Translation: Fish or Cut Bait

That’s the spot-on message Ramesh Ponnuru has for Congressional Democrats:

Dennis Kucinich called his party’s bluff. If Democrats believe half of the things they say about the Bush administration, then they ought to impeach both Bush and Cheney.

I don’t believe that Bush and Cheney “lied us into war.” If the Democrats who say they did really believe it, though, then they ought to do something about it. Surely taking the country into war on pretenses they knew were false counts as a high crime and misdemeanor.

If they don’t believe it, on the other hand, they are spreading some poisonous lies for partisan advantage. Good for Kucinich for having the courage of his sincere, though loopy, convictions.

I’m open for advice. 

Female Offspring Unit #2, a.k.a. G-girl, turned 16 back in August—upping my inventory of licensed-drivers-in-household to four. Regrettably, I only have three vehicles. The mathematics of this situation is pretty harsh.

It means we’re all playing an ongoing game of musical chairs cars. (When the music stops, everyone grabs a vehicle but one person is always left without keys.) And it’s about to get worse.

You see, the lease is up on my vehicle this week (I use the word “my” with several layers of irony) and I’m done with leasing. In fact, we are working on eliminating all debt except the real estate variety and I’d like to pay cash for my cars from here on out. (Darn you Dave Ramsey!) That means we’re about to have only two cars. And that means that game of musical chairs could turn ugly.

Female Offspring Unit #1 is at college and can get by without a car for a few more months. That means I need to scrape together some cash to buy a car now. And then scrape some more together to buy another in a few months. One for me. One for G-girl.

Now don’t laugh, but I’m looking to spend about $5k for G’s car and then perhaps go mid-life-crisis-wild and drop $7k on mine. Heck, I might splurge and drop $7,500 on something if I’m feeling frisky.

For FOU #2 I’m looking for reliable, safe transportation that won’t do too much damage to her image. Gas mileage? Don’t care. She won’t put enough miles on the thing for it to matter. Carbon footprint? Let’s make Godzilla jealous.

For me, well I’d like to have one of these but I don’t think my four-figure budget is going to shake one of those loose. So, I’m looking at ’99 Volvo S70s like this one and older Mazda Millenia. These cars are modest enough to avoid the dreaded ostentatiousness but nice enough to prevent a rush of shame every time I need to have it valet parked. In other words, the perfect car for a blogger whose rambling posts on aircraft attract 38-second views from people all over the world. That’s what I’m thinking anyway.

But I’m open for suggestions.

Oh, by the way, FOU #3 turns 16 in 21 months.

Embedded in the code of this happy little blog is a utility called “Google Analytics.” It gives me the ability to view reports on how many visitors have stopped by, how long they stayed, and, if those visitors came via a link from another site or search engine it allows me to know which one.

On a typical day, I get only 30-40 visitors to this site. (Of these, 10 are usually relatives. 10 others are friends–old and new. And the remainder appear to be either long-term inmates of Flurgendorf Prison or students at the University of Blaupunkt.)

 Well, a few days ago I checked my site traffic report and discovered a huge spike in visits on October 25th. More than 250 “unique visitors” had stopped by on that one day. Needless to say, I was curious as to why so many people had suddenly stopped by, and who/what had sent them. My assumption was that some popular blog had linked to one of my recent posts.

Upon futher investigation, I learned that nearly all of the new visitors had bypassed the home page of this blog and gone directly to a post I had written way back in July. It was, this one, in which I opined about the new Boeing 787 commercial aircraft.

That wasn’t all that surprising. I still assumed some busy blog had found that post interesting or relevant and decided to link to it, thereby sending a flurry of traffic to that page on my site. But then I checked to see what site had referred all that traffic.

As it turned out, the hits did not come from a single site but rather from eight different-but-related sites. Specifically, each hit had been a result of a Google image search in various countries. The referring sites broke down as follows:

67 visitors from images.google.pl (Poland)

60 visitors from images.google.fi (Finland)

57 visitors from images.google.dk (Denmark)

48 visitors from images.google.com (USA)

30 visitors from images.google.ro (Romania)

15 visitors from images.google.id (Indonesia)

5 visitors from images.google.uk (Great Britain)

4 visitors from images.google.ar (Argentina)

Plus a scattering from Russia, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovak Republic, Brazil, and Turkey. 

Is it just me or is this exceedingly odd? If I am interpreting the reports accurately, Scores of people on four continents all decided to do a Google image search that led them to link to an old post of mine containing a picture of Boeing’s new 787 and Airbus’s new Leviathan-garganto-liner A380. On the same day.

Really?

Did the guys at the NSA who are supposed to be monitoring bad guy activity on the Internets take notice of this? I sure hope so. It’s creepy.

I suppose some international financial publication might have run some big story on that day that prompted people all over the planet to do an image search using an unusual set of search terms that caused my little blog’s post to turn up high in the results. 

If you, dear reader, have an insight as to what might explain this, I’d love to hear it.

I returned from Nashville yesterday (and head for Houston today).

In Nashville we were recording some radio programs for a ministry client and, in addition to working behind the scenes on the content of the program, I play a wee role onthe program as well—meaning I spend a little time behind a microphone. Talking. (Those readers who know me from way back will remember that in the latter part of the Cretaceous Period I made my living talking on the wireless after my meteoric career as a newspaper guy.)

