Tomorrow is a momentous day for all kinds of reasons, but it's best known as my official half-birthday.

It used to be much more important, back when I was six or so. Now I don't even remember how old I am and have to calculate my age whenever I'm asked. I'm not sure when that happened, how old I became before I lost the obsession or just stopped caring, but I'm fairly sure I never told anyone I was forty-eight and a half.

I think part of that may be because when I was five, each year represented twenty percent of my life, so each one was a pretty big deal and just about everything I ran across was new. Now, each year's less than two percent of my life and while I still discover new things daily, I also see a lot of repetition.

Someone (Dave Barry?) once said that there's an age when you should stop celebrating your birthdays and making a big deal about them, and that age is eleven. I should make an earnest effort to remember that six months from tomorrow.

Tomorrow being the first month means I'll be busier than usual. Not only do I have laundry to do (light, unbloodied things), but I also need to change the filter in the heater, go grocery shopping, and update my online resumes. Timmy will want some playing and it may be a good time to begin my spring cleaning. No, it's not Spring, not yet, but today it was supposed to rain and is, instead, gloriously sunny and clear, so I'm thinking winter is over. It may still be chilly in the mornings, but it's not raining, which is about the difference between summer and winter.

March, of course, means wind, so I'd best get busy securing the tarp that acts as a cheap replacement for a real roof on the carport. I have plans, of course, on someday replacing the roof on that, but like all good plans that can be put off for a while more.

What can't be put off is rewarding myself for surviving another six months.

For those of you keeping track at home, today the New York Stock Exchange lost about six hundred billion dollars, and none of it to me (who could have really used even a fraction of it).
Hey! We coulda fought a war for that kinda scratch!

No, I'm not talking about that. Besides, that's for married people and I think the frequency's weekly, though last week must have upped the ante, what with the holiday and all.

My sister tells me that dogs like routine, but if they do they're not alone. People do, too. Here in America we've grown used to changing the battery in our fire alarms twice a year when Daylight Savings Time comes and goes, we bathe on Saturday night and have roast on Sunday, we change the filters in our heaters monthly and brush two times a day.

We have set routines for all these things and perform them without thinking, which may explain their popularity. Most everyone I know likes being mindless as often as possible, and having a structured routine lets us accomplish mundane tasks without giving them much thought.

It's easy enough to launder my clothes when they get dirty, what with automatic washers and dryers and store-bought detergent, but I feel a little left out of the mainstream. The ads for soaps and things show kids playing, and I can't remember the last time I got grass stains on my knees. They've gone the way of stubbed toes.

Nor do I work in an oil field. I can't recall ever having iodine in the house, but that seems to be a pretty common stain from what I've seen, as is blood. The number of times I've had my clothing ruined by blood is precisely one, but it's much more common than my personal experience would lead you to believe. I understand that.

At some point in my twenties or thirties I realized that I didn't work up as much of a sweat sitting in my office as many people did at their jobs. Not only didn't have stains to remove, I barely soiled my clothes at all. Still, after each day's wear, I washed them so I could safely wear them again.

I still do, usually, but winter brings with it a number of problems. Unlike summer, I routinely change my clothes several times a day now. I wear clothes to bed and leave them on for the first hour or so of waking, coffee-drinking life. During the day I wear one set, and it's sometimes shorts, depending on my activity, but once the sun goes down, I change again into heavier, warmer clothes.

I pull layers on, and remove them, and I'm never sure how much "wear" I've given a particular sweatshirt or pair of jeans. Have I crossed the threshold of acceptable use? It's one thing to wear a pair of jeans all day, but when that's broken up over a couple days for a couple hours each, can I keep wearing them?

I ask, mostly because I'm very much aware that not only do I have to remain on the right side of society, but I don't want to wash my clothes too much. It only took me a few times cleaning out dryer lint before I put two and two together and realized that if I washed my clothes often enough, they'd completely disappear. If they were losing that much fabric each time I washed them, it was only a matter of time before they'd be laundered into non-existence.

Yesterday, in what may be a record for my neighborhood, some kids were out playing with water wearing bathing suits. Incredible. Tomorrow, rain is forecast, and yesterday was hot as a pistol. Some people may point to these changing weather conditions as reasons for illness, but I'm not convinced about that. What I can suggest is you only get to wear a bathing suit once before it needs laundering.

Think of it as underwear, but, sometimes, cuter.

Last night, in Madison Square Garden, Dr. Robert A. Indeglia picked James, an English Springer Spaniel, as "America's Top Dog."  The Westminster Kennel Club selects a new genetically modified dog each year for the title, and this year's is pretty damn cute.

We Americans usually focus on celebrating genetic modification in the summer, what with all the dog and horse racing going on and the county fairs, so this award pretty much stands on its own. We hold it, too, in what's as unnatural a setting as we can find, but I never hear of any protests by the hippies.

