Coyote Blog

As promised (threatened?) here is a report on my home improvement project from this weekend.

We have a small (about 10x15) atrium area in the center of the house.  We have never really been happy with this area, and wanted to develop it as a sitting area when the weather is nice out.  We put in a ceiling fan and ordered some relatively inexpensive furniture, which of course won't get delivered for decades.  However, we were dissatisfied with the floor.  The original owners had a dirt floor, but the plants all apparently died.  They then laid in brick paving stones in the atrium.  Today, many of these paving stones are cracked and water stained, but I did not really have the energy or the money to dig them up and start over.

Last Friday we were at the Phoenix home show and saw a 12"x12" outdoor wooden interlocking floor tile advertised (they are called "interlocking keruing floor tiles").  The tiles have strips of finished wood that looks like teak (but are keruing, whatver that is) attached to a flexible rubber mat.  See the pictures below for the top and bottom respectively (click on any picture to get a larger version):

They can be laid with all the strips running the same way, or, as we did it, alternating for a parquet look.  The tiles were $3.25 each, not cheap but less expensive than alternatives, so we purchased enough to cover the area.  They look pretty good, but not perfect - you can see the plastic milk-crate pattern through the wood strips if you look at the right angle.

Here is the area before - note the water stains and the sand which is filling in big cracks and dips in the pavers:

Here is the floor after about 15 minutes -- they do go down fast.  They just lay on the ground with no adhesive.  The design of the bottoms keeps them from sliding around. 

And finally, here we are mostly done.  The company offers edge pieces that are designed like little ramps so a mat of these tiles can stand alone, but we did not need them since I was filling a depressed space wall-to-wall.  Here is the final effect:

We love the result.  I am just finishing a few diagonal cuts to finish off the last side - these were really the only hard part of the job.  I made them with some careful measuring and a circular saw (got a new one with a laser guide - awesome!)

Anyway, this is not really the kind of thing I normally blog, but this product was something I had never seen before and came out so well and was so easy to put down, I had to share.  Besides, if VodkaPundit can share this (which made me really jealous by the way), I thought I could show my weekend project too.

Blogging is light this weekend due to home improvements.  However, we found a cool new product for our house at the Phoenix home show, and, when I finish getting it installed, I will share some pictures.

OK, since I am car-blogging tonight, I will tackle another critical and substantive automotive topic.  Why do some people back into parking spaces?  And further, why are a large percentage of the people who back into spaces driving pickup trucks?  Here I am talking about backing into perpendicular spaces, like at the mall, not parallel parking.  Also, I am not talking about parking at a busy sporting event, where I often back in so that I can more easily pull forward into the inevitable post-gram traffic.

Backing up is at least 10 times harder than going forward.  Just try to drive a straight line backward - you will probably look like someone who is DWI. 

So lets think about parking.  When you are pulling in, you are generally going from a wide area to a very narrow area.  When you are pulling out, you are conversely going from a narrow area to a wide area.  If you did both of these forward, just to make things apples and apples, I think most people would agree that pulling in to the space is much harder than driving out.  So why do people do the harder move (pulling in) the harder way (backing up)? 

I have only had two people even try to give me an explanation for this.  The first was that they had read that most parking accidents happen pulling out of spaces, which is probably true.  But this is sloppy analysis.  I would argue that most accidents happen pulling out because people are backing up.  I would restate this stat as most parking accidents happen when people are backing up.  If everyone backed into spaces, most parking accidents would probably occur pulling in.  The second person told me that "this is how his dad always did it".  That explanation I buy.  I have found a lot of small habits like this that people stick by all their life stem from the way one of their parents taught them.

The only other advantage I can come up with is that backing in / pulling forward out might be safer in very busy lots where pedestrians and cars are constantly passing across the space and there is some danger of backing into them pulling out.  This may be, though I still see people laboriously backing up into narrow spaces at my office, where there is zero traffic in the parking lot.  And none of this explains why pickup trucks do it so much more often than sedans.  I would think that pickups would especially want to head in , since this leaves the bed accessible.

Update:

In the picture below, note the one car that is backed in along the line of perpendicular spaces at the bottom - a pickup!

