Weekend Assignment: History

This week's Weekend Assignment is History...

We don't all live near the site of a battlefield or other world-famous event, but any place has its own history: political, cultural, even natural history. How aware are you of the past of the town, city or state where you live now? Share with us a story of local history.

I actually do live near the site of a battlefield (several, in fact), and I'm very aware of the area's history.  I live in northwest Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee.   The region's main moment in the historical spotlight happened nearly 150 years ago during the Civil War.  Chattanooga was an important railroad center, where several lines met that connected most of the South.  There were several battles fought for control of the town and there are historical markers and monuments scattered all over the region.

Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee occupied Chattanooga in the summer of 1863. Union General William Rosecrans sent his Army of the Cumberland around Bragg's flank, threatening Bragg's supply line from Atlanta.  Bragg withdrew from Chattanooga and headed south into Georgia.  The armies met at the Battle of Chickamauga.  The Union army was routed, but withdrew into Chattanooga, occupying the town.  Bragg besieged the town to try to starve the Federals out, but General Ulysses S. Grant arrived with many reinforcements and, after several battles, managed to drive the Confederates out of the area.

There are many, many interesting stories and anecdotes that occurred during this period.  It is hard to pick just one, but one of my favorites involves John Wilder.

Before the war, John Wilder was a successful businessman.  He ran a foundry in Ohio and invented many hydraulic machines.  When the war broke out, he joined the army as a private, but was quickly elected captain by the other men (a very common practice at the time.)  Although he wasn't a professional soldier, he advanced quickly and was a colonel within a year.

When Rosecrans's army first advanced on Chattanooga, Wilder's Lightning Brigade was at the vanguard of the attack.  He took a position on Stringer's Ridge, across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga, and began shelling the town.  His battery, commanded by Eli Lilly, who would later become very famous as the founder of a large drug company, succeeded in sinking two steamboats and causing a great deal of panic in the town.

Wilder settled in Tennessee after the war.  He built and operated the first two blast furnaces in the South at Rockwood, Tennessee.  Then he established an ironworks in Chattanooga to manufacture rails for railroads.  In 1871, he was elected mayor of Chattanooga.  That has to be an unprecedented achievement -- from shelling a town to mayor of the same town in just a few short years.

Weekend Assignment: National Poetry Month

This week's Weekend Assignment is all about poetry.

Weekend Assignment #316: National Poetry Month

As April wraps up, let's not let it get away without celebrating National Poetry Month. For this assignment, please share with us something about poetry. Tell us about your favorite poet, or quote us a few lines of your favorite poem, or if poetry doesn't happen to be something you enjoy, tell us why!

April (and the weekend) wrapped up before I could get to the assignment, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

When I first saw the assignment, I was all set to start a diatribe about how much I really don't like poetry.  I studied it enough in my younger days that I understand the concept, but as Heinlein would say, I don't grok it.  I don't get it on some basic level of understanding.  If you want to tell me about something important, give me a few solidly written paragraphs of prose and I'll understand it better.

But after thinking about it some more, I realized that I do like poetry.  Just make it rhyme (even if just a little), put it to music and sing it, and I'll get it.

When I was a young tyke, my mother went back to school.  One of her textbooks treated some of the pop and rock lyrics of the day -- Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, Bob Dylan songs -- as poetry.  As I leafed through the book and picked out songs I knew, it gave me a deeper appreciation of them -- that they were important enough to be considered "poetry."  Even now, I sometimes have the crazy notion that some of our greatest poets are not exactly poets after all -- they're songwriters.

Continuing on that idea, I'll tell you about a favorite poem, the Baby Boomer generation's "Beowulf "(or maybe it's their "Rime of the Ancient Mariner").  In the late '70s, the rock band Jethro Tull released the album Aqualung.  Ian Anderson, the leader of the band, was dismayed that rock critics were calling it a concept album, and said, "If the critics want a concept album we'll give the mother of all concept albums and we'll make it so bombastic and so over the top."



The next album really was over the top -- a parody of the progressive rock album from groups like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, one long, continuous, seamless 44-minute song that stretched over both sides of an LP.  In addition to their standard guitar, drums, piano, Hammond organ and flute (yes, flute), they added the harpsichord, xylophone, lute, trumpet and string section.  The concept was that the lyrics were a poem written by a fictitious eight-year-old English schoolboy named Gerald Bostock.

The album cover was another parody, a spoof of an English community newspaper.  The main story was about young Gerald being disqualified from a literary competition "following the hundreds of protests and threats received after the reading of his epic poem 'Thick as a Brick' on B.B.C. Television last Monday night." 


