Owner: PhilosYphia URL:http://www.nathanpralle.com/blog/ Join Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 18:06:21 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Thoughts, Reflections, Rants, Musings, and Whatever Else I Feel Like on that Day from a computer programmer in small town Iowa. Site statistics:Click here
Geriatric Joyriding 2007-05-07 22:58:45 “Annoyed as hell” would be an accurate representation of my mood today on my noon hour drive home (all of 5 measly blocks). I’m fully of the opinion that Jan & Dean’s The Little Old Lady from Pasadena was a tongue-in-cheek absurdist piece about the bluehair population currently roaming our streets and wreaking havoc on everyone’s normal driving environment. Second only to drunk drivers, the extremely old folks still driving around town are seriously starting to screw up safety and responsibility on the road as well as make me pull out the profanity far more often than normal.
And, frankly, Iowa driving license law is to blame. While I fully support the ability for all ages of people to possess a license to drive, the fact remains that it is a privilege, not a right, and the laws are too flexible for those who have reached their golden years and past, allowing them to continue to renew over and over with only passing a simple eye exam. I fully be Read more:Geriatric
007 Teenagers 2007-05-07 18:57:52 I trotted out last night to burn some paper garbage in our burn barrel and had just gotten a leaping, bright fire worthy of front-page mention on a shitty local evening newscast when a car slowly drove by on the side road by our house with its lights off. It went down to the T intersection at the end of the road, turned its lights on, and turned right. “Strange,” I thought to myself, watching flames envelop the papers and cardboard. But this is Sheffield — small town of 960-odd people. Weird things happen from time to time. Being surrounded by cornfields kinda does that to you.
As I stood there, mesmerized by the roaring inferno in front of me, it happened again — the same car, sans exterior illumination, but this time it stopped in front of the neighbor’s house. “Hrm,” I thought, knowing that there is at least one teenage girl living at that house and wondering if this could be someone coming by to “visit”.
Sure enoug Read more:Teenagers
Greener Pastures 2007-05-04 07:15:36 The season of random green things appearing at the tips of every available brown thing out in the yard is finally upon us, mostly noted by the fact that the fiery heat box in the basement hasn’t done one of its typical, “click-click-click-WHOOSH!” things in awhile. The cat is decidedly more calm for the fact.
Of course, things around here have kept me busier than a triple-phallus endowed billygoat, but what else is new? The mere fact that I stay vertical on a regular basis is something to be proud of, I think. Note to self: Gloat to mother figure sometime.
The lawn is growing great guns which means that I will probably be unable to avoid mowing it on the weekend, lest my neighbors form a lynch mob and drag me to the town square. The pretty, round, yellow flowers are peeking their way above the verdant blades, shining happily to the sun. I will certainly have a moment of contrition when I push my way into their domain and violently hack them down Read more:Greener
Perfectly Precise 2007-05-04 06:37:03 One thing that has annoyed me for ages is when a person says something like, “Life is not supposed to be like this!” or “There has to be something better!” or similar statements. I believe such statements are not only a sign of immaturity and wishful thinking, but completely illogical. I propose the following conclusion:
Conclusion: No one can state that the life which they are living is not a perfect one, because nobody has the ability to conceive the concept of a perfect life.
I’m going to wax philosophical for awhile about this, so if you’re not into philosophy, you’ll want to skip on to the next entry, where I’ll probably berate someone for being a moron or similar.
(more…)
Out of Zion 2007-04-29 07:24:33 Entering the campus of my alma mater yesterday was like it was almost every time I have returned — it really is like coming home. Luther College is just one of scores of private, 4-year colleges in the world, but this is the one that holds so much special meaning for me, not only because of the memories I have of the place, but the people that I was met and exposed to there, and most importantly, what I learned there, which far surpassed even the best of what its engaging classrooms can offer.
Luther alums understand this feeling of returning to the place of your birth; in a sense, it was our place of a second birth, from the life of an uncertain teenager into the fresh yet enthusiastic one of an educated adult. Many of us experienced a great deal of growing pains while in this place; I have had some of my lowest lows and highest highs within my four years living there. How can one place on earth touch so many so deeply?
