Saturday, December 24, 2005
A lack of Christmas spirit from an odd source
Brace yourself for this one:
"The wife of the pastor of the nation's largest church said she chose to leave an airplane after a disagreement with a flight attendant, disputing accounts that she was asked to go.
The FBI has said Victoria Osteen, of Houston, Texas, was asked to leave after failing to obey crew instructions. The Continental Airlines flight Monday from Houston to Vail, Colorado, was delayed an hour as a result."
Why would ANYONE refuse to obey the crew of an airplane in these paranoid times? Worse, why would someone with such a high profile as "a child of the most high God" behave that way? What went through her head? "I'm tired of being a goody-goody, so I'm going to cause trouble in a public place"? And what about all the other people on the plane, who had to wait around for an HOUR, thus leading to missed connecting flights and delayed reunions with their families? Why did she not consider them when choosing a time to be a jerk? If I were Joel, I'd be REALLY ticked off... this makes him look pretty bad.
"In a statement posted on the Lakewood Church Web site, Osteen says: 'Regardless of how some have portrayed the situation, please know that it was truly a minor misunderstanding and did not escalate into what you saw or read in the news. Contrary to those reports, it was my choice to remove myself from the situation. Nonetheless, it was a most unfortunate event and I truly regret that it happened.'"
Sorry, Victoria, but NO ONE leaves a plane, voluntarily or otherwise, for something minor, especially 2 days before Christmas... and I find it a little hard to believe that the FBI is lying about something for which there are so many witnesses.
"A statement from Continental Airlines said the situation was resolved and a spokeswoman would not elaborate. The FBI reviewed a report from the airline and determined that no illegal activity had occurred, FBI spokeswoman Luz Garcia said."
What a relief that must be to everyone.
I'm not making this up; I got it from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/23/pastor.wife.ap/index.html
And it gets better; an article on the Houston Chronicle's site
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3538956.html
has the following claim from one of the Osteens' fellow passengers
"'She was just abusive,' said Sheila Steele, who said she was sitting behind Victoria Osteen. 'She was just like one of those divas.'"
"Steele said Victoria Osteen was upset about liquid on her pull-down tray and asked a flight attendant to have it cleaned. When the attendant, who was carrying paperwork to the cockpit, told her she couldn't do it immediately, Osteen replied, 'Fine, get me a stewardess who can,' Steele said.
She said Victoria Osteen pushed a flight attendant and tried to get into the cockpit. Passengers quoted in the Colorado paper did not address those details."
I hope some other passenger speaks up about all this; could Victoria really have PUSHED someone? Is this the beginning of the Osteens going the way of certain other TV religious figures, who thought themselves above actually following Christ's guidance? It'd be a bummer, if so; I really enjoy Joel's sermons.
Whatever occurred, I very much doubt that Ms. Osteen behaved in a blameless manner, which makes this final quote from the Chronicle particularly sad:
"A church spokesman said the couple and their children left the plane voluntarily after the incident Monday and took another flight to Vail, Colo."
She pulled this stunt in front of her KIDS; way to set a good example for them, Victoria, not to mention way to add to the magic of the season for them... and way to convince people to contribute to your husband's church, that you were willing to cause such a ruckus on your way to a luxury vacation.
We're gonna be hearing about this incident for a while, methinks.
I hope your Christmas Eve is going well; my husband is making a belated surge of effort on the tree, so things are looking up a little around here.
"The wife of the pastor of the nation's largest church said she chose to leave an airplane after a disagreement with a flight attendant, disputing accounts that she was asked to go.
The FBI has said Victoria Osteen, of Houston, Texas, was asked to leave after failing to obey crew instructions. The Continental Airlines flight Monday from Houston to Vail, Colorado, was delayed an hour as a result."
Why would ANYONE refuse to obey the crew of an airplane in these paranoid times? Worse, why would someone with such a high profile as "a child of the most high God" behave that way? What went through her head? "I'm tired of being a goody-goody, so I'm going to cause trouble in a public place"? And what about all the other people on the plane, who had to wait around for an HOUR, thus leading to missed connecting flights and delayed reunions with their families? Why did she not consider them when choosing a time to be a jerk? If I were Joel, I'd be REALLY ticked off... this makes him look pretty bad.
"In a statement posted on the Lakewood Church Web site, Osteen says: 'Regardless of how some have portrayed the situation, please know that it was truly a minor misunderstanding and did not escalate into what you saw or read in the news. Contrary to those reports, it was my choice to remove myself from the situation. Nonetheless, it was a most unfortunate event and I truly regret that it happened.'"
Sorry, Victoria, but NO ONE leaves a plane, voluntarily or otherwise, for something minor, especially 2 days before Christmas... and I find it a little hard to believe that the FBI is lying about something for which there are so many witnesses.
"A statement from Continental Airlines said the situation was resolved and a spokeswoman would not elaborate. The FBI reviewed a report from the airline and determined that no illegal activity had occurred, FBI spokeswoman Luz Garcia said."
What a relief that must be to everyone.
I'm not making this up; I got it from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/23/pastor.wife.ap/index.html
And it gets better; an article on the Houston Chronicle's site
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3538956.html
has the following claim from one of the Osteens' fellow passengers
"'She was just abusive,' said Sheila Steele, who said she was sitting behind Victoria Osteen. 'She was just like one of those divas.'"
"Steele said Victoria Osteen was upset about liquid on her pull-down tray and asked a flight attendant to have it cleaned. When the attendant, who was carrying paperwork to the cockpit, told her she couldn't do it immediately, Osteen replied, 'Fine, get me a stewardess who can,' Steele said.
She said Victoria Osteen pushed a flight attendant and tried to get into the cockpit. Passengers quoted in the Colorado paper did not address those details."
I hope some other passenger speaks up about all this; could Victoria really have PUSHED someone? Is this the beginning of the Osteens going the way of certain other TV religious figures, who thought themselves above actually following Christ's guidance? It'd be a bummer, if so; I really enjoy Joel's sermons.
Whatever occurred, I very much doubt that Ms. Osteen behaved in a blameless manner, which makes this final quote from the Chronicle particularly sad:
"A church spokesman said the couple and their children left the plane voluntarily after the incident Monday and took another flight to Vail, Colo."
She pulled this stunt in front of her KIDS; way to set a good example for them, Victoria, not to mention way to add to the magic of the season for them... and way to convince people to contribute to your husband's church, that you were willing to cause such a ruckus on your way to a luxury vacation.
We're gonna be hearing about this incident for a while, methinks.
I hope your Christmas Eve is going well; my husband is making a belated surge of effort on the tree, so things are looking up a little around here.
Friday, December 23, 2005
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The fight to get my home decorated for Christmas before the day actually arrives has escalated to a white heat... and as you might have grasped from the title, it's NOT going well.
