You will never be as awesome as Peter O’Toole.

Static + Balloon + Cat == hilarity.

Prompted by this post, I have just revisited my backup strategy. You should, too. Here’s what I do. Listen to me. Seriously.

• Because I’m on a Mac, I can use Time Machine. Whenever I’m at my desk, my laptop is plugged into a 1TB USB drive and is backed up incrementally every hour. With TM, not only can I immediately recover from “oh shit!” moments, I can also “scroll back” and pick up prior versions of files. (Cost: Free with OSX.)

• Because that’s not enough, I also create a complete clone of my internal drive about every two weeks using SuperDuper. I’m sure there are Windows versions of this tool, but the Mac makes it pretty easy. (This utility is also super-handy for hard drive upgrades; $27.95 for the full version.)

• Because I work on multiple computers, I also keep nearly all my current files in my Dropbox folder. Dropbox costs money every month, but the peace of mind is worth it. When I make changes to a document on one computer, they’re almost instantly sync’d up to the Dropbox server, and then sync’d down to any other computers I choose to associate with my Dropbox account. This is immensely powerful stuff. Bonus: I can also grab any file from my Dropbox account from any Internet-connected computer simply by logging into the web site. Oh, and there’s even a friggiin’ iPhone client. Booyah. (Free for 2GB; $9.99/mo for 50GB; $19.99/mo for 100GB.)

• Finally, I’ve just signed up for Crashplan after basically giving up on Mozy. Mozy was kind of early in this market, but they’ve suffered from software maturity issues on the Mac side pretty much the whole time, and I’m actively trying to find an online backup tool that works not just for me, but also for my company’s mobile professionals. Crashplan looks much better. Like several other tools, Crashplan backs your designated folders up to the server, which is how you get protection from catastrophic issues like fire or (more likely where I live) hurricanes. It also provides file versioning, which is a great boon and hedge against creeping data corruption. The downside (to all such services) is initial backup speed: I’m about two days into a 39-day initial upload. :( (You can pay them to send you a drive to seed your initial backup, but I made the command decision not to bother with the cost.) (Crashplan’s online option for individuals is $54/year for unlimited storage; other options exist for local and even enterprise backup.)

There are two kinds of people: Those who have had catastrophic data loss, and those who will. Protect yourself. If you can’t tell someone clearly how you back up your pictures, your documents, your financial data, etc., then you’re not backing up well enough. Give it some thought. Sign up for a cloud service, and get a big-ass backup drive at the very minimum. The data you save may be your own.

See Also.

The thing in Massachusetts sucks out loud, but we’re still fantastically better off than we ever were with Bush. Yes we did.

Amazon alone wasn’t quite enough to kill it, but Amazon and ubiquitous computing and connectivity might.

My printer needs toner (not ink; it’s a laser). OfficeMax has the cartridges, but they’re $70 each, which seemed high. I checked the Amazon iPhone app, and found that yes, that IS very high; I’ll have one by Friday for $36 delivered.

“By the way, the Latin word for yam is ‘dioscorea’.”

New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.

29, again, I understand.

Precis: NatGeo photographer goes to the antarctica to shoot leopard seals. One of them decides he looks helpless, but isn’t food, so apparently the right option in seal culture is to try to teach him to hunt over four days.

Celebrity amputee — now there’s an interesting category — Aimee Mullins gives us a rundown on choosing your prosthesis over on Gizmodo.

However, it’s possible that your parents may have been awesome. Vintage young couple pix, supplied by their children. Enjoy.

In general, I don’t mind getting older. I feel like I get a little smarter — or, if not that, wiser — every year. Consequently, I feel little real trepidation about closing in on 40 next March. There is, however, something really awful about this particular time.

Most of my friends are pet people. Lots of them didn’t get their own animals until they left the chaos of college, so put the average puppy or kitty adoption date at around age 22.

Now, not quite 20 years later, they’re all dying.

In the last year or so, I’ve seen an inordinate number of these faithful companions pass away. Joy’s Katya was probably first, but Frazer’s 20-year-old cat Christine passed just this summer, and then dear Bob, and Laura Sneed’s 19-year-old Tigger slipped away just yesterday.

At lunch, just now, I got an another awful email. In 1994, when I was making friends with the Rice crowd and, eventually, moving over here from Tuscaloosa, one of the Rice folks was also moving back after a grad degree at Georgia. Jamie had a young dachshund named Annie who was smart as a whip and completely delightful. She was ever-present at social events starting even before I actually moved here, and remained so until the late 20s happened and people got old and less drunk and, in some cases, moved away to Austin or the Woodlands.