The entire epic poem, "Thick as a Brick," actually written entirely by Ian Anderson, is after the jump if you're interested.  You can hear the song by Googling "Thick as a Brick."

Weekend Assignment: Summer Reading

The Weekend Assignment has a new home, a blog of its very own. This week's assignment has to do with our summer reading plans...

Okay, yes, I know, it's still spring, but this is when I begin thinking about what kind of summer reading I might like to have on hand for those too-hot-to-clean days of summer. So, for this week's assignment, I want you to share with us the kind of summer reading you look forward to the most. Sci-fi? Horror? Political Thrillers? Romance? It's all good. Now, tell me more!

I've written before about my strange reading habits. I used to be a voracious reader until the Internet came along and gobbled up all of my free time. Now, it takes me much longer to get through a book, but I'll read from almost genre except romance.

My only hard and fast rule is that my next book is always completely different from what I'm reading now. To illustrate: I've been slowly (very slowly) working my way through the bibliography of Charles Dickens, and at this moment I'm about 120 pages into Great Expectations. Before that, there was (working backwards) a quick read about the history of NASCAR; The Black Ice by Michael Connelly, a police procedural thriller/mystery; Mila 18 by Leon Uris, a great piece of historical fiction; The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, an atypical King work -- more unsolved mystery than horror; and The Barrens and Others by F. Paul Wilson, a book of mostly horror short stories.

I've never really noticed any perceptible changes in my reading habits from one season to the next.  Summer, winter, spring or fall, my reading doesn't fit any sort of pattern or genre.  In the coming months, possibly during the summer, I'll try to find another Dickens book, another King book (I'm waiting for the local library to cough up a copy of Under the Dome), and anything else that strikes my fancy.  The point is that I don't know what I'm going to be reading this summer, but the weather outside probably won't play much of a factor.

Weekend Assignment: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Karen has a weekly assignment at Outpost Mâvarin. This week's assignment is pretty straightforward...

Weekend Assignment #302: Do you Tweet? Why or why not?

Yes, I am a Tweeter...or a Twitterer...or a Twit, whatever the people who use Twitter are calling themselves, and you can find me here. 

I was avoiding social networking sites like the plague; they just didn't seem like my cup of tea.  Several people told me I needed to get on Twitter, but I kept putting them off.  One evening, my wife basically just put me on Facebook, and within a day or two, I finally decided to take the Twitter plunge.  Both have worked out pretty well for me.  On Facebook, I've managed to reconnect with several friends I lost track of over the years.  Twitter has turned out to be a pretty useful tool to quickly get an overview of the day's news events, keep up with the few friends I've found on the site, and occasionally promote my blog.  And although I'm not sure that I could repeat the process, I somehow managed to link my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that anything I tweet shows up on Facebook as a status update.

Extra Credit: If you do use Twitter, how many people follow you? How many do you follow?

It's not my goal to get on Twitter and interact for hours at a time, so I only follow 20 people.  Some are not "people" at all.  I follow MSNBC's and National Public Radio's News and Politics tweets, as well as tweets from AlterNet, ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post.  There are also a few liberal individuals I follow, like Rachel Maddow, Bill Mahre and Thom Hartmann.  Andy Borowitz has funny tweets about the day's events.  I follow a couple of sites that cover NASCAR news, one that was tweeting pretty regularly about the health care debate, and John Scalzi.  The remaining handful are personal online friends.

I'm trying to keep it from getting out of hand.  I like being able to log on to the site and work my way through the tweets that have accumulated since the last time I was on in about half an hour, including time to check out interesting links.  But I'm looking for more people to follow.  I'm interested in useful information, not necessarily what you're having for lunch (unless you're a friend -- then I might be interested).  I like people that tweet often, but not obsessively.  I like people who retweet useful information from the people they follow.

I have 14 followers so far.

Weekend Assignment: D.I.Y.

At Outpost Mavarin, Karen wants to know about our handyman skills...

Weekend Assignment: #297: There are times when we hire professionals to build or fix things for us, and other times when we attempt the job ourselves. Some people pride themselves on their DIY skills or electronics geekery, while others leave it to the experts as much as possible. How about you? Is your first instinct to call for help, or do it yourself?

