We’re perfect happy for this guy to do these FOR us so that we can watch from the safety and warmth of Houston, but we’re still glad someone’s doing silly things in absurdly low temperature weather (in this case, -14).

If it gets cold enough, you can freeze soap bubbles before they pop. (Widely linked.)

Did we get to this? No idea. But it seems wrong to continue to deprive you all of Yogabeans.com, which is of course the premiere internet source of Ashtanga yoga instruction using plastic superhero action figures.

You’re welcome.

Heathen Pals Jeff and Jo are a fine couple; this much we know already. However, they’ve reached a new eschelon of coolness in Jo’s Christmas gift to Jeff: a painting by local artist Grayson Coffee of Jeff as Boba Fett.

Interested parties may see photo-documentation of Christmas in Mississippi – starring Layla, natch – over at HeathenFlickr.

Y’all please welcome Nathanial Hugo Mohney to the world, spawn of Chris and Lisa, late of New York. Congrats!

I’ve never bothered with one of these things before, but there’s a first time for everything. Also, I’m watching my Windows Server VM update itself so I can do some testing, and that drastically limits what I can do besides “write text” for the moment.

So, seven random things about Chief Heathen, which turns out to be harder to make interesting if you’ve got eight years of blog posts illuminating most of your life.

1. I wish I could sing. It turns out I have excellent pitch, but (apparently) neither the disposition to gain technical mastery of an instrument nor vocal cords that will do anything other than my normal speaking voice. It’s annoying.

2. I hate old movies. Not all of them, just most of them. Generally speaking, if it was made before 1965, I probably have little interest in watching it. I’m not sure why this is — certainly the vocabulary of film became drastically more subtle and interesting in the auteur era of the 70s, and certainly too films made since I was born have more to offer me in terms of cultural resonance, but other than that kind of generality I can’t really explain my distaste for old movies. Obviously, there are exceptions for giants of the film canon, but for popular movies it’s a pretty hard and fast line.

3. My most recent passport — sadly now expired — was issued in a city and country that no longer exist. On a student tour of the Soviet Union in 1991, we all got royally hammered more or less at every opportunity, and certainly before every Aeroflot ride. Between Moscow and Tbilisi, my passport must’ve slid out of my jacket as I napped (or was taken by a nefarious thief; it doesn’t really matter). This generated some great consternation for the tour leader (my Russian prof), but imposed no actual inconvenience aside from an early-morning trip to a photomat in Kiev for a replacement pic (where our Intourist guide forced the shopkeeper to take me immediately, and to hell with the 40 or so Ukrainians waiting in line). The actual passport wasn’t put together until our last city, where there was a U.S. consulate, and where I delighted myself by stepping back and forth across the threshold (“I’m in the US! I’m in the USSR! I’m in the US!” etc). Consequently, said passport — containing what must be the least flattering photo of me ever taken, and that’s saying something — is stamped “Issued by United States Consulate, Leningrad, U.S.S.R.”

4. I’m shocked I’ve stayed in Houston 14 years. When I moved here in 1994, it was a lark — the idea was hatched in a drunken party weekend, and executed less than a month later. I assumed I’d live here for a bit, and then branch out. Except cool things kept happening, and I eventually bought a house, and my career turned into a travel-heavy thing (thereby rewarding me for living in mid-country), and I got involved in local nonprofits, and built a great network of friends, and here I am still. I still don’t think I’ll be here forever, but we sure do have good friends here. I just hate the summers.

5. I’m coming to grips with my 20 years of science-fiction-fan apostasy, and have actually begun delving into the pool a bit more. I read piles and piles as a teen, but was pretty much done with it by late high school. Real books — and I still think of them as such — were more rewarding to me. In my thirties, flying as much as I do and in need of more reading material, I started sampling again, first with the Dresden novels and then with Scalzi’s work, but also with bigger bits at a friend’s suggestion. It’ll never be what I read by default again — too much of it is utter crap, poorly imagined and badly written, and in willful violation of this law — but it’s fun to include as part of my literary diet.

