Said... :: Thunk...
the beginning
Flickr: I_M_BonBonWildly out of sync with the weather today, but this Flickr photo reminded me of my grandmother and her adoration of hummingbirds.
When we’d visit her apartment in Arcadia, CA, in the 1980s, we’d help refill the feeders on the balcony and spend hours watching for the “hummies,” as she called them. She had a little bird call for them and it worked pretty well.
We were enthralled.
The status line just now in iChat for my friend Chris, a seminary student in Austin, TX:
I'm sure the devout here in Salt Lake City just know in their hearts! that today's snow is a sign from God of the abomination that is Halloween falling on a Sunday. Or something like that.
My take: It's another reminder of the things I really miss when I'm not in SLC. I adore the well-defined seasons here in Utah. You know when it's spring, summer, fall, winter, and you know when the seasons mix just by looking out the window every few minutes.
This is a perfect time.
I posted some photos of the snow in my mobile gallery. Check 'em out: One, Two, Three.
And happy Halloween. :-)
Woo hoo! It's snowing!
And I've no idea what time it really is!
The neighbours' house went on the market in mid-September, and the for-sale sign on their lawn has had a red sticker reading SALE PENDING since about 5 days after the sign was planted.
Is that just a silly sales tactic by real-estate agents? Do they actually think claiming a sale is pending will enhance the desire of a property? And if they do think this, is there any evidence to show they're right in thinking it?
Somehow it doesn't surprise me that Mark Hacking didn't have the balls to plead guilty and be done with it.
I'm sorry for Lori Hacking's family. If there can be any good from this, perhaps it'll be that Mark Hacking eventually feels impelled to disclose the full story of Lori's death, which might help put the Soares' minds at ease.
Entire story below, exactly as it appeared on the Trib's site.
Continue reading "Mark Hacking pleads 'not guilty'" »
More randomness tonight. I’ve been up to my eyebrows in the point-of-sale register installation and inventory at the gift shop, and I haven’t felt much like writing anything when I’ve returned home each night. But tonight I’ve a few observations.
Continue reading "A few days away" »
Said... :: Thunk...
I think I'll put up answers to a few memes. Today's newspapers were utterly dull and I've an early day tomorrow for the ongoing point-of-sale insanity at the gift shop, so I don't feel like thinking about original content tonight.
Even my "random Sunday" post earlier didn't have much entertainment value. I yawned all the way through writing it, so now I turn to others for content ideas.
Happy reading. :-)
I spent 9 hours today scanning merchandise in the gift shop in preparation for the POS conversion. I've never touched so many different candy bars and ceramic mugs in my life.
My cats knocked my DVD player's remote control to the floor sometime overnight. The battery door came off and the two AA batteries are now just gone. I'm sure the two cats thought the batteries were just the best toys ever. I imagine I'll stumble over those batteries when I move out.
Iggy's Sports Grill on 200 West at 700 South is a pretty good restaurant, but Alan, a server who's worked there 3 days (and by his own admission drank there a lot before he got a job there), is just terrible. There weren't enough servers for the crowd of Utah Utes football fans and World Series watchers, and Alan kept coming back to our table to tell us our beers were on the way, immediately after which he'd deliver drinks and/or food orders to nearby tables before stopping by our table again to tell us once more our beers were on the way.
We canceled three orders because of that, and he ended up short-charging us anyway to the tune of $10 on the $70 bill, further reducing his already meager tip.
I've never worked in a restaurant but I'm pretty sure I could manage to deliver a couple of pints to a table instead of repeatedly telling that table the beer is (eventually) coming.
Jon Stewart slays me.
That's all for now; time for dinner.
I've followed the Friday Forum for a while (via its Yahoo! Group) but haven't participated until this week:
Entire story below the cut.
Continue reading "Lori Hacking autopsy yields little" »
Heavy rain for the last couple of hours.
Flash-flood watches and warnings flying left and right—my cell phone's lousy with the warning messages.
A bit of a chill in the air.
And I can't see more than a mile or so in any direction.
