Dream

It's kind of a gray day (like today) and I am in the parking lot of a business park hanging around, waiting for something. A large jet aircraft comes taxiing around the corner towards me. It's some kind of blue, teal maybe? The landing lights are on. Next thing is I am driving this aircraft inside a warehouse. There is room to maneuver in the section I am in, but I can't stay there, I have to go into the annex, which is a little darker. The floor leading into the annex is not level, it is slightly downhill, but it doesn't look too bad. But going down this slope we pick up speed and we have to make a corner and there isn't enough room and the wings run into a couple of giant wooden posts holding up the roof, which puts a stop to driving the plane. Once outside of the plane I look back at the slope I just came down and realize it's a lot steeper than I thought, especially regarding the size of the airplane.

Weird how much I remember.

Animals

I read a line the other day that said something like small minds think about people, medium sized minds think about events, and large minds think about ideas. I suspect that I am more of an idea person, which makes me feel good because that would mean I have a large mind, and bigger is better, right? Well, maybe, maybe not. But it does give us another way of classifying people.

You have no doubt heard the term "political animal". This gives us a clue to another scale for measuring human behavior. Some people are power seeking, they thrive on intrigue and gossip. They want to be in charge. I don't know why, I think it must just be their nature. Other people just want to putter in their own little domain and not be bothered. We could call them power avoiding, maybe.

And then there is "inclusiveness" versus "exclusiveness". Some people are dividers. You can tell who they are by their tendency to blame "them". It's not our fault, it's all because of those other guys, the communists, the Republicans, the socialists, the pagans, the Democrats, the Presbyterians, the Muslims, whoever. Often they leave out the title, but then proceed to describe their qualities that leaves no doubt in your mind just who they are talking about.

Everybody at some time or another talks about how great it would be to be rich, but most people aren't really interested in being rich. All they really want is a little comfort, a little security, and something interesting to do. Of course interests vary. Some people like to play golf, some people like to work, some like to watch TV, and some like to write on their blog.

Education

There are a lot of subjects we are short changing our children on:

• Marksmanship
• Singing
• Dancing
• Butchering animals for meat
• Mechanics of household repairs

If people were familiar with guns, they wouldn't be so terrified of them. Likewise if they are introduced at an early age to the fundamentals of food preparation, they wouldn't be as likely to develop squeamishness later on.

Somehow ordinary singing has been eclipsed by "professional" singing. You get people disparaging any singing besides the perfect voice of an opera singer, which is ridiculous, and even worse, people listen to them. All you critics can just shut up. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.. Dancing would probably be best done segregated by sex, at least in the older grades. Trying to teach adolescents how to be ladies and gentlemen is a losing proposition.

Everyone should learn how to use a screwdriver, hammer, wrench and pliers. But maybe I'm reaching too far.

Bumper Sticker of the Day

DEATH to ZOMBIES

Quote of the Day

Suddenly the sky is filled with birds: badly animated birds, out of proportion to the dwellings below, that barely flap their wings as they glide by. Occasionally an aggravated fowl breaks away from its clip-art flock, plummeting to the ground and exploding in a similarly unconvincing cloud of smoke.

From The New York Times review of Birdemic by Dave Itzkoff. I thought the quote was funny, but maybe you had to be there.

Static

We were listening to John's iPod this morning on the way to school. Because of the constant background static I thought the tunes sounded an awful lot like A Place To Bury Strangers, but then I heard this tune, and the vocals sounded an awful lot like the Beach Boys. Turns out the tunes are from 25 years ago by a band called Jesus & Mary Chain.



Found this quote when I looked them up on Google:

Sounding like a collision between the 1965 Beach Boys' tour bus and a truckload of malfunctioning vacuum cleaners, the Jesus and Mary Chain found something new to do with the old rock & roll verities. - Amazon.com

So I'm not the only one who thinks they sound like the Beach Boys. As far as the static goes, I kinda suspect that it contains more frequencies, so stimulates your ears more.

Dream

We were at a summer resort, like a small village on a lake in the mountains. I was talking to a couple of guys. One of them had a custom panel truck painted sort of a gold/sand color. It had a sliding door on the left rear. The body work was custom. I do not know how else you could get a panel truck these days. The back of the truck was full of his tools, including a small oxy-acetylene torch. We were all there to perform some kind of technical work, an installation or repair of some equipment, a radio maybe.

We are done with this location so the guy with the truck is packing up to go to the next site. He takes off and we follow him in another vehicle. He is driving really fast, not following the road, driving over grass, right by buildings, through the trees.

The ground is a little rough and I imagine the guy's truck is taking a beating. It's a cool truck, but I wouldn't want to have to spend all my time driving it, I would want something with a little more cush. But he has found a niche and is making the most of it.

We come to an area that is a little more open and there is a bridge over a gully. It is simply some sun-bleached planks on a couple of beams, no railings, maybe wide enough for a car, but there are steps leading up it so it is obviously only for pedestrians. That doesn't stop the madman we are following, he blasts straight ahead right over the bridge. There are no people about.

The guy I am with takes one look at this and slams on the brakes, saying "whoa!". He may have thought the guy we are following was nuts before, but now he is sure of it. He decides to follow him anyway, but at a more sedate pace.

We go over a couple of these bridges, but now we come to one that has fallen down. The far end is in a river, some distance from the far shore. We are going down the slope of this broken bridge towards the water. It looks like we are going to have to swim for it, but when we get there the wooden box (!?!) we are riding in is long enough to span the distance from the bridge to the far shore, which has shrunk to a few feet, so we just have to step up to the shore.