From Each According to His Abilities . . .

My brother demonstrated, again, why I end up doing most of the cooking around here.

He decided he wanted another skull cake to take to work and made red satin cake batter from a mix while I was out. I came back to find the skull halves in pieces. We debated all the things that could have gone wrong, from not being cooked through to trying to get them out of the molds before they were completely cooled down, when he suddenly remembered, while looking at the instructions on the next box before trying again, that he had neglected to add any eggs the first go around.

(Seems like it took forever to find the split seam
between the toes on the left front foot.)

He's outside today setting up and inflating the Hallowe'en balloons (which is his métier) despite a continuing low-grade variable wind. There's just nothing else to do if we are to have any decorations at all. It should be O.K. for 24 hours despite Frankenstein's Monster's stakes being pulled from the ground by the wind over the weekend . . . and that was while it was still just a misshapen lump on the ground.

Neighbor Dan was out there, too, and very upset. His balloons have been lying around out in the weather so long that several of them have developed rips and tears and won't blow up. We had a leakage problem with the giant black cat last year and found Duct tape an excellent bandage.

The tombstones are in. The four new apparitions will stay in the living room until the last minute and then join us in the driveway when the first little monsters arrive.

As we've both been reasonably good about not eating the candy ourselves, there should be enough to go around. This year.

Making the Best of a Windy Situation

Even though Sandy missed us by about two hundred miles, it's big enough that the backside winds have been blowing steadily for the past four days. And, while they're from the north and dry thus giving us high clear skies and temperate days, they're also strong enough to prevent my brother from putting out any more inflatable Hallowe'en decorations or blowing up the ones that are already on the lawn.

Neighbor Dan has been unable to raise his legions either and his have been staked out since the first of the month which means the grass all around them is now almost two feet tall and what's under them is probably dead.

My brother has been receiving more Hallowe'en stuff than I knew about. There are now four life-size ethereal figures looming around the living room. Three females and one male, all close to six feet tall, with livid hands and faces and draped in linen and gauze. They can't go outside, either, until the calm returns.




We did get to make use of one of his new purchases: a skull shaped (two halves, front and back) cake pan. He brought it out last night and we made up a double batch of pound cake* batter because the skull cavities looked a lot larger than they turned out to be so, after baking, we ended up excising a lot more of the material between the two halves than we had intended in order to get them to fit together properly the result being we have most of a pound cake, in two pieces, left over which is

actually a nice problem to have.

While the width of the skull cake is almost right, especially given the extremely pronounced zygomatics, the parietal is truncated giving it something of a bullet shape when viewed from the side. It remains, nevertheless, delicious.

My brother found some black food coloring when he went out late last night for additional baking supplies, so I am leaving the skull decorating to him.

* Is a double batch of pound cake a kilo cake? Sorry.

Familiar Faces Standing in the Light at the End of the Tunnel

The county Supervisor of Elections sends out sample ballots to every registered voter a couple of weeks prior to the election so we can all familiarize ourselves with what's up for decision this time around. I received mine yesterday.

The good news is: this means we're very close to the end of our two-year-long civic iron man triathalon. I look forward to the return of the overbearing used-car salesmen, ambulance chasing lawyers, screaming furniture warehouse pitchmen and concernedly sensitive hospice hucksters to our local airwaves. The bad news is: that final hurdle at the finish line.

We've been warned for a while now that this year's ballot would be exceptionally long, thanks to our pusillanimous legislature that decided, rather than actually doing its job and passing laws, to kick the responsibility over to us by creating an even dozen constitutional ballot initiatives and then exempting its initiatives from the legal requirements for brevity and clarity that ones proposed by, say, real concerned citizens are subject to*. Our ballot will be seven pages long**.

The first two pages are for candidates for office, the second page being entirely for the election of various judges which is a stupid concept in the first place and a legacy of Jim Crow but constitutional and just the way they do things down here. Technically, the judges are appointed and these are just retention elections but still.

What fascinated me, though, was the first column on the first page which is devoted entirely to the presidential/vice presidential race. In this state, at least, there are ten different tickets running for those offices. At the top of the list, of course, are Romney/Ryan and Obama/Biden (in that order, our governor being Republican thus giving that party top billing). After that, I'm not sure what order these candidates are in. Perhaps by vote total in the previous election? It's certainly not alphabetical by either candidate or party. Speaking of which, the three-letter abbreviations used for the parties are not much help.

