Yuletide Lights Run

Today I ran my annual Holiday Fantasy Lights run around our neighborhood. This is similar to the Fourth of July run, but this time I run to find good holiday light displays. This is a different task than hunting Fourth of July fireworks. The fireworks are sporadic. If I hear them I have to run there right away or I'll miss them. Not so with holiday lights. I can't hear them but they are visible for hours at a time. I found this year disappointing. Many streets in my neighborhood which were brilliantly lit in years past this year were mostly dull, with only an occasional holiday display. I try to find which display is the best. This year this honor goes to someone who put strings of colored lights all through all of the trees in his front yard. The side of the street is close enough to make you feel that you are in a wonderland. It must have been hard to get those lights up there; either a long pole or a ladder, with unsure footing on that tree, was needed. Most of the brighter displays use white floodlights. To me these are out. They pollute the sky! If I were a display judge, I would automatically eliminate all lots with white floodlights on them.

Hypermediaism of the day

I may establish a regular feature on this blog. Hypermediaism of the day, honoring the most hypered-up news story of the past 24 hours or so. Today the honor of Hypermediaism of the day goes to the Hyper-TV networks such as CBS, NBC, and ABC, as well as CNN's web page. CNN's web page featured late today a story showing the discovery of nuclear sites in Iran. This was highlighted as the lead story on their site, and even included an aerial site showing some works. So I tried to listen for it on 1830 news tonight. But not a single one mentioned the story in the first 10 minutes. Instead, they blabbed endlessly about Trent Lott's statement about Strom Thurmond. First they give huge lead story billing to the Iran nuke story; then they drop it and give the lead hype to Trent Lott. If the networks can do this, then either the Iran nuke story has been hyped up far more than is warranted, or the Trent Lott story is. I think both are true. In fact, I believe that the hypermedia are helping make things bad for Sen. Lott and may force him to resign. For this reason, I award Hypermediaism of the Day honors today to the Iran nuke and the Trent Lott stories.

Estival Christmas

I got an email today that says that we should try to show up for a party in the most festival costume that we can find. Well, of course, your costume can't be festival, for that's a noun, not an adjective. It can be festive or estival, but not festival. If it is estival, that means T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, or a swimsuit and a surfboard, since "estival" means "summerlike" or "summery". Thus a baseball uniform is estival. Which gave me the idea to rewrite "Take me out to the Ballgame" for this season of the year. At a Yuletide party, it would go:

Take me out to the Yule Party,
Take me out to the bash,
Buy me some chestnuts and spiked egg nog,
I don't care if I ever come back
for it's Ho, Ho, Ho here comes Santa Claus
If he don't come it's a shame,
For it's jerk, nod, up the chimney he scoots
at the Old Yule Party.

What is a code?

When is a code not a code? When it is the dress code of a place in West Virginia. It seems that this one worker at this company protested the code by coming to work dressed in a dress. It was a maternity dress, and he says it is not as comfortable as it would seem to appear. He started working at his computer, then his company sent him home because he did not conform to their dress code. Now dress codes may be nice. If I were head of a firm that had contact with the public, I would have them all dress in purple shirts, pants and skirts to make us look unique. And maybe some decorum is needed. But the supervisor of this worker said, ""The dress code is not a code. It is a statement that we expect our employees to be properly attired at work," Now that goes beyond the pale of simple logic. Since when is a code not a code? I guess when it's a dress code in West Virginia. You can require a workplace to adhere to a dress code, but you can't require them to follow a code that is not a code. That is simply contradictory.

Ice Storms

We had a snowstorm followed by an ice storm this week, coating all the branches with ice. It did not affect our power much, causing only one or two glitches of a fraction of a second. But it caused a lot of power outages in the Carolinas. Some people don't have power for a week. For them it was like the Great Ice Storm of 1998 December 24 for us which gave us a 21-hour power outage.

The question is why ice storms come with such large number of power outages. It is because trees fall on power lines. Many of our power lines are aerial, on endless sequences of TTTTT that line highways through the countryside. If there are trees nearby, then they could fall on these power lines. It seems to me that electric companies could do a better job of keeping trees away from power lines, and of making power lines that withstand weight better. Trees are not intelligent creatures, and they don't want to harm us. Terrorists are intelligent and they want to harm us. If falling trees can take hundreds of thousands of people out of power for a week, think of what terrorists can do. This is something the power utilities need to do something about. The worst of ice storms should cause no more than a few hundred outages.