JamesSavik

The House I waited years for the house to sell. Even then, I had to act through an intermediary. If David's parent's had known that I wanted their old place, they would have burned it down rather than see me get it. They were like that. They hated my guts. They blamed me for everything about David. They blamed me for turning him gay. They blamed me that he got wanderlust and caught HIV and of course they blamed me when he died. Hell, they didn't even allow me to attend the funeral after I had taken care of him through those two horrible years as he died slowly. It had been twenty-five years and it still burned, To be honest I never knew whether they were so galled that their son was gay or that he loved a white trash kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Didn't matter anyway. The high and mighty Whytes would be spending the rest of their days drooling and wearing a diaper in a nursing home. It had been a long, hard struggle but I had won. I had finally won. As I drove up the drive way the memories came flooding back. The pines towered along the front of the property and Lombardy poplars lined the drive. The old two story house with white columns across the front sat outlined by azalea and gardenia bushes with the lake and boat house behind it. The memory of visiting David out here when we were ten was strong . We had trekked through those woods and skinny dipped in the warm August waters of the lake. It was there in those waters by late summer star light that we had our first kiss. Afterwards, we always had to sneak around but with each new discovery we found ourselves closer and closer. Just like his name, he became my beloved. I parked by the garage behind the house and entered the house through the kitchen. My kitchen furnishing sat in four boxes in the corner. The house was empty for the most part. It swallowed the furniture I had in my old two bedroom apartment. Everywhere was the smell of fresh paint and in a few places the workmen were still attending to maintenance and repairs that had accumulated as the house sat empty. The afternoon sun cast long shadows in the big downstairs rooms. I thought long and hard about the furnishings and drapes. Furnishing this great place would be a long term project. My IKEA and Wal-Mart stuff just didn't look right here. I didn't look right in this place but it was mine. After years of toil, struggle and self-denial, I had won despite them telling me that all I would ever be was a bar-tender or a prostitute. I passed by the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of champaign that I had chilling and a glass. Bollinger, 1976. It had cost $400 but it was damn well worth it. I went upstairs to the master bed room. Again my meager belongings were dwarfed by the house. The room was huge. Bigger than the whole apartment that I had lived in for years. I turned on the television and opened the French doors to the balcony overlooking the lake. The smell of pine triggered another memory. David had just turned sixteen. His parents were in Europe or something. We had a bottle of cheap champaign and made love down there in the boat house. I sat down in a recliner and took in the view. I popped the cork on the champaign and took a sip. It was sweet and dry. I drank the bottle as the sun set over the lake and the stars came out. Somewhere along the way I went to sleep. David came to me in a dream. He looked like he did when we were in our teens. He said, "What are you doing here?" "I own it now. It's all mine." "Oh Jimmy, how could you?" "What did I do wrong?" "You didn't move on. Now you are as trapped in this place as I am." I woke with a start. Funny how a place so grand could suddenly feel like a prison: cold, dusty and lifeless. It was a prison that I chose because I could not change. I could not move on. I had to win and now I dwell there with the rest of the ghosts.

If you like science, you know that books about science are the most expensive anywhere. Except for maybe books about math. You will want to check out: http://freescience.info For free science e-books. Math, Earth-sciences, computer science- there's stuff there that would cost you a pretty penny to collect on your own. For Extra Credit: http://arxiv.org Is a web based archive of per-publication scientific papers for peer review. They are in PDF and PostScript formats. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p6fTDGLHGQ SCIENCE!

beer cans, old camp fire and hot dog wrappers

As I work on networks, I am often in tight places that aren't very nice. Think spiders, rats and claustrophobia. Crawling around in wiring closets and raceways is a bit like spelunking. In the summer the heat can be well above 100. You want to get in, get it done and get out before you die. What you carry can make so much difference: too much is a nuisance. Not enough and you've got to make more trips. It's tricky to find just the right combination. I've tried lots of different solutions. Backpacks sound like the right choice but in tight spaces you can't wear them on your back and worse, they can get hung up. You don't want to get stuck in those places. Tool boxes are heavy and bulky and can be a real pain in lower back to lug around. Again, crawling and climbing around the spaces where the wiring is difficult and can even be a little dangerous. Carrying my main box around is serious over kill in most cases and it's really heavy- ~80 pounds. For some time now I've been using a combination of my big bag (when necessary) and a light bag to carry into the bowels of buildings or underground. More often than not, my light kit which has just the basics has failed because it simply didn't have enough gear. This is my new kit. I'm just putting it together and will be giving it a good shake down soon. So far, so good. It can carry MUCH more than my old light kit without adding too much weight. My Mom says it looks like a purse. *Sighs* Well... at least it matches my work boots.

