Disorderly Content

Today I got a call from a representative of the Glendale, California Police Department. They found my cell number in the phone of my friend Kevin Kenney and wanted to know if I could point them at any of Kevin's family. It seems that he had died.

I first met Kevin at RIT in 1973 or 4. We proto-nerds in the Computer Science Department had begun to organize, and Kevin, though a Chemistry major, became one of us. We were nerds before nerds became cool, and if it been left to us, it never would have become cool. But I digress.

I lost track of Kevin after college. We ran into each other again in the early 80s at a printing convention in Long Beach, where RIT had a presence and decided to hold an alumni event. Our friendship really grew there, and for the next several years we did a lot of nerdly and not nerdly things together. Kevin had worked for a company that designed toys and videogames, which got us entry into the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas years before it was opened up to the general public. We played tennis - badly - three or four times a week.

A few years later I moved from The Valley to Silicon Valley. We kept in touch online and by phone. He introduced me to Farscape, and was responsible for my attending years and years of Farscape conventions over the years. He was the cause of many of my interests and obsessions, and, I dare say, I did the same in return. Neither of us was ever going to be one of the popular crowd. I think he was more okay with that than I.

We got more distant over the last couple of years. That was my fault, although I'd like to think that I forced him to confront some bad life decisions he'd been avoiding for a while. Whether or not I deserve any credit, he did get back on track and was doing much better. I don't know how he died; I suspect his health did him in but will wonder. But I mourn him; he was a good, kind and generous soul. He deserved better in life than he got. I hope I gave more to him than I received. It couldn't have been enough.

Kevin P. Kenney
1955 - 2010
Requiescat in Pace

Last night I was at a group photo shoot, an event that was postponed from a couple of nights earlier. One of the models was from out of town, and relying on our public transit and the kindness of strangers to get around town. When one of the organizers asked about a ride back to Fremont for her after the shoot, I volunteered. It was out of my way, but I didn't have anything else going on, I can use the karma points, and she was awfully cute. Okay, maybe I should should have put that first on the list.

Anyway, we're finishing up and doing paperwork. That's about model releases, and, depending on the shoot, getting photos of driver's licenses. Except... the model couldn't find hers. And she starts to stress over it, and about where she might have left it. Which, when we can start being logical, is likely the shoot she had earlier in the day. She's thinking about calling the photographer the next day (today), but I, being the kind of person who doesn't like to delay getting answers, get her to call and verify that yep, he really does still have it. And then, since I'm being such a take charge kind of guy, that he'll be around and awake by the time we can get from San Jose to San Francisco to pick it up.

Which, to make a long story short, is why we ended up driving for a couple of hours through increasingly quiet streets, first to San Francisco and then to Fremont, before I finally dragged myself home a little after two in the morning. And, once I relaxed enough to do it, settled in at three for a luxurious four and a half hours of sleep. Which, I hope, explains my first tweet of the holiday weekend. Gonna be a long day.

It's been two weeks since my mother's funeral, and there are some things that need saying. Not to my mom; first because it's way too late, and second because I already said what I felt two years ago. But to other people I encountered on that day:

• To the rabbi: I know you didn't know my mom, and that these things are inevitable. But for the record, Janet Wexler Shiffman was not born in Savannah, Georgia. Like her siblings, she was born in Bowling Green, Ohio. The family moved to Savannah when she was a year and a half. More importantly, it didn't require any force of will to maintain a Jewish identity in Savannah in those years. In fact, it was the vibrance of the Jewish community he found that led my grandfather to move the family there in the first place. There's been a strong Jewish community in the South almost from the beginning, including the world's oldest surviving Reform synagogue, in Charleston, South Carolina. Granted that to you, Reform may not be Jewish enough to count, but to the rest of us it's just fine.
• To my nephew and nieces: Your life isn't my life. You live by a seemingly infinite number of arbitrary rules. I don't. And it is the height of rudeness to point out every transgression I make on rules I don't believe in in the first place. Respect must be a two way street; if you expect me to respect your life, you will damn well learn to respect mine. I will not attack someone in his own home, which is why it will be a cold day in August before I enter yours again.
• To my father: You are the only reason I flew cross-country, and the only one whose feelings matter to me. I came in hope of offering you some small comfort. Dunno if I did any good, but at least I don't think I did any harm. I wish you could be happy or at least content.

