HJCotton.net

This is the confirmation dialog that appears when you install the Speed Tracer extension in Google Chrome.

“This extension needs access to: All data on your computer and the websites you visit.”

If only spyware installations were so up front about their intentions!

Just one of literally dozens of great songs by Roy Zimmerman.

Dear Hadyn,

Thanks so much for recently donating your car to public broadcasting through the Car Talk vehicle donation program. Your thoughtfulness resulted in a net gift of $35.00 to WITF.

Excellent! Almost enough for a case of good beer… but not anywhere near what the sticker suggests:

I passed this on some random road in New York state last winter. After thinking about it for a minute or two, I drove back to snap a photo. With Columbus Day approaching, I figured it would be a good time to share it. Kurt Vonnegut provides the caption.

“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Snapple Fact #680: “More Siberian tigers live in zoos than in the wild.”

That’s pretty much the most depressing thing I’ve ever read on the underside of a bottle cap.

It is incredibly rare that I see a postcard on a store rack worth keeping, let alone have one arrive in my mailbox. The one I just got, however, was so awesome that I framed it and hung it up in my bedroom.

That way, no matter how bad my day might be I can come home to look at this postcard, think happy thoughts, and ask “Did I really frame a postcard about being rejected from jury duty?”

And with a smile on my face I can answer “Why yes, yes I have.”

Over the summer I moved into a rental house, which while more modern and hopefully a little less drafty than my previous “cottage on the hill”, is unfortunately completely stocked with two-prong outlets. I’ve had to invest in a not-insubstantial amount of those chinsy three-prong to two-prong adapters that just never fit in the outlet quite right because the metal tab for the screw is always 3mm longer than it should be. In the basement, I have a rather innocent looking dehumidifier that runs occasionally to empty the basement of the odd high tide; and wouldn’t you know it’s a three-pronger and there’s not a three-prong outlet to be found! Well, except for that lone one on the bare bulb in the far back corner. Hmm…

Let me be quite honest. I have zero experience with and zero knowledge of dehumidifiers. I am far more familiar with the hardly-use-any-electricity-at-all-and-provides-exactly-the-opposite-in-functionality humidifier. I incorrectly assumed that the electrical draw of both appliances would be pretty much the same. Little did I know that my setup of plugging a dehumidifier into a light-socket was the equivalent of plugging an air conditioner into the end of a set of indoor Christmas lights.

On one particularly damp day, the dehumidifier worked extra hard to keep the puddles from forming on the basement floor and succeeded in lowering the humidity to between 8 and 9 on the dial. 8 being the Mojave desert and 9 being the Sahara. With the subterranean desertification project nearly complete and the electrical draw at a maximum, the only three-prong outlet in my whole basement cashed in its chips with a sparking, arcing fiesta into the dry rafters that I could only begin to describe as like watching an over-caffeinated Bear Grylls trying to start a fire in a Libyan match factory factory with flint and steel.

Thankfully, a fire didn’t actually start. To be honest, I didn’t even plug the dehumidifier into that outlet – it was like that when I moved in. I just stumbled upon some charcoal marks one day while I was investigating why a freshwater lake was beginning to encroach on my washer and dryer.

I’m sure there are other people in the world running similarly dangerous setups in their own basements. YOU may be one of these people. Never mind if your house burns down because of it – how on earth would you feel if you burned up the only honest-to-god three-prong outlet in your whole basement? Now that hurts. A three-prong outlet is a terrible thing to waste.

I would know.

I read a newspaper article in the Pocono Record about a Stroudsburg area pool that was closed down 3 times over the course of a weekend. The cause each time? Lifeguards on duty spotted what they called “a solid”. I can only imagine the scene when a lifeguard yelled for everyone to get out of the water; swimmers furiously paddling away from a turd in the center of the pool as if they were re-enacting that famous beach scene from Jaws. Everyone looks like they’re going to make it out except one small child with those floaty arm bands, who lies helplessly splashing in the center of the pool, unable to escape the achingly slow approach of the “solid”. Parents are screaming and holding their children tight, while the mother of the helpless little one in the pool paces back and forth across concrete, looking for her child in the ensuing chaos. After a few moments fruitlessly searching for her daughter, she spots her in the center of the pool. The turd is moving in fast – and the mother realizes that there isn’t single thing she can do. Things seem to move in slow motion for her now. It’s just about to touch her arm; parents turn their children towards them to shield their eyes from the approaching carnage… and out of the blue a pool cleaning net piloted by a lifeguard saves the child from certain death by scooping away the offending entity.

At least that’s the way I saw things going down.

Apparently, springtime is a very dangerous time of the year for wildfires. With the lack of shade from trees that don’t yet have leaves, the sun bakes last fall’s fallen leaves to a crisp. All it takes is a carelessly tossed cigarette, or a campfire that isn’t properly put out… We’ve all seen “Smokey the Bear” announcements. I never paid much attention to such propaganda; until today that is. I was burning cardboard boxes in the burning pit at my father’s house today. I was careful to rake up all the leaves within 10 feet or so of the pit and went at it. There was barely a breeze when I started the fire.

When the cardboard boxes caught, suddenly a stiff breeze picked up and blew flaming chunks of ash onto the hill in the backyard. Within seconds, a wildfire was well established. It genuinely surprised me how quickly the leaves and grass burned up the slope of the hill. My leaf rake wasn’t doing me much good, and the garden house didn’t reach past the fire pit, so I started filling up 5 gallon buckets of water and running up the hill to douse the flames; all the while insisting to my father that the pressure washer would not be a good firefighting apparatus. This wasn’t working quickly enough, so I picked up a rock rake and started removing the dead leaves and grass to create a break at the top of the hill. I was very glad to have watched that smoke jumper documentary on the Discovery channel some time back.

By now, my father had procured additional garden hose from the neighbors house and attached it to ours, lengthening it’s reach by 50 feet or so. Surely, this would put the fire out. A garden hose seems to disperse a lot of water; but in the face of such an inferno, it seems the equivalent of attacking the flames with a child’s squirt gun. Between the fire break and the garden hose, we managed to stop the advance of the flames up the hill and work back down the hill to extinguish the north and south fronts of the blaze. After dousing the hot-spots, we regrouped on the back porch to assess the situation.

It reminded me a lot of California; a 60′ by 60′ charred landscape has replaced the plant life that once thrived there. I figure it’s all good; until heavy spring rains fall and cause a mudslide.