Jim's Occasional Journal of Sorts

Reprint:

2009-12-09T08:15:50Z

The local suburban daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, is reprinting the Newsweek story on the twins with different photos:

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=342760

Newsweek article about the twins:

2009-12-04T07:44:32Z

http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1
The Power of Two:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098
Photo gallery of the kids, etc. The Intro picture is particularly stunning.

This has been in the works since spring. Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots. The interviews mostly were around Duckcon.

There are errors. They goofed on the date Meredith Grace was found (a year earlier), and a few little things. (For instance, a photo that was supposed to be of our house in the Chicago suburbs is really of the other family’s home in suburban Birmingham. Our house is not nearly as new, etc.)

But it’s written beautifully, and we are very happy with it. That’s it for twin stories in the news until they’re grown up and can talk on their own…if that ever happens! Enjoy the article and the photos!

Ice on road ahead:

2009-12-03T18:17:05Z

Nurrrrrrrrr.

Next, QVC:

2009-12-02T23:57:04Z

“Sarah Palin is a great friend to the bowling industry and we’re so proud and honored to welcome her as our keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010,” said Steven Johnson, executive director of the BPAA.

A bowling columnist writes:

Politicians don’t seem to give a hoot about championing the great sport of bowling and that bothers me when politicians who know nothing about bowling are invited to speak at a bowling convention and barely mention the sport. I would venture a guess that a keynote speaker at Bowl Expo earns between $25,000 and $50,000 for maybe 25 minutes of jokes and their beliefs about what is happening in the country…views they probably have expressed numerous times on numerous cable and network TV shows.

And that’s the point. The convention brings her in for the publicity and she’s there for the payoff and to reread her lines.

Heads up:

2009-12-02T21:51:43Z

The article I’ve been talking about in the recent past is about to come out; more details when it’s actually available.

Mere’s 10th Birthday Stuff:

2009-12-01T16:32:32Z

Meredith’s 10th birthday (and that of her twin sister Mer, of course) is today, and we are having a series of birthday parties for her; the first included Susan’s aunt(s) at their home in Elgin over the weekend, and the next is a just-the-household one tonight, and then this Saturday night, Mere has five pals over for a sleepover in the downstairs library.

My big thing this week is to whip the library area into shape, odd-stuff-wise, before the kids get here on Saturday. I’m also awaiting the household Christmas present; instead of getting each other a lot of stuff, we’re pooling resources and replacing our main TV with a HDTV. The delivery is supposed to be today, and so I have to be attentive to the doorbell – did I mention that our upstairs ringer for the doorbell doesn’t work? I have to rely on good ears and our ever-vigilant dogs who usually raise hell and selected sections of purgatory if they see someone coming to the house.

One big thing in the cleanup process is in rendering out a ton of magazines that have been sitting in piles in the basement; stacked up on shelves, but occupying a lot of space. I’d love to keep a lot of them for photo reference stuff, but I’d imagine that if I did that, I’d never get to them. So I riff through them and see if there’s anything article-wise of value, and then toss the rest after I’ve quickly taken out the article. This results in about 98% of the magazine(s) going into the recycling bin.

Also a lot of other follow-up stuff;

getting a special present for Mere (she has been dying for a typewriter, and I have a good lead for one in excellent condition in the city, and no, I hate typewriters; my frustrations with them in college and law school is what got me into computers in the first place).
getting dark chocolate letters made up (SMJC) for Sinterklaas’ visit this weekend.
getting cakes for Mere’s two birthday celebrations; I need to double-check with Mere and Susan about if cupcakes are needed for the sleepover club this weekend
and many other odds and ends of the same sort.

Photo courtesy of Sue Combs, who took it a few weeks ago on her trip to Chicago. Thanks, Sue!

Food: need recipe...

2009-11-26T17:42:44Z

Susan swears up and down that someone on he friends-list on LiveJournal (which is a subset of mine, basically) posted a good recipe for christmas cookies and we've been going nuts trying to find it.

