O Henry, 1996 - 2008.

O Henry passed away last week. She had cancer, and passed peacefully.

She started out as a stray, and was adopted by my mother by the time she was one year old or so. She made the move from Florida to Virginia about two and a half years ago, when she and Sami came up here.

She was a very sweet cat, always sleeping on my bed at night. She was also the matriarch of the household, keeping all the other cats in line, usually by grabbing them and licking their heads until they submitted. What was great fun was when she'd approach me while I was sleeping and lick my head. Not sure I ever submitted to her authority, exactly, but I'm sure there are those who will tell you that I have been very thoroughly trained to do all of my cats' bidding, including hers.

Tarred, but not feathered.

Sometimes, you just don't need an alarm clock.

This morning, for instance. This thing was in front of my house at 7 o'clock. Sounding very much like a cross between a jet engine and the propane torch for a hot-air balloon. More than enough to stir me from my slumber.

And it wasn't alone: its twin brother was right behind it, even louder.

I suppose I shouldn't complain too much: they'll only resurface the street once every 15 years or so, and I guess I can give up some sleep for that. If only they hadn't appeared Tuesday morning before 6:45 to resurface the other streets around me....

Not around for long.

Joss Whedon strikes again. It's free until Sunday, which is when it gets taken off the web and you'll only be able to see it by paying for it - download or DVD or something.

Very funny.

Seeing things you really don't want to.

Sometimes, you just can't help seeing things that you really would prefer not to have seen.

As an example, although not the one I really had in mind, there was the guy I saw this afternoon, out in the park outside my office. He was wearing running shorts. And black loafers. And carrying a briefcase. And on first glance, it looked like he was wearing mohair pajamas. (On second glance? Not so much.)

No, what I was really thinking of was the sight out on my porch yesterday evening. Awww! Isn't it cute! There's a kitten! Solid black, looked to be about 8 weeks old. When I went to open the door to greet it, it bolted: off the deck to the ground, and on a beeline for the back of the yard. And as it loped across the yard, it was followed by two other kittens, about the same age. And they disappeared into the brush along the back fence.

Man. Does this mean I'm now responsible for yet another litter of kittens? Won't be quite as easy as getting them before they're born, or before their eyes are open.

Luckily, I spotted my neighbor and asked him about them. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Those three have been hanging out at the house across the street, and the woman who lives there feeds them."

Great! I don't have to start a new class at John's Home for Wayward Cats.

2008 Folklife Festival

I went up to the Folklife Festival yesterday. Beautiful day for it, and relatively small crowds. It occurs to me that it's probably been 20 years since I've been to the Festival, so why not go this year?

The subjects for this year's Folklife Festival are Bhutan, Texas, and NASA. Yes, an eccentric combination. I was most interested in NASA, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.

The NASA exhibits were interesting: lots of educational stuff and things for kids to do-and-learn. And they had a lot of exhibits devoted to upcoming projects - the space telescope that will follow Hubble, and the manned space system that will follow the Shuttle had a lot of material.

The Bhutan exhibits were exotic: they had a replica of a temple that you could walk through, an area where a sand mandala was being made, and a large stage with native music and dancers.

The Texas exhibits were eccentric. One of the largest ones dealt with Texas wine ("Fifth largest wine producer in the country!" - Really? I'd have thought that California, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Virginia all produce more. They certainly all produce better, in my experience.) I listened to 20 minutes worth of an interview with a woman who has had a winery in Texas for over 20 years; kind of cool. There was a Texas cooking exhibit - Barbecue, Tex-Mex and whatnot. Two different music stages, with a changing assortment of tunes.

One of the draws to the Festival is always the food, and this year's didn't disappoint. Sure, you could get Texas barbecue (whether or not authentic is a different issue). But the coolest Texas cuisine was the Texas Noodle House, representing the large Vietnamese contingent in Texas.

All in all, a lot of fun. The price was certainly right, too. (Free, that is, except for the food.) And afterwards, you can always go to the Air and Space Museum and touch the moon rock.

Spam, spam, beautiful spam.

I always enjoy looking at my browser's spam folder before I delete it. On rare occasion, there's something that's actually supposed to have come to me. But there's always the unintentionally hilarious email that's intended to grab my attention.

The one I've been getting lately - about every third day for the past month - has a subject line of "what a stupid face you have here johnstoner."

Well, that surely gets my attention. Not entirely sure what it's selling, unless there's some sort of new profile enhancement scam of which I am unaware. And not sure it's doing a really good job of making me want to open the email to find out.

