Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Listening to: Thievery Corporation - Mirror Conspiracy
I’m operating in sort of a strange space today. I’ve spent the week working in Milwaukee, and I usually fly home to Seattle on Friday night. However, due to tight scheduling and some unfinished tasks, I stayed over Friday night and am departing at noon on Saturday. It’s upset my programming a bit. I usually check in, check luggage (I am congenitally incapable of travelling light), do my striptease for the delight of the TSA crew at security checkin, then head for the Northwest Airlines Worldclub for a glass of wine and some internet play before boarding my plane.
Today, however, the Worldclub closed at 11am, so I’m huddled with the great unwashed in the seating area around the gate, no wine, no internet access, no Friday night frisson. The Worldclub is one of several such facilities that each airline sponsors Anyone can join, you don’t have to be a frequent flyer, but there is a substantial annual fee that tiers down according to your frequent flyer rank. As an employee, I would probably not have the juice to cajole my employer into fronting the membership, but since I have my own corporation, and I’m the only employee, the cost controls are, shall we say, idiosynchratic and tend to unfairly favor the president.
Later…
On takeoff from Milwaukee, I saw lettering on the roof of a house under the flightpath that said, “May you fly with an angel on each wing.” (an incongruous well-wishing after living through the last few years of rancor between SeaTac airport and the surrounding communities). Though I don’t have a religious bone in my body, the sighting is still an odd coincidence, considering the events of the next hour.
Flying from Milwaukee to Seattle necessitates a connection in Minneapolis or, less frequently, Detroit. Of the two, Detroit usually offers the more problematic weather, ensconsed as it is on a peninsula between 3 Great Lakes. However, today the rough weather enveloped Minneapolis, and as we descended, the ride got a little bumpy - nothing unusual, really - but as we approached the runway, it felt like the pilots could not get the plane oriented properly, and we veered left, then right, then left again, with the nose pointed resolutely down, instead of the floating, nose-up attitude they usually assume just before touchdown. I became disturbed a bit by the seeming lack of control, as the plane was a DC-9, a clone of the MD-80 whose busted tailflap jackscrew doomed Alaska Flight 261. But then, I reasoned, the Alaska problem was the result of criminal neglect and deceit by the airline in its maintenance function, and not necessarily a design flaw in the plane.
Just then, the plane’s nose pointed up, the engines powered up and the pilots aborted the landing, no more than 10 feet from touching down. The climb out was not at all convincing either, gaining altitude only grudgingly and making sweeping turns this way and that. This only reinforced my feeling that the plane was experiencing mechanical problems. Additionally, there was only ominous silence from the cockpit, no reassuring, avuncular voice reducing the situation to policies and procedures.
Because of general cloudiness, I could not determine which direction we were headed, but I guessed northwest and away from the airport. Then I felt the landing gear come down again and the plane descend, and I was sure we were landing at an outlying airport, almost certainly dooming my Seattle connection any time soon, presuming that we landed safely in the first place. One more turn, and suddenly I recognized instead the southern approach to the Minneapolis airport, and regained my confidence in the whole process of air travel. Still, I was very attentive to all the details of approach and (finally) touchdown.
As we braked to a stop and the flight attendant got up to hand out jackets, I asked him, to nervous but general laughter in my area, if we’d be getting extra mileage credit for the flight.

From a personnel file I was perusing yesterday:

Employee Warning Record
Nature of Violation: Insubordination towards a shift supervisor
Remarks: You were observed giving a shift supervisor an obscene gesture after being asked by the supervisor to perform your job duties in relation to cleaning up the material you left on the floor by the scale
Action to Be Taken: Any future conduct of this type will lead to disiplinary (sic) action up to and including a layoff.

No Animals Were Harmed…
As we walked between Phinney Ridge and Greenlake Friday afternoon, this piece of amateur topiary loomed on the horizon. I’m not sure where I was looking, but I was about to walk right by it when my wife grabbed me and pointed it out.
Just as I reached for my camera and stepped back for a better angle, the property owner pulled up to the curb and hailed me. He regaled us with the years-long struggle to hack this out of the urban wilderness. My wife asked how the idea had occurred to him, and he said he was just looking at the bush and saw it in there, like Michaelangelo visualized exquisite shapes in the chunks of rock before him.
He had had his side done for quite some time, he said, before he convinced his neighbor (the bush is right on the property line) to complete the work on his side.
The result is an African elephant on this side…

…and an Asian/Indian elephant on the neighbor’s side.
We regarded the fauna with newly-minted caution, Hansel-and-Gretel-like, for the rest of the walk, but saw no other such transmogrifications of nature.