Mere and I are VERY fond of speculaas and kruidnoten; they are ginger cookies that are family pass-downs, and normally, I just buy a sack of kruidnoten (NOT the Frisian style) and speculaas at a store or online; Susan said that she wanted to make some, so I have been frantically digging around for a recipe. (note: my family background is 'lotharingian', but a lot of my food stuff interests come from the Netherlands and the Wesphalian area of Germany.

If anyone out there has a good recipe for these or had originally posted this recipe that Susan remembers being up in the last couple of months, please let me know. Thanks!

Best examples I've come up with so far:
http://www.kayotic.nl/blog/?p=5803
http://www.kayotic.nl/blog/?p=5698

And no, there's no existing family recipe around or anyone alive left to ask. *sigh*

Food: Zut alors!

2009-11-26T13:14:18Z

Just the thing for your Thanksgiving feast: White Castle Hamburger stuffing to go with your turkey. Mange! Vite, vite!

Yes, I’d use it for fun if we were having a weird-food-party this New Years Eve. Which, unfortunately, we won’t. (Mere and I like White Castle; its one of the odd tastes that I got from my Dad.)

Animules attack:

2009-11-19T13:13:05Z

Rampaging red squirrels in France
Kashmiri militants, meet bear. Bear, eat militants.
Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.

Needless to say:

And enough rotting meat to fill a high school gym did exactly what you’d expect: It stank.

It stank at the bank. It smelled at the law office. It reeked at the cafe. Even the jewelry store wasn’t immune. Everyone in this tiny town could smell it, everywhere they went. A putrid odor so downright nasty the cleaners sent to mop up the gooey mess of liquefied meat — topped by a blanket of swarming white maggots and buzzed by a legion of flies — gave up after two days.

*gurk*

Books: Crumb and Genesis

2009-11-19T13:01:53Z

I thoroughly recommend Robert Crumb’s new book The Book of Genesis Illustrated; exceptionally well done, and done straight, word for word. One note: while reasonably tastefully done, there’s no way to render the begats and things like Lot and his daughters without pictures that would make your maiden aunt Edna go *gleep, that’s a bare hiney*, so you are warned.

Health: not as bad as you thought

2009-11-19T12:51:57Z

…cross fingers and all that. My earlier post on this talked about dealing with a new set of docs at Edward Hospital, and so far, it’s paying off. I’m on long-range doses of penicillin for the near future, about 2g a day (broken into four pills) and have to wash myself down with Hibiclens (surgical scrub soap) daily or so. The stuff does work well, and we’ve also found that using it on Dot the dog seems to help a lot in controlling HER skin infections.

Mere has been dopy and tired and seemingly on and off sick over the last week or so; nothing dramatic, just a medium simmer of feel-like-crap and tired that has been miserable for her (and us, since she’s easily honked off when she’s sick and gets miserable to deal with, oh joy). Missed three days of school over a LONG weekend last weekend. We’re unsure exactly what’s going on there, as various tests at the doctor’s came up with nothing.

Both she and I are scheduled this next weekend to get H1N1 shots from the local county health department; we’re both considered high-risk. Our usual doctor’s office said that they didn’t have any H1N1 and didn’t know when they’d get it in. (And no, I’m not about to fool with live-virus stuff, I’m not nuts.)

She also got a new set of glasses – she had gone from a 1.75 to a 2.75, and hadn’t told us until very recently that she was having problems! Which, of course, is not cheap – our insurance is pretty good, but it really doesn’t cover much in the vision and dental direction.

Needless to say, Mere being sick has played a lot of heck with our schedules. There’s much more to tell, in another post or seven….

Last night in whoville:

2009-11-04T21:01:11Z

…is only indicative of local situations, really – with two caveats.

If you run a crappy candidate and a nasty, dumb campaign, don’t be surprised when you lose.
If you spend a lot of money and should have won or just barely won, that says more about your campaign and your candidate than anything else.

In Virginia and New Jersey, the Democrats ran really poor candidates and got beat. In NYC, Bloomberg spent $100M of his own money and won by a much lesser margin than expected; exit polls said that his gyrations to but term limits didn’t go over well with voters.

