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Have you seen the Hawkcam? It’s a camera rigged on a nest of three baby redtailed hawks on the ledge of a building at UW-Madison. Very interesting. If you’re lucky enough, you can spot Ma and Pa Redtail bringing fresh yum-yums home to the brood.
One wonders how the little balls of down don’t get blown right over the edge.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
The cry has no doubt been flying round the clubs of late: Where’s Robbo?
Well, the fact of the matter is that I’ve been out on another of my little biznay jaunts. I had meant to let you lot know about it before hand, but technical difficulties over the weekend prevented me from stopping in here. Now that I’m home again, home again, jiggity-jig, a few highlights (hopefully) of interest:
♦ My Field HQ this time around was in the lovely and talented city of Florence. Alabama, from which base my comings and goings took me numerous times across the waters of the mighty Tennessee River. Now this may be the single geekiest thing that I have ever admitted here, but nonetheless it is a fact: I found something genuinely disconcerting in seeing a river rolling obstinately to the northwest when I knew perfectly well that the Gulf of Mexico was only a couple hundred miles due south. Indeed, on at least one occasion as I crossed, I found myself pointing and yelling, “The ocean’s that way, idjit!”
♦ If you want other drivers to give you a wide berth, I suggest adopting a similar practice.
♦ Speaking of driving, this time around the rental people gave me a Chevy Impala. The rear-view mirrors on the thing were about the size of postage stamps and, couples with the hunched up trunk, provided damn-all view of the traffic behind me. I know that watching one’s six while driving does not appeal to most folks these days, but I’m a big proponent of it. Wish the designers at Chevy were, too.
♦ Also speaking of driving, this trip was the first one I’ve taken without my contacts and instead relying solely on my glasses. Let’s just say that the fact that it’s easily been a good three or four years since I got my prescription checked was hammered home in no uncertain terms. We’re talking Squintapalooza. Had it not been for a last second flicker which caused me to notice the airport exit on the way back, I’d probably be somewhere in West Virginia right about now.
♦ Speaking of the airport, this time around I flew in and out of the lovely and talented Nashville (or “Nayshville, as I like to call it), my usual practice being when practicable to find the closest direct-flight landing spot and driving on from there. Although I didn’t stop at any of them, it was a goodly historickal treat to go by the battle sites of Nashville, Franklin and Murfreesboro. It was also goodly to pass by the Jack Daniels distillery, even though bourbon is not really my favorite adult beverage. Perhaps some day when I’m not so neurotic about getting from A to B in the shortest time, I’ll force myself to detour to such spots rayther than just appreciating them vicariously from their exit ramp signs.
♦ Mention of the Gulf of Mexico above reminds me of working with a local lawyer a number years back down in Mobile. He referred to it as the “Guff”. I have thought of it as the Guff myself ever since.
♦ Speaking of working with local lawyers, let me give you an example of the practical use to which my otherwise utterly random collection of trivial knowledge can sometimes be put. The (potentially) adversarial attorney with whom I had to deal presented, at first, an extremely gruff and forbidding mien that had “Goddam Yankee” stamped all over it. Somehow in the course of conversation, it came out that he had a son in the band Shenandoah. As I happened to know something about them, and indeed, even have one of their albums, I was able to pick this up and run with it. We got on famously after that. Just goes to show you.
♦ Finally, I should note that in packing for my trip, I inadvertently forgot to bring along a book. (This is what comes of packing at Oh-dark-thirty Monday morning instead of the night before.) After a day or so, I found myself practically climbing the walls in withdrawal. I read the local fish-wrapper and Useless Today front-to-back each day, but that only took about twenty minutes tops. I studied the tedious local tourist mags in my room. I flipped through the local yellow pages. I came perilously close to dipping into the Book of Mormon. It was agony. Fortunately, I had remembered to bring along my book of crosswords. I did a lot of crosswords.
♦ Really finally, a word about those crosswords. I have an issue of the Dell “Crossword Special” and I must say that I don’t like it very much. For one thing, some of the clues are just wrong. A statue in a church, whatever non-conformists might think, is not an “idol”. Also, I think the editors invent some of their vocabulary. I’m morally certain that there’s no such word as “solidest”. Prove it to me and I still wouldn’t believe it.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers! Well, here we are at the turn of the seasonal tide. The storm is coming, as Gandalf said, but the tide has turned.
As for ol’ Robbo, today found him eating accrude leave in order to play host to a procession of repairmen, delivery guys and (much to my surprise) a cleaning crew, all of whom were scheduled at the behest of Mrs. Robbo to descend on the port swiller residence in order to fix, offload and clean before Christmas arrives. And where is Mrs. R her own self, you ask? Why, she and the gels have lit out for the Great Wolf Lodge for a night or two of watery holiday frolicking. How conveeeeeenient.
