Evening Sun, 8 PM

HDTV Action

My flat screen TV has been acting up. It’s been taking longer and longer to turn on, during which time the green power LED just blinks on, off … on, off ... on, off. It’s only about four years old. Am I the only one who thinks a thousand dollar TV should last longer than four years?

	It has a good picture when it’s working but it takes 10 to 15 minutes to turn on. I began just leaving it on 24 - 7. After a few weeks of doing that, I decided to take action: fix it or replace it. I knew the most likely cause of this malfunction was a bad electrolytic capacitor in the power supply.
	Step 1 – Pull the TV away from the corner of the room and disconnect the cables. Remove two screws and slide the TV up and off its stand.
	Step 2 – Place the TV screen-side down on a table and remove the speaker bar attached at the bottom edge of the case. Then remove a crap-load of little screws and the back cover comes off. It takes 15 minutes to get all that done.
	Step 3 – after removing still more screws, disconnecting cables, and peeling back metal foil tape, I’m able to flip the center box over. The power supply board is on the left.
	This is a closer view of the solder-side (bottom) of the power supply board.
	This is the component side of the power supply board. It’s difficult to see in this image, but there is an electrolytic capacitor near the top right corner of the board, just above the transformer on the right, that has swelled and vented.
	This is a closeup view of the bad capacitor. It’s in the center of the image, and the electrolyte being vented is black. The usual cause of this kind of failure is over-voltage. This cap is rated 2200µF/25VDC. I went to Radio Shack and bought a replacement. I wanted a 2200µF and I wanted to bump up the working voltage. The Shack didn’t have a radial lead cap in the value I needed, but I was able get an axial lead cap rated 2200µF/35VDC.
	Fortunately, there was room to install the axial lead capacitor where the radial lead cap had been located. I soldered it in place. I put everything back together and turned on the TV. It works great. When I push the power button on the remote, I have picture and sound in about eight seconds. The repair job took 90 minutes, not counting the trip to the store to buy the replacement part, and cost less than five dollars.

Biker Invasion

My small Virginia city has been invaded by a biker gang. They’ve just about taken over the town. Everywhere you go: bikers and more bikers. I was documenting the invasion with my point-and-shoot when there was a kerfuffle behind me. Carey’s dogs (she had them on leashes) were attacked (almost, anyway) by what looked like, and might possibly be, a roaming gang of rogue, non-leashed biker dogs.

How many bikers are there in this gang, you ask. I didn’t count, but it had to be thousands. At one point, I walked home, ate dinner, watched the 6:30 news, then walked back to the main drag and the biker gang was still streaming into town. Carey was still there with her dogs. She has two schnauzers she is training to protect her home from rogue bikers and their little dogs, and she wanted them to see the gang in action.

The bikers seem friendly enough, so far. But just in case … if you don’t see any more blog posts from me, you’d better send help.

Changing World

It’s late night and I’m watching Live From the Artists Den on PBS. Tonight Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are performing from New York’s Bryant Park. I like Grace Potter. Grace can belt out a song. Plus, Grace is gorgeous. How gorgeous? Imagine: if Kaley Cuoco could sing and play the Hammond B3, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer Electric Piano and electric and acoustic guitars. And not to put too fine a point on it, but Grace has great legs, as she well knows. (Ever seen Grace wear an outfit that didn’t show off her legs? No.)  But tonight Grace and her bass player Catherine Popper are competing to see who can show more leg. And Catherine is winning. But never mind that. I’m writing about something else.

Earlier this this evening I left my house to walk the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood. The setting sun was already at the horizon and dusk was falling. Birds twittered in the trees and the smell of honeysuckle floated on the evening air. It was almost like an evening from long ago. Almost, but not. I could hear girls shouting and hollering a block away. I rounded the block and passed a group of teen girls talking to each other. They looked to be in the 13 to 15 age range. As I walked past them I caught part of their conversation. It was fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that. One girl loudly proclaimed to the neighborhood, “I hate it when somebody takes my fuckin’ cell phone and fuckin’ calls somebody …” And on it went. (I wondered, “Do you kiss your mama with that mouth?”)  A shrill rant by someone’s little darlin’. I’ve heard plenty of profanity. My old man’s favorite was “goddamn” and he used it liberally. But at least he used it at home and at work, not in public places. He never used profanity on the street for the neighbors to hear, or in restaurants, or around strangers. My mother often told him that profanity was a sign of a poor vocabulary. Maybe so. But today’s casual and public use of profanity is a sign of something else.