It would seem we have not one but two candidates for the Darwin Award in this touching story about passion and parenthood in Alabama. Seems the father was distraught after the Tide (that same Tide that rolled for Mike Price last spring) lost to Arkansas, and was having a tantrum that involved levitation of kitchen utensils and household furnishings. Maybe his son thought this was just the moment when Dad would be distracted from his execrable driving record, and chose just then to press his suit for a new automobile. Dad thought it just might be the time to lower his auto insurance rates AND get even with his maker for dealing dirt to Alabama: he got his pistol, put it to the kid’s head and fired. Kid moved his head just in time to avoid having his brains turned into a less metaphoric Crimson Tide.
I know since I’ve preened about my Ohio State alumni band appearance last month that you can reasonably conclude that I’m a college football fanatic, but I think I’m more in agreement with Jennifer at Synaesthesia about the misallocation of resources it causes, both in terms of money and, more importantly in my mind, in terms of how we regard higher education.
On the surface, it’s an engaging entertainment and, because of the emotion surrounding it, preferable in many instances to professional sports. Universities apprehend this as a way to maintain the interest and, hopefully, financial loyalty of their alumni for years after they have graduated. However, this seems to me a flawed strategy for at least two reasons:

1) except for a handful of programs, the athletic programs cannot cover their entire cost through ticket sales and direct donations, and require a subsidy, which often takes the form of a per-student fee of some sort. and
2) attention and probably most alumni giving is diverted to the athletic department instead of focused on the academic mission and needs of the universities.

I know my own giving to Ohio State consists wholly of contributions to the marching band’s endowment and scholarship fund. That may be excused to some extent because I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly 30 years and have no other enduring connection to OSU, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I lived near Columbus, I’d be giving money to the athletic department anyway in order to have a better shot at buying tickets instead of to a deserving academic program being victimized by plummetting state funding.
Then, there’s the psychotic effect of being a sports fan generally, as illustrated in the Alabama example. I know that I’ve gone through periods where I’ve identified way too closely with a sports team, taking their victories as false affirmation of my own goodness, taking their losses as evidence of personal failing. Even now, I find myself checking in on college games on Saturday, going through a weird social pathology of rooting against southern schools just because they’re southern, rooting against religious schools because they’re religious, thinking that the outcomes somehow support my secular liberalism. Fueled by alcohol and a difficult life, this psychology is probably what would lead to the actions of that Alabama idiot. I’m saved by the fact that the games come on early in the morning here on the west coast, and I can’t really bring myself to drink to that excess until much later in the evening. And even though my son’s driving record at one time might have brought out the homicidal instincts of a less phlegmatic parent, my life’s pretty good so far.
And, dammit, we’re 5 - 0!

On our drive to the Green Mountain trailhead yesterday, we saw a church in some small town that had an electronic readerboard facing the highway. On of the more curious messages announced a meeting of a “Vegetarian Support Group”. Since this was in a small rural town, and not in the supercilious Seattle granola belt, we drew the conclusion that, as with the religious movement to “cure” gays, the purpose of this “support” group was probably to get vegetarians back on the godly path of meat-eating.
Just then, this question occurred to me: If you’re vegetarian, and believe in transubstantiation, can you take communion? One possible solution would offer itself if Christ ever appeared to anyone in the form of a vegetable, but even my poor religious education, derived from a Methodist indoctrination which consisted almost wholly of plotting ways to give attractive girls rides home after church and MYF meetings, tends toward the negative on this question.

We’re having something like an endless summer here in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s getting kind of spooky, like somebody left us in the toaster oven and forgot us, or the gods are so distracted with Ben & Jen that they forgot how to work the clutch on that season thingy. Whatever is happening, we’ve had weeks of basically gorgeous weather.
Yesterday we took a day hike near Glacier Peak in the Cascades called the Green Mountain trail. Glacier Peak is one of the “necklace” of volcanoes that characterize the Cascades from Canada to Northern California, which includes Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta and others. Since it’s mostly hidden from view in Seattle, it doesn’t get the press that Mt. Rainier or Mt. Baker get.
It’s a rather short hike - 3 miles in, 3 miles out - but it’s unrelentingly uphill, and you gain 3,100 feet of elevation over those three miles. You are rewarded with increasingly stunning views as you ascend, culminating in a 360 degree stunner at the end at 6,500 feet above sea level.
Blueberry bushes which cover great swaths of the terrain here have turned red and purple and they, along with scrub maples simply set fire to a lot of the landscape. An added dividend from the blueberries was abundant fruit that was still on the bushes, but which had dried somewhat, resulting in handfuls of blueberry raisins, bursting with concentrated flavor and sweetness.

View from the top
Mount Baker in the distance.