it’s a bike! it’s a bar! it’s…totally german.

Leave it to the Germans to come up with new and inventive ways to do sightseeing tours without leaving the bar behind:

The Beer Bike.

That’s a monster bicycle with space for 16 people. It features a bar, roof, sound system, and beer tap. The beer bike carries its own supply in the form of a 50-liter keg at the front. The twelve people on both sides of the bar have foot pedals for propulsion, and there’s space for four non-pedaling people in the back. The driver has a steering wheel and brakes. (Yes, the driver has to stay sober.)

You can rent those for tours in many German cities. People use them for sightseeing trips or special occasions like bachelor parties, graduations, or birthdays. And yes, they’re (still) legal to operate on public streets. (I say “still” because there’s legislation under consideration to ban the beer bikes from public roads.) When you rent one, it comes with a driver who steers you around and makes sure the rules are being followed. (Their code of conduct is actually pretty strict—no rowdy behavior, no harassment of pedestrians, no leaving the bike, and so on. Failure to follow the rules will result in an immediate end to the tour and a 200-euro fee.)

I’ve never been on one—they came up with that idea long after I moved to the United States—but I hear they’re a lot of fun. It’s certainly a different way to do a sightseeing tour, that’s for sure.

dachshund #3, the model with the volume stuck at 11.

This is Ban. He will be ten years old this year. Ban was a one-pup litter back in 2002, and even though we needed a girl, we kept him just because he was the only puppy from that breeding.

Ban is a sweet dog, very loving and eager to please. He just has one annoying habit—he barks at everything. If there’s a truck driving by on the road 200 feet away, he’ll bark. If there’s someone walking past the property on the way to the pond, he’ll bark. If there’s unfamiliar dialogue on TV in the next room, he’ll bark. And he absolutely, positively cannot run outside without winding up that bark while someone opens the door for him, and then sounding the fanfare as he runs outside through the covered porch. Every. Single. Goddamn. Time.

Now, as I mentioned, he’s a really sweet dog, if a little high-strung, so I’ve put up with that habit of his for ten years now. But if we ever get unwanted nighttime visitors intent on redistributing the valuables in our house, I am almost convinced that this dog will sleep through the whole thing.

AWD power activate!

So our driveway is about 200 feet long and unpaved. We had it finished with hardpack, and it’s fine most of the year, but when we have prolonged cold spells, it can be tricky for a front-wheel car to get up the incline to our house.

Well, we currently have a cold spell like that. The temperature has been around 20 during the day and in the negatives at night for a week or so now. The hardpack has been covered with snow a few times, scraped and shoveled, and left with a thin layer of snow that has frozen and smoothed out into something that now resembles one of those Olympic luge tracks. I have to park the Grand Marnier in the spot at the bottom of the driveway because the front-wheel drive does not do well when the driveway is all ice. The UPS, FedEx, and Sears service trucks have all had to capitulate and park at the bottom for their deliveries and service calls for the last few days.

Today I went out with the kids for the weekly grocery run. When I got back, I had to park at the bottom of the hill again and haul all the groceries up through the snow on the path through the Forbidden Forest, bypassing the driveway, because it was so icy I fell on my ass three times trying to walk up it. Took me twenty minutes to get all the groceries into the house. I was utterly convinced that the wife would not be able to make it up the hill tonight to park in her usual spot right next to the house.

Well, she gets in past dark, I see the headlights coming up the driveway…and the Subaru just trucks up the icy incline like it’s freshly laid gravel in the middle of July. She said she never felt a tire slip.

The Grand Marnier is nowhere near on its last leg, but when it’s time to replace it, I want a frickin’ Subaru too.

beeg boolitz.

Those are two of the 300-grain .50AE rounds we fired from the Desert Eagle two weeks ago, recovered from the rotting log that was part of our backstop and target backing. The coins are for scale. As you can tell, they both mushroomed very nicely, which is to be expected when you shoot them into spongy wood at close to 1,500 feet per second.

the 21st century comes to upper cryogenica.

 

 

When we moved to Castle Frostbite, the castle grounds were not connected to any sort of Intertubes infrastructure except for the phone line. Since then, we’ve had a succession of services:

• For the first two weeks, we had dial-up, which was almost entirely useless even back in 2007.
• Then we ordered the only thing available to us that was faster, which was HughesNet satellite internet. HughesNet was awful—expensive, bandwidth-limited (220MB per 24 hours), and unreliable. The connection would crap out every time there was a storm or more than just mild rain. Latency was insane—1000ms on a fast day. World of Warcraft was playable once you got used to the casting delay, but forget about first-person online shooters.The dish went out of alignment periodically, requiring a $125 service call every time for a tech to come out and re-adjust it. Speed fluctuated, but usually pegged around 64kB/s.
• As soon as the two-year contract with Hughesnet was up, we switched to a local provider I had discovered in the meantime. They offer WiLAN connectivity over the 900MHz band. That was better than Hughesnet—no data caps, low latency (60-ish ms), and a fairly consistent throughput of 64-96kB/s. They also charged half the monthly fee Hughesnet did. We kept them until January of last year, when I discovered…
• …that FairPoint had hooked our street up with DSL. Passed the “DSL Available Now!” sign at the end of our street on the way home from grocery shopping one day, ordered the service the second I got home, and have been enjoying low-latency megabit-and-a-half Internet for a year now.

