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A message from a coworker:

I’m glad you all are doing this. I thought a grep was something that grew on a vine to stomp on and make wine.

Thanx for all your help!

I wonder if this is a common toddler story…

Kathryn, Iris, and I are enjoying our nice Labor Day dinner on our newly finished deck improvements outside. We’re all talking to one another and at one point Iris looks at me and says “Momma” (which she does every now and then – she calls Momma “Dadda” sometimes, too.) So, Momma corrects her by saying to her, “No, he’s Dadda; I’m Momma”. Iris turns to me with a jubilant look on her face and cries out “DADDA!” To match her mood, I cry out “EUREKA!” And she replies, “No, I’m Iris; you’re Dadda!”

“The chief danger of an air raid, he said, was splintered glass
from windows. Thus, when one hears the siren one should get a
drink, lie down on a couch and put two pillows over
oneself–one pillow over the eyes and the other over the
groin…if the eyes or groin were injured, life was not worth
living. It was good advice for any groundling in the age
before atom bombs; and I took it.”

– Theodore White, recalling advice given him by cryptographer
Herbert Yardley during White’s reporting stint in China during
the early 1940s.

Today’s comes from Josh:

Adult Big Wheels!

The site reminded me of when I was kid. We just moved to Fort Bragg and I decided to take my Big Wheels for a spin. Well I didn’t stop at the end of our neighborhood and I ended up following a four lane highway for a while until the military police picked me up. They dumped me in the back of their truck to take me to the station. I remember it nearly fried me because it was bare metal cooking in the hot sun all day! I got dropped off at the station and my parents were called in.

I think they had already been looking for me and saw me in the back of the truck while they were driving around trying to find a kid cruising in his Big Wheels.

It’s a wonder I’m still alive. Must’ve been some wanderlust since we had just moved from Chicago (Fort Sheridan).

Iris isn’t Big Wheels age yet but she’s close…

Great quote:

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at least he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he *must do*. . . .”

– Ursula Le Guin, from A Wizard of Earthsea.

And in the spirit of ruining the mood created by such a fine quote comes the following discovery by Josh:

DogCondoms.Com!

This one will make you ill: (click here)

“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing
Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native
purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He
must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption
which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak
and degenerate race of beings.”

– Edward Gibbon, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire”

I’ve been having mindless fun lately submitting interesting locations found in Google Maps to the Google Globetrotting site. Click here to see the locations I’ve submitted.

One of my favorite finds is the Post-It note I found in Thailand.

Via Google Satellite maps I am having fun locating and identifying interesting things in Baghdad (click on the images to see the location within Google Maps) —

Monument to the Unknown Soldier: (more info and pics)

Grande Mosque:

No idea what this one is:

The Shaheed Monument: (more info and pics)

The Abu Ghyriab palace in Baghdad (home of Cobra Base, headquarters of Coalition Joint Task Force-7): (more info and pics)

Republican Palace (Saddam’s office): (more info and pics)

Google Maps went international yesterday with additional satellite imaging.

What is this structure in Baghdad?