The trip to Alabama and Georgia for the Mother-Daughter Camping Thing at Camp Juliette Low (which is out in the boones northwest of Atlanta) went very well, much better than I had expected.  Meredith had a glorious time, and the kids played like crazy and enjoyed the campout tremendously (even though it was raining like crazy). The camp people did a good job of keeping the kids busy, and Mere wants to go back next year (with Sissy, of course) and spend a week there.  The only hitch, of course, is that Mom Will Not Be There Too, and that gives the girls pause.  Being there with each other goes a long way to fixing that, but…they’re not quite sure.

Mere was in Sissy’s class for a half a day, and the teacher was marveling at the like-and-yet-unlike bits.  They have a LOT of personal ticks and gestures and whatnot in common, as well as responses to stimuli.  Meredith is very right-brained, Sissy is very left-brained, but all the same there’s a lot of similarities.

A quick update to the general run of things.

The doctors visits have slowed down somewhat.  Northwestern’s Infectious Disease people want to go digging to see if there’s bone involvement in the old foot wound, but it’s not because they think there’s something there, but because they’re covering all the bases.  The wound isn’t healing very fast, so the wound care podiatrist is prescribing a special new thing to put in there called ‘regranex’ that is supposed to help a LOT on healing open wounds like that. I can’t tell you how annoying having that foot messed up is…

The leukemia doc has me on a monthly infusion of immunoglobulins, which eats the best part of a day and are a pain from the sit-there-and-be-bored-while-the-IV-runs department.  Next treatment is in early June.

People asked after the last set of pictures - what’s with the odd nickname set for the twins?

Both have the same first name - Meredith - and developed the same sound nickname (sounds like the name for a female horse, ‘mare’) but the families spell it differently.  Meredith Ellen Harrington’s is spelled Mer, and Meredith Grace Ann Rittenhouse’s is spelled Mere.

The girls call each other Sissy, or refer to each other as Sissy.  So when we’re at home and talking to Meredith Grace about her sister Meredith Ellen, we usually refer to ‘Sissy’.

Obviously, this works when the parents are emailing back and forth, but not when we’re speaking to each other or the girls are present.  Then, we use “Meredith Ellen” or “Meredith Grace” to avoid confusion.  Ally is just Ally.

We have thought that the idea of having Ally pick up the phrase ‘this is my sister Meredith and this is my other sister Meredith’ would be amusing, but none of the girls would find the old NEWHART show in the least bit interesting.

Another set of photos from the trip, around the day and a half the girls spent together around Birmingham (Meredith Ellen’s home town, sort of).   Several are from a McDonalds’ Playland visit…

Here’s Meredith Grace (mine) expressing her opinion of her mom photographing her all the time:

The twins and Ally (and the moms) stopped on the way to Camp Juliette Low at a art fair in Springville, Alabama called Homestead Hollow - lots of old-time crafts of one sort or another.   The set of photos Susan took of the girls (especially of the twins working with hand looms) is here. An example:

Susan’s set of photographs of the twins, Ally and the two moms at the recent Mother-Daughter campout at Camp Juliette Low, in remote Georgia.  Here’s an example:

New Flickr set of my Mom’s scenic photography from the 1990s.  Here’s an example of a storm in New Mexico (taken while she was on a trip to see a friend out there):

More things than you ever wanted to know, probably, about horny spiny anteaters and how many -no, I'm not going there.  With embedded video of a spiny anteater that had to be retired from a zoo because he got too - ah -personal.  Well, it is science!

h/t to betnoir

A Flickr set of pictures of Susan and me, from the 1990s (part of the recent scans).

One example, from the San Antonio Worldcon:

…but I’m not the Republican nominee.

Story: Famous progressive blogger (Arianna Huffington) mentions on her big blog that McCain and Mrs. McCain had told her at a dinner party in 2001 that neither voted for Bush in 2000. McCain campaign says: Huffington is a lib’ral liar. Then several other people who were at that dinner table mention that they heard it too, including Murphy Brown, Josh and Toby from the WEST WING…or at least the actors who played them.

Whitford and Schiff said they did not hear Cindy McCain describe her vote, but both recalled how McCain had conveyed his opposition to Bush just a few days before Bush was inaugurated.