Update #2: LOL - getting more comments on my parking lot observation than my post that questioned why drugs and prostitution were illegal.  I guess I may be finding my niche in the blogosphere.  Parking blogging.  Anyway, thanks to all the backer-uppers out there for the comments.  I have come to the conclusion that maybe I am just a bad driver in reverse.  If I tried to back into a space between two cars, I would probably scratch a car a week.  I do understand that at least that does not hurt anyone, while backing out can indeed hurt someone, particularly small hard-to-see kids.  (By the way, I will think the best of my readers and not assume they are attracted by one other benefit of backing in -- that if you back in and hit a car, it is likely unoccupied and you can make a run for it; if you hit a car backing out, it will be occupied and you are busted).

Five years ago, I probably would sooner have had my head held underwater in a toilet bowl than drive a Volvo.  This probably wasn't a fair bias, but they just looked so unappealing and seemed to embody "uncool" like no other car out there.

Anyway, things have changed, and Volvo is now offering several compelling vehicles.  A few months back I was looking for an SUV to replace my Lincoln Navigator and tote my kids around.  I had several complaints with my Navigator:

• It was too large and unwieldy around town
• The fit and finish was terrible.  It started rattling after about 8000 miles
• At $2 a gallon for gas, its terrible mileage started bankrupting me.
• Its cargo space was poorly engineered - the seats didn't fold down all the way and the space in the rear was not very usable.

I chose the XC90 for a number of reasons:

• It was the smallest, tightest SUV with a third seat in the back, allowing me to take up to five kids with me.  No other small SUV's had this third seat - you have to go to Suburbans or Navigators to find another car that has it
• The rear cargo area is superbly engineered.  Both the back seats fold down flat making a totally usable flat space all the way up to the front seats.
• The car maneuvers and parks really well, especially with the ultrasonic sensors when backing up.
• The fit and finish is really nice
• The car's exterior looks pretty good; its actually remarkably similar to the BMW SUV.
• The car handles pretty well, particularly with the AWD (all-wheel drive) and is a hell of lot better at cornering than the large SUV's. 
• Its very safe - it consistently ranks as safest car on the road - not just SUV but safest car period
• I got a good deal on it at the end of the last model year, though even then it certainly can't be called inexpensive

The car does have a couple of flaws.  The biggest one is the engine.  Both the 5 and the 6 cylinder options are fairly weak.  I ended up buying the smaller engine, because it was cheaper and the larger engine wasn't noticeably more powerful.  The pickup in the car is pretty mediocre, though I would not call it dangerous - there is enough power to get on the freeway without getting smushed.  However, it is disappointing that this small and under-powered engine is simultaneously weak on gas mileage.  I am getting about 16-17 mpg with the car, which is certainly better than my Navigator, but low given how much smaller the car is and how small the engine is.  I would have hoped it got at least 20.  This would probably be the perfect car if Honda or Toyota would make an engine for it (By the way, I heard on the radio the other day that Volvo is adding a V-8 option).

This one is for Europe, but there are others for the rest of the world.  I got 107 of 111.  I mixed up Latvia and Lithuania and got a couple of pieces of the old Yugoslavia mixed up.  I will admit that I guessed at which half of the old Czechoslovakia was Czech and which was Slovakia.

The Onion reports that "Americans Feel Safer with Martha Stewart in Jail":

"When I found out [Stewart] was behind a 10-foot-thick concrete wall, I heaved a huge sigh of relief," said Daniel McAllen, a jeweler from Newark, NJ. "If she were on the streets, who knows what sort of business maneuvering she'd be up to behind closed doors?"

"I have a family to think of," McAllen added.

Boston-area teacher Helen Greene said she had been "afraid to leave the house" before the verdict in Stewart's trial was announced.

LOL.  Well, if they feel safer, I feel wealthier.  Last weekend, my wife read something in a Martha Stewart magazine that sent her off reorganizing her closet.  By the end of the weekend, I had bought over 400 identical wooden hangers (hint: get them from Ikea, they are half the price there as anywhere else) and a variety of other organizing gear.  Thank god Martha is in the slam so that maybe now, my weekends can be more peaceful.

Beyond the usual promises to work out more and shave off 15 pounds or so, I can't think of a better New Year's Resolution than this one, from Atlas Shrugged:

I swear--by my life and my love of it--that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

The only exception to this is my immediate family, which is really not an exception - I think the very definition of family is those people you move under the umbrella of your own self, to join you as part of your "I".

Happy New Year!

