I've seen fire, and I've seen rain.

The aroma of burning pine logs is a distinct and pleasant one, and the smell of that smoke conjurs up images of campfires past, of camping trips taken with the family or with Boy Scouts. A very pleasant trip down Memory Lane – until you realize that you’re smelling that pine smoke while inside your house, and you don’t have a fire going in the fireplace.

It was about ten days ago, when a line of powerful thunderstorms moved through the area, bringing the first measurable rainfall in months. Lots of lightning strikes nearby – almost enough to read by inside. Then one of them knocked out the power. Only for three seconds or so, but that was long enough to reset all the electrical appliances in the house. (Most notably, it reset the DVD player, and I’d gotten through almost all of the interminably long – 13 minutes and 20 seconds – end credits to the latest Harry Potter movie. Over 13 minutes! Of end credits! Gah! But that’s a rant for another day.) I wandered towards the office to check on my computer, when I started thinking about campfires of yore.

When I snapped out of my reverie, I realized that I was smelling the smoke while in my basement; with no doors or windows open. That got me moving. I quickly checked around inside to see if I could find the source of the smoke, and when I couldn’t, I went outside to look for flames. Glowing embers, at least. A quick check of my house and my neighbor’s didn’t reveal anything, so I went back inside for a raincoat. (It was still raining pretty hard, of course, but the need to quickly find the fire overrode any desire to stay perfectly dry.)

The smell of the smoke was very strong by my basement door, so that’s where I started my search. In a couple of minutes, I was 75 yards from my house, still looking without finding anything. I ran into some folks from around the corner and down a ways, who were searching from the other direction. They hadn’t seen anything, either, but had called the fire department. Indeed, we could hear the sirens, on the other side of a small woods. “I bet those sirens are from my call,” the neighbor said. “This street has two parts, and they’re not directly connected. They’ll have to go on a three-mile route to get from that part of this street to this one.” Sure enough, about six minutes later, the fire engines roared up. (You know, I’d be concerned about that response time and the fire trucks getting lost, if I lived on that street.)

The neighbors confirmed that they’d made the call, and everyone looked around for the source of the smoke. The firemen told us they’d gotten a lot of phone calls from the area, but no one calling in had actually seen the fire. Another report on the radio revealed that other firemen had now seen the fire, about 3 blocks away from us, across the woods. And with that, these fire trucks turned their sirens on and zoomed away.

By now, the smoke had dissipated, so I went back inside.

Four for the road.

It turns out that the reason I had to watch the borrowed movie is that the guy who loaned it to me was leaving the project, and while he’d forgotten that I had the movie, I hadn’t. And since I didn’t want to admit that I’d had it for months on end and hadn’t yet watched it, or to give it back to him and then get it from Netflix, I needed to watch it right away. Well, first I needed to find it.

At any rate, last week was an interesting week at the project, as four of the thirty or so of us on the project quit during the week: one to concentrate full-time on his solo practice, one to go to a different project (one that pays more, alas), one to work as inside counsel for a large Richmond company, and one to do, well, not much of anything, it would seem.

It’s always interesting when someone leaves our little project for a real job. You’re happy for her, of course, but that happiness is tinged with a feeling of “Why didn’t they pick me?” (Okay, the answer to that question usually is “Because you didn’t apply for it,” but still.) It feels a lot like what I imagine being in an orphanage is like: you’re glad that someone got adopted out into a family, yet at the back of your mind, you wonder whether you weren’t picked because you’re not pretty enough, or something.

That little box.

A few – okay, six or eight – months ago, someone who works on the project at BigLawFirm with me loaned me a movie he thought I should see, “True Romance”. An early Tarantino script, with an ensemble cast including folks who have become a lot more famous since (Brad Pitt, Patricia Arquette, Christian Slater, Gary Oldman, James Gandolfini) and some old favorites (Dennis Weaver, Samuel L. Jackson).

Between the time he loaned it to me and last week, I had forgotten that Tarantino was the writer, and somehow thought it was going to be a relatively light flick, somewhat like “St. Elmo’s Fire”. And since I didn’t look at the box or read the description on the back of the box as I was pulling the tape out, it was a bit of a surprise to me when the movie turned out to be, well, more like a typical Tarantino movie. Still pretty good, of course, but not quite a light romantic comedy or family fare.

In any case, it dawned on me as I was putting the tape into the VCR that the last time I watched a movie on video tape was probably over six years ago, and that this was the first VCR movie I’ve watched since I bought a DVD player. Amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly a new piece of technology (the DVD player) can change one’s habits. I still use the VCR all the time, but only to record stuff from the TV that I’ll watch later. And I bet that when the day comes that I get a DVR – shortly after I get an HDTV, I’m guessing – I’ll stop using the VCR altogether.