I love this weather.
Did this for the first time back in August and then forgot about it completely until tonight.
CORVALLIS, Ore.—Chris van Rossman's flat-screen Toshiba TV came with a built-in VCR, DVD and CD player.
Still, the 20-inch color TV aspired to higher things.
On the night of Oct. 2, it began emitting the international distress signal.
The 121.5 MHz frequency signal was picked up by an orbiting search-and-rescue satellite, which informed the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Before long, van Rossman heard a knock at his door.
Outside were men in Air Force uniforms, a Corvallis police officer and a Benton County Search and Rescue deputy.
::knock knock::
"Who is it?"
"Candygram...."
I just found out via Food Network's Unwrapped: Pasta show that Salt Lake City is the SpaghettiOs capital of the world.
Salt Lakers put away 8000 servings of the stuff each day.
I'm terrified.
Said... :: Thunk...
Another forever-since-I-did-this.
This week there's a word-association section too, similar to Unconscious Mutterings:
said:thunk
Been forever since I participated in this one.
Via kottke.org's 'Tag surfing' post, I was looking at the Flickr 'party' tag stream and saw a text ad that led me to
Too Short Munchkin Cattery : New Arrival Munchkin Kittens
...?
Had dinner with my mom last night at the Lone Star Steakhouse on 2100 S near 1300 E.
We went there because Mom had been craving ribs. Her craving began at 19:30 MDT Jun 06, 20004. I know this with such certainty because I wrote in my trusty PDA the date I got my Green Street club membership.
How, you may ask, does a private-club membership have anything to do with the beginnings of a craving for ribs?
There's a bit of a story behind that.
Continue reading "Must be that "Lone Star" State of Mind." »
Annie and Flex had their first post-animal-shelter veterinary visits today. They both did really well, even considering that I set up the appointment for my two cats and my mom's three Siamese cats all at once, since they were all due for boosters of one kind or another.
Stacks of cat carriers for the herd: Annie and Flex in the two small carriers at left, Sam in the upper right carrier, Porky and Wart in the lower rightAnnie is 6 months old, a month older than the shelter folks estimated. She weighs 4lbs 13oz, far below the 7lbs on all the pre-adoption paperwork the shelter gave me. She's in wonderful health but will be taking a short course of amoxicillin to clear up a minor bacterial infection she got after her cold last month, and she got a single-treatment dose of Revolution to protect her from Flex's ear mites.
Flex is 9 months, right on the estimate the shelter folks gave me. He's 7lbs right on, a pound below the 8lbs listed on all the shelter paperwork. He got a single-treatment dose of Revolution for ear mites and is on a week-long (or so) course of a couple of drugs to clear up an intestinal-parasite problem (giardia and spirochetes).
Each of them got a distemper booster as well, and neither even twitched when the vet gave the injections. I was pleased, because Annie nearly had a stroke when the shelter folks injected her ID chip last month. The needle for the chip injections is much larger gauge, of course, but still, I was waiting for the yowlings to start and nothing happened.
My mom's cats all reacted in their usual ways. Sam, the oldest Siamese (and mother to the other two), is in fact Satan wrapped up in an adorable-looking fur coat. She was tensed the entire time but didn't draw any blood from the vet or the technicians when they took a blood sample to screen for several problems that might explain her 30% weight loss over the last couple of years. Porky and Wart each took their exams and treatments in stride; in fact Wart, usually the nervous nelly of the bunch, didn't seem all that perturbed, but he did rush back into the carrier at the end of his exam.
All five cats resumed their normal activities when they got home, and we went out for a couple pitchers of beer. :-)
Have a good weekend!
Here’s my current iTunes playlist in playing order. 330 songs, 23h 41m 32s playing time. It’s on song #8 as I post this.
I think I’ll leave this one going when I hit the sack in a little while.
Continue reading "Because I’ve nothing useful to say" »
Said... :: Thunk...
Via TwilightCafé and random thinks:
I figured I'd end up being TRSDOS or Windows 1.0 or something else I'd never used.