There. I feel better now.

For the next couple of weeks I'll be driving a rental car, while my Camry is having the crunch taken out of its left side. (No one was hurt, and the damage was relatively minor if not exactly inexpensive. Thanks for asking.) I accept that I'm a creature of habit, and I like my little conveniences. But is it ridiculous that I hate a rental so much based on the lack of a plugin for my iPod, or that I keep looking in vain for the navigation screen? I even resurrected the iPod radio transmitter I used with my last car, only to discover that this particular vehicle seems to lack a working power adapter. At least I assume that's the problem. Maybe the transmitter is the piece with the fault.

It's gonna be a long couple of weeks...

What does it say about me that on hearing that a real jerk has died, I still think he was a jerk?

Back when I first started submitting photos to microstock agencies, there was a guy on one agency's forum who did everything he could to dominate the conversation. He made it all about him, whether by his comments or his turning the conversation to something he cared about or by a series of "who gives a damn?" remarks. Eventually he was banned, although I thought it showed extraordinary patience on the part of the guys in charge that it took so long.

That was a couple of years ago. Now I see a thread announcing that he's gone. There's a whole series of testimonials to his skills and to his willingness to teach. What nobody's saying is that he was a prick and a total pain in the ass, and that he damn near killed our online community with his assholiness.

So I'll say it here. Look, I'm sorry he died; I don't wish that even on online bullies. (Spammers, yes, and preferably slowly and painfully.) But I won't pretend that I liked him or respected him or thought he was anything but an irritant. He doesn't become a better person by dying. And neither, I accept, will I, when my time comes.

According to a piece in the Huffington Post, the author of "100 Things To Do Before You Die" just died, age 47. Wonder how many he got done.

I've written before about Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, which has to do with the assumptions we make that just because things happen in a particular order, there must be some sort of causal relationship among them. Sometimes there is; often there isn't. But assuming a relationship is a failure of reasoning.

But now I'd like to tell you of a different kind of failure of reasoning. Right after Apple updated its Safari browser, I started having trouble logging into my credit union's website. It would just hang; no timeout (although maybe I needed to wait a while longer), no nuthin. When it first happened, I thought maybe their site was down. But eventually I tried some experiments, and discovered that if I deleted the relevant cookies in my browser (the stuff that remembers me from session to session), it would let me in without a pause. And so for the next few weeks I'd follow a new and mildly annoying practice: try to go to the site, remember the problem, delete the cookies for the site, try again and get in. And so I might have gone henceforth and forevermore.

Until one day I changed the process. Instead of trying and failing to access the site, I deleted the cookies first. And discovered that it still hung! I cancelled the access, looked for the cookies (which weren't there), and then just tried again. And this time it worked. Turns out it wasn't anything to do with the cookies at all. No, all I have to do is try to access the site, cancel the access and try again. The second time is the charm, each and every time. And my logic, although excellent, was still wrong.

This used to be a lot easier.

I'm in Cambridge, Mass this week for the day job, just across the Charles from Boston. Got in late Sunday night and have been suffering a combination of insomnia and general discomfort ever since. Okay, maybe it started on the plane; sitting in the cheap seats of a fully loaded 757 for six hours'll do that. But it's gotten worse instead of better.

Some of it's jetlag, I guess. But it's more than that. Like what's with all the overheated buildings around here? When it's 40 outside, does it really need to be 75 inside? Or maybe it's the dry air. Whatever it is, I feel like I'm gonna jump out of my skin. Only three more days and I can get on the plane for home...

We had a pretty good earthquake about fifteen minutes ago. No damage, although I bounced around on the couch for longer than I liked. According to the guys who know, it was magnitude 5.6 and was centered five miles NNE of Alum Rock. I haven't experienced a quake like that in years...

