Author: Heather Meadows

Eight hour drive–successful!

I stopped at Grandma’s on my way out of town, and she gave me one of Grandpa’s Aubrey-Awbrey of Virginia and Kentucky books. I’m thinking of setting up a site for it someday. Grandma gave me permission to republish the material for non-profit purposes.

Again the drive provided ample time to think about plenty of things. This time I pondered that I always think about stopping at various sights along the way, but I hardly ever do. (The one time I did stop, to see Lost Sea, I didn’t actually go into the attraction because it cost something like $15!) Today I thought that I should make a list of all the places I want to stop and visit, and then start doing them all one at a time.

Here are some of them, off the top of my head:

• Anything in Jellico (I just think the name “Jellico” is great)
• Renfro Valley
• The Smokies
• Lost Sea (for real this time)
• Cumberland Falls (I’ve actually been there, a decade ago…I want to go back)
• Colonel Sanders KFC Cafe and Museum (I drove past it once)
• Boonesborough (although I am confused as to whether or not that is actually “Fort Boonesboro”, or just a town with that name…if it’s the latter, then never mind)
• “Adult World” (it’s this huge warehouse of adult products somewhere in Tennessee…seeing it cracks me up every time)
• Gatlinburg
• That outlet mall north of Atlanta
• Any of those places advertising boiled peanuts, homemade fudge, or (in Georgia) peaches and onions
• Downtown Atlanta (yes, someday I would like to actually stop there, instead of just driving through and rubbernecking)

That’s about all I can think of right now. (And that’s plenty, really.)

I also thought on my drive about the name “Conrad” for a boy. Then I thought, “Conrad Leonidas Meadows”. Then I thought, “That child would have a hard life.”

Then I thought, “I’m thinking about having kids again.”

I noticed something interesting on my drive about my MuVo. When I have it on repeat/shuffle all, it will play lots of songs from folders that have lots of songs in them–often the same songs numerous times–but it completely leaves out folders with only a few songs in them. I literally couldn’t hear anything from my “Kyou Kara Maou” and “Misc Anime” folders without changing the play mode to “Repeat Folder” (or “Normal”) and then Skipping Folder to those directories. Weird.

(And yes, before you ask, I did sit there hitting “Next” over and over and over, waiting for one of those songs to come up. They never did.)

My second gas-up took place at a Chevron somewhere in Tennessee. Their prices were actually five cents higher than I’d been seeing elsewhere, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere else. When I was finished, my car pulled its oh-so-cute “What? Start? I don’t know how to do that” routine. I tried it over and over for a long time. When I finally glanced up at the station and thought about going in there for some help, I noticed that it was closed. (Tricky pay at the pump people!) I resigned myself to trying the car again and again until it finally started up. It always startles the hell out of me when it suddenly roars to life after doing nothing but clicking despondently.

I saw two notable billboards on the drive, and I didn’t want to forget them so I actually used my MuVo to record myself briefly describing them. I’d upload the sound file, but it’s really not all that interesting, so instead I’ll just write what the billboards were.

The first one, just north of Atlanta, had a picture of the faces of Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, and Saddam Hussein, with the headline: “News is important. Now more than ever.”

I wonder what Mr. Kim would think of being lumped together with bin Laden and Hussein. I’m sure if he finds out about that billboard it will do nothing for our diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The second billboard was somewhere east of Atlanta. To get this one you must know that I had previously passed on the same highway a car dealership with a huge inflatable purple gorilla holding a car over his head. The billboard featured a screaming purple gorilla and the text, “The 05 chikins are here.” I was perplexed until I noticed the cow mannequin, and then I laughed out loud. (Literally. And I pounded the steering wheel, too.) Go Chick-Fil-A!

Somewhere near (I think) Covington, Georgia, there was a huge car accident on the westbound side of I-20. Traffic was completely stopped; they weren’t even letting one lane through. As I drove past I counted eight cars on tow trucks or along the side of the road surrounded by police cars. The line of traffic behind the pileup lasted for ages. Towards the front of the line, many people had their cars shut off and were walking around on the median. While I didn’t get a picture of the aftermath of the actual accident or the front of the line, I did take a few of the rest of the line of cars. I also said aloud, sympathetically, “Sucks to be you.”

I made the (admittedly lame) comment to my mom today that if I had a daughter, she’d have to move to South America. (Because Mom moved from Illinois to Kentucky, and I moved from Kentucky to Georgia. We just keep going south. See? Ha, ha.)

Mom didn’t laugh, or even tell me how stupid that joke was. Instead, she very seriously told me that I shouldn’t focus my happiness on something that might not happen. She said she wants me to be happy. She may have even said that plenty of people are happy without children. I don’t actually know. I can’t remember exactly what she said. It’s like my brain shut down when she said it, or started adding to what she was saying, or something.

