Girlie Bear, watching Star Wars:  Are the guys in the white suits good guys or bad guys?
Me:  Honey, those are imperial stormtroopers.
Girlie Bear:  So they’re….. bad?

Facepalm.

I have messed up as a father.

NASA and SpaceX have announced that a SpaceX Falcon rocket will be launched on November 30 and dock with the ISS on December 7.  This is part of a move to shift a portion of the space missions for the United States to private launch companies. 

This is where I agree with others about how the U.S. space industry needs to be run.  NASA has changed a lot from the 1960’s.  Where in the Gemini and Apollo eras NASA was using cutting edge technology and methods to push towards a goal, it’s been muddled ever since in trying to justify its existence.  Now that technology and capital have been developed to make at least the low earth orbit part of NASA’s mission a commercially viable option, NASA can contract out the day to day launches and do what it seems to be doing well:  exploration using unmanned probes.

I will probably never be able to afford a trip to space, and I doubt it will be economical enough for my children to do it in their lifetime.  But if someone can figure out a way to get into orbit at low rates, I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t become affordable for my grandchildren.  If we are ever to do more than voyages of discovery outside of our atmosphere, there has to be a profit motive.  Columbus, Cortez, Cartier, and Hudson may have been successful explorers who were financed by governments, but it was the settlements like Jamestown and Saint Augustine that were settled by people motivated by not much more than a yearning to do better economically that opened up the New World.  The same will probably be true of space.  NASA and the other governmental space organizations will do exploration, but the wish to find riches will drive the masses of people and equipment that will be necessary to colonize and exploit the rest of the solar system.

The director of Boston’s Big Dig project says that water leaks are a major concern to the tunnel structure and are causing damage to support girders and electrical systems.  While he maintains that the tunnels are safe, I don’t think lights falling from the ceiling are a good sign.

Since the Big Dig runs through downtown Boston, a collapse would probably be pretty catastrophic.  The pessimist in me has to ask whether or not it would be worth the expense to just fill the thing in with the dirt and rock that were taken out to build the darned thing.

In the event that I go to Boston anytime soon, I think I’ll take my chances with surface streets that aren’t above the Big Dig.

Fox News has a new slideshow, and it’s good to see photos of my ex-wives in all of their different body forms and hair styles.  Enjoy!

One of the main complaints about the X-ray booths at airport security has been the perception that a realistic nude image of the person being scanned is viewed by TSA personnel.  Frankly, it’s one of the reasons I’ve kept myself and the rest of my family away from flying, especially since the alternative is to be groped by a TSA agent.

Now, the TSA has announced that new software will only show a generic picture of a person and highlight anything unusual on them.  So you see a blocky humanoid figure with alerts for non-normal things, which could range from terrorist weapons and narcotics to prosthetics and insulin pumps.

If it works as advertised, I suppose this will alleviate one of the arguments against the perv-o-tron scanners.  And that’s a big ‘if’.  I want to see it in action.  It would help if a projection of what the TSA guy can see is put up on a screen so that the scanned passenger can see what the TSA is looking at.  Something as simple as a mirror reflecting the agent’s monitor to the passenger would work.

On the other hand, there are unanswered questions about the amount of radiation the scanner puts out. Before I get down off of my soapbox and stop railing against this technology, the TSA is going to have to come across with independent documentation about the dose of radiation that thing puts out.  For someone like me who flies infrequently, it might be like having one extra chest X-ray over the course of my lifetime. For someone who flies all the time, such as OldNFO or flight crew, it could be a huge problem.

So I look at this as a start.  As to why they didn’t just put up blocky cartoon graphics instead of the more lifelike images in the first place, we will probably never know.  Someone had to have known there would be an outcry over it, but probably didn’t care.  If the TSA is being honest about the new images and provides some verifiable documentation about radiation doses, then I will probably drop my opposition to their use.  Mind you, I won’t be holding my breath.

Well, I’m two weeks post-op, and I’m doing OK

The first few days were pretty rough, but that was expected and Irish Woman and I had planned for it.  Thank goodness for good friends and Girlie Bear, who were a real help to Irish Woman while she split her time between the family and the hospital.  I spent two nights in the hospital instead of one because my doctor’s practice forgot to tell the hospital to discharge me, but since I was still on IV morphine for pain until the end of the second night, that was a blessing in disguise.

My post-hospital pain management took some adjusting, but eventually I was comfortable.  My doctor started me out on liquid Percocet, but I had to have him change that to another medicine because every time I took Percocet, I’d pass out, have horrific nightmares, and wake up with the worst tension headaches of my life.  Once my meds were adjusted, all that would happen was that I would get kind of dopey and fall asleep, but I was comfortable.  I switched over to over the counter pain relief on Sunday, and I’m doing OK.

