Overheard #3142

Comment made between two men pointing at a flyer on the plant wall, in February: "That got-dang new company policy on outdoor grillin' is killin' me!"

This Has Been Bothering Me The Last Few Minutes

I think the plural of "Safe" should be "Saves". It ties in better with what you do with them: Save stuff.

Breaking News: Beastly Update

"The Beast" has departed Bloomington California, headed straight for Michigan and leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. It's eating through villages and small towns, schools and grocery stores. Anything that stands in its way. I've even heard tell of a miniature golf course falling prey to it.

So please, hide your children and grandparents, and keep the dog indoors, until you hear from me that "The Beast" is safely in its cave at my house running Photoshop and sending emails.

Unholy Mackerel

I have an unholy love of mackerel. It's my favorite fish, by far. Not just because it's one of the best fish for you (with obscene amounts of omega fatty acids). But because it is rich tasting, and has a great texture (raw of course, I'd never eat it cooked). Salmon is way jealous of this showy, luscious fish. It even looks cool, sleek and fast. The sports car of fish. If I was stranded on a desert island and could only catch one kind of fish, I would wish to be in the middle of a giant mackerel shoal.

Just The 10 Of Us

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary math, and those who do not."

23 Seconds Of Good Lovin'

So, the cellular phone signal in my hotel room oscillates more than Andre 3000 on the dance floor. I get max-bar goodness for about 23 seconds at a time and then it plummets to the ground with a thick splat like a giant loogey. So when I talk to Heather to say goodnight it's an extended exercise in frustration. When you think about it, you really can't say much in 23 seconds, especially when you have much to say. Try it somet~

Thornback Ray

Is this the cutest ray you've ever seen, or what?

Kenny And The Sled Dog

The happy hour in the lobby today was intriguing and also a little troubling - it raised more questions than it answered. For one thing, there were more than a few heart transplant recipients there. Why? And one more who was celebrating being added to "the list" for a transplant. Now, I have been to quite a few happy hours in my day, and never before have I seen more than one heart transplant recipient there amongst the beer-chuggers. Interesting.

So that was the first odd thing. And there was a guy who looked just like Kenny Rogers. Ok, it probably wasn't Kenny Rodgers. So for now, let's just call him Kenny R. So, Kenny R. had like 15 beers in the space of about an hour. And they just kept serving him. "Ok, Kenny, want another?", and "So, ready for another beer, Kenny?". That's what they said, instead of "Kenny, your blood is now volatile enough to use as rocket propellant, don't you think you should slow down, kiddo?".

And there was a woman who had just gotten a nose job. She had the classic Hollywood Bandage in place. She was there with her surgeon. He was talking about the finer points of Rhinoplasty as she vacuously sipped her white zin and looked for all the world like she was still under the heavy influence of the sodium pentothal. Did he just kidnap her from the hospital recovery room? It could happen.

There were of course the long-timers, the people who actually live in this hotel. Some have been here for years. I tried to imagine how many elevator rides that would be, and if they were ever in the elevator when it got stuck. Seems almost probable.

There was a big malamute, appearing to be fresh off the Iditarod. Yes, a dog came to happy hour. If he had grabbed a beer and some pretzels I would have written this entire post on just that one thing, but as it was he just sat patiently and waited for Mr. Alpha to get loaded.

That was about enough for one evening. I almost can't wait to see what tomorrows tides bring in.

Big Ugly Scary Men

My hotel has a dreadful selection of television channels and I get pretty bored here at night, so last night I was trolling the TV for something watchable. There wasn't much so I settled on one of the three-letter-acronym channels (TBN, CBN, TNT, CNT, something like that) that was showing real-life murder investigations. After an hour or two of that they went right into a slew of fake muder investigations (CSI). I think the real ones were better, because you know they are real.

Anyhow, all of that is irrelevant because the reall scary stuff was the commercials. They hit me hard with all kinds of doomsday scenarios from Brinks Security...single woman getting ready for a blind date comes out of the shower to witness a Big Ugly Scary Man with a ski-mask on breaking into the house, only to see him scared away by the security system. I think the "date" scenario was their way of insuring you know that this helpless woman is also single.