Like last weekend's assignment, you can put me down for somewhere in between.  As Clint Eastwood once said, "A man's got to know his limitations," and I'm pretty good at knowing mine.  If it's a simple project like changing the oil in the car or something similar, I'll tackle it myself.  The last such job was replacing some of the drain pipes under the kitchen sink.  If it's a little more complicated I'll try to find someone who knows what they're doing to come over and help me, i.e., make sure I don't screw it up worse than it was before I started.  If it's still under warranty or absolutely necessary, I'll send it in for repairs or call someone to come out.  It all depends on how complicated it's going to be.  I'm not real handy, but I do have some skills.


With cars, I can usually figure out what's wrong with it by what it's doing, or at least narrow it down to a couple of possibilities.  I may or may not know how to fix it, but I can tell you what's wrong with it.  Around the house, I can saw a board or hammer a nail or connect some PVC pipes, but forget about any kind of major renovations.  Computers are a special category.  I've often stated that I know just enough about them to turn a minor problem into something major.

Of course, the whole topic reminds me of that song by Peter Gabriel...

Weekend Assignment: Scandalized

I haven't done one of Karen's Weekend Assignments in a while. I don't know why. I just got out of the habit. I like this one...

Weekend Assignment: #296: The press and the public always seem to be obsessed with one scandal or another, from Tiger Woods to Balloon Boy. Do you eagerly follow such stories, try to avoid them, or something in between? Does the identity of the celebrity (or would-be celebrity) affect how interested you are?

Put me down for "something in between."  I'm a major news junkie so it's virtually impossible for me to avoid the media's scandal of the day, but I'm certainly not obsessed with them either.  When a scandal or any other big celebrity news story comes along, I usually pick up on the major points and ignore the rest, switching the channel or turning the page as the story drags on through Day Three, Day Four and beyond.  I'm certainly not interested in knowing every teeny, tiny detail of Tiger's life.

You can usually catch me on my soapbox, railing about how the media is wasting so much time on such nonsense while there are much more important stories going on.  For example, in the past few days, while the media has devoted major resources in tracking down every single one of Tiger's mistresses, the escalation of the Afghanistan War, the health care battle in the Senate, the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen, and other major stories haven't received the attention they deserve.

Extra Credit: Have you ever purchased a supermarket tabloid?

Not for myself.  My wife goes through phases where she likes to read them, and I've occasionally picked one up for her and even occasionally flipped through one.  One of them (the National Enquirer, I think) has a pretty good crossword puzzle, and almost all of them have some sort of puzzle page.  That's about the most that I get out of them.

Image via Wikipedia

My wife is partial to supermarket tabloids like the Enquirer, Star Magazine and US Weekly, but my favorite one to flip through while I'm waiting in line is the Weekly World News, which bills itself as "the world's only reliable news."  They're great at covering all the major stories that the mainstream media somehow misses, like how Obama met with aliens at the White House to avert a Fourth of July invasion, or how Michael Jackson faked his own death, or that Megan Fox is a man, or that the Earth's rotation has suddenly increased to 66,666 mph -- "the Speed of Satan!"

An aside:  When I was younger, I used to know who all the people were in the celebrity tabloids.  Now, I don't have a clue who a lot of these people are.  They must be reality show stars or something.

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• Tiger Woods Christmas Picture (blippitt.com)

Weekend Assignment: What Are You Drinking?

Karen, at Outpost Mavarin, provides the weekend assignments. This week she wants to know "What are you drinking?" People ask me that a lot. I don't know why.

Weekend Assignment #221: What do you like to drink? Do you prefer Coke, or Pepsi, or neither? Do you start your days at Starbucks, or end your days with a nice cup of herbal tea? Are you a connoisseur of beer, or do you like to keep a pitcher of lemonade on hand? Do you carry a bottle of water around, and refill it as you go? Tell us about your favorites!

My drink of choice is usually that old Southern specialty, ice-cold sweet tea. I drink it all the time -- day or night, winter or summer. I much prefer the homemade variety, but will occasionally drink a bottle of Lipton or Nestea, a poor substitute.

I probably average one or two soft drinks per day -- usually a Coca-Cola or a Dr. Pepper. I don't care for Pepsi too much; it's too sweet. I'd rather drink one of those generic colas. Occasionally, I'll get a wild hair and drink something really outrageous like a Mountain Dew or a Fanta Orange.

I drink a lot of coffee when the weather is cooler, but only have a rare cup to stay awake or to wake up during the hot months. Starbucks is a very rare indulgence. It's sort of obscene to pay four or five dollars for a cup of coffee.

Bottled water is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on the American consumer. They're getting people to pay good money for something that they can get out of the tap for just pennies. Occasionally, I'll drink a bottle of water, then refill it out of the nearest water fountain.