The third party listed is "OBJ". Objectivist? After that, I recognize Gary Johnson and the "LBT", or Libertarian. There's Virgil Goode and what I assume from "CPF" is Conservative Party of Florida although it could just as easily be Communist. (O.K. a quick Google search indicates the "C" stands for Constitution. Apologies to all those on the far left and/or right.) "GRE" equals Green and I recognize Jill Stein. I assume "SOC" is Socialist. (And good luck to you, too, in this state.)

I have no idea what the REF, PSL, PFP, AIP, or JPF parties are even though Roseanne Barr (yes, that Roseanne Barr!) and Cindy Sheehan (of camping out in W's front yard fame) are the PFP candidates.

And then, here, at the very bottom of the ballot is a candidate I know personally, who I have met on a number of occasions and spoken to. Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake City, lefty burr under the saddle of the Utah legislature, is the presidential candidate for the JPF and is on the ballot here in Florida.

It is indeed a small, and very strange, world.

*I intend to vote no on all of them. The ones I have been able to read are awful and I have no intention of voting "Yes" on anything I haven't read.
**Some slightly paranoid commentators have opined that the length of the ballot is intentional and designed to discourage voters who may get frustrated at the amount of time needed and the backed up lines and just give up without voting but, as a voter suppression tactic, I don't see how that favors one side over the other. Never ascribe to Evil that which can be explained by Stupidity. For me, it's a moot point since we have early voting starting tomorrow and I intend to get it all over with then.

Transitions

A number of seasons are ending and beginning just now.

Rainy Season officially ended at the beginning of the month and I optimistically began leaving my car windows open to avoid the runaway greenhouse effect resulting from parking a sealed up vehicle in the sun. Unfortunately, the actual end-of-season is a bit more raggedy and I've had to bale twice now after leaving the car open at the library. And that doesn't even count my brother very kindly not waking me when he came home late one night as it started to shower and hanging towels all over my open windows. I have no idea why he has so many towels in his truck.

Fall is approaching. It is noticeably cooler (although today it's cloudy mostly because of Hurricane Sandy way off the east coast). I watched a tribe of very tiny ants stocking up for the coming "cold" spell. Scores of them were climbing up and down a vine including four triumphantly hoisting a cockroach leg aloft as they negotiated the tendrils. To be more precise, three of them were carrying the leg. The fourth had grabbed it in such a way that it's own legs couldn't reach any surface while they were moving and it just sort of dangled along for the ride not only not helping but actively adding to the burden.

With the weather cooling down, Bartleby has decided to become an outdoor cat again. She spends her time sleeping beneath one or the other of our vehicles or, occasionally, in a lawn chair and comes in only to dine. When we open the door for her she complains loudly at our inattention for not opening it sooner and, as soon as she finishes her meal, she starts yelling at us to let her out again. I am become majordomo to the cat.

Also, the zombies have come and gone. It's an annual migration, pretty much confined to the other side of the river.

Besides, Oktoberfest is here. After a couple of days no one on this side of the river will even notice a few zombies wandering loose.

End Games: My Face-Palm Moment

In the first book of the Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, there is a scene outside the gate to Moria in which Gandalf sits pondering the riddle written over the door trying to uncover the password that will let his party through. He translates it as "Speak, Friend, and Enter," and becomes increasingly frustrated as his "300-lives-of-men" worth of accumulated wisdom allows him to drag up virtually every secret password known to history all to no avail until it is pointed out to him that the riddle can also be translated as "Say 'Friend,' and Enter."

Face palm.

Boy, have I been over-thinking these puzzles. I solved two of them in short order over the weekend after dialing back a bit. I blame the need to discover an extra step in Puzzle 3 for my assumption of an unnecessary extra step in Puzzle 4. I was looking for the right solution and muddied up the clues which had been presented as straightforward as possible.

Puzzle 5 I rebuilt three or four times and kept fiddling with until I finally noticed, through sheer physically manipulative luck, the final instructions were built into the structure of the puzzle itself. When followed, the puzzle changed shape on its own, without further fiddling, and the answer was written right on it (although that did take a little squinting to see).

Unfortunately, that still leaves me four puzzles to go, the last one being unlocked yesterday. With all of them released, it is now a simple race to see who can deliver the last answer first. I am sure I am so far behind as to be completely out of the running but no announcement has yet been made, so I will keep plugging away.

And Not a Moment Too Soon

The UPS guy delivered four large boxes of body parts this morning.

