Author Archives: ObbieZ

Hawk Encounter

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red-tailed hawk from below

A red-tailed hawk stands watch above our front sidewalk.

We saw a large bird in our neighbor’s maple tree 18 months ago. Today a similar bird (a red-tailed hawk, please comment if you disagree) appeared in the large tree in front of our house. It was the robins who brought it to our attention, sounding uncharacteristically alarmed in the outer branches.

Just like last year’s bird, it was kind enough to pose for pictures. But this year we have a better camera, so we got better pictures. Seven-image phototale after the jump. Read on →

Pulled from the Shelves!

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Back in late March, we published this post about boycotting products from Koch brothers companies. Among those products is Georgia-Pacific toilet paper.

Peoples Food Coop in La Crosse, as it looked during a snowstorm in February, 2004

We were distressed to learn that the single-roll toilet paper we’ve been buying for years from our local co-op bore the Georgia-Pacific logo. I brought this to the attention of Margaret, the grocery manager, who shared our motivations to remove this product from the shelves. She instructed her buyer not to stock this product any more, and even though it took several weeks for the existing stock to be exhausted, it was replaced by another type of single-roll toilet paper.

It turned out the co-op’s main supplier only carries this one type (Georgia-Pacific) of single-roll toilet paper, so they had to go “above and beyond” to find a source of an alternative product. They didn’t have to do it, but they did it anyway.

We can often be quick to complain about the things that businesses do that annoy us, so it feels important to applaud the People’s Food Coop for doing something right.

Harmon Killebrew – When Baseball Players were Heroes

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I grew up about 80 miles from Metropolitan Stadium, which is where the Minnesota Twins played during the 1960s. Our local TV and radio stations played Twins games, so they got more of our attention than the Braves, who played in Milwaukee at the time.

One day we were watching the highlight reel on the six-o’clock sports report, and I saw a grainy film of Harmon Killebrew hitting a home run. But this wasn’t just another home run floating over the fence; it was a line drive that rocketed into the nosebleed seats high above left field. At over 500 feet, it was one of the longest home runs ever hit.

A summer or two later, my mother bought a pack of baseball cards for each of her five kids. My sister’s pack included a Harmon Killebrew card like this one. I don’t remember how I got it from her. I probably stole it. I don’t know where it is any more. I wish I did.

My life as a young baseball fan was all about rooting for Harmon Killebrew to hit home runs, and he did so often enough to hold my interest for several years. Even though a lot of people have hit more home runs than he did, only Babe Ruth exceeds Killebrew in consistency. When he wasn’t hitting home runs, he was hitting doubles off the outfield walls. He didn’t hit many triples… he couldn’t run fast enough. Like Ruth, he struck out a lot, but that’s what happens when you’re swinging for the fences all the time.

In my early teens, a group of friends and I were brought to a Twins’ game by our fathers. There was a chance we’d see Killebrew hit his 500th home run, but we had to settle for a line-drive single. The only home run we saw was a game-winner by Tony Oliva, which barely snuck into the bleachers as it hooked into the right-field corner.

But the highlight of the trip was sitting in the cheap seats on the third-base side, looking to my right to see home plate, and then looking to my left and high up to the vast pavilion in the sky above the left field wall, where all the seats were painted green except for a small cluster in the middle that were painted red. The red seats marked the landing spot of that massive home run, and I could not fathom a ball getting hit that far. The distance looks a lot different when you’re standing there than it does on TV.

The best thing to remember about Harmon Killebrew is that he had massive upper body strength without the need for steroids, and that he played at the top of his game year after year without getting full of himself, trash-talking or taunting. Even when he developed into the older player that Jim Bouton called “the fat kid,” he was a fat kid that pitchers had to take VERY seriously.

It’s too bad that baseball no longer produces the kind of players that kids can revere the way that some of us revered Harmon Killebrew, who became the model for the silhouette of Major League Baseball’s logo, and who was rumored (not true) to be the model for the “Arm and Hammer” logo. Harmon Killebrew represents a baseball era that – sadly – is long gone.

We Don’t Need a Head on a Pike

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Back in the dark days of semi-ancient history, victorious armies would kill the leader of an opposing nation or notorious band of villains, cut off his head and parade it around town at the end of a pike. It was a way to gloat and to taunt.