Alcohol is not really my drug of choice. I don't care too much for the taste, the effect on my mental processes, and the way it makes me feel the next morning. I might have a mixed drink on a very rare occasion. If I do drink, I like Scotch on the rocks. I don't drink beer very much, but when I do, I'm a snob about it. I think most Americans drink beer that is too weak and too cold. Give me something dark, preferably an ale or a stout and serve it too me close to room temperature.

Extra Credit: Have you ever invented your own drink sensation?

The closest I've come to inventing a drink is flavoring my homemade sweet tea. You can get those packets of flavored tea at your local supermarket. When brewing tea, I'll sometimes substitute one or two of those flavored tea bags, usually mint or cinnamon, for the regular tea bags. Mmmm! Good!

I read recently that Dr. Pepper used to have an ad campaign back in the 1940s or 1950s to convince people to drink it hot. Not room temperature hot, hot coffee hot. Heated up on the stove. I think I might try that when the weather starts turning cooler again.

Weekend Assignment: Fun, Fun, Fun

I was going to do Karen's Weekend Assignment over the weekend (duh!), but somehow got sidetracked and completely forgot about it. Here it is now, a day (or two) late and a dollar short.


Weekend Assignment #218: What do you do to have fun? Since you're reading this blog, let's assume that one of your leisure activities is blogging and reading blogs; we don't need to rehash that one, nor the subject of books, which we covered just recently. What else do you do for fun? Are you a runner, a hiker, a birdwatcher, a surfer? Or do you prefer to lie on a beach? Is cooking a joy rather than a chore? What do you enjoy doing, when you're not doing the usual stuff?

It's easy to get in a rut with the usual stuff and forget about having fun, but the usual stuff usually includes blogging, reading blogs, surfing the Innernets, &c. that is fun, but I see we're not talking about that.

This is probably my favorite time of the year. The weather is warm, maybe a little hot during the day and very pleasant at night. If your going to be out at night for a long period of time, you might want to wear a long-sleeve shirt, but you can definitely pack up the sweaters, jackets and coats. A fun thing for me to do is get out in it however possible -- a long walk around the neighborhood, a day trip to a park or a nearby historic site, a hike through the woods, fishing, camping, bird watching, sky gazing, anything that gets me outdoors communing with nature.

It's fun to read about something historical that happened locally (in and around Chattanooga), then going out and actually walking the ground and learning even more.

Photography is fun, but I've never really had the kind of equipment I'd like to have. Right now, I have no equipment -- my antique digital camera has finally bitten the dust. I should be able to get something basic and affordable later this month when my stimulus check arrives.

I like spending weekends watching NASCAR, and catching a baseball game whenever I can. And college and pro football, though I'm not a year-long fanatic about it like some -- all things in their season.

Getting in a car and driving wherever the road takes me is fun, but that's a joy that's waning with rising fuel prices.

Crossword puzzles, Sudoku, video games (driving games are my favorite), listening to music, and watching movies and selected TV shows (especially Battlestar Galactica and Lost) are also on my list of fun things to do.

Extra Credit: What fun thing (no restrictions) do you plan to do next?

Well, I'm listening to music now...

----------------
Now playing: Dream Academy - Power to Believe
via FoxyTunes

...and I'll probably work a little more of the Sunday crossword puzzle before I go to bed, but I'd really like to get out to Cloudland Canyon very, very soon.

Weekend Assignment: Everyone's a Critic

Karen dispenses the weekend assignments at Outpost Mavarin...

Weekend Assignment #215: Review a film. Any film. Got something interesting to say about Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903)? I'd love to read it. Metropolis (1927)? Why not? A Night in Casablanca (1946)? Fine. The Seventh Seal (1957)? Er, okay! Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)? You'll get away with it. Speed Racer (2008)? Go for it. From Hollywood to Ballywood to Hong Kong, from Kubrick to Kurasawa, it's all on the W.A. marquee. But there's one catch: the film should not be on your personal list of favorites; nor should it be a film you despise.

I guess I'll take on the most recent movie I've seen...

Stephen King's The Mist

Director Frank Darabont has never heard the old adage "Quit while you're ahead." After almost flawless turns of adapting a Stephen King novella (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption) and novel (The Green Mile) to the big screen, Darabont returns to King's material again, this time with mixed results.

The Mist (the novella) is vintage King with ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, full of heart-stopping action and suspense. It's a far cry from the more peaceful, more thought-provoking material Darabont has worked with before, but Darabont handles it beautifully, keeping us on the edge of our seats throughout most of the movie.

