Spotted Dick

A while ago, I saw some overpriced "new recipe" spotted dick for sale in the grocery story, and I couldn't resist. We finally got around to eating it with dinner tonight. Yum. Everyone enjoyed it, especially the kids. I'm sure that I could write all kinds of jokes on the subject, but I won't. Instead, imagine there is one in this sentence here, and don't be afraid to try things with funny names.

Weekend Photos

Here are some photos from the recent trip to the in-laws.


Do you want to buy some parts? I hear someone inquired about the engine and transmission. The asking price is $400 for the engine and transmission, or $500 for the whole thing. To me, this is backwards. If I owned the truck, I'd ask $500 for the engine and transmission, or $400 for the whole thing!


This next one wasn't from the weekend trip. It's the tree in front of our house. (Some botanist, please let me know what kind of tree this is.) It's only in bloom for a short time each year, so I thought I'd capture the moment.

Biking "Weigh In"

One thing that I use a blog for is a handy place to keep notes to myself. This is one such post. However, since nobody wants to read the details of my weight, I'll use an encoded numbers.

Today was the first day this year that I bicycled to work. When I do that, I use the showers in the Fitness Centre there, along with taking my weight at what I assume is a reliable scale. Despite the desire of my geeky nature, I will not keep and post a spreadsheet where I can graph my weight by day. However, I do want to record my weight at the start of the "biking to work" season. We'll call today's weight "10". This compares to the 2005 "bicycling to work" season's starting weight of "8" and ending weight of "11".

I don't have any particular weight goals or resolutions, and I'm not making any here. Like many people, it certainly wouldn't hurt me to lose a bit of weight. So, it might be nice to get down to "5". It would also be nice to avoid getting up to "15". Dropping it to "0" this summer would likely take more of a behavioural or dietary change than I'm willing to voluntarily make.

Early Presidential Selector

"Everybody's Doing It!" The selectsmart.com Early (2008 US) Presidential Candidate Selector, that is. As suggested by The djl Zone and THEJESZONE, my results are below. What do your results look like?

I'm probably more concerned about economic issues than djl (who ended up with all Democrats up high) and less concerned about them than JES (who ended up with 5 Republicans on top). So, maybe it's not a surprise that I have a mishmash of Republicans and Democrats up high.

If I tried it again, I might end up with totally different rankings, and the odds of me voting for a Republican or Democrat are slim. But I think I'll read more about Hagel and Warner.

Percent

Rank

Item

(100%) 1: Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) Information

(98%) 2: Ex-Gov. Mark Warner (D) Information

(93%) 3: Ex-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R) Information

(92%) 4: Ex-VP Al Gore (D) Information

(87%) 5: Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) Information

(85%) 6: Sen. John McCain (R) Information

(83%) 7: Sen. Evan Bayh (D) Information

(80%) 8: Gov. George Pataki (R) Information

(80%) 9: Sen. Joseph Biden (D) Information

(79%) 10: Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D) Information

(79%) 11: Sen. Russ Feingold (D) Information

(77%) 12: Gov. Bill Richardson (D) Information

(77%) 13: Sen. Sam Brownback (R) Information

(76%) 14: Sen. John Kerry (D) Information

(75%) 15: Ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) Information

(74%) 16: Sec. Condoleezza Rice (R) Information

(71%) 17: Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) Information

(70%) 18: Rep. Tom Tancredo (R) Information

(70%) 19: Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R) Information

(67%) 20: Sen. Christopher Dodd (D) Information

(64%) 21: Gov. Mitt Romney (R) Information

(62%) 22: Ex-Gen. Wesley Clark (D) Information

(62%) 23: Sen. George Allen (R) Information

(62%) 24: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) Information

(61%) 25: Ex-Sen. John Edwards (D) Information

See the most frequent top results for this selector
See Google information for the above results.

The Math Olympian

I don't know much about the "Math Olympics". I mean, getting information from my son is difficult. I know that, one or two months ago, a few students from his class scored high enough on a test to have the opportunity to travel to another school and compete in this event. But my son had little idea how many students were competing in each event, which ages participated, how many people won awards, or anything like that. But, he was indeed the only one from his school to win a first place gold bronze medal, or any medal at all. So, it's impressive, but we have no idea how impressive!

