I hope they have one called Vault 13

A Futuristic Bunker Meant To Survive The Future : NPR

The hardest working man in show business.

James Brown Did Not Continue His World Tour | TMZ.com

Zombie James Brown would still be the funkiest thing in the world. At least, I'd pay money to go see the undead godfather of soul, and hear classics like "Say it loud, I'm a zombie and I'm proud", "I got your brains (I feel good), and "Get up (I feel like being) a brain-eating machine".

Signs I've been out of Colorado too long.

Jambiani, Zanzibar, Tanzania
Originally uploaded by neiljs.

The level of Vitamin D in my blood tested really low. Gotta get back to the sweet mountain sunshine and make me some vitamin D. The air is just brighter there, I swear.

That, or go to Zanzibar for a couple weeks and soak up that spice island sunshine.

Good thing I already have a ticket to Zanzibar. Leaving in three days. Holy eff. Three days!!!

Lego Magazine ad from the year 1981.

Lego Magazine ad from the year 1981.
Originally uploaded by Moose Greebles.

A post on Slate's Double-X blog led me to this. Compare this ad, ostensibly targeted at girls (or their parents), to how lego tries to appeal to girls now: http://belville.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx

Toys are even more gender segregated now than they were 30 years ago.

beardhead

beardhead
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

Check out my new beardhead from beardhead.com. I got "The Pirate", obviously.

Pet AT-AT

AT-AT (Walkies)
Originally uploaded by NickIsConfused.

A flickr user posted a set of pictures showing his pet AT-AT. Pure genius.

Flickr stats

Origami animals
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

One of the neat things about Flickr is that you can view all kinds of statistics on your photos. It'll show you which specific photos are getting the most views and what search terms people are using to find your photos.

Well, the one photo I have that is consistently getting the most hits is this one, a shot of some basic origami animals I made along with T and some other friends. It was a neat little origami pack we found at McGuckin's, with several copies of these three designs and instructions on how to fold them. It was a fun diversion for an afternoon, and a decent introduction to Origami.

Strangely enough, the search term people are using to find my photo is "origami animals".

Kinder Surprise - Disturbing 80s advert

I love these little chocolate eggs with surprisingly clever toys inside. My family was addicted to them for a while, too, when they were available at a local import shop near my parent's house. I'm not sure, but I think I first encountered them while living in Budapest, where we all started calling them Kinder Eggs and the name stuck, instead of their actual name "Kinder Surprise".

But now I'll never look at them the same way again after seeing this creepy commercial.

ennui

I only recently learned the correct pronunciation of this word. It's one of those words that you run across in writing enough that you can figure out what it means from context, and you kind of come up with your own way to say it in your head, and maybe you heard it spoken before, too, but the spoken pronunciation was so different than the one you made up in your head that you didn't file it under the same word in that vocabulary file in your head. Other words in this category for me would be things like "hegemony" and "basalt". Is it buh-SALT? BAY-salt? Hmm, Merriam Webster says either is valid, but they both sound wrong. And dammit, I still think "incongruous" should be pronounced with the accent on the third syllable, not the second.

What words do you have in your vocabulary but not necessarily with the correct pronunciation?

Obama Yo-yos

Obama Yo-yos
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

I want one. If anyone can get me one they'd have my eternal gratitude. I bet they're already showing up on ebay...

UPDATE: Nope. No returns on ebay searching for "Obama yo-yo". And searching The Google for those terms is not very helpful, as Yo-Yo Ma is playing at one of Obama's inauguration events. Getting slightly more clever yields this yo-yo,but is sadly out of stock. I want a commemorative yo-yo from the district, anyway. I want a piece of kitsch with a story, not some stupid barely usable yo-yo ordered from the interwebs.

Good news, though. My agent in DC is keeping a sharp lookout for one for me. Said agent once borrowed one of my yo-yos and showed me a trick where the yo-yo ends up in the mint julep I'm holding. It's a good trick for whenever I happen to be holding a mint julep, which is not nearly often enough.

T in Tanzania

T in Tanzania(Click for full set)

The Perfect Thew Device

Such was the subject line on a missive that arrived in my inbox today from my long-time friend and illustrious creator of Big Trendy. Contained therein was a link: http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/10/06/iyo-induction-iphone-charger/, with accompanying text "this is my submission for the perfect piece of Thew technology."