Annie’s been having a hard time, the mail said. She was hurting a lot, it said. So today she had bacon and roast beef for breakfast, and then they went to the vet to say goodbye.

I haven’t seen Annie in years, and I know this is hitting me harder than it should precisely because it’s so close to the loss of Bob, but it sure seems like there’s been a bit of an epidemic of this lately, and I for one am not at all pleased about it.

Dear science: Please make longer-lived pets. KTHXBI.

And cheers to our forever-loved four-legged friends. They are, to a person, much better people than we are. Hug ’em if you got ’em. It turns out 20 years happens way faster than you realize.

So, earlier this summer, we dropped a few grand on the Heathenmobile to return its a/c capabilities to a level Stuttgart intended, and figured that was enough HVAC work for the year. It sure FELT like enough.

Oh no. Not even close.

The house unit’s been kinda puny lately — taking a longer time to get the job done, creating higher bills, etc. The unit’s from 1997, so it’s not surprising for it to need some work (it’s been perfect so far), but we were kind of surprised to discover that it had basically failed while we were at the best concert ever last night. Thermostat setting? 74. Household temp? 82. Uh-oh.

It didn’t get below 80 all night, and crept way past the end of the dial during the day today. Ick. The a/c guy finally made it over about 630, and gave a potentially expensive diagnosis inside 20 minutes.

• The system wouldn’t start up at all at this point. Fix: a $150 “start kit”.
• It’s now on, but won’t cool. Whups! Out of freon. $125 later, it’s no longer out of freon.
• Since the lack of freon is certainly because of a leak, let’s add in some dye to help us find that pesky bastard later. $72.50 for the dye, natch.

The story goes a little like: lower coolant -> harder working compressor -> higher bills and overheating -> Profit! Well, for the AC guy, anyway.

The leak diagnosis is a good new/bad news kind of thing. The bad news is that they’re almost always in the coil, and leaks in the coil can’t be repaired. This means we’re about to spend real money.

The good news is that, if we replace the coil, we’ll get an efficiency boost not just because the new one won’t be leaky; SEER ratings for new units are much higher than whatever the rating is on my 1997 unit, so next summer we’ll get equivalent cooling efficacy for fewer kilowatt-hours of work. That’ll help take the sting out of the check I suspect we’ll be writing between now and Thanksgiving. Yuck.

Halloween is completely safe:

Lenore “Free Range Kids” Skenazy points out that there has never been a single substantiated incident of a kid being sickened, hurt or killed by doctored candy handed out during trick-or-treating in the history of America.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Owl in a Box.

Well, most of you will agree, anyway. Here you go.

This is Bob.

Bob was the only kitten they had at the Tuscaloosa County Humane Society one May morning in 1992. Scrawny and underfed and, frankly, kinda ugly, she was still full of personality. She reached through the bars of her cage and meowed louder than you’d think reasonable when I got close, and when I picked her up to take her home she started purring louder than any cat I’ve heard before or since.

When we took her to be vaccinated, she was still purring so much the vet had to thump her on the nose so he could hear her heart. As a kitten, she was obsessed with open mouths — what IS that? Can I see in? — and with long hair.

Bob was actually a gift to the girl I was dating at the time, since her cat was dying of feline leukemia. I kept her in my place since, for a little while, we had poor, doomed Hudson in Cassie’s apartment (conveniently across the parking lot). When we moved in together a while later, Bob learned what Cassie’s car sounded like, and would leave my study to wait for her at the front door every day when she came home. The apartment faced a parking lot; cars came and went all the time — but Bob knew which one was Cassie’s.

Bob and I moved to Texas in 1994 — somehow I got custody when Cassie and I split up — and Bob became a bit more reclusive and a bit more owner-focused. If I stayed in my car to listen to the end of an NPR story, my roommates would complain because Bob would meow at the back door until I came in. She took a dim view of other animals, including, memorably, a certain husky who desperately wanted to be her friend — and, more hilariously, a friend’s labrador who’d come to visit. With people, she was just selective; I’ve had friends over the years who didn’t know I had a cat. When I was single, she made it very clear she thought one brief relationship was a bad idea. It cost me a comforter.

Knocks at the door and doorbells always freaked her out. She’d run to a hiding spot, growling slightly under her breath, until the threat passed — or until she realized the visitor was on her short list of other acceptable humans, like Eric or Lindsey, or Sharon or Greg, or — oddly — my infrequently visiting mother, whereupon she’d remerge and be social.