MarDee Clark has 19 children.
Not 19 by way of a Brady Bunch arrangement or adoption, but 19, as in take a deep breath and push.
That's 19, as in 19 trips to the hospital. As in 171 months of pregnancy. As in three more and she could field her own football team, offense and defense.
MarDee is the Barry Bonds of mothers. Married at 21, she had 19 babies in 21 years. All but one of them weighed at least 8 pounds, and several of them weighed 9 and 10 pounds. They range in age from 29 to 8 years old.
She's 51 now and raising them alone. She and her husband, Floyd, split up.
MarDee and Floyd had always planned to have a large family. They decided they wanted an even dozen kids.
"I've always known since I was a young girl that I wanted lots of children," she says.
When they got to 12, well, "I just knew there was more, so we just kept having them."
She can name every one of them—if you give her a minute.
"Let's see," she begins, "there's Christina, Yvette, Stephen, Conner, Evan, Ethan... um, let's see, I have to say them in order so...." (At this point, she pauses to think a moment and then starts over again with the first child and works her way back to where she left off.)... "Bridget, Brian, Ileana, David, Danielle, Jason, Darlene, Cullen, Deborah (twins), Donovan, Forrest, Amber and Shannon!"
She pauses to catch her breath.
"Yes, I have trouble remembering names," she says, laughing. "Sometimes I have to try four or five times till I get the right one."
[...]
There are so many problems with this.
"MarDee"? I've seen some typical Utah names in the past, but I think that may be the most obviously-a-Utah-native name I've ever encountered.
Then there's the 19 children. That's just beyond my comprehension. Before this article, the largest family I knew about was the one that lived next door when we were kids. They had 13, but only six were their own; the others were adopted. It was amusing/horrifying to watch them go to the grocery store—when they returned, they'd set up a human chain to get the couple dozen gallons of milk, the 20 or so loaves of bread, the endless boxes of cereal, the 50-pound bags of flour and sugar and salt from their 15-passenger van (!) to the house.
And finally, this quote from the story:
When they got to 12, well, "I just knew there was more, so we just kept having them."
I can't even put the mixed fascination and horror into words.
Death By Caffeine.
Choose your fave soft drink, enter your weight in pounds or kilograms, and find out how many cans you'd have to consume in order to kill yourself.
For my beverage of choice, Diet Coke, it'd take 363 cans—at my normal can-or-2-a-day rate, six months to achieve death.
Come to think of it, I wonder in how short a time I would have to consume that quantity for it to kill me.
I also wonder how that page calculates this. My result for Diet Pepsi is 454 cans; for Coke Classic, it's 481 cans.
?!
I nearly didn't post this, as you'll probably understand shortly.
Via TwilightCafé, my Squirrel Name:
Don Nunn is Bushy Smallnuts.
If I use my full first name:
Donald Nunn is Dave Drunkenpaws.
Let the chucklings begin.
Continue reading "My Squirrel Name." »
In the 10 months I’ve had a TiVo Series2 DVR, I’ve often thought of a few improvements that I’d certainly welcome. In no particular order; I’ve numbered them for easy reference later on:
Any TiVo users who stumble over this have any other ideas? I’d be fascinated to know what functions or improvements other TiVo owners consider important.
Nutshell version: They won't refer to collisions as "accidents" anymore. They'll be called "crashes" under the theory that there are no such things as accidents—there's always some preventable mistake that leads to highway crashes. There's a flaw in this argument, however: They're discounting crashes caused by unforeseen mechanical failures, unless they're also considering the potential loss of control after a tire blowout a "preventable mistake." For that matter, they're also assuming all drivers are expert enough to be able to dodge a deer that leaps into the road 100 feet ahead of the vehicle.
I'm all for consistent terminology, and the word "accident" has always struck me as something of a silly euphemism, but come on: Changing the word you use to describe an event is supposed to be an effective method of reducing the frequency of that event?
When I first moved to Seattle in 2002, the local radio stations were going through this same flap, trying to get their traffic reporters to stop referring to "accidents" and call them "crashes." The Washington State Patrol was encouraging the terminology change as a highway-safety measure along the sames lines of the UHP's effort.