I have a new colleage in town, a Parisian who relocated to the Bay Area so his wife could be back among family. Anyway, we were at lunch yesterday, and I decided to give him a little tour of some parts of the area he hadn't discovered yet. That included a drive down Grant Road, with me pointing out El Camino Hospital as we passed by. I also pointed out a few upscale markets, he being as much a foodie as the stereotypical Frenchman.

So imagine my surprise on our weekly conference call when I discovered that said colleague had made almost immediate use of that hospital, when his martial arts training proved to be inadequate for the board he was attacking, or that attacked him. (I didn't get details.) It seems his injury needed quite a few stitches but was neither life-threatening nor ultimately debilitating. As for me, I'm glad I didn't point out any cemetaries...

Am I getting more absentminded? Or was I always this way, and just too bewildered to notice? I ask because I had one of those moments a couple of days ago, one of those "Damn! What do I do now?" kinds of things. And they do seem to happen with increased regularity, although they're still rare enough that I don't plan to check myself into the padded room any time soon.

It was at Thrillerfest a couple of days ago. I was back in my room, changing from jeans and a particularly colorful Tommy Bahama shirt to a slightly nicer outfit for the banquet. Then I got on my computer for a while. And when I walked out of the room, I suddenly realized I'd neglected to transfer stuff from one pair of pants to the other. Important stuff. Like my room key. And my wallet. And the thought struck: how exactly do I get a new room key when I don't have any ID on me?

So I explained my plight to the desk clerk, who drilled me on all the details of my reservation: name, address, how I made the booking, when I checked in, when I was due to check out (which caused a moment of panic, cleared up when I explained that I had two contiguous reservations). Then she asked for the last four digits of my credit card number. Not being good at that sort of thing, I recited the whole number and then repeated the last four. She was shocked that I knew my card number. (Doesn't everybody?) But she gave me a new key card, and I headed off to the dinner with a lighter step.

So now I check my pockets regularly for forgotten or lost items. Which isn't about being a nervous tourist traveling the subways and the streets of New York. Although maybe it is, at least a little.

I got an email from my brother today to tell me that Hy Zarat died. Neither one of us had met Mr. Zarat, who missed his hundredth birthday by a month or so. But still we felt connected to him, through some rather tenuous links in the old Shiffman family tree. (A tree with a few recursive branches, or so I'm told.) Hy was my father's cousin, some fourteen or so years older, so I doubt they were exactly close. He was more of a curiosity, the relative who was famous.

Okay, so if he's so famous, how come you've never heard of him? You have so heard of him; you just don't know it. His biggest claim to fame is as the lyricist for Unchained Melody, that hit song for the Righteous Brothers that reemerged a couple of decades later in Ghost. And the Washington Post mentions in his obituary that he had several hits in the 40s. Heck, just getting an obit in the Post means you're somebody. Somebody dead, but still.

I didn't know about any of that; I mostly knew him for a series of records he did in the sixties, science-related songs that I loved before I got older and cool and embarrassed by stuff like that. (Okay, I'm still waiting for the cool part.) But they're cool too, in their way. Heck, They Might Be Giants did a cover version of Why Does The Sun Shine? from Science Songs. And they're cool? They are, right?

It's Mother's Day, and I wanted you to know how much you mean to me. I know you won't see this, but I have to say it anyway. I guess I understand a little better why people go to funerals to say goodbye, even though it's too late to say anything that matters. Not that you're dead; you're just elsewhere.

I've been thinking about you a lot lately, both since the last time I saw you in Florida and then later, when I was told you and pop were going back to New York, you to that nursing home and pop to live with my sister and her brood. It's hard to imagine that things could change so quickly, that the disease would leave you, well, so little of yourself. I realized it two years ago, when I visited after coming into the area for a job interview. The next time we talked, you wanted to know when I was coming for a visit. In a strange way it's easier on you than on my father. He could see how you were changing. You couldn't. And can't.

