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Six months ago I joined a group of friends for a social weekend in Cincinnati. We’ve all moved on to new homes since the time we lived in San Francisco — now, we’re spread out across the country. In Cincinnati we vowed to meet twice each year in an attempt to keep in touch, so we don’t grow old and fat and full of regret at having lost contact with each other. (To be clear, the twice-annual party plan only combats the “regret” part of the progression I just described. The “old and fat” part is pretty much inevitable.)
This time we met in San Diego, which was an excellent choice. Although I was there last Fall, I’d forgotten, or maybe not even noticed what a stunning city it is. We stayed in the Pacific Beach area at a dumpy motel about a stone’s throw from the beach. This motel, the Diamond Head Inn, was ideal for our reunion for many reasons:
Weekends like this can be pricey, if you factor in the travel, lodging, meals, obligatory CD shopping, tattoos, replacement clothing, and subsequent therapy. And yet this is exactly the sort of thing I want to spend my money on. What’s better than catching up with friends, making new times while reminiscing about old times? I hope we do this every six months forever.
If you go to the Diamond Head Inn, make sure to request one of the two rooms with ocean views.
The medical firm that provides anesthesiology to Good Sam Hospital in Los Gatos is called Group Anesthesia Services, Inc. Doctors tend to be pretty somber, or even grave, so I’m impressed that they had the audacity to select a name whose initials (for a group of anesthetists, remember) are “GAS.” Perhaps the collective years of handling N20 have had some effect. The doctor who picked the name is a funny guy — a real cut-up.
I used to think of houseflies as annoying but relatively harmless pests. Living in the country, we’d often have one or two buzzing around inside the house if we’d left a door open for any length of time (2-3 seconds was usually enough).
Then my opinion changed. I needed to research flies, specifically the genocide thereof, and I learned that they are so far from harmless that they’ve lapped past harmless from the benign side and are again halfway up the scale, double-plus vile, infectious, and all around revolting. The memory of this event makes me shudder. Even after four weeks, my mouth involuntarily pulls into a grimace of disgust at the thought.
OK, here we go. Brace yourself. Bite down on a rubber puck if you have one handy.
We had some friends in to warm up the new house. We put a spread of food on the table inside, and because everyone was sitting outside on the deck, we left the sliding glass door open to facilitate anyone’s inclinations to feed. (Friends don’t let friends drink on an empty stomach. Also, friends don’t let friends walk into screen doors with a glass of red wine in one hand and an expensive wool carpet within splash radius.) The open door was an invitation to more than our guests — the neighborhood flies crashed the party.
This became clear when I watched through the window as someone went inside to get food. As he approached the table, what appeared to be a few dozen flies lifted off and swarmed around. This was disturbing, although in retrospect perhaps not as disturbing as the fact that my friend ate the food anyway. I went inside after him to drape plastic wrap over everything still on the table.
At some point later, it occurred to me to close the sliding door. There seemed to be fewer flies than previously near the table, and for a moment I thought the rest had flown back outside. And then I looked up in horror to see all of them, and their extended families, with guests in from neighboring counties, clinging to the ceiling. There were hundreds.
I couldn’t imagine going after hundreds of flies with a flyswatter, and I definitely didn’t want to scar the ceiling with hundreds of little fly-stains. I tried to suck them up with the vacuum, but was unsuccessful; the flies saw me coming and took off long before the suction reached them. Having no solution, we went to bed that night with a couple hundred houseflies on the living room ceiling. That’s not a restful thought, I can tell you.
The next morning, we purchased and installed flypaper strips. These are an inadequate solution, because flypaper works only work passively — if a fly happens to land on it, he’ll stick, but otherwise the strips are ineffective. (But sometimes a fly will manage to brush up against the edge of the strip while in flight, and catch a wing in the goo. This must be a hard way to go, glued by one’s back and hanging in the air with legs dangling. If flies have nightmares, this must rank near the top. Be sure to add in the visual of a hex-tiled image of the gloating homeowner (armed with a vacuum hose) to complete the effect.)