Anyhoo, all is done now, with everything fixed, delivered and cleaned for the moment, and all those persons now gone and gone. (As I grow older, I abhore having strangers in the house more and more.)
♦ So I had a go at uploading the middle gel’s song directly from CD to WordPress, only to be informed that the file type was not authorized. Anybody know of a way to transfer musick to a blogpost that doesn’t involve YouTube?
♦ I have a confession to make: Whenever I’m channel-surfing and stumble across The Postman, I almost invariably stop to watch it. There’s just something compelling in its awfulness.
♦ Speaking of such things, we’ve had a Blue-ray player for better than a year now and I only discovered that the thing could play CD’s about an hour ago. Good news for me, as I am starting up my exercise routine again, the elliptical is in the teevee room, and I can’t abide trying to watch teevee while working out. Much rayther listen to musick.
♦ And speaking of corpore sano, I woke up with a very stiff left knee today. Examination of same revealed a palm-sized bruise on the inside part, quite deep purple and red. Certain smarty-pants family members can keep their Robbo’s-been-at-the-bottle-a-bit-too-much comments to themselves, as this thing is hardly in a location where I could or would have got it by stumbling into something. On cross examination, Mrs. R confessed that she does sometimes kick me when I’m allegedly snoring (a false charge, btw), but she swears she never kicks that hard. I can’t imagine where I picked up the thing.
♦ Since I’m batching it for a couple nights, I plan to run off Topsy-Turvey, which Netflix sent me a good month or two ago but which I haven’t had the time to run off. (The thing is over two and a half hours.) The film is about a feud and reconciliation between W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan and comes highly recommended by the Mothe. I’ll let you know what I think.
Mrs. R and I are still in the midst of noodling about replacing the port swiller family computer, an ancient Dell that has become hopelessly contaminated with some hideous virus. (We haven’t even turned the thing on in months.)
T’other day, a techie colleague told Mrs. R that Macs are superior to PC’s in that Macs are not susceptible to computer viruses. This immediately won over Mrs. R and she is now demanding that we look into getting a new Mac of some kind.
Being used to PC’s and detesting change, I immediately poo-pooed the colleague’s assertion, insisting that the thing was manifestly impossible even though I confess I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about. I hate to discover that I am mistaken, but……am I?
Dear Spammers,
In re your latest.
Yes, it is quite true that ol’ Robbo has three daughters and that he one day hopes to marry them all off successfully. Therefore, it is also quite true that sooner or later ol’ Robbo is probably going to have to pony up for multiple wedding gowns. (As an aside, I suppose it would be too much to ask that they all take turns using the same one? Why not? The Robbo Family Christening Gown has been handed down the generations and has been reused eleven times to date.)
However, even given these facts, I can assure you absolutely that under no circumstances whatever would I buy such gown or gowns over the intertubes at all, at all, even if you were something more than a pack of fly-by-night weblinks that can’t even get simple spelling right.
My advice is to give it a rest.
Sincerely,
Robbo the Port Swiller
This is cool stuff: Nasa’s Voyager 1 in ‘cosmic purgatory’ on verge of entering Milky Way.
The spacecraft is close to leaving the Solar System and into the uncharted territory of the Milky Way after more than three decades in space.
Voyager 1 was launched with its twin, Voyager 2, by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) in 1977.
Voyager 1 is travelling at just under 11 miles per second and sending information from nearly 11 billion miles away from the sun.
It is about to become the first man-made object to leave the Solar System, although Nasa expects it to take between several months and years before it completely enters interstellar space. Voyager 2 will follow later.
Ed Stone, the Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: “Voyager tells us now that we’re in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system. Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back.
“We shouldn’t have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like.”
Not to be pedantic, but the Sun and the Solar System are every bit a part of the Milky Way as any other system or the bits in between, but I know what they’re getting at – something akin to the difference between in-shore and blue water navigation. Also, I’m not sure the author understands what “Purgatory” actually is. (And if Deep Space is “Heaven”, does that make Earth…….?)
At any rate, pausing to consider the vast distances involved in this biznay always gives me a pleasant sense of vertigo.
I’m also reminded of the Medieval idea of the Heavens not being a vast, empty void, but instead being filled with, well, celestial matter of various sorts. The best “modern” description of this idea that I know about comes in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy, especially the first one, Out of the Silent Planet.
(*Not to spoil the joke, but for the benefit of those, like the Mothe, who have no reason to know, this is a reference to the awful 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the plot of which hinges on what happens in the 23rd Century when Voyager comes back.)
UPDATE: Ha! Ol’ Robbo scoops the Puppy Blender! (Either that or else he’s sneaking sips out of the decanter without telling me.)