Fellowship of the Ring, the concert

I went out to Wolf Trap a couple of weeks ago, to see The Fellowship of the Ring. Yes, an outdoor showing of the movie, digitally projected in HD-quality. But this was a special print – it didn’t have the score. Sure, it had the dialogue and any sound effects. But the score itself was performed by an orchestra. And a 200-person choir, and soloists.

They billed it as the “world premiere” of a live performance of the score done to the movie. (The score has been separately performed as a concert, but never with the movie.)

I’ve been to three or four other orchestral performances of scores at movies, notably the Abel Gance 1927 silent film masterpiece Napoleon, but this was the first time I’ve been to a live performance of a score to a sound movie.

Absolutely amazing. Really shows how much a score adds to a movie, and having it live made it almost 3-D in character. The orchestra had some extra instruments, called for by the score: Japanese and African war drums, anvils, metal plates suspended by wire. And the soloists were superb.

I could not identify any instances where the score was off from where it was supposed to be, or any errors. There were certainly times where the volume was louder or softer compared to the dialog than it had been in the movie, but hey! It’s a live performance!

Really a lot of fun. Only drawbacks were that (a) they had to wait until dark to start the movie (hello! It’s a movie), so it started at 8:30 and, with an intermission, ended after midnight, kind of late for a school night, and (b) it was mighty cold. Probably 50 degrees when the movie started, and certainly less than that when it ended, and it felt chillier when the wind blew through the house. As I hadn’t really thought about the weather when I started out from Richmond, where it had been in the high 70’s in the afternoon, I was really happy that I had not cleaned my car out for the trip, so I still had a sweatshirt in the trunk and a down jacket in the back seat. I put them to good use at the movie. (And, of course, if they had waited until later in the year for the performance, when it would have been warmer, they’d have also had to wait until even later in the evening for it to get dark. Late May and done shortly after midnight is much better than mid-July and ending after 1 a.m.)

Where's Waldo - Virginia State Bird edition.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend was visiting from the Pacific Northwest, and noted that it was a treat to see cardinals, because there aren’t any out there. So I felt obliged to take a photo of one to memorialize the occasion.

It turns out that it’s a lot more difficult than I thought to center the camera on a really small object when the bright sun is shining directly on the viewing screen you’re using to aim the camera with. I was convinced that this photo was centered on the bird. Apparently not.

Wine festival report.

Went to the annual James River wine festival last weekend. Located nowhere near the James River, naturally. (A decade ago, it was on an island downtown in the middle of the river. No idea why it’s not there: can’t possibly be the ambiance of this empty field next to parking lots in a nondescript office complex.)

The winery I usually pour for at this festival chose not to attend this year, so I got to go to the festival as a civilian for the first time in three or four years.

An okay festival – 20 wineries, ranging from the very good (e.g., Barboursville) to the … well, let’s be charitable and call them “new and still figuring out what they’re doing” and not name them here. Even though some of them aren’t remotely new. But the real reason I go to this festival (as a civilian) is that it’s only about 6 miles from my home.

Beautiful weather on Saturday: mid 80s, not a cloud in the sky. Somewhat crummy weather on Sunday: low 60s, completely overcast, sometimes windy, and constantly threatening to rain. And sometimes actually raining.

Which day did I attend the festival? Sunday, of course. Far fewer people, which means shorter lines or no lines at all, the opportunity to try more wines during your stay there, and the chance to chat at length with winemakers.

Didn’t really discover anything terribly new and exciting. Fabbioli Cellars had some good reds, of which their Bordeaux blend was the best. And clearly very few of the wineries making a Traminette (hybrid of Gewurztraminer and Riesling) know how to make it well. (One or two wineries had good ones there, so it can be done, but most of the others had an odd metallic finish that ruined any enjoyment of the wine.)

Charlotte airport wine bar.

On my various trips to Florida over the past few months, I’ve connected a couple of times in the Charlotte airport. While waiting for my connection (or, usually, for its replacement), I’ve had plenty of time to wait.

At some point I looked at the airport diagram, and discovered that Carolina Beer was listed, with a pub “under construction.” Well, no telling how old the listing was, so maybe by now they have finished construction and had opened it. If so, I was going to have an Endo Pale Ale or two before my next flight. Purely for medicinal purposes, you understand.

The pub was located a fair distance away: a long walk up the terminal arm I was in, across the main hub of the airport, and all the way out a different terminal arm. (Nothing wrong with a long walk. I had plenty of time before my connection.) Alas, when I got there, I discovered that the pub was, in fact, still under construction. (Well, as “under construction” as it could be, given that there were no workers to be seen anywhere around it. In any event, it was both unfinished and not open, sufficient to dash my hopes.)