In our ecology sometimes things get out of balance. Subtle things that you wouldn't notice might make a huge difference. The populations of various types of species, most noticeably insects, can suddenly spike to many times its annual average. Things as subtle as a five degree variation in temperature, an inch or two of rain one way or another or even a early or late frost can cause huge variations in different types of species. These events are called population outbreaks and can happen in certain types of species with regularity. Not just with insects but micro-organisms and even higher marine and terrestrial animals. The key question is why but often the answer is quite elusive. Outbreaks can occur in diverse populations: algae, gypsy moths, forest tent moths, Japanese beetles or starfish. Sometimes they tick along regularly like 7 year locusts or exceptionally haphazardly like red tides. One of the theories behind why this happens is called catastrophe theory. It has nothing to do with disaster or apocalypse. Catastrophe means the loss of stability in a dynamic system. The major method of this theory is sorting dynamic variables into slow and fast. Then stability features of fast variables may change slowly due to dynamics of slow variables. Now we enter the realm of differential equations and things get murky so lets look at a simple example. Every few years in the American South we experience a very mild winter. Typically, southern winters have 5-6 frost events with temperatures in the twenties or below. Every few years we have little or no frost. This changes the dynamics of the ecological system significantly. Plants that grow as annuals don't die. Insects that are typically killed off en mass when temperatures go into the twenties survive and even thrive. So what happens when the mosquito population isn't wiped away by winter? What happens is that they do actually die but their reproductive cycle is doubled and the following summer the population spikes at three to six times normal numbers. This causes a great deal of misery. The hungry little bastards do their best to make life miserable and worse- spread mosquito born disease. While Yellow fever is a bad memory in the American South, West Nile has arrived with a vengeance and Dengue may not be far behind. The ecology is a massive and complex system that we are only beginning to understand. There are so many dependent and independent variables that what we call science is really a matter of a string of educated guesses. The more that we learn, we simply comprehend the true depth of the complexity. Small changes can yield exceptionally large results. We like to think of ourselves as above the natural world but we are an inextricable part of it. We are bound to it by our very DNA. We have a great deal to learn and as we see minute changes that may be the beginnings of climate change, the stakes of understanding our ecology are raised to exceptional levels. There is a second and inevitable part to population outbreaks. Once that population is outside its stable dynamic, there will always be a population crash. The system will return to equilibrium. This is something that a population that recently passed 7 billion should consider carefully. It took from the depths of antiquity to some time in the 1800s to reach a population of 1 billion. Then it took another 100 years to double it. Since that time, human population has surged 350% with no end in sight. One might argue that humanity is in a state of population outbreak. As with all population outbreaks, something is going to have to give for our population to reach a stable and sustainable level. The system will return to equilibrium.

So... what's it like to be a rocket scientist?

My dumper is a tech-free zone. You needn't imagine farting and flushing background noises with any of my posts.

I wouldn't get too excited about biblical prophesy. Some of them don't turn out so well for us,.

Never saw Once Upon a Time. I would skip it for the title alone. LOST was a train wreak. Even the authors didn't know where they were going. For several years after LOST, we had a number of LOST-alikes but none of them could recapture the magic. Police, procedurals are a formula like Law & Order, Special Victims or CSI. There's nothing really creative about them other than deriving the formula.

Oh God, not him again.

Fast start but the follow through is lacking?

