Romeo, Romeo — wher4 Rt thou Romeo?

I find it ironic that the day following the news about Seattle being the most literate city in the U.S. I came across a story about Dot Mobile, a British mobile phone service aimed at students, which will begin distributing literature’s greatest classics in text message format this January.

(Groan!)

Are the hallowed halls of literature no longer immune from the soulless, ravening hordes of children raised on AOL spelling?

If Dot Mobile gets their way, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” will become “2b? Nt2b? ???” And John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, would begin, “devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war.” (The devil is kicked out of heaven because he is jealous of Jesus and starts a war.)

The company claims the service will be a valuable resource for studying for exams and will finally break through to a generation otherwise uninterested in the subtle rewards of reading.

Humbug! It’s a travesty, plain and simple!

Text messaging will eliminate all that makes literature great – imagery, irony, nuance, layers of complexity. How could the compressed climax of Jane Eyre, for example – “MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus” (Mad wife sets fire to house) – truly do the story justice?

It will also discourage students from reading the books, to settle for something else. And when was the last time people needed excuses not to read books?

Arrrgh!

I’ll be boiling up some pitch, and whoever came up with the idea had better hope I never find them. 

Seattle Reaches Literacy Peak

This just in...According to an annual survey by Central Conneticut State University, Seattle is the nation’s most literate city in the United States. Wow!

The ranking, based on the culture and resources for reading in the 69 largest U.S. cities, aims to rate cities not on whether their citizens can read, but whether they do. To determine this, the survey examines a variety of sources to rank six factors: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and, new this year, Internet resources.

The latter is based on number of library connections, commercial and public wireless access points per capita, online book orders and percentage of adults who have read a newspaper online. Seattle, Boston and Austin were the top three, respectively, in the category, helping catapult Seattle into the top overall spot. (Seattle was second to Minneapolis last year.)

In case you’re wondering, here are the top 10:

1. Seattle, WA
2. Minneapolis, MN
3. Washington, DC
4. Atlanta, GA
5. San Francisco, CA
6. Denver, CO
7. Boston, MA
8. Pittsburgh, PA
9. Cincinnati, OH
10. St. Paul, MN

Way to go Seattle!

Uncle Chris Saves the Day!

Warning: Nick content ahead.

Thanks to coincidence and willing accomplices, I (Nick) am now in possession of a pair of Campagnolo Record Pista large flange bicycle hubs. Stunning in their swoopy design, legendary in their smoothness and durability, the classic Campag track hub is the Holy Grail of bicycle hubs.

Several years ago, I asked a friend of mine, a very good wheel builder, to walk me through building a bicycle wheelset. I would supply the parts. He agreed. I had a pair of rims – highly polished and very lightweight – but I lacked the heart of the wheels.

Events conspired against me as I dawdled with sourcing the parts. In the mean time, Campagnolo discontinued this hub after an extraordinarily long life, causing the retail price to soar well above the manufacturers suggested asking price.

How would I ever build my dream wheels now that my dream hubs were commanding such ridiculous prices at home? I went shopping.

A company in England still offered the hubs, and they were in fact on sale for 20 percent off! With a momentary dip in the value of the pound, the price became attractive. But one last glitch remained- the retailer in question no longer shipped to the United States. My parents were visiting England – would they be anywhere long enough for the hubs to be shipped to them? No. They were going to be staying somewhere different for the next four days. “But,” suggested my father, “you could try your Uncle Chris.” Of course! A quick phone call explaining the situation had the arrangements made. Aunt Linda answered the door a few days later (in her bathrobe if the story is true) and took delivery of my prize.

Safely tucked into my parents’ luggage, they made their way home. I collected them and spent the rest of the afternoon staring at them. Lovely. Stay tuned…

Law & Order - SRU (Special Rodent Unit)

It has been an adventurous few days in the Porter-Brown household. Yesterday, after doing a load of laundry, we noticed that the washing machine smelled suspiciously like pee. No one’s been using our washing machine as a bathroom as far as we knew, so this was weird to say the least.

Nick did a little investigating and discovered a whole bunch of mouse poop behind the washer and dryer. Yuck! (Of course, we now have an explanation why the cats have been pacing back and forth near there lately.)

He pulled the machines out and started cleaning up, only to find more mouse pee and poop on the metal bottom inside the washing machine. Double yuck!

He worked for hours - vacuuming, sweeping, mopping. Just as he finished, he peered into the drum of the washer at what looked like an out of place piece of bungee cord. He grabbed it and was more than surprised to find it was the tail end of our mouse!

(This is a job for the Special Rodent Unit!)

I grabbed my bike helmet and dashed to the basement to retrieve the Coffee Shop Cruiser. Within minutes I was at the door of the local ACE Hardware store, panting. (Should have taken the race bike.) The store employee who helped me find the mouse traps told me they’d been selling tons of these lately. “They’re flying out the door; must be the season,” she said.

I wasn’t reassured, but left with $1.79 in anti-rodent ammunition.

Back at the house, Nick practically exploded at the sight of the traps: “Don’t these come any bigger?! We’ve got a rat to catch! All this will do is make the rat angry. We’ll have a pissed off rat wandering around with a mouse trap attached to his head!”

I can’t remember now what our rationale was, but we decided to use one anyway and see what happened.

With the peanut butter smeared trap placed inside the washer we screwed the plates back on the big holes and taped over all the little holes we could see.

The waiting wouldn’t have been so bad, except that we could hear the mouse scurrying around inside the washer. It stopped after a while, but we didn’t have a rodent in our trap.

Cats to the rescue again. Both of them were staring at the stove intently this morning. Nick pulled out the drawer under the oven to see if he could see what they were so interested in. At first he was amazed at all the wine corks and lost milk bottle tops under there (relics of what we used to give the kittens to play with when they were little). Then he saw the mouse. (Guess there must have been a hole in the washer we didn’t tape over.)

I pulled out the second trap, loaded it and set it under the oven. I then replaced the drawer to keep the cats from inadvertently setting off the trap. Again, more scurrying and scratching.

At this point we’re figuring it might take a while, so we’re resigned to waiting. Not too much later, however, Nick discovered the crime scene pictured above on our back porch. We’re not sure if it’s the mouse, or if it’s a mouse they found somewhere else.

The traps are still set, though. Just in case…

NWOutdoorGrrl is back!

It is with a great deal excitement that I’m writing this blog entry. As some of you may have noticed, NWOutdoorGrrl crashed a week or so ago. I had no idea what happened and I was really worried that I’d lost the entire site.

Clearly that didn’t happen, but here’s the story in a nutshell if you’re interested:

My hosting company updated the version of PHP running on my server without telling me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t compatible with the version of Expression Engine that I was running. (Expression Engine is the software that I use to publish the site.) As a result, all anyone got when they visited the site was error messages. No big deal; I just had to update to the current version of EE. Here’s where the second problem arose. In the course of figuring out what needed to be done, the error log bloomed to an unweildy 800mb and maxed out my storage capacity. Yikes!

It took me a day to figure this out, but once that file had been purged, I began tackling the upgrade. Four hours later...here I am, exhaling a huge sigh of relief!