Jesse

So I was watching the Daily Show, and they were talking about how ‘radical’ it is  the 9/11 guys might get tried in New York City in a civilian court. This confused me a bit, because Newt Gingrich indicated that New Yorkers would not like this happening, and I don’t understand why.

I mean, these guys attacked New York. They damaged the very fabric of life there and destroyed one of it’s iconic landmarks. While I think it’s a travesty we’ve not rebuilt something bigger and better there (if possible, taller than any building in Dubai, but hey) that we could parade them in front of, showing them that any harm they think they can cause if fleeting and momentary at best, I don’t understand why anyone would think New Yorkers don’t want the trial in their city.

Hell, if I lived in New York I’d want the trial to take place at Yankee Stadium, on the jumbotron. I’d want to eat hot dogs with pork in them while I watched the trial. I’d want my wife, with her face completely uncovered, wearing a tight shirt, and driving the car to be sitting beside me. I’d assume every New Yorker would want something similar. What kind of message is it sending if we’re too afraid to have them in NYC? What are they going to use their super powers to burn holes in their cells and escape? How long do you think they’d last on the streets of Manhattan -without- the protection of the NYPD? Put it on the news they are running around free and assuming they don’t end up in the East River, I somehow think they’d be found pretty quick.

I just hate the idea that people in our government think we’re such a group of weak-willed, frightened children we can’t stomach this. One of the basic tenants of our Democracy is our Justice system. We don’t behead people, we don’t cut off thieves hands, we don’t stone women in the street. Why, in a war that comes down to ideals and beliefs, would we want to abandon our core values for a sense of security we don’t even want?

-J

…a strong voice, coming from the space….

Okay. So as some of you know I got my car stolen last Sunday. It sucked, the cop said if we don’t find it in 72 hours it’s likely gone, in Mexico, or in parts. So by Wednesday, when I had not heard anything, I began to make my peace with the fact that my “fly ride” had likely been cut in to little pieces in a Mexican sweat shop and that the ‘Nissan’ hood ornament was being worn around some Chulo’s neck. So, imagine my surprise when at 6am this morning we get a call from Phoenix PD saying, “We found your car!”

It seems that it was left in front of some person’s house not but a few miles from my house. I was glad to get my car back, even if they gave me full value for it I doubt I could have found one in as good condition as mine, for the same price. So Diana and I get in the Beetle and she drives me over to where it is. Now keep in mind I was bracing myself for the interior to be all slashed up and covered on blood, feek, and maybe some #3. But no, there’s no apparent damage to the interior. The only real damage the Cop tells me about is, the front tire is flat and there’s Ramen Noodles on the gas tank.

That was kind of a surreal moment, at 6:30 in the morning, cop cars (there were 3) all around, lights flashing, and the cop to go, “Those your Ramen noodles on the gas tank?” I was beginning to wonder if he was field sobriety testing me.

Anywho, the cop goes through the car, realizes the thieves left some stuff in the car so he collects it and bags it and all that jazz, then offers to help me move the car by pushing, since it’s in front of a woman’s driveway. We push it a few feet down the street, no problem… Remember we pushed it. this will be important later. Now, I can’t drive the car home with the flat tire, so I got to replace it. I dig through the trunk, find the spare tire, find the wrench to get the lugnuts off, and find the jack. I try and jack up the car, but the way it’s positioned in the gutter I can’t get it high enough to get the tire off. This means I have to get it out of the gutter. Now if I was smart, not addled because it was pre-dawn, and had been thinking I’d have tried to start the car and move it. But because the cop pushed it, I guess I was in a pushin kind of mood. So I put the car in neutral, turn the wheel, get behind it and start pushing. I manage to get it out of the gutter (thanks laws of Physics!) and in a good, flat spot to change the tire.

Hands now covered in grime, damp because of the morning dew everywhere, I manage to get the other tire on the car. I am annoyed, but whatever, got the spare, I’ll drive it home, call insurance company. Easy peasy.

