Hats off to winter!

Shoveling out from this past snowfall, I took a trip down memory lane. Fortunately, I didn't have to shovel that, too.

Whenever my grandfather would come up to Alaska to visit us in the winter, he would always get on my case about going outside without a hat on. "75% of body heat escapes through the top of your head," he would say. "You'll catch pneumonia."

This was the only time he would not seem notice my thick mass of long hair.

I sported quite the mullet in those days. My nose was my hairstyle landmark; if my hair reached the tip of my nose it was time for a haircut. I would have them cut it back up to the top of my nose and then use that as a guide how short(?) to trim the rest - except for the back, of course. My hair was so thick that they had to go back over again with the thinning scissors. At the end of the cut, I left enough hair on the floor that I could walk out the door without stepping on a single tile.

Grandpa would always notice my hair when we were indoors or when it was warm outside. Especially when I had the long hair in the back pulled into a tail. Boy, howdy, did he ever notice it then.

When you think about it, a hat is really just a pile of hair clippings that's been reassembled in a new way. What Grandpa never realized while we were standing out in the Alaska cold is that I was already wearing a hat.

Apart from the obvious age thing, my grandfather and I had some notable differences. He exercised for an hour every morning, I considered eating potato chips a hobby; he was always up doing something while I was always sitting around doing nothing. My hair color was brown, his was freckled with some age spots, except for a few gray patches where the hair actually protruded out from the skin.

Grandpa had good reason to wear hats; he had almost no body fat and very little hair. I, on the other hand, had plenty of thermal protection all over my body. Blubber has great insulation properties, which is one of the reasons you'll never see a walrus in a parka. On top of that, I had a mop-top mullet that was rated to -23 degrees.

Grandpa never seemed to get that for us bigger folk, letting body heat escape is a good thing. Some of us break a sweat from eating. Frigid air comes as quite a relief - especially when you don't have to find a restaurant with a walk-in freezer to get it.

I did finally cut my hair short before moving to the East Coast. Not coincidentally, nowadays I do keep hats around and use hoods as well. Grandpa would be proud.

Sort of.

See, while my past-times involve much less caloric intake, I am still a big guy. As such, I still do not adhere to Grandpa's standards for body-heat retention. I can only imagine what he'd say about me outside during a blizzard shoveling snow in shorts.

It's partly the Alaskan in me, but more so all the cheeseburgers and pizza in me.

Goo, goo, goo joob.

Liquor Store Snowman

Looks like the kids kept busy while mom and dad went grocery shopping ...

Someone save Baby Jesus!

With great power comes great washability

Hi ... my name is Kevin ... and I ... am ... a power-washer renter.

There's something about a power washer. There's something about hooking your regular garden hose up to a wheeled contraption, pulling the crank on that noisy little motor, aiming the nozzle at something dirty, and blasting the grime away with a 1,500 PSI stream of water.

Washing is not normally an exciting activity. Soap, scrub, rinse, repeat. Nothing thrilling in that. Washing, generally speaking, is a chore.

But power washing ... that is a different story. The words are in that order for a purpose. The washing comes second; the power comes first.

When you pull that trigger you feel the force of the water pushing back at you. Loose objects get tossed aside like Brussels sprouts on a five-year-old's dinner plate. Power wash a dirty surface you feel like you're spray painting the clean on it. The before-after picture is right in front of you and the differences are stark.

There are six types of jobs that get done when you get a power washer, and they come in a natural progression. It starts with the job for which you got the power washer.

We rented a power washer yesterday to clean up the siding on the north side of our house. Dampness plus nature minus sunshine equals yuck, and it was showing. We knew it was starting to look bad, but it wasn't until that jet of water flushed away all the much that we realized how bad it was. Yet a lot of problems can be resolved at 1,500 PSI and we quickly cleaned up the siding.

After you've finished your original chore, you realize that you're not ready to give up the power. Fortunately, you've inevitably hit something else with the spray which left a bright streak of clean on that something. This is the second type of power washer job - the collateral benefit, if you will. In our case, we had some streaks on the driveway that had to be cleaned up. Again, though, that ended too soon.

The third type of power-washing job is the one you weren't planning on doing, but you decide to do anyways because a) you've got the washer and b) you're not ready to put it away just yet. We cleaned our deck, our sidewalks, the already clean sides of the house ... everything in need of cleaning.

When nothing else needs to be cleaned, you encounter the fourth type of power-washing job ... the creative application. By this point you've already seen what the power washer does to loose debris - leaves, twigs, and the like - and it has been ruminating in your brain for a little while. Now you actively look for nuisances to blast away. Those irritating squirrels? Gone. Weeding is much more amusing at 1,500 PSI. And what lawn is complete without your autograph etched into it, right?

At this point, you discover the fifth use of the power washer ... re-washing the stuff you washed previously but then muddied up again by trying something stupid like weeding with a power washer. And it is during this series of tasks that the thrill of the power wash begins to subside. Now that you're cleaning up what you have to clean up, it starts to become a chore again. This is a good thing, because if you're like most people you rented the washer and it needs to go back. Besides, in your zeal for washing, you've set yourself up for the sixth and final type of job that comes from using a power washer: repairing the stuff you damaged.