I'm tireder than I can say of being held hostage to my husband's procrastination and sloth, not to mention his outright refusal to do anything. After breaking his often-repeated promises to get the tree dragged out over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then the weekend after that, and the weekend after THAT, he finally got it up... but in the nearly 2 WEEKS since it got put together, it's STILL not fully decorated, not even CLOSE. Why? Because the ornaments are packed in big boxes that are in big stacks, and there's no room to take them out and just LEAVE them out for ME to use them (as much as I can-I can't do stuff above shoulder level anymore, sigh), so nothing can get done until my husband dismantles a stack and carries over a box. Why doesn't he just do that? Good question. I've hammered him ceaselessly about it, but he's chanted "In a minute" for as long as TWELVE HOURS at a time, and thus day after day, including an entire weekend, have gone by without it being done. To make matters worse, a couple of times he HAS brought boxes out at 3AM and thrown a few things up... and then has the unmitigated gall to complain that I'm not giving up a bunch of sleep to help him out!! At 3 in the frigging morning!!
At the risk of repeating myself; GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
And what excuse does he have for his endless refusals to get to work? None; when questioned, he LIES, and claims that all those evenings that I prompted him every half hour to fulfill his promises of work, when EVERY TIME I went to his study he was screwing around on a forum or on CNN, never happened... alternating with claims that those things were somehow more important than working on the tree, and so it was ok to lie about his intentions of getting to work soon and keep doing them-he can't even be bothered to be consistent or logical about his lies, how's that for rotten?
Worse, there isn't a single one of my hundreds of dollars worth of other Christmas decorations set up either, because they are all, you guessed it, packed in big boxes in stacks with other boxes, where I can see some of them but not get to any of them; worse, the stuff that's currently laid out where those things would go needs to be packed up and put in still other boxes in yet another stack... all stuff that only my husband has the muscle (and height) to handle.
Say what you will about my father, and if you're a regular reader you know that you can say quite alot, none of it good, when my mother announced that it was time to get the Christmas stuff out, he brought out the ladder and hauled all the boxes down from where they were stored up under the roof of the garage and in to the appointed place in the family room... and he did it that day, ALL of it that day, and without coming up with 12 hours of trivial nonsense to do to delay it, either. As my mother needed boxes moved around, or stashed back up in the storage area, he did that too, and right when he was asked, not after endless delays. It's pretty grim that my husband can't do as well as a man that should be locked up like a vicious animal.
So, once again, by the time Christmas Eve rolls around we'll have spent so much time screaming and fighting that we'll hate the sight of each other, and will spend the biggest holiday of the year with gritted teeth. Sadly, I've had to conclude that, although I have literally over a thousand dollars' worth of ornaments, which collectively create what everyone proclaims the most magnificent Christmas tree they've ever seen, this will have to be the last year we put it up; I just can't take another year of having the month before Christmas be non-stop arguing and stress to get the tree (and nothing else) done by the morning of the 25th. From now on, I'm just going to have my husband swap boxes of year-round display items for boxes of tabletop decorations, and I'll set them out myself (except a few that need to be hung up, which we'll most likely just do without) and that'll be it.
I hasten to add that no tears need to be shed about any of this; if all I can complain about is not having a Christmas tree, I figure that makes me one of the luckiest people on the planet. This post is partly to allow me to vent, partly to show the rarely-seen darker side common to many good marriages (as Chris Rock says, "If you ain't never had the rat poison in your hand and stared at it for a good long while, you ain't never been in love"), and partly to show that sometimes you need to just cut your losses and stop pushing to make something work... there's no holiday tradition ever created that's worth weeks of stress and fighting to have, folks, there just isn't, and if you're still doing a meal for 30 people, baking 100 dozen cookies, or anything else that you resent and dislike during what's supposed to be a season of joy and togetherness, I hope you'll take a moment to consider if maybe it might not be better for you and the loved ones you're with at this time of year if you found a way to celebrate that let everyone relax and have fun.
Stranger things have been said to have happened at this time of year, after all...
I'm tireder than I can say of being held hostage to my husband's procrastination and sloth, not to mention his outright refusal to do anything. After breaking his often-repeated promises to get the tree dragged out over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then the weekend after that, and the weekend after THAT, he finally got it up... but in the nearly 2 WEEKS since it got put together, it's STILL not fully decorated, not even CLOSE. Why? Because the ornaments are packed in big boxes that are in big stacks, and there's no room to take them out and just LEAVE them out for ME to use them (as much as I can-I can't do stuff above shoulder level anymore, sigh), so nothing can get done until my husband dismantles a stack and carries over a box. Why doesn't he just do that? Good question. I've hammered him ceaselessly about it, but he's chanted "In a minute" for as long as TWELVE HOURS at a time, and thus day after day, including an entire weekend, have gone by without it being done. To make matters worse, a couple of times he HAS brought boxes out at 3AM and thrown a few things up... and then has the unmitigated gall to complain that I'm not giving up a bunch of sleep to help him out!! At 3 in the frigging morning!!
At the risk of repeating myself; GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
And what excuse does he have for his endless refusals to get to work? None; when questioned, he LIES, and claims that all those evenings that I prompted him every half hour to fulfill his promises of work, when EVERY TIME I went to his study he was screwing around on a forum or on CNN, never happened... alternating with claims that those things were somehow more important than working on the tree, and so it was ok to lie about his intentions of getting to work soon and keep doing them-he can't even be bothered to be consistent or logical about his lies, how's that for rotten?
Worse, there isn't a single one of my hundreds of dollars worth of other Christmas decorations set up either, because they are all, you guessed it, packed in big boxes in stacks with other boxes, where I can see some of them but not get to any of them; worse, the stuff that's currently laid out where those things would go needs to be packed up and put in still other boxes in yet another stack... all stuff that only my husband has the muscle (and height) to handle.
Say what you will about my father, and if you're a regular reader you know that you can say quite alot, none of it good, when my mother announced that it was time to get the Christmas stuff out, he brought out the ladder and hauled all the boxes down from where they were stored up under the roof of the garage and in to the appointed place in the family room... and he did it that day, ALL of it that day, and without coming up with 12 hours of trivial nonsense to do to delay it, either. As my mother needed boxes moved around, or stashed back up in the storage area, he did that too, and right when he was asked, not after endless delays. It's pretty grim that my husband can't do as well as a man that should be locked up like a vicious animal.
