Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• Robert Jastrow, the well-known NASA space popularizer, has left us, at age 82. My copy of Red Giants and White Dwarfs is in pieces from overuse, but as with Jastrow himself, I can only say: Mission accomplished.
• I stumbled upon an interesting piece of art today (while following an unrelated link sent by Pete Albrecht) by the late French Impressionist Albert Besnard. Rather too casually entitled "Decoration for a Ceiling," to me it suggests something altogether more cosmic: The reunion of all things and all people with God at the end of time. As Pete suggested for a caption: "Honey, I picked up your wings from the cleaners." (And how about using it as a book cover? Right there in the middle is space for a title!)
• D-Stix are amazingly rare on eBay (considering all the rest of the bizarre and obscure crap that I see there regularly) but today I finally scored the 464-piece set from the mid-1960s, and for only $10 at that. I've mentioned D-Stix here on Contra in the past, and on our second date, Carol and I flew a tetrahedral kite that I had made out of D-Stix. Building a replica of that kite has been on my do-it list for some years now. All I have to do now is find some purple madras tissue paper...
• Jim Strickland sent me a link to a nice page from a German chap (it's in English) who has done considerable work with spark speakers. This isn't quite a flame speaker as I saw one in 1969 (which used an ionized propane torch flame) but is more like a modulated Tesla coil.
• Also from Jim (in honor of the Westminster Dog Show, which ran last night) is an entry from what might as well be LOLDogs. Alas, the bichon didn't win his group last night. (There are too many poodles in the world, and not enough melted butter...)
• Still again from Jim is a fascinating short history of the Teletype.
• While we're talking ancient communication technologies, I finally remembered to link to a summary of Western Union's "92 code," which is a list of 19th century telegrapher's numeric abbreviations that includes the ''--73--" that has been my email signature since my MCI Mail days in the early 80s. This is as good a summary as I've found, but it's missing a few codes that I've heard, like --86-- which is short for "We are out of..."
• And further in that same direction, here's as good a list as I've seen of the 10-codes used by CBers, police, and, of course, Broderick Crawford.

I dislike sports generally, though I watch baseball on occasion in honor of my Cubs fan father. Football always seemed ridiculous to me somehow and hockey—well, it's the spawn of the devil. So we're not watching the Super Bowl today. (We have gone to Super Bowl parties on occasion for the sake of the company, and we stop to watch only when the commercials come on.) We have the Puppy Bowl on right now, and George Ewing tells me that WE has a Cutest Puppy Pageant scheduled as well, but as we don't get WE here it's hard to tell.

This is the fourth year that Animal Planet has done the Puppy Bowl, and acccording to Wikipedia it consistently has the highest ratings of anything programmed opposite the Super Bowl. I consider it a work of utter brilliance: For several hours, a rotation of five or six puppies (out of a total "slate" of about twenty) just mix it up in a little set painted to look like a football stadium. They wrestle, haul toys around, and slop in their water bowl. Every so often one of them takes a crap, after which a human extra in a referee's outfit steps in to clean it up.

We left the Puppy Bowl on for QBit while Carol and I took Aero and went over to visit Jimi Henton—on roads that were basically empty. Jimi is the bichon groomer and breeder from whom we purchased Aero. Aero enjoys some Puppy Bowl action with Jimi's several bichons, most of them his close relatives. (QBit is unrelated and doesn't enjoy them as much.) We enjoy them too; I could never have that many dogs, but every now and then it's fun having a pile of four or five bichons on your lap.

Jimi has only one puppy at the moment, who arrived as a litter of one the day after Christmas. We snapped some shots this afternoon, and that's him up above. He's five and a half weeks old, and completely beautiful. His nose is darkening up nicely (bichon noses are pink at birth but become totally black after a few months) and he's not as manic as a lot of puppies his age are. He's destined to be a good size for a bichon, simply because he got all the nutrition while gestating, but he also looks to be show quality and a real heart-stealer. Jimi will be selling him once he's eight weeks old, so if you're looking for a great bichon puppy—and especially if you want to show him—contact Jimi at her Web site.

Right now I'm going back to the kitchen to put some supper together while watching the Puppy Bowl. Football? What's that again? Oh, right. Pass.

On our way back home to Colorado, and we ended our second day on the road at Ogallala, Nebraska, just south of Lake McConaghy. We hadn't intended to go to the lake—it's October, after all—but it was 88° when we hit town at 4 PM. So what the hell; it's just a few miles up the road to the south shore.

And it was beautiful; nay, it's a sort of Red State Paradise, even a Poor Man's Hawaii. We didn't have our beach bag and thus our digital probe thermometer, but I'm guesstimating that the water was 78° or thereabouts. Had we had suits with us we would have been up to our necks, but even though the beach was deserted for miles in either direction, nudity is still illegal, and we had to content ourselves with running the puppies up and down the sand. More than once we had to haul Aero bodily out of the water or he would have been happily paddling, which is at total variance with our Bichon experience: Mr. Byte and Chewy would not willingly enter water. (QBit is much more ambivalent about water, but he'll follow Aero if he senses that fun is being had somewhere.) We certainly won't get any more stateside beach time in before next summer—though we're overdue for some sort of tropical vacation—and 2007's beach season went out in fine, fine style.

Not much more to report. I've got a list of things as long as my arm to do once we get home, the most important of which is Volume 4 of Carl and Jerry. And boy, I miss my own bed.

• The two puppies I showed in yesterday's entry are doing fine, and we're going to see them Thursday to see if their eyes have opened yet. (That'll happen Any Day Now; typically ten days after birth for bichons.) In the meantime, I posted the little video I took of them on YouTube. The strange raspy noise in the background (which drowns out Carol at times) is the damned digital camera constantly autoadjusting its focus.
• Pete Albrecht shows how to do a sort of home-brew Vac-U-Form hack on a pfeffernüsse tub to make a Hartmann mask, which is a very slick optical trick for focusing touchy things like telescopes. And if you're too young to remember Mattel's 1965-ish Vac-U-Form, study up.
• Jason Kaczor sent me a pointer to the Canadian Mint's new gold coin. Take some B-12 and get some weight-training, kids. This coin weighs 100 kg. Yes, that's kilo, and if that doesn't register, get yerself a metric converter. Hint: I don't weight that much myself. As for its face value, well, that's always dicey with modern gold strikings, but I don't recommend paying for an Egg McMuffin with it and expecting to get change.
• Proof that language and culture can be at odds sometimes lies here. One wonders what the Dr. Brain people paid the Doody family for their endorsement (and one wonders what the Doody kids will pay—or perhaps have already paid—in school) of an offal meatball with an awful name.
• Garth Books seems to be getting his way: In Florida (and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin) it's now illegal to sell used music CDs. Ok, it's not out-and-out illegality—which would conflict with the venerable Doctrine of First Sale—but it makes selling used CDs so onerous that nobody will bother. Oh, and a note to the music industry that doubtless bought this new law: People who can't easily buy music will steal it. People who know they can't resell the CDs they buy will buy fewer and steal more. Oh, wait, I forgot: It's not about making money. It's about being right.