I owe you so much. I certainly didn't make things easy for you growing up. I can only hope you got some pleasure or at least some satisfaction out of all your efforts. Your three kids turned out pretty well. On average, anyway.

I miss you. It's only now, on your day, that I realize just how much. Even a long life isn't long enough.

Bye, mom.

Congratulations to Ealasaid and Antwon who today became blogger and, umm, blogger. The ceremony was mercifully brief, merciful given both the lack of chairs and Antwon's desperate effort to avoid saying something wholly inappropriate. Whew! Glad that's out of the way!

Kurt Vonnegut died today at 84. So it goes.

I just got off the phone with my father, who told me my uncle Sanford died a couple of days ago. It was hardly a surprise; Sanford Wexler was 91 years old and in failing health. But it's still hard to accept. Of all my relations, he was the one I thought of as immortal.

My mom's family moved from Bowling Green, Ohio to Savannah when she was a baby. And despite their unfortunate beginnings in the Midwest, it's hard to imaging a more classic bunch of Southerners. Sanford was the picture of the Southern gentleman, down to the seersucker suits and an accent you could cut with a knife. He was feisty and funny, the favorite of all of his nieces and nephews. And, as we all spread far and wide, he was the one who could bring us all back together. Funny that the bachelor uncle became the patriarch.

He wasn't perfect by any means. But he was a kind, gracious and warm man. I can't imagine a world without him in it.

I'll miss you, Sanford.

Welcome to part three of my report on my first college alumni weekend, which, not to spoil the surprise, is likely to be my last as well. I'll admit that yesterday was a vast improvement over my disappointments of Thursday and Friday. The day started with a lecture about a research project to visualize colliding galaxies. Reading the description I thought there might be some small relevance to my work with clusters of thousands of servers; turns out not to be the case. But it was still interesting, in a high nerd quotient kind of way.

That was followed by a barbecue lunch, where I talked to the wife of one alum and a computing student and her parents. And realized that the weekend was much more tuned to the needs of students and parents than it was to us grads; they have more of a stake in the here and now than I do, lo these many years since I trod the bricks of RIT.

After that there was a guest lecture by Erin Brockovich, a remarkable woman chiefly because of how unremarkable she really is. Her talk, and her life, are an object lesson in what can happen when an ordinary person siezes an opportunity to do something extraordinary. If the rest of the weekend was a study in the uninvolvement of my fellow alums, about which more anon, Ms. Brockovich was the counterexample we all need.

My alumni get-together was next, or it would have been if there had been any alumni to get together with. There were a grand total of six people from my graduating year to celebrate our 30th. Okay, seven; one guy showed up who hadn't preregistered. And he was the only one I knew, from our days together on Student Senate. (A time I'm just as happy not to remember.) Okay, you might say, thirty years is a long time. But the other anniversaries were equally poorly attended: seven people for the 20th, eight for the 10th. I guess once you get the hell out of Dodge Rochester, you're not all that interested in going back.

That evening was the high point: a performance by actor and comedian Brad Garrett. Mr. Garrett was a lot more animated and a lot bluer than he was allowed to be on Everybody Loves Raymond. And a whole lot funnier. He took particular delight in interacting with (and heckling) the tag team of interpreters who were signing his act, a regular part of life on campus thanks to the presence of the National Technical Institute For The Deaf. The interpreters somehow managed to persevere, and to avoid cracking up in the process. And the audience of several thousand laughed our proverbial asses off, hearing and deaf alike. For at least those couple of hours, I was reminded of how much fun college life could be.

That takes us up to this morning, and a poorly attended alumni brunch. In a little while I'll head back to campus to catch a city tour, and maybe get a few more pictures for my stock photo portfolio. The weekend hasn't been a total loss, at least on that score. On this particular weekend Rochester is a pretty nice, or at least photogenic, place to be. But not a place I feel connected to, not any more. As I said at the beginning, I doubt I'll be back.

Wandering around my old college campus has taught me some interesting lessons. Like how much the world has changed in the last thirty years. Just think of all the things I've seen that either didn't exist or weren't available to me back then. ATMs. Cell phones. PCs. Walking down the hallway in the College of Computing, I keep reading about specialties that weren't even pipe dreams in my day. It's all enough to give a guy a sense of dislocation.