So, once again, by the time Christmas Eve rolls around we'll have spent so much time screaming and fighting that we'll hate the sight of each other, and will spend the biggest holiday of the year with gritted teeth. Sadly, I've had to conclude that, although I have literally over a thousand dollars' worth of ornaments, which collectively create what everyone proclaims the most magnificent Christmas tree they've ever seen, this will have to be the last year we put it up; I just can't take another year of having the month before Christmas be non-stop arguing and stress to get the tree (and nothing else) done by the morning of the 25th. From now on, I'm just going to have my husband swap boxes of year-round display items for boxes of tabletop decorations, and I'll set them out myself (except a few that need to be hung up, which we'll most likely just do without) and that'll be it.
I hasten to add that no tears need to be shed about any of this; if all I can complain about is not having a Christmas tree, I figure that makes me one of the luckiest people on the planet. This post is partly to allow me to vent, partly to show the rarely-seen darker side common to many good marriages (as Chris Rock says, "If you ain't never had the rat poison in your hand and stared at it for a good long while, you ain't never been in love"), and partly to show that sometimes you need to just cut your losses and stop pushing to make something work... there's no holiday tradition ever created that's worth weeks of stress and fighting to have, folks, there just isn't, and if you're still doing a meal for 30 people, baking 100 dozen cookies, or anything else that you resent and dislike during what's supposed to be a season of joy and togetherness, I hope you'll take a moment to consider if maybe it might not be better for you and the loved ones you're with at this time of year if you found a way to celebrate that let everyone relax and have fun.
Stranger things have been said to have happened at this time of year, after all...
Thursday, December 22, 2005
An astonishing day
A package came in the mail from the UK today; neither my husband nor I could remember winning anything on eBay from there that we hadn't already gotten, so we were at a loss. The customs declaration on it said "Sweets"; foreign sellers write all sorts of goofy things on those labels to avoid whatever problems their countries might give them for shipping certain sorts of items, so they're rarely any kind of useful clue as to a package's contents. I picked up the box, and it made scary rattling sounds; since most of the things we get from auctions are breakable, I do NOT want to hear anything moving around in a shipping box. I got the brown paper off and revealed a CEREAL box, which isn't remotely sturdy enough to ship stuff across the city much less across half the globe; now I was REALLY nervous. Bracing myself, I opened it up... and it WAS candy!! Package after package of colorful Christmas chocolates tumbled out; at a total loss, I checked the wrappings again, looking for a clue, and found a little return address scrawled in ballpoint pen on the back... I didn't recognize the name, but the city was Aberdeen, and there's a lady there that I've been emailing with for nearly 6 years, so I was able to add 2+2 and get 4. She must have either gone back to her maiden name, or back to her ex-married name so that it matched her sons' last name, because I double-checked my records and found that yes, the address WAS hers, but no, the last name was NOT the one she used on her correspondence; I was going to email her and find out (after thanking her profusely for making such an effort on my behalf, of course)... but I think I'll call her instead. That's not as crazy as it sounds, because thanks to these guys
http://www.1010297.com/
I can call the UK for 3¢ a minute... less than most people pay to call the next city. And, although it's obviously too late to ship anything to her by Christmas, I'm going to get her a bunch of American candy and send it to her ASAP; she and her boys will have it to celebrate the new year with.
The other astonishing thing today came from the movie "Slaves of New York"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=148955&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
when the heroine said something I've never heard used as a description of the way any human being other than myself feels; "To me, having fun is almost identical to feeling anxious." It's being excited about something in general, not exclusively having fun, that does it to me, but it DOES feel almost exactly like anxiety; it'll even give me the same symptoms, such as sleeplessness, intestinal distress, head rushes, and hives. I don't know if that line appears in the book on which the movie is based
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671745247/qid=1135248715/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8570383-1034463?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
but the author, Tama Janowitz, was heavily involved with the movie, and even had a small role in it, so it's very likely that this concept came from her; some day, when I have time to read books again, I'll check her out. Anyways, see the movie if you get the chance; it got horrible reviews, but, perhaps because some time has passed since the era it portrays, I found it very entertaining.
http://www.1010297.com/
I can call the UK for 3¢ a minute... less than most people pay to call the next city. And, although it's obviously too late to ship anything to her by Christmas, I'm going to get her a bunch of American candy and send it to her ASAP; she and her boys will have it to celebrate the new year with.
The other astonishing thing today came from the movie "Slaves of New York"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=148955&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
when the heroine said something I've never heard used as a description of the way any human being other than myself feels; "To me, having fun is almost identical to feeling anxious." It's being excited about something in general, not exclusively having fun, that does it to me, but it DOES feel almost exactly like anxiety; it'll even give me the same symptoms, such as sleeplessness, intestinal distress, head rushes, and hives. I don't know if that line appears in the book on which the movie is based
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671745247/qid=1135248715/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8570383-1034463?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
but the author, Tama Janowitz, was heavily involved with the movie, and even had a small role in it, so it's very likely that this concept came from her; some day, when I have time to read books again, I'll check her out. Anyways, see the movie if you get the chance; it got horrible reviews, but, perhaps because some time has passed since the era it portrays, I found it very entertaining.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Possum report
We had a bad few weeks where we didn't see our original male possum and feared the worst; he finally came back, looking much thinner, so he'd either been trapped and relocated and taken a while to find his way home or had been hibernating... the little female has been vanishing for days at a time, and coming back thinner, so we think hibernating is the more likely answer. We were so happy to see him!! He chomped his food, grinned toothily at me, and brought joy back into my heart; it's foolish to get emotionally involved with wild animals, because a thousand dangers surround them every moment they're away from you, and eventually they'll succumb, but... although the possums show no sign of intelligence (except for the female, of course), they have a great deal of charm, and even my husband, who's not a remotely sentimental sort, adores them.
With the reappearance of the alpha male, we've had to return to worrying about what's going to happen when he encounters the beta male; the latter showed up with a chunk of fur ripped out of his head a week or so ago, and the former had an abrasion on his foreleg yesterday, so it's possible that they've already had a skirmish or 2. Both of them are totally cowed by the female (who's less than half their size, lol), so maybe if they meet up in her presence she'll square them away, but... it's just not natural for possums to hang out with each other, and the males will be territorial about my yard, the food, and the pretty possum girl, so it's a constant source of worry.
They may have had a close call last night; there was some loud squealing from nearby, so I jumped up to see what was going on, the female, who was eating by the sliding glass door, lunged into the landscaping, where she'd stay for the next half hour, and the alpha male came dashing in from the corner of the patio and began running hither and thither as if disoriented. I sprinted from window to window, calling anxiously to him, screaming for my husband, and looking for signs of blood or injury; we were both relieved when he finally calmed down and came over to eat, and an examination revealed not a hair out of place. The beta male was here tonight, and he's ok too, so maybe the squealing I heard was the rats, either fighting amongst themselves and scaring the alpha possum or perhaps fighting with him, since they're supposedly on his menu (although we've never seen him show any interest in them, sadly). The male possums MUST be able to smell each other all over the place around here, so they're aware of each other's existence at the very least; my best hope is that they've decided to just alternate visits and thus share the infinite supply of food.