The concept of a cultural celebration by African-Americans of themselves and their history is a good one.  The specific values celebrated in Kwanzaa, however, suck.  They are socialist -Marxist-collectivist-totalitarian crap.   Everyone seems to tiptoe around Kwanzaa feeling that they have to be respectful, I guess because they are fearful of being called a racist.  However, I find it terrible to see such a self-destructive set of values foisted on the African-American community.  These values are nearly perfectly constructed to keep blacks in poverty - just look at how well these
same values have played out in Africa.

First, understand that I have no problem with people of any ethnic group or race or whatever creating a holiday.  Life is worth celebrating, as often as possible, even if we have to make up new occasions. One of the great things about living in Arizona is getting to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

Second, understand that Kwanzaa is not some ancient African ethno-cultural tradition.  Kwanzaa was made up in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga.  Karenga was a radical Marxist in the 60's black power movement.  Later, Karenga served time in jail for torturing two women:

Deborah Jones ... said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga ... also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

Interestingly, after this conviction as well incidents of schizophrenia in prison where "the psychiatrist observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and imaginary persons and believed that he had been attacked by dive-bombers," California State University at Long Beach saw fit to
make him head of their Black Studies Department.

Anyway,  I give credit to Karenga for wanting to create a holiday for African-Americans that paid homage to themselves and their history.  However, what Karenga created was a 7-day holiday built around 7 principles, which are basically a seven step plan to Marxism.  Instead of rejecting slavery entirely, Kwanzaa celebrates a transition from enslavement of blacks by whites to enslavement of blacks by blacks.  Here are the 7 values, right from the Kwanzaa site (with my comments in red itallics):

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race

On its surface, this is either a platitude, or, if serious, straight Marxism and thoroughly racist.  Think about who else in the 20th century talked about unity of race, and with what horrible results.

In practice, the notion of unity in the black movement has become sort of a law of Omerta -- no black is ever, ever supposed to publicly criticize another black.  Don't believe me?  Look at the flack Bill Cosby caught for calling out other blacks.

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves

Generally cool with me -- can't get a libertarian to argue with this.  When this was first written in the 60's, it probably meant something more
revolutionary, like secession into a black state, but in today's context I think it is fine.

Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To
build and maintain our community together and make our brother's and
sister's problems our problems and to solve them together

Um, do I even need to comment?  This is Marxism, pure and simple.

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.

OK, I said the last one was Marxism.  This one is really, really Marxism. 

Nia (Purpose)
To
make our collective vocation the building and developing of our
community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.

There's that collectivism again

Kuumba (Creativity)
To
do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our
community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

I guess I don't have much problem with creativity and make things better.  My sense though that if I was to listen to the teaching on this one in depth, we would get collectivism again.

Imani (Faith)
To
believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers,
our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

What about in ourselves as individuals?  Through all of this, where is the individual, either individual responsibility or achievement?  It is interesting that a holiday that
was invented specifically to be anti-religious would put "faith" in as a value.  In fact, Karenga despised the belief in God as paying homage to "spooks who threaten us if we don't worship them and demand we turn
over our destiny and daily lives."

However, this is in fact very consistent with the teachings of most statists and totalitarians.  They tend to reject going on bended knee to some god, and then turn right around and demand that men go on bended knee to ... them, or other men.  This is in fact what this "faith" was about for Karenga - he is a statist laying the foundation for obedience to the totalitarian state.  He wants blacks to turn over their destiny and daily lives to their leaders, not to god.

So, in conclusion, Kwanzaa was designed as a celebration of creating a totalitarian collectivist Marxist racist state among African-Americans.  I may well get comments and emails that say "oh,
thats not how we celebrate it" and I will say fine - but Marxism is the core DNA of the holiday, a holiday created by a man who thought Lenin and the Black Panthers were all wimps.

Never wishing to criticize without suggestion a solution, here are alternate values I might suggest:

Freedom
-Every individual is his own master.  We will never accept any other master again from any race (even our own).  We will speak out against injustices and inequalities so our children can be free as well.

Self-Reliance - Each individual will take responsibility for their life and the lives of their family

Pride - We will be proud of our race and heritage.  We will learn about our past and about slavery in particular, so we will never again repeat it.

Entrepreneurship - We will work through free exchange with others to make our lives better and to improve the lives of our children

Education - We will dedicate ourselves and our time to education of our children, both in their knowledge and their ethics

Charity - We will help others in our country and our community through difficult times

Thankfulness - Every African-American should wake up each morning and say "I give thanks that my ancestors suffered the horrors of the slavery passage, suffered the indignity and humiliation of slavery, and suffered the poverty and injustices of the
post-war South so that I, today, can be here, in this country, infinitely more free, healthier, safer and better off financially than I would have been in Africa."