I get in the car and what I should have noticed earlier now becomes painfully apparent – these tiny tiny little pieces of shit (they had the seat all the way forward. I estimate their height to be no more than 3 feet tall.) had driven my car until it simply ran out of gas. So as my engine tries to turn over, the giant ‘E’ staring me in the face makes it very very clear this car won’t start. You have to be kidding me.

So I call up my dad, ask him to bring me a gallon of gas. He says he will, so he gets ready and heads down to where I am. Mind you, this is 30 minutes later. So when he gets here, rather than go get a gas can, get gas, and try and put air in this tire we decide to call AAA (I don’t have AAA, he does) and they’ll bring us the gas and put air in the tire and away we go.

30 Minutes later, the AAA truck arrives. He gives me some gas, puts air in my tire. The moment of truth, I try and start the car and…. it starts right up. We’re golden. Wewt. My dad gets in his car, I pull away and… haha, you thought it was going to be over there, didn’t you? No, I didn’t pull away from the curb, because when I put my foot on the gas – nothing happens. My dad stops, we shut the car down, try and figure out what’s going on, can’t figure it out and well now we’re screwed. Now, it’s only about 4-5 miles home, and it’s all neighborhoods… well, mostly. Only 2 major streets to cross, and neither has a light. In theory…

That’s right. I idled the whole way home. 3 miles an hour baby. Hazards on and my dad behind me in case my car blew up and I died, he could, I don’t know, scrape me off the pavement. The whole experience was amusing, but it was not until I saw God that I really understood how funny my situation was.

You see, I am not sure who or what God is, really. I have some ideas, but who knows. But this morning, bored out of his mind, God decided to have a little fun with me. He did not make my car go flat, use my gas, or disconnect my accelerator. I would not blame him for those things. What God did, was take the form of a very cute little 7 year old girl, in a purple dress with pigtails.

This little girl came out of her house, bright and early on an otherwise beautiful January morning here in the Valley of the Sun, and started to skip down the street. I smiled at her, she was confused why these two cars were driving 3 mph down the road, but then seemed to carry on in her own little world. She continued to skip down the street, then looked at me oddly as I started laughing. Uncontrollably.

You see, I was laughing because this little girl, skipping down the street, was passing me. She was going faster than I was. So as my little Nissan put-put-putted down the road, she was skipping on ahead leaving me in the dust. I couldn’t help it. This was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I laughed and laughed til I got home, pulled in to my parking lot, and saw my dad was laughing for the very same reason.

We got under the hood of the car, and saw they simply had disconnected the accelerator for some reason, and ditched the car. We fixed it and now I am waiting on the insurance guys to come look at the car and the window glass guy to come fix my window, but man. What a morning, huh?

-J

It rained a bit last night, was cloudy all day, and really started coming down this evening. Understand, that rain is wonderful and when you live in a city that has over 300 days of sunshine a year, a little rain now and again is a very welcome sight. My entire well-being is based on being to pump water that comes from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from me in to my house. When it falls from the sky, I am pretty happy with this.

But people in Arizona -really- can’t handle rain. Admittedly, we’re not a city built for rain. Sure, we have storm drains and run off and all of that – but the ground dries in to a solid brick in the sun and (ironically I know) the desert can’t absorb the rain. I am telling you all of this, because it’s important to realize that as a rare event, playing outside in the rain was something my brother and I enjoyed as a rare treat.

One of the great advantages to Phoenix is of course, that it’s rare we have “cold rain”. Even during the winter it may be 60 degrees outside while raining, so my mother rarely used the idle threat of “come inside or you will catch cold” as an excuse to get us to stop playing in the rain. More often than not, she’d just get mad since we’d come in and tromp water and mud throughout the house. So, unrestrained by vague claims of death by respratory ailment brought on by exposure to cold damp air, we’d go play. On our street, the curbs were a bump, and several layers of blacktop covered the street itself. This created a nice channel that ran down the gutter, where water could flow. Living on a cul-de-sac we did not get a lot of traffic, and living on a mountain the water had a rather rapid flow down the street. This presented the perfect river for my brother to play out our civil and structural engineering fantasies by attempting to dam off this mini river and ensuring that the millions of citizens down stream (they must have lived in the flood plane by the grumpy old man’s house or something) did not get killed in a raging torrent of water, leaves, sticks, and gravel brought on by the water washing in to the gutter. Of course, while real dams are made of concrete and rebar, we were operating on a budget here so we used the only building material that made sense: rocks.

Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that, since I live in a desert, I have an ample supply of rocks available to me with which to build the dam, and while this is technically true, I would have had to go to the mountain to get them, load them in our red wagon, haul them down the street to some kind of staging area on the sidewalk where they would then be inserted one by one in to our makeshift dam. This represented an extreme amount of work and planning, and frankly, did not sound like much fun, so we used the next best thing which of course was gravel from my parent’s front yard.

So, relatively unsupervised, my brother and I would take handfuls and handfuls of gravel from my parents yard, dumping it in to the gutter in the street in a failing attempt to block the flow of the “river” and save the helpless towns people below. Of course, what I did not know at the time was that you can’t really block the flow of water forever, and that some must be released in a controlled manner to avoid overflowing the dam, or in our case, just re-directing the water further out in to the street. This was unfortunate, but not something that would so easily defeat the Miller Boys so we got more gravel, extending our wonder of modern engineering further out in to the street. Once again, the water would simply go around the dam, further out in to the street. Once again, our dam simply needed to be expanded to block this flow of water.

Normally, this would be bad, but had I the foresight and deviousness I now possess as a 30 year old man, I likely could have performed this little model of construction, put the rocks back in the yard when we were done, my father would have been none the wiser and I could go on living a nice peaceful life, never giving another thought to the millions who died, living downstream, in the great flood caused when I removed the dam.

But of course the rain stopped, which means the water stopped flowing and Max and I got bored so we moved on. And we left the rocks, and our rock dam, extending halfway out in to the street as if we had somehow given up our roles as dam builders and became civil engineers in charge of traffic flow and felt we needed to install half a speed bump in front of our house.

Made of my dad’s rocks.

Suffice to say, when he got home and saw a large portion of his yard no longer in his yard, but instead arranged in an artfully crafted, though doomed from the start dam he was a little tense and expressed his displeasure with his two sons, who then had to go out and shovel the rocks back in to the yard as they should have done in the first place.

I love it when it rains in Phoenix.

-J

So I switched to IE8, and that’s why I haven’t posted in awhile.

What?

Well, I use the bookmark in my bookmark toolbar in Chrome and Firefox to remind me to post. The bookmark toolbar in IE is older, and while it has some of my links it doesn’t have this one so I forgot to post. I am a tool. I am sorry about that. So let’s get back to it, shall we? I’ve been thinking about some random things lately, I wanted to put down.

First, I watched Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey with my wife the other day. Or rather, I should say, I was watching Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and my wife came in and watched it with me. The conversation went something like this:

Diana: “What’re you watching?”
Me: “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.”
Diana: “Where are they?”
Me: “Hell.”
Diana: “Why?”
Me: “They are dead. It’s part of the bogus journey.”
Diana: “Are they playing Battleship?”
Me: “Yes.”
Diana: “Why?”
Me: “They are trying to beat death.”
Diana: “Are they playing twister now?”
Me: “Yes.”
Diana: “You watch weird shows.”

A few minutes later, two large aliens with very exposed alien butts are on the TV. Those who are in the know, realize this is Station – the greatest scientific mind in the Universe.

Diana: “You watch really weird shows.”

So that was my wife’s introduction to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Now to randomly switch topics, I’ve been plotting out a new tabletop campaign I want to run. This will likely be played via text like on a MUSH or something, because this is going to be more of a story than a series of dice rolls. I am specifically writing it to trick and confuse the players. It’s going to be for more veteran RPers, one’s who I think can keep up and roll with the punches I throw at them. I need about 2 more players, so we’ll see what I can dig up. I am excited though, I’ve been carrying around a notebook with me and jotting down little notes here and there with stuff I want to be sure to include. I think it’s either going to be really awesome or fall flat on it’s face.

On that note, I have some more to say about school and Star Trek online, but Word Press is doing something odd and I don’t want to lose this so I’ll write it this afternoon.

-J