Leprechaun Phlegm

Now, there's a good title for a post.

A while back, I read somewhere about a simple game that can be played on Google. The idea is to enter a two-word search term and see if you can get only one hit. Sounds simple, but I have yet to find such a term.

Here are a few examples of terms I tried today:

Leprechaun intestine - 6,760 hits
Leprechaun hemorrhoid - 2,070 hits
Galactic hemorrhoid - 4,220 hits
DeSoto hemorrhoid - 1,450 hits
Spaghetti phlegm - 10,400 hits
Globular pitchfork - 514 hits
Leprechaun Gerhardstein- 5 hits

Drop a line if you can do any better...

Puh-leaze!

What is this world coming to...

New Life for Barnaby

Every year, Dorothy comes in and decorates the Christmas tree, and every year the theme is different. Last year, I had dozens of fish hanging from my tree. The year before, it was all the characters from "Green Eggs and Ham." This year, the theme is political (imagine that...).

I'll post a picture of the entire tree later, but this ornament made me laugh.

Pictures of my kids, my parents and my siblings are part of the decoration every year, and in keeping with the political theme of this year's tree, everyone is an ambassador to a foreign country.

Looks like Barnaby has been resurrected and is now serving as an ambassador. (See April 26, 2006 post, "Barnaby: Death of an Icon.")

No, wait...maybe that's not Barnaby...maybe it's Thom.

You decide.

Another house worth looking at...

Contrary to what some have said, Elvis Presley was not sighted here in 1996.

This little cabin on the Potomac River would work. The owner did a great deal of planning as he laid out the gardens, and I'm told that he was able to catch upwards of a million pounds of herring from the river each year. That amazes me -- I didn't know herring would travel this far upstream during their annual run.

It comes complete with a smokehouse and stables, and although the interior could use a little updating (I'd probably add running water and maybe even electricity), it would be a fine place to live.

More reasons to buy that house...

I'm almost sure the house is not wired for cable, so I'd probably add a Direct TV antenna to the roof.

I want to buy this house

A great trip to Virginia week before last. I couldn't find this house, with its beautiful gardens, in the Multiple Listing Service, but I'm sure the owner will eventually want to sell. And I'll be ready.

Of Wise Men, Gold and Googols

I have way too much useless information in my head, here being but two examples.

1. Imagine a box 51 feet tall, 51 feet wide and 51 feet deep...all of the gold ever mined thoughout history would fit into that box. Now imagine that the Three Wise Men had invested one dollar at 6% interest, and one of their heirs is now going to cash out the proceeds of the investment. (I know, I know there were no dollars then, but bear with me.) At $600 per ounce, how much of that gold could they buy?

The size of the piece of gold, if shaped into a sphere, with the sphere centered on the sun, would extend to the orbit of Pluto. If you were to put the earth on that sphere, its size would be comparable to the size of a house on the earth's surface.

This is mind-boggling, and when I first heard this story many years ago, I was skeptical. Then I did the math. It's true.

2. A googol is a number, Specifically, it is 10 raised to the 100th power. To write out that number, you would write a "1" followed by 100 zeros. A googolplex is 10 to the googol power. To write that number out, you would write a "1" followed by a googol of zeros.

Suppose you wanted to write out that googolplex. How big a piece of paper would you need?

The paper needed to write the number would not fit into the known universe.

Things like this will give you a headache if you think about them long enough, so just move on to another blog now...

A Memorial Tournament To Remember

Dublin, Ohio is home to Muirfield Village Golf Club, "The Course That Jack Built." Each year, Jack Nicklaus hosts the Memorial Tournament, and each year my company sponsors a hospitality house. It helps that my boss lives right on the course, at the corner of the 14th green and the 15th tee.

This year, in addition to the hospitality, we held a fundraiser on Thursday for Congressman John Boehner, the Minority Leader of the US House. John is a great guy, but what made this event so memorable was that Jack Nicklaus himself stopped by to show his support. I shook his hand, and hoped that some of his legendary golfing skill would rub off on me (it didn't).