Heading back to the terminal where my flight was getting more and more delayed, I spotted this wine bar. Well, okay: a glass or two of medicinal New Zealand sauvignon blanc or Oregon pinot noir would probably hit the spot.

As I walk into the bar, though, I realize I’m not going to get either one of those: this wine bar has only wines from the Yadkin Valley viticultural region of North Carolina.

Fine. I’m willing to try some North Carolina wines. You could do a tasting – six wines for, I don’t recall, four bucks. And they had around 25 wines to choose from: Ten to twelve each of reds and whites, a couple of dessert wines, and a “port.” I decided to pass on the reds and dessert wines, and just tried some whites. Three each of viognier and riesling, as I recall. The viogniers were forgettable: not bad, but there was also nothing to recommend them. The rieslings were, respectively, horrid, almost passable, and reasonably decent. I was delighted to find the last one, and had a glass of it. Enjoyed it enough that I lost track of time and got back to the boarding area while they were midway through the boarding process.

Interesting enough marketing gimmick: the bar showcases the wines of a viticultural area in North Carolina, to a fairly captive audience (people waiting for their planes) who – if they get to try something they like – will tell people back home about the wines, thereby setting the stage to build future demand.

And interesting enough that it would be a neat idea for someone to do for Virginia wines at a Virginia airport. Probably only Dulles or National airports would have enough traffic to justify such a specific wine bar, and neither one is as much of a regional hub as Charlotte is, which gives people the time to spend in a wine bar. Still, I think Dulles has enough flights connecting through it to give such a wine bar a decent amount of patrons with time on their hands.

Netflix v Blockbuster? I vote Netflix.

I've been a fan of Netflix for a long time. A year ago, I thought I'd give Blockbuster Online a try. I'm now ready to go back to just one service again, and I pick Netflix.

One reason I tried Blockbuster was that they carry some movies that Netflix does not have, and I wanted to see some of them. Primary among them is the World At War series, which I'm honestly very surprised that Netflix doesn't carry. I had seen the series when it was first broadcast in the 70s, on PBS (as I recall). Twenty-six broadcast hour-long episodes, plus a bunch of extra features they came up with for a later (30th anniversary?) release. Eleven disks in the series, so it's taken me a while to go through them all. Wonderful series; no surprise there.

And Blockbuster has cut deals to make some movies exclusive to Blockbuster. Lower-echelon movies, mostly. The best of those that I saw was Bobby.

But I've now had enough. The biggest "benefit" to going with Blockbuster Online is that you have a choice in returning movies: you can mail them back in a prepaid mailer (like Netflix), or you can take them to a brick-and-mortar Blockbuster store and trade it in for a "free" rental. (The store will then drop your movie in the mail for you.) The free rental is treated like a regular Blockbuster rental - you have to return it within five days, or they hit you with a late fee (which they call something else, but that's what it really is), and if you don't return it in something like two weeks, they bill your credit card for the retail cost of the movie.

The other benefit with Blockbuster Online is a monthly free coupon for a game or movie rental. (Okay, for me, that's a movie rental, as I don't have an XBox or PSP game system.) Same deal: you have to go to the physical store and get a movie, and return it five days later.

And because Blockbuster Online is more expensive than Netflix, you have to take advantage of these benefits to feel like you're getting your money's worth. (Especially when they raise their monthly fees while Netflix leaves theirs unchanged.)

When you come down to it, though, the three-movies-out-at-a-time that you have with Netflix is sufficient for me, and you don't have the hassle of returning movies before their dates to avoid late fees or the inconvenience of driving out of your way to the Blockbuster store, where you have to undergo their attempts to upsell you with candy and popcorn.

I have a new toy.

Okay, I understand that I'm an Old Guy. My cell phone doesn't have a camera, doesn't have a large keypad for texting, and doesn't have the capacity to be my mp3 player. (I do have a cell phone, though.)

So it's no surprise that I am only now discovering something that's been around for a few years: Pandora.com. It's, I don't know, an Internet radio station that you program yourself. Sort of. You create a "station" with the name of an artist (or album or song), and the site's artificial intelligence algorithms will pick similar songs and artists to play for you, and you can give feedback to your station with thumbs up/down buttons and it will use that information to refine its choice of music for you.

Plug in your headphones and you can listen to music, more or less of your own choice, without having to listen to commercials or hauling CDs around with you. And it's free.