Outbreak For eons the bat and the virus lived in harmony deep in the jungles of Brazil. For eons the world of the virus lived harmlessly without infringing on the world of mankind. There had been a few times when a fisherman would stray into a cave to escape storm clouds and get bitten. The way the damned stuff worked, the victim was suddenly too sick to make it out of the jungle. Months later they would be found with their skull on a makeshift pillow and their bony fingers clutching a fishing rod. The world of man is nothing if not intrusive. Always seeking new lands, more resources and greater wealth mankind and the virus were on an inevitable collision course. It started as a clear cutting the native trees and replacing them with genetically altered fast growing evergreen trees. In the course of a few dozen days on the human calender, a biosphere billions of years in the making was completely destroyed. The moths that lived in the layered canopy of the jungle had no where safe to hide from predators. The bats that ate those moths had to move to find a new food source. One bat, after gorging itself on insects, went to look for shelter and found a huge metal cave. So large that the people couldn't see so tiny a creature. The ship, anchored in a nameless bay where it shouldn't be, taking on a cargo that it shouldn't be carrying weighed anchor with a tiny stowaway. The bat could hardly believe its good fortune. The metallic monstrosity was covered in lights that attracted all manner of insects. As the days passed, the air changed. The insects were different and the tiny bat shivered in the cold night air. Once again it was time for the bat to find a new home. The ship stopped at a busy port and the bat flew on to a vast new land. This new land was hard on the bat. The nights were cold and the insect population was much different. One night half frozen and half starved, the bat landed near a big, warm fuzzy creature. The bat snuggled against the rabbit but the rabbit wanted nothing to do with the freaky little bat. The rabbit tried to kick the bat. The bat bite the rabbit and flew away into the night. Once the virus found itself in the rabbit's blood stream, it began to amplify and reproduce- millions and billions of viral particles filled the rabbits blood stream. There was a minute change to the virus as it passed from the bat to the rabbit. Less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the viruses DNA but it was a major mutation. The virus had successfully crossed the species barrier. Within a few hours the rabbit became lethargic and began running a fever. When dawn arrived, the little girl who loved the rabbit arrived on her appointed rounds. She fed the rabbit, watered him and picked him up. The rabbit was completely tame but she could tell that he wasn't feeling well. She put him down in his cage, gently stroked him and went inside. "Mummy. I think Mr. Hoppy has a fever. We should take him to the vet." Her mother said, "If Mr. Hoppy isn't better by the time you get home from school, call Dr. Jamison." The girls mother knew that her attention span was over taxed as it was and she wouldn't remember. Besides, better that damned smelly rabbit died than shelling out a few hundred bucks to the vet. The mother dropped her child off at school and went to work at the airport. Both were dead before the day was over. A week later twenty-five thousand were dead. In a month a quarter million had perished. By six months the worst of it was over. At just short of 100 million cases and 60 million deaths, the mystery virus vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. Waiting and watching for next time.

Very quietly this fall serial drama, which had been absent for some time, reappeared on the network schedules with a bang. NBC's Revolution, despite numerous flaws, started strong and continues to entertain. ACB's Last Resort follows the over-used evil goverenment conspiracy plot device but it remains watchable. What makes both of these shows interesting is that the writing is strong and tight. The dialog is well done and they follow the rules of good drama. Is this a renaissance of network produced drama? It certainly bucks the trend. With more and more reality crap on the networks, good stuff really stands out. It's my hope that the networks learn that they can win with well written drama and don't need to become clones of MoronTV- all bullshit all the time.

It is Thanksgiving and it is wise to list the things that we are grateful for. Though I am not especially wise, I will do it anyway. It is not THINGS that I am grateful for. As someone who has lost everyTHING and come back, I know that THINGS are transitory. THINGS are fleeting. It is PEOPLE that stay with you. Even in your darkest hour. Even only as a memory. It is LOVE that endures through good and bad. I am sincerely grateful for and to the PEOPLE in my life. They make it worthwhile and I wouldn't trade them for anyTHING. Thank you. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your loyalty. Thank you for your patience and thank you, most of all, for your love. -the biggest turkey you know

Colin- you are one of the many young people around that we've watched over the years grow up into fine young men. We're proud of you and wish you much success and happiness in the future. May your stone garden never become a cat box.

I actually look forward to the comedy of the Holidays. Since I'm clean and sober, I can sit back and watch the fun as my alcoholic and addicted relatives duke it out over stuff that happened way before most of us were even born.

high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, lard, partially hydrogenated soybeans and cotton oils, beef fat, dextrose, cellulose gum, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate, polysorbate-60, dextrin, calcium caseniate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, gluten, calcium sulphate, artifical flavors, caramel color, yellow dye #5, red dye #40 100% natural.

Looks like you do now.

I haven't eaten twinkies for decades. Not missing them.