Next week, after it has had time to dry, we are repainting our deck. For some reason the paint is missing in little strips.

Meeting History

We met history this morning.

Last night my kids and I joined my son's Boy Scout pack on an overnight encampment on the battleship USS New Jersey. It was a lot of fun. We got special tours of the ship, got served dinner and breakfast in the mess hall, got to explore areas of the ship normally closed off to the public, took lots ...

... and lots ...

... and lots ....

... of pictures, and got to sleep in the enlisted berthing areas!

OK, that last part wasn't nearly as fun.

My daughter asked why they called them the berthing areas, what with the lack of anybody actually being born there. After trying to squeeze my hefty frame into a less-than-hefty-sized bunk, I have a hypothesis of my own. For a person like me, the berthing area was about as roomy as your standard-issue womb. And when I emerged from the bunk, it did resemble birthing.

Breach.

With my shoulders squeezed tightly between the mattress and the ceiling and my head turned in a position last seen in The Exorcist, I woke up at 0300 with a massive headache and Quasimodo-like posture. I yanked my sleeping bag and pillow off the bunk and set up new quarters on the linoleum floor. I slept like a baby for the rest of the night - albeit a neglected baby - and woke up this morning straight-backed and headache-free.

After our hearty breakfast (my son wound up on KP), we meandered around the ship for a while. One of the volunteers reminded us parents that the brig was open. "Get pictures of your kids in there now," the guide said, "while it's still funny. Ten years from now, if they're in a cell won't be nearly as humorous."

While we were up by the bridge, we got into a discussion with one of the veteran volunteers about the history of the ship. Being that she was designed for battleship-to-battleship contact - the heavyweight bouts of the naval warfare world - and she saw combat service in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East over her many decades of service, I asked the obvious question. Did the New Jersey take any direct hits? The volunteer confirmed that yes, she had taken a hit from a 5" gun on shore. The volunteer also brought up a tale of a non-combat casualty in which a sailor was killed when he and a turret wound up occupying the same space.

After about 15 hours aboard, we packed up our gear and finally left the ship. We made a quick stop at the gift shop for the obligatory tchotchkes (a Yiddish word for trinkets that the Blogger spell-check wants to replace with "crotchless"), then headed towards the car.

An old guy and his two middle-age sons were walking towards the ship. Looking at our gear, the old guy asked if we slept aboard the ship. I told him we did. "Do they still have the metal bunks" he asked.

It turns out this guy served on the New Jersey in the fifties in Korea. With the tour information fresh in mind I asked "wasn't the ship hit in Korea?"

"Yes," he replied. "I was in the turret when it happened."

The turrets are protected by nine inches of armor on the sides. The five-inch shell did not penetrate. "It mainly scratched the paint," he said. My daughter then brought up the story of the guy who was killed by the turret. The old man was silent for a moment, then said "that was Bob. He was a friend of mine."

(The man did say Bob's last name, but unfortunately I don't remember it.)

It was one thing to walk around this storied battleship, but it was quite another to meet a someone who experienced some of the most memorable moments first-hand. And to think if I had done my normal routine of hurrying the kids past the gift-shop we would have missed that opportunity. It was something special.

My daughter made the moment. I thanked the old man for sharing his experiences with us. Then my daughter added, "thank you for your service."

As he was heading off to re-visit the ship on which he lived and served over fifty-five years ago, you could see in his eye that he appreciated that thank-you.

SPOILER ALERT ... or not

I ha an amusing email exchange with author and poet A F Harrold on a book he is authing, The Curious Education of Epitome Quirkstandard.

Mr. Harrold released an early version online as an audiobook at Podiobooks.com, which I have been enjoying tremendously. Every so often I'll send him an email to compliment him on an episode. This was taken from our latest volley.

He wrote:

When you finish it - which is getting near - I'll warn you in the latest (final?) draft the ending is different in one detail - I'll see if you can guess what it is when you get there...

To which I replied:

Oh, this isn't going to be one of those cliche endings where aliens show up and use their photon plasma recombobulator ray guns to reanimate Elvis Presley in a futile attempt to take over the world, only to find out that they wound up in a book that not only doesn't take place before Elvis died, he wasn't even born yet, and since their plan is thwarted they leave Earth, but not before using their advance technologies to turn Simone into a cyborg and Winston Churchill - who, they are happy to find out after quickly re-reading the book up to this point, is actually alive in this era - sober, which, unfortunately, makes him realize that he doesn't like politics and instead becomes a dancer, which then means he is not there to save England a few decades later, which then means the Nazis take over and make everybody wear silly hats, which, in the a moment of complete irony, leads to the downfall of the Third Reich when the dancing Churchill throws his hat into the audience after a show in London attended by Hitler, who has to duck to avoid getting hit and winds up choking to death on his chips, and in the ensuing chaos a now very elderly Epitome finally discovers how to dress himself, is it?
I hope not. I hate those endings.