6. I never really planned this technology career, so I still don’t really know where it’s going. There’s a lot to unpack there, but I mostly decided against going to grad school in creative writing because I didn’t want to be poor, and I liked hacking with computers as much as I liked writing. But I didn’t really give it much more thought than that. I sort of thought I’d keep writing, and while in some ways (e.g., here) I have, I really pretty much retired from fiction and poetry a long time ago. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. It’s also pretty obvious my nonprofit arts activities are attempts to scratch this particular itch by being close to art being done instead of really making any of my own, and (like most such replacements) that’s unlikely to be satisfying in the long haul.

7. It will surprise no one for me to say that I’m a deeply cynical bastard; I trust people in general to be dumb as posts and venal besides, and to act stupidly in their own interests, or based on superficial lies. This cynicism extends to an utter disgust ar the willful and ham-handed emotional manipulation that is part and parcel of so much of pop culture, and said culture’s inability to separate sentiment from sentimentality. So it may actually surprise people to learn that “It’s a Wonderful Life” completely has my number, and that Sam Wainwright’s telegram makes me tear up every single year: MR GOWER CABLED YOU NEED CASH STOP MY OFFICE INSTRUCTED TO ADVANCE YOU UP TO TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS STOP HEE HAW AND MERRY CHRISTMAS SAM WAINWRIGHT

Seven people? You must be joking. Virtually none of my people blog. But I’ll try: Dorman, Christina, Patrick, JoAnn, Chris and Cathy, Noel, and Erin, for whom this is a surprise soft-launch. (Sorry, honey; your idea is too good not to push.)

I’m really glad the yard was cut when Google Street View came by, but I sorta wish it had been after we got our new curtains.

Also, it was apparently on a Friday.

Y’all join me in wishing “My Attorney” and happy birthday, won’t you?

Please join the Heathen faithful in congratulating longtime Heathens Ear O’Corn and Lady McHorne on their anniversary today.

The good news is that a local TV repair shop was interested in hauling off the 55″ Mitsubishi for free, presumably for parts or even cheap-rehab for second-hand sale.

The bad news is that i had to help the little Chinese dude get the monster down the stairs, and it’s too early for beer yet.

From the Onion: Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion.

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

“On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced,” said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. “While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don’t have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them.”

In 2002, Fultz’s team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

Facebook thinks I should be friends with lots of people I don’t know, mostly because of shared friends. If five folks I know also know John Doe, it stands to reason I might know him, too. You get false positives with this approach, but that’s ok, because you also end up with renewed connections to people you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

What’s weird is when you get strange friend intersections. Right now, there’s someone on my “you may know…” list that I do not know, but with whom I share three completely unrelated friends, at least from my perspective.

The first shared friends is someone I know from The Well, an online community I’ve been a member of for a decade or more.

The second is from my high school in Mississippi.

The third is a playwrite my wife and I hosted in Houston when she was working on a piece for a local group we volunteered with.

Bizarre.

I’m not feeling particularly moved by the Heathen spirit, for reasons that should be obvious. It’s been a shitty fucking week. Even so, here are a few things I might’ve gone on longer about given the absence of Ike, or the continued presence of Cary:

• Roll Tide and Fail Irish and USC is still overrated.
• This is what Mrs Heathen thinks about riding in Chief Heathen’s car
• If and when one is proven to exist, we will promptly acquire a plush Higgs boson for all Heathen nieces.
• This lightsaber is specifically for Sharon.
• According to this, under different circumstances I might have been named “Torpedo Vindicator Palin.”

Cary died last night after a long battle with cancer. He was 38. He was my friend.

Go read this short delightful anecdoate at Mr Bosch’s site.

Merlin Mann points out a comment by blogger Rebecca Blood on the day-of-9/11 planes-hit-buildings thread at Metafilter:

my greatest fear is how our government is going to respond. more erosion of freedom in the name of security. mark my words.

How about a body wash with black pepper in it?

Some guy had his camcorder out on an Air Canada flight and caught a space shuttle launch from 30,000 feet. Check it out.