I tried to say that I was getting over it, but that felt like a lie so I didn’t say anything.

Just watched National Treasure with my brother and his wife (and ha! Now that statement isn’t specific enough to let you know who I’m talking about! It was Ben and Manda).

What a great movie!

I’d heard good things about it, but you know me. Watch movies? Never.

It’s not that I have anything against movies. Hell, I took two film courses in college. I just…never watch them. (And that includes many of the films I was supposed to watch for class.)

But anyway…this movie is fun. It’s very fast-paced–you have to pay attention or you might miss the reasoning behind all the running around. But that’s cool!

There’s more to it than a simple treasure hunt, a lot more. There’s a rival, a love interest, and family conflict. Plus there’s a sidekick type guy who is absolutely hilarious–he gets most of the best lines. All the pieces fit together perfectly at all times. The movie is firing on all cylinders from the very beginning and simply does not let up until its highly satisfying conclusion.

I don’t know (or care) if the story is plausible. It’s done in such a way that I believed in it. And that is what makes for a good time at the movies :)

(Disclaimer: I started crying over a children’s book called Big Brother, Little Brother today. It was just so sweet! “When Big Brother cries like this, who knows why? Little Brother.”

(So, I’m a sap. Bear that in mind.)

Part two of Ampontan’s discussion of Japanese prime ministers, and Junichiro Koizumi in particular, is up. (Part one is here, and here’s where I linked to it.) A tantalizing tidbit:

Has the prime minister of any other country chosen not to hold an election because his party was sure to be successful in that election? Yet that was exactly Koizumi’s predicament.

The article has a fantastic conclusion, and this two-parter has made me simultaneously wish Koizumi wasn’t stepping down next year, and understand why he’s doing it.

It would seem, based on Ampontan’s evaluation, that Koizumi simply loves democracy.

Yokosuka, Japan, site of a United States Navy base, is treating the 2008 decommissioning of the USS Kitty Hawk and its planned replacement with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as a major issue in its current mayoral campaign. While all four candidates oppose a nuclear-powered carrier, none have actually come up with a way to keep one from being assigned to the base. (The typical strategy so far seems to be to petition Tokyo.)

Opposition to the nuclear carrier seems rooted in the nation’s deep aversion to all things nuclear. Asahi provides this example of justification for the opinion that nuclear vessels are dangerous:

In July 1998, a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine called at Yokosuka and city officials said they detected abnormally high radioactivity in the water.

This sounds to me like the same pseudoscience fueling the campaign against the use of depleted uranium rounds, but I could be mistaken. Does anyone know if radiation has ever been shown to be higher in the waters around nuclear vessels?

I think this news story demonstrates both the low and the high end of human capability:

Arthur Richardson thought he’d pull a prank and pretend to swallow a friend’s truck key. Unfortunately, Wednesday’s prank backfired when Richardson plopped the key in his mouth and gravity took over.

Richardson went to a doctor Thursday, who X-rayed his stomach and got a clear picture of the key. The doctor said the key posed no danger, but Richardson’s friend needed to use his truck.

So Richardson and his friend took the X-rays to a locksmith, who used the pictures to fashion a new key. And it worked in the truck.

Bravo.

Kevin (who does not have a blog or webpage, because he sucks) linked me to the blog of a friend of his, Jake Zigler, who is staying in Japan for a month. I’ve been enjoying reading about his trip this afternoon.

The writing here is not art, per se. He rambles, and there are grammatical and spelling errors, and the only organization seems to be chronological. This is fine, of course. I’m interested in the content and can therefore forgive a lack of polish.

But I was reminded that even the most haphazard writing can yield powerful prose. During the post describing his anxiety about suddenly being alone in a country where no one speaks English fluently, Jake writes the following:

I’m pretty sure I spelled Caucasian incorrectly and I felt like an idiot and it was in pen.

It’s its own paragraph, following some general situational descriptions. And it works, profoundly.

It’s short and simple. The lack of commas to separate the three independent clauses adds to the effect of feeling overwhelmed. Ending with “and it was in pen” is so much more powerful than starting with that fact; you get the mistake, you get the emotion, and then you get the “oh shit, he can’t fix it, either”.

Wonderfully executed.

A guy passing himself off as a British spy swindled people out of their money for 10 years. He used his “earnings” to finance his James Bond lifestyle. Yahoo! has the story.

Meanwhile, the Leo Burnett advertising agency (for which my uncle once worked) has released the results of a survey of 2,000 men around the world, from which they discovered that men are more complex than advertising campaigns typically give them credit for. Also from Yahoo!.

Ampontan at Japundit has posted the first in a series about Japanese prime ministers.