Then something else happened that made this a special tournament. I went out yesterday with my younger daughter and her boyfriend, but there was a weather delay when we arrived. So we went into the house and what did we see, but Sergio Garcia hanging around. He was coming up the 14th fairway when the delay was called, so he just walked right up to the backyard and came into the house. He stayed for about two hours. There were a bevy of college-aged girls at the house, which might explain why Sergio was in no hurry to leave.

Today is the last day of the tournament, and who knows, maybe Tiger will slice one into the back yard and we'll meet him too.

The Day I Lost Respect For Authority

I was the first kid in my family to go to kindergarten. The first six kids went directly to the Catholic school for first grade, but I was five years old when someone decided that kids should start school at 5 years old instead of 6, so off I went to the public school.

All went well in kindergarten. To this day, I think I was the teacher's pet. I was the only kid who knew that a pound of coal weighs the same as a pound of feathers, and I was also the only kid to realize that Mrs. Friedt had a first name.

But that was kindergarten. Off I went again, this time to the Immaculate Conception School, where I served an eight year sentence. Well, the first four years were okay...I started out as a straight-A student, and when Father Bishop came in to read report cards, I was never worried about being embarrassed by my grades. But then came the fifth grade.

Sister Mary Karen was the teacher. We were in science class when one of the kids asked why it was warmer in the summer than in the winter. Sister Mary Karen explained that it was because the earth is closer to the sun in the summer than in the winter.

I knew better.

I raised my hand, and when she called on me, I explained that the sun is actually closer to the earth in the winter (in the northern hemisphere) than in summer, and that it was the tilt of the earth's axis that gives us more direct sunlight in the summer. She looked at me and said -- in so many words -- you are full of bullshit.

So, being the wise-guy, stubborn German kid that I was, I said, well how do you explain summer in the southern hemisphere? Is the sun closer to them in their summer, when it's winter here?

She didn't take too kindly to my way of explaining this, so I went home that night and pulled out a science book that explained all, complete with a drawing of the earth (relative to the sun) at different times of the year. I took the book to school the next day.

In science class the next day, I raised my hand and told Sister Mary Karen that I had a book that would answer the question that had been asked the day before. She looked at the drawings, read a bit of the text, and shook her head. "The book is wrong," she said.

I must have realized at that moment how Galileo and those poor kids who were raised in the USSR must have felt every day. Here was the truth, but my teacher ...MY TEACHER...denied it. I guess she was even more German and stubborn than me, but truth will eventually prevail, as those kids in the USSR found out. I don't think Galileo lived long enough to get his revenge.

That was the day I lost respect for authority. Might does not make right, and I learned that day that it was possible for me to know more than some people in authority. And I paid dearly for that lesson throughout the remainder of my sentence...I mean, the remaining three years of my education...at ICS.

R.I.P.

Mike Newkirk
1955 - 2007

Things That Astound Me (Part I)

1. People actually reply to those e-mails from Nigerian hucksters who have $28 million to give you. Were you born yesterday? Remind me not to leave my pets in your care.

2. Non-Fat Half & Half. If it's half cream and half milk, then it has fat. Do you know what makes cream so...well, creamy? It's the fat. That's why ice cream tastes so good and has that creamy texture. Half & Half was invented so that you could cut down (but not eliminate) the fat from the cream you put in your coffee. And if you want Half & Half in your coffee, but you want no fat, then you don't want Half & Half. You want black coffee.

This is an apple...

...with a story. Click on the picture to take a good look before reading on.

On April 23, 1985, we brought Dad home to the Golden Hill Cemetery. It was a beautiful spring day, made more so by the millions of apple blossoms that bloomed that day. It wasn't unusual for the apple trees to be in blossom so early, but this seemed to be an unusually large blossom. And it was fitting.

