up, you probably wouldn't eat those icky little catfish at all, so fish wouldn't fry in the kitchen. Plus- your servants would do the frying if it had to be done or perhaps you'd eat out all the time so the fish might fry in A kitchen but not the THE kitchen which would be your own kitchen (with those fancy silver sub-zero fridges and stuff.) Speaking of which, I'd like to have a kitchen with all those funny commercial appliances and some HUGE rack of copper pots and pans hanging overhead. That would be SO cool...

But, I digress. So, I put the questions to you as the Friday koan - Why don't beans burn on the grill? And why doesn't fish fry in the kitchen? And why would you be grilling your beans? And, finally, if your beans stopped burning on the grill (and your fish stopped frying in the kitchen) how would that assist you to get up that hill?

Happy Friday!

Info for ya (since this is Lynn's info site)

I don't know about you, but I'm a bit of a geek and I use the command-line a lot. I wrote a short article to help people with some of the common and most useful commands so here it is if you want to take a look: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/63943/most_useful_run_commands_for_windows.html

How come?

How come people who make commercials actually think that the majority of viewers will buy a product or go to a website just because the commercial is so annoying that it drives you nuts? Now, I'll admit that if they are just trying to drive traffic to a site, it might work, but to spend money on it or use it? Not so much.

For example, take those horrid commercials that demand repeatedly that you "get zwinky" or something like that. Yes, they made me curious enough to look up the website. No, I didn't bother with more than a cursory glance because I'm not the target audience. So, maybe it works for the target audience? Problem with that (in my area at least) is that the ads are always on during late-night talk shows! The site appears to be intended for the junior-high crowd and I rarely saw my daughter watching "Leno" when she was that age. I don't get it...

Since my blog shall obviously be super-powerful, to all you commercial-makers who are reading this: If you want me to remember your product, annoying might work but better yet- make me LAUGH! Like the Sonic commercials with the two guys, or those gum commercials with the funny blonde lady. If you actually want me to BUY your product - tell me why I should! (I watch those swinky or zweeky or whatever commercials and I don't even know what they MEAN.) Ok, well, that's my say on commercials for right now...