I researched fly-killing techniques online. My stomach turned, reading about where flies congregate (near garbage, sewage, manure, and the eye secretions of cattle) and the number of diseases they serve as vectors for (typhoid, diarrhea, dysentery, cholera, poliomyelitis, anthrax and tuberculosis). I was particularly disturbed by this description of using “spot cards” to measure infestation level: “Spot cards are 3-inch by 5-inch white index cards attached to fly resting surface… A count of 100 or more fecal or vomit spots per card per week indicates a high level of fly activity and a need for control.” My white ceiling was one big “spot card.”
We quickly developed winning techniques for fly management. I returned to the vacuum, but I altered my technique. Rather than trying to slam the nozzle around the fly, I moved very slowly, sneaking up behind each one at a pace below its threshhold of concern. When I got within three inches, the fly would take off — up and backwards, generally — right into the slipstream. It was gratifying to hear the whack when the flies smashed into the side of the tube on their way to the bag. My new vacuum technique was about 80% effective — best on windows (perhaps the bright light outside masks the “overhead” image of the vacuum approaching), decent on the ceiling, but not so good on the floor.
My wife became a terror with a dishtowel. This approach is superior in kitchens, better even than a flyswatter, because a towel is lethal around uneven surfaces (edges and corners). We’re both about 90% effective with the towel.
The U. of Cambridge’s Insect Vision Group website offers some interesting PDFs that explain about compound eyes and fly vision: Seeing the brain through a fly’s eye.
I have time to write, but nothing to say. This is the reverse of my usual condition, at least in the sense that I have time. Truthfully, though, even my time will be up shortly, so it’s just as well I have nothing to say. Ahh, wait, I just thought of something.
We had breakfast at a different diner today. I’ve driven past this place a hundred times but was always put off by the sign on the door announcing “Ribs! Chicken! Beef!” They have almost as many types of meat as they have tables.
Breakfast is the hardest meal through which to maintain a healthy diet. Worldwide, traditional breakfast food choices are among the fattiest, most heart-stopping on the entire cultural menu: fat strips (fried), chicken ova (fried), stacks of refined-wheat “cakes” (fried, natch) served with butter and a chemical soup designed to evoke the gustatory properties of boiled tree sap. And that’s just in America. Other countries provide even more gruesome fare. Black pudding, popular in the UK, consists of pig blood and suet (a hardened animal fat that’s also used to make candles and soap). Vegemite, popular in Australia, is made from “yeast extract culled from brewery wastes.” Africans eat fried bees.
Even relatively innocuous domestic entrees are suspect: carbohydrates turn to glue, cow’s milk blah blah blah, fruit is reported by some to cause blood acidity and yeast infections. What’s left? Don’t tell me about raw vegetables; only ascetics eat salad for breakfast. Then again, I drank Klamath Lake algae this morning, so maybe I shouldn’t judge.
I think I’ve just committed a weblogging foul — writing about one’s breakfast is tantamount to admitting one has nothing of import to contribute. There’s some interesting commentary on this phenomenon in A List Apart’s forum, spawned by a thoughtful piece on web writing. (Search the forum page for “breakfast”.)
This is old news for some of you, but I’ll risk boring you for the sake of anyone who hasn’t heard the story, which is an important one — certainly more important than most of the tripe I publish.
Microsoft is a successful company. They have huge amounts of cash, and access to the best and brightest minds on the planet. This makes their failures especially poignant, because they have fewer excuses than most anybody else.
The basic story is that Microsoft published a web page about a former Mac user who switched to Windows 2000. This was an apparent response to Apple’s “Switchers” campaign, which offers the reverse — stories of ex-Windows users who found happiness in the MacOS.
The frightening-but-funny reality is that Microsoft’s “switcher” story is a complete fabrication. For example, the image of the alleged switcher is a stock photo. And the unnamed switcher, when she came out of hiding, turns out to be an employee of the PR firm that Microsoft had hired to create the testimonial.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted an insightful analysis of the story and ensuing cover-up and denials. Part 1: Microsoft’s Answer to Ellen Feiss; part 2: Microsoft Make-Up
(Ellen Feiss, BTW, is one of Apple’s “Switchers.”)
Best quote, from Dave Winer as quoted by Gruber: “You’d think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it.”