“My friend Tony, who lives in Kosovo, has taken up beekeeping.”

Please get one of these for LawyerHeathen. Last week was his birthday; it’s the least you can do. kthxbi.

More from Frank:

What you see in the picture is actually already on the market – the box with the graph is a pump just like mine, above that is the continuous blood glucose moniter transmitter that talks to the pump. What will make that combination an artificial pancreas is the algorithm that will do all the predicting and deciding. I was on a national JDRF conference call a few months back to discuss that very topic. The current algorithm is getting very, VERY close to actually predicting future blood sugars down to the mg/dl. It is scary good, but not good enough, yet. More testing is required and that takes millions and millions of dollars. Truly dollars well spent, though. The JDRF working hard to get this to market and to get it covered by insurance companies so people can get one.

This is an excellent reason to give money to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. We do. So should you.

Fred Clark explains the FICO scam for us:

Here’s how the scam works. You’ve got a $10,000 limit on a credit card and you’re carrying $2,500 due to a recent dental procedure. The lender, in the name of reducing risk, abruptly reduces the limit on your card to $4,000, announcing this change on page seven of the nano-type in a booklet mailed with your next monthly bill. Now instead of a 25-percent utilization rate, you’ve got a 63-percent utilization rate (they round up, when convenient), lowering your credit score.

That lower credit score means you no longer “qualify” for your previous rate of 9.9 percent and will now be paying 19.1 percent. Oh, and there’s a one-time fee of $35 dollars, conveniently added to your existing balance, for exceeding 50 percent of your available limit.

Unfortunately for you, these changes in your balance and rate became effective at 9 a.m. on the 15th of the month. Your electronic payment, dutifully set for the previous minimum payment, is credited to your account at 1 p.m. on the 15th. That minimum payment was based on the earlier interest rate, so it’s no longer adequate to cover your newer, higher minimum payment. A $35 late fee is therefore added to your balance and this delinquency is reported to the triumvirate, contributing to the further reduction of your credit scores. Second verse, same as the first.

The entire affair is designed to perpetuate both “bad” credit and high debt. Banks are not your friends. Frankly, no corporation is your friend. Behave accordingly.

(I think I’d blogged this long ago, but apparently not; its recent resurfacing at MeFi reminds me to do it now.)

During World War II, Rolex extended a fairly amazing offer: British officers detained in German camps could order timepieces on credit, so Clive Nutting ordered one in March of 1943. Nutting was at Stalag Luft III, Sagan, Germany, which is now part of Poland, and — more importantly — was one of the organizers of the Great Escape. Owing to a backlog of orders by other British officers also in German hands, Rolex was unable to fill the order until June, but they acknowledged the order with a letter dated 30 March stating “This watch costs to-day in Switzerland FRs. 250,– but you must not even think of settlement during the war.”

In other words, don’t pay us ’til you get home. How cool is that? (Also, consider a world where POWs could get mail, order watches, etc.)

Nutting got the watch that summer, along with an invoice with a zero balance, and almost certainly used it for timing purposes as they planned the escape. Nutting kept the watch until his death, n 2001, at 90.

Scans of the correspondence with Rolex as well as pictures of the (restored) watch are available at TimeZone, long the best watchgeek site online.

If you’d been born the minute MTV played its first video (“Video Killed the Radio Star“), you’d be turning 27 today.

Ouch.

Really, I got nothing here. Metafilter has many links.

Actually, I do have something: Jesse goddamn Helms lives to be a wrinkled old racist prune, spreading misery and bigotry from his deathbed, and this guy, this shining example of what a teacher — or just a human — can be checks out at 47. That’s fucking raw.

Days with My Father, a photo essay about the author’s 98-year-old dad, who has no short term memory anymore. Go look. Via BoingBoing.

The aforementioned idiot-hotel is actually in the 94th tallest building in the US, not counting antennae. (By pinnacle height, it’s the 32nd.) It’s the 5th tallest in Atlanta. ATL’s number four is across the street, and is much cooler.