But not in the way you think, or at least not entirely. Because there was a good side to my more primitive CS experience: it was actually possible to know a little about everything, how it works and how the pieces fit together. Today's students can pretty much forget about that, as they become game programmers or database software developers or network infrastructure architects.

So I feel a little bit superior at the same time I envy these grad and undergrad students. But what I don't feel is connected to them. In a very real way, I feel like an alien in an environment that was once mine. I don't fit in; I don't connect. And they don't connect to me. Ironic, isn't it, that the act of revisiting my college makes me feel less a part of it.

Or maybe it's just the experience of not knowing a soul among the faculty or the other visitors. Perhaps I just waited too long for this visit, although I don't know what I can do about that now.

Misery may love company, but somehow the fact that most of the country is experiencing sweltering weather doesn't make my own suffering any less uncomfortable. But there's been a bit of mystery as well, as I wonder why I'm suffering quite so much. The problem is that my Macintosh keeps telling me it's not that bad: low 80s during the day and dropping into the 60s at night. So why the sweating? Am I coming down with malaria?

Finally this morning the answer came to me. Yes, the temperatures are quite pleasant in Mountain View, just as that little app on my Mac's menu bar claims. But you see, there's Mountain View where they take their readings, and then there's Mountain View were I happen to be. And a mile or two makes a big difference. I'm at the edge of Sunnyvale, where those same weather authorities tell me it's a good ten (actually, more like thirteen at the moment) degrees hotter. Damn Bay Area microclimates! But at least it's not malaria...

Trust me on this. Last week I was one of them.

The details don't matter. And discussions of bodily fluids are uninteresting at best, even when they're your own. So just suffice it to say I was hating life for a few days. And managed to get enough better in time to take a couple of business trips on Friday and Monday, although not well enough to avoid getting my ears clogged in a fairly comical way every time the plane started its descent. Still, if we didn't get flat-on-our-back sick every once in a while, how would we know how good it feels afterward?

A while after I wrote yesterday's post about my dental adventure, I found myself starting to pass out. So I went with the feeling, taking a little nap. I woke up a few hours later, went into the kitchen for something to drink and found myself squelching through a soggy front hall carpet and into a half inch of standing water on my kitchen floor.

Perfect! And mysterious, since I couldn't find the source of the leak. Not the sink, not the refrigerator, not the air conditioning vent over the front door. No, turns out this little disaster had come from the utility room outside, where a check value suddenly stopped... doing whatever it is check valves do.

After I'd mopped up most of the water from the kitchen, the maintenance guys came in to deal with the carpet. Which meant vacuuming as much of the water as they could and then installing a couple of mammoth fans to dry things out. And that meant my trying to sleep to the sound of a pair of jet engines. Good thing I had those pain pills from the surgery.

But that left one more mystery. Somewhere in the moving stuff around so they could rip up the carpet, my DSL started to misbehave. And really strangely too; some sites worked just fine, but most were either inaccessible or unrecognized by my domain server. I'd hoped things would right themselves by this morning, optimist that I am. When they didn't, I returned to my long ago role as support engineer and started eliminating suspects. Pull one Mac off the router, plug it directly into the DSL modem. Yep, works fine. So I pulled the power from the router, left it off for a couple of minutes and then put all the computers back together. And now we're live again.

Lesson learned: when you disconnect the power to a router, give it plenty of time for the bits to run out the end before you plug it back in again. Oh, and Vicodin doesn't seem to have an effect on my ability to sleep, although it might have made a bigger difference if I'd been in more pain. This whole dentist thing wasn't nearly as agonizing as my plumbing issues. (No, not those plumbing issues; the apartment ones. My plumbing is just fine, thank you very much.)