The doorknocking thing also came in handy for me, since I frequently have things delivered. Bob started correlating the arrival of a big truck outside with impending knocks, so I could tell if the UPS guy was about to show up and knock on the door by her own little growly-retreats.

Bob’s always been all about me, so when Erin came around in 2002, we decided to let Erin be the foodgiver. That worked out fine — Bob loved Erin just as much as me pretty quickly — but had some unintended consequences. Bob had learned that waking up Chet was not acceptable, as I’d just shove her off the bed, but Erin was a soft touch, so Bob developed a habit of tapping Erin on the face when she was hungry. Tap tap tap. Wait. Tap tap tap.

When I started working at home after the tech crash, Bob was understandably much happier. She’s spend most of the day on the desk, sometimes on a pile of “decoy papers” I’d lay out to distract her from my actual work documents, but eventually she figured out that the cozy spot formed by the back of the keyboard, the edge of the desk, and bracketed by my forearms was just the right size for napping. I do a lot of writing in my work, so I’d be pretty still for long periods. That suited Bob just fine. She’d tuck her head into the crook of my left elbow and, as God is my witness, snore.

At night, she’d do kind of the same thing. I tend to sleep on my back, so she’d wait until Erin and I were settled and then come and curl up between the crook of my right elbow and my armpit, usually with her head resting on my arm, sometimes under one of her own paws. Other times, like in cold weather when Erin and I were given to spooning, she felt most comfortable as the “innermost spoon”. If she awoke to find herself facing a back, she’d get up and crawl over us in a way I swear was meant to be indignant, sometimes with grunts, until she found her way to the concave side again. And she always figured out a way to take way more than her share of the bed; quite a feat for an 8-pound cat on a queen-size mattress. But of course, we are talking about an 8-pounder who went all Matrixy on a lab, so there you go.

Bob got sick a long while back, in 2000 or so. She picked up a herpetic sinus/eye infection when I boarded her one Thanksgiving, and it’s been a battle ever since. The sneezing — sometimes productive, unfortunately — was chronic and pretty everpresent, but the real nastiness was in the flareups. When they happened, she’d get really horrific swelling on the right side of her face, centered around her lower and third lids, sometimes obscuring the eye entirely. We got to be good friends with a local veterinary ophthalmologist, who managed to knock the flareups back pretty handily with a complicated cocktail of drugs delivered by ointment, food supplements, and pills, and they typically did the job pretty well. One of them I got pretty good at popping down her throat until a few years ago, when I figured I’d let Bob smell the quarter-pill first. She sniffed it twice, and then ate it out of my hand. Well, there you go.

A few months ago, Bob stopped coming down to my office as much. She was quite happy to “help” me if I worked on the couch, so I didn’t think much of it. Then, while I was traveling nearly full time, Erin noticed she was bumping into things; we think she gradually went blind, and had started avoiding the less-predictable layout of the office as a consequence. Oh well, we thought, she’s 17.

About two weeks ago, though, she had another flareup, the first in years. This time, there were more problems. Her blood pressure was very high, and they worried about renal problems — a common endgame for cats. We went with the usual wonder cocktail, but it didn’t help as much or as quickly. Late last week, she was clearly not well, and stopped coming upstairs to sleep with us. We hoped the meds would help turn her around.

Then, at the worst possible moment, we had to leave town for a funeral. Sharon took care of her for us, but called us Monday morning with bad news. Bob was much worse. What vet should she take her to?

The specialist could do little for her, so he sent her to our nominal “general” vet. That vet quickly sent Bob and Sharon to the internal medicine people for around the clock care. The situation was grave, but not without hope.

Hope left late yesterday. I flew home from Kansas early today, and my driver took me from the airport directly to the specialist’s office, where we met Erin and Sharon. We held Bob one last time, and then let her go.

Bob was nearly 18 years old. I got her when I was 22; I’m nearly 40 now. I can type all this out just fine, but I can’t begin to talk about her. Erin and I are shattered and heartbroken, and the house is horribly empty without her on the couch between us tonight. And I don’t know what else to say other than I miss her horribly.

Heather Armstrong fucking WINS AT THE INTERNET.

I wrote this last September 18, on the Well, after a bad week for Houston.