The following winter was bitterly cold. On one of those cold days -- it was below zero -- I walked up the hill to the cemetery with my camera. Dad's tombstone had not been laid yet, and the cemetery was a very barren looking place. I spent some time walking among the apple trees, when I saw this apple. It was frozen solid and covered with a thin layer of ice. And it was a blossom the day we buried Dad.

You won't see this anymore...

I sit back every now and then to reflect on how much the world has changed during my lifetime. I remember my grandmother (1902-1996) telling me how she didn't need a driver's license when she started driving, and heavier-than-air flight was invented when she was just a year old. Before she died, she saw men on the moon and man-made satellites travelling to distant planets. That's something to think about.

The changes in my life have been more subtle in many ways. Consider the following.

When I was a kid, there were ashtrays in the grocery stores. If there wasn't an ashtray in this aisle, you could be sure there would be one in the next aisle.

We would pile into the station wagon to go downtown without putting any shoes on. No one kept us out of the stores because we had bare feet.

My junior-high principal gave me an option once: take two whacks with the paddle or spend 60 minutes in detention. Being the tough kind of kid I was, I opted for the two whacks. (Of course, detention would mean my parents would find out, so I had other reasons to take the whacks.) He made me pull my pants down and he hit me -- very hard, I might add -- with his wooden paddle with the holes in it, squarely across my bare ass. I dare any principal to try that today. But I never acted up in Mrs. DeLuca's English class after that day.

Speaking of junior high, part of the phys-ed class involved swimming, and we swam in the nude. Let me put that another way: we were not allowed to wear swim trunks or anything else. Nudity was required.

We had a party line at home. That meant that when you wanted to make a phone call, you would pick it up and first check to see if anyone else on your line was using the phone. If they were, you hung up and waited a while. I think we had 6 or 7 other people on our line, and some talked more than others. But you had to wait.

Our telephone number back then was 2-6764. That's the whole number.

There was no such thing as a free breakfast when you went to school in the morning.

We didn't cancel school because it was cold and some kid might freeze to death. You dressed against the cold, and if you didn't, either you were stupid or your parents were stupid. School would be cancelled if there was a lot of snow, but "a lot" of snow meant a lot of snow.

The first day of hunting season was an excused absence from school.

We drank milk that came directly from cows. It wasn't store-bought, and yes, it had a lot of fat in it, but it tasted like milk.

Margarine was something that city folk put on their toast. We ate butter, from the same cows that gave us our milk.

TV consisted of 3 channels (weather conditions permitting). But that was OK, because we didn't watch much TV.

Fast food was something you ate without heating up. Like cheese, or an apple.

My aforementioned grandmother made her own ice cream, using the cream from the very same cows that gave us milk and butter. She also made her own soap. You simply didn't waste anything.

I'm one of 9 kids, but we didn't all have soccer, cheerleading, basketball, lacrosse, track, football, baseball, golf and bowling practice to go to. I was the most involved in sports of all of us, and my sporting forays were limited to track, football (junior high only), and CYO basketball (high school). I think I turned out reasonably well, and I certainly didn't harbor any illusions about my future as a professional athlete.

Seems these days that every kid is the brightest, most athletic, most promising young person in the world. Any kid that finishes school with more than a 4-point average has already been victimized, because that average has been inflated artificially, and the kid has reason to believe that he or she is better than an "A" student, which is not possible when "A" is the standard. I have nothing against parents and educators instilling confidence in children, but a dash of reality will go a long way toward preventing future problems in these kids. They should all get a job and quit playing video games.

There...now I feel like an authentic curmudgeon.

Those Darn Terrorists!

I went to Washington, D.C. in October 2001 on a business trip. Our travel policy mandates that trips over a certain distance must be by air, but for this trip I asked for a waiver. It was only a few weeks after 9-11, and I simply was not yet comfortable with the thought of getting on a commercial airliner.

So I drove the 6 hours or so to Washington. I met up with our federal lobbyist (Becky), and we made the rounds, visiting many members of the Ohio congressional delegation.

That evening I met up with a House staffer from Ohio for dinner and drinks. I won't mention his name, but he has since become infamous for his involvement with the Jack Abramoff scandal. Then it was off to the hotel for a night of rest.