The fact that the MiniMotel even exists.

Back when Mrs Heathen and I tied the knot, we had the mandatory Williams-Sonoma registry. We got lots of lovely gifts, and some dupes, so after gift orgy subsided we took our excess bounty to the local shop to reconfigure. After we got everything we definitely wanted, we had some excess, so we did something nobody ever thinks they’ll do: we spent a bunch of money on a very attractive stainless-steel garbage can that, even worse, takes proprietary bags.

I don’t want to hurt any feelings, but this thing may be our best and most useful wedding gift, and anybody who gave us something from Wm-S can lay claim to a portion of our ongoing thanks. Bachelor that I was, I refused to spend money on something I was only going to put garbage in, so I had a nasty white plastic can from Target. It was white, and seemed to attract stains. The new one made a huge difference in the style of the kitchen, and definitely signaled some grown-up-ness. Plus, its wonderful lid is so adept at sealing in trash odor that it’s no longer obvious what we had for dinner. It’s amazing, really, and means that you needn’t waste bag capacity by immediately emptying the garbage just because you threw away fish heads, for example.

So we like it.

Anyway, it came from Wms-S, but it’s made by SimpleHuman. A couple weeks ago, it broke. Not horribly, but enough to be annoying. The lid is a tap-to-spring open kind of affair, and the mechanism to make it spring open stopped working. The seal’s still good, but you have to open it manually, which means more gross things tend to end up on the lid. Mrs Heathen called to inquire about repair, and something wonderful happened.

First, she got a real human in about 45 seconds.

Second, the real human interrupted her story to find out our mailing address. “Why?” “So we can send you your new lid.” “Don’t you need a receipt or store or a credit card number or something?” “Oh, no. You should get your replacement in a couple weeks.”

Excellent.

Frankly, it hurts my feelings that the last president George Carlin saw was this goatfucking puritan in the pocket of the sort of right-wing moralist dirtbags that he’s spent his career lampooning.

John Scalzi, as always, has more. Mr Bosch is poetic as usual. I still remember borrowing “A Place For My Stuff” on cassette from my friend Jeff in about 1982, sneaking it home in my backpack, and listening to it in my room on headphones. Carlin’s delivery and word choice (blue or not) was a revelation, and no doubt still influences what I find funny. We are poorer without him, and with him we lose the last of the three giants of standup: Bruce, Pryor, and Carlin.

Here’s a live performance of Stuff from 1986, and no online encomium (however brief) would be complete without this late version of 7 Words, or this.

Mrs Heathen and I have spent the last several months addressing our failures as homeowners, i.e., our sudden realization that we were Those People who have a jungle for a backyard, a persistent A/C drip, unwelcome growth in the gutters, etc. As it turns out, “every 8 years” is probably not a good interval for home maintenance. In any case, think on this before you buy.

Today marks the end of Phase I, which included:

• Backyard clearing; this was complicated by a period of benign neglect as well as the discovery, during clearing, of previously unknown precolumbian tribes living in the underbrush. Unspoiled and noble, they’re now being studied by some anthropologists at HCC while I, of course, took their land. Hey, I bought it fair and square. Cost: $400, which is still less than paying someone $25 a week to mow it.

• Despite my best efforts with bleach and a snake, convincing the backup A/C condensation line to stop dripping on the side of the HQ required the attentions of a professional. In his visit, though, he inspected the balance of the cooling system and pronounced it ship-shape. Drip resolved. Cost: $130, or a solid bargain in my eyes — A/C guys won’t come in the house for less than a C-note.

• Gutter-cleaning. This sounds trivial, but as Heathen Central is nearly 4 stories tall at that point, there’s no way in hell Chief Heathen’s going up there. Cost: $280. They also put an extension on the aforementioned backup condensation line, though, so that future drips won’t hit the side of the house on the way down.

• General roof-inspection. When the Neighbor had his gutters done, he discovered some fastener issues. Said issues extended to Heathen HQ’s roof, but have been similarly resolved. Included in the gutter-cleaning.