“He was going on and on about how horribly unqualified and untested Bush was, how the campaign had attacked his family,” said Whitford, a registered Democrat. “Someone said, ‘If he’s so terrible, why did you support him?’”

McCain replied that as a member of the GOP, Whitford added, he always intended to back the party’s nominee. Then, the actor said, someone asked McCain whether he had cast a vote in favor of Bush.

“He put his finger up to his lips, shook his head and mouthed, ‘No way,’” Whitford said.

Schiff remembered the conversation the same way. “My memory was he said pretty clearly, no, he did not vote for him,” he said. “I discussed it with others afterwards. It was clear to everyone he said no. Did he shout it from the rooftops? No.”

People have occasionally speculated on what life would have been like for Mere if she’d still been in China (and lived in the orphanage or on the streets).  I have no idea, of course, for certain, but things like this about child labor in China don’t help my thoughts on the subject:

China is now investigating whether hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor children of the Yi ethnic minority group in Liangshan were lured or even kidnapped to work in factories that are increasingly desperate for the kind of cheap labor that powered China to prosperity over the past two decades.

Labor recruiters — government investigators and some local residents portray them as con men — have connected two radically different parts of China’s turbulent society. They have brought together ethnic minorities untouched by economic development in their mountainous isolation, and factory owners in the prime export manufacturing zones of southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong.

Exporters have struggled to adjust to soaring inflation, a fast-rising currency and, with some irony, stricter enforcement of labor laws that make it harder to hire regular workers on a seasonal basis. Using child workers from a remote region, many of whom cannot even speak Mandarin, the country’s main national dialect, have provided a temporary, albeit illegal, solution.

A scandal involving Liangshan’s children first came to light late last month, when Southern Metropolis, a state-run newspaper, reported that as many as 1,000 school-age workers from the area were employed in manufacturing zones near Hong Kong.

And officials in Dongguan, one of the manufacturing zones where the children worked, said that they had “rescued” more than 160 young people from factories. The legal minimum working age in China is 16.

But residents of Liangshan say abject poverty, drug abuse and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents’ permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters, and then call home from a factory dormitory, hundreds of miles away.

“When our daughter left, we were quite worried,” said 42-year-old Qi Ji Gu Xi, whose 14-year-old daughter left last February. “We didn’t know where to find her. Then she called us and told us she’s a migrant worker in Guangdong.”

Such stories are not unusual. In more than two dozen interviews this week, children who had returned home from factories told of hardship and abuse. Parents living in squalor acknowledged that their children had been lured into traveling to factories. And other residents said conditions in these mountain villages were so appallingly poor that young people felt they had no choice but to leave home.

NYT reports that high gas prices are driving people towards higher use of mass transit.  (My office offers us a tax-free subsidy for using mass transit, to a ceiling of around $110 a month.  And yes, we use mass transit and the subsidy…)  However, there’s a problem:

But meeting the greater demand for mass transit is proving difficult. The cost of fuel and power for public transportation is about three times that of four years ago, and the slowing economy means local sales tax receipts are down, so there is less money available for transit services. Higher steel prices are making planned expansions more expensive.

Typically, mass transit systems rely on fares to cover about a third of their costs, so they depend on sales taxes and other government funding. Few states use gas tax revenue for mass transit.

In Denver, transportation officials expected to pay $2.62 a gallon for diesel this year, but they are now paying $3.20. Every penny increase costs the Denver Regional Transportation District an extra $100,000 a year. And it is bracing for a $19 million shortfall in sales taxes this year from original projections.

“I’d like to put more buses on the street,” Mr. Marsella said. “I can’t expand service as much as I’d like to.”

Average annual growth from sales tax revenue for the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, a rail service that connects San Francisco with Oakland, has been 4.5 percent over the last 15 years. It expects that to fall to 2 percent this year, and electricity costs are rising.

Which goes back to the proposition that people always want government services, but they don’t care much to pay for them.   The big problem with the idea of doing a gas sales tax ‘holiday’ is that (1) doing that will mean that there’s no money to repair road infrastructure - which leads to deferred maintenance until the bridges start collapsing.

And people who say this can be taken care of by a windfall tax off of the Big Oil Bidness people have to guarantee that that money is actually going to be paid, not just kicked along to consumers, and that the tax itself will be enacted over the votes of a recalcitrant We-Like-Big-Oil GOP group in the federal and state governments, who will scream RAISING TAXES at the top of their lungs and protect their corporate sponsors.  I’ll believe all that will take place - maybe after the next election puts in a more responsible set of jokers in the government.  I’m not holding my breath.

