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Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is an absolutely brilliant piece of music. Tito Puente’s version of “Take Five” (sample mp3) is just as good.

If something is that good, I’m not gonna just take five. I’ll take ten or twenty.

The next time someone asks what you’re having for dinner, don’t be afraid to answer, “Potted meat, of course.”

Once again, government has stepped in to stop someone from doing something (for free) that benefits everyone and hurts no one.

A scientist at Fermilab in Illinois invented an ingenous snow plow that is pulled behind a bicycle. This plow is then used to clear a small section of a bicycle path. For the past three years, the scientist has used this brilliant invention to benefit everyone who uses the path.

So what did the governing authority do? They recently threatened him with fines if he keeps plowing the path.

How dare he perform a public service with no thought of reward or pay?!? Doesn’t this scientist know that only activities sanctioned by bureaucrats are allowed on paths paid for and maintained by the public for the public’s use?

Clearly, we should all check in with the local bureaucracy before heading out to enjoy the facilities that our tax dollars create. We should also ensure that we do not try to improve our public facilities in any way. This means that you shouldn’t pick up litter if you see it, nor should you attempt to shovel snow if you find yourself on public land. You should also not attempt to engage in any other form of non-invasive public facilities improvement without the explicit blessing of your local bureaucracy.

Sarah and I haven’t seen many movies of late because we’ve been busy with other things. However, we have seen a few.

• Desperado: A fun, fun movie. If you just want to kick back, suspend disbelief, and have a good time, this movie will keep you entertained. If you’re going to analyze the action and motives of the characters, rent something else.
• Once Upon a time in Mexico: Written, directed, edited, shot, produced, and scored by Robert Rodriguez, who also directed and wrote Desperado, above. Another fun, suspend disbelief movie. If you rent the DVD, make sure to watch the fascinating bit on making puerco pibil in the DVD extras.
• The Italian Job: An average movie. Not good, not bad. If I was stuck on an airplane with a limited amount of reading material, and this movie was free in the cabin, I would watch it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t bother.

Yesterday, I worked as an “election officer” at one of the local polling places. That was the first election I worked since Wisconsin had an election for governor in November of 2002.

If you haven’t worked as an election official, you really are missing out.I like to work in one of the wards near the University of Wisconsin-Madison, even though it is several miles away from my house. The students are almost universally charged up about voting. Most of them haven’t had the opportunity to vote in too many elections, so the luster of the process hasn’t worn off yet.

Many of the students also haven’t had the chance to vote for Presidential candidates before. They were too young to vote in the Bush/Gore election, so this is their first chance to vote for the country’s chief executive.

Election workers have an enviable job. We get people where they want to go. Sales people often have to convince their potential clients that what the salesman is selling is something that the clients cannot live without.

Chances are, if you show up at a polling place, you want to vote, nobody needs to convince you to do so. Therefore, election workers just try to make the process smooth and easy for everyone involved.

As a general rule, most people who come to vote are happy. If I worked as a bill collector, repo man, or the like, working as an election official would be a wonderful change of pace. Instead of making people unhappy, I would help to make sure people stay happy.

There are always interesting stories to be garnered from working at the polls. One gentleman yesterday (who was working for the Dean campaign) was literally dragging people he knew in off the street to vote. He didn’t care for whom they voted, so much as they cast their vote. Even if you didn’t agree with his politics, you had to admire his heart.

While at the library conducting research for a potential story, I strolled past the New Releases shelf. A book titled Fortress Malta caught my eye since Sarah and I talked about vacationing in Malta last year. I read the dust jacket and decided to bring it home.Generally, non-fiction isn’t my preferred genre of book. I’m a Sci-Fi/Fantasy reader (I’m reading Phillip K Dick’s short stories, at the moment). So, a non-fiction book has to cover a subject that interests me and do so with intelligence, humor, and insight. This book met all of those criteria.

Now that I’ve finished the book, I would recommend it to anyone interested in history or WWII. The story of Malta, the Maltese, and the island’s British defenders is truly fascinating. There are several people in the book whose exploits would be hard to believe in fiction, must less in real life.