Anyway, I got home and turned on the TV. The local news was telling me about a beloved and respected local teacher (male) who was just arrested for having Internet sex with a girl younger than sixteen. Everyone in his neighborhood (at least, everyone they put on the air) claims to be shocked. Shocked! I didn’t know the man but I wouldn’t have been shocked. Heck, teachers having sex with students is so prevalent these days it’s almost trendy.

The “Tea Party” people say they want to take back their country. I have bad news for them. The country they want to take back is long gone. It’s blowin’ in the wind now.

The Cow That Thinks It’s A Horse

A 15 year old German girl wanted a horse but her parents said “No.” So she put a bridle on one of the family’s cows and voilà: a show cow.

The Last Shuttle

Atlantis, America’s last space shuttle, is being rolled out to launch pad 39A. (Click the image below for a larger photo.)

The claim is that they (the shuttles) are getting old and therefore unsafe. The way I see it: the technology is getting mature; we’ve found most of the gotchas associated with flying space shuttles. We know about O-rings and cold temperatures; we know about foam insulation hitting the orbiter during launch. So actually, flying a shuttle should be safer now than ever. We should be building more shuttles, better shuttles, with new materials and better computers.

At left: the shuttle Atlantis with booster rockets and external fuel tank is sitting on the Mobile Launcher Platform which in turn is being carried on a crawler-transporter. More shuttle photos can be found at launchphotography.com.

Fully loaded, the top speed of the crawler-transporter is one mile per hour. Because of Federal regulations, the driver must wear a seat belt. Safety first.

I can’t think of a more boring journey than driving at one mile per hour for however many hours it takes to reach the launch pad. It’s a dream job for people who love being stuck in traffic.

This photo (right) shows the Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Complex 39 (click image for a larger photo). Could they have found a swampier piece of ground to build a Space Center? Doubt it.

I’ve been to Kennedy Space Center and I’ve stood beside the crawler-transporter, and it’s an impressive machine. It was built to haul Saturn 1B and Saturn 5 rockets to the launch pad. Each track on a crawler-transporter is taller than a man. There are eight tracks and each track has 57 shoes. Each shoe weighs 2,200 pounds.

At left: a crawler-transporter, which carries the Mobile Launcher Platform, which carries the Space Shuttle. (Click image for a larger photo.)

The crawler has 16 traction motors, powered by four 1,000 kW generators driven by two 2,750 horsepower diesel engines. Two 750 kW generators driven by two 1,065 horsepower engines are used for jacking, steering, lighting, and ventilating. Two 150 kW generators power the Mobile Launcher Platform. The crawler burns 125 U.S. gallons of diesel per mile.

We’ve spent billions of dollars to build up all this infrastructure; we’ve lost too many lives learning how to fly shuttles. And now what? We toss it away? We rely on other countries to get our astronauts to space?

Okay, whatever. We have to do what we have to do. But as someone once said, it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.

Tragedy in L.A.

I wrote this short essay 10 years ago, on June 20, 2001, for a website I had at that time. It still seems relevant.

As I write this, the TV news is telling the world about the death by drowning of a small child who was attending a pool party in Los Angeles. For a few minutes, at least, no one was watching the child. A few minutes is all it takes for a child to lose his life. Certainly, the death of a small child is a tragedy, and my heart goes out to the parents of that child. Yet it seems to me we are forgetting something important, or perhaps we are denying something important.  We are forgetting that we all are only imperfect human beings and not failsafe robots programmed for perfect operation. We are forgetting, too, that death is a part of life.

Our existence on Earth is brief and transitory. We are born, we live, we die. While we live, we know joy and we know pain.  Life is precarious. Our 21st century culture seeks to banish death, seeks to blame death on someone so that we can punish that someone. But children cannot be watched 24 - 7, and life has risks. Sometimes a tragedy is no one's fault. Sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy, the result of a confluence of events we could not control.

There was a time when a family stricken by cruel fate would seek out their spiritual advisor or find solace with family and friends. That time may now be a relic of the past. The parents of this child say they are consulting their attorney. Now, when one of life's tragedies overtakes us, our first thought, too often, is to find someone to blame, someone to sue, someone to punish. Our pain can cause us to strike out at others we perceive to be at fault, and we may not pause to consider that those others may be going through their own private suffering and regret.