It went on like this every commercial break. My favorite one though was the new Volvo S80 that has an optional heartbeat sensor so that if you are prone to believing the urban legend that a Big Ugly Scary Man is waiting for you in the backseat of your car you'll want to run right out and get one of these things. Of course the vulnerable and sexy woman was walking out to her Volvo at the far end of a dark lot in which it was the only car. She looked down at the key fob and saw the heartbeat sensor...and it was beating...

...I screamed. Give me the murder shows any day. That I can handle.

Up A Notch, Please

I like hot (aka spicy) foods more than most I suspect, so it chaps me pretty badly when a prepared food item comes in Hot, Medium, Mild, and Extra Mild, and I get the Hot one figuring they have enough mild padding in the lower end of the product line to make the hot one really hot...and it's mild. All I can say is,

WTF???

58 Down, 58 More To Go

Happy Birthday Mike & Mark!!!

A Deeeluxe Apartment In The Sky

I am staying in a hotel in downtown Chicago and I have a perfect view of how the other 5% lives. There is a luxury loft across the street and level with my room that is everything the aspiring business executive or art dealer could ask for. Huge bright windows with no curtains, impossibly high ceilings, soft netural colors and custom low lighting. Big vases and old chests, immaculately restored fill custom-made, lit cubbies in the walls. Lots of browns and beiges, with rich red and green accents. Oversized candles burn in every room. I'd be willing to bet it smells fantastic in there.

And nobody's ever home.

Jake Said "Amaranth"

Admittedly, I was napping and just coming out of REM sleep. But I clearly heard Jake say "Amaranth". Heather is not as sure, but I think she's just reticent to admit that one of our dogs is into health food. In reality, both of our dogs habitually say things that sound like real words when they yawn their long, drawn-out, expressive yawns. Coco right now is whining on about "Owie...We...Outside?".

It's scary, I tell you.

Flood Gates, Open

"The Beast" has been summoned. Hide your wives and children, for the Mac Pro is on its way.

Tribblebytes Of Data

I have blogged before about my "out of control like jungle weeds" hard drive collection, which is perpetually bursting at the seams. My hard drives are like a herd of cattle out on a lush grassy plain, eating everything in site until they bust open messily and release copious amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Only in this case, it's not a smelly gas, it's my picture data.

So I have fought with different strategies to contain all of this precious data and keep it recently backed up (in the case of the pictures, two separate backups, one offsite in case of fire or art thieves). This has resulted in a wiry mess of different sized drives with colorful names. I just updated my list yesterday as we have a new computer coming soon and it will be filled with even more drives. I guess these drives are the modern equivalent of shoeboxes stuffed with photographs under the bed.

And I have a lot of shoeboxes:

Green Fairy 80GB MacBook Internal (User data, iPhoto database)
Orange Julius 200GB External (Lightroom catalog backups)
Blue Whale 300GB External (Music, Movies, Podcasts)
Black Hole 500GB External (Main photograph data)
White Dwarf 80GB Portable (Pictures from shoots - temp)
Purple Popsicle 1TB External (2x500GB concatenated set, Time Machine backups)
Aqua Wave 500GB External (Offsite pictures backup)
Red Dragon 500GB Mac Pro Internal (User data)
Grey Havens 2x160GB Mac Pro Internal striped RAID set (Photoshop scratch data)
Yellow Sun 1TB Mac Pro Internal (Future main photograph data)

I have some names saved up for future drives, but I'm open to suggestions.

So all this data uneasily co-exists on this haphazard flotilla of spinning platters. And despite the constant backups and built-in redundancies, I live in constant fear of that statistically inevitable day when the tribbles bust through the outer hull and data spills all over my desk.

Lost & Found

Zach is in Orlando at Disney World this week. There was a terrible scare: he lost his Nintendo DS! Fortunately Mickey found it and last I heard he was on his mousy way to return it. If all goes well, tragedy averted. Lets keep our stylus' crossed on this one.

UPDATE: Z got the DS back but one of his games was missing :( Seems Mickey just couldn't part with Super Mario 64 DS.

Wisdom Of The Aged

"We all lead essentially the same life, it's just that some of us will lose a finger." - Dennis

I'm Working For DHARMA

My cubemates and I are in good agreement that my boss looks and acts like the Ben Linus character on Lost. He has a very creepy sideways glance that scares the bejeezus out of me. I'll make sure to keep an eye on him. Right now he's not in his office...probably out scheming with "The Others".

