everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Home

  • Strawberries!

    Tyler gets started

    The weekly harvests have begun at our local organic farm, the Watershed, where we split a family share that allows us to share in the food that they grow there. Most of the crops are harvested for you and all we need to do is drive down the road to fill up a couple of grocer bags full of wonderfully fresh and pesticide-free veggies. It’s fun to go with the kids because each week there’s always something that’s available on a “pick your own” basis. In May, it’s strawberries to be followed soon by rasberries and, *yum* blackberries. This week too were snap peas which are so sweet you can eat them right off the vine!

    Julia in the strawberry fields

    Summer is truly here as our neighbors, the Trasks, have yet again graciously opened up their pool which is unofficially known as the, “East Franklin Swim Club.” After a morning of picking in the fields, a dip in the pool is always welcome.

    A bit of Fame touched our block this weekend as we heard the good news that the Trask’s daughter, Emma, who had been busting her butt for the last year on a Michael Moore film project not only was able to attend the Cannes Film Festival but also that the film won this year’s Palm D’Or.

    Not only did Fahrenheit 9/11 pull down the world’s top film prize, it received a 20-minute standing ovation (a record in the film festival’s history) and was only the second documentary to win the Palm D’Or in 50 years.

    As you may know, the film’s original backers have pulled out which prompted all kinds of conspiracy chatter and probably only helped boost the film’s profile. Disney’s recent punch in earnings was due, in a large part, to their theme park business and the most successful Disney theme park is in Florida. Some say that Disney didn’t want to jeapordize their cozy relationship with the Governer of Florida, Jeb Bush (the President’s brother) by distributing a film so openly critical of the President.

    Disney just can’t seem to call any of the right shots in their film division. First they piss of Steve Jobs and send him, Pixar, and the Shrek franchise off in search of their own distribution channel. Shrek 2 opened last week to a “record shattering $125 million” for through this weekend. Now it looks certain that Fahrenheit 9/11 will be a money-maker as well. I recall Moore’s first documentary, Roger & Me, was extremely profitable because production costs on a documentary are so reasonable. Way to go Emma!

  • Cool Email Alias

    I normally just delete the junk email that lands in my box but this one caught my eye just because of it’s name.

    Flippant H. Sassafras

    The middle initial really makes it.

    A further search for Ms. Sassafras on Google led me to this page which really raised an eybrow. I mean, it’s a page of gibberish (as far as I can tell) with the title of “Indelible Iceland Summand Purdue” WHAT THE HECK? It’s registered at yale.edu so I navigated up the URL and can’t seem to find a root.

    Google and the other web crawlers must be having fun with this person’s site! If anyone can tell me what this is about – please tell me!

  • Allowance

    Oh man! I just found a PDF of Bush’s request for more funds referred to below and it’s even funnier than I thought. Krugman referred to the one page cover letter to the budget ammendment but he didn’t mention that the ammendment request was only THREE pages with the first two pages being a cover note explaining why costs “cannot be estimated with precision.”

    How do you estimate something with precision anyway???

    To think of all the business plans, market analysis, and positioning statements I need to submit to initiate projects at my company and this is all it takes is four pages for our government to fling $25 billion overseas! The kicker is in the footnote:

    **The original version of this document inadvertently contained an incorrect date. The money is intended to be available on the first day of Fiscal Year 2005: October 1, 2004. The orignal document incorrectly listed this date as October 1, 2005.

    Not only do we want our money, we want it NOW.

  • p-p-p-powerbook

    I normally feel sorry when the web swarms around something they want to make fun of but in this case it’s fully justified. If you’ve read about scammers who prey on eBay innocents, you’ll get a kick out of this meme.

    A scammer tries to get someone to send him a $2000 PowerBook to the UK with a promise that funds put into a phony escrow account would be released upon delivery. Smelling something phishy, especially when a check on the registered domain of the escrow site doesn’t look legit, the seller goes along. These type of scams usually end up with the seller sending off a legitimate item only to never hear from the buyer again.