Introducing ... Mosby.

It's official. She's Mosby. The winner should contact me soon for official transfer of his or her prize. Bring a cat carrier.

Many of the suggestions were good. I've already had a "Misty" and didn't want to tempt fate by giving her name to another cat who lives outside and could thus share the original's demise by being hit by a car. Decided against "Empress" or "Palpatine" because I just didn't want her to continue working on her Dark Powers to cause lightning to shoot from her paws. Figured that "Erdos" wasn't appropriate because not only could she not write a mathematics paper (or whatever the Cat Equivalent thereof is), she couldn't read one either. (Remember, this is the cat who declined the opportunity to sleep inside the house when it was fifteen degrees outside.)

She has, however, slept inside the house a couple of times this week, and has been introduced to the Inside Cats. Sami is always happy to find another cat to play with, but O. Henry wasn't too pleased at the idea of sharing her house with yet another feline. Not that it mattered much: Mosby was too busy growling and hissing to really tell what the other cats' reactions were.

No topic is too trivial for me to discuss.

For instance, the NCAA pool at my office. 17 of us are taking part. 16 of us are dead for the coming weekend, having predicted as winners in the national semi-finals and finals none of the teams that made it to the Final Four. And the 17th person picked UCLA to win in the semis and lose in the finals. Seven of us correctly predicted exactly one of the Final Four (six, myself included, picked UCLA, and one picked Florida); everyone else was 0-for-the-Final-Four.

The good news is that the final rankings in our pool are almost set: if UCLA wins its semi-final game, the guy that picked them wins the pool; if they lose, he comes in second. And whatever happens, I come in third.

Idle speculation leads to the next question: what are the odds of perfectly predicting the entire 64-team tournament? This article indicates that if every game were a 50-50 proposition, the odds of a perfect bracket are about one in nine million trillion. If you factor in the observation that, more often than not, favorites win their games, the odds are somewhat more reasonable: estimated at between one in 150 million to one in a billion.

Good enough odds that various companies - including AOL and PapaJohn's - have contests promising huge prizes (a million bucks, or a million pizzas) to anyone who correctly picks the entire bracket. They won't have to pay out this year, as no one in any of the contests got through the first weekend with perfect picks.

Still, I'd liked to have picked as well as this guy (who is leading in the Washington Post's bracket contest). Perhaps I could get him to pick stocks for me.

Here are the new resident cats.
This one is Sami, and he's 13 years old.

And the other:
O. Henry. She's about eight.

There and back again.

I've returned from a quick trip to Florida to pick up my father's cats. Not a terribly exciting trip as these things go, although I suppose that's a good thing. Good weather, both ways, so that was a plus. But a one-way distance of 860 miles, with all but the first 2 miles and the last 3 on Interstate highways (or their equivalent) through a relatively flat landscape with no view of mountains or ocean makes for a pretty boring drive. South Carolina is especially interminable, and it's less than 200 miles of the trek.

The cats were very well behaved on the return trip: Sami complained for five minutes every half-hour, and O. Henry complained for the first twenty minutes of each day and not at all thereafter. And they have taken to their new home as though they'd lived here for years. The as-of-yet-not-officially-named gray cat was happy to see me return, bag of cat food in hand. That didn't stop her from giving me a lengthy piece of her mind waiting for the cat food to hit her bowl.

One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a school-bus-yellow Hummer. (Well, a Hummer H2, like the one above, which I guess is the SUV version of the Machomobile for idiots.) Very bizarre, indeed: why would you buy the vehicle in the pretense that it makes you as rugged as the Marlboro Man, and then paint it to look like a school bus? I suppose it allows you to sneak unseen through the school bus yard on the way to your secret manly spy mission.

The best part of the trip, though, was a 20-minute piece of highway theater in Florida. I'm cruising along at 2 mph over the speed limit in the middle of the three lanes going in my direction, and am passed by someone going perhaps 10 mph over the limit. Then I'm passed by someone else doing 10 miles over the limit - and it becomes pretty clear that this second car is an unmarked police car. (No markings, no lights on top - but a big star on the license plate and a uniformed driver kind of give it away.) The first driver tumbles to the secret and slows to my speed, as does the cop car, now 5 or 6 car lengths ahead of me and no more than 2 lengths behind the first driver. Someone else goes around me pretty quickly, and slams on his brakes when he recognizes the license plate as being the police. I drift over into the righthand lane, the better to watch the vehicular interaction. The first car slides into the middle lane; the cop immediately slides over right behind him.

Cars keep getting added to our little Kabuki group. Someone zooms up in the middle lane and starts to go around - and slows abruptly when he's close enough to see the star on the license plate. Forty-five seconds later, someone else zooms up behind him and starts to go around, only to stop when the immediately previous car slides into the right lane ahead of me, revealing the cop car.