Today, to put a “head on a pike” is a mostly a metaphorical term, but it can still be literal if only in a sanitized form. Such was the behavior of the Bush regime when it killed the Husseins of Iraq. Uday and Qusay (sp?) had their morbid mug shots published in newspapers around the world, and Saddam Hussein had video of his hanging leaked to the Internet.

So when word came Sunday night that Osama bin Laden had been killed, we asked each other how long it would be before we saw pictures of dead Osama on the Internet, and the answer was, “tomorrow morning.” A very large segment of the American population is glad to know bin Laden’s dead, but they wouldn’t believe it until they saw his head on a pike, and the Internet picture of the bloodied skull is the head on the pike of the twenty-first century.

Word came out that such pictures exist, and that they are “gruesome”. But today it was announced that these pictures will NOT be made public.

We applaud this decision. The head on the pike is so tenth century. It’s a barbaric act of gloating and taunting, and such blood sport would be offensive to our enemies and our friends. There is nothing to be gained by doing this. To those who claim it would offer “proof” to the doubters, I say that there will be doubters anyway who will see the “head on the pike” picture and scream, “That’s Photoshopped!”

We have enough gruesome images polluting our collective mind, we don’t need a bloodied skull of Osama bin Laden to become an iconic image for a generation. I want to believe we’re classier people than that.

Ben Masel – Professional Activist

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Ben Masel addresses the crowd from the north steps of the state capitol during the 1995 Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival in Madison, Wisconsin.

This weekend, Wisconsin lost one of its unique and colorful characters with the passing of Ben Masel.

Ben and I used to shadow each other during the late 80s and early 90s. I was selling propaganda for a commune I belonged to at the time (a long story for another time), making the rounds of college towns, Grateful Dead concerts, political rallies and festivals. Ben would show up at these same venues advocating for cannabis legalization, selling propaganda and merchandise while promoting his own rallies and festivals.

We first met at an Alpine Valley Dead show in 1987, where he was making a spectacle of himself cruising the parking lot handing out handbills for the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival. This was an event Ben put together each year, where advocates for cannabis legalization would gather in Madison. They’d march down State Street from the university to the state capitol, then there’d be a rally with music and speeches.

I asked him if early June might be kind of early to promote an event scheduled for October, and in the middle of a parking lot filled with license plates from everywhere in the country said, “So how likely is it that I’ll run into you again between now and then?” In my case, it turned out to be pretty likely, but I got his point.

Read on →

Intro to MacOSX for First-Time Users

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In a partnership between Obbie’s Help Desk and Youtorial Market, I’ve just released a series of instructional videos on basic Mac usage called Introduction to MacOSX for First-Time Users. However, to call this product a “series of videos” doesn’t do justice to the teaching platform for which they’re built.

The Youtorial Player is an application that presents its content from a corner of the screen to walk you thru computer tasks. The content includes a video capture of the instructor’s screen accompanied by his/her voice describing and explaining the task. The content developer (i.e., I) can program the display of text and links in a box below the video, and I can make chapter breaks and “pause points”, where the presentation pauses to give the user time to try things out.

Given my extensive experience training users new to the Mac, the high praise I’ve received from those users and their supervisors, and the availability of purplearth’s production facilities and experience, I thought this was something I could do and do well, so last fall I submitted a demo video to the Youtorial people and was given a “Go.”

The course is targeted to two types of users I’ve regularly worked with over the years: those that come to the Mac from the Windows world, and those who are new to computers entirely (The prerequisite for the latter group is the ability to type and use a mouse). It starts at the Desktop of an account opened by a new user for the first time, and takes the user on a tour of the system and its workings, then goes on to guide the user thru personalization of his/her system.

Many parts of this course are based on lessons I’ve taught to users seemingly hundreds of times over the years. For twenty bucks, you get over two hours of lessons, which is a better hourly rate than you’ll find anywhere. There’s a 25% discount for the first month, so you can get it for fifteen dollars if you BUY NOW!  😉

In the future, I’ll be developing a follow-up course for Mac Administrators, and a course on basic Mac applications (iTunes, Safari, Mail, etc.).

