Checked that box...

According to the Associated Press:

RAVENNA, Mich. - A Michigan man who bowled his first perfect game immediately collapsed in the bowling alley and died.

Don Doane belonged to the same team at a bowling alley for 45 years.

On Oct. 16 at Ravenna Bowl, he scored a perfect 300.

As he was being congratulated by his teammates, local television reports said Doane collapsed on the floor.

The 62-year-old was taken to a local hospital but could not be saved. A medical examiner later determined that a heart attack killed Doane.

Now I don't want to jump to conclusions, but perhaps, just maybe, Doane might have thought of doing something other than spending the last 45 years in a bowling ally? Although, those 10 Xs will look mighty good on the headstone.

At least his final resting place won't be the "Tomb of the Unknown Bowler."

I Fought the Law...

Just so everyone's on the same page, there's a little thing called Moore's Law stating computer processing power doubles roughly every two years. That is to say, chip companies can now jam twice as many transistors into a specific space than they could two years ago.

While Moore's Law usually applies to processing power, I had my own little experience with it this week in terms of storage capacity. This happened when I realized a Word document I'd been thinking about was actually stored on Opus, my older, but incredibly faithful Macintosh Power PC 7500. (He's named after the penguin in Bloom County. There's a pretty good likeness of Opus here if you're interested.) This was my first computer and, when I bought him in December 1995, he was the most kick-ass computer on the ninth floor of Morrison Hall. I was kicking all kinds of ass at Marathon and Marathon II.

Anyway, to get to the point, as I was strolling down a digital memory lane and digging around on that old 1G drive, I discovered there was a lot more stuff there than I actually remembered. Letters and emails and journals and notes I'd taken covering this story and that. Now that I knew it was there, I wanted to save them all like a PETA member protecting baby harp seals.

Here's where Moore enters and the problem arises (again, Moore's applies to processing, not storage, but who really cares?) The venerable old Mac has, as I said, a 1G drive. Sitting at the other end of my desk, next to Opus' illegitimate Gateway son, Evil Opus, is Milo Bloom, a 250 gig external drive (named after another Bloom County character), and the ultimate destination of all the digital crap I'm unwilling to part with like some folks and their shoes. Figuring seven doublings during the 13 years since I bought it (I'm rounding up), that 1G becomes 128G, just one doubling short of actual reality.

Now, you may not think a 1G drive is very big, to tell you the truth, my iPod Shuffle (Little Opus) has the same capacity. But here's where I ran into my fight with technology. There were no CD burners built into computers in 1995 and, following a horrific and tragic crash about eight years ago, old Opus lost some of his marbles and no longer has a program to interact with the Interwebs.

So, without a burner in the drive bay, I was left with nothing but 3.5-inch disks (in case you forgot what they look like) to move everything from one computer to the other.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to move a couple hundred text documents and photos 1.4 megabytes at a time?

Gotta love that technology.

10 or .10?

Is perfect? Or just a tenth of a percent of perfection?

NASA announced some good news today, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in action and sending cool pictures back to Earth again.

The above pic, which they're calling "a perfect 10" was the first released after engineers convinced the orbiting spyglass to switch to its back-up data transmission channel last week.

The reason for the name? Well, if you look closely, the galaxy on the left looks kinda like a "1" and the galaxy on the right looks a "0." Put them together and you've got a 10.

But I'm thinking if you take the really bright star or galaxy on the far left into account, the image is just a .10.

Don't get me wrong, it's a cool picture and I'm rooting for the guys heading there early next year for a delayed repair job (they're bringing up parts to fix the problem that shut it down in September). Once everything is shipshape, the Hubble is expected to keep working and sending us beautiful pictures for another five or so years until 2013 or even longer.

It's funny how something that was once a joke is now one of the most valuable scientific instruments ever conceived by man. Me? I think they should keep fixing it for as long as possible.

Not as Good as Dancing With Matt, but...

We all remember the video of Matt Harding, who's in Singapore according to his Web site, dancing his ass off all around the world. It was sweet, hopeful and basically cheered your heart. The music is pretty cool as well.

This link to the Atlantic does almost the same thing. It'll make your day a little bit brighter.

The video, posted on Andrew Sullivan's "The Daily Dish," is titled, "My Dogs greeting me after returning from 14 months in Iraq." As Sullivan writes, "God bless and save all of those defending us abroad. And their dogs waiting for them patiently at home."

For those of you who are dog owners, you know the joy this guy and his two friends are feeling. If you don't own a dog, like me, well it's still pretty clear.

A Thousand Words

A friend of mine passed this along to me and it's so funny I just had to share it with y'all. For those of you unfamiliar with the many and varied camouflage utility uniforms of the American military, the guy on the left is a Marine captain.