This year's winner was one of my favorites, but that's not hard when two of the competitors are poodles. Now, don't get me wrong: I like poodles fine enough, just not when they're shaped with clippers.

The dogs in the show are as unnatural as the setting. There isn't much talk about genetic modification, but we all know it's there. Nature never built any English Springer Spaniels, or Dachshunds, or even Dalmatians, we humans did that. We're rather fond of pushing together different things together to see what we get, and it doesn't much matter if it's done in a breeding pen or a scientific lab.

For some reason, though, if some kindly old farm woman in a calico apron is grafting a branch of one plant onto another, or her husband chews on a weed while wearing overalls and watches his favorite rooster mount his fattest hen, we're fine with that. In each case they're trying to manipulate nature to produce a better result, but we get in a tizzy if a geneticist does the modifying directly inside the cells.

There's a difference, sure, but not a difference in kind.

We humans can build mules out of an unholy alliance between horses and donkeys, and everyone's cool with that. We've made so many hybrids, someone's come up with a top ten list of them. When we're not content with seeing what happens when we mix different species, we go up a level and see what we can come up with members of different genera. You can buy one of the results of this, triticale, at Whole Foods.

Humans just can't leave well enough alone. Nor, should we. We have fancier tools now and better ways of using them, but once we stopped our nomadic ways we began genetically manipulating our environment. Doing it with a pipette is no different than doing it with branch and twine or a penis, only more efficient.

It may seem horrifying to move some DNA from a trout to a tomato, but they share over half the same genes, anyway. Every living thing on this planet does, which either argues for a common ancestor or a lazy god. Also, it makes discovering life on other planets even more interesting.

Someone, and I'm looking at you, Teresa Patton and Ruth Dehmel, did a great job constructing James. Congratulations!

We had what can best be described as a smattering of rain over the weekend, less than had been predicted and not nearly enough to loosen the roots of the plants I wanted to yank out of the ground. I'd hoped for more, but it turned out we only got a light drizzle during the nights.

Curiously, and this always happens, while the officials tell me it was at most a quarter inch, every container in the yard had over an inch. I've never figured that out, and I refuse to buy into the whole "sloping sides" argument.

Still, even with all that fractional inch of rain, I was unprepared for how wet I'd get driving to the market yesterday. Timmy, my little car, had tricks I wasn't prepared for.

He's, ostensibly, a convertible. I mention that only because I still can't get the top fastened closed. When I bought him I paid a couple hundred extra for the new top his seller had intended to install. After paying a few hundred more to have someone knowledgeable perform that task, his top was on, was up, and sheltered me from a more substantial rain.

I was told to leave the top up for four or five days to prevent wrinkling, and I left it up for close to a week. Since retracting it from its installation, I've never managed to get it to fasten back up. It comes close, but is about an inch shy of meeting the mounts that will secure it over the windshield.

So, overnight or when rain's predicted, I put the top up as best I can and cover the car with a car cover I  bought for my last car, which was larger. Timmy looks to be wearing a tent in it, but that's okay. I bought a can of some water repellent from a camping store, one that had a penguin on the cover to demonstrate its efficacy, but that doesn't work as well as expected. I guess it supports linux, and that's good.

One thing I've learned about convertibles is that they trap little bits of water in channels even with the top up, typically over the windshield. This water, naturally, slides into the driving compartment when the top's let back down, and I find it refreshing. Timmy does that, too, rewarding me with an ounce or so when I first turn right or left, accelerate or brake.

What I hadn't expected was a steady stream coming from the sun visor, but only on the driver's side.
Unlike "real" cars, my sun visors are plastic and, evidently, rain gets in it through the treated cover and  between the top and windshield. I'm guessing, through the mounting bracket. Since the visor is at least as old and worn as the rest of the car, there's a small rip in the bottom.

And, whenever I brake, the accumulated water inside the visor runs to the hole and freedom, ending up in my lap. The visor, itself, must think it's a baggy because water came out of that damn thing for close to fifteen minutes of driving. Never a lot at once, just a dribble every time I stopped, just enough to thoroughly soak my knees by the time my driving was finished.

There may still be some in there. I need, now, to make sure it's all out, then see about sealing the visor closed. One thing about a car like Timmy, there's always something going on!

In addition to have one of the cooler and more memorable names, ever, Faith Popcorn has a very cool job: she's a futurist.

Her website, however, sucks.

I've been watching this series on the Discovery Channel where they're looking ahead fifty years and reporting on how we'll live. Well, I won't be living then, but you will, and I'm afraid, like most of these predictions, they're being far too generous. Their depictions of future life, I predict, won't be true.

Many of the city scenes look to be the same ones recycled from the 1950s when they were talking about the year 2000. It didn't happen in the last fifty years, and I doubt it will in the next. With the exception of Los Angeles, most cities just don't feel the need to tear down every existing structure just to make room for the new ones, but these depictions of future cities pretty much look like they have to do that. There's nothing but tall, stately buildings connected by walkways that hang in the air and are visited by flying machines, which I also doubt we'll ever have.