And speaking of food; while the squirrel girl ran fearlessly to me from the 1st time I offered her a nut, the alpha possum, who's by far the most familiar with me of the shy trio, not only hasn't taken food from me yet, he's been walking away when I try to offer him something... he doesn't RUN away, he eats for another minute or 2 and then saunters off, but the end result is the same. He's reacted the same way to me opening the door and tossing more fruit out when he's run out of food; ignoring the food and pointedly leaving. Last night, though, amazingly, perhaps because he felt safer near me after his bad scare, when he finished all the food he had and I eased the door open and tossed some more out, he sniffed a little (I don't think possums see very well) and then came forward and ate it. HOORAY!! :-)
There's one little drawback to the enhanced closeness with the possums; since, as my husband puts it, they're not "hermetically sealed," I periodically catch one of them crouching in a bathroom sort of way off in the shadows, and they totally ignore my outraged yelps of "Stop that!! Bad, dirty possum!!"... my husband laughs at that, but then HE gets to go clean up the poopies, so *I* have the last laugh. I'd periodically seen suspicious damp spots on the patio, and wondered if someone was piddling out there, but there was never any odor so I couldn't be sure; tonight, however, as I was putting out food, I heard the unmistakable sound of falling liquid, looked to my left, and there was a cascade pouring down from between the slats of the patio cover... and it was NOT raining. I watched in amazement and disgust as the puddle grew; at 1st I thought it might be a rat, as this was before the possums had showed up, but there was enough urine to DROWN a rat, so that left me with it being either a certain filthy stray cat that hangs around here or a possum... and a feline-loving friend assures me that a cat would NEVER climb through foliage on a patio cover and pee up in the air like that, so that means that one of our marsupial buddies had arrived early and had a nap, and a tinkle, on the patio cover. My husband thought this was VERY funny of course; less so after I informed him that he'd have to go clean it up, naturally, but still, anything to do with bodily functions amuses him greatly.
There's a big time gap between this sentence and the previous paragraph, because when I finished it I looked out onto the patio and saw... a FOURTH possum!! This one is very small, and without the bulgy skull of the males, so we assume she's female; her poor tail is damaged in several spots, and it looks like the tip is missing, which broke our hearts, but she's a pretty little thing, and was very brave about eating when she could see and hear me, even though she's not used to me... she even smiled shyly at me. We're thrilled to have a new visitor, and are crossing our fingers that an additional female will make it possible for the males to each feel like they've got all they need, and so not fight.
Christmas came a few days early to the Omni household!!
With the reappearance of the alpha male, we've had to return to worrying about what's going to happen when he encounters the beta male; the latter showed up with a chunk of fur ripped out of his head a week or so ago, and the former had an abrasion on his foreleg yesterday, so it's possible that they've already had a skirmish or 2. Both of them are totally cowed by the female (who's less than half their size, lol), so maybe if they meet up in her presence she'll square them away, but... it's just not natural for possums to hang out with each other, and the males will be territorial about my yard, the food, and the pretty possum girl, so it's a constant source of worry.
They may have had a close call last night; there was some loud squealing from nearby, so I jumped up to see what was going on, the female, who was eating by the sliding glass door, lunged into the landscaping, where she'd stay for the next half hour, and the alpha male came dashing in from the corner of the patio and began running hither and thither as if disoriented. I sprinted from window to window, calling anxiously to him, screaming for my husband, and looking for signs of blood or injury; we were both relieved when he finally calmed down and came over to eat, and an examination revealed not a hair out of place. The beta male was here tonight, and he's ok too, so maybe the squealing I heard was the rats, either fighting amongst themselves and scaring the alpha possum or perhaps fighting with him, since they're supposedly on his menu (although we've never seen him show any interest in them, sadly). The male possums MUST be able to smell each other all over the place around here, so they're aware of each other's existence at the very least; my best hope is that they've decided to just alternate visits and thus share the infinite supply of food.
And speaking of food; while the squirrel girl ran fearlessly to me from the 1st time I offered her a nut, the alpha possum, who's by far the most familiar with me of the shy trio, not only hasn't taken food from me yet, he's been walking away when I try to offer him something... he doesn't RUN away, he eats for another minute or 2 and then saunters off, but the end result is the same. He's reacted the same way to me opening the door and tossing more fruit out when he's run out of food; ignoring the food and pointedly leaving. Last night, though, amazingly, perhaps because he felt safer near me after his bad scare, when he finished all the food he had and I eased the door open and tossed some more out, he sniffed a little (I don't think possums see very well) and then came forward and ate it. HOORAY!! :-)
There's one little drawback to the enhanced closeness with the possums; since, as my husband puts it, they're not "hermetically sealed," I periodically catch one of them crouching in a bathroom sort of way off in the shadows, and they totally ignore my outraged yelps of "Stop that!! Bad, dirty possum!!"... my husband laughs at that, but then HE gets to go clean up the poopies, so *I* have the last laugh. I'd periodically seen suspicious damp spots on the patio, and wondered if someone was piddling out there, but there was never any odor so I couldn't be sure; tonight, however, as I was putting out food, I heard the unmistakable sound of falling liquid, looked to my left, and there was a cascade pouring down from between the slats of the patio cover... and it was NOT raining. I watched in amazement and disgust as the puddle grew; at 1st I thought it might be a rat, as this was before the possums had showed up, but there was enough urine to DROWN a rat, so that left me with it being either a certain filthy stray cat that hangs around here or a possum... and a feline-loving friend assures me that a cat would NEVER climb through foliage on a patio cover and pee up in the air like that, so that means that one of our marsupial buddies had arrived early and had a nap, and a tinkle, on the patio cover. My husband thought this was VERY funny of course; less so after I informed him that he'd have to go clean it up, naturally, but still, anything to do with bodily functions amuses him greatly.
There's a big time gap between this sentence and the previous paragraph, because when I finished it I looked out onto the patio and saw... a FOURTH possum!! This one is very small, and without the bulgy skull of the males, so we assume she's female; her poor tail is damaged in several spots, and it looks like the tip is missing, which broke our hearts, but she's a pretty little thing, and was very brave about eating when she could see and hear me, even though she's not used to me... she even smiled shyly at me. We're thrilled to have a new visitor, and are crossing our fingers that an additional female will make it possible for the males to each feel like they've got all they need, and so not fight.
Christmas came a few days early to the Omni household!!
