The winner by a landslide is Kanyé West. Here he is on his triumphant world tour, sharing the magic of his butt-hurt whineyness with the University of Texas and their fans.
“Yo Mark Ingram, I’m happy for you and Ima let you finish… but Texas is the best team of all time. Of all TIME!”
Look, since that last post, my life has been … rococo. Rococo, as in filled with intricate detail. Lately, a lot of sad.
Bad stuff: our twins. A week before Thanksgiving, all is on schedule for a late Nov, early Dec. delivery. Both babies are healthy, appropriately sized on ultrasound, and Siddhary is doing well. Four days later, on Tuesday, one baby has no heartbeat. We do a C-section immediately and save the other baby - Indigo Phoebe Olsen, who is doing fine. We don’t know what happened to the other baby, Scarlet. Same weight, alive four days earlier, no sign of trauma or illness or cord mishap, nothing. Mystery. We will always miss Scarlet. Honestly, that alone is enough to put me into a shell and to not even think about updating this page.
Less than a week later, my grandfather died. Robert C. Olsen (the original, none of your cut-rate sequels). Obviously I’m named after him (and my dad). I could write (and have written) pages about what a great guy he was, great grandfather, and how much he and Grandma both meant to me… but you aren’t here to read that, I’m guessing. Suffice to say that he was close and that it really hurt.
All of this on top of my one and only mother having major cancer de-bulking surgery about the same time. It’s just body blow after body blow around here. Losing Scarlet still hurts worse than anything has ever hurt me before. This last couple of months have been really hard, and unfortunately having the best Bama team ever doesn’t really compensate for losing my Scarlet. I’d gladly watch ‘em go 0-12 just to get a chance to hold her and tell her hello…
… and life moves on, eventually. It’s hard. And even talking about it is hard. There was a guy on one of the SEC forums who announced the birth of his twin girls, right after the BCSMNCG - and I just couldn’t say a thing to him. What would I say? How do I talk to the exhausted mom of new triplets? I don’t want to rain on their parade, so I keep going and don’t talk about it. Violet gets sad sometimes about baby Scarlet; we tell her it’s OK to be sad, and we are very fortunate to have baby Indigo, and she accepts that. Must be nice to be four years old. I don’t know what we’re going to tell Indy. I think I’d freak right out if I was told I had a twin who died at birth.
We still have to do our Christmas shopping and gift manufacture. We basically just took the month of December off. Siddy’s not going back to work, I hated what that job did to her and her job doesn’t really pay enough to cover daycare for both girls anyway. Would have been even worse with twins. I’d have been fine with it, though.
But you know, my life isn’t JUST the sad shit. Despite being a Gator in terms of geography and in terms of awarded degrees, I love Alabama football more than any other team in any other sport. And there haven’t been many better seasons in which to be a Bama fan. It makes me a bit of an outcast at work (where we almost all have degrees from UF) but beating the Gators in the SECCG was as rewarding as any game I’ve seen in years. I’m still very bummed about Colt McCoy going down so early in the BCSMNCG, but the victory is sweet and stays crispy in milk. 14-0, SEC Champs over Gators, National Champs over Longhorns (and first ever victory over ‘em), first Heisman in Alabama history, most All-America selections by one team ever, most rushing yards for the season, most single-game rushing yards at Bryant-Denny… I’m sure there’s more, but this is easily the most-accomplished and most decorated Alabama squad ever. Thank you, coach Saban.
My University of South Alabama Jaguars have finally gotten a football team; I went to their first game, a solid victory over Hargrave Military Academy. Hey, first game isn’t going to be against Notre Dame, you know? But they played and beat all the teams they had on their schedule this year, just like Boise State, so I’m going to rank USA #3. Take that, Broncos.
As usual, there are recent photos at gallery.me.com/rco3 . Always interested in hearing what you think about any of those photos, if one causes you to think something.
Random droppings and Irreverent, forsooth!
TeamSpeedKills, an SEC sports blog on SBNation, posted a roundup of yesterday’s news that included both mention of the passing of the University of Georgia’s bulldawg mascot, UGA VII, and (further down the same page) mention of some foolish-sounding title of a Klansman. I didn’t follow the link to see what it was about, I refuse to give such people the attention they crave - but TSK, it should be pointed out, linked to it with specific derision in mind. It occurs to me that this is the South: a study in contrasts. We all care that a dawg died, even though it was the mascot of a team that most of us don’t like; but any news about some group of racist assholes who have been responsible for the murders of hundreds and thousands of human beings? That’s just business as usual.
