Today

Today was one of those coffee days. Whole bunch of running around and not much to show for it.

Leave the house at 8:45 AM, drive Anne downtown to her class at The Bar Method. Drive to Herzog-Meier in Beaverton to find out about a new key for Anne’s Mitsubishi. On the way I notice two (TWO!) battery shops on TV Highway. I might need a battery for the remote control that is built into the key. Turns out the key is not covered under warranty. Warranty expired 800 miles ago. Keys are $130 each, plus $20 for cutting, plus $40 for programming. Plus they need an hour and a half. Too much bad news all at once. I bail.

Drove to Precision Locksmiths on Canyon Road in Beaverton. They want $190 for a key, but they might be able to get me a “shell”, which doesn’t contain the electronics, for considerable less. They will check and let me know.

Go looking for a McDonald's to get something to eat. Remember there is a Burger King on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, just a few blocks from where I am. Get there, it’s not a Burger King anymore, now it’s some kind of Hawaiian joint.

Turn toward Portland, oh look! There’s a McDonald’s at the light near Jesuit High School. Didn’t turn at the light, can’t turn after that, there’s a divider bump in the road. Too much trouble to turn around. Give up on the idea of food and decide to just head downtown. Take Scholl’s Ferry road up to the Sunset Highway. Traffic is light, which gives me time to think, and I think this is a nasty little road. Steep, twisty, narrow, no shoulders, jammed with traffic most of the time. No wonder I seldom take it.

Downtown I find a parking spot right outside the front door of the exercise palace. I pull out the paper and finish reading the comics that I started earlier when I dropped Anne off. I finish and Anne’s still not out, so I start on the Jumble, but I don’t have anything to write with. Well, let’s see how far I can get without one. I get through the four initial words okay, but now we have the final phrase. This is where a pen would come in handy, but today’s phrase is only two three-letter words. I might be able to do this, and I do. The answer is “YOU BET”.

Anne shows up and we head to the Bonnie L. Hayes Small Animal Disposal Facility, er, Animal Shelter in Hillsboro. One of our two cats has been missing for a week. One of our neighbors found some tufts of suspicious looking fur in their back yard, so she might have gotten nabbed by a coyote. On the other hand, Anne is looking at pictures of cats that have turned up at the animal shelter and one that got posted on Sunday looks like it could very well by our missing Iggy. Turns out, no, this one was found in a mobile home clear on the other side of town. I don’t quite understand the situation there. Not sure I want to.

On our way home we stop at Black Rock Coffee for a cuppa Joe. There is a small shopping center across the street from Shute Park. Juan Colorado’s Mexican Restaurant is there. A coffee kiosk appeared in the parking lot there several years ago. It ran for a while and then closed up. Now we have a new coffee operation there. Good coffee. $2 for a good size cup.

Home, check my messages, make a call and it’s time to head out to lunch. John comes along, he wants to pick up the by-now-infamous Marshall amplifier from the shop in downtown Portland. We pick up my friend Jack and head over to O’Connors, where I parallel park my truck on the first try in a spot that is only a few inches longer than the truck. Jack pretends not to be impressed.

We eat out on the deck in back. I have Joe’s Scramble because I didn’t get any breakfast. It is some kind of egg thing with shrimp. Pretty tasty. We are sitting and talking while waiting for our check and a track hoe (a power shovel on tracks, we used to call them steam shovels) clanks by on the road below. Then a street sweeper comes by. Yeah, we aren’t going to be able to hold a conversation out here anymore. I look at my watch, it’s one fifteen. Oh, that explains it. The construction gang took a lunch break, but now they are back at work.

We wander over to Post-Hip to visit with Scott. I pick up a novel by Georges Simenon, the prolific Frenchman. Glancing at the book I notice that Chapter 4 starts near the very back of the book. Wait a minute, this isn’t a book of short stories is it? No, it’s not, but the chapter layout is very weird. Chapter 2 starts on page 163. There are only 188 pages in the book, so the first chapter takes 163 pages, and the last three chapters only take 26. Well, we shall see.