A recurring theme in some of King's work is that we (the human race) aren't too far removed from the beasts and that once the lights go out and the phones don't work, we'll swiftly devolve back to our primitive state, especially when a heightened state of fear is involved. Stephen King's The Mist begins with the lights and the phones already off.

After a big storm, people start noticing a strange mist where it shouldn't be. Artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) goes to town with his son and his neighbor to pick up some supplies and gets caught at the local supermarket when the titular mist suddenly rolls in and engulfs the town. A townie comes running into the store, screaming about "something in the mist." Suddenly, almost everyone is content to remain in the store. Strange creatures appear from out of the mist and pick off the occasional hapless minor character. Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), the town crackpot who gets her worldview from the Bible and Weekly World News, begins preaching about the end of the world and very shortly has attracted a devoted following, the majority of the 30 or 40 people trapped in the store.

One of the major flaws of the movie is how quickly sane, sensible people begin gravitating to such an obvious fruitcake. Eventually Drayton and a small band of his followers must decide whether to stay or go, whether to face the monsters in the mist or stay there with the monsters their neighbors have become.

King, in his novella, comes to an inconclusive conclusion. You don't know how the story turns out, but the protagonists are out of the market and on the road trying to find where the mist ends. It's not conclusive, but it's a good ending for the havoc and mayhem that has come before. Darabont, not knowing when to quit, keeps going with the story. He shows us some amazing scenes and monsters, but doesn't stop until he ends up with one of the worst endings in horror movie history, possibly rivaling the 2001 remake of the Planet of the Apes for stupidest, most unsatisfying movie ending of all time.

Extra Credit: Is there a film due out this summer that you plan to go see? If so, what is it?

I really haven't followed movies much lately. I'm not sure what is due to come out. I guess I'm most eager to see if they screwed up the Iron Man trailer by adapting it into a full-length motion picture.

Weekend Assignment: Book Boosters

Karen, at Outpost Mavarin, deals out the weekend assignments. While it is technically Monday, I don't consider the weekend over until I have to go back to work, so here goes...

Weekend Assignment #213: While it may be difficult to choose your favorite book of all time, there's probably a certain genre or category of books you prefer over other kinds. Do you love a mystery, or would you rather read about dragons? Are you thirsty for a good vampire tale, or is science fiction more your style? Do you mostly stick with the classics, or look for the latest spy novel? Are you a biography buff? Do a lot of your books have the word "Dummies" in the title? Do you like to read about real-world politics, science, history or sports, or would you rather escape the real world with a good romance? Tell us! And while you're at it, tell us your second favorite category of books.

I've always been an avid reader, but the Internet sometimes gets me out of the habit of actually picking up a book and reading it. There are several genres that I like, but it would be hard to settle on a favorite. I like horror novels a la Stephen King or Dean Koontz, some science fiction, some mysteries, some political novels, historic novels. I'm making an effort to read some of the classic literature. I also like to read non-fiction books about politics or history, especially books about the Civil War. I'll read the occasional biography, but it's usually about someone like Ty Cobb or Braxton Bragg, never celebrities. I don't have a favorite genre. In fact, when I finish a book, I usually pick up something entirely different to read next. I've recently read Old Man's War by John Scalzi, Children of Men by P. D. James and Cell by Stephen King. Right now, I'm wading through Sketches from Boz by Charles Dickens. What will I read after that? Who knows? If you held a gun to my head and made me choose a favorite genre, I'd probably have to go with the horror novels. Most of them are pretty fun.

Extra Credit: Do you ever loan out books to friends or family?

When I finish a book, my only reasons for keeping it are that it's so fantastic that I think I might want to one day read it again (which I rarely do, although I've read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller about five times) or that I think of someone I know that might like to read it. So, yes. Otherwise, I save them up and trade them in for new books (new to me) at the used bookstore.

Weekend Assignment: Speechifying

Karen has a new assignment every weekend at Outpost Mavarin. Here's the latest...

Weekend Assignment #210: It's been 40 years since the Mountaintop speech, and even longer since the great speeches of John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and others. Are the days of great oratory behind us, or have you drawn inspiration from some recent public speaker? If so, what was the speech? Do you remember any actual quotes from it?

Yes, the days of great oratory are behind us. No, not too much inspiration from too many recent public speakers.

