Message to Uncle Paul and Aunt Amina

Good job!!!!

hailey and ryan

, originally uploaded by beths96.

A scene in a steel mill

A scene in a steel mill, Republic Steel Mill, Youngstown, Ohio. Molten iron is blown in an Eastern Bessemer converter to change it to steel for war essentials (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

This is from a great flickr catalog of Library of Congress photos from the 1930s and 1940s. Fascinating stuff.

And it reminds me of a joke ... Don Rickles is at one of those TV celebrity roasts that Dean Martin hosted.

Rickles: "And you're from Youngstown?"
Martin: "Steubenville, actually."
Rickles: "Like that's better?"

mario beat him like a rented mule

I recommend reading this piece by my friend Slev, who outlines some of the amazing, and hard to believe, stories about how he became a Steelers fan. His mom beat up Jack Lambert -- seriously. That's hard core. My mom probably could have taken, maybe, Walter Abercrombie, or beat Eric Green in a 60-yard dash. That's about it. She's not in Lambert's league.

I came across this video on the YouTubes and started to sniffle, just a bit, especially at the second goal. I don't have any cool stories about how I became a Pens fan; it was more a gradual path to fandom, and I think because of that, I get a bit more emotional when I see these highlights.



In fact, the two times I can recall getting all sniffly over sporting events as they happened:

• Mario's return from retirement in 2000:


• Cowher giving the Lombardi Trophy to Mr. Rooney:



• And every time I see Cowher in that "America's Game" commercial on the NFL Network -- it's at 0:33 here and makes me choke up just thinking about what he says ... "I turned ahraaand ..." and his chin -- I mean, if you grew up within 200 miles of Pittsburgh and that doesn't make you misty, your heart is stone.

i love british newspapers

Why is this even a story?



Gosh, did you notice how nice that clock looks? I can't stop staring at it. I think I'm in love with 6:58.

dc-10

dc-10, originally uploaded by pr9000.

As much as I fly nowadays -- which isn't a lot, but is more than I ever thought possible -- I can't say that I've spent a ton of time waiting on delayed flights. Oh, sure, there was that eight hour Sunday afternoon in Charlotte, but it was fine because Charlotte has these cool rocking chairs all over the place. But they didn't have real silverware at the restaurants -- I can get a real knife on a plane now, as long as as I get bumped to first class, but I can't get one at the Charlotte ESPNzone?

But I digress ... as I was saying, flight delays haven't bitten me in the ass all that much. When the inevitable happens (scheduled for right after I hit "publish post") I won't believe the gate agents when they blame "weather" on the delays, even though it's -WTF° Fahrenheit outside. 

The real reason we have so many delays is listed right here:

[T]here is an absolute limit to the number of airplanes any runway can handle, per hour, even in perfect weather. At an absolute minimum that limit should be enforced -- by rule and regulation -- for every commercial airport in the country. Currently it is not and -- unbelievably -- airlines are allowed to schedule more flights than the runways can handle in even perfect weather. It is madness.

If you fly commercially a lot, or just find the subject fascinating (that's me on both counts), you could waste hours on that site.

luigi and his mom

luigi and his mom, originally uploaded by pr9000.

remind me to write more about this later ...

???

fermentation tanks

fermentation tanks, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Amina and I spent last weekend in San Francisco; I was heading to Macworld '08, four solid days of breakfast meetings, midmorning meetings, late morning meetings, lunch meetings, afternoon meetings, dinner parties, answering email and voicemail, passing out ... then starting all over again.

We took Saturday for Napa. We spent part of our honeymoon there, and we always ask ourselves "Why aren't we living here?" whenever we visit. This time, though, the usual wanderlust and charm were absent -- at least until I got home and discovered those sub-arctic temps everyone's heard about.

The first highlight of Napa was Palmaz Vineyards, a computer nerd's idea of the perfect winery. Dr. Julio Palmaz invented the heart stent. No, not a heart stent, but the mother-frigging first-ever heart stent. As you can imagine, that made him a slightly well-to-do man. He invested part of his vast fortune into a winery on the east side of Napa, just off the Sliverado Trail.

But not just any winery -- Palmaz dug* a cave the equivalent of an 18-storey building, and designed the vineyard around two extremely opposite technologies: gravity and computer software. All wine flows from level to level inside the cave via gravity. But the tanks the wine flows into is completely controled by complicated software that measures temperature, density, alcohol content and the number of rodents that fell in when the staff was off "sampling" products.**

Above is a photo of some of the fermentation tanks; there are two levels of tanks, both of which line the outside of the circular cave. The computer system can rotate the tracks on which the tanks sit -- think of a giant wristwatch, with each tank representing a number of the face of the clock. It's just amazing to see, and probably was the coolest vineyard I've ever seen.

* I doubt he actually dug the thing himself, but it's cool to imagine that one man could.
** That's what I'd do if I worked there.

i'm back

a bridge too far, originally uploaded by pr9000.

It's 19 days into 2008, and I found myself about five different times thinking "I should write about this." And four of those times I thought "I used to have a blog; maybe I should write it there." (The fifth time I thought "Nobody wants to read about men's nipples.")

My good friend Slev Dupre (note: not his real name ... I think) used to write for a site I ran long, long ago, and he's a great storyteller. He stopped writing when the site went under, or at least he stopped writing in a venue I could access. And besides, the nice people in the white coats only gave him crayons after a while, which I understand hampers the creative process. But he's better now, and he's started blogging again at The Nude Bone, which is kind of a sick title for one's blog if you ask me.

Anyway, he's started blogging again. And my other co-conspirator, John Avelis (note: his real name ... I think) had been writing for a while at Coffee and Diapers about his post-childbirth life in the smallest state in the Union. I wonder if he knows about this Coffee and Diapers -- somewhat diametrically opposed to his, but I imagine he'd be supportive of this story (or at least its headline).

So what the hell, I'm thinking ... maybe I'll start posting again. But I'll only do it if I get to post some pictures at the same time, and guess what? It's my blog, so I can do what I want.

Consider this my return to the internets.