John calls amplifier man. While the amp is ready, the shop isn’t open today, so no trip downtown. On the way home we stop at one of the aforementioned battery shops. It looks a little sketchy when we pull in, parking lot is empty. Who knows what they have inside? Jack does. He was here last week, and recommended them. Inside it’s a different story. Not a big store, but impressive. Any kind of battery you might need. Everything from watch batteries to car batteries. Bought a new battery for remote control / key for Anne’s car. $4. They even have batteries for cordless power tools. My Makita drill is getting old. I may need a new battery before long.

Back home I pause for a minute to regroup and then I am off to pick up a couple of items. Epoxy from the hobby shop (JB Weld for $7), vacuum cleaner bags from the vacuum shop, and printer paper from Office Depot, now $5.50.

Home again I get to work on the old broken key. Replace the battery and then mix up some epoxy. Slather the inside of the case where the stub end of the key goes and pop it all back together. It takes three napkins to wipe up the little bit of excess epoxy that got squeezed out. Who knew epoxy was so messy?

While I did not accomplish much, I did see a few interesting sights:

• one 1950's vintage Dodge truck in very nice condition
• two battery stores on Canyon road in Beaverton
• three cops with their lights on who had pulled people over
• four armored cars (one each Brinks and Loomis and two from Garda)

I would have liked to gotten photos, but I was driving.

That’s enough for today, time for a nap.

Product Description

Everybody kind of tip-toes around this subject. This is first time I have seen someone out and out state it. From Amazon's web page about Planet Dora: A Memoir Of The Holocaust And The Birth Of The Space Age.

An extraordinary memoir by a survivor of the Nazi camps, Yves Béon, Planet Dora is a recollection of life and death in a concentration camp like no other. Dora was a cavernous underground factory cut out of solid rock, where life was like a nightmarish scene from Dante: thousands of prisoners beaten, starved, killed, and living underground for weeks at a time. The purpose of all this brutality was to build the world’s first operational rockets: the V-1 and V-2 missiles, Hitler’s vengeance weapons.Some of Germany’s most brilliant engineers were involved with production at Dora, including Werner von Braun, who after the war went on to become the father of the American space program. It was his Saturn V rocket, designed with the help of his wartime comrades, that put the first man on the moon; while the Saturn V project was headed by the same man who had been the director of slave labor in Dora. In fact, some of the very rockets built in Dora were packed up after the war and shipped to New Mexico to serve as the seeds of the U.S. space program. In a very real sense, the greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century had its origins in the enslavement and murder of thousands of innocent people, the down payment of a Faustian bargain that still tarnishes the foundation of our reach for the stars.

Via Roberta.

Blue Belle by Andrew Vachess

Another murder mystery, this time in New York City. It was better than the last one, but not great. It did a pretty good job of exploring the mind of someone who has had a rough life, and exploring the compulsions he goes through to insure his safety. Some of it is very real. Too many words are spent on smoking cigarettes, sex scenes and wondering what it all means. Our hero has it in for people who hurt other people, whether it is for pleasure or profit, and both kinds of people get some examination, but both are out and out condemned.

Pay Attention

I was in driving in downtown Portland last week when this happened. I was stopped at a traffic light on a two lane street. There was a transit bus sitting next to me. On the far side of the intersection there is a pedestrian crossing the street. He stops in the middle of the street, apparently preoccupied with something he is holding, a cell phone perhaps. The middle of the street is not a good place to stop, but we are stopped at the light and he is not in anybody's way. Eventually he starts to move, but haltingly, as though he can't quite break his attention away from whatever he is holding. Now he is directly in front of me, but we're still okay, he might make it to the curb before the light changes. Well, no, he doesn't. I give him a beep of the horn and start moving. No response, he continues his halting shuffle. I give him another toot. Still no response. I am half way across the intersection now, still moving slowly. I give him a third toot, but still no response, though by now he is almost to curb. The bus pulls up even with me (the pedestrian is well clear of the lane the bus occupies) and bus driver gives a long blast of his horn. The pedestrian gives no indication of having heard any of this. Finally he reaches the curb and mounts the sidewalk and it is clear enough to drive by. I give the truck a little extra gas so the tires will squeak to further announce my displeasure at this person's combined obliviousness / rudeness / stupidity.