My friend Cary died on Tuesday. He’d been fighting cancer for a while but his most recent and dire prognosis wasn’t common knowlege. He was locally famous in Houston and Austin, partly for being in a band called Horseshoe, and partly for his years of association with Houston’s Infernal Bridegroom Productions. IBP was, until its own unfortunate and premature death in 2007, a tremendous and inventive local theater company devoted to doing the weird, the underperformed, the new, the avant garde, and doing it very, very well. Cary’s only acting was with them, but his roles just got stronger and better with time. He started with their very first production in 1993 with an original show, but was best known for star turns in productions of the Kinks’ “Soap Opera” (2002) and, in 2006, something called “Speeding Motorcycle.”

If you asked Cary the most important, biggest, best thing he ever did on stage, he’d answer quickly that this show, based on the songs of Daniel Johnston, and done partly in collaboration with Johnston himself, was his pinnacle. Already sick by the time the show went to Austin this summer, he cut his chemo short so he could reprise his role (all three “Joe the Boxer” actors made the move).

Ike’s made it a rough week or so to be a Houstonian. You still can’t go to the grocery store, mostly, or buy gas like a normal person. More than half the city doesn’t even have power yet, which is astounding. Galveston is still flat, and will stay that way for a while. We got lucky in that we had no damage, little to clean up, and good friends a mile away who never lost power and opened their home to Erin and I as well as two other couples and a singleton from our social group. We called it Camp Ike, and tried to make the best of it — but even in a largish house, that many adults is tight, so we were very happy on Tuesday when we got word our block had power at around 8pm. In the midst of dinner when we got word, we didn’t end up coming home until nearly midnight. Sitting on the bed in our delightfully re-lit house, waiting for my wife to join me, I idly checked my email on my phone, and the four-hour everything-is-finally-fine holiday I’d been enjoying evaporated. Cary’d had a seizure Tuesday morning, and was in Ben Taub. I should call for more details.

I think I knew what those details were before I clicked Jason’s number. Cary’d never regained consciousness, and passed away around 1130pm. Erin and I didn’t go to sleep for a long time, watching video I had on my laptop from a still-unfinished and unreleased DVD version of SM. Also on YouTube was this performance of Cary doing a cover of a Johnston song that didn’t make the final show. Cary liked well enough to work up for a post-show performance one night, after his much-loved singalong of “Brainwash”.

Cary Winscott was 38.

Why corporate IT should unchain our office computers lays out the very convincing case for less lockdown on workplace PCs. I’ve been on consulting sites where users couldn’t change their wallpaper, for crying out loud, and the true reason for this is not quality of service, or protection, or SarBox; it’s a failure of IT to view their job as enabling the workforce.

Big Corporate IT says “no” unless someone above them forces them to say “yes.” Their default mode is obstruction — for outside contractors like I’ve been for most of my career, and also for employees.

I had a long sequence of very odd dreams last night, only one image of which I remember well at all. For some reason, Mrs Heathen and I were having dinner with LeBron James, who was unaccountably dressed in a vintage Kansas City Royals uniform that included snowshoes.

My subconscious is weird.

Four decades ago, human beings did the absolute coolest thing ever.

Y’all please wish Chief Heathen Health & Legal Correspondents Triple-F and Boogielips a happy seventh anniversary!

FirstNephew Jackson entered the world, or at least Florida, at about 2 this morning Eastern time. Seven pounds seven, 21 inches, and all is well. Pix, we’re sure, are forthcoming.

He was your Elvis, and when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure.

Here.

This makes two:

Followup, as promised. From the archives, before Heathen existed as a web site and I was forced to share my wit and wisdom via the mailing list named below. Arrant Knaves, represent!

From: chet@netexplorer.com Sun Jul 26 22:36:12 1998
To: “Some Arrant Knaves I Know”
Subject: David Fucking Carradine

So I’m sitting in the bar in the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, right? Not at some nebulous point in the past; right the fuck NOW. Jan Watson and I are over here for some client meetings, and rather than zoom over at some godawful hour of the morning, we came over on Sunday night.

So we’re all checked in, and have retired to the aforementioned bar for an aperitif whilst we revisit the documents for Monday’s meeting. It’s a quiet night at the Driskill; we’ve got the bar to ourselves. The bartender’s a chatty kid who’s quick to refill our Shiners, and we’re actually getting some work done.

A guy wanders through and asks the bartender if it’s a nonsmoking bar. Of course not, says the bartender. So the new guy leaves, only to return moments later to sit down behind the grand piano and begin tickling the ivories. At this point, Watson and I notice something unusual about the impromptu pianist. He is, as it were, David Carradine. David “Snatch the Ivories From My Hand, Grasshopper” Carradine. He of a thousand episodes of two (count ’em) Kung Fu serieses. He of (no doubt) an eminently forgettable series of movies running on USA even as we speak. A genuine B-Movie Icon. Playing occasionally bad jazz piano in the Driskill Hotel bar at 10:30 on a Sunday night, apropos of nothing.