(The djl Zone is on in the background.)

Which European City Do You Belong In?

I'd have guessed something more Central Europe-ish, like Berlin or Munich or Vienna or Budapest. But it came up London for me. It did for Levy too. Which city do you get?

Of course, I'm not sure I'd trust a site that misspells "Sydney".

You Belong in London

You belong in London, but you belong in many cities... Hong Kong, San Francisco, Sydney. You fit in almost anywhere. And London is diverse and international enough to satisfy many of your tastes. From curry to Shakespeare, London (almost) has it all!

What European City Do You Belong In?

Back in the Fantasy Baseball Saddle Again

When we last left fantasy baseball, I was celebrating the 2005 championship of the Dave Spiwack League. I have since humbly renamed my team in honour of that event. After week 1 of the '06 season, I again find myself in first place. Sure, it's early, but I'd rather be in first than in last at the moment.

The point is this post is that I have no confidence that this good fortune will last, and I wanted to keep a snapshot of the standings. This proves that, at one point in the season at least, my team was actually in first place.

The 438 Steps

No, this post isn't about a remake of The 39 Steps, the Hitchplop flick from 1935.

Not long ago, my wife purchased a cheap pedometer. It's the sort of thing that if I get one day's of use out of it, I'll be satisfied. That is, it seems like a fun thing to try, but I don't think I'd want to wear one every day.

I discovered a few things:

• At work, if I walk to the near restroom, a round-trip is 82 steps. If I walk to a more distant restroom, a round-trip is 438 steps.
• Given how little I walk, the 356 extra steps is a non-trivial addition to my day.
• One site recommends 10,000 steps per day as a benchmark for good health. How close do you come?

By the way, that site says that their pedometer cost less than $30. I think ours cost about $5.

Last Light by Terri Blackstock

I read this novel for my book club, and while it is a work of fiction, it makes for a good contrast with the previous book that I reviewed. In it, the world is much simpler and black and white. For example, the drinking of alcoholic beverages is only associated with disreputable characters, guns are good, it's OK to mess up the police's efforts in a criminal investigation if you're a good person who's really upset, and so on.

The premise of the book is a largely unexplained outage to just about anything electrical. Later, this is narrowed down to an unexplained worldwide failure related to semiconductors. Some electrical items, like simple battery-powered flashlights still work. While I felt the technical details were somewhat lacking, some of the characters feel it was a direct Act of God which (just for starters) caused airliners to fall from the sky on page 2, sending all aboard to fiery deaths.

I think the duration of the book is about the first month after the outage. Another thing that wasn't clear to me was the post-outage economy. Money seemed important to everyone, but it wasn't clear that there was anything to buy. Some rudimentary law enforcement is in place, but as far as I can tell, the police was just about the only part of the economy that was functioning. It wasn't clear how the police got paid, or in what.

The book is the story of how the Branning family from the Birmingham, Alabama area deals with the crisis. The family is well-off. Father Doug is a middle-aged stockbroker; mother Kay is a stay-at-home mother, and they have 4 children, aged between around 22 and 10. As you would expect, they are ill-prepared to deal with such a catastrophe. In part, the book is an interesting thought-experiment looking at what would happen should we lose our technology. As you would guess, a stockbroker and a well-off housewife don't exactly have the skills to make it in a pre-electrical world. And neither does most of society.

The book would be somewhat interesting if it focused on just dealing with the outage. But one area where the book fails for me is when it adds a neighbourhood murder ("Plot Device #2") to this plot. For a while, at least, the book becomes a murder mystery, with the characters trying to track down the killer.

I'm hesitant to give such a book a low rating. Obviously, the author tried hard. Also, a friend who knows a lot more about literature than I do said he loved it. Virtually all of the reviews on Amazon say it's good. But I found the characters to be unrealistically one-dimensional. When the whiney-loser adult daughter finally gets into a bit of trouble, instead of having sympathy, I thought that it was about time she was getting what she deserved. Maybe my next comment is obvious, or maybe it's insulting, but this isn't serious literature. I'm not sure if it's meant to be. It reminds me of the sort of thing that you might pick up at an airport bookstore, (it is easy reading), pass some time with it on a flight, and then throw it away when you land. Two stars out of five.