Sometimes, of course, there really is someone to blame. Sometimes it really is appropriate to take someone to court. Sometimes. But all the laws and lawyers in the world will not eliminate the pain and suffering caused by life's accidents. That is the nature of our existence. Accepting this simple reality furthers healing; denying it, seeking someone or something to blame, delays healing and prolongs grief. For in denial, we are saying that accidents should not happen. We are saying that our world can and should be a risk-free world. And that means we are denying our reality and opting to live, instead, in a world that can never be.

Where Are You, Part 2

This is part 2 of a two-part post. Part 1 is the previous post, titled “Where Are You, Billie Jean?”

My high school classmates and I were not arrows fired from the bow of life, to arc gracefully through the days of our lives until we hit (or missed) our life’s goals. No, that would have been too poetic. We were buckshot fired from life’s scattergun. I was there and now I’m here, and it’s been the blink of an eye.

When I published my last post, Where Are You, Billie Jean?, I was satisfied with what I had written. It’s a true story; it has a beginning, middle, and end. It’s written about as well as I can write. It’s practically tied up with a bow. But my satisfaction lasted only a day before I developed a nagging feeling that it is incomplete – a story not quite finished.

My story ended with the question, “Where Are You, Billie Jean"?” With all the people-finding resources of the Internet available to me, why leave that question hanging? I decided to look for an answer to that question. If I can’t find Billie Jean, so be it. But I had to look. Call it due diligence. Call it finishing the story.

I fired up my browser and began my search. The search was like finding pieces of a puzzle. This piece fits with that piece; this other piece doesn’t fit with anything. Finally I had enough pieces to see a picture. I obtained a phone number and an address in South Carolina.

The phone number didn’t pan out. The number belonged to a horse breeding farm. I left a message, hoping it would reach Billie Jean, but I received no reply. That left me with the address, so I composed a letter. I composed it using my best non-stalkerish persona. I don’t need a restraining order barring me from the state of South Carolina. If I want to drive from Virginia to Florida, it would be a major hassle to go around the state of South Carolina.

Today I put the letter into the mail. I’ve done my part. Now the ball is in Billie Jean’s court. Or to be more accurate, the ball is in someone’s court. I hope the address is Billie Jean’s. I hope she will reply.

But either way, reply or no reply, I feel the story has an end now.

Where Are You, Billie Jean?

A million years ago when I was in high school, there was a girl in my grade level (I don’t think we shared any classes) named Billie Jean. She was a knockout. A babe, a looker, a stunner. A pretty, blond-haired fox. You get the idea. Now, keep in mind that I’m giving you her description as perceived by a shy, 17 year old boy. I didn’t have a crush on Billie Jean; she was too far out of my league for that. I may as well have dreamt of having my own atomic submarine. Billie Jean was a clear-skinned goddess of hotness and I was a lowly, cash-poor, acne-plagued teenage boy struggling both at home with an alcoholic parent and in the high school trenches with their buttoned-down cliques.

In my high school days, I was always looking for ways to make money – I mean, in addition to the meager amounts I made at after-school jobs. So when a beauty contest was held in the high school auditorium my senior year, I was there with my 35 mm camera and flash unit, and I took a picture of each girl as she walked down the runway. (Billie Jean was Miss Jaycee.) I could take only one picture of each girl; the flash took so long to recharge between pictures that it was barely possible to get even one photo. I took the camera home and developed the film and printed the photos in my basement (a hobby that brought brief respite from the conflict usually going on upstairs). Then I put the photos in cheap frames and knocked on doors where the girls lived, offering the parents a framed photo of their little darling on the runway at the beauty contest. I didn’t ask for a lot of money – I think it was five bucks for a framed 8 x 10 black & white photo. They usually bought the picture, though I don’t know if it was my fine photographic technique and darkroom artistry that prompted them to buy, or if it was simply that it creeped them out to think of a strange boy walking out of their house with a photo of their daughter in a swimsuit. I really hadn’t considered the creepiness factor, but it worked in my favor, monetarily speaking.

Graduation Day came and went and scattered my high school classmates in various directions near and far. I saw Billie Jean one more time, about eighteen months later. It was a chance encounter on a street in Richmond. She was talking with a couple of people, and I stopped briefly to say hello. I heard her say she was going to enlist in the Air Force.

I walked on, shocked. The Air Force? The flippin’ Air Force? This young woman who so clearly had big-screen Hollywood-esque beauty – beauty that needed, that demanded, to be exposed to an adoring world – was joining the Air Force? I could see her going to college to study acting. I could see her going to L.A. to become a starlet. But enlisting in the Air Force? It was like stashing the Venus de Milo in a closet. I was so disappointed.