You will not see an accurate assessment of Koizumi as prime minister for the simple reason that the pundits will base their judgements on the premise that Koizumi is a political leader in the way that term is understood in the West. He is not, and never has been. The Japanese political commentators should know better (and probably do, but their careers and self-esteem depend on pretending that Japan is run like the other industrialized countries), and few foreign journalists take the time to understand how the Japanese government works, much less try to explain it to their readers.

It would seem that Ampontan has stepped up to the plate!

From MSNBC:

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses – even against their will – for private economic development.

It was a decision fraught with huge implications for a country with many areas, particularly the rapidly growing urban and suburban areas, facing countervailing pressures of development and property ownership rights.

As a result, cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.

Basically, the court said that it wasn’t up to them to make the decision–that it was up to local governments. But it was a close vote.

I can see how it is problematic to let the federal government mandate how local properties are used, and I am of course a staunch supporter of the rights of local governments. I firmly believe that communities should be able to look out for their own needs as they see fit; blanket rulings by a federal body can be irrelevant or can hinder a community with its own unique needs. However, it seems to me that people’s homes should be something sacred–that people should at least feel secure in their living arrangements. It just feels wrong that now a local government can decide to kick people out of their houses in order to put up a mall.

According to the article, Kentucky, along with South Carolina and six other states, has laws against “eminent domain when the economic purpose is not to eliminate blight”. Georgia hasn’t been definitive on the issue yet.

From Hiroshima bomber expresses hope for a nuke-free world:

“I felt, the bomb was successful, the mission was successful, and the entire Manhattan Project was successful,” he said. “And so we were going to end the war or significantly shorten the war. And that’s what we were trying to do.”

Kirk said that the feeling he had at that time hasn’t changed in the 60 years since. He also answered a question many Japanese people have in mind; was it necessary to drop the bomb?

“Well, my personal feeling was that Japan was a beaten nation before we ever dropped the atomic bomb. Eighty-five percent of the industrial capacity of Japan was ruined before we ever dropped the bomb,” he said. “A rational, knowledgeable people would have ended the war a long time before we ever dropped the bombs … They wanted to fight the last big battle on the beaches.”

Kirk then said that more people would have lost their lives if the bombs had not been used against Japan.

“No question about it. Even if there had not been an invasion, there would have been a lot more people (dead) as a result of not ending the war.”

This is not a new opinion, obviously, but I wanted to establish that before I went on to quote the following:

Perhaps ironically, Kirk — like many people around the world — hopes the bomb will disappear from the globe.

“I think it should be abolished. I really do. But if we are going to have anybody that has an atomic bomb, then I want one more than anybody else,” Kirk said.

I am having trouble with this basically because I share that opinion, and I tend to suspect my own opinions of being ill-informed. It also seems paradoxical to me to claim that the decision to nuke was the right one at the time, but that it will always be the wrong one in the future. That doesn’t seem like a claim you can make. I guess you can argue that people didn’t have all the information back then–maybe they thought it was just a big bomb, and didn’t realize that with the explosion would come horrible radiation sickness. Assuming that was the case, then the previous argument can work. The decision was made without complete information. It was the best decision possible at the time. But now we know better. We know that there should always be another way.

Of course, I have no idea if the ignorance my rationalization requires was a reality for those who made the decision to use the bomb.

(I probably don’t need to point out that the second part of Kirk’s statement at the end of the article is problematic–as long as there are governments that share that opinion, there is zero chance of the bomb ever being “abolished”.)

The Augusta Chronicle has a feature about the area’s apparently awesome biking trails. The feature could have been hmm, I don’t know, longer, with further discussion of all the trails in the area, but heck…it is nice to see someone writing about biking.

Three minutes into the ride, I blindly followed Mrs. Allen down a hill that hooked to the left and led to a 20-foot-long, 2-foot-wide plank bridge that she easily traversed. The bridge spans a dried-out riverbed, which is fortunate because the ramp leading to it proved too steep, and when I turned left to regain my balance, over the edge I went.

Sounds like fun to me!

Click here to read “Hold on tight, and bring the bug spray” by Patrick Verel.

Ampontan at Japundit writes about the Asuka Onda Festival at the Asukaniimasu Shrine in Asuka-mura, Nara Prefecture.

The reason you’ll never read about this festival in a newspaper is that the central event is the simulated performance of the sex act on stage in front of an audience.

Read the article for the full description of the festivities. Man. I have got to see this.

Fortunately, it’s held on the first Sunday of February every year!

Via the Divine Miss Em.

There were some interesting questions on there. I was somewhat horrified by my estimate of how much time each week I spend on blogs…

Justin Klein’s descriptions of his amazing experiences at Ritsumeikan University have really made me jealous. Today’s especially. I really want to go.

Probably no way I can do it though.