Susskins Central Dispatch

The 4th of July baby

My Sister Barb is celebrating her birthday today. I would like to take a moment of your time and set out some of the really cool things that I’ve learned about her over the years.

1. She’s dead-center middle in our Sibling Hierarchy.
2. While a teenager, she was convinced that I was the most annoying thing in the world.
3. She once killed a bear with her bare hands.
4. She’s fluent in Portuguese.
5. She accidentally invented Brylcreem while trying to fry up some chicken.
6. Her name is banned on three continents due to awesomeness.
7. Her arms are detachable, though she will vehemently deny this.
8. She once stopped a bullet just by glaring at it.
9. She’s waiting for the Statute of Limitations to run out, but she won’t tell us why.
10. And finally, she can crack walnuts with her mind.

Happy Birthday, Barb! Thank you for not killing me every night!

I have waddled down to the basement

Status update: Fred’s tooth is completely fixed. Last Saturday the dentist told him that his tooth was infected, gave him antibiotics, and referred him to an endodontist for a root canal. On Monday, an endodontist did the root canal and charged us a rather daunting $530. (That was half the bill. Our insurance paid the other half.) On Friday, the original dentist did the permanent filling on the tooth. Today, Fred took the last of his antibiotics.

Problem solved.

So today has been a lazy day with lots of laying about. I did a fair amount of shopping for groceries, since I hadn’t been up to it last weekend. And just a bit ago I cooked up some brats, potatoes and corn on the cob on the grill. We’re both fat and happy, and later we’ll go out for ice cream. Fred has a gift card for Cold Stone Creamery.

Plus my A1C is 5.5, which is a fantastic blood glucose reading. The ice cream will not present a problem for me.

Life is good, bitches.

When life hands you lemons, make whiskey sours

First off, Fred is already feeling much better. A handful of pills and a two hour nap have helped him tremendously. Much less pain, and the swelling has already gone down.

Second, it was time to bake. So I made these:

Can’t you just smell the cinnamon in the air?

Third, the Catawba is in bloom. I love this tree, and feel blessed that we have it in our yard.

The blossoms are like orchids, and have a sweet scent. It’s a wonderful tree to have.

Hooray for Summer.

It’s like someone unleashed a clown during a dinner party

Well, it’s Saturday. And the fun has been going all day.

Fred has an infected tooth. So we spent a good share of last night and this morning trying to find a dentist who can see him. His regular dentist (who as of now is no longer his dentist) was vague and unhelpful, just as she has been for months. Fred has finally decided to fire her and find another dentist that he can actually speak to without getting annoyed. (It’s a very oil-and-water relationship between them.)

In the meantime, we found a clinic that was open this morning, and got him in to see someone. He’s now on an antibiotic, and will be making an appointment for an Endodontist on Monday to schedule a root canal. Once that’s done, we start shopping in earnest for a new dental clinic. If he’s not going back, I’m not going back.

I brought him home, and got him comfortable. Poor thing, he’s all swollen and tender on one side of his face. Then I took off to pick up his meds. Halfway there, I heard a horrible SKKRRRRRRRNGK from under my car, and looked in the rear-view to see a piece of metal cartwheeling along the street. Turned around, and discovered that the metal shield from the catalytic converter had decided to jump ship. I left it there, because NO WAY was I going to try to pick up a screaming hot piece of metal from the street. Later, returning home, I discovered that the formerly bowl-shaped piece was now quite flat, and once again cartwheeling about as another car hit it.

My poor car. I’m coming close to squeezing the last bits of use out of it, I’m afraid. And I’m just 3000 or so miles from turning over 200,000. Can I make it?

So now I’m in the cool of the basement, poking at the computer and doing laundry. Not the most exciting way to spend the day, but there you are. At least I’m indoors with a working air conditioner.

Let’s hope that the rest of the day goes better.

My little (snort) brother is a year older as of yesterday. He’s a workin’ man, with a burgeoning landscaping business. He tends bar occasionally, he’s a volunteer firefighter, he mows lawns, he runs a garden nursery, he builds walls. He has an awesome wife, and a beautiful little boy.