Various retailers are offering shoppers a 10% rebate or break on money spent at their stores with money from the new US Treasury tax rebate ’stimulus’ check. (For us, it’s probably going into a side of beef and some needed home repairs.)

Domino’s Pizza is also offering a “recession-busting” special of three pizzas for $12. “While you’re feeding the economy with your special refund check, let it feed you back,” the company said in a news release promoting the offer.

“A lot of people probably have high-cost debt they need to pay off with this money,” said Jean Ann Fox, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “And if you’ve tied up your stimulus check in a card that can only be used at one store, you can’t do that.”

“You’ve got to be careful that you don’t seem like you’re, what I call, like a buzzard,” said Evan Anthony, vice president for corporate marketing and advertising at Kroger. “But you build customer loyalty when times are tough.”

The real problem, of course, is that people do not have a lot of loose money around under tight circumstances, with tight budgets and rising costs of fuel and food. Of course, it would be nice if someone did something substantive about the base causes of the financial problems, food, fuel, etc.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

From Computerworld: how to salvage a hard drive from the Shuttle Columbia’s breakup during re-entry in 2003.

Still, over the past four and a half years, data recovery specialists at Kroll Ontrack Inc. have painstakingly retrieved 99% of the information stored on the charred 400MB Seagate hard drive’s 2.5-in. platters. The device was found in a dried up lake bed along the shuttle’s debris area.

h/t Dave Ihnat

From Rod Dreher:

Voter: I’m sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!

Garin: We’re closin’ for lunch.

Voter: Never mind that, my boy. I wish to complain about this candidate what I voted for not two days ago.

GG : Oh yes, the, uh, the Hillary Clinton …What’s,uh…What’s wrong with her?

Voter: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her, my lad. Her campaign is dead, that’s what’s wrong with her!

GG: No, no, she’s, uh,…she’s resting.

Voter: Look, matey, I know a dead candidate when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

GG: No no she’s not dead, she’s, she’s restin’! Remarkable bird, Hillary Clinton, idn’t she? Beautiful plumage!

Voter: The plumage don’t enter into it. Her presidential campaign is stone dead.

GG: Nononono, no, no! She’s resting!

The Tribune article on the firing of Mary Gade (the head of US EPA’s Chicago office, where I’ve worked for almost 25 years)  was the basic reporting on the story.  But check out the 150-plus comments to it, including several from people who work at the office…some of them had some pretty strong opinions on the matter.

(Note: don’t take from this that any of those opinions are mine.  They aren’t.)

Article from the Sunday Times just before the UK election in 1987 that views an alternate-history scenario leading to the scrapping of the Polaris missile submarines in the Royal Navy.

uk_times_1987_scrapping_polaris (PDF, 1.4M)

New York Post:

While the case for Hillary Clinton to stay in the race is shakier than ever, one ugly reason for staying in could be found Tuesday amid the ruddy, sun-kissed Hoosiers who cheered her on to victory at the Indianapolis Speedway.

With Clinton posing alongside pioneering Indy speedster Sarah Fisher, there were almost no African-Americans to be seen. Many in the white, working-class crowd were simply not ready to back Barack Obama - for reasons that are disturbing.

“I’m kind of still up in the air between McCain and Hillary,” said Jason Jenkins, 32, who cited information from a hoax e-mail as a reason to spurn Obama.

“I’ll be honest with you. Barack scares the hell out of me,”he said. “He swore on the Koran.”

Obama did manage to pull in many white voters, but still encountered similar sentiments from a man who refused to shake his hand at a diner in Greenwood, Ind.

“I can’t stand him,” the man said. “He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”

Such feelings leave Clinton and the Democratic Party in a tough spot. With the largest number of remaining delegates now being party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy - essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.

filkcook , in particular. A computerized, electric Mahjongg table. It notes that: The Mahjong Table have support for English languages and gosh, I can trust that there. 

Ganked from metaquotes:

"At this point, her only remaining hope for victory is that there's a sex tape out there with Obama, Wright, and Ayers in a three-way on a bed of Bibles, complete with US flag condoms and dead babies on spikes posted around the room for decoration. Short of that, she's toast."