To which he replied:

Um, not quite.
Hitler chokes to death on his popcorn.

On Faith, Science, and Self-Propelled Meat Sacks

This was my recent contribution to a discussion on science and faith.

Those who champion the notion that "pure science" is the source of all knowledge lump religion into the realm of the supernatural. The supernatural, they argue, is by definition outside the realm of what science can even attempt to explain, science being limited to the "natural" universe as it is.

This desire to explain all natural phenomena in terms of natural causes and effects is religion-neutral (that is, neutral to religion as a concept). To say science has no capacity to either confirm or deny the characteristics, capacity, or even existence of supernatural phenomena is understandable and also religion-neutral. To state that there is no physical evidence to support a particular claim of supernatural interaction with the natural world – or to state that there is evidence to dispute such a particular claim – is religion-neutral and within the defined realm of scientific study. We know, for example, that the Earth is not resting atop giant elephants that are standing on giant turtles.

But the science true believers overlook an incredibly important logical fallacy. They make a leap of faith that essentially states that since some claims of supernatural interaction with the physical world can be disproved, all such claims must be false. Apollo is not carrying the sun across the sky in his chariot, therefore Catholicism is invalid.

Faith is the holding as true something that can neither be proved nor disproved. To claim that anything outside the realm of "science" can not exist is nothing more than a statement of faith. Atheism is a religion of its own.

Personally, I think there is a dual nature to man. There is a physical existence, but there is also something that is not quite physical. For convenience, we shall call that a soul. I believe there is interaction between the soul and the physical body, but the soul is something separate. I won’t go into my own faith beyond that; I won’t try to explain how that interaction occurs or what greater meaning this may imply. I just included that tidbit to posit the notion that perhaps there is something within us that can indicate the existence of something “supernatural”. The way I see it, my body is my body, but my soul is “me”.

Then again, maybe I am wrong. The phenomenon that is my consciousness may simply be a byproduct of the electrical fields generated in the central processing unit of a self-propelled meat sack. I don’t think we’ll really know until we know … or we don’t – depending on which side is correct. My point is that even self-identity is a matter of faith.

Incidentally, I do hope my view on duality is correct. I’d hate to think that all this time I’ve been a figment of my own imagination.

Next task: rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

I saw a guy walking by the side of the road today picking up trash with one of those pointy sticks.

Normally, this would be a useful task. People litter. Litter has aesthetic as well as environmental consequences. Ergo, someone has to pick up the litter. Even I can figure that out.

But there's a slight problem with trying to do this task today; namely it is windier than the collective backsides of an entire mining crew at a chili-eating contest.

So here this guy is, dutifully picking up trash from the grass alongside the road, while loose plant matter, paper products, small poodles sent outside for wee-wee time at the same moment that Mother Nature planned whoosh-whoosh time, and sorts of other stuff are blowing about all around him.

What is the point of this? Not only is the ground he's cleaning being uncleaned right behind him, but the stuff he's picking up now be gone by tomorrow if he just leaves it on the ground.

And now for something completely different ...

Jim Cramer (of Mad Money fame) just made perhaps his single most unique market observation. While being interviewed on CNBC about the merits of various retailers, he said of one one: "People go to Kohl's to buy their fat pants."

The woman interviewing him almost didn't recover. You could see at least four things running through her mind:

1. I can't believe he said that,
2. I wan't to laugh but I shouldn't,
3. I really can't believe he just said that, and
4. wait a minute ... I shop at Kohl's!

As she was regaining her composure, she mentioned, "I'm glad I'm wearing waterproof mascara."

Websites on which you don't want to appear

I am watching "Talkshow With Spike Feresten" because, well, the remote is really far away, and right after the bit where they gave a 99-year-old woman a set of tramp stamps (aka the "license plate" tattoos in the center of the back just above the waistline), Spike discussed an issue plaguing bad-haired, bad-skinned, oft-bespectacled aging male has-been or wanna-be celebrities everywhere.

You see, gone are the days of any-pub-is-good-pub. Nowadays the Internet opens up "pub" opportunities that can be unflattering to the point of painfulness. Outer-tier celebrities such as former Saturday Night Live star Dana Carvey, Spike Feresten, the loud half of Penn and Teller Penn Gilette, sodomite satirist Oscar Wilde, seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, Senator-elect-ish Al Franken, and alleged best friend of and political mastermind behind President Obama William Ayers have all been the subjects of this very type of Internet attack.

Yes, they have all been featured on MenWhoLookLikeOldLesbians.com, a website dedicated to exposing men who look like old lesbians.

Interestingly enough, three guys on the site (Spike, Dana, and Penn) were all on the show this night. So they did what any group of guys facing the public scorn of looking like aging homosexual women would do ... they sang a song about it.

Let's face it; nothing restores one's masculinity more than breaking into a musical number.