We’re all so proud of him. Happy Birthday, Wayne. Hope you get the chance to celebrate with a cold beer and a steak, once you get the lawn mowed.

Can I touch ‘em?

Here’s a little boy seeing lobsters for the first time. So cute you can hardly stand it.

It’s like a little slice of my childhood

This weekend was the Father Hennepin Festival here in Champlin. It’s a three-day festival that purports to commemorate the crossing of the Mississippi river by Father Hennepin back in the 1800s. Mostly, it commemorates the beginning of Summer, cheese curds, beer, and fireworks.

We live a block from the route that the parade takes, so on Friday night we grabbed our deck chairs and a cooler and headed up to the route. One of the neighbors flagged me down and invited us to sit on their lawn, since they’re right on the route. They also served us hot dogs and burgers, as they were grilling up a storm. Nice folks. We also sat with Betty from across the street. Lovely lady. The parade was about 90 minutes long, and the kids all went home with lots of candy. (We got some too.)

Saturday I spent under the car, banging on a stubborn bolt. Finally gave up and put the car back together, unfixed. Dang it. I’ve lost one of the rear strut mounts, and don’t fancy paying $700 to have it replaced. But so far I’m stymied by a single bolt that just refuses to come out. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some trick I’m missing. But I managed to get its partner out, so I think it’s mostly a matter of applying force in the right way. A ten pound maul doesn’t seem to be the right way. (No, I didn’t damage anything. Yet.)

Saturday night we went to the festival grounds, and watched the kids making themselves sick on funnel cakes and carnival rides. We also sat at the edge of the pond and watched the fireworks. Great fireworks, easily as good as any I’ve seen in downtown Minneapolis, and a hell of a lot easier to see. Perfect weather, fireworks in front of me, shrieking kids on the Tilt-A-Whirl behind me, and Fred beside me. Absolute joy.

The fresh-cut fries and the lemonade were pretty good too.

Today has been a low-key day, other than a run to the grocery store for a couple of things, including some grapes that I frosted with Jell-O. (Pluck all the grapes off the stems, wash thoroughly, sprinkle with Jell-O gelatin mix, toss and chill. OH MY GOD.)

And that’s a pretty good weekend.

For some reason, the comment notifier on this here blog seems to be not working. So don’t be surprised if I don’t respond to you.

Working on fixing it.

There’s a gentleman named Scott Nesin, who runs a website called Games By Email.

The site does just what it sounds like; it facilitates the playing of games by email. You supply the friends, it supplies the mechanics. You can play a variety of games, including checkers, Reversi, backgammon, and the like. You can also play clones of Risk, Axis & Allies, etc. All free, all via email.

Mr. Nesin has used various online services for providing random dice rolls, and has run into the usual pitfalls of randomization. Mathematical randomization is tough. You can get pseudo-random numbers, but you’ll never get true random numbers. The numbers tend towards patterns. Some of the pseudorandoms are very good, but geeks tend not to trust them, and complain bitterly.

Scott decided to take his dice rolls into a new and interesting direction, one that would come as close to appeasing the players as possible. He begged donations, and built a massive dice-rolling machine called the Dice-O-Matic.

This thing is awesome. It’s beautiful in a Geek way, and also somewhat sinister. Seven feet tall, and capable of rolling nearly 1,500,000 dice in a single day. It runs a continuous spiral waterfall of dice, scooping them up with conveyor buckets at the bottom, and scanning them at the top just before they get dumped again. The connected computer reads the dice, and shoves the numbers into a massive online database. All dice rolls for the website pull from this database. When the database gets low, the Dice-O-Matic starts up again and refills it.

I love machines like this. Love ‘em. Scott, you did great.

If Aretha is the Red Queen, here’s the White Queen

I’m a big fan of Annie Lennox. She’s an amazing vocalist, and a performer who’s full of actual personality, as opposed to all the pop slags who think a performance consists of lip-syncing while they shake their asses like cheap hookers.

Not that shaking one’s ass like a cheap hooker is necessarily bad.

Annie has released a small group of albums since The Eurythmics broke up. Of those albums, my favorite by far is Diva. It has great songs and showcases her voice nicely. But she has other works that are damned good, and this is one of them.