I’ve seen what other publishers charge for tutorial videos, and I can confidently say that I’ve produced something that is a lot better and more useful than many products costing much more. So if you or someone you know is grappling with adjusting to the Mac way of doing things, send them here.

UPDATE (2013/03/21): All of the links to youtorial market no longer work… they went belly up without selling a single download. I still have the original videos, so I may do something with them at some point.

One Hail of a Storm

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Goldilocks wouldn’t care for the kind of Spring we’ve been having. Our normal days should be in the low 50s (low teens C), but it’s stubbornly been ten degrees colder than that. So for a change, today it got warm… a July kind of warm.

They told us there would be storms. There are always storms when the temperature changes this radically. But the early afternoon was calm, warm and mostly sunny.

We were on the phone with a friend when, at about 4:35, we noticed it was dark and we could hear thunder. RoZ pulled up the weather page and saw the words “Tornado Warning.” That got our attention and we got off the phone.

At 4:45, it was pouring rain but it wasn’t windy at all. The weather people were saying the tornado would be here in five minutes. However, we weren’t panicking too badly, as no one had physically seen the tornado (it was “detected by doppler radar”), and we had a good view in the direction it was supposed to be coming from.

At 4:50, the hail started. We’ve each lived thru hail a handful of times, but never anything bigger than peas or marbles. This sounded like rocks hitting the house, and we saw ice balls nearly the size of golf balls bouncing in the yard.

We scrambled around to close windows and “monitor” the progress of this event as best we could. Suddenly, the rain and hail let up. At 4:55, the sun came out, and Obbie went into the yard to collect some hail stones for closer inspection. Here they are….

RoZ holds a sampling of hail stones from the La Crosse hailstorm of April 10, 2011

RoZ holds a sampling of hail stones from the La Crosse hailstorm of April 10, 2011

Not quite “golf ball” size, but definitely at least the size of quarters. At any rate, this is the largest hail either of us has experienced in our ample lifetimes.

Miraculously, all of our windows are intact, and we don’t have a car to worry about being dinged up right now. We are also thankful this didn’t happen a few weeks later, when delicate young plants will be trying to establish themselves in our garden.

This coming week, the economy will improve for insurance adjusters, body shops, and window people.

The “Green Thing”, Back in the Day

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We’re not big on regurgitating viral emails. It amazes us how many lame and cheesy messages keep popping into our inbox, years after we first saw them. Why is so much crap viral, but dispatches of much higher quality fade out in a couple of days? Must be a conspiracy of some sort.

At any rate, we recently received a forward from an unusual source… unusual in the sense that this is someone who we’ve regarded as somewhat conservative. After the jump is a rant I wish I had written, as it succinctly describes the drift toward “magenta” living (opposite of green living) that we boomers have witnessed over the course of our lifetimes. Read on →

Breaking the Koch Habit

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The Koch family has a long history of funneling money to the most extreme right-wing organizations and think-tanks. Fred Koch was a founding member of the John Birch Society, and his sons Charles and David are sponsors of the Cato Institute, Americans For Prosperity, and the new crop of crazy Tea Party Republican politicians.

The Koch brothers get all of their money thru Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in the United States. They’re into coal mining, oil refining and pipelines, and they own Georgia Pacific and Invista. They’re also into climate change denial, dismantling of environmental regulations, and union busting.

We don’t want to give any money to the Koch brothers, but we recently discovered we were inadvertently giving them money when we spotted the GP logo on our toilet paper. Needless to say, we now buy a different brand of toilet paper.

After the jump, I’ll take you on a tour of the brands to avoid if you don’t want to give the Koch brothers any money either.

Read on →

Dooh Nibor

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Scott Walker claims that he must bust unions because “Wisconsin is broke.” Actually, the only reason we have a $137 million deficit is because he gave away $140 million to corporations in the form of tax breaks. So in order to pay for gifts to the rich, he wants to steal from programs that help the poor.

That makes Walker into a modern-day Dooh Nibor… Robin Hood in reverse. Newly elected Republican lawmakers nationwide are acting like an army of Dooh Nibors, giving away the treasuries to rich people, and then crying that there’s no money to help poor people.

After the jump, there’s a great chart showing how we can pay for important parts of the social safety net by rolling back specific giveaways to rich people.

Read on →