Melting Promises

I had a Dove chocolate heart that was very yummy...but the statement printed inside the wrapper, "Trust with your heart, not your head", was quite possibly the worst advice I've ever been given. Doing that in a relationship will guarantee you're going to get your real heart stomped on. And can you imagine if you employed that logic in negotiations for a major business deal?

Love, by all means, but use your brain too, at least a little. Otherwise you'll end up in a burlap sack left for dead in the desert while some crazy yoga instructor empties your bank accounts and runs off with your best friend. And your cat.

Chocolate: Good.

Trusting a Masterfoods USA marketing department intern with your love life: Not so good.

Silly Things That Carbon Does

We went for a chilly walk yesterday. The mercury climbed up enough to allow us to go outside for a half hour so we took the opportunity to walk the dogs and take Maddie for a stroller ride. To say the dogs were happy to get out is a profound understatement. They love walks and don't get too many in the winter.

Coco is a bona fide freak on a walk. It's like walking a vampire bat on a leash. In the dusk hour, she appears as a fuzzy-edged, fast-moving black hole against the snow as she flies and spins and leaps and twists along. A nuclear reactor doesn't generate that kind of energy. I wish I could trap it, bottle it, and sell it on eBay.

Jake, on the other hand, has been really favoring his bad "Jake" leg lately. He looks ok while walking, but then lifts it afterwards and the whole next day. This morning he looked like he was in pain. Not sure what to do about that. If it keeps up we'll have to take him in to the vet. His tolerance of Coco Loco is wearing thin though, I can tell. One day soon there may be fur flying in the house, and it won't be his.

Farming For Pixels

For Pixar's "Cars" each movie frame took 10 CPU-hours for the final render. The movie is 116 minutes long x 24 frames per second, that's a huge chunk of calculations (10 x 24 x 60 x 116 = 1.7 million CPU-hours). Fortunately they have a large "RenderFarm" that does this work massively parallelized. They buy a brand new farm for each feature film and they cost tens of millions of dollars.

Here's a description of the Incredibles RenderFarm...

"Pixar's new RenderFarm, used to create the digital images for each frame of animation in its movies, will consist of 1024 Intel Xeon processors inside of eight new RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar's own RenderMan software. The RenderFarm features two terabytes of memory and 60 terabytes of disk space. Each Intel Xeon processor at 2.8 GHz is about five times faster than the older RISC-based processors in Pixar's outgoing RenderFarm. Pixar is using the system for its film, "The Incredibles", scheduled for a 2004 release."

This was 2003, eons ago in the computer landscape. Can you imagine what they have now?

A Real Wonder Bread

My good and very busy friend Ingrid has taken on a new hobby: baking bread. Or as she says, baking "yeast bread". This is to distinguish her home-made-from-scratch bread from the not-so-yeasty breads like naan and pita, but it also reminds me of how Z used to say "I'd like some cow's milk please" as if to make sure I didn't inadvertently give him a nice big foamy glass of pungent yak milk.

I grew up next to a baker, so I know a little about what real bread tastes like, and it's wonderful (as opposed to Wonder). Mr. Rosen would bring us home fresh Kaiser rolls or caraway rye or challah almost every day, and it was the best thing since...well, it wasn't sliced, but you get the idea.

I only wished Ingrid lived within bread-making distance of us, because I would gladly help her eat any leftovers. Even if she Fed-Ex'd me a loaf, it would be day-old by the time I got it, not ideal. I think we might have to relocate to Minnesota...

Catching Z's In Orlando

Z is in Disney World this week! He's there with mom and he's going to have a blast! I told him to try to get on the 20,000 leagues ride, that was my favorite when I went, although that was a long long time ago and I'm sure there are new things there...like running water perhaps, or flush toilets.

Pets

Maddie has caught another population of daycare bacteria and decided to keep them as pets for a while in her digestive system.

She threw up all over her nice clean "yesterday". Several times. And when 19-month olds throw up there is no warning or special attempts at aiming. It just comes out wherever she is and in whatever direction she happens to be facing. And afterwards the only indication that anything unusual has happened is a huge mess on the floor and a slight look of surprise on her face.

Personally I think a hamster would be a much better pet than a colony of bacteria, but who am I to say...