In New York’s 23rd congressional district (which will go the way of the dodo come next reapportionment and census) the Conservative Party candidate and his snarky stunts and we’re-entitled-to-stomp-the-unpure approach, hand in hand with Glen Beck, didn’t go over well with the locals. For the first time since the 1870s, the Republicans lost that seat to the Democrats.

The big lesson for the Democrats is not that Obama’s lost support; his support in VA and NJ was far higher on election day than the sad-sack Democratic candidates. It’s that they run to the right with cruddy candidates at the peril of losing the active support and interest of their base and of voters who are tired of the same old stuff. A large majority of voters in both states clearly said in exit polls that their vote had nothing to do with national politics, period, and far more that the other guy was a bigger stinker.

..how does your economy stink?

2009-11-04T19:42:09Z

AP has a map here (interactive flash) on local economic conditions; my home county (DuPage) has (in the last two years) seen unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies double, and we’re nowhere near the bottom. Check it out.

Night Beat redux:

2009-11-02T20:20:58Z

Some extra notes on the show:

The Digital Deli’s excellent posting on the history of the show and its cast; very much worth a read. (PDF version )

Other logs and listening locations:

Old-time.com (txt)
Otr Network Library (real streaming audio links)
Freeotrshows.com (streaming mp3 links)
Waybackradio (mp3links to various shows up on the Internet Archive, but interestingly organized)

OMG:

2009-10-29T22:58:49Z

Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town.

Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)

Cooking question #1:

2009-10-27T18:28:22Z

How do you maintain your set of personal favorite recipes? If software, which ones work or don’t work?

And if you’re inviting people over for dinner, what sort of leave-time do you give to start in case people come late – as in, will you hold dinner and for how long – before you start dinner anyway? (Assume that there’s a group of people at your house and 1 or 2 have not shown up, out of, say, seven.)

Home front:

2009-10-22T22:05:54Z

Meredith came home early today sick to her stomach and running just under 100F; the H1N1 still isn’t available out here except a trickle with the public health departments, and there’s been some deaths with teenagers (usual serious swine flu symptoms). I can’t take the live virus nose spray, and that’s all that’s available.

Susan may have some trouble coming home on the commuter trains; there’s contradictory stories about the cops stopping trains halfway between here and downtown.

This is the article about the house fire on the block; people were stupid about an unattended grease fire on the stove.

Favorite Pizza in the universe:

2009-10-21T18:44:39Z

Marion’s Piazza in the Dayton, Ohio area, hands down. Mushroom, sausage, pepperoni and (if I’m eating by myself) anchovies. Yes, I like anchovies on pizza, so long as they don’t have bones.

Glimmerings:

2009-10-20T18:33:54Z

On Saturday, I started getting the red splotchy stuff, and it was really apparent Sunday noonish that it wasn’t going away and my body temp was going up in the area, and so on…so we went off to Edward Hospital in Naperville – to get a fresh set of eyes on the situation, since I had been going npowhere recently with the folks at Good Samaritain in Downers Grove, who admitted they’d run out of ideas on how to treat me.

At first, it looked like I’d screwed up, because the infectious disease person who first walked in was an associate of the guy who had given up on a fix at the other hospital; I explained my dilemma and she said she wasn’t offended, and that she’d get another good infectious disease guy to give it a look.

Note: especially since I have my medical support scattered around in different places, I have to reel off my entire checkered medical history to practically everyone over and over again and highlight what’s relevant and keep them from going into dumb rabbit holes like ‘oh you must be diabetic’. I’m not, but they look at the foot wound that doesn’t heal easily and my weight and just run like heck down that hole.

Anyway, the new Infectious Disease guy came in late on Monday and told me that it was obvious that what was going on was a recurrent strep infection, and that it was probably entering my body through the wound on my foot, and so he started outlining a very different and targeted line of attack against both the foot wound and the step infections.

