Or someone might have gotten hurt.

A man in Chicago was attacked by a group of youths on Saturday night.  And by attacked, I mean smacked by a baseball in the head and then beaten by 15 to 20 youths, and by youths I mean the semi-civilized denizens of our cities who get together to do nothing better than lay a beating on a random stranger.

The misguided children of the night fled when the police arrived, and apparently several were arrested.  Something tells me they weren’t members of the National Honors Society or the Boy Scouts.

At least this happened in Chicago, where I can almost guarantee that the recipient of the beat down was unarmed.  If he’d had a gun, he might have utilized it to either prevent the attack or to stop it before it progressed.  I mean, one of these poor unfortunates might have been harmed, either by running from an armed man who refused to be beaten within an inch of his life by a pack of urban wolves, or maybe even ventilated in the torso or cranium by someone who had the audacity to object to being victimized on the streets of a major American city.

Luckily, all the target of this mob had to defend himself against 20 to 1 odds was his rapier wit, and the police arrived to chase the group of youths away before he was beaten bad enough to actually die.  So I guess everyone won here.  The youths got to beat up a stranger, the stranger is still alive, and the police can claim they saved a man’s life when they go for funding next year.

Isn’t it nice when a story has a happy ending?

A company in Wisconsin is reporting that they have found a way make biofuel out of wood chips and agricultural waste such as corn stalks.  This may be a significant step.  If fuel can be made from what is normally a waste product, then the increased demand for food grains such as corn, and the resulting higher prices for food, could be eliminated.  It would be even more interesting if this process uses the cellulose in the plant matter to make ethanol, and not just the sugar in it.  That breakthrough would allow just about any plant material, such as grass or leaves, to make fuel.

Before cheering about this, I want to see some math that shows that more energy is produced by this fuel than is used to make it. That’s always been one of the drawbacks of corn based ethanol.  The amount of energy a gallon of ethanol provides is dwarfed by the amount of energy from petroleum that is needed to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and process it.

So, on the whole, I’ll give this one a qualified “cool”.  If this company can a) produce fuel that has a net increase in the energy produced and b) can do it economically enough that it can compete with petroleum fuels, then I’ll upgrade it to a “sweet”.

Since I became a father in the early 1990’s, it’s probably safe to say that I’m intimately familiar with Pixar Studios and their work, as well as the work of other studios who copied their digital approach to filmography.  Even a cursory look at the success of The Lion King, Shrek, and How to Train Your Dragon will show that these artists and their distributors have caught lightning in a bottle.

But almost all of the offerings in computer animation have been kid or family oriented.  The exception, of course, is Avatar.  Let’s get over the political and social commentary that this film is supposed to contain, and admit that James Cameron at least had the vision to take the medium that has worked for kids and make it work for an adult audience exclusively.

There are a lot of books in all of the genres that I have read that I think would make a really good movie, but due to problems with either the settings, characters, or story would be difficult to translate from paper to celluloid.  Some attempts have been made, such as Dune or Starship Troopers, with varying levels of success.  Some stories, such as Dune or Starship Troopers have so much commentary and story happening solely in the minds of the characters that no matter the medium, they would be difficult to make and still stay true to the original story, no matter the medium.

So what do you all think?  Are there books that you’ve enjoyed, and would like to see produced as a movie, especially if Pixar’s methods would do a better job than traditional cinema?

I spent part of my morning stripping paint off of the hardware that affixes our shutters to our windows.  It occurred to me that as the Dremel ground down to the bare iron, I was looking at over 60 years of paint.  There was the original grayish primer, followed by at least six layers of different colored paint.

Irish woman also found four layers of paint on the shutters themselves:  gray primer, white, off white, park bench green, and the Navy blue she put on them several years ago.

When she first bought this house, Irish Woman stripped out several layers of wallpaper, which was all horrid, but reflected several decades of home decorating fashion.

Add to that the multiple generations of plumbing and wiring that I’ve encountered, and I’m beginning to feel like Indiana Jones whenever we try to do anything around here.

Now excuse me while I go add another layer for a future domestic archeologist to investigate.

Sorry for the lack of postings.  Real life is intruding into all of my hobbies.  Here’s how it’s been going:

The government has relieved us of the drudgery of deciphering the food pyramid.   Almost two decades of having to actually read and understand the ratios of fats, grains, meats, and sweets are over.  Let the parade begin!