I didn't know what they were, of course, when they arrived but they were addressed to my brother so I stacked the cartons in front of the door to his room. He took one look at them, smiled, and said, "Ah! Dead people!"

It seems we will be competing with Neighbor Dan in Hallowe'en excess this year after all. Neighbor Dan's blow-up menagerie of goblins, ghoulies and monsters has been spread across his lawn since the beginning of the month. Several of them are new this year. (The main effect, so far, is that Neighbor Dan has been unable to mow for almost three weeks and it shows.) All we've had to show until now are half a dozen balloon-head ghosts swaying around the live oak, and those only went up two days ago.

The contents of my brother's boxes consist of various zombie bits to be used to create a graveyard uprising.

(What a graveyard uprising might look like.)

My brother has started laying electric cords in preparation for the implantation of the inflatables. We're already stocked up on candy. I predict by the end of this weekend we will be in full holiday battle mode. 

And Back to Feeling Stupid, Again

I am going to be certifiably manic depressive before this Smithsonian puzzle contest is over.

Puzzle #7 opened yesterday and in short order I solved the surface conundrum but, of course, there is at least one more layer beneath that.

To make things worse, I have made no progress at all on puzzles 4 and 6. It doesn't help when I check Ken Jenning's puzzle blog and find comments from others about how quickly they have found the correct answers  and warning not to over-think the problem.

Right now I still have time but, if unsolved puzzles continue to accumulate, that will run out quickly since the winner will be the one who not only solves the last puzzle but is the first to respond. So they all need to be solved before the last one comes up next Monday.

One of Those Days

Sometimes a bunch of little things that, individually, don't mean anything accumulate in such a way that you just have to say "Well, this has been a strange day."

Today was platelet donation day but my appointment wasn't until noon so I decided to get a couple of things done on the way.

First off was gasoline since the car was running on fumes. As I pulled into the station I noticed a lizard had hitched a ride and was now clinging to the driver's side window opening just off the mirror. It was maybe three inches nose to tail tip, brown with a gorgeous delicate greenish stripe down its back. I tried catching it with the intention of releasing it in some nearby shrubbery and ended by chasing it up and down and around the side of my car while the attendant looked on from a distance. Eventually it got away. I tried looking for it when I was done fueling up but couldn't find it so maybe it got to somewhere green on its own.

(Not my barber. Although the resemblance
is scarily close. Stan's hair is fuller on
the back and sides.)

Next stop was the barber shop for my semi-annual shearing where I found my barber undergoing some sort of identity shift. He's always been on the doughy side and kind of soft with a Richard Simmons Sweatin'-to-the-Oldies thing going on, especially with his own hair, which I found amusing because of his very vocal full-on-Ebeneezer are-there-no-workhouses? libertarianism. Today I didn't recognize him. He's gone the full "It's Pat!" His voice is still upper baritone but he was wearing big dangly emerald glass earrings and his hair was classic middle-age matron.

Then it was on to the hospital where the TV over the donation couch was playing an episode of "House" and a patient was crashing out. "Oh uh," said my phlebotomist, glancing at the set while she stuck me. "Somebody's dying!" There's a reason the airlines all have a policy against showing in-flight movies involving plane crashes. I changed the channel.

And then on to the Smithsonian website where today's puzzle turned out to be an exercise in three-d. Even now that I'm done constructing it, the lettering makes no sense. I've already rebuilt it once. Well, back to feeling stupid again.

The Games Are Back On Track

The unseemly amount of fist pumping, happy-hopping and hooting accompanying my solution to the third puzzle would have been embarrassing if there had been anyone around to see it but, after six days of frustration, my elation was very real. So, take that, Ken Jennings! I'm back!

In the end, the answer just sort of appeared.

The Smithsonian released the fifth puzzle yesterday. It required some effort but was totally straightforward. Step one was basic, if time consuming, and yielded three clues, the first explaining what to do and the other two how to do it. An hour and a half and I was done.

That still left me with puzzles three and four. Letting them age was not working so I took out puzzle three again. I noticed that a few potential components had not been used and in attempting to identify all that might be missing began deconstructing the blamed thing when the answer just popped out. Actually, it more oozed out and I paused part way through when it suddenly seemed to not make sense any more only to realize it consisted of two parts and I was seeing the juncture. Now I'm wondering what the hidden extra steps in puzzle four might be.