Both Yolanda and I made the 2.5 hour drive up yesterd
Metal Bird Crap 2007-04-25 23:53:00 Things that go whiz, zoom, bang, and bleep have always been my passion, especially those things that are impressive feats of engineering and science. Although I’m just a beginning airhead (is that the right term?), airplanes have recently really sprung my spring and I’ve wiled away quite a few hours reading up on various airplanes, airlines, etc. My recent trips on planes have renewed my interest in this field, the terminology, and how it all works to provide the world with an amazing system of transportation.
There are a lot of great sites out there that appeal to the airplane enthusiast, from the detailed walkings of Wikipedia and their wide range of airplane descriptions to SeatGuru, for those that want to find the best ride, to travel places like Kayak that compare hundreds of airlines for nice prices, and my newest favorite place — FlightAware.
This awesome website tracks all flights over US airspace at all times, 24/7/365. You can look at air traffic ove Read more:Metal
Erotic Footwear 2007-04-25 06:34:51 Why is it when I always see movies about transvestites, cross-dressers, or drag queens, I’m with my friends Kate and Paul?
The other night, in their continuing effort to educate me to the movies of the world (I am not very “well-watched”, if that is the right term), we had a viewing of the funky-footwear-as-a-business film, Kinky Boots. Keep your shoes on, here goes a review:
This book of erotic footwear starts out like any typical British movie does: Slowly. If you can make it past the first, say, 15 minutes, you’re golden. I now appreciate this style of filmmaking although that wasn’t always the case, as it was hard to keep my eyelids open that long when I was younger. Nowadays, I try to interpret what the director had in mind with those scenes dragging by.
Slight Spoilers Follow:
The story revolves around a son who inherits the family business from his old man — a shoe factory. Little does he know, however, that business is bad and ev Read more:Footwear
Crazy News Day 2007-04-24 06:19:25 Today must be a crazy news day. I must have missed the memo this morning in my mailbox that read: “World went crazy over weekend. Expect a rash of idiots and idiotic things in the news. Brace yerself, Effie.” If I had known, I would have prepared myself by doing meditation or clubbing some baby seals or something else catharthic.
Here’s the stupidity in its glory:
Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Monday to protest a concrete wall surrounding Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. CNN Story Here
Oh, well, that’s grand. A wall being built by the military in a city. Does anyone have a sense of deja vu here? Hello, Germany? It’s Iraq on line two.
I don’t know about you, but just about every headline I see about this damned “war” in Iraq portrays the soldiers as doing efforts equivalent to stopping a lava flow with sand shovels. I have no doubt that they are working their hearts out and, as we well know, dying fo Read more:Crazy
Racially Stupid 2007-04-11 18:22:50 One thing that continually astounds me about Americans is our ability to concentrate on the dumbest things in the world when it concerns the daily news stories and events that everyone chatters on about.
For those of you still under a rock, the past few days have been surrounding the saga of Don Imus, a n’er-do-well in the world of shock jock radio, who has recently been crucified on a burning cross for some offensive statements he made while on his daily radio show.
Read that above paragraph a few times — go ahead, I’ll wait. Do you see the stupidity yet?
A shock jock. Making offensive commentary. Oh, REAAAAALLLY?
I, personally, am flabbergasted. I thought they were all about fat yellow bumblebees, sunshine on tulips, and fuzzy bunnies in fields of clover. All the things that make cherubic angels sigh in orgasmic joy. (They are, of course — as long as the bumblebee is sodomizing the bunny with the tulip stem.)
But what is even worse is the Read more:Stupid
Religious Mental Hardware 2007-04-06 17:11:38 For some years now I’ve mused about the idea of religion and belief as being something that is inate to the human condition, perhaps as a hardwired feature within the folds of our melons or just something that gets ingrained within us as we go through the normal process of analyzing reality and dealing with the complexities of a sensory system that is unable to be omniscient. Today on CNN.com is an article entitled, “Are humans hard-wired for faith?“, which talks about Dr. Andrew Newberg’s quest to explore the way the human brain functions in capacities dealing with religion, faith, rapture, meditation, and other religiously-based activities.