Aortic Insanity

I was a chaperone-slash-helper at Zach's class Valentine's Day party last week. It was pretty tame as Valentine's Day parties go, with no strippers and no alcohol. But I guess that sort of fits as they are in the third grade. I guess that kind of over-the-top stuff begins in middle school nowadays.

They did have a kissing booth though. Not actual, sloppy wet kissy kisses of course, but those of the chocolate variety. The premise was that the kids would go up to this booth and answer questions for chocolate kisses. The announcement was made by the teacher something like this:

Teacher: "And today we have a kissing booth!"

Whole Class: "EEEEWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!"

Teacher: "CHOCOLATE kisses"

Whole Class: "YUUUUUMMMMM!!!!!!!"

Teacher: "But you have to answer science questions to get the chocolate"

Whole Class: "BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"

And thusly it was explained to their complete satisfaction, and mine too.

About halfway through the party, as I was carrying out my duty to try and get the kids to stop sniffing the fruit-scented magic markers (why do they make those, can you think of a dumber idea?), a little girl came up to me and asked me...

"Hey mister Zach's Dad, what is the biggest artery in the heart?"

I somehow managed to immediately realize that she had been posed this gem at the kissing booth and was coming to me for help. So I said...

"The Aorta, I think"

Little Girl: "The WHAT??!?! Laaaayorba?

"Aorta. Aaaaa Oooor Taaaa"

At which point this little girl shot me the same look that you would give to an insane asylum escapee who just ran up to you with the white "Sunnyvale" jumpsuit on and said "You fan the flames of blue cars but trip on the wire gently". So her next line was not unexpected...

"Thanks...I'm going to go ask another adult though. But thanks anyhow."

Ok, so now I am overwhelmed by a curiosity to know what this other, much smarter adult will tell this girl that I couldn't, so I casually follow behind her, listening.

She walked right up to the teacher and asked her the same question...

Teacher: "Um....I don't know."

So she never ended up with the chocolate prize on this one, apparently that crazy word I had uttered to her was far too embarrassing to try out as a real answer. As a side note, yes the answer is aorta. In fact, it's the biggest artery in the whole body, not just the heart.

I can often find irony where it doesn't live, but isn't it a little bit ironic that a question about the heart would trip this poor girl up on valentine's day?

Going Down

There are times when even the buzzing caffeine hum my brain cannot silence thoughts about sleeping. Eyelids droop like elderly boobs. Thoughts are scrambled and slowed. My attention span shrinks to that of a red squirrel.

This is such a time. I'm really not sure how I am going to make it through the rest of the day...the afternoon alone is like an eon. New life forms are evolving in front of my eyes, and they're not pretty.

Making things worse is the current coffee situation (CCS) in the kitchenette down the hall. Whoever the nameless person is that makes the coffee usually stops around noon, leaving me without any chemical replenishments after about 2pm. And later still, deep in the afternoon as I find myself now, there is nothing to do but pinch myself and hope for the best.

Perhaps when I doze off my head will hit the desk hard enough to wake me?

Why is it like this? How can I be this tired? I mean, it's not like I ate a whole turkey for lunch or anything. At least I don't think I did...I can't really remember.

Alarming Nights

Zach has not been sleeping well lately. He wakes up and calls for me through the monitor, usually around midnight. I think the monsters under his bed have returned, darn them. Well, ok, he actually whispers but the monitor unhelpfully amplifies this to near concert-level volume (Amplified whispers are pretty creepy. Don't try at home).

So, the drill is: I come downstairs and lay with him for a little while until he falls asleep. But what usually happens is that I fall asleep and wake up hours later, freezing and with a stiff neck, and try to negotiate the Lego and HeroScape-scattered terrain of his floor quietly in the dark to sneak back upstairs where my warm toasty bed and warm toasty wife await. This doesn't usually work, Z wakes up and begs me to come back.

This went on throughout most of the night last night and I woke up very late to get Zach to school on time. We walked into school embarrassingly late for him. When I indicated that the reason we were late was that I slept in his bed with no alarm clock, he immediately solved my problem for me by telling me to "next time bring your alarm clock down WITH you".

Silly me, what was I thinking, leaving my alarm clock upstairs? :)

Specs of Rex

I am waist-deep in the intricate process of choosing a new computer for my photography business. As a card-carrying member of the "Cult of Mac", it will be an Apple, but I am agonizing about which model to pick, and how to best outfit it for my needs. The iMac is a very nice computer, but that uber-glossy display, along with very limited upgrade options is slowly bumping me up the ladder to a full-blown Mac Pro.