I think public speaking began to go downhill when politicians and others began to rely too heavily on speechwriters instead of their own abilities to craft inspiring words. It all sounds like stuff that's been tested in front of too many focus groups to avoid offending anyone. With our current president, too often the memorable phrases are something like, "Bring 'em on!" or "Axis of Evil." And if he gets off the script, he's liable to say anything like "Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." Ronald Reagan could deliver a good performance, but didn't often say anything I was much interested in hearing. You didn't want him wandering too far from the script either. Barack Obama has a good delivery, but I often think of the old Wendy's commercials when I hear him speak. "Where's the beef?"

Occasionally, I'll hear a politician give a speech and be impressed by the ideas, almost never by any lofty rhetoric. Their mostly just focus-tested words to appeal to the lowest common denominator...unless it's an old rerun of the West Wing.

Extra Credit: Have you ever given a speech, other than in a classroom?

I majored in Speech/Mass Communications in college and gave quite a few classroom speeches. I also worked in radio for a while, but that's not the same thing. It's a lot easier to get comfortable when you don't see all those eyes staring back at you.

Weekend Assignment: In-Just Spring

I'm sure she's going to start deducting points for lateness if I keep waiting until the weekend is over before doing my weekend assignment, but Karen has the latest one at Outpost Mavarin. Hey, I just realized it's still Sunday night in Arizona where she lives so maybe I'm still in time...

Weekend Assignment #208: Meteorologists define spring in the Northern Hemisphere as beginning March 1st; others define it according to the vernal equinox, the return of warm weather, or the appearance of a groundhog's shadow. What does spring mean to you, and what, if anything, do you intend to do about it?

Once the weather takes a turn for the better and the trees and flowers start doing their budding and blooming thing, spring is here as far as I'm concerned regardless of what the calender actually says. The date that really marks the beginning of spring for me is that all-important day in the first week of April when the umpire screams "Play ball!" and the baseball season begins. Opening Day is always the first day of spring, which is why Thomas Boswell wrote an essay entitled "Why Time Begins on Opening Day," then later put that title on a collection of essays. What do I intend to do about it? Root, root, root for the home team -- the Atlanta Braves...and occasionally the Chattanooga Lookouts.

Weekend Assignment: Too Much News?

Karen has this weekend's assignment at Outpost Mavarin...

Weekend Assignment #207: Are you a news junkie, or not so much? Do you seek out news on tv, radio, in newspapers or online, or are you sick of the endless rehashing of the same issues? I realize it's all a continuum, from "I never watch the news" to "I keep it on all day, and read several newspapers" (or whatever). Maybe you vacillate, depending on what's going on in the world or your own life. What's your current level of interest?

Yes, I'm pretty much a news junkie, but I have very little interest in the "baby in the well" (or to use more recent references, the "800 dogs in a mobile home" or the "woman stuck to the toilet seat") stories. I prefer hard news. I want to know what's really going on in the world. I want to know which politicians in Washington are trying to screw us over. It's a constant obsession.

Although I'll occasionally flip on CNN or MSNBC to get the latest headlines, I don't get much news from the TV. I used to listen to NPR news shows quite a bit, but don't anymore. When, for whatever reason, I'm not able to get online, I read the local rag, the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, pretty much cover to cover. The paper is a weird conglomeration. We used to have a liberal morning paper, The Times. In the evening, we had the conservative News-Free Press, which was the result of another merger and led to a good joke about the name -- that they were news-free. A while back, the papers decided to merge to cut expenses. We don't have an editorial page and an op-ed page. We have the two papers' individual editorial pages side-by-side, offering opposing views on every subject under the sun. Paul Krugman, E. J. Dionne, and David Broder on one page. Cal Thomas, Walter Williams and Phyllis Schafly on the other.

When I'm online, I get email newsletters from the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Nashville Tennessean and others. I also read a lot of left-of-center news-oriented websites like AlterNet, Think Progress, and Truthout. I also belong to Digg, where I submit or add a "digg" to stories others have submitted. Many days a week I compile these stories that I've "dugg" into random headline blog posts. So yeah, I guess you could call me a news junkie.

Extra Credit: Is there a particular news story you have been following recently?

The biggest story in my neck of the woods (just 100 miles down the road) is the tornado that hit downtown Atlanta Friday night. The story was big not only for the couple of deaths and the destruction, but also because the tornado damaged the Georgia Dome where they were holding the SEC basketball tournament at the time.

Weekend Assignment: Happy Birthday

Karen has this weekend's assignment at Outpost Mavarin...

Weekend Assignment #206: My birthday is coming up on Monday. In the grand tradition of the Beatles and my mom*, I magnanimously declare this to be your birthday, too. So, what would you like for your birthday? (And no, I won't actually be buying it for you. Sorry!)