Becky and I met again in the morning to finish our visits. One of those stops was at the Hart Senate Office Building, where Senator Voinovich set up shop. I was hoping to get out of town by noon, and I was feeling optimistic about making it, until word started going around about the anthrax that was found in Senator Tom Dashle's office. Dashle was located in the Hart Building, one floor away from Senator Voinovich.

By the time I heard about the anthrax, Becky and I had already separated. But before hitting the road, I tried to call her to see if there was anything for us to worry about. It took a very long time to reach her - the cell phone system wasn't able to handle the volume of calls made that day - but eventually we were able to talk. She told me that the word she had been given was that anyone who had been in the Hart Building since yesterday morning had to be tested for anthrax. I asked where I was supposed to go, and she told me the tests were being done in the Hart Building.

Now, I'm not the brightest guy in the world, but I was puzzled. Why were we going back into the Hart Building to be tested for anthrax, when that was the very building in which the anthrax had been found? But that's where I went.

After waiting in line for close to two hours, someone finally decided that we shouldn't be in the Hart Building after all. That's when they started handing out numbers to everyone in the line. We were told to go to a different building, and our numbers would indicate our places in the line at that building.

It was a mess. I started thinking that I might have to make a reservation for another overnight, because the line was moving very slowly, and there were hundreds upon hundreds of people in the line. So I took a different tack. I called a friend who knows about things like anthrax spores, and asked him how long it would take for them to start doing their deadly duty. He told me I had about 24 hours to be tested, and while waiting for results to come back, I would need to start taking Cipro.

That was good enough for me, so I walked away from the line and made my way to my car. I started back for Ohio, with plans to stop by a local hospital in the morning to take the test. It was going to be late before I would get back to Columbus, but I decided to make a stop at Antietam to see the civil war battlefield. It's less than an hour from the outskirts of Washington, and I figured that an hour or two taking a tour was not going to kill me.

The battle site is something to behold, but only if one is imaginative. It's a very large tract of land, and only with the help of a detailed visitor's guide was I able to imagine what happened there...and many terrible things happened there. Two sides were fighting for an ideal, and neither would give up easily. I thought about what had happened in a US Senate office building the day before, and at other locations a few weeks before. The irony of this situation was not lost on me. After an hour or so of touring the grounds, I headed back toward the freeway.

About that time, my friend called and said that he had been mistaken: anthrax takes only 8 to 12 hours to incubate, and I should not wait until morning.

What to do? I wasn't about to drive into a small Maryland town and tell them I needed to be tested for anthrax. Instead, I drove back to Columbus and stopped at Grant Hospital before I went home. I arrived sometime around midnight. The doctor in the ER had never done an anthrax test before, and I hope I never have to endure another. Imagine a 12 inch Q-Tip being shoved into each nostril -- as far as it can be shoved -- and you'll start to appreciate the nature of the test. My eyes water just thinking about it.

I went home and started taking Cipro as directed by the ER doctor. It took a few days for the test results to come back, but as it turned out I was not exposed to anthrax, and life went on. A memorable part of the experience was looking at the weekly news magazines the following week, seeing the pictures of lines of people waiting for the anthrax test, and looking for people I knew...and even looking for myself.

I don't think the feds are a bit closer to solving this crime than they were that day I waited in a line at the Hart building, and Washington will never be the welcoming place it used to be, or at least not in my lifetime. We have certain people to blame for that...most of them of a particular religion. And to them I say, shame on you.

Thank You

Amazing what that last push can bring about. Natalie has achieved her goal. Now go watch her run on April 14 in the LaSalle Columbus Classic. I'm personally curious to see if she can beat her time from the Columbus Half-Marathon. I'm also thinking about running myself, so I can teach her that old age and treachery will beat youth and inexperience every time.