I refer to this person as "him", but it was not clear that it was a man. It could have been a woman. It was wearing a jacket and a hat.

A few months ago there was a tragic accident downtown. A bus turned across a crosswalk and ran over a party of four pedestrians. At least one was killed. This may explain why the bus driver was more forceful with his horn than I was.

A couple of days ago at Costco I ran into a similar situation. I was driving toward the main entrance to the building when a woman starts across the driveway with her shopping cart. So far, so good, normal grocery store parking lot behavior. But then she stops halfway across and starts rooting around in her purse. I would have expected her to come to a quick decision and either go back or go on, but no, she stays there continuing to dig through her bag. I drive around her at five MPH. I don't think she even looked up.

A woman was killed crossing the street in downtown Hillsboro this week. A pickup truck was turning the corner and hit her while going about five MPH. She fell and hit her head on the pavement. An accident pure and simple, near as I can tell. I suspect that for whatever reason the driver just didn't see her.

I went to the lab this morning to get some blood drawn for some kind of voodoo. I didn't get there till about ten and I was surprised to see four people ahead of me. Early in the morning this many people would be normal, but by this time I would expect the rush to have dropped off. It's twenty minutes before the first person is done. One woman, fed up with waiting judging by the expression on her face, gets up and leaves. Another twenty minutes goes by and Sandy, the queen of the vampires, shows up and takes over, just in time to take care of me. This is doubly fortunate, because she is the only one at this lab who can reliably find a vein in my arm.

Slowpoke and Sandy have a brief conversation as Sandy takes over, and it was a little odd. The woman holds up a sheet of paper and asks Sandy whether it should be sent on or not. Sandy was a little discomfited by this. I finally realized that slowpoke was inserting something irrelevant into the process. Perhaps she was new to the job and didn't understand just what the procedures were, but I suspect it was more along the lines of she didn't really have a clue as to what needed to be done because it hadn't been drilled into her for the last ten years.

Creeping Digital Revolution

Used to be telephones used wires, wires that were dedicated to telephones. They were completely independent of all other systems. Even if the power went out, the telephone would still work. That was then. Now everyone has a cell phone and nobody has any wires. Except me, till now. It started a few years ago when Verizon brought a fiber optic line to our neighborhood. When we signed over our souls to the devil in return for broadband access to the internet, he also took away our telephone wires. Instead he gave us a little box that hangs on the wall in the garage and converts our nice analog telephone signals into digital bits that get dumped in the fiber optic pipe along with everything else. It has worked fine for several years.

Along with the broadband internet access, we also got some TV, and the TV has been a hundred-dollar-a-month thorn-in-my-side ever since. Now Verizon has sold the fiber business to Frontier, and Frontier has just raised their rates by $30 a month, so now I really want to get shut of them, well, as much as possible. Let's cut it down to the bare minimum: internet access only. But that means doing something about the telephone. I could get a cell phone, but I don't have a pocket to put it in. Besides cell phones are expensive. I could get an internet phone service, but that means some kind of funny hardware to connect my existing phones. You can buy it, but it's not cheap. The boxes are like $200.

Then Verizon comes out with a deal. They will give you a box that will connect your old, land line phones to the cell phone network for $20 a month, and they supply the magic box for free. Being as Vonage, the big name in internet phone service wants $25 a month, and they don't supply any hardware, Verizon's offer sounds like a pretty good deal, so I signed up. The box showed up on my doorstep yesterday and today I plugged it in. It may be a week or so before the connection with Frontier goes away and this thing totally becomes my phone, but so far so good. Notice how it is not plugged into the telephone jack. Too bad we have to use two wall warts to power this assemblage.