Personally, I’m surprised that it’s taken a neuroscientist this long to broach this subject, although I can imagine that the topic itself is somewhat unpopular to a large mass of people in the world, due to religious freakism. (a phenomenon that I’m going to write about next, I think) The overriding Read more:Hardware
I’m Melting Into a Puddle of Rainbows 2007-04-06 07:13:23
It is rare that I post a blog entry of little to no worthy intelligence, relevance, thought, or otherwise proving content. However, this is going to be one of those, mostly because the picture on the left is one of The World’s Absolutely Cutest Penguin and I can’t stop the unbelievably horrible feelings of affection rising from my inner cockles at the sight of this little bugger. I have desires to go out and pet bunny rabbits, coo at newborn babies, and tie little pastel bows on every passing car antenna. He’s so terribly cute that I just want to stare at him all day long until my eyeballs dry up and crack.
I know — this is really, really sad.
I am very, very fond of penguins, however, and since I’m a Linux geek, it works out pretty well. (Linux’s mascot is a penguin named Tux, if you didn’t know.) In some ways, this little guy makes me giggle because I’ve had that same sort of expression on my face once or twice, and I’ Read more:Puddle
, Rainbows
The Way Back Home 2007-04-05 07:05:15 Vacations are strange beasts. They are essentially a means of escape for us humans, consumed daily with the tasks and pressures of modern, industrialized life, yearning to unplug and run away from everything, if only for a few fleeting moments. Taking holidays is the closest that mature adults come to running away from responsibility without actually doing so, all under the pretense of, “having a good time”, when “getting away from it all” is more the case than anything.
As such, coming back from an extended time away is always a bear, but it is even moreso when it involves a trip halfway across the world. I think I have mostly recovered from my jetlag and the spinning of brain as it tries to reorient itself on the world of the HereAndNow, so I can write this final chapter in our trip to Australia.
Brace yerself, Effie — she’s a long one.
(more…)
Birds on a Wing 2007-03-27 05:29:20 I believe that flying is one of the finest ways to travel known to man. You get to ride in a technological marvel of the modern age, utilizing tons of engineering and physics to raise you high up into the atmosphere, traveling at a speed that would skin your eyeballs if you did it in a car, and in a few hours or more, you arrive at another location anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of miles away. The fact that there are a ton of people who have never experienced this mode of movement simply blows my mind.
For those of you too scared to do it, you really need to educate yourselves as to the safety of modern airliners and the industry in general. You are, statistically speaking, more likely to be struck by lightning than an airliner crash. Heck, you have a 1 in 6 chance of being in a car accident in your lifetime, yet the chance of an airplane crash is almost insignificant. The engineering, safety protocols, and care with which the planes are flown gives me great confide Read more:Birds
Water Heater Down Chunder 2007-03-24 05:37:47 Tonight I made myself useful (as I so often do around here) and attacked the problem of the smelly hot water. Since we were gone and our housesitter only stayed here for a limited amount of time, the hot water sat in the heater for most of the time, undisturbed, which apparently gives it an odorific attitude and it came out upon our return smelling like…well, something odd. Kind of like a wet rock, you know the kind — the ones that smell after a warm rain on a summer’s day? That sort of rock. The ones that show up to parties and everyone avoids, but nobody says anything to them, poor blokes.
So I went to drain it out of the stopcock on the bottom of the tank (don’t you just love that word — stopcock? It’s like, “Stop, cock!” Chickens beware!) and instead of water running out, I got water meandering down a grassy path or something of that nature. Clearly, it was blocked up.
Well, no time like the present to wind the entire Read more:Heater
Aussie Brewskies 2007-03-13 14:31:15 Australians love their beer, and I love my beer, so while I was in the land that loves its beer, I thought it prudent to make an appropriate review of some of the brands offered here. I am not, of course, a proper brew reviewer nor am I as up on my lingo as, say, my former roommate, Adam, so forgive me if I screw up something or sound like I’m just a guy that likes his beer cold and lots of it.
XXXX (pronounced ‘four eks’) is brewed in Queensland by Castlemaine Perkins. It is a clear-ish lager that has a bit of a bitter aftertaste to it and goes down relatively like flavored water. Unfortunately, the odd aftertaste to it leaves it wanting and it lacks any sort of body to it. I’ll drink it (as I did on the plane ride over) as it’s decidedly Aussie
, but it’s not a favorite.