Well, if you're not going to buy it for me, I hardly see the point. But what I really, really want and really, really need is a new digital camera. I think I'll just have to break down and buy it for myself if no one else will. I'd like to go with an entry-level DSLR, but just can't see paying that kind of money at this point in time. I'll probably get something a lot cheaper like the Canon Powershot A570 IS. It's an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera that I can keep with me at all times and whip out whenever a photo opportunity arises. Once I get a new camera, I need to take as many photos as I can to work on my composition techniques. And I'd really like to get back to posting a lot of photos here and at my woefully neglected Flickr page. The DSLR can wait until later.

Weekend Assignment: Road Trip

Karen at Outpost Mavarin has the Weekend Assignment...

Weekend Assignment #203: If you had the time, money, housesittter, etc. to pack up right now and drive somewhere out of town for a few days, where would you go, if anywhere? Note I said driving, so wherever you pick should be in driving distance.

If I'd had the time, money, etc., you can probably guess where I would have gone this weekend...and the whole week or so before. If you can't guess, take a peek at the next four or five posts below this one. Yes, that's right, Daytona Beach, Florida, for Speedweeks and the 500. Of course, without tickets and reservations made months and months in advance, I probably would have been reduced to begging scalpers for a deal and sleeping in my car or camping out in the infield for days. And it would have been heaven.

But, for the sake of argument, let's say we're not talking about this specific weekend. My answer would probably be the same or maybe a little further south in Florida. Someplace nice and warm. You might remember, I don't like winter.

Chattanooga is within a day's driving of most of the eastern half of the United States. One day in the not-too-distant future, I hope to take a little jaunt to see the Mississippi River, perhaps around the Vicksburg area. I'd also like to visit some of the Virginia Civil War battlefields and Washington, D.C. Savannah and the Georgia coastal islands also sound nice.

Extra Credit: last time you got out of town for non-business reasons, what was your mode of transportation?

Driving. With the way airline travel is since 9/11, I wouldn't even attempt to get on a plane unless it was absolutely, no-way-around-it necessary.

Weekend Assignment: The Food Rut

Karen has the latest Weekend Assignment at Outpost Mavarin...

Weekend Assignment #201: To promote a new cooking show, a TV station is going to pay you $500 to eat the same basic meal every day for a week, prepared with only minor variations by their on-screen host. What's on the menu?

I think I'd have to go with beef. From steaks to hamburgers, you'd have enough of a variety to keep from getting tired of it. And it's only a week.

Extra credit: Do you tend to eat the same thing all the time anyway?

Yeah. Sad to say. Breakfast is usually coffee, with an occasional bowl of cereal, Pop Tart, or egg. I usually have a piece of fruit or a fruit cup for a mid-afternoon snack. Lunch is usually eaten at work at most people's dinnertime and is usually a sandwich, chips and Little Debbie. I usually eat dinner late at night when I get home from work. This is usually whatever the wife has cooked or pizza or fast food burgers. It's usually different from day to day, but the same from week to week.

Weekend Assignment: When Do You Sleep?

Karen has the new weekend assignment at Outpost Mavarin:

Weekend Assignment #199: What is your usual sleep schedule on weeknights? Are you an "early to bed, early to rise" sort of person, or do you stay awake far into the night (voluntarily or otherwise), and get up as late as your work schedule permits? Do you give priority to getting adequate sleep? If so, how is that working out for you?

I am now and have always been a night owl. I work second shift and usually stay up most of the night, then sleep until it's time to get up and get ready for work -- usually around the crack of noon. The nighttime is the right time. I enjoy the peace and quiet of being the only one in the family still up. I can enjoy me some inner nets or watch the boob tube without having to fight and argue with someone else for the privilege. I don't have to wait until someone else gets off the computer or argue over which DVD to watch. If I try to write a few lines I can do it without the constant distractions that seem to be ever constant during the daylight hours.

I don't have a problem with getting up early. I love the early mornings for the same reasons I enjoy the late nights: the peace and quiet. I just hate to go to bed early. It's a voluntary thing -- not insomnia. When I do finally drag myself off to bed, I sleep like a log, a lamb, a baby...like I did before the rooster went blind. I don't always get a sufficient number of hours of sleep, but I usually make it up the next night.

Extra Credit: If you had no work or family scheduling obligations, would your sleeping pattern change substantially?

I don't think so. Like I said, I've always been a night owl. But no work or family? I might not have a regular sleep schedule at all. I might sleep all day sometimes, or just sleep whenever the mood struck.