Their new reminder on how they think we should eat is called MyPlate:

Here at DaddyBear Laboratories, we’ve come up with our own graphic to show the ratios of the principle ingredients in a good, healthy diet that will not only keep your body strong, but will make you happier:

As you can see, not only are the basic needs of fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein taken care of, but all of the things that make plain old nutrition into a meal have been included.  Please feel free to post this in your kitchen, school cafeteria, and anywhere else good people go to enjoy food and life.

From the Inspector Clouseau Department – Police say that a woman whose body was found stuffed into the box spring of a bed in a Salt Lake City hotel may have died under suspicious circumstances.  Are we actually paying for this hard charging bit of detective work?

From the Meet the New Boss Department – The executive officer of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower has been relieved of his position and re-assigned pending an investigation.  This is the third executive officer the Eisenhower has lost in the last year.  What is going on in the U.S. Navy?   It seems we can’t go a month without a captain or his exec being canned.

From the Kobayashi Maru Department – A standardized math test in Great Britain included a problem that cannot be solved.  Maybe they were using this as a crowd-sourced try to see if it was truly unsolvable.  A million British teenagers banging away at a million math tests for two hours might just get us closer to an answer than we have ever been.

From the Nice Marmot Department – The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has announced that they will no longer be using live ferrets to practice intubating premature infants.  Instead they will be using a plastic model.  My guess is that the courses on reattaching fingers and treatment of injuries to the hands from weasels can’t be far behind.

From the Mother of the Year Department – A woman has been arrested in Louisiana after she was found passed out in the ladies room of a gas station with drug paraphernalia.  The kicker is that she left her 20 month old son in the car with the body of another woman.  I’m not going to comment on this one.  For once, I’m speechless.

The two individuals who snatched an 11 year old girl off the street, raped her, and forced her to live in their back yard for 18 years with the two daughters she conceived by the ‘male’ individual have been sentenced to long stretches in prison.

Philip Garrido has been sentenced to 431 years to life in prison, and his wife Nancy Garrido has been sentenced to 36 years.  I’m hoping she lives a long life and serves out every second of those 36 years.  As for him, I hope he sets a Guinness World Record for longevity and suffers every day.

When this story first broke, it really caught my eye.  Even more than the fact that a missing child had been found 18 years later, or that California law enforcement personnel had been to the house on multiple occasions without doing anything, it was the location.  When we left North Dakota, we eventually settled in Antioch, where the Garrido’s would eventually hold Miss Duggard.  My step-father had grown up a couple of towns west of there, and he wanted to be close to his family.

All of this happened after I graduated and left for the Army, but my little sisters, one of which has a bit of a resemblance to the victim and was close to her in age, still lived in Antioch for several years.  If these sick bastards had decided to go hunting a little closer to home, it could have been my baby sister in that shed. 

The thing that really sent chills up my spine is I know the area where the house is.  I ran with several guys from that neighborhood, and dated a girl who lived a couple of blocks away.  When I read about what happened there, I could easily visualize the very small world that Jaycee Duggard lived in for a very long time.

As a father, this scenario is probably close to my worst nightmare.  All dads tell ourselves that we’ll die defending our kids if necessary, but what do you do if someone snatches them when they’re out of your sight, or when they’re too far away for you to help and protect them?   How long do you keep hoping that they’ll turn up before you hold a funeral mass?  And how, once your child is found, do you contain your rage and let the criminal justice system punish them rather than taking matters into your own hands and getting real justice for your child?

I sincerely pray that neither I nor any of you ever have to find out.  I also hope that these two live a very, very long time and come to know suffering that in some way compares to what they did to a beautiful little girl who was just trying to get to her school bus.

The Norwegian government is reporting that for those who show a reaction to cosmetics and other methods of enhancing appearance, the use of hair dye is the number 1 cause of problems:

People who develop allergies to hair dye often have symptoms such as eczema, redness, blistering, and itching of the scalp, face and throat, the registry says. They also experience severe swelling on the forehead and around the eyes.

Something tells me that a lady with this kind of reaction to their hair dye realizes it’s not a good look for them.

I know a lot of people, both men and women, who dye their hair.   While I just look at my gray hair and take that as a sign that life is about 1/3 over, others look at them as a sign of mortality.  I just hope that the rate of people who have these kinds of reactions is low.

A few weeks ago, I opined that I wanted to know how much of my gasoline purchase was going to the gas station and the petroleum company, and how much was going to Uncle Sugar.

Looks like the state of Tennessee was way ahead of me:

According to the attendant at the gas station, it’s a statewide requirement.  While I still had to do the math to figure out how much I gave to the state and federal governments while filling up the truck, it’s better than anywhere else I’ve been.