Well, it seems like the bandwidth fairy has decided to do us one better, presumably to compensate us for all our suffering trying to do Internet banking over a flaky satellite link in bad weather, or trying to cast spells with a two-second casting delay. We got a letter from our town informing us that our neighborhood is currently being wired for fiber-optic cable. Faster than DSL or cable Internet by a factor of anywhere between ten and a hundred—the current state-of-the-art in residential bandwidth delivery. We have friends up in Orford whose house has been hooked up by the same project, and their download speeds are insane. It makes DSL look like dial-up. The letter says they’ll be finished running cable and connecting the infrastructure by June.

I’m quite happy with the DSL we finally got, and if it turns out that “gee, sorry, Mister, but your street is the only one in town that can’t be hooked up”, then I’ll be content—it works well for everything including Netflix streaming and such—but will I have them hook us up with fiber the second we can get it? Hell yes.

the ebook wars are over, and paper has lost.

I checked my Amazon account the other day, and of the last fifty books I purchased on Amazon, forty-nine have been Kindle books. (The fiftieth was a gift for someone else that went directly to the recipient.) I don’t know about you folks out there in Intertubes land, but for me, the Paper-vs-ebook debate is over, and the ebook has won.

My current reader is a basic fourth-generation Kindle. I also have the Kindle app on both the iPad and iPhone, but I do most of my reading on the Kindle because the e-ink screen is easier on the eyes than the backlit screens of the iThingies. I picked the basic Kindle because it’s the smallest of the bunch (small enough to fit into the back pockets of my jeans), because I already have 3G capability on my iPhone, and because I dislike touching a screen for turning a page. The hardware page turn buttons on the Kindle are easier to use one-handed and require less finger movement, and the screen doesn’t get all smudged with fingerprints.

I’ve given all the major players fair shakes—I’ve purchased books on the Nook via B&N, on iBooks via Apple, and on the Sony reader via pitiful Sony ebook store. In the end, I’ve settled on Amazon for several reasons:

• Kindle books are usually cheaper than the same books on the iBooks store or the Nook store.
• Amazon has the biggest catalog of titles.
• Amazon offers the easiest and most convenient browsing and buying user experience.
• The Kindle is the best reader out there in my opinion—and I’ve tried all the current competitors. The new iteration of the basic Kindle is everything I need in a reader—small, flat, long battery life, perfectly integrated with Amazon.com, and not loaded with features I don’t need or want to pay for.

Yes, Amazon has its problems. Among those are the proprietary ebook format and lack of support for the open .epub format. But with Calibre, I can convert .epub to the .mobi format the Kindle does read, and the advantages I’ve listed outweigh the problems for me. Open standards are good, but ease of user experience and quality of integration trumps open source for me. (That’s why I have an iPhone and not an Android phone, which is a whole other argument and a topic for another day.)

So yeah—I love my Kindle, and while I still love and own paper books as well, I’ve converted to ebooks a while ago. Don’t get me wrong—I love browsing in brick-and-mortar bookstores, but with the Kindle, I can buy the books I want in thirty seconds without having to leave the house or even put on pants. They don’t have the paper smell and feel, but they don’t need to be stored and are easily moved, they don’t have to be thrown out by the boxful because of water damage from a leaky roof, and I can carry a thousand of them around in a four-ounce device that fits into my back pocket. The words are the same whether you read them on paper or e-ink, though, and that’s what counts in the end.

spirit of america, indeed.*

This article is about the brother of a friend of ours. He went to take the T in Boston, the MBTA cops wanted to search his bag, and he refused the search. They arrested him, and a sympathetic judge dismissed the charges.

The really depressing part of that article is the comments section, which right now leans 90% toward chastising the man for not bending over and taking it like a patriot. “My safety is worth more than your inconvenience!” “Like it or not, we’re at war, and that’s the way things are now!” “If you don’t like it, walk!” “If you don’t like it, leave the country!”

You know liberty is a long way down the shitter when the subjects not just tolerate having to answer to people in uniforms just to get to work, but actively demand that kind of treatment—and heap scorn on those who don’t.

*”Spirit of America” is the license plate motto of Massachusetts. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t refer to clicking your heels and kow-towing to anyone with a badge and a uniform who demands to see ‘papers, please.’

romney? really?