• Replacement of plants in the back 40. The reclaimed backyard is all in Dirt now, which isn’t so great for lounging. Phase 0.0001 has begun with YOURS TRULY actually digging holes and planting shit under the pecan (specifically: a ginger variant (2); foxtail fern (2); groundcovery thing (1); orchidy thing (1)). More to come, after Mrs Heathen and I decide on a plan. Cost so far: < $100.

Now, where’s our goddamn tax credit?

Heathen Central has, very nearly, the best DVR and TV option available today.

Strong words? Yes, yes they are. Even stronger when you realize I’m talking about a standard-definition DirecTV setup with a Series 1 Tivo, but there it is. The briefly available DirecTV HD with Tivo is probably better, but that’s about it (except for our upgrade; see below).

What we have is a Sony SAT-T60, which is a combo box containing both a Tivo and a DirecTV receiver. It preserves the digital soundtracks on HBO programming even on recording, since it just saves the stream as it comes in from the satellite and has to do no compression/uncompression for the save-to-disk task (i.e., like normal Tivos do). As a combo box, there’s no wrangling to make the DVR work with the TV receiver. And, since it’s a real Tivo and not some retarded cousin stuffed into the market by creepy TV providers and acceptable only to be people that have never seen a real Tivo, it Just Plain Works.

And I’ve had it since, oh, 2001. We thought a time or two about upgrading the drive for more space (it’s a 35 hour unit), but never did anything about it.

Well, as of yesterday, it looks like the digital audio output stage has gone the way of all flesh. I can still get stereo via a conventional pair of RCA cables, but the optical output is dead. (The cable and receiver input check out fine; it’s definitely the Tivo.) This makes me sad, since DirecTV got into a pissing match with Tivo some time ago and no longer sells real Tivos (see above about brain-dead boxes made by creepy TV providers; DirecTV is better than a cable company, but only just).

On the tech support call to finalize the diagnosis, they made a valiant effort to sell me a DirecTV DVR — I say sell; it’d be free, since I pay a maintenance fee — but I’m having none of it. I’ve seen the bullshit they think of as a DVR, and it has no place in my house. Nobody has new DirecTV-Tivos, really, and the Tivo standalone units work best with cable companies (FUCK that). (The only alternative for me is a MythTV box — if my DVR can’t be a nice, easy to use Tivo, then it may as well actually work for ME and not the cable company.)

Fortunately, there’s WeaKnees.com, who sell factory refurbished units, both conventional and HD. For a few hundred bucks, we can upgrade to a newer Tivo (series 2 instead of series 1) with a bigger HD (70 or 140 hours instead of 35); the device will be essentially a drop-in replacement, which is nice.

Maybe I should buy two. Just in case.

From the Mississippi office, this profile of Caroll Spinney, the 74-year-old who’s been the man inside the Big Bird costume for nearly 40 years.

NEW YORK – On the street, Caroll Spinney is a 74-year-old of modest proportions. On the job, transformed into Big Bird, he stands 8 feet 2 inches tall and is 6 years old.

Being Big Bird is sweaty, physical work. But Spinney, who has worked on Sesame Street for nearly four decades playing both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, has no wish to be anywhere else.

“I can’t imagine willingly walking away from Big Bird and Oscar,” he said.

Ten years ago this summer, I went hunting with some pals from Dallas. The article I wrote for a now-defunct web zine used to be on the old NoGators, but with that gone it’s been offline for a while. In response to a flood of demand (ok, maybe not), I’ve republished the approved, corrected text here.

Update: Link fixed.

Order of the Day, June 6 1944, 64 years ago this year.

The backyard has been reclaimed. We thought we might find a lost civilization back there, or at least George Lucas’ long-gone sense of shame, but it turns out it’s just dirt.

New plants are the next step.

Leave it to the Germans to create a giant waterslide with a 360 degree loop that begins with a trapdoor chamber. Warning: Speedo alert.

It may or may not be funnier or more interesting if you speak German.