I love Texas.

Godspeed, Grasshopper.

Online acquaintance Laura Lemay details her ongoing problem with deer in her rural California garden. Enjoy.

The Clayton iHouse.

In Belize. On the beach. No software in bait shops. No airports, either. And only bugs I can physically quash with one flip-flop.

Bait shop.

Where babies come from!

So, Heathen Central has always had an alarm with these people. Over the weekend, we had enough heavy weather in Houston that we lost our regular phone line, and the alarm started telling us about it by beeping.

Ever ten minutes.

Without stopping.

Clearing the error doesn’t work; it tries the phone line periodically to check, and as soon as the test fails it starts beeping again (unless the alarm is actually ENGAGED at the time, in which case the alarm goes off; this is less charming than beeping).

I called ATT, sure (we don’t actually use ATT for voice; the POTS line exists only for the alarm and failover reasons), but in the meantime what I needed was a way to continue to set and use the alarm, even in the absence of a phone line for monitoring.

Well, it turns out there’s no way to do that, and this is bone fucking stupid. An alarm works on several levels:

1. The big ADT sign does some deterrence;
2. If some douchebag breaks in and the alarm goes off, there’s a nonzero chance the miscreant will just run away. Someone DID try our (unfortunately unlocked) downstairs patio door at one point, which is on a zero-delay switch. They got it open half an inch and the alarm went nuts; exit bad guys.
3. If both of those fail on you, then yes, the alarm DOES use the phone line to alert the monitoring service, and the monitoring service will dispatch the authorities.

By making it impossible to turn off the phone line check (for situations such as the one we’re in), ADT has made the alarm system 100% useless until ATT gets off its ass and fixes my POTS line. Given the power in case #2, above, that’s just dumb.

(Well; the signs still work; call it 95% useless.)

I think it’s probably time to shop for a new alarm system. In a city with a history of heavy weather, a system designed like the one I have seriously needs to get fired.

Longtime Heathen “Attorney” writes to inform us of the untimely passing of the Chief Mastiff Correspondent Pomplemoose, late of the Sue Barnett district of Heathenstan. Here he is, all ten stone of him, enjoying his native Texas Bluebonnets.

Pomplemoose was not yet 10 when he bounded off this mortal coil on Tuesday, quite unexpectedly. We’ll miss him, as we know all the Acostas will as well — particularly Miss ~.

Today is the 99th anniversary of my great-grandparents’ wedding; visitors to Heathen Central can see an April 3, 1910 picture of Ike and Dell Farmer in our entryway.

Highbrow British shirtmaker Thomas Pink now has no-iron traveller shirts.

Check it out.

Hey, deal with it. I’ve been up since 5.

So, I’m sitting here minding my own, and my phone rings.

It’s someone I was dear friends with (a vanishingly small number of you will care, but: Paul McMullan) in like elementary and middle school, and still friendly with in high school (different circles by then), but I haven’t seen in 20 years. He was driving to work this morning, and when the radio DJ said something about it being “Friday, March 13,” it clicked in his head that it was my birthday. So he called his mother, who called my mother, and in an hour or two he had my cell number, and twenty minutes ago he called me to say “hey, happy birthday, and by the way how’d the last 20 years go for you?”

That’s kind of cool.

I can’t share it off Facebook, apparently, but there is video of the Albany nieces actually singing Happy Birthday to me, and it’s heartmeltingly lovely.

I love my life.

Her Aunt Bo found the Socktopus for her.

Thanks, Layla. You’re the awesomest.

This one. (From this set of sci-nerd tatts.)

(Of course, had our RFID firm actually made money, or my stock been worth anything, I might’ve felt differently.)

Since the meltdown began, I’ve been studiously following a practice that I was actually first advised of in a far better market environment: Do not open your retirement statements.

Well, at year end, you sort of have to, since they send you tax info that you’ll need for the 1040 process.

Ouch. 12/31/2008 value? About half the 12/31/2007 value, even in a mix of fairly conservative funds also age-indexed to gradually reduce risk. Christ.

Dear Layla,

So, a week or so ago, your Aunt and I went to Washington to see something amazing happen. What made it even more exceptional to us is the fact that for you, in your life, it will always be simple history, just as “men walking on the moon” is a boring fact for your Dad and I but astonishing science fiction come true for your grandmother. Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009, and your Aunt Bo and I got to be there to see it happen, standing in the cold about 450 feet from the podium, in an astonishing crowd of 2 million amazed Americans.