So, they changed over the IV stuff to ancef / cefalozin, and they’re going to send me home with a heavy dose of penicillin (luckily, I don’t have my dad’s allergy to it) and taking a whole bunch of maintenance precautions to eliminate the flora on my skin that’s causing this and generally de-colonize me. Also, I’m looking into using their wound clinic and podiatrists to deal with healing the foot wound; I’ve run into the limit of my podiatrist’s tricks as well.

Some solution that would shut down this cycle of reinfections and heal my foot would be beyond wonderful.

Final note: the infectious disease people have given their clearance for me to go home today, and I’ll be delighted to go home. My leg is responding very well to the IV antibiotics, and looks and feels tons better. As usual, thank you all for your good wishes, thoughts and prayers.

Mystery…tadadadadadah!

2009-10-20T09:21:14Z

I’ve been a great fan of radio drama for a long time, and if you were to look through my MP3 player and the burnt CDs in my car, you’d see BBC drama, old time radio and the like. I got a real love for it as a kid, and as it’s drifted in and out of my life, the real problems have been availability – of the programs and for time to listen to them!

One of my great faves in such matters, the 1950-1953 noir drama Night Beat, has been saved as MP3s at the Internet Archive, (better quality set here) and is very much worth listening to.

As to a mystery; while I was listening to Night Beat episodes, I’d hear something like ‘transcribed from Hollywood’, and I was totally puzzzled; my understanding of the term refers to ‘transcriptions of TV programs -> a written record of what the people said and did on the show’.

After a bit of digging, the answer was that it meant ‘pre-recorded in a studio on special vinyl-like disks and played on the network for the actual broadcast later’ – a system used in the days before audio tape was in common studio usage. Huh!

Twitters of the day:

2009-10-19T20:06:11Z

My twitterings of the day:

02:08 Back in the hospital again...same stuff, different hospital. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

The Last Ottoman:

2009-10-19T14:04:26Z

The 97-year-old heir to the Caliphate and Sultanate of the Ottoman Empire, Osman, died recently in Istanbul…he was the last heir to have been born during the Ottoman Empire (he was a 12 year old student in Vienna when the Empire was abolished) and he spent the rest of his long life in exile, living for sixty years in a rent controlled apartment in New York City.

Trafficant?

2009-10-19T12:50:39Z

Weird – the guy who transported me up to my room from the ER last night was going on at length about the horrible injustices done to former Congress critter James Trafficant; I hadn’t heard that name for a while. Most of the rest of his blurb was a odd and incoherent rant about the Powers In Charge smashing the little guy, but in a very weird ‘the aliens are coming in black helicopters’ style.

Help on SATA drives / cards:

2009-10-17T19:32:44Z

I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to set up a Ubuntu server for the house, and running into various problems. The most pressing one at present goes like this:

(1) Large capacity hard drives (above 350G) are all SATA
(2) The old computers I have here that could easily be made servers don’t have SATA connections on the motherboard
(3) I tried getting a SATA card for a cheap way around this, but when I put drive #2 on to increase capacity, it ALWAYS fries drive #2. Gone through two hard drives this way; they’re both going back for RMAs, but…
(4) Looking through Newegg, SATA card reviews seem to amount to (this is cheap and crappy) or (this is very high priced and used for a big RAID system). As in $20-40 for the low end stuff, and $400-500 for the high end stuff.
(5) I’m not interested in a RAID system.
(6) If I gotta spend $400-500, I’ll get a new motherboard for the box that has SATA ports already in it. I’d rather NOT spend that level of money on this.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Unearthing:

2009-10-17T02:56:49Z

As noted elsewhere, Mere is downsizing her Stuff; the toughest part was getting her to semi-methodically go through her books. As House Librarian, I was the one sitting down with her; she got rid of quite a few books, about 2/3ds picture books. In some cases (very few) I hung onto some stuff *I* wanted to keep around, like the Golden Book science stuff (which actually is a good basic handbook on this and that) and some stuff she hadn’t gotten into yet. I do know that practically all of the newer books I’ve gotten her went into the ‘I didn’t look at this yet so I have no attachment to it here it is Dad’ pile. I’ll hang onto them for right now, but she’s going to have a really hard time getting me to buy books for her on a whim (mine or hers) for quite a while.