Trips like that one give me the ability to affect my best Barney Fife, hike up my pants, take a deep breath and then speak-groan: “Yep…had to go to Nashville to do a recording session…Yeah…In a studio. There in Nashville…you know… recording…yep…Had to do a session. . .in Nashville.”

You’ll find the previous installments of “The Future That Never Happened” here:

Part 1

Part 2

You should read this.

Read it then forward it.

Precisely 50 years ago, the folks at Frigidaire looked forward to our time and envisioned the typical housewife in a space like this:

{click on picture for larger image}

Very shiny. Very chrome-y. Very devoid-of-anything-remotely-organic-y. But oh, the vivid colors.

I’m not sure I’d want to cook a meal here, but I’d probably be comfortable having my spleen operated on. Looks very… sterile.

This is a common element of almost all futuristic glimpses envisioned in the 1940s and 50s. I guess it was due in part to the fact that to that generation, living amidst natural materials was “primitive.” After all, it is what people had been forced to use for thousands of years. “Surely in this dawning golden age of acrylics and synthetic fibers, those old materials will be replaced by space-age ones,” they must have surmised. After all, wasn’t the sage career advice of the tipster in the movie The Graduate the single word: “Plastics.”

In the ’50s, faith in science’s ability to improve everything was still very much alive.

Well, as I look around me here in my 21st Century home study, I see a wool rug, a leather chair, wooden floor and bookshelves, granite, marble and…what is that…oh yes, dog hair. (Can you imagine a dog being allowed into the space pictured above? Maybe a robot dog.)

What the futurists of the past didn’t factor in is how deeply the human soul seems to need and want natural materials around. A couple of days trapped in an environment of acrylic, vinyl and plastic and we start to get an itch in the medulla oblongata. We crave the sight and feel of wood and leather, the warp and woof of fabrics shorn from living animals and plants.

I would wager that 1,000 years from now, if God hasn’t brought the curtain down on this act and begun the next one, people will still fill their environments with the same materials Abraham used in his tent.

As for some of the details in the picture above. . .

Just what is R2D2 cooking up here?

An elephant heart? A meat accordion? Jabba the Hutt’s fist?

As for our homemaker, it’s comforting to know that in this future of ours, tea-length dresses, wasp waists, and heels are still standard-issue for housework. As for her friend, the last time Betty showed her what she was cooking, something leaped out of the pot and attached itself to her face, so she’s wary.

No surprises this time. It’s just polymer gravy for the buckminster fullerene synthetic rump roast.

Then there is the crude-but-sweet knife rack her son made the other day in Carbon Fiber Composites Shop class.

Finally, it’s comforting to know that even in the atomic era, we still find a place in the space-age kitchen for the Crock Pot.

Or is it a Wok Pot? A Crock Wok? A Wokky Crocky?

{image courtesy of Plan59.com}

I’ve never seen these guys in the same room. I’m just saying. . .

Our favorite North of England guy, Fergus, sends me this column from the NYTimes. (Fergus does me a huge service by reading the Times so I don’t have to.)

In it, liberal Gail Collins wonders why all social conservatives aren’t flocking to Pastor Mike:

“But why aren’t the social conservatives rallying around this guy? Unlike any of the major candidates, he’s still on his first wife and first position on abortion.”

East Coast liberals like Collins tend to think all of us yokels here in fly-over country are two-issue voters, she comes right out and says so in her column:

“They’re united mainly by their hatred of abortion and gay marriage, and a desire to win.”

To say that any columnist writing in the Times, with the possible exception of David Brooks, is clueless about social conservatives is to state the glaringly obvious.

So to help, allow me to explain why this Southern social conservative has mixed feelings about Gov. Huckabee:

1. He’s wrong on immigration, and that is a HUGE problem for me and many others.
2. He’s questionable on free trade. See this discussion on NRO.
3. He’s to the left of Hillary on government-mandated health policing. (i.e., a federal ban on smoking) Promoting a British-style “nanny state” is not exactly a big winner with conservatives.

If you think all of that sounds a lot like “compassionate conservatism,” I suspect you’re right. And I, for one, am ready for a conservatism that leaves compassion where it belongs, in the hearts and actions of those who comprise the Church. And I will readily admit to a raging case of Bush Fatigue right now.

From what I can tell, Mike Huckabee is an outstanding, admirable man. But as I’ve stated elsewhere, any candidate that credibly promises to nominate more Scalias and Alitos to the Supreme Court; and uphold the Hyde Amendment on federal funding of abortion; has passed my test of support on that issue. And right now that leaves this pro-life voter a number of other options.

Or so they claim. I’m dubious. I’ll try to confirm that when I go there today.

Yes, it’s once more into the breach of air travel. My optimism that things will go well is a touching triumph of hope over experience. Like, say, my experience trying to get home from Pittsburgh last week. I’ll just say it was “special” and leave it at that.

I had picked up a copy of “Best Life” magazine on the newsstand at the Pittsburgh aiport. I was in the middle of my second extended ground  delay of the day when I remembered I had slipped the publication into my computer bag. As I thumbed through it, I came across an article about increasing air travel snarls titled, “Delayed and Confused.”

The lead line of the article was:

I have flown 110 flights in the last year. Precisely 10 arrived on time.

I suspect we may be witnessing the collapse of the airline’s hub-spoke  system. I’ll post more on this later. They’re calling my flight!