Well, screw that.
There really isn’t anything else to say. I’m no Georgia fan, but I’d rather lose every single human being* who has even worn a Klan nightgown** than to lose a single UGA. I hope there are plenty of slow kitties there in heaven for you, UGA VII.
Next post will be something light and fluffy again, butterflies and rainbow and pretty pictures of busy little bees or something else. Perhaps I’ll talk about who I’d rather have been on that plane that Stevie Ray… there’s plenty of former guitarists who are now just taking up chart space.
* benefit of the doubt
** Sadly, we already lost Cleavon Little, but Gene Wilder can stay. Blazing Saddles doesn’t count. I guess Harold and Kumar probably don’t, either.
I took a bunch of photos of itsy-bitsy flowers in our front yard. Of course, we all know what comes with flowers, don’t we? Bugs! There were butterflies, moths, honeybees, and ants. There was also a lot of dust on my sensor, I know - and I’m too lazy to have cleaned it up yet. I know.
Other photography news: I finally cashed in my D90 fund, which would have gone toward buying a D90 if I were going to buy a D90 but instead went toward adding three lenses and two extension tubes to my Mamiya collection. I now proudly sport the 65mm, the 50mm ‘C’, the 127mm, and the 140mm Macro ‘C’, plus both the #1 and #2 extension tubes (45mm and 82mm, respectively). The 50 is the most beat up, and is still a remarkably solid and massive lens. The 65mm and 127mm both have more wear than the average Nikon lens ever sees, and the 140mm looks nearly new. None of these lenses look as if they have been affected AT ALL by this wear. Both extension tubes look as if they were brand flippin’ new, man.
Best of all, though, is that there was almost enough money in the D90 fund to get an Epson V750 flatbed scanner; close enough that I went ahead and bought it. This thing won’t replace a drum scanner for quality, but it’s about on par with a dedicated film scanner like a Nikon LS4000; I think that’s the model used in the comparison review I saw. The Nikon might be a bit better, but it’s 3x the price and won’t handle larger than 120 film. Or opaque documents, either.
Of course, UPS saw fit to throw a delivery exception for my Saturday scanner delivery - my address doesn’t exist. Ironically, it existed the previous day when I had TWO packages delivered - from UPS. I’m still waiting to see if they try to deliver it today, or if I have to pick it up. The folks on the phone can’t tell me. Nice.
I went traipsing around Midtown Mobile last weekend. Eventually I got swept up into a crowd and we rallied at a footsball game.
This is where we lived. It’s where this site got its name.
I also went to the very first football game played by the University of South Alabama Jaguars. They won. I may talk more about it later.
Clicking on either one of those images will take you to my MobileMe gallery for that set of images. Copyright ©2009 Rob Olsen. All rights reserved. Happy to sell ‘em, though.
OK, let’s say I weigh 220 lbs. I don’t, but it makes the calculations easier. Engineers are kinda like physics students sometimes. Let’s further assume that my mean body density is equal to that of water - again, an approximation. If I thus weigh 100 kg then I have a total volume of 100 liters, or about 0.1 cubic meter, or about 100,000 cc’s of pure, unadulterated Rob. And some butter. Now, let’s go a bit off-track.
About how much volume does my pinky finger occupy?
Wow, it just got quiet in here.
Well, I’m comfortable with the approximation that my right pinky finger is about 1 square centimeter in cross-section and about six centimeters long, totaling about six cubic centimeters. It’s not the size that matters, anyway. Trust me. So, anyway, I have a total body volume of 100,000 cc’s and a right pinky finger of 6 cubic centimeters’ displacement. That pinky finger occupies, therefore, approximately 1 / 16,666th of my total volume. If one were to say that I had a certain amount of something (virility, intelligence, charisma, etc) in my pinky, it would be implied that my entire body carried about 16,667 times that much of that stuff (e.g., butter). Hm.