Victoria Bitter, most often known simply as “VB”, is, despite its name, a traditional lager brewed by Carlton & United Beverages, a subsidiary of
Arise, Ye Little Shoots 2007-05-10 07:46:19 What is it about growing and cultivating plants that gets our rocks off so much? I mean, really. There’s growing things all around us, but we humans take special interest in choosing certain plants to tend to and coddle and cause to yield. At least for the United States and other first-world countries, the need to grow our own plants doesn’t really extend to a matter of survival (farmers excepted), but yet we spend gazoogles of money each spring on “garden supplies” which range anywhere from a new hoe to some funky new poisonous chemical to rid our blossoming patch of an unwanted critter, insect, bacteria, fungus, bird, rodent, snail, cat, dog, or sneaky neighbor.
Alas, I, too, fall under this spell each year and succumb to the calling of the “Garden Centre” at our local SomethingMart to browse amongst the aisles of green, my fingers lightly brushing the fronds like a delicate lover, seeking the best seeds and plants to garnish my little plot o Read more:Arise
Geriatric Joyriding 2007-05-07 22:58:45 “Annoyed as hell” would be an accurate representation of my mood today on my noon hour drive home (all of 5 measly blocks). I’m fully of the opinion that Jan & Dean’s The Little Old Lady from Pasadena was a tongue-in-cheek absurdist piece about the bluehair population currently roaming our streets and wreaking havoc on everyone’s normal driving environment. Second only to drunk drivers, the extremely old folks still driving around town are seriously starting to screw up safety and responsibility on the road as well as make me pull out the profanity far more often than normal.
And, frankly, Iowa driving license law is to blame. While I fully support the ability for all ages of people to possess a license to drive, the fact remains that it is a privilege, not a right, and the laws are too flexible for those who have reached their golden years and past, allowing them to continue to renew over and over with only passing a simple eye exam. I fully be Read more:Geriatric
007 Teenagers 2007-05-07 18:57:52 I trotted out last night to burn some paper garbage in our burn barrel and had just gotten a leaping, bright fire worthy of front-page mention on a shitty local evening newscast when a car slowly drove by on the side road by our house with its lights off. It went down to the T intersection at the end of the road, turned its lights on, and turned right. “Strange,” I thought to myself, watching flames envelop the papers and cardboard. But this is Sheffield — small town of 960-odd people. Weird things happen from time to time. Being surrounded by cornfields kinda does that to you.
As I stood there, mesmerized by the roaring inferno in front of me, it happened again — the same car, sans exterior illumination, but this time it stopped in front of the neighbor’s house. “Hrm,” I thought, knowing that there is at least one teenage girl living at that house and wondering if this could be someone coming by to “visit”.
Sure enoug Read more:Teenagers
Greener Pastures 2007-05-04 07:15:36 The season of random green things appearing at the tips of every available brown thing out in the yard is finally upon us, mostly noted by the fact that the fiery heat box in the basement hasn’t done one of its typical, “click-click-click-WHOOSH!” things in awhile. The cat is decidedly more calm for the fact.
Of course, things around here have kept me busier than a triple-phallus endowed billygoat, but what else is new? The mere fact that I stay vertical on a regular basis is something to be proud of, I think. Note to self: Gloat to mother figure sometime.
The lawn is growing great guns which means that I will probably be unable to avoid mowing it on the weekend, lest my neighbors form a lynch mob and drag me to the town square. The pretty, round, yellow flowers are peeking their way above the verdant blades, shining happily to the sun. I will certainly have a moment of contrition when I push my way into their domain and violently hack them down Read more:Greener
Perfectly Precise 2007-05-04 06:37:03 One thing that has annoyed me for ages is when a person says something like, “Life is not supposed to be like this!” or “There has to be something better!” or similar statements. I believe such statements are not only a sign of immaturity and wishful thinking, but completely illogical. I propose the following conclusion:
Conclusion: No one can state that the life which they are living is not a perfect one, because nobody has the ability to conceive the concept of a perfect life.
I’m going to wax philosophical for awhile about this, so if you’re not into philosophy, you’ll want to skip on to the next entry, where I’ll probably berate someone for being a moron or similar.