Greetings, my fellow port swillers! The name of this post? Oh, what the heck – let Nordlinger sue! Shoe fits foot and that’s all there is to it.
♦ First, I was able to snag Mrs. R’s laptop over the weekend, so as my weekend traffic is usually terrible, you might want to review the posts below to better understand what I’m talking about here.
♦ Oh, and let me just say that I hate Macs! Infernal thing kept trying to tell me where to go and what to do. Bloody impudence. Give me a PC any time. And if that makes me a dinosaur, so be it!
♦ As promised in the post on the great chimney fiasco below, Mrs. R and I did indeed sneak off to a downtown hotel Saturday night. All in all, a relaxing and pleasant time, although once again ol’ Robbo’s inability to get in a good sleep away from home manifested itself. Whenever I stay in a hotel, I tend to drift back and forth between semi-consciousness and dream time without ever getting to the deeper part of the sleep cycle. And each of the dreams builds on the last, usually pursuing a theme of something starting out relatively simple, but getting progressively more complicated as the dreams wear on, and often incorporating what I half hear or see when in that dozy state between them. This time, I recall that my first dream involved the simple proposition of trying to cross a softball field to get to where my team was warming up. I don’t recall all the permutations of the thing as it progressed through the night, but certainly at one point later on I was being chased by Confederate cavalry.
♦ We decorated the port-swiller Christmas tree yesterday. A decorated tree on December 4. It just ain’t right. I derived some grim satisfaction by pointing out that the thing would be dead long before Twelfth Night.
♦ This morning I heard something odd, speaking of Christmas: In roughly the 43rd rendition of “The First Noel” I’ve endured since the beginning of Thanksgiving week, I couldn’t help noticing that in the refrain, “Born is the king of Israel,” the choir were pronouncing Israel as “I-Is-REE-el” instead of “I-Is-RYE-el,” which is the way I’ve always heard it sung. As the kids like to say (or do they still?), what’s up with that?
♦ Yes, I say “endured”. And the punch line is that, come December 26, which is actually in the Christmas Feast, all such musick will positively vanish from the airwaves. Fitting for the by-then withering tree. Time and place. I rave about everything having its proper time and place, and yet nobody listens. Feh.
♦ Or should that be humbug?
♦ May I finish up with a little bragging? I may? Thank you! Well, yesterday saw the eldest gel play her first CYO basketball game of the season. I’ll spare you any triumphalism about the game: We got crushed by St. Theresa’s, 33-9. In defense of our team, I will say that we only had seven players to their fifteen, which means we could only swap out two at a time while they had three functioning squads through which they could rotate. And they had some giantesses on their crew. Also, we’d only had our first practice on Friday and the ref had a real down on us for some reason. No, what I really wanted to praise was the gel’s attitude: I have never in all her years seen her so full of hustle and aggressiveness as she was at that game, flying up and down the court, going after the ball, taking her licks, cheering on her mates and…….not complaining at all. She tells me that she’s really not all that especially interested in basketball, but is doing this instead in order to become more socially active and to help out the school as best she can. That, my friends, shows that we are making progress.
A happy day to you all!
UPDATE: Oh, I should have noted that “CYO” stands for Catholic Youth Organization. From what I gather, it is a sort of diocesan club league, different from the regular parochial school league, in which the gel is also playing.
Just a few thoughts:
♦ Sat behind a fellah at Mass yesterday who was sporting what appeared to be an e-missal. I know the message is more important than the medium, yadda, yadda, yadda, but still, this just doesn’t seem right to me.
♦ For those of you following the great chainsaw debate, no new developments yet. Too wet to work outside this weekend. A certain part of Robbo’s brain is now saying, “Oh, just get somebody else to cut the tree up for you.”
♦ For those of you following the great Port-Swiller home computer repair/replace debate, no new developments on that one yet because I’ve been mooching Internet service off various family laptops. But this has only affirmed my preference for PC’s so I suppose I’m going to have to sit down and do the math on this soon.
♦ Tried some pistachios that were both salted and peppered. Yum.
♦ Congratulations to my beloved Nationals for winning their final home game (and home stand) of the season by knocking off the Braves 3-0 yesterday. (Those of you in St. Louis may thank us at your convenience.) What a lot of fun this season has been – and it’s only going to get better from here on out. Three games left (against the Fish), and a possibility of the first winning season in something like forty-five years of Dee Cee baseball. GO, NATS!
♦ Given the wretched season the Dolphins are having so far, it’s probably just as well that my interest in professional football has been ebbing dramatically over the past couple years.
♦ By what process of logic does a child base the statement “Yes, I am ready for soccer practice” on a bag containing one shinguard and three unmatched shoes? Grrrr……..