I’ve been able to eat a little normal food for the last few days, but my diet is still mainly made up of jello, pudding, yogurt, and protein shakes.  I’ve had ice cream a few times, but not too much.  I tried drinking some broth, but it tasted like a mouthful of chicken grease, so I haven’t had too much of that. When I weighed myself this afternoon, I was down 15 pounds from my weight on the morning of my surgery.  That curve is probably going to flatten as I start eating more and more normal food, but I’ve cut a lot of the crap out of my diet, so I expect to continue to lose weight slowly.

At my check-up this afternoon, the doctor said my throat is healing as well as can be expected, but it’s going to be about another month or so before I’m back to 100%.  He said that I can expect to have a sore throat for a couple more weeks, but I can eat whatever I want as long as I can stand the pain.

I started back to work today.  My boss is being very understanding, and is letting me work half days for the rest of the week at the office.  I will dial in from home after lunch.  Next week is a short week for me, so I’m easing back into work.

So, to sum up, I’m doing OK.  Recovery from this was a bit rough and painful at first, but after spending the first week pretty much flat on my back, I’ve been able to do a little more every day.  Irish Woman tells me that there is a noticeable lack of snoring when I sleep, which is one of the main reasons I did this.  Hopefully that continues.

For those of you who stuck with me while I was blogging while stoned on pain meds, thank you.  I’ve gone back and read my posts, and I can tell that a lot of my filters were definitely in the off position.  Hope I wasn’t too obnoxious.

I’m barely old enough to remember the Vietnam War.  I remember Walter Cronkite talking about it a couple of times on TV, and my mother made sure I got put in front of the TV when the POW’s came home and the final evacuation of Saigon happened.*  I was 4 when the helicopters were pushed off of the decks of aircraft carriers, so it’s mostly just flashes.  My father fought in Vietnam, as did most of my friends’ fathers, but there wasn’t a lot of talk about the war where the kids could hear it, if it happened at all.

Now, the U.S. military is holding a small, non-combat, exercise with the Vietnamese armed forces, probably as a way to stick a thumb in the eye of the Chinese.

My question is, for those of you who served in the Vietnam War, how do you all feel about this?

*One of the few things my mother did that I emulate.  I’ve watched men walk on the moon, the evacuation of Saigon, POW’s saluting the flag as they got off of a transport plane, and the Watergate hearings.  Even though a lot of these are just flashes of memory, especially the moon landings, I have those memories.  I have always tried to get my kids in front of the tube when the shuttle takes off or lands, or whenever anything that feels historical is being televised.

A law professor at George Washington University is suing the president of the Catholic University of America over a CUA decision to make their dorms sex-segregated.  CUA claims this is being done to cut down on binge drinking and indiscriminate sex in the dorms.  The lawyer from GWU claims that same-sex dormitories violate “human rights”.  


I’m not going to debate the merits of CUA’s assumptions about separate buildings for the sexes cutting down on drinking and sex.  I’ve been in both segregated and mixed-sex living arrangements before, and it wasn’t the sleeping arrangements that kept the young people from mixing, mingling, and pairing off.  It was the threat of punishment if you got caught, in both circumstances, that kept things to a dull roar.


Anyway, I’m curious as to which human rights the good professor believes are being violated here.  Is it the right of 18 year old boys to have their girlfriends only a couple of doors down?  Or for drunken teenagers to only have to crawl a few yards to get to their bed after getting blotto with the guys or girls down the hall?  Maybe it’s the right to not have to undergo the ‘walk of shame’ the morning after hooking up?


No-one forces anyone to go to CUA.  As long as CUA publishes this policy and enforces it equally to all students, I don’t see a problem.  If a young person doesn’t want to go to a school that enforces some kind of conduct standard, then there are many other schools that are a bit more liberal in student living arrangements and behavior. Hey, the school has the word ‘Catholic’ in its name.  I’m kind of surprised they had co-ed dorms in the first place.  When it has the name of a major denomination right there on the label, I expect more conservative rules for students than I would at the University of California Communal Social Experiment and Educational Cooperative at Berkeley.


And if you ask, you’ll find a certain father in Kentucky is looking for a cloistered all girl school for Girlie Bear.  I’m not so old I don’t remember what boys are like between the ages of 18 and 30.

They say these geeks are a dime a dozen. I’m looking for the guy who’s supplying the dimes.

Though Obama is my president
I shall not succumb
He makes me to invest in useless green technology
He leads me into a still economy
He confiscates my earnings
He leads me in paths of socialism
for his parties sake.

Even when I walk through the gun show
or the security of the airport
I fear for the Republic
for he has people running guns and feeling up grandmothers
His czars and his staff, they vex me.

Surely debt and inflation shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in the house of the
poor, forever.