(more…)
Out of Zion 2007-04-29 07:24:33 Entering the campus of my alma mater yesterday was like it was almost every time I have returned — it really is like coming home. Luther College is just one of scores of private, 4-year colleges in the world, but this is the one that holds so much special meaning for me, not only because of the memories I have of the place, but the people that I was met and exposed to there, and most importantly, what I learned there, which far surpassed even the best of what its engaging classrooms can offer.
Luther alums understand this feeling of returning to the place of your birth; in a sense, it was our place of a second birth, from the life of an uncertain teenager into the fresh yet enthusiastic one of an educated adult. Many of us experienced a great deal of growing pains while in this place; I have had some of my lowest lows and highest highs within my four years living there. How can one place on earth touch so many so deeply?
Both Yolanda and I made the 2.5 hour drive up yesterd
Metal Bird Crap 2007-04-25 23:53:00 Things that go whiz, zoom, bang, and bleep have always been my passion, especially those things that are impressive feats of engineering and science. Although I’m just a beginning airhead (is that the right term?), airplanes have recently really sprung my spring and I’ve wiled away quite a few hours reading up on various airplanes, airlines, etc. My recent trips on planes have renewed my interest in this field, the terminology, and how it all works to provide the world with an amazing system of transportation.
There are a lot of great sites out there that appeal to the airplane enthusiast, from the detailed walkings of Wikipedia and their wide range of airplane descriptions to SeatGuru, for those that want to find the best ride, to travel places like Kayak that compare hundreds of airlines for nice prices, and my newest favorite place — FlightAware.
This awesome website tracks all flights over US airspace at all times, 24/7/365. You can look at air traffic ove Read more:Metal
Erotic Footwear 2007-04-25 06:34:51 Why is it when I always see movies about transvestites, cross-dressers, or drag queens, I’m with my friends Kate and Paul?
The other night, in their continuing effort to educate me to the movies of the world (I am not very “well-watched”, if that is the right term), we had a viewing of the funky-footwear-as-a-business film, Kinky Boots. Keep your shoes on, here goes a review:
This book of erotic footwear starts out like any typical British movie does: Slowly. If you can make it past the first, say, 15 minutes, you’re golden. I now appreciate this style of filmmaking although that wasn’t always the case, as it was hard to keep my eyelids open that long when I was younger. Nowadays, I try to interpret what the director had in mind with those scenes dragging by.
Slight Spoilers Follow:
The story revolves around a son who inherits the family business from his old man — a shoe factory. Little does he know, however, that business is bad and ev Read more:Footwear
Crazy News Day 2007-04-24 06:19:25 Today must be a crazy news day. I must have missed the memo this morning in my mailbox that read: “World went crazy over weekend. Expect a rash of idiots and idiotic things in the news. Brace yerself, Effie.” If I had known, I would have prepared myself by doing meditation or clubbing some baby seals or something else catharthic.
Here’s the stupidity in its glory:
Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Monday to protest a concrete wall surrounding Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. CNN Story Here
Oh, well, that’s grand. A wall being built by the military in a city. Does anyone have a sense of deja vu here? Hello, Germany? It’s Iraq on line two.
I don’t know about you, but just about every headline I see about this damned “war” in Iraq portrays the soldiers as doing efforts equivalent to stopping a lava flow with sand shovels. I have no doubt that they are working their hearts out and, as we well know, dying fo Read more:Crazy
Racially Stupid 2007-04-11 18:22:50 One thing that continually astounds me about Americans is our ability to concentrate on the dumbest things in the world when it concerns the daily news stories and events that everyone chatters on about.
For those of you still under a rock, the past few days have been surrounding the saga of Don Imus, a n’er-do-well in the world of shock jock radio, who has recently been crucified on a burning cross for some offensive statements he made while on his daily radio show.
Read that above paragraph a few times — go ahead, I’ll wait. Do you see the stupidity yet?
A shock jock. Making offensive commentary. Oh, REAAAAALLLY?
I, personally, am flabbergasted. I thought they were all about fat yellow bumblebees, sunshine on tulips, and fuzzy bunnies in fields of clover. All the things that make cherubic angels sigh in orgasmic joy. (They are, of course — as long as the bumblebee is sodomizing the bunny with the tulip stem.)