By the way, if you doubt that last part, note that in the late 90's, median per capita income of African Americans was about $25,000, while the per capita income of Africans back in the "old country" was around $700, or about 35x less.  Note further this comparison of freedom between the US and various African nations.  Finally, just read the news about the Congo or Rwanda or the Sudan.

Update:  Even years later, commenters insist on misinterpreting this last point as some sort of justification for slavery.  I am not sure how one can come to this conclusion in an article that drips with disdain for slavery, but folks will find what they want to find.  My mistake perhaps was to presume to speak for African Americans.  It is very possible that the enslavement of their ancestors and the legacy of racist crap that still exists in this country is not balanced by the prosperity blacks now enjoy in America vs. Africa.  So I will merely speak for myself and say the rest of us are immeasurably better off for having you here.

You can actually watch the numbers move as it refreshes.  After spending yesterday watching the tsunami body count go up, this is a much better number to watch rise.  Update:  Now over $3 million.

The Southeast Asian Tsunami may well be the worst natural disaster in our lifetimes.  I helped out by donating at Amazon - it takes two seconds here.  The Southeast Asian Tsunami Blog can keep you up to date here.  By the way, here is the stingy American reference.

This is cool - a bridge built privately in France, for a fraction of the cost of most major public bridge projects.  More via the Mises Economics Blog.

Merry Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a happy version of whatever holiday they celebrate. 

Around our house, I am always the tech support guy, fixing issues ranging from computers to hitting all the right buttons on the home theater.  Because my wife has a Mac and I and my kids use a PC, just trying to keep everyone playing nice over the home network is hard enough (god, this is starting to sound like a Chaos Manner column).  Usually, this duty is spread pretty evenly through the year, but on Christmas day, our household has an influx of technology that often needs support.

Yesterday was no exception.  First, with the arrival of yet another new mini iPod, this one for my son, a new user partition had to be created on my wife's Mac.  Later in the day I was back on the Mac, helping my son when iTunes inevitable Christmas Day server overload caused him to have a few songs disappear on him during download.  In between, I was on the PC helping my daughter with Zoo Tycoon 2, given to her because Santa knows that she loved the first version. 

Finally, towards the end of the day, I was helping my son with his Star Wars Battlefront game install.  Unfortunately, the install code on the back of the CD box did not work, so with my son panicking when I told him he would have to wait 2 WHOLE DAYS for the the tech support people to come into the office, I swallowed my scruples and went to one of the pirate sites that publish registration codes for games and successfully used one of those to get the game started.  Unfortunately, those sites slam you with pirate-ware, so first I had to fire up my backup computer I use for such grossly unsafe surfing.

Whew.  I can relax now, everything is up and running.  Imagine my relief this morning when my kids wanted to play something low tech - Yahtzee.

Hope everyone out there has a fantastic Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Winter Solstice, New Year, etc. (did I get everyone?)  We try to do something different each year for our holiday card.  Here is this year's.

UPDATE

I realized from fellow Arizona blog Speed of Thought, in their link to my post (cool, am I a moonbat?) that I left out Kwanzaa.  Oops, I hope there are not protesters outside my door.  Next week I plan a post on Kwanzaa -- I have zero problem with people making up a new reasons to celebrate, since life is worth celebrating.  However, I will look at the 7 values celebrated by Kwanzaa and consider whether these 7 values are really helping African-Americans (hint:  think socialism).

By the way, Speed of Thought has a very moving image here.

Every year we do this strange dance when it comes to deleting people from our Holiday card list.  My job each year is to print out the labels from last year so my wife can edit them.  In the process, particularly since we move so much, we always add about 10-20 new names and delete about as many.  So the cards went out a few days ago.

Each day, though, I get a few more from my wife to mail.  My wife doesn't tell me why we need to send a few more, but I know.  You see, we have received a card from one of the people who we took off the list.  Having received their card, we therefore must (?) send them a card in return.  This seems nuts to me.  The implication of this process is that there is no way for anyone to get dropped from a card list unless both parties mutually, without coordination, decide to drop the other in the same year.  So, inevitably, our list just keeps getting longer each year.

By the way, don't miss this year's letter here.