I know this is a lazy form of blogging, but if it’s good enough for Jay Nordlinger, it’s good enough for me.
♦ Another sodden day at the port-swiller residence. Literally sodden, to the point where you can smell the soak all around.
♦ No, I did not bother with the GOP debate last evening. I was too busy trying to get the eldest gel’s laptop to make nice with the printer, which proved to be an exasperating ordeal. By the time that was done, all I wanted was a roast beef sammich, a glass of wine and a good book.
♦ I’m sure I will find a similar excuse for ducking this evening’s POTUS speech.
♦ Quote of the Day (from the eldest gel): “Dad, you know how kids in 7th and 8th grade are starting to date? That’s very sweet and all, but I think when they start telling each other ‘I love you’ it’s really kind of ridiculous.”
♦ Happy birthday, Antonin Dvorák, born this day in 1841. I grow increasingly fond of Dvorak’s musick despite the fact that I’m not much of a fan of Romanticism.
♦ Got an email yesterday noting that next spring will mark my 25th college reunion. Yeek. (The email also sought volunteers to serve on the reunion committee. I don’t know much about these things, but it strikes me they’re leaving things a bit late.) I have no plans to attend, since I have almost no ties whatsoever left with the old school and not much interest in attempting to renew them.
♦ As I was wrestling with the computer hook- up mentioned above, I overheard a bit of a teevee show that Mrs. R was watching. I didn’t get the name of the show, but it was on TNT and seemed to involve a “gutsy” (but hawt) female forensic detective. I stopped to listen a bit more closely because the dialogue was so glaringly caricaturist that I couldn’t believe it: the entire script seemed to be nothing more than said gutsy (but hawt) detective effortlessly skewering a series of troglodyte male sexist pigs who sought to either a) objectify her, or b) belittle her. Clang! Clang! Clang! I thought all that went out with “Maude.”
♦ It’s a curious thing, but Mrs. R is not much interested in my opinion of the quality of teevee script-writing. Or, as she put it more succinctly, “Shut up.”
I find myself slightly staggered that it’s Labor Day weekend already. Where is 2011 going in such a hurry? Tempus fugit, indeed.
♦ Ol’ Robbo is currently rereading his Xenophon. I have always found the march of the Ten Thousand to be a fascinating story in itself and never fail to delight when I come across a reference or allusion to it in other writings. My copy of the Anabasis is from the Loeb Classickal Library and contains the original Greek and the English translation thereof side by side. It’s one of Robbo’s educational regrets that I never took any Greek. (Indeed, if I had it all to do over again, I probably would not have been an English major, but would have doubled in history and classics.) Ah, well. At least when I’m on the metro, I can make fellow passengers wonder which text I’m reading.
♦ Speaking of classics, last week the middle gel insisted on putting on a “concert” for the Family Robbo in which she sang half a dozen songs for us a capella. To my horror (although I hid it from her, of course), half the program came from the works of Andrew Lloyd-Gawd-Help-Us Webber. In my opinion, the gel has entirely too lovely a voice to throw away on that sort of stuff. Thus, I hurriedly nipped over to the devil’s website and bought the gel her own copy of Emma Kirkby and Evelyn Tubb singing Monteverdi duets and solos, one of my very favorite recordings evah. Hopefully, this will put better ideas into her head.
♦ My fellow port-swillers, I’m here to tell you that cell phones and stick-shifts don’t mix. (Just ask that fire-hydrant I barely missed while trying to turn and answer a call at the same time.) Thus, I really don’t think the gels should be so surprised at my infuriated response when they phone me on my way home in the evening not because of some emergency, but instead just to rat on each other over their petty squabbles.
♦ And speaking of technology, a long, drawn out drama over getting a homework assignment finished last evening was quickly scotched upon Robbo’s arrival home from softball when I pointed out to all parties involved that if one expects the printer to function properly, one has to actually plug it into the pc. When Robbo is your last line of defense in these matters, you’re in deep trouble.
♦ No plans for this weekend, at least that I know of. From Netflix I have Armageddon, which I rent every now and again for the shear, popcorn-scarfing fun of it, as well as for the pleasure of hearing Michael Clarke Duncan’s amazing basso profundo. I’d have to double check the queue, but I seem to recall tossing in three or four other Bruce Willis movies at the same time. One goes through these phases.
♦ A conversation: Eldest gel – “Dad, were you a geek when you were young?” Youngest gel – “NO! He was a NERD!” S’true.
♦ My old neighbor believed that lawn maintenance was a competition. My new neighbor, who bough the old neighbor’s house, has never dealt with a yard before and doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s doing. Not sure which is the more annoying.
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