Now, let’s go one step further down the path of ridiculosity. What if we needed a standard unit of mojo? We would logically equate it to the amount of mojo in a normal human male, similar to the way in which a unit of power is referred to as “horsepower (hp)” and is intended to be on the order of the amount of power that could be generated by the average horse, presumably so as to give the average cultured gentleman a way to innately understand that amount of power in a way that the dry sobriquet “watts (w)” does not convey; after all, who knows how well the esteemed James Watt after whom the aforementioned unit is named could deliver the goods in terms of pulling plows, hauling cotton, or accelerating one’s own bulk around an oval track whilst carrying (CARRYING!) a human rider? Certainly not I. So, let us assume that the average human male has about one such unit of mojo. What shall we name it? The “dude (du)”? Tigger, please. No, like the Tesla, you name it after he who is most closely associated with the referenced unit - Austin Powers. I hereby respectfully submit that the unit of “mojo” should henceforth be known as the “Austin (Au)”.
It is clear that inasmuch as Austin Powers has as much mojo in his little finger as the average man ‘as in his entire body, we can also say quite accurately that the “Austin” is the amount of mojo in Austin Powers’ pinky finger. This gives us a very accurate standard reference, much as time is referenced to wavelengths of light (or vice versa) and {insert standard political jab here} (or Vice President - har, har, har!)
Note also that it can be predicted that the total amount of Austin Powers’ mojó is about 16,667 kAu, but actual field experiments continue to return exact measurements of 16,969 kAu. Yeah, baby!
Wardenclyffe, in case anyone is wondering, is the tower/facility that Nikolai Tesla had constructed as his laboratory and to explore his theories about radio, electromagnetic waves, and wireless power transmission. Construction was halted when his main financier, J.P. Morgan, famously asked (paraphrased) how giving away power was going to make him any money. The facility was never completed, and was foreclosed upon in 1915. It was used to make photographic paper from the 40’s through 1992, and now is available to anyone with about $1.6 in spare change.
What I find fascinating is the verbage Tesla used when describing the amazing benefits that his technology would make available. Check it: “As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction.” (Wikipedia)
Wow. That all sounds familiar. Of course, in 1908 that was pure science fiction. Now it sounds boringly common.
So where did Tesla get all of this? Dude invented AC power, the synchronous motor, radio, the ‘AND’ gate, and SO much more. He was an early experimenter with X rays. He accurately predicted the uses to which his technologies would be put, VERY accurately. Prescient? Or…
Well, if I’ve ever heard of ANYONE who might reasonably be expected to be a time traveler, who else would it be? Perhaps Leo da Vinci, or Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss… but my money is on Tesla. Folks, he knew how to do things that no one else did - technologically, he was decades ahead of everyone else, in multiple fields. He made outlandish predictions of how things would work, and was often correct. What if, when he faced Morgan and was denied the opportunity to build his global power distribution system, he was carrying the certain knowledge that this would be done in the future and WOULD work - wouldn’t he just realize that he was facing ignorance born of the times he lived in, and just walk away? That’s exactly what I hear happened.
Yeah, OK, I’m starting to sound a bit Spider Robinson here, but the theory does have a certain internal consistency. I think I’d go crazy if I were trapped in 1900, too.
and a big lens to snare them with. Har har har! {evil laugh}
I love lens extension tubes. You lose long distance focus, but the things you can do close up, whew! I took that photo with my Nikon D40, using my Nikon E-series 70-210 Macro and about 2″ of extension. It gets closer, actually.
… my mom’s just registered on this site! Shhhh!
Violet had a GREAT Fourth of July weekend. First Grammy and Pappy in town for a few days. Then Grandmama and Boompa showed up, and Violet got a birthday cake and presents with Grammy, Pappy, Grandmama, and Boompa all there and singing. What a lucky girl! She got to spend entire days with Grandmama and Boompa while Mommy and Daddy went to work, too.
A happy girl and her female ancestors.
She blew ‘em out, too!
Then Grandmama played dolls with Violet. What a great visit!
Then Mommy, Daddy, Grandmama, Boompa, and Violet all went to Disney. I’ve already posted pics from that trip further down the page.
Sure was nice having my Mom and Jon down for a visit. Didn’t seem at all like the same Mama I saw in Penna last September. Back then, I wouldn’t have dreamed that we’d be able to spend the whole day walking around the Magic Kingdom together. I will treasure that day forever, and I expect Violet will as well.
My 150th site member just registered! I am now HUGE!
Of course, that 150th member was a ‘bot. Just here to spam my comments section. Not enough clever enough to get past the email response. Actual users accounts? Eight. Eight WONDERFUL, clever people. Number of useless spambot attempters? 140. (Laurie, the other two are me and my admin account.)