We got this extreme pleasure because Erin worked her ass off on the Obama campaign here in Houston, organizing phone banks and canvassing squads, managing other volunteers, and generally making herself as indispensable to the local DNC and OFA staffers as she always is to me. This got us “Silver” class standing tickets, which put us in the outermost ticketed area — people behind us were ticketless, standing on the National Mall. (We found out later that we apparently were lucky to have the Silvers; some folks in the nicer, closer Blue and Purple sections were victims of crowd management gone bad, and never got in.) From where we stood, we could barely discern the podium, but we could see the Jumbotron quite clearly, and the PA system worked fine. We had no trouble hearing the speeches, the music, or Justice Roberts bollocksing up the oath.

Without these tickets, I’m not sure we would have tried to go — I hope we would have; being there is now one of my most treasured experiences, and rates on the list only a few slots behind the first time I held you. But we got the tickets, and Erin’s brother-in-law’s mom had room for us in Chevy Chase not far from the Bethesda metro stop, and we had the frequent flier miles to keep us from having to spend a fortune on plane tickets, so to DC we went. My boss was envious and supportive despite the crunch we were under at the time, and even texted me to cheer for him on Tuesday. (Of course, owing to the overloaded cell network, I didn’t get the text until well after the Inauguration was over. I’m confident our cheer volume was sufficient, though.)

The frequent flier mile tickets put us up there early, on Saturday, which was fine with Erin and I since we have friends in the District. We stayed with our friend Tony in Virginia that first night. His apartment was full of his kids’ artwork, and seeing all that gave me the same good feeling I always have when I see Tony and his kids. It’s neat to see who this guy from college grew up to be, which I’m sure is a feeling you’ll get someday. Anyway, we went out to dinner with Tony on Saturday, and then drove into the District to do some nighttime monument photography. It was super cold, and we froze our butts off wandering around from the Washington Monument all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial.

Something weird was going on when we arrived there; music was playing, and we could see shapes moving on the jumbotrons set up for Sunday’s Inaugural concert. We assumed it was a sound-and-systems-check of some kind — it was already about 9:00, and no one was out — but as we got closer we could recognize the singer. First, it was James Taylor, and we joked about “what kind of weirdo does a soundcheck with James Taylor,” but then it became an unknown voice singing “American Pie,” and we were close enough by then to be able to tell from the screens that it was someone actually performing. We just couldn’t tell who it was until we got a bit closer, when one of us said “Is that Garth Brooks singing American Pie which a choir?” Yes, yes it was. We figure it was a soundcheck or something — there was literally no crowd beyond those working the event — so it was kind of weird. Brooks, for his part, has been largely absent from American popular culture for at least 10 years now, so recognizing him (especially without his trademark hat) was sort of a challenge.

When we came back to the Mall on Sunday for the concert, it was with about 400,000 other people. The area around the Lincoln’s reflecting pool was a sea of people, all bundled up against the cold and forecast, but never actual, snow. A somewhat bizarre who’s-who of artists played that afternoon in honor of the new president-elect, from Bruce Springsteen to U2 to the 89-year-old folk icon Pete Seeger (and Brooks, natch, this time in his black hat). Actors read from significant speeches between musical numbers, and we all got a little taste of what Tuesday’s throngs would be like. It was here, on Sunday, that we first encountered the “friendliest massive throng of humanity EVER” phenomenon, as strangers willingly parted to reunite separated people, shoving was almost unheard of, and smiling epidemic. People danced and sang along, and listened intently when Obama spoke at the end of the afternoon. We were very, very cold when we made our way back to the Metro, but also excited and pleased and hopeful.

Monday was our less busy day; we were by this point working out of Virginia Ceasar’s home in Maryland, enjoying wonderful hospitality at a price you can’t beat (i.e., free). She was delightful to us, constantly ferrying us to the Metro at a moment’s notice, and for that Erin and I remain very grateful. We met up with the “Texans for Obama” crowd at a downtown brewpub for lunch, which turned out to be a delightful if insanely crowded affair. Erin’s crack squad of volunteers was there — including Paddy, a young man from Dublin who was so inspired by Obama that he took leave and flew to the US to volunteer on the campaign — along with the Texas-wide muckety-mucks and at least one surprise: an old friend of mine, long since moved to El Paso, had done a huge share of volunteering in West Texas since her husband worked for the DNC out there. It’s always fun to run into people in faraway places, but it was especially cool to add that kind of fun on top of the emotional high of Inauguration week.