    The scammer is usually overseas so there is no legal recourse. This happened to my neighbor where someone in South Africa saw his posting for his Volvo, offered to buy it and even sent a cashier’s check for the amount plus $3000 extra for shipping. Because it’s an overseas bank, it takes several days to clear so in the meantime, the scammer’s asking my neighbor to send the car off for delivery and also to wire the “shipper” $3000 real dollars. My neighbor had never heard of the bank which drew up the cashier’s check and grew suspicious. When he asked for further proof, they trail went cold. Of course the cashier’s check finally bounced.

    In this case, the guy scams the scammer and writes the whole thing up complete with excerpts from his email conversations. He says the goods are enroute, stuffs a plastic three-ring binder with a bunch of keys from a busted up Windows keyboard pasted on the inside, marks the customs form as a $2000 notebook and sends it off.

    But what really makes this a gem is the whole time this is going on, he is posting comments on a newsgroup asking for advice and basically getting egged on by the community. By marking the package as a $2000 computer, this forces the scammer to have to pay something like $200 in customs fees. Posters in London see the thread and check out the delivery address (a barbershop/internet cafe) and even go in for a haircut to stake the joint. The members of the bulliten board track the Fedex tracking number and someone even visits the shop at the time of delivery to try and get a snapshot of the fuming owner as he realizes he’s been had. The didn’t get the shot but they did go into the internet cafe and left “p-p-p-powerbook” on the screensavers.

  • Hassles

    Poor ol’ Cory at boingboing posts long and lengthy about the frustrations of getting a cell phone in the UK with “no credit.” Why can’t the credit agencies put their heads together to come up with a global rating system so that us trans-national workers can move freely about and immediately begin contributing to the local economy? I work with a bunch of ex-pats that have relocated from the UK and they all got shafted on their mortgages and car purchases because they essentially didn’t exist as far as the local banks were concerned.

    I too had a funny experience when I tried to open up an account at Bank of America in Berkeley. I walked up to the teller with a wad of 10,000 yen notes that I had earned as English teacher and said that I wanted to open up an account using this as my initial deposit. The teller said that I couldn’t exchange foreign currency without an account. When I pointed out the flaw in their procedures and asked for an exception, she stuck to her guns and directed me to the Wells Fargo branch across the street. “I know they will exchange your currency even if you don’t have an account. Why don’t you go there, change your money and come back here? I’d be happy to help you then.” Needless to say, I never made the trip back to BofA and ended up banking with Wells Fargo for over 10 years.

  • Middlesex 20th Reunion

    mx84.jpg

    Last weekend we drove up to Concord, MA for my 20th high school reunion. Middlesex School is an independent boarding school that was founded in 1901 where I lived and learned from age 14 – 18.

    The campus was designed by Olmstead, the same fellow that laid out Central Park, and is just as beautiful now as I remember it. The four years I spent there were the foundation of my education and schooling.

    An innocent request by one classmate to check into rates for a banquet at the local inn evolved into my somehow organizing the class get-together for Friday evening. In the end it all worked out and those in attendence had a great time sharing stories about what we’ve been up to the past 20 years and what we’ve heard about others that didn’t make it.

    As always, Alumni Weekend fell on a spectacular New England Spring day and groups of us wandered around the campus poking about our old haunts. Some places hadn’t changed a bit and others were radically upgraded or new all together. There’s two new dorms, one named “the new dorm” and I guess waiting the label from a particularly generous alumni. There’s also a brand new science center that is topped by an observatory. Everyone agreed that the athletic center can hold its own to any Manhattan health club and the new Student Center in Ware Hall (with it’s floor to ceiling glass windows) is a welcome change to the old student/faculty center that was known as the “Stu/Fac.”