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Stone babies
Tonight on the Discovery Health Channel I saw a program called "Pregnant for 46 Years," for which the blurb is "Follow two amazing stories of pregnancies that occurred outside the womb. The first story details Zahara's pregnancy that began in 1955. At the age of 75 doctors discovered her unborn, calcified baby that had grown to full term."
http://health.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=114743&gid=0&channel=DHC
I know it sounds more like a National Enquirer story than science, but it's the real deal; that lady carried a SEVEN POUND fossilized mass inside of her for half a century. The explanation is that it was an ectopic pregnancy that, instead of rotting when it died, got covered by a dense, thick layer of calcium by her body to protect itself from the foreign object; what they removed from that poor lady looked like a semi-abstract stone sculpture of a baby. What's even MORE amazing is that this is NOT a unique case, but has appeared throughout the world (Zahara is in Morocco, just FYI):
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Brazil: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-31802000000600008
"A 40 year-old woman of brown skin had a primary complaint of lower abdomen pain. The patient reported regular abdominal growth and healthy fetal activity from a pregnancy that happened 18 years earlier. She had never done pre-natal follow-up. In the third trimester, she had started to feel strong cramps in the lower abdomen at the same time that fetal activity disappeared. She had not looked for medical assistance and some weeks later she had eliminated a dark red mass through the vagina with a placental appearance.
She had experienced the characteristic modifications of breast lactation. The abdomen had started to decrease but retained an infra-umbilical mass of about 20 centimeters in diameter, mobile and painless. A few months before being seen at our service, she started to fell pain in the lower abdomen and looked for medical assistance."
"The abdominal X-ray and computerized tomography showed the presence of an ectopic fetus in a mesentery blood vessel branch, with peripheral calcifications. The ultrasound examinations showed an empty uterus, regular ovaries and the presence of a 31-week fetus (determined from femur length)."
"A hypothesis of lithopedion was made, and because of the clinical symptoms and the patient's desire to remove the mass, exploratory laparotomy was done. After performing parietal celiotomy, an oval tumor was seen with adherence of the right ovary and epiploon. It measured 15 x 25 centimeters and weighed 1,890 grams. It was composed of a calcified ovular membrane adhering to a fetus, which was dissected and proved to be well conserved and partially calcified."
"In the cases related in the literature, the age of the patients on the date of diagnosis varied from 23 to 100 years, 2/3 of them being over 40 years old. The period of fetus retention was from 4 to 60 years. Fetal death occurred between 3 and 6 months of pregnancy in 20% of the cases, between 7 and 8 months in 27% and at full term in 43% of the cases.
Abdominal pregnancy results from the rupture of tubal or ovarian pregnancy with abdominal cavity implantation. The development of lithopedion happens under certain conditions: (1) extra-uterine pregnancy; (2) fetal death after 3 months of pregnancy; (3) the egg must be sterile; (4) there cannot be any early diagnosis; (5) local conditions must exist for calcium precipitation (deposit). The development of this pregnancy is the same as for abdominal intra-uterine pregnancy until fetal death. After this time, dehydration of tissues and calcium infiltration occur.
An abdominal pregnancy that calcifies is generically called lithopedion and can have the following forms: (1) lithokelyphos (litho = rock, kelyphos = shell): only the ovular membrane is calcified and the fetus can be in different stages of decomposition; (2) lithokelyphopedion: both are calcified, i.e. fetus and ovular membrane, as in this case; (3) lithopedion: only the fetus is calcified.
Although most cases remain asymptomatic for years, pelvic pain, weight sensation in the abdomen and compressive symptoms can occur."
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Zaire: http://www.obgyn.net/ENGLISH/PUBS/ARTICLES/Stone_Baby.htm
"The patient is a 37-year-old Zairian female who lives in a village of Malongo at the headwaters of the Congo River. She presented with a relatively asymptomatic large abdominal mass. Examination revealed a distended abdomen with a very irregularly contoured mass present consistent with a large fibroid uterus 28-32 weeks size. The patient was having fairly regular periods. She has had eight previous pregnancies with five living children. Recommendation made for exploratory laparotomy through a midline incision with a working diagnosis of uterine leiomyomata.
Exploration through the midline incision revealed no free fluid present in the abdomen. The uterus and ovaries felt fairly normal to palpation. A large calcified spherical mass was delivered through the incision, enveloped with omental adhesions. At this point diagnosis was thought be possibly some type of splenic or mesenteric tumor. The diagnosis was finally made when a shoulder was delivered along with this mass. Finally, after the adhesions were removed, a four pound calcified fetus was removed. This appeared to be approximately a 32-week intra-abdominal pregnancy which had died and calcified.
In further questioning the patient, she stated that she had been pregnant about three years ago and everything seemed to be going fine, but 'the baby never came out.'"
Korea: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:uSb5Hrf93ZEJ:jkms.kams.or.kr/2002/pdf/04274.pdf+lithopedion&hl=en
"A 63-yr-old... woman was referred to our hospital for a palpable abdominal mass with a 40-yr history... the patient reported that she had become pregnant 40 yr before and that the pregnancy had continued for about 9-10 months with fetal movement and abdominal distension, until she experienced a vaginal bleeding without any signs of labor. Because of poor accessibility to doctors and hospitals, she stayed at home and sought the alternative medicine such as herb medication. After some time, the fetal movement and the abdominal distension disappeared and the palpable mass developed. Two years later, she became pregnant again and successfully delivered a daughter, who was 38 yr old at the time the patient was admitted to our hospital. From history taking, we suspected the possibility of old advanced abdominal pregnancy.
On gross pathologic examination, the mass showed a glistening, stony hard calcified external surface. After decalcification, the mass was sectioned and found to be composed of mummified tissues, bones, and cartilages that were compatible with fetal long bones and ribs. So we concluded that the mass was a lithopedion."
Taiwan (France, UK, USA): http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000106/20000106s5.html
"Doctors at the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei have recently discovered a 'fossilized' fetus in the Abdomen of a 76-year-old woman, suffering from cervical cancer while operating to remove her womb.
According to a an examination report, the fetus was conceived 49 years ago, making it only the fourth such recorded phenomenon, said Yu Chien-jen, chief of the hospital's gynecology department.
Yu said doctors on Dec. 31 found a 20-gram (0.7 ounce) and 12-centimeter-long lithopaedion, the rocklike remains of a fetus hardened by calcium buildup, in the abdominal cavity of the woman surnamed Wu.
Wu, who returned home for rest on Monday, said she first found a tumor in her womb in 1950, but doctors told her that the tumor was benign and did not have to be removed if she did not wish to have more children.
Wu decided not to remove the tumor because she and her husband did not have enough money to support a third child.
It was not until a few days ago did Wu find the so-called tumor was actually a fetus.
Wu and her 83-year-old husband migrated from mainland China to Taiwan in 1950. Wu's husband had been by her side since she checked in the hospital late last month.
Yu said the fetus appeared to have died in the 20th week of Wu's pregnancy when it moved from her womb to her abdomen. The average weight of a 20-week fetus is about 300 grams.