Tuesday came quickly enough. The inauguration was set to begin at 11:30, as I recall, but we left Virginia’s before 8:00. She, of course, took us to the Metro station, fortunately on the same line as the Mall exit we planned to use to get to our section, Judiciary Square. The throng effect was already in place when we emerged just north of the Mall about half an hour later, and from that point on we pretty much stayed in a massive crowd until about 2:30 that afternoon.

There was some confusion about the proper walking route from north-of-the-Mall to the Silver entrance point on the south side, but eventually we did locate the path — which involved, hilariously, walking through an underground tunnel ordinarily closed to pedestrians. Walking, walking, and more walking ensued, until finally we found what we thought was the Silver entrance line. We followed it, and followed it, and followed it some more for about 45 minutes before we found what we thought was the end of it at about 9:45, our hearts sinking since the mile+ of line was not moving, and we were terribly afraid we’d be standing in line until well after the Inauguration was over.

In a gesture of absurd hope, I left Erin in the line and jogged about 20 yards over to a red-capped Inauguration volunteer to ask what was up. His answer saved our day: “yeah, the line’s broken and doesn’t lead anywhere. Just go back towards the entrance just west of the Indian museum, and you’ll get in there.” I yelled for Erin, and we ran for it, just ahead of a general announcement to the rest of the line. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

When we got the gate, we were cheek-by-jowl with hundreds if not thousands of other people all trying to move in roughly the same direction. (The upside of this was that it was the only time all day that both of us were warm.) Eventually, an opening happened, and we started to slowly “flow” into the Silver area, but we’d have been fine if we’d had to stay where we were: from there, at least, we could see the Capitol, and hear the PA.

We reached security soon enough. I assumed a full patdown was about to happen — I hadn’t even brought a pocketknife — but the crowds were such that they were just more or less waving people through to try to prevent a stampede, I guess. They never even checked our ticket, and by 10:30 we were standing at a fence separating us from 3rd street. A few minutes later we realized we could easily get much closer, and that’s when we relocated to our ultimate spot only a couple dozen yards back from the Capitol’s reflecting pool.

Looking back across the Mall, all the way back to the Washington Monument, there was an uninterrupted sea of people. Later, they said 2 million, but the Park Service — who control and maintain the Mall — no longer does official projections, so we’ll probably never know how many folks really were there. (It’s a fair bet that more will claim to have been there than actually were, too.) Where we were, we once again encountered the bizarre “friendly crowd” vibe so totally unusual for anyone used to big crowds — and when I say “big crowds,” I mean 50,000 or 100,000 at a major sporting event, not twenty times that for an event of global sociopolitical importance. No shoving. “Here, you dropped your glove.” “Need another handwarmer? I have extras.” “Let me take y’all’s picture.” And smiles, smiles, smiles. I got goosebumps as we stood, watching the former presidents — Carter, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and the incumbent — file in, and we all laughed and smiled some more when the cameras caught Obama’s daughters fidgeting and taking pictures of their own. Soon their dad stood, hand on the Lincoln bible, and took the Oath 42 other men took before him. (Quick quiz: why is the 44th president but only the 43rd man to take the oath?)

For your aunt and I, and for your parents, this election was more about getting our country back than anything else. Bush’s ruinous policies were hostile to growth, hostile to civil liberties, hostile to our national prestige, destructive to our alliances, and hateful to the principles on which our country was founded. Obama came from seemingly out of the blue in 2004 with a convention speech about fixing all that, and emerged quickly as a truly inspiring frontrunner even in the Democratic primaries two years later. The more he spoke, the more specifics of policy he proposed, and the more class he showed as a candidate, the more supporters he gained. He was the anti-Bush, but also a candidate of vision unlike any we’ve had in a generation or more. Clinton won twice, but he won by being better at the political game than the hangdog Republicans he ran against, and he was aided in both his elections by a freakshow third-party candidate that sapped support from the Right. Obama just plain WON, and in a way that reminded more than a few folks of RFK’s aborted campaign 40 years ago.

So there’s that, and this was emotional and incredible and hopeful, and it was this change that inspired many people, like me, to give money to a candidate for the first time, and to volunteer more time and effort than they’d ever given before. This was a huge opportunity, and one none of us wanted to blow.