The story of Adrian Warburton (“Warby”) in Fortress Malta is so fascinating, touching, and funny that one should read the book for it alone. The man was a reconnaissance pilot (who had trouble with take offs and landings) yet he managed to shoot down no less than nine aircraft over the course of the war. He flew so low that he once came back to Malta with a radio antenna from an Italian warship wedged into the bottom of his plane.

If you need an interesting and entertaining book for a long plane trip, a day at the beach, or for some bedtime reading, check out Fortress Malta by James Holland.

Metrosexual: “An urban male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.”

Dude: “a man extremely fastidious in dress and manner”

The etymology of the word dude is somewhat unclear, but the word’s root seems to spring at least partly from what we might consider the Old West. Dudes were Easterners, often from large cities, who came out to western raches in their fancy clothes and perfectly coifed hair.

So, if those folks were from the big city and they spent a fair amount of time worrying about their appearance and lifestyle, wouldn’t that fit the definition of metrosexual almost perfectly? Did we really need a new word to describe that type of person when we already had a perfectly good word?

Sure, in recent years, dude has been almost exclusively linked to the modern declarative usage, “Dude!” But there are numerous words in the English language that carry two or more vastly different meanings and people rarely, if ever, suffer confusion as a result.

Down with redundant words! Let dude knock metrosexual back into the sludge pit from whence it came.

A few photos we took in December 2003 and early 2004 are now on-line.

An Op-Ed I wrote about returning Cuban refugees to Cuba was published today by one of the local Madison newspapers, the Wisconsin State Journal. Of course, they spelled my name wrong (even though it was spelled correctly no less than three times in the e-mail in which I submitted the piece). Apparently Bogen just yearns to be spelled Bogan. Moving on… The article is not available on-line. However, it was a lengthened version of an article that I posted on this site.

The weekend before last, I was on a rink that took second place at the Arlington Mens’ Bonspiel. Last weekend, I found out that my picture had been printed in the Poynette Press.

Have you looked up the word “sanctity” in the dictionary lately? It is clear that most of the nation’s politicians have not.

All this (moronic) talk of “defending the sanctity of marriage” is just embarrassing for its overt hypocrisy. Sanctity referrs to the holiness or sacredness of an object. Since when did the state (in the philosophical sense of that word) grant sacred status to objects? If the state does not make objects holy, does it make sense to assume that the state can make objects less holy?

For instance, how could Wisconsin make the Christian cross less of a holy object for Christians, thereby reducing or eliminating the sanctity of the object? The short answer, of course, is that it couldn’t.

To some, a marraige is only holy if it is performed by a recognized religious figure. Marriages performed by judges or justices of the peace are inherently state-sponsored unions with no religious blessings, and thereby strictly without sanctity.

So, how exactly, does banning gay marriages preserve the sancity of marriage when the state already sponsors a mechanism that creates marriages without any form of sanctity?

Since when did the USA become so utterly stocked to the rafters with motivated, creative individuals that we couldn’t use a couple more?

Remember the Cubans who tried to escape the to US on an old truck that they converted to a boat? They were stopped at sea by the Coast Guard, their truck was sunk, and the occupants of the truck were returned to Cuba.

Now, three of same Cubans are trying to get here again. They converted a 1959 Buick into an ocean-going vessel and set sail for Florida again. Eleven Cubans (try getting eleven people into a car on land, much less at sea) were captured by the Coast Guard and their car was sunk.

It seems to me that these are exactly the sort of people the USA ought to be trying to attract. Clearly, the guys who turned an old car into a sea-worthy vessel, who timed their voyage for good weather and calm seas, who were not deterred by failing a first time, are smart, creative, hard-working, forward-thinking, never-say-die people. Since when did we have too many of those folks around here?!? You can go weeks at a time without finding a person like that in the US.

This country was founded by people just like those gentlemen: people with vision; people with backbone; people who were determined to make their own way in the world. Remember David Farragut’s famous cry? “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” I can almost picture the Cubans in question, just before they drive off the beach in Cuba and into the ocean saying, “Damn the Coast Guard! Full speed ahead!” Why are we turning people like that away?