The hospital said their research yielded only three known lithopaedions, and the earliest case dated back to 1582, when a 28-year old fetus was found in French woman.
The other two cases were reported in the United States. In 1995, the Lancet medical journal reported that a 92-year-old woman had a lithopaedion inside her body. In 1999, the Madigan Military Hospital in Washington D.C. said a 67-year-old woman had been found to have carried a calcified fetus for 39 years." (Note: The Lancet is a British medical journal, not American.)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1348500
"A stone baby, or lithopedion, results when a fetus dies during an ectopic (typically abdominal) pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies. It is not unusual for a lithopedion to remain undiagnosed for decades, and it is often not until a patient is examined for other conditions that a stone baby is found. The oldest reported case is that of a 94 year old woman, whose lithopedion had probably been present for over 60 years.
Lithopedion is a rare phenomenon, occurring once in about 20,000 pregnancies, and with less than three hundred cases noted in medical literature accumulated over some 400 years. Lithopedion may occur from 14 weeks' gestation to full term. The earliest stone baby is one found in an archaeological excavation, dated to 1100 BCE."
http://path.upmc.edu/cases/case128/dx.html
"The appearance of a calcified fetus or lithopedion may be evident if maturation is advanced. This can occur if there is retention of the fetus for many months beyond the average gestation. It is important to remember that a lithopedion does not need to be a twin. In one reported case, a 94-year-old woman was found to have a lithopedion, probably present for approximately 61 years."
Truth really IS stranger than fiction!! :-O
http://health.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=114743&gid=0&channel=DHC
I know it sounds more like a National Enquirer story than science, but it's the real deal; that lady carried a SEVEN POUND fossilized mass inside of her for half a century. The explanation is that it was an ectopic pregnancy that, instead of rotting when it died, got covered by a dense, thick layer of calcium by her body to protect itself from the foreign object; what they removed from that poor lady looked like a semi-abstract stone sculpture of a baby. What's even MORE amazing is that this is NOT a unique case, but has appeared throughout the world (Zahara is in Morocco, just FYI):
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Brazil: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-31802000000600008
"A 40 year-old woman of brown skin had a primary complaint of lower abdomen pain. The patient reported regular abdominal growth and healthy fetal activity from a pregnancy that happened 18 years earlier. She had never done pre-natal follow-up. In the third trimester, she had started to feel strong cramps in the lower abdomen at the same time that fetal activity disappeared. She had not looked for medical assistance and some weeks later she had eliminated a dark red mass through the vagina with a placental appearance.
She had experienced the characteristic modifications of breast lactation. The abdomen had started to decrease but retained an infra-umbilical mass of about 20 centimeters in diameter, mobile and painless. A few months before being seen at our service, she started to fell pain in the lower abdomen and looked for medical assistance."
"The abdominal X-ray and computerized tomography showed the presence of an ectopic fetus in a mesentery blood vessel branch, with peripheral calcifications. The ultrasound examinations showed an empty uterus, regular ovaries and the presence of a 31-week fetus (determined from femur length)."
"A hypothesis of lithopedion was made, and because of the clinical symptoms and the patient's desire to remove the mass, exploratory laparotomy was done. After performing parietal celiotomy, an oval tumor was seen with adherence of the right ovary and epiploon. It measured 15 x 25 centimeters and weighed 1,890 grams. It was composed of a calcified ovular membrane adhering to a fetus, which was dissected and proved to be well conserved and partially calcified."
"In the cases related in the literature, the age of the patients on the date of diagnosis varied from 23 to 100 years, 2/3 of them being over 40 years old. The period of fetus retention was from 4 to 60 years. Fetal death occurred between 3 and 6 months of pregnancy in 20% of the cases, between 7 and 8 months in 27% and at full term in 43% of the cases.
Abdominal pregnancy results from the rupture of tubal or ovarian pregnancy with abdominal cavity implantation. The development of lithopedion happens under certain conditions: (1) extra-uterine pregnancy; (2) fetal death after 3 months of pregnancy; (3) the egg must be sterile; (4) there cannot be any early diagnosis; (5) local conditions must exist for calcium precipitation (deposit). The development of this pregnancy is the same as for abdominal intra-uterine pregnancy until fetal death. After this time, dehydration of tissues and calcium infiltration occur.
An abdominal pregnancy that calcifies is generically called lithopedion and can have the following forms: (1) lithokelyphos (litho = rock, kelyphos = shell): only the ovular membrane is calcified and the fetus can be in different stages of decomposition; (2) lithokelyphopedion: both are calcified, i.e. fetus and ovular membrane, as in this case; (3) lithopedion: only the fetus is calcified.
Although most cases remain asymptomatic for years, pelvic pain, weight sensation in the abdomen and compressive symptoms can occur."
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Zaire: http://www.obgyn.net/ENGLISH/PUBS/ARTICLES/Stone_Baby.htm
"The patient is a 37-year-old Zairian female who lives in a village of Malongo at the headwaters of the Congo River. She presented with a relatively asymptomatic large abdominal mass. Examination revealed a distended abdomen with a very irregularly contoured mass present consistent with a large fibroid uterus 28-32 weeks size. The patient was having fairly regular periods. She has had eight previous pregnancies with five living children. Recommendation made for exploratory laparotomy through a midline incision with a working diagnosis of uterine leiomyomata.
Exploration through the midline incision revealed no free fluid present in the abdomen. The uterus and ovaries felt fairly normal to palpation. A large calcified spherical mass was delivered through the incision, enveloped with omental adhesions. At this point diagnosis was thought be possibly some type of splenic or mesenteric tumor. The diagnosis was finally made when a shoulder was delivered along with this mass. Finally, after the adhesions were removed, a four pound calcified fetus was removed. This appeared to be approximately a 32-week intra-abdominal pregnancy which had died and calcified.
In further questioning the patient, she stated that she had been pregnant about three years ago and everything seemed to be going fine, but 'the baby never came out.'"
Korea: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:uSb5Hrf93ZEJ:jkms.kams.or.kr/2002/pdf/04274.pdf+lithopedion&hl=en
"A 63-yr-old... woman was referred to our hospital for a palpable abdominal mass with a 40-yr history... the patient reported that she had become pregnant 40 yr before and that the pregnancy had continued for about 9-10 months with fetal movement and abdominal distension, until she experienced a vaginal bleeding without any signs of labor. Because of poor accessibility to doctors and hospitals, she stayed at home and sought the alternative medicine such as herb medication. After some time, the fetal movement and the abdominal distension disappeared and the palpable mass developed. Two years later, she became pregnant again and successfully delivered a daughter, who was 38 yr old at the time the patient was admitted to our hospital. From history taking, we suspected the possibility of old advanced abdominal pregnancy.