For the uninitiated, the Mac Pro is a muscular computing beast of epic proportions, a kind of computational Tyrannosaurus Rex out roaming the late-Cretaceous landscape.

This technological terror boasts two of Intel's red-hot Xeon "Harpertown" 4-Core Processors for a total of 8 cores. It can be expanded up to 32 GB of very fast RAM, four 1-Terabyte hard drives, and a host of awesome graphics and display options. And all these powerful guts are tucked inside a gorgeous shining aluminum armor, like a knight outfitted for battle.

But what do I really need to best suit my photographic workflow? Well, there are a few things I can do to really make this beast better fit in my stable, as it were.

I don't need the hottest graphics card available. This machine is going to be used for photography, not 3D games. I am more interested in 2D pixel-pushing power than in getting 200 frames-per-second in Quake 4. So this saves money that can be used to add more all-important RAM.

Also, although I would love to spread my photos out on that brilliant wall of light that is the 30" Apple Cinema Display, the 23" ACD is really all I need. It has a respectable size, good color, and it's not glossy like the iMac screen.

And "The Beast" has great expandability for the future...I can add memory, drives, displays, etc. as needed. This thing is not cheap, and I want it to last me a while. One good way to do that is to make sure you're ahead of the curve starting out, and leave plenty of options open for the future.

I still have quite a bit of research to do, but don't be scared if you hear a roar coming from the vicinity of my house one day.

Does It Get Any Better Than This?

Grrrlz

In case her penchant for shoes and baby dolls leaves any doubt that she is a girl...

'Noman!

Here are two really big smiles for you this morning. We're having a fun chilly winter. Maddie's first snowman is now frozen hard like a boulder, which is good because we like looking out the wondow and seeing him there.

Avalanche!

We have very ugly green metal awnings on our house, and they are not long for the world. We plan to remove and dispose of them in the spring. Of course, I have been planning to remove them every spring since 2001, but this time I think we're serious.

These awnings are easy to forget about, they are very familiar and boring. But every winter when it snows we are reminded of them anew, as the snow builds up on them and then releases in waves of mini avalanches. Heather said the "event" this morning was pretty spectacular as awning avalanches go, it startled the whole house and now the dogs are circling the living room like agitated sharks.

What will we do for mid-winter entertainment next year, I wonder...

Parting Company

Of all the twisted pop culture references in music, I think one of the most imaginative must be the 1977 Adverts song "Gary Gilmore's Eyes".

Gary Gilmore was an American double murderer who became famous in 1977 after demanding that the Utah courts carry out his execution despite a moratorium on capitol punishment at the time. He henceforth became the first American executed after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. He wanted desperately to die, even attempting suicide twice while incarcerated.

His last words were "Let's Do It".

Incidentally, and this is important for my little story here, he donated his eyes to science and two people eventually received a cornea each from him. This little aside proved to be fertile territory for the upstart punk band called The Adverts.

Shortly after news of Gary's high profile execution reached Covent Garden, The Adverts released "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" about an eye donor recipient realizing to his horror that he had been given Gary's eyes and wondering if seeing the world through a murderer's eyes would effect him. It's quite a good piece of black humor. But the song is also good on it's own, and clearly shows off punk's surf music roots. Quite a merry romp.


Gary Gilmore's Eyes by The Adverts (1977)

I'm lying in a hospital,
I'm pinned against the bed.
A stethoscope upon my heart,
A hand against my head.
They're peeling off the bandages.
I'm wincing in the light.
The nurse is looking anxious,
And she's quivering in fright...

I'm looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes
Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes
Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes
Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes

The doctors are avoiding me.
My vision is confused.
I listen to my earphones,
And I catch the evening news.
A murderer's been killed,
And he donates his sight to science.
I'm locked into a private ward.
I realise that I must be...

Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes
Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes
Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes
I'm Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes

I smash the light in anger.
Push my bed against the door.
I close my lids across my eyes,
And wish to see no more.
The eye receives the messages,
And sends them to the brain.
No guarantee the stimuli must be perceived the same...

When looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes.

Gary don't need his eyes to see.
Gary and his eyes have parted company.