Ok. You win. This is almost enough to make me want to buy an apple product. I'm not a big fan of apple. Their closed DRM is worse than all the evils of Sony and Microsoft combined. But being able to charge my iphone with a yo-yo!? That would be the ultimate in geek awesomeness. Now if only someone would invent a yo-yo powered bicycle...

Thanksgiving

Many, many years ago I visited my cousin Sea_Pea_Tea when he was still a student at Central Michigan University. I remember fondly him taking me on a tour of the greenhouse on campus where he was employed, I believe in an arrangement with the program in which he was studying, but I could be misremembering. I'm not sure if I had ever seen a banana tree before, but I was certainly wowed by the size of the leaves on the banana tree in that greenhouse. I also remember, in the style of two college students who were both into music, sharing a few cd's with each other at his place. One of the bands he introduced to me then was a group called Poi Dog Pondering, and their album "Wishing like a mountain and thinking like the sea". A collection of wistfully upbeat chamber rock songs, the album didn't immediately grab my attention. But through a few repeated listenings, the poetry of one particular song started to speak to me. The track is called "Thanksgiving", and while the words really deserve the music, and vice versa, I'd like to share the lyrics with you here. They exhibit a certain turn of phrase that I came to find quite beautful, and poignant.

Somehow I find myself far out of line
from the ones I had drawn
Wasn't the best of paths, you could attest to that,
but I'm keeping on.
Would our paths cross if every great loss
had turned out our gain?
Would our paths cross if the pain it had cost us
was paid in vain?

There was no pot of gold, hardly a rainbow
lighting my way
But I will be true to the red, black and blues
that colored those days.

I owe my soul to each fork in the road,
each misleading sign.
'Cause even in solitude, no bitter attitude
can dissolve my sweetest find

Thanksgiving for every wrong move that made it right

As an aside, I later found out that the father of the lead singer worked as a solar physicist at the solar observatory in Hawaii. Thus the bands name involving Poi, the sometimes Hawaiian themed instrumentation, and a particular song on one album called "Circle round the sun". I found this out because my supervisor at the Naval Research Lab, when I worked there during an internship during college, worked with this particular solar physicist at one point previously. Would our paths cross, indeed.

Ok, Seattle is pretty awesome after all

Yesterday I went to the Science Fiction Museum at Seattle Center. My friends had a birthday party to bring their six-year-old to at the Children's Museum there. So while the six-year-old was having a good time at the party, her father and I tried to get what we could out of the sci-fi museum before it closed in a little over an hour. This is the guy that goes by Centauri on message boards and stuff, so you know he's gonna be into it. The museum is not large, but it does have some pretty cool exhibits. One of my favorite items was the original paper manuscript of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. He writes his novels out by hand on paper using an old-fashioned pen that he dips in ink. Crazy-awesome, but still crazy. And each of the three volumes of the Baroque Cycle are approximately 900 pages, so writing that all out by hand is quite the stack of paper. Neal Stephenson was mentioned in several sections, including his novel Diamond Age in a small section on Nanotechnology. My other favorite piece there was old school Centurion from the original Battlestar Galactica. The museum needed more Firefly stuff, though. As in it needed something, anything, from Firefly.

After visiting the museum and killing some time by climbing a climbing wall at the arcade we picked up the six-year-old and the six-year-old's mom and the six-year-old's sister and walked around amongst the lights and the snow. Yes, snow. The trees were all decorated with christmas lights and there was a carousel and the snow was coming down pretty well. It was magical.

Denver is still cooler than Seattle

About a year ago I went to a charity fund raiser for Child's Play called Funde Razor, but with rocknroll umlauts and stuff. I have a blog post about it and everything. It was awesome. Well, on wednesday I went to the Seattle version of basically the same thing, only here it's called Pinkapalooza. Maybe it was because when I went to the one in Denver I had with me such good comrades, but I have to say that Denver knows how to party better than Seattle does. The crowd in Denver was amazing. Lots of people all very enthusiastic about every band that went up. Huge line of people waiting to go on stage. The one here in Seattle was mellow by comparison. Not a big crowd. Mostly not interested. The people that got together to form bands were in general pretty awesome, though. Lots of them dressed up in themes or had various bits of rocknroll attire on. And you could tell they had been practicing "their song" for the show. But the energy of the place just wasn't the same. The highlight, for me, was when the boys from Harmonix got up on stage to jam joined by Wil Wheaton. That was awesome.