    The addition of wings on some of the dorms was done so subtly that only careful examination revealed the difference in brick tone (and redeemed my sanity). It was strange to walk into the old BP dorm where I lived on the top floor in a shared suite with others in a “quad” and see how much they’ve changed things around. Not only have they broken up all the odd-shaped nooks and dormers that used to make it so den-like, they’ve also sub-divided the whole floor into a series of singles. The old wooden staircase are gone, there are safety rails everywhere, and as of a few years ago they’ve put locks on all the doors. As my old dorm master said, they basically took the front door down, replaced the building, then put the old front door back on. Time rolls on I guess – I’m now sounding like one of those crusty old Alums lamenting the good old days.

    It was great to bring Zoomer & the kids out to see my old school. I’ve always wanted to share this part of my life with them. I hope they got at least a sense of what it was like to spend time here. Tyler jumped right in and had a blast with the other kids. Tyler and Chloe got along grand which prompted her father John to say, “they’re getting along better than we ever did!”

    I took a few photos of the weekend but am kicking myself for not taking more – too caught up in the present I suppose – if anyone wants to submit more photos from the weekend for the album, send them my way.

  • Cherry Blossoms

    The rainstorm last night brought down many of the cherry blossoms from the tree that overhangs our driveway onto my car. As I drove off to work and sped down to work this morning I left behind a flurry of blossom petals in my wake.

    The car behind me must have thought I was heading home after an Indian wedding.

  • Number 5

    It’s been a grueling curriculum at St. Matthew’s Little Leisure this year. Tyler’s pre-K class covered a letter each week. The first week was the letter “A” and they worked on crafts that used apples, colored in construction paper cut in the shape of an “A,” you get the idea. After 26 weeks of that, they moved onto numbers and picked up the pace a bit and covered a number each day. On Tuesday, Tyler was home sick with a stomach ache (he slept it off) and he subsequently missed the number five. Today he was back in school and they covered the number six and they had Tyler make up his exercises on the number five.

    Unfortunately, this confused Tyler on the order of the numbers – he thought they were teaching him that the sequence was 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5 – which I had to straighten things out with him tonight as I put him to sleep.

    Imagine the chaos this would have caused if he went through the rest of his life with these numbers the wrong way around – all because of a stomach ache!

  • Shopping

    Flash, the name Tyler gave our trusty green Honda Odyssey served as our chariot for a shopping run to a huge outlet mall about 30 minutes away in Pennsylvania. We only go there a couple of times a year and I think we now have it down to a science. We head out as early as possible and time it to arrive about 10 minutes after opening. After securing a good parking spot that allows for rapid, clean lines of escape, we head inside and plunge ourselves into the major stores we want to hit that day. Momentum was pretty good but we got way-laid at the Marshall’s (pictured above) which was fascinating because the household goods and toy sections were like an attic for failed consumer goods. The 3 foot pepper mill, the porcelain statuette of a cherub playing soccer, the gigantic paella pan, cooks for 40 – these were the things that stores just couldn’t move and one can see why!

    Tyler picked up a pair of “scooter red” Keds, Julia a fresh pair of flower-patterned spats, Zoomer got some shirts and a funky pair of floodwater-hemmed jeans, and dad got a bunch of short-sleeved shirts for the Summer and a nice running shirt to make up for the 2002 World Cup Brazilian soccer jersey that was melted down in the dryer.

    We got home late and I now understand the seething disgust reserved by parents for the man that drives the ice cream truck. We hadn’t even gotten dinner organized yet when his plinkity-plink sugar-high melody could be heard warbling it’s way around our corner. The kids immediately started moaning and frowning their entire bodies in an attempt to soften our resolve that they were not to spoil their appetite despite the fact that the entire block of kids were lined up outside the truck for their jet pops and crazy cones. The truck had parked itself strategically in front of our house and the melody played itself over and over as the ice cream man served up one treat after another, the tune was almost mocking us, as if to say, “come on, don’t be such a prude. . . .it’s just ice cream after all. . .” I have to hand it to the kids though, once the truck motored away (this time at top speed, not the tempting crawl when it first came to our block) they finished all their vegetables without too much fuss.