A couple more cars join our pack, always doing the same: overtaking the back car and weaving their way through all the cars going the same speed, until they spot the cop car and slow themselves down. And the whole time, the cop car is no more than 2 car lengths behind the first speeding car.

After about 20 minutes of cruising along like this, now with 12 or 15 cars in our convoy because no one wants to speed past the police car, and with all traffic ahead of our group having gone out of sight long ago, the policeman finally decides to stop messing with the head of the driver in front of him, and pulls into the right lane and accelerates away from us.

A piece of pi, to go.

Tomorrow is World Pi Day. Why tomorrow, of all days? Because you can write "March 14" as 3/14, which ought to look familiar to fans of pi.

A much bigger version of the pi poster above can be found here. Much bigger - a file size of 1.7 mb and what looks to be about 65,000 digits in the background.

Yes, I suppose it's all somewhat irrational.

Name that cat!

It's contest time, here at the Cellars. The little gray outdoor cat needs a name; something better than her temporary name of The Gray Ghost. We've decided that she is, in fact, a female, although that need not limit your choice of a new name for her.

She continues to be skittish, although as The Provider of Food, I am permitted to pet her and briefly pick her up. But I think she's also getting a bit used to being around people, as she seems to like my company for substantial stretches, so long as I'm between five and ten feet away.

The deadline for entries in the Name that Cat! contest is "soon" and all decisions will be final and arbitrary. The winner's prize is yet to be determined, but will include having the winning name given to the cat. And if you live close enough and are easily persuaded, the prize may also include the cat herself.

Yet another self-distribution update.

A few updates on self-distribution by Virginia wineries.

First, this year's legislation remains "tabled" and thus will be dead for this year's session. Don't know whether there was any serious attempt to revive it; if there was, it didn't come to anything.

Second, I got an email from an owner of a Virginia website, in response to one of my earlier postings on self-distribution:

Comment about your post regarding your belief that wineries won't go out of business: I'm having to make the decision of whether to sell my house because the winery can't afford to pay me more, and I'm stuck with an ever-growing mortgage payment because of taxes. And I'm sick of working 3 jobs. We are not a profitable business yet, and probably won't be for another year or so. Even using current projections, profitable means a meager margin. That will now be eaten up by the cost of having to set up and support a separate business entity, warehouse, employees, etc., not to mention making less money per case. The threat is real, and although I believe that everyone needs to be able to play with the big boys when you're talking about business, I built our business model on being able to self-distribute. We will probably survive because we're a bit more established--but if you're thinking about starting up a winery and having to go directly to a distributor, good luck. Perhaps they will pass something that will allow a cooperative that can make the alternative more palatable, but I assure you, there was no exaggeration from my end about the gravity of this development to [my winery].

Fair enough. The owner also went on to note that having their wines in retailers and on restaurant lists helps push customers to visit the winery and to their booth at festivals, which are on-site sales that won't have to go through distributors. So losing the ability to self-distribute hurts both direct and indirect sales.

Finally, with the defeat of the bill, there have now been a few articles in the press about losing self-distribution will hurt wineries. It's too bad these articles didn't appear before the legislative session, when they might have done some good.

Showing your work will not be required.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

And no, you can't clean the blackboard for extra credit, either.

Another minute of fame.

My local watering-hole had its second annual “Taste That Beer!” competition last night. Well, not a competition, exactly, as Virginia’s alcoholic beverage control laws frown on such things. And certainly not something that would award prizes, either, other than bragging rights. But a blind tasting of 12 different beers, and you try to determine the style and the particular beer.

At last year’s not-a-competition-as-that-would-be-illegal, you may recall, I came in second, one point behind a professional beer writer buddy. So I claimed that he won the professional division (consisting of him) and I won the amateur division (consisting of the other 39 participants present).

This year’s format was different from last year’s (where all you got was the beer, and you had to dredge your memory to come up with styles and beer names): they had a list of 120 beers, broken into 12 groups of 10, one group for each style. Once you guessed (ah, I mean “determined”) the style, you had to pick the actual beer from the 10 possibilities. They awarded 4 points per beer: 1 for the correct style, 1 for the correct location of the brewery (state, if U.S., otherwise country), and 2 for the correct beer. Thus, a total of 48 points were possible.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, in a humbling sort of way. Since you knew what the 12 styles were, you had the opportunity to second-guess yourself. The beer that you thought was the hefeweisen when you had it in the first round might well have been the Belgian light malt when you try a beer three rounds later that tastes more like what a hefeweisen really should taste like. And they admitted that they were going to include some difficult beers to identify, or even to classify.