But there was something else happening here, too, and it’s the thing I alluded to at the beginning of this letter. Barack Obama is an African-american. He may not be descended from American slaves, like his wife and children, but to the rednecks of our ancestral home that doesn’t matter, and by the time you’re old enough to read this you’ll know well the hateful terms those sorts of people would use for a man who looks like Obama. Bigots notwithstanding, America’s promise as laid forth in our Declaration of Independence does not stutter, and it does not equivocate: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This has been a promise unkept for most of country’s history. For the first hundred years, we kept our collective fingers crossed, and whispered “um, except slaves,” and called it ok. For the next hundred, we said everyone was free, but instituted a shameful system of separation and substandard services for black Americans, a situation only partly remedied by the 60s and the civil rights era. People fought and died to make the Declaration true at Concord, yes, but also at Gettysburg, and also in quiet and not so quiet ways in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s. Evil men murdered peaceful idealists only a few years before I was born, and it took the intervention of the National Guard to integrate schools and ensure the Voting Rights Act wasn’t a sick joke. I grew up hearing “good” men, friends of your grandfather, tell racist jokes well into the 1970s. I have friends from college, born after the moon shot, who nevertheless have the memory of being called “nigger” to their face. It’s not dead, not yet anyway.

This is also all history for you. This also part of the litany of names and dates and places some terribly boring teacher has tried to cram into your head at some point. But let me tell you: no matter how amazing and moved and happy Erin and I were to watch Barack Obama take that oath last Tuesday at what your dad and I called “the end of an Error,” our happiness cannot compare to the collective joy of the African-Americans in that Inaugural crowd. An older black couple, about your Grandmother Green’s age, stood near us. If I’m right about their ages, the were born in the war, and remember Selma and lunch counters and colored-only water fountains and the absurdity of great jazz musicians playing in clubs where they couldn’t get served. But on Tuesday, the 20th of January, 2009, they watched as American moved from Jim Crow to Barack Obama in a single lifetime, a transition that a makes your great-great grandmother Anise’s stores of moving from horseback to 747 seem like a hop over a puddle.

This is why so many people went to Washington. The hope and the change and the promise after eight years of Bush, yes, but behind that a groundswell of amazement and pride and happiness about the way we were getting the change we needed. In 1938, Langston Hughes wrote “America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!” In 2009, we got a lot closer to being what Hughes was talking about, to being who we said we’d be in 1776. We aren’t there yet. We’ll probably never get there; the ideals Jefferson set out are almost impossible, and assume our better Angels will always hold sway, but they are who we say we want to be. America is an aspirational state. But it’s that American optimism that makes me believe that by the time you’re old enough to read this, we’ll be even closer to that ideal than we are now, in January of 2009.

Love,

Uncle Chet

CC: Caroline, Natalie, and a nephew to be named later

Compared to the games of today available for kids, Candyland and its ilk sucked balls.

The problem is true interactivity and the influence of chance. Games children play today — especially electronic or video games — tend to reward decision-making and paying attention and decoding the environment of the game. Games like Candyland are 100% games of chance, with no hope of mastery and no reward for paying attention or experimenting.

Super Mario Brothers is a vastly more interesting task, cognitively speaking, than drawing cards and rolling dice.

• The Good News: Pink’s in Montrose is open.

• The Bad News: Comments are br0ken. Updates forthcoming…

A 1950s bungalow in St Louis is for sale; owing to some somewhat nontraditional choices on the part of the original owner, the main living floor is frozen in time and completely unused since construction.

I don’t mind being on hold. I don’t even mind hold music. What drives me bats is having a recording pop in every 30 or 60 seconds to tell me I’m still on hold. Music’s easy to tune out, so you can get work done while you’re waiting; the recording is interruptive enough to shake you out of whatever task you’re doing while on hold, more or less ensuring that you can do nothing other than sit on hold.

Assholes.

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature has a gallery up of the Inauguration that’s well worth your time; it includes a satellite picture of the Mall from about 11:00 Tuesday.

After the actual swearing-in ceremony, we left the Mall area for distant Red Line points in search of warmth and food. En route to the bar, we discovered the reason for the occasionally empty bleachers we later saw on the bar TV: DC crowd management was pretty broken, and apparently had last minute changes not documented in any of the publicly available info source.

Consequently, it would not surprise us to learn that some of those bleachers had become inaccessible islands, with their ticket-holders trapped elsewhere with no way to reach their seats. We have several friends who couldn’t get in (we did, though) despite having tickets owing to the enormous crowds and perhaps questionable crowd-routing choices. Granted, there’s not a lot of precedent for 1-2MM extra people in a town this size, but it was still frustrating.

We spent Sunday in the company of 400,000 of our closest friends. It was cool.