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Now playing: Robin Trower - Day of the Eagle
via FoxyTunes

Weekend Assignment: Winter's Winning Ways

Over at Outpost Mavarin, Karen has posted a new Weekend Assignment...

Weekend Assignment #198: What is your favorite thing about winter? Whether you love this time of year, hate it or merely endure it, you should be able to find something good to say about the season. What is it?

There are two things I love about winter.

First, the sky is so crystal clear at night that it seems as if you can see the entire universe. (That's assuming that it's not cloudy or rainy, which can be a pretty big assumption here during the winter.) At other times of the year, it can be pretty hazy here in my neck of the woods.

Second, I love snow. I especially love it when you wake up in the morning to find a couple or three inches of untouched, pure white snow on the ground. Everything looks so clean. It's a big change from the same old same old. The only problem is that snow is a fairly rare occurrence here, maybe once or twice a year if we're lucky. But I wouldn't want to live up north where snow is constantly on the ground -- too much of a good thing, you know.

Ice can be pretty neat too if you don't have to drive on it...

The photos above were taken on Missionary Ridge a couple of winters ago. Sorry about the blurry quality of the last shot; I think I smudged my lens.

Extra credit: What do you hate most about winter?

Oh, don't even get me started. Other than the clear skies and the occasional snowfall, there's nothing I like about winter. I hate, hate, hate cold weather. I would rather it be 100 degrees than 20. And here, the weather is extremely fickle all the way through March. You have to dress in layers and be ready to peel them off and put them back on. It might be 70 degrees for a week in February, then 20 for a week in March. That happened last winter. I'm just too cold-natured to deal with it all. I often comment, especially when it's extremely cold, that I'm someday going to move somewhere where they don't have winters. People think I'm joking, but I'm not. Give me white sand, blue skies, and sun in January and I'll be happy.

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Now playing: The Connells - Carry My Picture
via FoxyTunes

Weekend Assignment: Missing Words

I started my blogging journey at AOL Journals. The inimitable John Scalzi used to give us Weekend Assignments at his blog By the Way. Now, Scalzi and AOL have parted ways, but the Weekend Assignments live on at Outpost Mavarin.

This week's assignment...

Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns? Do you miss your weekly appointment with that ill-behaved doctor, or your visits to Wisteria Lane? Does it bother you not to laugh at fresh jokes on your favorite sitcom? Or are you just as happy watching reality shows, or new episodes of shows that have been held back until now? We want to know!

Extra Credit: how are you spending the time instead?

I don't watch a lot of network prime-time television because of my work schedule, but I would hate the glut of reality shows, game shows, and pseudo-news shows. What was really killing me was not being able to watch new episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Both shows are back on now without writers. I don't know how that's working out for them; I haven't been watching. My favorite shows, Battlestar Galactica and Lost have had their season premieres delayed, but Lost will start airing the episodes they've got in the can on January 31.

I've got a lot of sympathy for the writers. The media companies are on shaky ground. They're pleading web ignorance. They just don't think there is any money to be made on the web, and they certainly couldn't figure out an appropriate formula to compensate the writers for any of their work that happens to go out on the web. It's all BS.

In a previous post, I talked about the effects of the strike on Battlestar Galactica. There was a long quote from showrunner Ron Moore. It bears repeating...

"Fundamentally this is about the internet, and this is about whether writers get paid for material that is made for the internet or if they're paid for material that is broadcast on the internet that was developed for TV or movies." Moore shared a story to illustrate the scenario, saying "I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and 'Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?' It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio's position was 'Oh, we're not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we're not going to pay you to write it. We're not going to pay the director, and we're not going to pay the actors.' At which point we said 'No thanks, we won't do it.'"

"We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said 'But we're not going to put any credits on it. You're not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.' At which point I said 'Well, then we're done and I'm not going to deliver the webisodes to you.' And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway -- which they have every right to do. They own the material -- But it was that experience that really showed me that that's what this is all about. If there's not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says 'This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula - whatever that formula turns out to be - for use of the material and how it's all done,' the studios will simply rape and pillage."

The future of entertainment is the merger of the traditional forms with the Internet. As their delivery systems improve, more people are going to go to the Internet to watch what they want when they want. That's where the money is, and that's the golden goose the media conglomerates are trying to protect. I don't think I'm going to watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report until their writers come back.

Previous posts on the strike:

Battlestar Galactica and the Writers Strike
The Colbert Report Writers' Video
A Daily Show Fix of Sorts

Extra Credit: I'm going to spend the free time the way I spend most of my free time: more time on the Internet.

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Now playing: Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit
via FoxyTunes