I never saw Billie Jean again. Many years later, after my parents passed away, I was cleaning some clutter from their house and I found, amongst other old photos I had printed in my cellar darkroom, a picture of Billie Jean walking the runway at that beauty contest. Maybe her parents didn’t want to buy it; maybe I couldn’t catch them at home; maybe I couldn’t find her address. Or, quite possibly, they did buy a photo and this is an extra print. I often printed several copies of a photo using different exposure times or with different Polycontrast filters, to get the best print possible. Or – and I’m throwing this out as a remote possibility – maybe I made an extra print because she was a pretty girl and I was seventeen.

This week I learned a few facts about Billie Jean’s life. She retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. She has been married, apparently more than once. She worked for four years as a legislative aide in the South Carolina House of Representatives, and when she left, the House passed a Resolution to thank her and to recognize her as “an exceptional woman.” I found out she is an avid golfer and devoted horse owner with a love for the outdoors. She left South Carolina to begin the next chapter in her life in St. Louis, Missouri.

Why did she join the Air Force? Maybe she wanted adventure in her life. Maybe she wanted to get out of the little town where she lived and away from the mundane jobs that were available to her. Maybe her family didn’t have the money to send her to college and her choice was the Air Force or the kitchen at HoJo.

I don’t know her address, and I don’t know her last name now. But I bet she’d love to have this old photo of herself walking the runway in that beauty contest. Maybe she has grandkids who’d like to see what their grandmother looked like back in the day. I’d be happy to send the photo. But send it where? Where are you, Billie Jean?

Obama and Religion

Certain right-wing news organizations are still promoting the myth that President Obama is a secret Muslim. The reason they say he’s a secret Muslim, rather than a regular Muslim, is because he calls himself a Christian, attended a Christian church in Chicago for twenty years before he ran for President, was married by the Reverend of that church, and has never been spotted close to a mosque, much less inside one. At the National Prayer Breakfast he spoke about how his Christian faith has influenced his life. With so much appearance of being an ordinary Christian, he simply must be a secret Muslim … a very secret Muslim. Acting Christian is just a con. So they claim.

It so happens that I know part of the truth in this matter (who can ever know the whole truth of anything?), and I’m going to set the record straight. You read it on this blog first. Here it is: Obama is actually a Christian pretending to be a Muslim pretending to be a Christian. It’s a double con – kind of like that 1982 movie Victor Victoria in which Julie Andrews plays a struggling female soprano who pretends to be a man to get a job as a female impersonator. Now as I said, I don’t know the whole truth, so I admit it’s entirely possible that Obama is a Muslim pretending to be a Christian pretending to be a Muslim pretending to be a Christian. That would make it a double-reverse con.

I know what you’re thinking: the double-reverse con sounds stupid. It’s one con too far. I agree, it sounds pretty farfetched. But how about the double con? A Muslim pretends to be a Christian pretending to be a Muslim. Does that sound stupid, too? It does! Only in the movies would something like that work, and then not for long. We got rid of one layer of the con and it’s still too complicated.

Health Care Story: A Cautionary Tale

When I was 57, I didn’t have health insurance. I was healthy and I didn’t worry about insurance. One day I was working on my roof when suddenly I felt strange. I knew something was wrong with my heart. I dropped my tools and went inside my house and lay down. After an hour I felt no better, so I drove to the local hospital. Doctors diagnosed a dangerous heart rhythm called atrial fibrillation (a-fib). After spending a few hours on meds in the ER my heart was still in a-fib, so the ER doctor admitted me to the hospital. Untreated, a-fib can cause a stroke.

I spent the night hooked to an IV. The next morning my heart’s rhythm converted to a normal sinus rhythm and the meds were discontinued. My doctor kept me one more day for observation; she said she needed to make sure my heart was stable before I was released. That little adventure happened in 2004 and cost me almost ten thousand dollars. The hospital room cost a thousand bucks. The ER physicians sent me a bill. There were lab tests: chest X-ray, echocardiogram, blood tests. And there were specialists who analyzed the tests. For weeks afterward, every few days a new medical bill appeared in my mailbox. If the same thing happened to me today it would probably cost twenty thousand dollars. I put it on a credit card and I paid every penny of that debt.

