The Ghost Writer

We were looking for a movie to rent the other day and one that popped up on the Red Box web site was The Ghost Writer, but my wife tells me we've seen it already. Really? I don't remember anything about it.

Today Steve sends me a story about Obama's dog getting a private jet flight to Trenton to join the family for vacation in Bar Harbor. Okay, Bar Harbor is in Maine, but Trenton is in New Jersey, isn't it? So I check Google Maps, and there is a Trenton in Maine, and unlike Bar Harbor, it has a small airport. So if you were flying to Bar Harbor, you would actually land in Trenton, Maine.

So I'm looking at the map and I notice that Bar Harbor is on the same island as Acadia National Park. Hey, isn't that one of the sites they used for filming Shutter Island? I look on my list of maps, and hey, what's this? The Ghost Writer! I made a map. I must have seen the movie. I don't remember any of this. Huh.

Update May 2024 replaced link to map.

Conversational Styles

When my wife and kids talk it is kind of light-weight banter, give and take, back and forth, and usually of little or no interest to me. I was at lunch the other day and Steve commented that I talk like I write my blog posts. He gave a brief impression that made me sound heavy and pedantic. My son John imitates me sometimes in almost exactly the same style, and his impressions I have to admit are funny. When I go to lunch with Jack, we take turns telling each other stuff that has happened or stuff we have learned in the last week. We will occasionally interrupt each other or ask questions, but mostly we alternate talking and listening. When Jack and Randy get together, I get the impression that Randy is even more serious. He doesn't tolerate interruptions well: wait till I'm done, and he doesn't tolerate questions well: if there is something I didn't tell you it's because I didn't know, and if you didn't understand, it's because you weren't listening.

I sometimes bark at my family when I am trying to explain something and they interject with a comment. I bark because the comment seems to me to be from out of left field, or they are trying to jump ahead, but they jump in the wrong direction. If you would just wait a minute, I'll tell you . . .

I don't think I bark at my friends. I might bark at co-workers, after all, they are being paid to keep their eye on the ball. If they were paying attention, they wouldn't be asking stupid questions.

I suppose I bark at my family because I am surprised by their behavior. Or maybe it's just because I am a grumpy old man.

Words?

Supposedly ReCaptcha works by putting up two distorted words, one of which it knows how to spell. If you get that one right, then it assumes you also spelled the other one right, and it stores this information away for use by an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program so it can use your spelling to recognize this word.

However, today's puzzle only compounds the ignorance. The instructions say "Type the two words", but onces & indrect are not words (okay, onces might be a word, as in multiple occurences of once, but that's going to be a rare case). I suspect they are typos for ounces and indirect, which is something OCR is going to have to learn to deal with.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Truths For Mature Humans

I usually read lists once and forget about them, but this one had too many items that hit close to home. From Steve.

1. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.
2. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.
3. There is great need for a sarcasm font.
4. How the h*ll are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
5. Was learning cursive really necessary?
6. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on # 5. I'm pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
7. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
8. I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.
9. Bad decisions make good stories.
10. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment during the day when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.
11. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don't want to have to restart my collection...again.
12. I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page technical report that I swear I did not make any changes to.
13. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.
14. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
15. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lite than Kay.
16. I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option.
17. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
18. How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear or understand a word they said?
19. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers and sisters!
20. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
21. Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
22. Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet everyone can find and push the snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time, every time!

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

I Hate Paint

I've patched a hole in the wall, now I just need to paint it. Look in the pile of old paint cans and there it is: Devine "Storm". But wait, there's not just one can, but three. Why do we have three? Could it be that one is flat, one is semi-gloss, and one is . . . we don't care. It's enough that one might be semi-gloss and one might be flat. We ran into this once before and ended up having to do a do-over because we got it wrong. The paint on the wall looks like semi-gloss, but the paint that is spilled on the side of the cans looks flat. Why can't the dunderheads at the paint company label it so I don't have to deal with this dilemma? Fortunately darling daughter comes to my rescue and assures me that the one in my hand is probably the right one, so I used it. Now I have to wait till tomorrow to see if it matches or not.

Political Debt

I started off at Tam's place this morning, like I often do, and following some links I ended up reading a couple of articles about How Hyperinflation Will Happen by Gonzalo Lira. I don't buy his conclusion (or, for that matter, some of his premises), that hyperinflation will hit the US within the next year or two, but his explanation of how it would happen is very interesting. It piqued my interest enough that I did a little more reading on the subject. There is no end to the amount of discussion on the economy, and eventually I got tired, but toward the end I came across a graph of the national debt, and I thought it was illuminating. There are good reasons for going into debt, like a war of conquest and expecting your victories to bring you wealth (the British Empire), or some massive construction project that will greatly improve your production capabilities (the Interstate Highway System). But lately we've been piling up trillions of dollars in debt because we are trying to kill a few thousand radical Muslims? I'm sorry, I don't think this is a cost-effective way to run a country.

The green line is revenue (taxes), the pink line is spending, and the dark red line is debt.
The horizontal lines are spaced one trillion dollars apart.
The range is from zero at the bottom to eleven trillion dollars at the top.
Click to embiggen.

I got the base graph for this from an article in USA Today. Their version is "interactive", meaning it will show you the actual dollar amounts for any point on the graph when you mouse over it. I added the Presidents and the colored bars for the parties: yellow for Republicans, aqua for Democrats. I wanted pastels so they wouldn't overpower the lines, and I wasn't up to mixing my own colors for this, so yellow and aqua will just have to do.

Note this graph goes all the back to WWII, which is what the little bump at the left side is all about. After that the debt slowly declined until the very end of Ford's term when it started up. Carter didn't seem to have much effect, one way or the other, but Reagan sure put us on the map. Things were going so well under Clinton that we were actually able to start reducing this huge debt. Then we got G.W. and his neo-cons and the sky became the limit. Things haven't slowed down under Obama, and I am sorry to see that.

If we don't get this debt thing under control, things are going to get much worse.

Update October 2016 replaced missing graph. However, linked larger version is gone and all the other links are dead.

It's Raining!

What's going on? It isn't even September yet, and it's raining outside. This is severely disconcerting.