Ask Calvin’s Dad. The accumulated HeathenNieces can expect us to use the dickens out of this. Our favorite:

Q. How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then? A. Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too. Q. But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way? A. Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane. Q. But… But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then? A. Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s. Q. So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too? A. Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

And:

Q. What causes the wind? A. Trees sneezing.

When I was a kid, I thought my dad’s dad was kind of odd because whenever he’d find something he liked, he’d buy several. “How come?” I’d ask. His answer was always some variation on “they might quit making them.”

I figured it was some sort of depression-survivor thing, but now, at 38, I find myself thinking the same thing a lot. The most recent example: Several years ago, Mrs Heathen gave me the first home coffeemachine I’ve ever had that actually made consistently good coffee. Drip machines might start strong, but they’ve got weird internal parts you can’t clean, and are probably inconsistent temp-wise besides even if they DO attempt to heat the water before it hits the beans. I’ve had a mess of them, from a variety of manufacturers, and the fact of the matter is simple: they all suck. I even looked sideways at Erin for bringing this one into the house, since at the time I was making coffee a cup at a time with a filterholder set atop my favorite mug (it’s slow and sucks for volume, but it works and makes good coffee).

The model she found was a vacuum style pot made by Bodum that was actually electric. Put in water, put in coffee, hit the switch, and either watch the show or come back in a few minutes to perfect coffee, every time. The whole thing came apart for easy cleaning of every surface (though in truth, I had to ask Mrs Heathen to clean the interior of the bottom half every so often, since her hands would actually fit inside it), which meant none of the lingering weird flavors that have haunted basically every drip machine I’ve ever drunk from. Simple, direct, and reliable, the Bodum Electric Santos was damned near perfect.

I used this blessed, wonderful device nearly every morning for three years, but this week it developed significant cracks about the (plastic) base. It leaks, and therefore no longer makes good coffee. And this is the point in the story wherein I discover the model has been discontinued and that no one, apparently, makes an electric vac pot anymore. There are stovetop models (from Bodum, even), but nothing with the fire-and-forget brilliance of my late, lamented Santos. Aside from some used ones on EBay, it looks like I’m SOL.

I totally should have bought like ten of them as soon as I realized it was the One True Coffee Device. I’m kicking myself now, and counting my gramps quite a bit wiser in the bargain.

Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently is fantastic, and I hope to remember them to use on my nieces.

1987

I am almost 17. It is spring. My father is 7 months dead, and I’m somewhat unmoored by the potent cocktail of teen angst filtered through that prism. In retrospect, I had a pretty ok high school exprience, but only because of friends and the idea of what would come next — not because of anything that happened in any class there, except one: our very free-form debate team, naturally scheduled for the last class of the day. After school on a March afternoon, after someone in that class (Jason?) reminded me of its release date, I drive to the mall. The small, southern town I grew up in had only a single music store, and it was mall-bound: Camelot. We called it Camelsnot, and it was the only outlet for music short of expensive mail-order from NME or Rolling Stone or other, hipper, indie or punk magazines like Maximum Rock & Roll. I buy it on cassette. Only rich people had CD already, and only people older than me had vinyl. I unwrap it in my 1978 Buick, but I don’t move my car until I have to flip the tape. The music is ethereal, atmospheric, deep, and polished without being poppy. (It will be years before I realize this is Daniel Lanois’ touch.) The tape moves with me from car deck to walkman to bedroom stereo and back for much of the rest of the year.

1989

I am 19, and a college freshman in Tuscaloosa. The rest of my life I looked forward to in high school is starting. My tape has gone the way of all flesh, which is what happens to tapes in cars in the South. The transparent case is scratched to opacity; the tape warbles and presents only a distorted version of the record. Two years is a long time, though, and I have a CD deck now. I buy a CD copy at Turtle’s — a real record store! in a college town! — on a credit card I won’t pay off for years. I listen to it again, closely, for the first time since 1987. I play it over and over that afternoon, kind of amazed it’s still interesting after two whole years, and realize suddenly it’s a record I’ll keep coming back to all my life.