At the moment, I've got three "stations" - you can have lots - one initially seeded with the group Cream (okay, I'm an Old Guy), which also plays the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Beatles, and Eric Clapton (among many others), one initially seeded with The Beach Boys, which plays a lot of 50's and 60's doo-wop, and one seeded with Pete Seeger, which also plays the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie, and Bob Dylan (again, among others).

I happily recommend it.

Here is my profile page, if you want to check out my stations.

Update (March 24): I guess it's not a surprise - Pandora.com is not the only self-programming internet radio station out there. I've come across another one - Jango.com - which I think I like even better. (I found out about it through a Washington Post article on social network internet radio stations, and you just know that if there's a term to describe them and a Post article on them, they've been around for a while.)

Jango has a different algorithm for picking songs: It keeps track of what songs you like, and then goes to its database of other users to find what people who like those songs like to listen to, and chooses one of those songs next. Kind of Google-like. It also seems to give you a bit more freedom to pick what you want to hear and how often.

Drop by my profile page here, too, if you'd like. My username is JediKt, and you can search fairly easily for me. I'm listening mostly to my Cream station.

My computer keyboard ran out of ink.

Okay, it's been a while. I blame the disappearance of my writing muse, which has happened before, and will doubtless happen again.

During my absence, I have had the opportunity to write about many things, and yet could never find the time or energy to take 45 minutes - or, for some items, 5 minutes or less - to mention them here. Among those things:

• In November, I got my flu shot in a city Health Department-sponsored drive-through flu shot clinic, designed to test out procedures for a mass inoculation. The shot was free, and I (knock on wood) haven't gotten the flu this winter.


• Also in November, I led a wine tasting. My first paying wine tasting. Seven Virginia wines; a good time was had by all.


• And, of course, I voted in November. Not entirely sure why: in all the races I voted on, there were ten candidates for eight seats. Only two contested races out of eight. And I didn't especially care about the two contested races. I wrote my name in for the House of Delegates and State Senate races. Didn't win, though.


• Early in December, Tommy (cat number five) finally overcame his fear of my bedroom and started sleeping at my feet. He still gets into daily fights with Mosby and Rebel, but is also willing to stand his ground when he wants to. Or, you know, when he's eating.


• I went to Florida over Christmas. Had a nice, relaxing time. Except for the endless hours I was in airports, or shoehorned into airplanes.


• While waiting for a connection in the Charlotte airport, I discovered a wine bar, which was a nice enough place to wait. More on this wine bar later, I'm sure.


• My contract attorney job came to an abrupt end one Monday early in January. We got a phone call from the associate in charge of the project: "It's about 1:20. Why don't you sign out for the day at 1:30? And then not come back until a week from Wednesday. Because this project is done." It's not as though we could say "No." Still, it was a project that started last February and was intended to last only a week and a half, so having it last ten and a half months was a pretty good deal for us.


• I went to an Ansel Adams exhibit up in D.C. Amazing stuff - and it made me feel that I am all thumbs when I take photographs. The presence of genius will do that, I suppose. Also went to an accompanying exhibit of Annie Liebowitz's photos - and I came away with the feeling that she is excellent at her craft - but he's still four levels above.


• My father passed away in mid-January. Very sudden, very surprising. He was in good mental and physical shape, so it was unexpected. I spent more time in Florida for this, and returned to Richmond driving a 16-foot truck loaded with furniture, most of which is now stacked in my living room, waiting for me to get rid of my 25-year-old graduate-student-esque furniture to make room for it. The cats love the new places to walk and sleep.


• The new contract attorney project started up - and I spent the first two weeks working on material from the project that "ended" three weeks earlier.


• This year's crocuses first appeared around Jan. 28. No photo of them this year; sorry.


• I voted in this year's primary. Kind of funny to vote in a primary when it actually means something.


• And last weekend, I went to a "wine expo" - an indoor wine festival, of sorts. The excitement for me was that I was able to get in for free, as part of "the trade." That hobby business of doing wine tastings in people's homes is paying off. More about this later, too, I imagine.

I'll try to post more often, but I make no promises. (I suppose I can hardly post less often.)

Thank you for shopping at Kroger.

Unaccustomed as I am to random unsolicited compliments from strangers, I was rather taken aback the night before last at the grocery store when the guy overseeing the cluster of self-check-out stations told me that I was very efficient. “I’ve been watching you,” he said, “and you really know what you’re doing. No wasted motion. You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” “Um, yes,” I admitted, but did not add: “You do something for seven years, you figure out how to do it.” I quickly left.

And a creepy Halloween to you.

Powerless to change.

Or perhaps, just powerless.

I had just gotten home from work, watched enough of the Redskins game to see they were hopelessly behind, and started watching something I had recorded.