Puzzle six will be released tomorrow and I still have number four on backlog but I no longer doubt my ability to work through this challenge. Whether or not I can work through it faster than anyone else is the question.

The Games Continue

O.K., Ken Jennings is currently kicking my butt.

The Smithsonian's puzzle contest started off well enough. I solved the introductory clues in the magazine fairly easily and unlocked the secret password needed just to get into the contest in plenty of time for the official start. The first on-line puzzle was a riddle and, after a little judicious Googling, I felt confident in my answer.

However, the next two puzzles have now been unlocked, one on Wednesday the other yesterday, and my brain seems to have shut down. My only consolation is that, from what I can gather on Jennings' puzzle blog, a lot of other people are in the same boat. On the other hand, anyone who is breezing through these isn't going to be complaining to Ken.

At least I have the long holiday weekend (thank you Cristobal Colon!) to wrack my brain before the next test becomes available on Tuesday.

Book Review, Now With Bonus Puzzle

I just finished a book, The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything by Michael Saylor. It was a fun read, with a number of intriguing ideas by someone who ought to know, although it suffers from the boosterism of every title involved in the subject of "how X will change everything!".

One thing that has change in publishing, and not for the better, is the lack of serious editing and proofreading, a decision made, undoubtedly for financial reasons, by virtually all publishers. And very few authors value the services enough to pay out of their own pockets. The results are noticeable, often distracting, and do not do credit to either authors or publishers.

In this case, the book is well written but poorly proofed and, especially in the second half, an increasingly distracting number of extraneous words pop up in the text. Mostly they are conjunctions, articles and prepositions and do not change the meaning or clarity of the author's arguments but occasionally where the author selected a better choice for an existing word the old one was never deleted. Noun/pronoun mismatches and noun/verb disagreements also grate.

The best part, however, is: the author used staff from his own company to work on the book and at least some of them took advantage of the lack of adult supervision to hide their own names throughout the Reference section. (Yes, authors, there are people who will look at your notes, appendices and references.)
I had noticed what appeared to be randomly bolded letters throughout the section which, on closer inspection and connecting the dots as it were, formed the names of several employees whom the author credited with helping. (I've mentioned before that I like puzzles.)

So now I confess: I sent a somewhat snarky e-mail to the VP of Communication (who is also credited with working on the book put did not participate in the prank) sort-of ratting them out.

And Home Again Already

My niece is out of the hospital and home again.

She's on Tylenol and Motrin for pain relief and is walking around, playing her harp, playing card games with Mom and complaining of being bored already. She wants to be back in school again. I'm sure her friends can't wait, either.

Her Mom reports she was running a small fever, but her doctors expected as much, and as long as it stays below 101 everything is supposedly fine.

So, now we can get back to the annual Hallowe'en battle of the inflatable lawn decorations, wherein Neighbor Dan has already taken the offensive and may have a commanding lead.

Let the Games Begin

I'm a sucker for puzzles. Crosswords, acrostics, Sudoku, you name it I have to try it. I will often try to do them in my head, which I can manage for some crossword puzzles (although not the New York Times') and the local letter-substitution cipher (but not the Sudoku).

A button from the Twain's World
contest. I also still have the T-shirt
lying around somewhere.

I once participated, back when I lived in Hartford, in the "Twain's World" contest, a sort of scavenger hunt around the city for clues put on by the Hartford Courant over the course of a month or so with the final clue and solution to be determined by all the participants in a gathering in a city park under the direction of Merl Reagle. I was the first to come up with the correct answer, but my brain works differently and I did it intuitively, a sort of flash of insight, about two thirds of the way through. Merl and his gang were still setting up when I came up and showed them my answer whereupon he immediately made up a new rule, which wasn't in any of the written material, that we now had to "show your work" in order to claim the prize. I have held him in contempt (which I am sure bothers him immensely) ever since.

All of which is a mostly irrelevant introduction to the fact that the Smithsonian magazine is holding a contest designed by "Jeopardy" whiz Ken Jennings (who used to patronize the bookstore where I was a manager in Salt Lake but that's also mostly irrelevant). The first clue was in the magazine itself and I felt very Nic Cage-ish (unfortunately, without Diane Kruger) as I solved that one which gave me the password to get into the real puzzle that started today on line. It took a half hour to solve the first on-line clue. The next one will be released Wednesday and then every second or third day for the next couple of weeks.

It's totally ridiculous how much I am enjoying this.