Thoughts on Iowa:

Now that Mitt Romney can feel like a frontrunner, I give it two months tops before we see the first Fudd-placating video with him dressed in Realtree camo and safety orange, holding a shotgun like he’s being forced to touch another man’s Mr. Happy, and supplying a solemn voice-over that tells us how he saw one of those shoot-guns at his pappy’s farm once when he may have shot at a squirrel, and yes, you dumb NRA yokels, hunting is very important to him.

Oh, Stupid Party. Better get used to saying “President Obama” through your gritted teeth for another four years.

a few words on harry potter, storytelling, and christianity.

A few days ago, I finally had a chance to watch the last of the Harry Potter movies, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2″. The movies run the range from excellent (Deathly Hallows Pt.2, Half-Blood Prince) to competent (the first two movies, directed by Chris Columbus) to odd and head-scratchingly inconsistent with the characters of the novel in places (Azkaban). Overall, however, they’re a remarkable achievement because they manage to replicate in movie form what makes the books so unique: they progress and grow with the characters through seven years.

After I finished Deathly Hallows, I had the impulse to read the books and watch all the movies again from the beginning because I was sad to see the story end. This is what makes great storytelling to me–when you feel a nostalgia and sense of loss for a world that never existed except in your head and that of the author. it also reaffirmed my personal theory of storytelling: that a novel ultimately stands and falls with the author’s ability to make us care about the characters. Ideally, a good novel has both great characters and a great plot, but a novel with a humdrum plot can still be great if we care enough about the characters and the world in which they move. On the obverse, the best and most airtight plot will not save a novel with bland and uninteresting characters. If we don’t care about the people in it, the story becomes uninteresting even when the author is firmly in command of the plot and throws in narrative razzle-dazzle.

Harry Potter isn’t about witchcraft and wizardry. Those are the dressing on the salad, the tinsel on the tree, the swirl on the pastry. Harry Potter is about friendship and love and loyalty, about family and the nature of life and death, and about what’s truly important in life, the qualities that define us as human beings. That’s why the criticism of the series from certain segments of Christianity is not only misguided, but profoundly unfair. So much of the Harry Potter books could actually serve as Christian allegory (and far more effectively than C.S. Lewis’ heavy-handed pap in the Narnia books) that people who accuse Harry Potter of being the Devil’s work only show that they either don’t have a clue what the books are about (and many haven’t even read them), or that their version of Christianity is a particularly loveless and grim one.

I know that most Christians don’t have a problem with Harry Potter. Most of the Christians I know, for example, read the books and let their children read them, simply because they’re good entertainment that ultimately champions good values. But I have come to understand why some Christians reject the books, and why they’re invariably members of the inflexible and fundamental branches of Christianity. You see, the Christians I know and get along with have an understanding that books are a way to make us understand our nature and our place in the world, and that nothing is literal in fiction. They apply this attitude to the Bible as well–Jesus speaks in parables, the lessons of the New Testament are to be seen in context, and the spirit of the book is in the totality of its message.

There’s another kind of Christian, though, and they treat the Bible differently. For them, the important thing is that parts of it have lists of black-and-white rules, lots of “Thou shalt not” and so on. They are the ones who see the Bible as literal truth. What’s important is not the message or the intent or the spirit of the book, but the lists of printed rules that can be followed. They absolve the believer from having to apply their own judgment, from having to examine an issue from all sides and see it both in the context of human experience and the spirit of the book’s message. That would require having to attempt to understand the issue, when it’s much easier to hold it up against the go/no-go gauge of Leviticus et. al.  The Bible says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, Harry Potter talks of witches and wizards, ergo Harry Potter is anti-Biblical and therefore un-Christian. It doesn’t require understanding, or exercising judgment, or even reading the books in question. In reality, Harry and his friends embody values that Christianity claims as virtuous. They are kind, fair, loyal, and concerned with the suffering of others. They face evil with courage even at the risk of their own lives. Most importantly, they love each other and remain loyal to friends and family even in the face of persecution. Those are all professed Christian virtues, aren’t they? I mean, if you’re going to encourage your kid to read, isn’t that the kind of stuff a Christian would want their kid to read and like? When it comes to moral lessons in literature, you could do a lot worse than Harry Potter.

Do I believe in the literal truth of Harry Potter, that reading the books will make my kid turn to witchcraft? Not any more than I believe in the existence of God or gods or divinity in general. I don’t believe that I can point a wand at an object and make it levitate by saying “Wingardium Leviosa”. But I do believe in the power of love and friendship and beauty, the things that elevate us above just being meat–and those are the essence of the Harry Potter books, not wands and spells and witchcraft.

only the fed can print their own money, silly.

The only way I can explain the people who regularly surface trying to pay at WalMart with fake $1,000,000 bills is mental disability or illness. The alternative is too unpleasant to contemplate—that our educational system produces people who think that your neighborhood Wally World can break a million-dollar bill on a $500 purchase and hand you nine hundred ninety-nine grand in change.