Once again, I didn’t win. The winner had a total of 11 points. (Yes, out of 48.) Once again, I came in second, one point back. The good news, I suppose, is that the winner wasn’t the professional beer writer (who had 8 points). And thus the bad news is that I can’t even claim to have won the amateur division.

Unlike last year, I had a couple of regrets about the answers I eventually turned in. The one beer I correctly identified was the Smuttynose Smuttinator doppelbock – and I misremembered the state that Smuttynose is brewed in. It’s in New Hampshire, of course, and not Maine as I recalled. (My excuse is that I was remembering having fresh Smuttynose when I visited friends in Maine. Yeah, not that great an excuse.) If I had gotten the state correct, I’d have tied for first, and there would have been a sudden-death taste-off. Or something.

The bigger regret was failing to identify the brown ale. At least I got the style correct. It turns out to have been the Cottonwood Low Down Brown, which is my favorite brown ale and from one of my favorite breweries. But it didn’t taste quite like I remembered – a bit thinner body than I recalled – so I ruled it out, and picked something from the other side of the country. If I had gotten it correct, that would have been three more points in my column, and a clear win. Alas.

Blackout!

To my great surprise, I came home to a dark house last night. And, I'm happy to report, it wasn't that I failed to pay my electric bill. Unless, of course, all my neighbors forgot to pay theirs, too - and that seems unlikely, as most of them are pretty responsible.

It wasn't a lightning strike or an ice storm, as the weather was clear and reasonably nice yesterday. It wasn't even the usual cause of blackouts around here, a hurricane. No, it was the far more typical cause: a tree (or big branch) fell on the above-ground lines.

Well, no surprise, I suppose. When one lives in a residential subdivision that's over 50 years old and was built in a fairly heavily wooded area, one learns that these things happen.

(Don't know when the blackout started, as I no longer have non-digital electric clocks in the house. But the area was dark at 7:30 when I got home from work, and the electricity came back on around midnight and the cable was back by 9 a.m. So the stuff in the freezer is still safe, or so I've convinced myself.)

The Gray Ghost update.

The new outdoor cat is willing - barely - to allow me to touch her, although she still tries to squirm away. But she's hungrier than she is squeamish, so she puts up with it while she's eating. And yes, her fur is soft.

And after she eats? She's more than happy to have a conversation with me, so long as I stay five or more feet away, and even better if I'm on the other side of the fence from her.

But she's not interested in coming inside to be warm, even though nights lately have gotten down into the teens.

No, it's not.

A quick little quiz:

What's the correct spelling and punctuation of the federal holiday being celebrated tomorrow (the third Monday in February):
(a) Presidents' Day,
(b) President's Day, or
(c) Presidents Day?

Certainly, if you look in the ads in the paper today, you can find support for all options, sometimes with two or three of the variations being used in the same ad. And it makes a difference, as the first would seem to celebrate all presidents, regardless of how poor they might have been; the second would appear to celebrate a single, albeit anonymous, president; and the last looks like it honors the father-and-son pair of presidents whose last name is "Day."

So which of the possible answers is correct?

You guessed it, this is a trick question. The correct spelling and punctuation of the holiday is "Washington's Birthday".

If it makes you feel better - and I'm not sure it should - the schools systems in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and the City of Alexandria, Virginia (where George Washington was born and where Mount Vernon is located) both refer to the holiday as "Presidents' Day." And shame on them.

A spot of yellow.

Time for the annual posting on how early the crocuses are blooming. I first saw them peeking up on Tuesday last week, but lethargy and the weekend snow kept me from taking their photos until today. (Seventy degrees today - might as well take some photos.)

And yes, the crocus blooms are surrounded by the remains of last year's leaves. When the darn things stay attached to the trees until the middle of December, I figure they can jolly well stay on the ground until I get around to mowing the yard sometime this spring. (My neighbors sometimes figure otherwise, alas.)

Guns don't shoot people.

Dick Cheney shoots people.

Or, if you prefer, Star Wars valentines.

Just not commercially available ones.

Breakfast time at the Cellar door.

The gray cat greeted me this morning. Well, if complaining that breakfast is well overdue can be described as a greeting.

She - or he - still won't let me get within 15 feet, unless there's a closed door between us. So while her/his fur looks soft, for now we'll just have to assume that it is.

And I got to see interaction between the two cats yesterday. This cat was sitting on my back deck, and the "tuxedo" cat (who actually turns out to be black-and-gray tabby-striped with a white hind leg, not that you can easily tell the difference between black and black-and-gray-striped at 11 p.m. as the cat is diving under a parked car) was walking up the steps towards it. You could pretty easily figure out that the gray cat was saying the feline equivalent of "This is MY house and MY territory and MY food so you should just stay away" while the tabby was responding "Yah, yah. It's a free country, and I'll go where I want."