I was talking to a friend who works at a hospital. She says her hospital gets a lot of low income people without health insurance. They come to the emergency room and complain that they have a headache, or their stomach hurts, or they sprained their ankle. Sometimes they call an ambulance to take them to the hospital. A lot of these people are regular visitors to the emergency room. My friend says, “They come in with a minor complaint and when we pull their record, it’s a stack of x-rays and CT images and lab tests this high.” Here she puts one hand three feet above the other, and says, “And that’s just the last ten years of records we keep! We look at their chart and find out they got a CT scan just last month and there was nothing wrong, the CT revealed nothing. But the doctor orders another CT scan.”

Who pays for this? Does Medicaid pay for it? Meaning, do our tax dollars pay for it? Does the hospital recoup its losses by charging everyone who pays their bill an even greater amount? Do insurance companies pass these higher bills onto employers and individuals by increasing their health insurance premiums? Somebody pays for all these services, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the low income people coming to the ER. I’m pretty sure it’s all the rest of us that pay. You may say, “I don’t pay because I never go to the doctor.” But the food you buy, the automobile you buy … everything you buy costs more. Because the people who grow the food or assemble the auto, if they have health insurance, are now more expensive workers. So the price of what they grow or make goes up.

Around the time I had my a-fib attack, I had to hire a plumber. I told him about my hospital adventure. Then he told me his story. He didn’t have health insurance, either. One day he became ill and had to enter the hospital. He had an unknown virus. The doctors gave him supportive therapy: an IV to keep him nourished and hydrated and maybe some meds. He lay in a hospital bed for three days and his bill came to thirty-five thousand dollars.

I started thinking what would happen if I was in a bad accident or had a serious illness and had to spend weeks in the hospital and perhaps have surgery, too. What would my medical bill look like? I realized it could easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars. There’s a reason many health insurance plans limit their lifetime benefits to a million dollars. It’s because a lot of people hit that million dollar mark and keep going.

After my trip to the hospital I decided it would be a good idea to have health insurance. So I set about trying to buy some. I applied to company A, to company B, to company C. No one wanted my business. I had pre-existing conditions. I had been in the hospital within the past year. My blood lipids were marginally high. One agent simply told me the truth, “I can’t write you a policy. No one can. You’re too old.”

In Virginia there is a law that says Anthem (Blue Cross Blue Shield) is insurer of last resort. Anthem has to offer everyone who applies some kind of health insurance product. So Anthem, after denying me a regular policy, offered me a plan in their high risk pool. It was expensive; Anthem had a market without competition. No other company had to offer me a policy. And it offered poor coverage. The insurance plan they offered me didn’t even meet Virginia’s minimum requirements for health insurance. But the lawmakers had given Anthem a loophole: Anthem’s health insurance plan did not have to meet the law’s minimum requirements as long as the company revealed to me that it didn’t.

My health insurance plan has a five thousand dollar deductible. At first the premiums were $443/month but they increased every year. After five years, the monthly premium is $927/month. Because of the high deductible, Anthem has never paid a penny of any medical bill of mine. On the other hand, over the last five years I have paid Anthem $46,119.

One time I had to go to the local hospital to get a CT scan. I presented my Anthem card, and I was told the scan would cost $1800 and that I had to pay half up front before I could get the scan. I felt like a second-class citizen, and in terms of health insurance I was. People with Medicaid breezed past that obstacle, while I got pulled aside to hear the words, “Show us the money.” I put away my Anthem card and pulled out the card they really wanted: my credit card. I paid the $900 down payment and got my scan, and then I went home and waited for the bill to arrive.

A final note about that CT incident: the hospital informed me that if I had not had insurance the scan would have cost just under $6000. You see, if you have no insurance your medical bills are much larger. If you have private insurance the bills are smaller. If you have Medicare or Medicaid and the hospital or doctor accepts it, the bills are even smaller.

To that ten thousand dollar hospital bill I mentioned earlier, add 5 years of doctor visits with the normal bumps in the road that happen as one gets older (CT, an ultrasound, blood work, meds) and I’m out-of-pocket $18,000 for health care. Add that to my Anthem premiums and I’ve spent about $64,000 on medical bills during the last five years. I had planned on replacing my 16 year old Jeep by now, but that’s just a nice dream.

What is Anthem like as an insurance provider? Near the end of the 12 month period during which they don’t cover pre-existing conditions, I went to my doctor. I had several things to discuss with her but the one she coded as primary was a condition that was pre-existing. (I hadn’t gone to her about that issue, I merely took the opportunity of being in her office to ask a question.) Anthem didn’t cover the visit because to Anthem it was for a pre-existing condition. I wrote Anthem a letter to point out that my doctor visit had been just a few days from the end of the 12 month exclusionary period, and I asked if they could give me a break and cover the visit. I would still be paying 100% of the bill and they would still be paying nothing. But if they covered it, I would pay less. They refused to cover the visit. Technically, they didn’t have to cover it. But it would have made for good customer relations. Especially as Anthem had just given their then-CEO, Larry Glasscock, a $42.5 million dollar cash-and-stock bonus.