Calling All Coleoptera

The great biologist J. B. S. Haldane liked to say that if biology had taught him anything about the nature of the Creator, it was that he had “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Taxonomically, beetles are in the order Coleoptera, and unlike spiders, they are insects. There are more species of beetle on Earth than any other kind of life. In fact, there are more species of beetle than there are species of plants. Estimates range up to about 8 million species! Fully 25 percent of all known life forms on Earth are beetles. These little chitinous buggers must be doing lots of things very well to have that kind of success.

Beetles can live in almost any climate or habitat, from jungles to deserts, and even under water. They come in every color, including metallics and pastels. A designer's dream, as it were.

We love some beetles, like the ladybug. And the June Bug too, Zach had a pet June Bug last year as you may recall. A species of Dung Beetle commonly called a Scarab Beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians.

Others have gained our ire over the years, including the scourge of the southern cotton crops, the Boll Weevil. At least a few pests that we often think are beetles, such as the cockroach, are not beetles at all (a good way to tell is the elytra...beetles do not have overlapping wings).

But love them or hate them, know that they were here long before us (beetles entered the fossil record during the Lower Permian, about 300 million years ago), and they will likely be here long after we are gone.

So this spring when you come face-to-antennae with one of these wonderful creatures, remember that you're looking at the most successful and varied life form on the planet. What a bug!

When Life Doesn't Imitate Art

I have a general rule never to enter any photo contest that is not decided by actual judges. I have been burned many times on the "popularity contest" setups, where one family with a thousand bored relatives swamps the vote for their latest drooling offspring, carrying the whole thing away. I find it very frustrating that no matter how many awesome photos are in there, an unfocused snapshot of a baby (often with camera date stamp prominent in the corner) will always win.

So pervasive is this trend that it even crosses genres. I once entered a BEST LANDSCAPE contest online and, amid all the gorgeous natural shots that would make Ansel green with envy, guess who won? Yup, blurry, timestamped baby.

I have more luck in properly judged arrangements. I have won second place in the Detroit Zoo themed contest twice, and they printed my pictures in the zoo magazine...a very high honor for someone like me.

On the other hand, if I ever feel like I need to be humbled, I'll just remember that no matter how good I get, I can't come close to competing with blurry baby.

Happy Super Fat Tuesday, Y'all!

Out There

There's something really heartwarming about being at work and reading a blog comment that your 8-year-old son just wrote from school. I can just picture him, across town there, typing away on the class blog. I wonder if he thinks about how I'll read it and smile a few minutes later...knowing he is out there, doing his 8-year-old thing.

First Blogiversary!

Hi throngs!

Today marks the end of the first year of my blogging adventure! Thank you all (three of you?) for stopping by and looking through the windows of our silly lives a little bit. It's been a busy year, lots of briny water has passed under the bridge. Milk has been spilt, and we only cried a little. We got to laugh some too, and I noticed a few groans as well. We have all gotten a year wiser and more beautiful, and I suppose a year closer to needing "Depends", but we won't think of that now.

So here's to the next year, hopefully full of adventure and stories worth telling. I'll continue to leave the curtains open if you promise to stop by and sneak a peek.

You Should Be So Lucky

For my money, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is just about the worst thing a person can be subjected to. It is a neurological disorder that kills your motor neurons, those little cells that allow you to move you muscles. This disease slowly robs of you of your ability to move and eventually, since muscles are required to breathe, your life. It is almost always fatal in 2-5 years. If you can think of a worse way to die than being systematically paralyzed and eventually choking on your saliva, I would like to hear it. No, on second thought, I wouldn't.

Probably the most famous American to have ALS was Lou Gehrig and the disease bears his name here in the USA. But there are many more, including a couple of heroes of mine, Stephen Hawking and Leadbelly.

Back in 2004 when I was going through some very strange neurological problems that had too much in common with early ALS for my liking or comfort, I started reading three blogs written by people with ALS (PALS). I came across them in my web research. Well, here it is 2008 and the second of the three has just died. I don't know his name, and I didn't see his face until today, but I read every day about his trials so I feel like I knew him. He was intelligent and sharp-witted, and he loved his family. I will miss reading his blog and knowing that he is out there.

So, goodbye Brainhell. I wish I had known you.

Brainhell's last words were:

"It's been fun."

A post on his blog today read:

"ok i'm dead. so what? i partook of much wonder and beauty. you should be so lucky!"