Update: One day later, and the land line is dead. Just verified that we can get incoming calls through the new box.

Update 2: Error: the magic box hanging on the wall in the garage was only in use for a short while. It was replaced by a new, combination box on the outside of the garage that split the fiber optic into wires for the telephone and coax for the internet and TV. In order to connect the rest of the telephone extensions to the new magic box in the kitchen, I disconnected the phone line from the old magic box and then plugged the new magic box into the telephone wall jack. Now all the old land line phones are connected to the new magic box, and they all seem to work.

Chocolate

Chocolate | Official Trailer | 2008 | HD | Action-Drama
GARDEN OF GORE
Gangster's moll in Thailand falls for Japanese dude from competing gang. He goes back to Japan, she stays in Thailand and raises their autistic daughter while boarding in a martial arts school. Zen (the daughter) spends her time imitating the kids practicing their punching and kicking. It turns out she has some uncanny physical abilities. Her cousin Moom exploits these abilities by having her give demonstrations in the street and collecting donations from the crowd. This turns out to be a good thing when mom contracts cancer and they need money for treatments. But the pittance he collects from the crowd is nowhere near enough to pay for all the treatments. Then Moom discovers a little black book with a list of people who owe mom money. So Moom and Zen go out to collect. Moom is a nice kid who simply asks for the money, but that doesn't work so well. Zen gets it through her head that this guy owes her mom money, and when he throws an abacus at her head, well, it's all over but the shouting.

It's a great film. JeeJa Yanin (Zen) might be the next Jackie Chan. It's a good story, and the fight scenes are thoroughly entertaining. There's a new trick in dang near every punch and kick. Our heroine (Zen) is so light, and thin and flexible she can do things no man should ever attempt.

The villain seems to have an endless supply of thugs, and towards the end of the movie when Zen is working on her second hundred knockdowns, it gets a little old. We also have a couple of instances of people who have been seriously wounded doing things they shouldn't be able to, but that is kind of standard in movies like this. Besides, they're gangsters, they are probably coked to the gills and don't even realize they should be dead.

Update July 4, 2025 replaced missing image with video trailer.

P. S. The whole movie is available on YouTube here.

Amateurs

I think I have a handle on the whole economics thing, but people continue to be a mystery. Professional athletes who play for one of the big franchises make buckets of money, but guys who play the same sports for colleges make nothing. There was an article in the paper today about how some dude at the university goes around tracking down the origins of college sports memorabilia, trying to determine whether the athlete the item originated with was ever compensated for it. If he was, that would be a violation NCAA rules and he could be disqualified from further participation.

There is a parallel in the sciences, albeit on a much smaller scale. There are various competitions staged for science and technology buffs, and the rewards are generally in the way of a certificate of recognition and maybe a plaque. Occasionally there will a cash award, but it is generally too small to even interest the IRS.

This kind of thing puzzles me. Not too long ago I heard a story about a guy from India who had done something special in college and once he got a job his attitude became one of entitlement. He no longer had to do anything, he had proven himself and now that he had his position he could do as he pleased. Although this attitude bothers me, I can't say that if I were in his position I would not behave the same way. I would like to think that I would not claim entitlement, but I would probably accept the position.

I can understand working on something because you enjoy it. I also understand getting paid for working on something. One reason for granting tenure to someone at a university is that given free rein they might produce something remarkable, something that otherwise who not have been created. Tenure could be a reward for having done something exceptional. It can also be a bet placed that the professor might yet do something exceptional. I wonder if that bet has ever paid off.
 
Schools with big sports programs should form a new organization that would allow paying their players. These guys are taking big risks and the schools are reaping the benefit. Stiffing the players while reaping the rewards strikes me as being downright un-American.

The science thing isn't quite so clear cut. There isn't the visceral attraction, it's more cerebral. As such, any financial success is only going to be achieved through business or internecine politics.