This morning I had that dental appointment that had been cancelled on me a couple of weeks ago. Their mission: to yank one of my wisdom teeth before it did any more damage to its neighbor. My mission: to survive the operation. Which I grant is overdramatic, but I couldn't help at least consider the possibility that something would go wrong. Heck, my last post could well have turned out to be my last post. I even thought about blogging about it, but it seemed both maudlin and kind of cowardly.

Anyway, my friend Tammy agreed to drive me over to the office and to get me home. I was wondering how out of it I'd be, my last surgical experience having been at the ripe old age of six. We got to the office early, and I blathered on about all sorts of subjects while we waited for the doctor to be ready for me. (I'd blame the Valium they'd given me for my loquaciousness, but who's kidding whom?) Finally I was brought in and told to lie down. The doctor gave me my choice of stupor: light sedation, heavy sedation or unconsciousness. I opted for door number three. So he injected me with something, I experienced the fascinating sensation of the world going... somewhere. And when I woke up it was all over. Aside from a numbness on the left side of my mouth, I seemed none the worse for the experience.

Now I'm home, eating comfort food and watching comfort video. And waiting for the drugs to wear off completely, so I can decide whether to take the pain pills they provided. All in all, it went pretty well. Not for the first time, I was worried over nothing.

At my last visit to the dentist, the guy with the smock announced that one of my wisdom teeth was getting way too friendly with its next door neighbor. Time for that sucker to come out! So I hemmed and hawed and finally made an appointment with an oral surgeon. That was supposed to be today. By this point I'd have been Valium-ized and about to be drugged into insensibility.

Alas, it's not to be. Not yet, anyway. While I was at LAX waiting for a flight home, the dentist's office called. The surgeon had a family crisis and had to reschedule all of his appointments for today. So my tooth stays in my mouth a couple of weeks longer. And, much as I'm looking forward to getting this over with, there's a certain sense of relief as well. After all, the last thing you want is a distracted guy attacking you with sharp implements...

I got a card a few days ago from Children International, a charity through which I've been sponsoring a few kids around the world. The card was a thank you, and an acknowledgment that I'd been donating through them for five years now. Which would be nice, and unimportant too, except for one thing. I'd never heard of Children International until after the memorial for a good friend from my Sun Microsystems days. His name was Chris Winters, and he died most unexpectedly at the age of 45. (I was told later that it was his use of an organic supplement that did it, which is irrelevant except in the way it makes his death even more pointless and tragic.)

Anyway, Chris had been a long time sponsor through CI, and his family had asked for donations in his name. Which I did of course. And which led to my sponsoring one, and then later two, and now three children of my own. Which I don't mention to make myself sound virtuous or anything; it's a small enough gift to those who need it more than I. I just want to remind the world that Chris was here. And that he made a difference. And that he's still making a difference, because of those of us who knew him and miss him.

Almost makes me want to believe in a heaven.

I was visiting friends tonight, including a barbecue that was only slightly affected by the pouring rain we've been enjoying all day. And on my arrival back home I noticed that the neighborhood looked considerably darker than usual. Took a moment for it to penetrate, I'm afraid, as I went from "hmmm... interesting" to "guess the power's gone out". And then I had the challenge of getting from my parking space under my building to the door, finding the right key and getting it into the lock (no more than a 3.5 on the difficulty scale), getting up two short flights of stairs, finding my apartment door (maybe a 5.2), working the two locks and getting inside. Which was strangely bright, as I'd left my laptop open. That made it easier to find the little LED flashlight in my computer bag, close my laptop (its battery down to 14%) and settle in for an early night. Which was a lot earlier than I expected, as everything started to come back to life a mere half hour later. Nice job on the repairs, PG&E guys. I was starting to feel the pangs of net.withdrawal there.

I spent time in the dentist's chair this morning, after two reschedules due to a work trip and the bug I brought back with me. Things were going along fine until the technician decided that one of my wisdom teeth was getting way too snuggly with the next one over. My dentist concurred, so it looks like that baby is coming out! Never having experienced dental surgery, and not being much of a one for pain, I'm facing the prospect with a combination of fear, trepidation and dread. The only consolation is that I'm some kind of genetic freak, but in a good way: I only have half the usual complement of wisdom teeth. Guess that's something else I can thank mom and dad about.