But what is even worse is the Read more:Stupid
Religious Mental Hardware 2007-04-06 17:11:38 For some years now I’ve mused about the idea of religion and belief as being something that is inate to the human condition, perhaps as a hardwired feature within the folds of our melons or just something that gets ingrained within us as we go through the normal process of analyzing reality and dealing with the complexities of a sensory system that is unable to be omniscient. Today on CNN.com is an article entitled, “Are humans hard-wired for faith?“, which talks about Dr. Andrew Newberg’s quest to explore the way the human brain functions in capacities dealing with religion, faith, rapture, meditation, and other religiously-based activities.
Personally, I’m surprised that it’s taken a neuroscientist this long to broach this subject, although I can imagine that the topic itself is somewhat unpopular to a large mass of people in the world, due to religious freakism. (a phenomenon that I’m going to write about next, I think) The overriding Read more:Hardware
I’m Melting Into a Puddle of Rainbows 2007-04-06 07:13:23
It is rare that I post a blog entry of little to no worthy intelligence, relevance, thought, or otherwise proving content. However, this is going to be one of those, mostly because the picture on the left is one of The World’s Absolutely Cutest Penguin and I can’t stop the unbelievably horrible feelings of affection rising from my inner cockles at the sight of this little bugger. I have desires to go out and pet bunny rabbits, coo at newborn babies, and tie little pastel bows on every passing car antenna. He’s so terribly cute that I just want to stare at him all day long until my eyeballs dry up and crack.
I know — this is really, really sad.
I am very, very fond of penguins, however, and since I’m a Linux geek, it works out pretty well. (Linux’s mascot is a penguin named Tux, if you didn’t know.) In some ways, this little guy makes me giggle because I’ve had that same sort of expression on my face once or twice, and I’ Read more:Puddle
, Rainbows
The Way Back Home 2007-04-05 07:05:15 Vacations are strange beasts. They are essentially a means of escape for us humans, consumed daily with the tasks and pressures of modern, industrialized life, yearning to unplug and run away from everything, if only for a few fleeting moments. Taking holidays is the closest that mature adults come to running away from responsibility without actually doing so, all under the pretense of, “having a good time”, when “getting away from it all” is more the case than anything.
As such, coming back from an extended time away is always a bear, but it is even moreso when it involves a trip halfway across the world. I think I have mostly recovered from my jetlag and the spinning of brain as it tries to reorient itself on the world of the HereAndNow, so I can write this final chapter in our trip to Australia.
Brace yerself, Effie — she’s a long one.
(more…)
Birds on a Wing 2007-03-27 05:29:20 I believe that flying is one of the finest ways to travel known to man. You get to ride in a technological marvel of the modern age, utilizing tons of engineering and physics to raise you high up into the atmosphere, traveling at a speed that would skin your eyeballs if you did it in a car, and in a few hours or more, you arrive at another location anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of miles away. The fact that there are a ton of people who have never experienced this mode of movement simply blows my mind.
For those of you too scared to do it, you really need to educate yourselves as to the safety of modern airliners and the industry in general. You are, statistically speaking, more likely to be struck by lightning than an airliner crash. Heck, you have a 1 in 6 chance of being in a car accident in your lifetime, yet the chance of an airplane crash is almost insignificant. The engineering, safety protocols, and care with which the planes are flown gives me great confide Read more:Birds
Water Heater Down Chunder 2007-03-24 05:37:47 Tonight I made myself useful (as I so often do around here) and attacked the problem of the smelly hot water. Since we were gone and our housesitter only stayed here for a limited amount of time, the hot water sat in the heater for most of the time, undisturbed, which apparently gives it an odorific attitude and it came out upon our return smelling like…well, something odd. Kind of like a wet rock, you know the kind — the ones that smell after a warm rain on a summer’s day? That sort of rock. The ones that show up to parties and everyone avoids, but nobody says anything to them, poor blokes.
So I went to drain it out of the stopcock on the bottom of the tank (don’t you just love that word — stopcock? It’s like, “Stop, cock!” Chickens beware!) and instead of water running out, I got water meandering down a grassy path or something of that nature. Clearly, it was blocked up.
Well, no time like the present to wind the entire Read more:Heater
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