Here’s Annie Lennox, singing Love is Blind from the album Songs of Mass Destruction.

Love Is Blind - Annie Lennox

Two big movie openings this weekend, and we went to them both.

First, Terminator: Salvation. We went on Sunday afternoon. It’s a Terminator movie, so there’s not much that needs to be said. If you’ve seen a Terminator movie, you’ve got the general gist.

Christian Bale shouting and firing weapons, Terminators and ships roaming the land, lots of explosions, messing about with timelines, and a couple of interesting twists, none of which are all that hard to figure out. Lots of fun. We liked it. The dialog was stupid in a couple of places, and there were a few things they did that made no sense. (If you’re hanging from a tower, and you’re close enough to get handed a knife to cut yourself down, then just swing over to the tower rather than drop to the ground, you idiot.)

Smartest movie of the year? No. Fun? Yes.

Second movie, attended this afternoon, was Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Again, if you’ve seen the first one, you’ve got the general gist of this one as well.

Silly and funny. Lots of great characters all interacting. And Hank Azaria was awesome as Kahmunrah, the main villain. Intellectual, slightly effete, with a bizarre speech impediment and a tendency to get off track. Made me laugh.

Smartest movie of the year? No. Fun? Yes.

So that’s four (I think) summer movies down, and several more to go. Next week, we go see Up, the latest Pixar feature. Sweet.

The Japanese are fucking insane

Honestly, there’s no other way to describe it. The Japanese, having been crammed on their little island for so long, have lost their collective minds. As a result, they have built a culture that fosters the most bizarre video games I’ve ever seen. Check this out; it’s called Muscle March. And it’s freakish beyond all measure.

I think I’ll start tucking the occasional song into this here blog thing. What the hell. Might as well do something, as I don’t particularly feel like writing long-winded screeds any more.

So here’s the inaugural song for Music That I Like. Mister Jonathan Coulton, and his wondrous song First of May. Gentle, romantic, joyful. And also NOT SAFE FOR WORK, OR AROUND SMALL CHILDREN OR OLD LADIES WITH DELICATE CONSTITUTIONS.

First of May - Jonathan Coulton

Not using the obvious joke for once

Good grief. I know that the world is full of oddities. Many clever people find many ways to do thoroughly unusual things. And yet, every now and then, I see something completely unexpected. (Warning: don’t click the link if you’re squeamish. You’ll freak out.)

Disturbing and cool at the same time.

Courtesy of a commenter over at Jonathan Coulton’s blog. (For the record, the comment was on a post about JoCo’s music career, and how it’s like a magical cow that is fed music and poops money.)

Stay out of there

Imagine having a little incident on your four-runner while messing around in the desert. Got that in mind? Good.

Now go look at this.

OW OW OW

Rick Berman can suck it

Fred and I went to see Star Trek yesterday afternoon. Thirteen dollars well spent. A fun movie. I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was a kid, and I like origin stories so this was a good match for me.

Zachary Quinto was amazing as Spock. Nailed it. And the guy who played Kirk did a great job of swaggering about the place.

Poor old Leonard Nimoy, however, needs better dentures.

Bleah. Nose starting to go all gunky. What a great way to start the weekend.

Stupid rhinovirus.

One of the funniest people ever has passed away.

I LOVED Dom DeLuise. Loved him. A big, broad, wild comedic talent.

Here’s one of my favorite movie scenes. Dom versus Leo McKern, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother. (A tragically underrated movie, in my opinion.)

and she’s judging you harshly

Just a tip; if you’re stuck in traffic because of construction, screaming at the construction guys means you’re a gigantic asshole. Look into therapy.

Adamantium is in aisle 12 at the hardware store

Just got back from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. No point in going into detail; if you don’t know what an X-Men movie is, you’re not likely to enjoy it anyway.

Suffice to say it was violent, explody, sarcastic, and full of mutants. Fun, by my standards. And that’s all I ask of movies these days. A couple of hours of action and explosions. Keep your serious dramas to yourself. I’m here for helicopters launching missiles at mutants riding motorcycles.

The Summer Movie Run has begun. Next week: Star Trek.