On gross pathologic examination, the mass showed a glistening, stony hard calcified external surface. After decalcification, the mass was sectioned and found to be composed of mummified tissues, bones, and cartilages that were compatible with fetal long bones and ribs. So we concluded that the mass was a lithopedion."
Taiwan (France, UK, USA): http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000106/20000106s5.html
"Doctors at the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei have recently discovered a 'fossilized' fetus in the Abdomen of a 76-year-old woman, suffering from cervical cancer while operating to remove her womb.
According to a an examination report, the fetus was conceived 49 years ago, making it only the fourth such recorded phenomenon, said Yu Chien-jen, chief of the hospital's gynecology department.
Yu said doctors on Dec. 31 found a 20-gram (0.7 ounce) and 12-centimeter-long lithopaedion, the rocklike remains of a fetus hardened by calcium buildup, in the abdominal cavity of the woman surnamed Wu.
Wu, who returned home for rest on Monday, said she first found a tumor in her womb in 1950, but doctors told her that the tumor was benign and did not have to be removed if she did not wish to have more children.
Wu decided not to remove the tumor because she and her husband did not have enough money to support a third child.
It was not until a few days ago did Wu find the so-called tumor was actually a fetus.
Wu and her 83-year-old husband migrated from mainland China to Taiwan in 1950. Wu's husband had been by her side since she checked in the hospital late last month.
Yu said the fetus appeared to have died in the 20th week of Wu's pregnancy when it moved from her womb to her abdomen. The average weight of a 20-week fetus is about 300 grams.
The hospital said their research yielded only three known lithopaedions, and the earliest case dated back to 1582, when a 28-year old fetus was found in French woman.
The other two cases were reported in the United States. In 1995, the Lancet medical journal reported that a 92-year-old woman had a lithopaedion inside her body. In 1999, the Madigan Military Hospital in Washington D.C. said a 67-year-old woman had been found to have carried a calcified fetus for 39 years." (Note: The Lancet is a British medical journal, not American.)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1348500
"A stone baby, or lithopedion, results when a fetus dies during an ectopic (typically abdominal) pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies. It is not unusual for a lithopedion to remain undiagnosed for decades, and it is often not until a patient is examined for other conditions that a stone baby is found. The oldest reported case is that of a 94 year old woman, whose lithopedion had probably been present for over 60 years.
Lithopedion is a rare phenomenon, occurring once in about 20,000 pregnancies, and with less than three hundred cases noted in medical literature accumulated over some 400 years. Lithopedion may occur from 14 weeks' gestation to full term. The earliest stone baby is one found in an archaeological excavation, dated to 1100 BCE."
http://path.upmc.edu/cases/case128/dx.html
"The appearance of a calcified fetus or lithopedion may be evident if maturation is advanced. This can occur if there is retention of the fetus for many months beyond the average gestation. It is important to remember that a lithopedion does not need to be a twin. In one reported case, a 94-year-old woman was found to have a lithopedion, probably present for approximately 61 years."
Truth really IS stranger than fiction!! :-O
Monday, December 19, 2005
Sunday stuff
Joel Osteen went traditional Christian on me tonight; his sermon centered around the idea that everything you take in is recorded in your brain, which is certainly true, and that whatever you see over and over can eventually seem normal and ok to you even if you started out knowing better, which, given the weak-mindedness of many people, is a fair assertion, and that therefore you should try to surround yourself with things that are positive, encouraging and uplifting so that THOSE are the feelings you absorb throughout the day, which is a perfectly good idea... but then he veered off into describing our culture's TV shows, movies, music, games, ads, and even catalogs as things that a "child of the most high God" needs to refuse to see or hear, because those things are unwholesome and bad for you. I've got alot of respect for Joel, and his skill in analyzing the workings of the spiritual world, but the idea that to be a good Christian you have to not go to the movies with your friends, or not flip through the catalogs that come in the mail, and even use the remote to change the channel every time an "impure" commercial comes on, is just plain ridiculous. I guess the honeymoon's over...
I saw Morgan Freeman on "60 Minutes" this evening; he said that he hated Black History Month, that he wished it didn't exist, because black history is part of American history, and since there isn't a special month for whites, there shouldn't be one for blacks either. If a white person had said that, they'd be torn to pieces by a howling mob; it'll be interesting to see if there's a reaction from any of the black leaders about this. I personally am happy to have as many months for different kinds of history as the public wants, so that we can be reminded that all kinds of people have done important things, but when asked how we'll fight racism if we don't have things like BHM, Freeman said something thought-provoking; that the way to end it is to just stop talking about it, because if we're not calling people white or black but just men (or women, presumably), then there's no more racism. People could still think racist thoughts, and commit racist acts, even if we weren't talking about it, but it'd certainly be far less of an issue in general if it wasn't always being talked about... I doubt we'll see it happen in our lifetimes, though.
My quote script came up with the following yesterday:
"There are no facts, only interpretations." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
You've gotta hand it to Nietzsche; he gives good quote. Although I can't imagine that many people take this concept literally, it's undeniable that many things presented as facts are NOT, although they might have been based in facts at some point; sadly, just as the visual processing area of the brain alters what we see so that we don't notice any gaps in our perceptions (this is why we don't see blackness every time we blink), the thinking areas of the brain pad the information we take in with whatever's necessary for us to believe we saw and understood the whole situation, even though if we look at it objectively we know we rarely do. A favorite example of mine is the case of UFO's; most people who've seen inexplicable lights in the sky and call them UFO's make the jump to claiming that aliens were in them even though they didn't SEE any aliens, or any evidence that they were there, or that the lights were ships... we're so programmed in this culture to think that UFO stands for "alien spaceship" instead of just "unidentified flying object" that we see the presence of aliens inside of them as a fact rather than a pretty extreme interpretation of some oddly-behaving lights.
Quantum physics shows us that the very act of observing something, or even having a mechanism observe it, can change it, so how can we ever be sure that what we saw or recorded was the way the thing would be if we weren't observing? We ASSUME that what we see or record represents overall reality... but does it? What if we found out some day that EVERYTHING ever observed through a microscope, telescope, or other scientific instrument was just the tiniest bit off due to "observational interference"? What would that tell us about how well science explains reality?
I saw Morgan Freeman on "60 Minutes" this evening; he said that he hated Black History Month, that he wished it didn't exist, because black history is part of American history, and since there isn't a special month for whites, there shouldn't be one for blacks either. If a white person had said that, they'd be torn to pieces by a howling mob; it'll be interesting to see if there's a reaction from any of the black leaders about this. I personally am happy to have as many months for different kinds of history as the public wants, so that we can be reminded that all kinds of people have done important things, but when asked how we'll fight racism if we don't have things like BHM, Freeman said something thought-provoking; that the way to end it is to just stop talking about it, because if we're not calling people white or black but just men (or women, presumably), then there's no more racism. People could still think racist thoughts, and commit racist acts, even if we weren't talking about it, but it'd certainly be far less of an issue in general if it wasn't always being talked about... I doubt we'll see it happen in our lifetimes, though.