Gotta love law-enforcement logic.
Entire story below the cut.
Continue reading "Deseret Morning News: No more 'accidents' on Utah roads" »
Entire story and photos below the cut.
Continue reading "Deseret Morning News: Lori laid to rest as the tears flow" »
The common opinion of the several online buddies who've commented to me by IM about the Provo flag story:
It looks like a statement about or tribute to gay rights.
Struck me as incredibly amusing, knowing the homophobic views of Utahns in general and residents of Happy Valley in particular.
Must be the rampant scholarship going on at BYU. Free exchange of ideas and all that, keeps them awash in new thinkin' all the time!
A couple of quick links; the full story is below the cut.
Continue reading "Salt Lake Tribune: Provo's city pennant a flop with flag lovers" »
"Eulogy" trailer main page at AppleEvery now and then I check Apple's movie trailers page to see what's new there.
Tonight I saw a few new entries, among them Fat Albert, which looks insanely stupid (I never liked the cartoon, so a live-action version strikes me as absurdly ill-conceived); and Eulogy, which looks pretty funny despite Ray Romano's presence among the cast.
"Eulogy" large-trailer page at Apple
Then I looked at the wording on the main Eulogy movie page and on large-size trailer page.
I'm wondering if the (sparse) copywriting and/or -editing on these pages was done by a non-native English speaker.
Click the images to view full-size screenshots in new windows.
This is the first story I've seen about Garrett Bardsley since a week or so after his disappearance in August, when the search effort switched from "rescue" to "recovery." The story dropped right out of the news at that point, typical for stories of this type.
Entire story quoted below.
Continue reading "Deseret Morning News: Students come through for Garrett" »
Entire Salt Lake Tribune story quoted below. I’ve added links to the breweries and restaurants in question, since the Trib doesn’t provide them in its stories.
Continue reading "Utah brewers get a taste of success at beer festival" »
The state Office of the Medical Examiner has released the body of Lori Hacking to her family, which is planning a private burial.
Family members took custody of the body on Tuesday, police said.
"They're very pleased and relieved to have received Lori's body back," said family spokesman David Gehris.
Gehris said the the woman's mother, Thelma Soares, of Orem, and her father, Eraldo Soares, of Fullerton, Calif., are planning a private burial ceremony at Orem City Cemetery, where a headstone has already been erected.
Lori Hacking's body was found Friday at the Salt Lake County landfill following a 10-week search.
Although the office of the medical examiner has completed its autopsy, it has not delivered its written report to police and prosecutors, who this week refused to disclose the manner and cause of Lori Hacking's death.
Authorities believe she was shot to death July 19 by her husband, Mark Hacking, and her body was placed in a Dumpster near the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Unit, where he worked.
Prosecutors say Mark Hacking killed his wife to prevent disclosure of his deceptions about his college career and medical school.
After Lori was reported missing, family members learned Hacking had not been accepted to medical school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, as he had claimed, and had not graduated from the University of Utah. The couple were planning to move to North Carolina within days of Lori's disappearance.
Mark Hacking is charged with murder and obstruction of justice in Lori's death. He is scheduled for an arraignment Oct. 29 before 3rd District Judge Denise Lindberg.
If you use Safari's built-in Google search, but you goof and hit Enter immediately after you've typed the letter a that was to be the first letter of the first word of your three-word search term, you get 3.61 billion hits.
It only took 0.32 seconds, though.
I found today that my PowerBook's battery will last close to 5 hours when I'm using the screen dimmed and don't have AirPort active (and that was hard, because there were two open wireless networks in the medical office building, and I really wanted to load up CNN.com).
I was pleased, because "up to 5 hours" is part of Apple's marketing of the machine, but the highest I'd ever seen before was 3.5 hours at full brightness and with AirPort operating the entire time.