Unlike many libertarians, I am not particularly rabid about gun rights.  It's just not an issue I am that passionate about one way or another.   I have always thought that the one monopoly the government rightly should have is on the use of force for anything other than self-defense (e.g. military, police & law enforcement, incarceration, etc.)  Given this one monopoly, it makes sense that the government should have some interest in regulating private weapons ownership.  However, we can theorize all day but as long as the Second Amendment exists, the government may wish to limit gun ownership but its ability to do so is severely restricted.

Anyway, the point of this post was really just fun and not philosophy.  Take four states:

• Connecticut
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• Florida

Two of these states have concealed handgun carry rates by private citizens 3x higher than the other two.  Guess which.

Here, via Instapundit, is the linguistic map for how people refer to a soft drink.  Its interesting how you adjust.  I grew up in Texas and called every soft drink a "coke" and now I call it a "soda", which are both the dominant terms in the places I have lived in each phase of my life.   For the record, though, I have never, ever called it a "pop", or as they say in the midwest, a "pahhhp" (click for larger map)

An oldie but a goodie from Bob & Doug McKenzie to get you in the holiday mood, courtesy of Aeon.

Our bathroom has a pocket door to save space - that's one of those doors that slide on a hidden rail in and out of the wall.  From time to time, usually because my kids go slamming into it, the door comes off its rails and gets jammed, which is a problem as it can bottleneck some very critical facilities.

The first time this happened, I tried to get it back on its track, but I just could not.  The track is up in the wall and it is almost impossible due to the lack of clearance to do anything with it.  I checked in the Yellow Pages and saw there was actually a company that specialized in pocket door repairs, so I called them out.  Well, Joe (or whoever) shows up with his little tool kit, looks at the door for a second, grabbed it in a certain way, and then gave it a quick jerk - kabam - and it was back in its tracks.  It took him like 5 seconds. 

Well, there I stood, completely unmanned, right in front of my laughing wife and family, by Joe the visible butt-crack guy.  Bummer.

Since that time, I have had the door come untracked two or three times.  Thinking to save me further embarrassment, my wife tends to ask any passing stranger to come in and fix it.  I can sit there for hours fighting the thing, and then my wife brings in the guy painting the house - kabam - fixed.  Next time she brought in the 60+ year old sales guy who happened to be there - kabam - fixed.  I swear, if Paris Hilton was dropping by for a visit she could probably fix that damn door.  It is humiliating.

Well, this time I would not allow my wife get someone else to fix it.  Every night, for about 10 minutes, I would take my innings with the door, struggling to do what everyone else seemed to have learned at birth.  I actually suggested to my wife that we should call out a contractor and tear the thing out and install a real door.  She suggested instead that she could have our 13-year-old baby sitter come in from the other room to fix it.  Finally, tonight, when I was about to give up, I tried holding it in a slightly different way and - Kabam - fixed.  God I feel great.  My manhood is restored and I am at the top of the world.

WELCOME Carnival of the Vanities!  My post this week is a little more whimsical than usual.  If you need to chew on something more serious, check out a 60 second refutation of socialism while sitting at the beach.

I won't bore you by being overly dramatic, but my family came within a hair of dying on US27 between Orlando and Ft. Meyers.  A car that had slowed to about 10 miles an hour in the left had turn lane changed their mind and pulled back, still going 10 miles an hour, into the main traffic lane.  Right in front of my car.  While I was going 60.  At night.  I jammed the breaks on my unfamiliar rent car and managed to slow just enough to have time to slide into the other lane, just ticking the back bumper.  Fortunately, there was no one in the right lane, because I was sure as hell going over there whether it was occupied or not. 

So we live, and I had the shakes for a while.  My daughter, who had already gone for the bad-traveler trifecta, barfing twice on the plane and once in the car, didn't even stir.  My son never really realized how close things were. Good.

Pretty sure my life did not pass before my eyes, and I didn't really reach any lifetime epiphanies or anything so dramatic.  Maybe I am just shallow, or maybe I am so optimistic I cannot in my heart accept the closeness of death.  Anyway, I had an unbelievably relaxed day today.  The one lasting effect of the near-mishap was that 4 or 5 things that were bothering me and stressing me a bit were quickly flushed down the mental drain as trivial.

So much for shortcuts.  Tomorrow, we take the longer way back to Orlando on the Interstate.