Having Anthem high-risk insurance has taught me one thing, though. If I can handle a $927/month Anthem premium while paying 100% of my medical bills, I think I can handle a $110/month Medicare premium and a 20% co-pay.

Is It Safe?

Did you see the 1976 movie Marathon Man? There’s a rather famous bit of dialogue between Szell, played by Laurence Olivier, and Babe, played by Dustin Hoffman.

Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: You're talking to me?
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Is what safe?
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.
Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.

Americans seem to have become obsessed with safety. I blame it on the lawyers and all those frivolous lawsuits. I read a story years ago … and this is the best I remember it, and I may have a detail wrong, but the gist of the story is true … it was about a man who was cleaning his pool with one of those long metal-handled pool skimmer nets, and while skimming leaves out of his pool a bird perched on an overhead electric wire pooped on his pool deck, and this angered the man and he swatted at the bird with his skimmer net. The skimmer net hit the electric wire, electricity came down the metal handle, and he was electrocuted. As a result his wife hired a lawyer and sued the manufacturer of the skimmer net. Her lawyer said that the manufacturer of the skimmer net failed to warn buyers not to stick the metal net into an electric wire. Really. I couldn’t make that up.

There’s an automobile commercial running on TV now where a narrator tells us that at 190 mph the air hitting the windshield will lift the wipers off the glass. Then he asks us, “Should we build a slower car or a better wiper?” When I hear this question I want to shout at the TV, “For God’s sake, build a slower car! ” I say that because I care about safety. I don’t want anyone driving 190 mph on the road I’m on.

However, there’s a difference between caring about safety and obsessing over it.

Thirty one distinguished scientists from fourteen countries reviewed the data and answered the question, “Do cell phones cause brain cancer?”

After great consideration and much shuffling of numbers on spreadsheets, their distinguished answer was: “Maybe. Maybe not.”

There you go. Case settled.

There are other things that we do know cause cancer. There are things that may be even worse for our health than cell phones. Like, processed meat. Bacon. Pastrami. Pepperoni. In fact, all processed meats increase the risk of getting colon cancer. The meat isn’t the problem; scientists say the problem is the sodium nitrite that’s added to the meat.

What else causes cancer? Pickles. In fact, it seems that all pickled vegetables increase the risk of getting esophageal cancer. Scientists believe the fungi responsible for fermentation are releasing carcinogens.

So ordering a hot pastrami on rye with dill pickle on the side amounts to playing Russian roulette with your health. Who knew? As for using a mobile phone to order a pepperoni pizza, you might as well step in front of a bus. Don’t do it!

If you really want to be safe, don’t forget about background radiation coming from rocks and soil. You might want to leave earth altogether and live in space. Oh, but then there are cosmic rays and solar flares to worry about. I guess there’s no escaping the fact: no matter how safe we are, we’re all going to die.

I considered all these facts as I made my breakfast this morning. I considered, also, that my weight is too high and my cholesterol is too high. And then I added an extra slice of bacon to my bacon-and-egg sandwich. As I sat down to eat, I switched on my cell phone. As the Internet philosopher CyberDave has been known to utter from time to time: “Fuckum.”

Eureka

My house was buzzed today by a Zeppelin named Eureka. When I saw it I thought it was a blimp, although it looked bigger and sleeker than blimps I have seen. According to the Farmers Airship website, Eureka is “one of only two flying commercially in the world, she is the only Zeppelin in the Americas and is owned and operated by Airship Ventures.” You can buy a ticket to ride on Eureka. The airship’s schedule is posted on this website: www.farmersairship.com.

A blimp is a non-rigid airship that keeps its shape by internal overpressure. A Zeppelin is a rigid airship; its shape is determined by an internal frame. I believe the Eureka is actually a semi-rigid and therefore not strictly a Zeppelin. The semi-rigid Zeppelins are called Zeppelin NT (New Technology) airships.



It looked like it was going to pass right by, but when I went out into the yard it turned and flew toward my house.


After flying a loop around the local shopping center, Eureka motored away to the southwest toward Petersburg and Dinwiddie County. Sayanora, Zeppelin. Happy travels.
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Ride along with a local news reporter. Full-screen mode is available.