My quote script came up with the following yesterday:
"There are no facts, only interpretations." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
You've gotta hand it to Nietzsche; he gives good quote. Although I can't imagine that many people take this concept literally, it's undeniable that many things presented as facts are NOT, although they might have been based in facts at some point; sadly, just as the visual processing area of the brain alters what we see so that we don't notice any gaps in our perceptions (this is why we don't see blackness every time we blink), the thinking areas of the brain pad the information we take in with whatever's necessary for us to believe we saw and understood the whole situation, even though if we look at it objectively we know we rarely do. A favorite example of mine is the case of UFO's; most people who've seen inexplicable lights in the sky and call them UFO's make the jump to claiming that aliens were in them even though they didn't SEE any aliens, or any evidence that they were there, or that the lights were ships... we're so programmed in this culture to think that UFO stands for "alien spaceship" instead of just "unidentified flying object" that we see the presence of aliens inside of them as a fact rather than a pretty extreme interpretation of some oddly-behaving lights.
Quantum physics shows us that the very act of observing something, or even having a mechanism observe it, can change it, so how can we ever be sure that what we saw or recorded was the way the thing would be if we weren't observing? We ASSUME that what we see or record represents overall reality... but does it? What if we found out some day that EVERYTHING ever observed through a microscope, telescope, or other scientific instrument was just the tiniest bit off due to "observational interference"? What would that tell us about how well science explains reality?
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Check out my new sidebar game
I know, most sidebar games are stupid, which is why I haven't gotten one before now, but finally there's one that tests knowledge, ability to reason, and memory; it's called "LittleNeo's Flag Quiz," and thanks to it I've discovered that, because of my other NeoWorx doodad, "Online Visitors," I've learned to recognize an astonishing # of countries' flags... pretty cool for someone who never took a geography class. You don't have to know that many flags to play it, though, if you understand how countries in the different parts of the world tend to design them; for example, European flags are usually striped, African flags tend to be fancy, and Asian flags often have alot of solid-colored area... it sounds silly, but you'd be amazed at how many right answers I've gotten just with that. It also helps to know what countries control, or used to control, various other countries, particularly the islands, because that's often reflected in the flags; I was VERY pleased with myself for recognizing the flag for the Faroe Islands because I knew, having seen them on the geolocator and looked them up, that they're part of Denmark, and the flag is very similar to Denmark's. Even without being able to use any of those sorts of hints, though, you can still play if you've got a decent memory; with 60 flag displays per game, you can see them all pretty quickly, and each game you can learn a few more. Give it a try; go ahead, I'll wait.
Fun, isn't it? Sadly, getting it installed was FAR from fun. In the News section of the Neoworx site it says "You will find the HTML code in the Members Area," but my problems with doing things on that site continue (don't ask), because the darned thing would NOT let me log in; undeterred, I copied the code from the blog I'd seen it on, swapped in my own member #, and stuck it in my template. I republished, refreshed, and... where the game should have been was a 2nd copy of my "World Wide Clock."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!
Since both of those things are iframes, I thought maybe they were confusing each other by being too close together, so I moved the game; no matter where I put it, it still ended up being the clock. I found out on a forum that you have to do something with the iframes to have more than 1 on a page at a time, but I didn't understand enough of the explanation to actually alter the code, so I consulted with "Jayson the Tech God," who'd given me the 1st iframe code (see my post of 11-20-05), and, after a couple of false starts, he came up with the idea of sticking "id="id1"" in one of the commands and "id="id2"" in the other, and it worked; the game was finally in my sidebar... well, mostly.
The problem with these free doodads is that there's no standard for whether or not they have imbedded line breaks before or after them, or as to how much space, if any, they pad themselves with, and there's something else going on that makes some of them REALLY not like to be next to each other, because they create a bunch of extra space between them; in other words, I had to do the usual trial and error to get the game spaced properly from the surrounding doodads... which was complicated in this case because the game is different sizes based on whether it's being played or not, and even on the names of the countries listed, and I had to recognize that, stop messing with it, and plan its placement based on its size in the reset position. There was an additional wrinkle, too; at one point, a sliver of the bottom of the box vanished; fortunately, I'd seen that once before, and knew that it meant that, although there didn't seem to be any overlap, there was an invisible margin from the doodad underneath it that WAS overlapping, and I needed to add another line break to fix it... I took what was undoubtedly an excessive amount of pride in how quickly I figured that one out.
So, at last, after more time and trouble than anyone who doesn't read this post will ever guess, I've got a cool sidebar game; I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.
Fun, isn't it? Sadly, getting it installed was FAR from fun. In the News section of the Neoworx site it says "You will find the HTML code in the Members Area," but my problems with doing things on that site continue (don't ask), because the darned thing would NOT let me log in; undeterred, I copied the code from the blog I'd seen it on, swapped in my own member #, and stuck it in my template. I republished, refreshed, and... where the game should have been was a 2nd copy of my "World Wide Clock."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!
Since both of those things are iframes, I thought maybe they were confusing each other by being too close together, so I moved the game; no matter where I put it, it still ended up being the clock. I found out on a forum that you have to do something with the iframes to have more than 1 on a page at a time, but I didn't understand enough of the explanation to actually alter the code, so I consulted with "Jayson the Tech God," who'd given me the 1st iframe code (see my post of 11-20-05), and, after a couple of false starts, he came up with the idea of sticking "id="id1"" in one of the commands and "id="id2"" in the other, and it worked; the game was finally in my sidebar... well, mostly.
The problem with these free doodads is that there's no standard for whether or not they have imbedded line breaks before or after them, or as to how much space, if any, they pad themselves with, and there's something else going on that makes some of them REALLY not like to be next to each other, because they create a bunch of extra space between them; in other words, I had to do the usual trial and error to get the game spaced properly from the surrounding doodads... which was complicated in this case because the game is different sizes based on whether it's being played or not, and even on the names of the countries listed, and I had to recognize that, stop messing with it, and plan its placement based on its size in the reset position. There was an additional wrinkle, too; at one point, a sliver of the bottom of the box vanished; fortunately, I'd seen that once before, and knew that it meant that, although there didn't seem to be any overlap, there was an invisible margin from the doodad underneath it that WAS overlapping, and I needed to add another line break to fix it... I took what was undoubtedly an excessive amount of pride in how quickly I figured that one out.
So, at last, after more time and trouble than anyone who doesn't read this post will ever guess, I've got a cool sidebar game; I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.