CBS News really is falling to some new lows.  Courtesy of Rathergate.com is this article from Reuters that CBS is firing the producer who had the temerity to break into a top-rated show (CSI-NY) with news that a major world figure had died (Arafat):

CBS News has fired the producer responsible for interrupting the last five minutes of a hit crime drama with a special report on the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (news - web sites), a network source said on Friday.

Great.  CBS has an hour-long show using documents my 10-year-old could see were forged attacking a presidential candidate a few weeks before the election, and no one gets fired - and no apology to viewers is issued.  But, pre-empt a few minutes of a top rated show to announce that one of the most prominent world figures of the last 50 years has died, and you get fired (within hours) and CBS publishes an apology to viewers. 

For a variety of reasons, my wife and I, who usually get along swimmingly, get into fights when I am trying to help her with the computer.  She has never developed a high comfort level with computers, while I have been using them since I was about 15, programming assembly language on S-100 bus CP/M computers (and yes, I have used punch cards too -- I am just old enough to have had that experience).

I realized today what the problem is.  She called me on my cell, trying to elicit from me the set of commands to do something-or-other in Word.  I kept saying I don't know and she got mad at me because she knew I had done it before, and she thought I was just blowing her off.

In truth, the difference is in how we have both learned to use the computer, and maybe even a fundamental difference in how each of us learns anything.  My wife is a memorizer and note taker.  If I explain to her how to, say, embed an image in a word document, she will carefully write down each step in a notebook she has.  She will never ask me again or falter at the task of adding an image to Word, because she now has either memorized how to do it, or she can look in up in The Book.

I, on the other hand, am nearly incapable of memorizing anything, and the sum total of the notes I took in college probably would not fill a single spiral notebook.  In fact, I suspect I switched from chemical engineering to mechanical engineering in college because, at least at my University, chemical engineering had a ton of memorization (can you say, Isomer?) while mechanical engineering was all about open book problem solving.

When I sit down to a computer, I just sort of figure things out.  When I had my old S-100 bus computer, that was essential, because there was no manual.  Today, its just how I am.  The disadvantage is that every time I insert a graphic in Word, I may have to fiddle around in the menus to figure out, for the 100th time, how to do it.  The advantage is that, if I am suddenly required to insert a spreadsheet rather than a graphic, I am not thrown for a loop - I just follow my usual process of poking around through the menus.

So, I have explained to my wife that to help her, I need to be at the computer.  Once I figure out how to do something, she can then document it in The Book. 

I have had friends who work like me try to insist that my approach is better than my wife's.  I don't think it is - just different.  Take driving directions.  I have no problem trying to find someplace I don't have clear directions for, because I have a good sense of direction and can usually get there by visual reckoning.  As a result, though, I sometimes cannot give street names to get to places I have been as many as 10 or 20 times.  Since I navigate visually and by real-time reckoning, any knowledge I have gained in my successful exploration is very difficult to pass on, just like I have difficulty passing on my computer knowledge.  If the world was all like me, technological society would end after this generation, because no one could pass our knowledge on.

In fact, as I write this, I am getting an epiphany about myself and why I did not do so well as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. (the reader is welcome to stop at this point, because what follows will likely be real-time self analysis rather than of general interest).  I was very very good at analysis, and quickly getting to a sort of 70% confidence level as to conclusions, and then I would hit a wall.  I had little tolerance for continuing to build evidence and analysis and the perfect polished presentation once I thought I "got it", and I had absolutely no tolerance for sitting down and writing a white paper or other published article about our experiences.  This profile probably makes me perfect for running my own business - I wish I had figured it out about 10 years earlier.

I try not to impose too much of my personal life on this blog, but I couldn't resist showing off our weekend project.

This is my 10-year-old son's recent science project.  They are required to do a report on a subject (in this case, he chose the biology and physics of hitting a home run) and supplement the report with a model that has to be entirely edible - i.e. all made out of food (Seriously - what sadistic maniac thinks up this stuff?).  He and I worked most of Sunday on this, while mom laughed her butt off watching.  He presents tomorrow, and then the class eats it (who wants to bet that they will fight over eating the eye?)

(Click for larger image)

Anyway, this thing includes cookie bones (we used foil for molds for the bones and bat) licorice muscles, gummi worm brains and nerves, cake baseball, chocolate bat, and fondant hand and eye (with almond nails).  Thank God for fondant - usually a smooth finish layer for cakes, it basically acts like edible clay.

Move over Martha, coyote is here!