Boom! The lights went out. More importantly, the TV went off.

Didn't hear any thunder, so a nearby tree probably wasn't hit by lightning. Doubted it was a tornado, unless it was one of those extremely rare blue-sky tornadoes. Just one of those things, I guess, those things that Dominion Power is fond of: random outages for no apparent reason.

I called the emergency line, and the automated voice told me (a) that a "widespread outage" had been noted in my area, and (b) that the power should be restored by 8:15. Hmm. Interesting that an outage could be described as "widespread" after only 5 minutes, and that they could predict a successful conclusion to the quarter-hour.

Rather than sit in the dark, I drove to a local watering hole for dinner. On my way out of the neighborhood, I couldn't help but notice that the widespread outage did not include, for instance, the house immediately in back of mine - on the other side of the power line from me. But it did include the vast majority of the houses in my neighborhood, and the nearest set of traffic lights on the major road near me, so I was satisfied.

And by 8:30, the lights were back on.

You can tell it's the middle of October.

Last Sunday, I saw that my neighborhood grocery store has a display of boxed Christmas cards for sale - and already marked 50% off.

Party like it’s 1999!

Or, at least, work that way.

The folks “in charge of” the project I’m working on at BigLawFirm discovered early in September that they had a large production due by the end of October, and that the current number of contract attorneys (there were five of us) was insufficient to do all the work necessary for that production. Naturally, that meant that they’d wait until the end of the first week of October to actually do anything about it, at which point they hired on ten more contract attorneys, eight of whom had never done document review before and five of whom had never had a law-related job before, having just graduated from their respective law schools in the spring. I’m guessing they’ll be a big help in meeting the October 31 deadline.

Well, anyway. They needed to bring in a bunch of rental computers for these new folks, and in keeping with the firm's tradition of providing us with crummy-but-insufficient resources, the computer of the fellow at the table behind me has that sticker on it.

Holy cow! A Y2K sticker? Even the decrepit, steam-powered computer I use at home is new enough that it didn’t need to be tested for Y2K compliance. (And I’m ready to send my home computer out to the farm.) Nothing but the best for us, I suppose.

Introducing ... Tommy.

Here's Tommy, short for Thomas Jifferson. (See here for the explanation of the odd part of his name.)

He's still a big cutie, and he's getting more comfortable in his new house, but his interactions with Rebel have gotten no better. Well, except for the fact that he completely ignore's Rebel's screeching and howling and waving of her little paws if she approaches him while he's eating. Otherwise, though, she still has him completely terrorized.

I'm still looking for a new home for him - or for Mosby and Rebel, who will have to go together - so that he can have a place to live where he feels safe in every room of the house.

Click a Vick.

Today's celebrity football criminal drama was somewhat tamer than the one a few weeks ago (pictured to the right). For Vick's arraignment, there was a huge crowd, about 90-10 in favor of those opposed to dog killing for entertainment. And since the arraignment was taking place a block away from where I work, naturally I went to see the circus: People dressed in dog costumes, people opposed to dogfighting, people supporting their favorite quarterback (who surely was innocent of those horrid charges), people out to gawk at all the cameras.

Today? Much smaller crowd, and 80% of it was made up of religious fanatics, who were certain that Vick could be saved, if only he believed. (In, I don't know, something.) Vick's grand press conference, where he sincerely apologized for whatever his press folks wrote for him to apologize for, took place 50 yards down the hall from my office. We took a quick stroll out to see the sedate crowd, decided he wasn't going to walk down our hallway, and went back to work.

Name that cat! Round two.

Here's Cat Number Five. The previous owner named him Jif. (She evidently named her cats after brands of peanut butter, as the cat who lived with her before this one was named Skippy. I predict that her next one will be named Peter Pan.)
As you might guess, I'm not a huge fan of the name Jif. So there's now a new name-the-cat contest. Grand Prize yet to be determined, but it might involve your receiving a new cat. (Might not, I guess.)
At the moment, I'm leaning towards a British name for him, like Winston or Hudson.
He has mostly incorporated himself into the little feline colony at my house. He's made friends with Sami and O Henry (whose attitude seems to be "Oh, fine. Another cat. yawn. Feed me"). He's reached an accommodation with Mosby, so there's a minimum of screeching when they get close to one another. But Rebel? Little Rebel hates him, and shrieks and howls and scratches whenever he's around. And she terrorizes him to a degree that he tends to stay in one or another of his Safe Places.
Which, I suppose, is one of the signs that he's a friendly, peaceful cat. Because he's about four times Rebel's size, and all he'd have to do to win would be to lie down on top of her.