I was going to scribble a few more random thoughts, but Phil just called and I'm off to our regular Wednesday-night pub crawl. Have a great evening and night. :-)
I was staring at a sheaf of packing slips, probably 30 pages printed in various font sizes but easily representing a couple thousand different products—each with its own UPC, I'm sure—and dreading the data entry to come, when I called a couple of the suppliers and immediately received importable cross-referenced files of SKUs, UPCs, wholesale costs, and item descriptions.
My despair has turned to elation.
Now I go home to do what data entry I have to do for the items we sorted and prepared today. Many of these are smaller suppliers who don't have the ability to provide us with electronic item references, or don't know how to do it, or don't speak English well enough for me to explain what I'm asking them to provide.
Another argh....
Inventory, UPC/SKU/description/price files from suppliers, 10-key data entry from hell:
All of these add up to a few days' work to get the gift shop ready for the point-of-sale registers we'll be installing in the next couple of weeks.
We also have to teach the volunteers how to use the system, which will make their jobs easier (and their work more accurate) in the long run, but which will scare the shit out of them in the short run. I'd say that with one or two exceptions, all of the volunteers who staff the shop (shops, in fact; there's a small satellite shop in the Women's Pavilion) are 60 or over, and what computer experience they have is mostly from being near the registers at the grocery-store checkout counters.
Off I go then to the storeroom to catalog the Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas items.
Argh....
Said... :: Thunk...
Full content of both stories below.
Continue reading "Salt Lake Tribune 10/02/04 stories on discovery of Lori Hacking’s remains" »
Full content of both stories below.
Continue reading "Deseret Morning News 10/02/04 stories on discovery of Lori Hacking's remains" »
Links only for now; I'll include story quotations later.
Deseret Morning News:
Salt Lake Tribune:
A hit I saw from a Google search on cats and colds reminded me that both felines are past their colds.
The black cat still sneezes once in a while, but nowhere near as frequently as he did last week. And neither cat wheezes now.
No more cat mucus to scrape off the windows, woo hoo.
I know you'll all be pleased to hear that my tabby cat is over her rabid fear of the TiVo remote.
She was already over it when I got back from Seattle Thursday night. No clue what caused it or why it went away; I'm just happy to be able to change channels—or hold anything in my hands, for that matter—without incurring the wrath of a vengeful kitten.
Some detect a desire to sin in 'I can't... I'm Mormon'
PROVO—Managers of the student newspaper at Brigham Young University pulled an advertisement after numerous complaints that it was too offensive for the conservative campus.
Chad Ramos, who capitalizes on "Mormon speak" in order to sell T-shirts, is surprised—but not particularly disappointed—at the furor at BYU over his "I can't" T-shirts. (Stuart Johnson, Deseret Morning News)The ad campaign began at the start of the month and sparked a big stir over a T-shirt with a simple phrase—"I Can't... I'm Mormon."
Students, professors and administrators felt the slogan implied wearers wished they could drink, smoke or have casual sex but were prevented only because they are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
One letter to the editor in the student paper was particularly sarcastic: "I can't, I'm Mormon, but if I wasn't, you know I'd be there 'cause it sounds sweet!"
Many also felt the female modeling the shirt in the ad struck an overly provocative pose.
Both objections surprised the shirt's creator, Utah Valley State College student Chad Ramos. He grew up in Las Vegas and said the phrase served him well when peers asked him to drink or smoke while he went to high school in an area with a large LDS population.
"I found if I told people I didn't drink, they didn't know how to react," he said, "but if I said, I can't, I'm Mormon, they said, 'Oh,' and boom, it was over."
One of the things I truly I adore about living in Utah is the occasional hilariously uptight reactions of LDS Church members to innocuous phenomena.
Best part: They don't even realize they're giving the T-shirt credence by their reactions.
I was pleased to see the SI.com article detailing Ichiro Suzuki's record-breaking 258th hit of the season.
Even better: He did it during the Mariners' 8-3 victory over the Texas Rangers.
Best yet: It was a Mariners home game. Ichiro broke the record in Safeco Field, so Seattle fans could have a chance to see it right in their own back yards.
Woo hoo!