Some folks would argue that these Cubans were going to be nothing more than a drain on our already stretched social support system. Let’s put those folks on an inland with an old car, some hardware, some tools, and a limited amount of food and see how they do. Let me remind you: these Cubans converted a 1959 Buick into a sea going boat that held eleven people! Do you honestly think they couldn’t make a living fixing cars? Heck, they’d do well to setup their own garage. I’d be willing to buy a car, just to get those guys to fix it. It would go in an oil change, and come out with wings, and the ability to fly for short distances.

This country clearly needs to stop and think for a minute before reflexively slamming the door in the face of people who clearly fit the mold of what we all would like to be.

Our Russian tortoise, Ira, has been in hibernation since 19 Dec 03. This morning, we took him out of hibernation and warmed him up.

Ira’s hibernation adventure began in late October when he stopped eating regularly. Sarah and I stopped feeding him altogether in early November. Tortoises that hibernate with any food or waste in their digestive tract will die as the food rots in their belly during hibernation. Thus, it was very important to make sure that Ira had a completely empty system.

In addition to stopping feeding, we also started soaking Ira in luke-warm water more regularly. Soaking him ensured that he was properly hydrated. It also helped to flush any wastes out of his digestrive tract.

A thermometer was put into the fridge to check the temperature of the air. We were lucky as our fridge was right in the hibernation sweet spot of 39-41°F.

On the appointed day, at the appointed hour, we cleared all the vegetables out of the vegetable crisper in our fridge. Some shredded newsprint went into the empty crisper to serve as bedding for Ira. Then, it was time to put Ira into the fridge. Right before he went into the fridge, I weighed Ira and recorded his weight and the date on a piece of paper. I put Ira into the fridge early in the morning, before he had a chance to wake up from his nightly rest.

Over the next weeks, we occasionally opened up the crisper drawer to see how Ira was doing. He was clearly in a deep sleep, but somewhat responsive to physical stimulation. About once a week I spritzed his newsprint to temporarily raise the humidity in the crisper to prevent him from becoming dehydrated. Also, I weighed Ira periodically to ensure that he didn’t lose very much weight while in hibernation.

This morning, seven weeks after he went into the fridge, I took Ira out and started warming him up. After sitting in his pen for roughly fifteen minutes, he started to show some signs of wakefulness. His breathing got much deeper and more frequent. His head started to come out of the shell and orient itself towards the light. About one-half hour after taking him out of the crisper drawer, I put him in a warm bath to soak for twenty minutes. This helped to rehydrate him after spending so much time in a frost-free fridge.

Now Ira is back in his pen, basking under his heat lamp. He hasn’t eaten anything yet, but I’m guessing that he is still waking up his various organs and bodily functions. However, given his clear eyes and generally quick reflexes, it appears Ira survived his hibernation adventure with no deleterious effects.

Sure, a dog will warn you when the mailman drops off the mail. And if you’re lucky, a cat will turn out to be a good mouser, and not just a worthless layabout. But will either of them alert you to a furnace failure like a loyal pet rat did for a New Hampshire man?

Excerpts from an interesting book Do Americans Shop Too Much:

“Because environmental damage is typically not included in the price of the product which casues it (for example, cars, toxic chemicals, pesticides), we overcomsume environmentally damaging commodities. Indeed, because all production has an impact on the environment, we overconsume virtually all commodities. This means that we consume too much in toto, in comparison to nonenvironmentally damaging activites.”

“In comparison to what a truly democratic state might provide, we find that a business-dominated government skews outcomes in the direction of private production. We don’t get enough, or good enough, education, arts, recreation, mass transport, and other conventional public goods. We get too many cars, too many clothes, too many collectibles.

“For those public goods that are complementary with private spending (roads and cars versus bicycle lanes and bicycles) this bias constrains the choices available to individuals. Without the bicycle lanes or mass transport, private cars are unavoidable. Because so much of our consumption is linked to larger collective decisions, the individual consume is always operating under particular constraints….As public telephone booths disappear, mobile phones become more necessary. Without adequate public libraries, we need to purchase more books.”

It is obvious that many of those who left reviews of the book at Amazon.com did not understand what they read. Their eyes moved across the words written on the page, but the meaning of the words did not filter down into the consciousness.