Now, I'm not saying there aren't Marines who fit the wide profile of the soldier in the picture. In fact, I had a company commander considerably larger than that guy, but he had a heart condition and was eventually medically retired.

I'm thinking if you're a guy and your work-out T-shirt says "ArmY" because you've grown a pair of man boobs like Meatloaf in "Fight Club," you might want to think about spending a little more time in the gym and a little less in the chow hall.

Time to Pay Up

I was amused by the bottom grafs of a Bloomberg story on the conviction of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. It pointed out the irony of how even though they're not represented in the Senate, 12 District voters may have just decided if the Democrats will have the 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in that chamber the party so desperately desires.

Stevens, 84, like other long-serving senators, was wildly popular in his home state. During his 40 years in the Senate (he's the longest serving R in the Senate), he brought home the bacon and made sure his tiny home state (population-wise) got every penny it could, whether it needed it or not.

Like any powerful person who's been corrupted, he apparently felt he was above the law. The hubris of his excuses is laughable.

"I paid every bill I was sent," Stevens said, trying to justify the pittance he paid for the massive renovations done to his house. "It was a loan," was his way of describing the presence of the vibrating chair he received.

Does he really think we're that stupid?

Today (yesterday, actually) is a great day for the District. Should Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich defeat Stevens next Tuesday, not only will he represent the 683,478 residents of Alaska, he'll definitely owe those 12 District residents and, by extension, their 588,280 neighbors, for getting him elected.

Not that he'll come through, of course. Begich, like Stevens before him, is first and foremost a politician and politicians have no loyalty.

More than the sum of its parts

While I try not to go back and revisit topics, I'm going to make an exception here. Every time I read an article in the paper or see one on TV about California's Proposition 8 my blood pressure goes up a point or 40.

With hopefully eight of the shortest days ever recorded in the history of mankind to go before the election next Tuesday, the bullshit in the Golden State is getting deep.

Like I said last week, I don't have a vote on this issue and I only have a few friends who do, and I'm pretty sure all of them are voting "no." But if you know anyone who does vote in California, I'd urge you to give 'em a call and a nudge in the right direction.

Or, rather, not the right direction, but the correct direction.

Here's a little sample of the rhetoric being used in support of an amendment to another state's constitution to codify discrimination:

“It’s more important than the presidential election. We’ve picked bad presidents before, and we’ve survived as a nation. But we will not survive if we lose the institution of marriage,”

This quote in the NYT's story is from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobby based here in Washington. Gay marriage will bring down America, eh? I'm pretty sure if we survived the Soviet threat during the 40+ years of the Cold War, and Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan during World War II, we'll learn to adapt.

The scary part of the NYT article is how the proponents of Prop 8 are casting the fight in terms of freedom of religion and hate speech. Supporters claim if they fail, churches and pastors across the state will be forced to perform gay marriages. To back this up they've brought in Ake Green, a preacher from Sweden, who spent a month in jail after running afoul of his country's hate speech laws when he gave a sermon denouncing homosexuality.

Now, if for a moment I thought the failure of Prop 8 would in any way trample on someone's freedom or religion or speech, I would be in the vanguard of those fighting against it. But it doesn't and won't. As the article stated Catholic churches haven't been forced to marry divorcees and rabbis don't have to do interfaith weddings if they don't want to. Prop 8 won't create a protected class, all it will do is allow people who love one another to claim the same government-sponsored benefits everyone else is eligible for in California .

Unlike some European countries, we don't have laws in this country against hate speech. There are hate crime laws (which I'm a little iffy on, personally), but you have to combine thoughts and speech with criminal action for them to apply.

Just like the Illinois Nazis were allowed to march in Skokie, in America you're free to to out and stand on whatever soapbox you like and announce to the whole wide world you hate fags and kikes and niggers and spics and pollacks and micks and wops and chinks and wogs and crackers and Yankees and papists and towel heads and whoever the Hell else annoys you. All you risk is the same thing the suburban Chicago Nazis risked: an ass kicking of cosmic proportions that takes place in front of a cheering audience and, perhaps, temporarily indifferent police officers.

For those of you whose jaws are still hanging open, yeah, I really did use all those nasty words. Why? Because there are people out there who do use them to hurt, many of them are the same ones who were sure that letting blacks go to the same schools and vote was sure to be the end of this country. And we all know how that worked out so far.

The quickest and surest way to bring down this country is not gay marriage. The quickest and surest way is when one segment of the population is allowed to use the democratic process to take rights away from another segment.

America is the strongest country in the world because of our differences, not in spite of them. Our differences are, in fact, what give We The People our power.