Current conditions:

Current conditions:
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

The weather up here in Icy Bay turned into winter. Rain, sleet, snow, and ice. It's not bad here, though, because we're surrounded by mountains, so we're protected from the 30 knot winds blowing offshore. We've been surveying at 3 knots as we nose our way through ice, sometimes making the whole ship shudder as we glance off a growler or bergy bit (official sizes of icebergs). The weather lifted briefly for a bit today so we all went outside to take pictures of the pretty mountains and blue glaciers.

Glacier
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

The least crazy thing that happened to me on the 3rd was getting interviewed for NPR.

NOAA begins process of updating Kachemak Bay nautical charts | APRN

Shortly after a death-defying deployment of Launch 1018, repairing a snafu'd gangway, and in the midst of fixing a sliced mooring line, a reporter from the local NPR station in Homer showed up to interview me about NOAA Ship FAIRWEATHER's role in the Kachemak bay project, also known as Hydropalooza. It's weird to hear one's own voice on the radio. You never sound how you think you sound. But overall I came off sounding ok, only stumbling over my own words a few times.

I'll write more when I get a chance. I promise.

Beach Party! (And Kayaking)

Nagai Island Kayaking, AK
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

Beach parties are fun. The other night, after many rumors were flying around, the command officially announced a beach party while we were anchored in Larsen Bay. Part of the bay had a nice sandy beach to play on, with dunes and ridges to climb on. The ship's kayaks found their way to the beach somehow, so one of the ensigns and I took them exploring up this inlet around the corner from the beach. It was a magical trip up a waterway I'm sure very few people have been. It started to get pretty shallow and we didn't know what the tide was gonna do, so we cut the trip a little shorter than we liked, having not discovered what was "just around the next bend." And we even made it back to the rest of the party for there to be one Coors Light left. Hey, at least it's colorado beer.

I don't get it.

If the earth is flat, how come it's still light outside in Kodiak, AK when you're bar-hopping at 1:00 am?

Happy solstice everyone! I celebrated the longest day of the year with some Kodiak Island Brewery brews, some rockband, and some karaoke. Well, sorta on the karaoke. I helped Bonnie belt out some Joyride by Roxette, the song Rhapsody calls the best new wave hit of 1991, with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Kodiak is pretty amazing. There's several thousand foot mountains rising right out of the sea. Said mountains are covered with snow and moss, giving a stunning contrast between emerald green and pure white. My colorado eyes aren't used to seeing mountains that are so green. The island here has a Coast Guard air station, with several amenities such as a little movie theater, a bowling alley, a commissary, an exchange, and gym with a pool and rock wall. The town is pretty small and generally non-touristy, with a few local eateries and bars. Like other small Alaskan towns I've been to so far, the locus of shopping appears to be the local Wal-Mart.

I'd love to spend a little more time here. A weekend doesn't do it justice; not with all the opportunities for hiking, biking, exploring, and relaxing. Being summer, the days are crazy long and the temperatures are generally mild. Maybe I oughta get a summer home here...

My girlfriend and I are in almost the longest possible long-distance relationship (Earth relative)

According to this website it is 13,924 km between Anchorage and Dar es Salaam. The circumference of the earth is 40,000 km, to a first order approximation. This means that the farthest any human being could possibly be from another human being and still remain on the surface of this spheroid we call Earth is about 20,000 km. Since I am currently in Sitka, AK and she is in Tanzania, we rank a 7 out of a possible 10 on the scale of long-distance relationships. Let's make some comparisons, shall we? Let's say you live on the west coast in, say, San Diego and your honey lives on the East Coast in, say, New York City. That seems pretty far, right? Well that's a mere 3922 km, ranking only a 2 on the 10 point scale. I got you beat by 5! Take that!

Or how about if you live in Reykjavic, Iceland and your sweetie lives in Perth, Australia? That seems pretty far, too, right? (It also seems awesome!) Well, you're right! That is pretty far, and pretty awesome! That's a distance of 15,403 km, for a ranking of 7.7 on the 10 point scale, edging out my measly Alaska to Tanzania ranking of 7. So, for all you sleepless in Reykjavic and Perth couples out there; dude, I'm sorry.

This is all to say that my girlfriend is really far away, and that I miss her.