Point Lookout
Musings from the hillside

A Red Alert bulleting was issued today for a suspected al Qaeda attack on key, strategic US poetry Web sites. The President was romored to bave been called out of a critical story-reading session to members of a multinational kindergarten class in Amman, Jordan, for a national security council briefing on this situation, early Friday morning. Air Force One was on hot stand-by for immediate departure for a safe haven but has not, as of this report, been scrambled (or poached, for that matter).
The notice was issued to the U.S. cybersecurity industry after officials saw a posting on a “Jihadist Web site” calling for an attack on U.S. Internet-based poetry sites in December, said Homeland InSecurity Department spokesman Jordan H. Heyman, ML.

There is no information corroborating the threat, Heyman said, adding that the alert was issued “as a routine matter and out of an abundance of caution. There is no immediate threat to our homeland at this time. But, just as he was there to protect America for 9/11 and Katrina, we just wanted you to know that he’s there for you this time as well.”

[Parody of this.]

So, we went out to the Northern California Dachshund Club’s field trial on Saturday (rain, mist, cold) and Sunday (partly sunny, cloudy, cool, not very windy). We worked a lot of bunny-free ground early Saturday. 90 minutes without bumping a bunny and then got busy. Jordan was in the fifth brace.

I put him on the scent line and released him. He trotted gamely down the line, a little behind Charlie but definitely sniffing his way towards where the bunny disappeared.

Then he turned around and looked at me. You could see that tiny little mind mulling it over. He’s never been that far away from me off his leash. Ever. He thought about it and decided that the better part of valor was coming back to make sure I wasn’t mad at him.

You can’t say anything. He has to do what he’s going to do and he did. They told us to pick up our dogs when he got back and stared lovingly in my eyes. Charlie was around the corner looking for a bunnie. Charlie took second for the day. Jordan got congratulated for going out even a few paces.

Sunday was not as good. He got released in dense star thistles. He hated it and started to slink back to the parking lot immediately. He wasn’t at all interested in chasing bunnies. He just wanted to get out of there.

There will be other better days. In all, I had a great time and I think he had a good time, except for the thistles.

Well, DARPA is at it again. The be all and end all of language to language translation systems. Speech to text transcription. Language to language transcription, and a “distillation engine”. And the focus is on Arabic and Mandarin. How about Farsi, Cantonese, and the 37 other dialects and pidgins the rest of the universe out there uses?

The first milestone only requires that almost 2 words out of three be correct. The final milestone allows for one word in 20 to fail.

I guess that’s good enough for government work.

Welcome to Democratic Power. My hunting dog that won’t hunt would be perfect in Congress. Polite to a fault. Clueless.

The dog doesn’t understand his job but if he ever figures it out, he’ll hunt. These people have figured it out, hunting is bad for business, bad for party and personal revenues, bad for their sponsors … which aren’t the people.

I’m going to teach the dog to hunt. We’ll have some fun with that. I am too old and too tired and too honest to try to teach either of these political parties to do their jobs for “We the People”!

So, at noon, after what, 70% of the voting was done, I get a call from my close personal friend Robert Redford telling me how important it is that I vote for some proposition or other on the California state ballot. Robert doesn’t call here that often, so I figured it was pretty important to him to call me to tell me that.

But I had already voted before 8:00AM, so it was a waste of Bob’s time and mine.

Then, our family friend Bill Clinton decided, at 5:30PM on election day, that he’d forgotten to let me know how he feels about that same proposition. Now by 5:30PM with the polls closing at 8:00PM, you’d figure that close to 90% of us who are going to vote have already done so.  This is a complete waste of money because we all know that the people running the telerobots are billing someone for those calls.

Nope, this is wasted money in search of referendum pork barrel funding. The discussion of the proposition in the official mailings was contentious and only convinced me that if I trusted our bureaucrats to do things efficiently and frugally would I vote for it. I don’t and I didn’t along with several others with idealistic sounding titles and empty promises.

Sorry Bob. Sorry Bill. Maybe next time, you’ll call in time and with a message that has enough content to overcome the information gleaned from a relatively trivial study of the issues.

But I doubt it.

for what it’s worth. And I hope it is as much value to them as it is/was to me. In the spirit of “if you haven’t got anything nice to say”:
It’s nice that the polling place is on our daily walk and that the polling place staff are very nice people. I even like some ot the candidates for local office who, for a change these past weeks, were not hovering around the Post Office and Starbucks. I liked the shiny new high priced scanner thingie. It’s nice that we have nice recountable paper ballots though the burble soft-pointed markers are pretty clumsy.

Jordan had a positive experience too. And I feel better now that my blood pressure is back to normal.

quiz election. It’s the second semester term and we collectively failed the first.

Republicans? “Stay the Course” and run the ship of state so far up the beach you can’t see water from the bridge and no tug can pull you off. Done.

Democrats? “We should change course some day … maybe” and not just on Iraq. Are they going to undo any of the damage done by the Republican Congresses? Let me know if you think so, I seem to have missed any sign that might be likely.

About all there is to feel like voting for are the local battles over school board and city council seats (amusing at worst) and the referenda and propositions (one place where a vote might matter).

We’ll vote. We’ll vote fairly early in the day. The real reason? The dog likes the walk down there and it’s on the way to a cup of tea and a pastry.

Then, maybe by Friday, I’ll remember to look for the results. Just maybe.

And we’ll take down all those tacky little signs and recycle them and get the neighborhood looking nicer again.

Big words. An intriguing thought piece by Jamais Cascio on his Open The Future blog. Is it inevitable?

Probably.

So, our book-keeper / Comptroller moved from LA to Utah. No worries. She still does everything the way you’d like her to and we still bank at the same banks.

So she deposits a check from our corporate account in a California bank into my Wells Fargo account, and it’s pending. It’s waiting for some mystical process to clear it. When she did that in LA, it was pretty much instantaneously available. The difference in her location is, apparently, important to this national bank. And frustrating to us/me.

I saw a posting on a blog about why one shouldn’t use Wells Fargo. This is actually an instance of that very problem. Sad. We’re moving the corporate account to Wells Fargo, I think, but there will be a discussion here at the local branch on the way by.