Team-in-Training

There was a reference to this in an earlier post, but Natalie is raising money for cancer research, and she's getting down to crunch time. I don't understand how a charity can tell someone that if you commit to a certain amount, and you can't raise it, you have to pay the difference. But that apparently is the case with this event, and Natalie is a long way from her $1400 goal.

You'll note that one of the people she is running for is Kylie Gerhardstein, who is my great-niece. Kylie has something called SMA, and as I understand it, no one has lived past the age of 14 with this disease. A very sad situation, but no one is giving up on Kylie.

If you can, please copy and paste this URL and make a small donation:

http://www.active.com/donate/tntcoh/tntcohNGerha

Here is Natalie's note explaining the event - she thanks you and I thank you:

• The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is the world’s largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education, and patient services, with nearly 75 cents of every dollar spent devoted to their mission.

• Blood-related cancers account for 8 percent of all cancers diagnosed in the United States. An estimated 747,465 Americans are currently living with leukemia, Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma.

• I have decided to run the LaSalle Bank Columbus Distance Classic Half Marathon in April for this cause, on behalf of Kylie Gerhardstein and Marina Lakhman. In order to do this, I need to raise $1,400. You can help me reach this goal and help with advancements in curing leukemia. All charitable contributions are welcome, tax-deductible, and can be made payable to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I would be happy to keep you informed of my training progress over the next few months!
Thank you!

Natalie

Ready, aim...

Fire.

This story starts out when I was four years old.

We all had chores when we were growing up, and my brother Butch had the chore of taking the trash out to the barrel and burning it. I would tag along becase I was fascinated by fire. I noticed that when he lit the fire, he would light Kleenex or newspaper to get it started.

I wanted to learn how fire worked. I convinced myself that if I could just take some Kleenex and matches into the barn, I'd be able to figure out this mysterious thing. So that's what I did.

I sat on the floor of the barn, laid the Kleenex on the floor, and started lighting matches. I was mesmerized by the spreading of the flame, and I kept looking at it, hoping that somehow it would reveal its secrets. What I failed to plan for was the fire spreading to the straw that was also on the floor.

I looked toward the wall of the south stable, and the flames were already licking the bottom of the wall. I ran outside to get the water hose, and as I sprayed water on the flames, they seemed to jump under the wall to the other side. So I went into the stable and sprayed from that side of the wall. The flames, naturally, jumped back to the other side.

At about that time, my sister Toni happened to be looking out the dining room window and told Mom that the barn was on fire. Mom ran out and promptly put the fire out. She gave me a look that I will never forget, and said she couldn't decide whether to spank me or to send me to bed without any supper. So she did both.

That was the first of many fires that I either started or encouraged. My brother Thom was a master at starting fires, and we used to dump gasoline on the ground and light it, imagining that hell would look something like that.

My day of reckoning came when I was a sophomore in high school. I stayed home from school one fall day, pretending I was sick. Late that morning, I decided to make something to eat, so I put a pan of oil on the stove to make some french fries. Then I went into the living room and nodded off.

I awoke to a crackling noise, and I assumed that Thom was sneaking into the house to see what I was up to. He had been in the shop all morning grading and packing apples. Imagine my surprise when I walked out of the living room and saw billows of smoke coming from the kitchen.

The flames were far too high and hot for me to do much. There was no fire extinguisher in the house, so I ran outside and started yelling for someone to come help. Fortunately, the neighbor across the road had a fire extinguisher, and he put the fire out. But the damage was done. Mom's new kitchen was a total loss, and the entire downstairs had smoke damage. The flames had been so hot that the drapes in the dining room melted.

A reporter from the local paper came out and took pictures of our burnt out kitchen, and one of those pictures made it into the Bellevue Gazette the following day. Mom was not amused.

It didn't take long for my friends at school to start with the arson jokes. Even my history teacher got into the act. We were studying the French Revolution, and he noted that it was good thing for Marie Antoinette that I wasn't locked up in the Bastille, because I would have burned my way out.

But all is well that ends well, and Mom was able to have her new kitchen replaced with a newer kitchen, and I learned never to leave a pan of boiling oil unattended.