(Yes, of course this was about my teeth! Why, what did you think I meant by that coming out title?)

So I'm minding my own business, see, sitting in my hotel room and listening to a product competition talk on my laptop. And an email comes in from my brother. It's short and to the point: Are you okay? Your father's been trying to reach you. I email a reply and call my parents. Pop's in a panic; he left me a message on Saturday and another one yesterday. He tried calling my cell, but had an old number. (I've had my current number for just over three years. And I know he's called me on it. But never mind that.) So he started calling relatives on the east coast, none of whom had my number but a couple of whom agreed to email me. And then he reached my brother. But you know that part.

So now we're busy putting out the little fires of panic. Which is better than if there'd been a real reason to panic. And I have to remind myself that I'm dealing with old people. And that even though I'd given him my current number, and even though I'd told him about my New York trip, it's still kind of my fault he got worried. Guess that means checking my messages at home every day or two, even though no one ever calls. No one else, anyway.

I've been mulling over a job offer I received a couple of days ago. It's a cross-country move, which has done interesting things to my stress level. But it's a job, and a good one. And the new location has its virtues, even if California weather isn't one of them. So I'm torn between restarting my life as a once-again Right Coaster and sitting around and waiting for somebody to offer me something here in The Land of Fruits and Nuts(TM).

So when I arrived home from visiting friends in Sacramento and found a note on my apartment door, I thought I'd been given an omen. It was a rent increase, and a big one too. Aha!, I thought. Just the excuse I need to get the hell out of town while the gettin's good. They clearly don't care how much it'll cost 'em to turn this place into a habitable environment for someone else! Let 'em find out!

And then, as I went through the rest of my mail, I looked closer at the letter. And discovered it wasn't for me; it was for the people in the larger apartment next door. Huh; isn't that interesting?

I think it was in an Irving Wallace novel that I first encountered the idea that a boy doesn't really become a man until his father dies. I can't confirm or deny that one; my father's still hanging on. But I'd like to offer an alternative: that you're fully an adult when you realize that "...and they lived happily ever after" is a damn lie.

Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called "I Sing The Body Electric" about a robotic grandmother who's hired (purchased?) to take on a widower's three children. It's been filmed twice that I know of. The first version was on the original Twilight Zone; it covered the grandmother's arrival, the children's struggle to accept her and then her retirement as they went off into the world. The second version was a TV movie called "The Electric Grandmother". But this time the children growing up wasn't the end of the story. No, this version traced the rest of their lives until they became old and helpless and needed someone to take care of them again. And that's the reality of life: that, assuming accident or disease doesn't take you too soon, you reach a point where you become steadily less able, where you fight infirmity and death or you wait for it to come. But it's coming, no matter what you do. And every day you lose a little bit of yourself.

All this came home to me last weekend, during a long overdue visit to my parents at their retirement digs in Florida. They're nearing the end of their story, whether it takes months or a few last years. And no matter how many years of happily ever after they may have had along the way, it's hard to know that's all behind them. As my father says, getting old isn't for the weak. And that's one hell of a life lesson.

Those amazingly snarky people over at Television Without Pity had a great idea for combining fanaticism and good works: the Tubey's Kids auctions. The idea is that fans who'd love to see TWoP's reviewers take on an episode of their favorite show get together and try to outbid each other, the spoils going to a deserving charity. We Scapers won the first auction, lost out on the second one to fans of Hugh Laurie's show House, and missed the chance to bid on the third one due to some bad timing. But on number four we kicked butt! An organization called Donors Choose, coincidentally the beneficiary of our last win, is a cool thousand dollars richer. And we get a TWoP recap of Farscape's premiere episode. Sounds like a win all 'round, aside from that anonymous bunch who came in second. But there's always auction #5, right?

Update 09/10: Great news! The Premiere recap is up! And with any luck, a few TWoP readers will discover the wonderfulness of Farscape. Right in time for its arrival in syndication too!