1996

I am 26, theoretically an adult. Years of dorm life, college-era parties, and haphazard storage habits claim the CD; a skip I know by heart mars “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Mobile Fidelity releases a “gold disc” remastered version, and I buy it — this time at the venerable Cactus Music in Houston. It does indeed sound better than my old CD, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is real and how much of it is the lack of the skip I continue to anticipate for years afterwards. I fail to notice that, at 26, I am about the same age the band was when they recorded it.

2004

I am 34, edging into the vast middle of life. I am engaged to a woman I knew in 1989, but lost track of. Our first date after finding each other again in 2001 was a U2 show in Dallas; the date lasted 72 hours, and continued the following weekend for 72 more. I buy her the U2 iPod for Christmas, and fill it with the Digital Box Set, which of course contains the first new copy of the Joshua Tree I didn’t actually need to buy. We listen to nothing but U2 for weeks, and it reminds us of high school, of college, and most of all of a bubble of possibility we created for ourselves as we drove to Dallas on that absurdly optimistic first date. On our honeymoon, a year later in Mendocino, it is this copy and that iPod that we listen to through the window of our suite as we soak in our private hot tub, gaze at the California stars, and marvel at our incredible good fortune.

2008

I am 38. The actual Joshua tree pictured on the cover is now dead and the album itself is older than I was at its release. Actually, it’s also older now than “old” records like Abbey Road, Who’s Next, Sticky Fingers, or the entire discography of Led Zeppelin were when I discovered them in high school. My brother and sister-in-law notice that The Joshua Tree is now old enough to drink, and send me the 20th Anniversary edition for my birthday; it’s playing as I type this. The mix is brighter, more alive, more intense, more spacious. Listening closely, I hear things I don’t think I’ve noticed before, deep in the background of the mix. When it finishes, I hit “play” again.

The niece is clearly well on her way to getting her uncle to do anything in the world for her.

It’s HeathenDay, which is also the birthday of William H. Macy (’50) and Adam Clayton (’60) and, well, Bill Casey (’13) and L. Ron Hubbard (’11).

Celebrate in any way you feel appropriate. We suggest whisky and cake.

Next year will be the really fun one, since it’ll be the first time since 1998 that my birthday has fallen on Friday, which some folks consider unlucky. We disagree, since the first time our birthday fell on a Friday was our very first go-round, in 1970.

Since then, the 13th has only been on a Friday in ’81, ’87, ’92, and ’98. That pesky leap year keeps getting in the way.

We suspect a Big-Ass Party is called for in honor of my Sixth Friday Birthday next year, which would be flaunting tradition — I’ll only be 39, and convention would suggest the big party would come in 2010, but fuck that. Fridays are more fun.

(Btw, very quick and dirty: for ((i=1970;i<=2009;i+=1)); do cal march $i | grep -e ‘ 8 9 10 11 12 13 14’ -e ‘March’; done)

In celebration of our upcoming HeathenDay, we’ve been blessed!

Two bits, recently:

ONE: I get an update email from an online magazine that’s usually chock full of images and crap. I read the text, and never bother loading the images. Actually, I rarely load any images, since images in email are usually worthless footer graphics or, worse, web bugs designed to allow the sender to know when and if you’ve read their mail. No thank you.

Sure enough, they think I’m not reading their updates, so they sent me a message saying “hey, we noticed you don’t read our mail, so we’ll quit sending it to you if you don’t [click here].”

Obviously, they’re using these web bugs. Icky. I like the magazine, but I don’t think I’ll bother reading the much anymore.

TWO: Yesterday, I got a call on the old line from a credit card company pitching add-on services. It was an ARU, but one dressed up and obfuscated in such a way as to try very hard to pretend it was a real person, and they’d worked hard enough that I was thrown initially. When I interrupted the voice to ask if it as a real person, it said “Do I sound that bad? (pause)” and then resumed its pitch. I asked irrelevant questions, and it clumsily spat out something based on keywords, like Eliza. I asked it to say “rutabaga,” and it hung up on me. Very creepy. Also an excellent way to ensure I never do business with your company.