Oh, sure, we may have flying cars, but given the density of most urban environments, only an idiot would think we'd be flying in them. If we get flying cars at all, I can't see them being illegal inside any city limits. They'd be fine, I suppose, for dashing between cities, but I wouldn't want to fly surrounded by the same million people who have trouble aiming their cars on the streets.

What I would like is personal blimps. We could all putt around at no more than thirty miles an hour, and if our blimps collided, we'd just bounce off each other, anyway.

The future, I'm convinced, will be more or less like the present or, to take it further, like the past couple of thousand years. Life hasn't changed all the much, but many of these predictions, somehow, seem to think we'll all be completely different. Computers and the Internet may well have changed how we get information and brought us all closer together, but it hasn't changed human existence all that much. Sure, you can pop in here and read what I'm thinking about, or visit a better site and actually learn something, but life is pretty much the same as it was before we were all connected. We just spend more time looking at monitors and less time reading and talking.

I'd like a job making predictions. It has to have even less accountability than telling people about tomorrow's weather (which, I think, will be more or less like today's).

Sir Richard Branson, who's in the enviable position of having so much money he's giving it away, must have read my earlier entry about scrubbing the skies. He recently announced a twenty-five million dollar prize for scientists to come up with a way to pull the carbon dioxide out of the air.

Interestingly, just a few days ago I heard on the BBC about some plan that involves seaweed or fungus or something that can eat CO2 and turn it into baking soda, otherwise known as sodium bicarbonate. I can just imagine how cool it would be to have huge machines scrubbing the air and pulling out all the excess greenhouse gases and transforming it into mounds of baking soda. No, it might not be good for the Arm and Hammer people, but the rest of us would benefit.

Those of us in the developed countries could have sweet-smelling refrigerators at even less cost than we currently enjoy, while those in the emerging countries and England could have bright white teeth! Not only that, but everyone whose heart works the way they're supposed to would never have to worry about heartburn.

Just think of all the burping!

I have a hunch, though, that the hippies might not like this idea. While I still believe that cleaning the atmosphere is more palatable to the world's leaders than decreasing emissions, I can't help thinking that many won't be happy unless humanity suffers. The only way, they'll say, that we can get the planet back in balance is by reducing, and anything we do on the other end, cleaning up afterwards, is misguided.

I remember when I first began hearing about acid rain, and all the conservatives said it would hamper our economy to install any safeguards. They were, of course, wrong and the economy has done quite nicely, even benefitting from the smokestack scrubbing advances. They're saying the same thing now about reducing carbon emissions, and I think we can handle that, too, without crippling the ability for people to work and make money.

Now, the hippies are onto a good thing, but I just can't see the world giving up snowblowers in place of shovels, replacing lawn mowers with shears, or recycling all our old electric toothbrushes. Sir Branson, I feel, is on the right track and his earlier success with offering less than half the money for someone to fly above the reaches of our atmosphere was pretty successful. He's had a few duds in his time, and I'm not counting my crappy Virgin Mobile Phone in the list but I easily could, but I think he's taking a very practical reaction to the global climate change problem.

And those of us who eat chili and drink black coffee can only applaud what may come of his generosity.

Today, while most of the good folk of the US were busy learning who could win a football game in the rain, I got some indication that I may be a racist.

I was busy in my post-yardwork relaxation when I looked up and saw some sky typing in the air above. I'd already seen some this year, some actual, classic, sky writing, so that wasn't a first, but it took me a minute or so to make out what was being written. Part of that may be due to it being windier than optimal for sky typing so only three or four letters were discernible, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which way the letters were arranged.

All I could tell, at first, is that they weren't oriented toward me, and when I figured out that they were upside down, I still couldn't figure out the message.

A moment later and I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was seeing sky typing in Spanish.

I was momentarily thrilled. This is cool, I thought, that the Spanish marketeers were taking advantage of southern California's high, blue skies and I was happy thinking of little Latino kids looking up at the sky I used to as a kid and getting giddy about reading the message. Then, it struck me.

Not only was this the first message en espanol that I'd seen, it had never before dawned on me that sky writing had never before been in anything other than English. I'd never questioned it. Instead, to my chagrin, I'd never given any thought to it and had assumed without question that anything written in the skies would be written for me to understand.

That's not only incredibly selfish, but its as bad as never noticing that Life magazine and CBS showed only the white viewpoint. Some overt racists may rally against Ebony, saying there's no Ivory magazine, all the while never acknowledging or noticing that damn near every magazine on the rack has a white slant, but I'd always considered myself pretty aware.

Until today, that is.

What I'm hoping for next is sky writing or typing in something outside the Latin characters. Cyrillic writing, I think, would look pretty, as would Farsi or Arabic.

This week has been an instructive one for the people of Boston and, as they say, education don't come cheap.

I suspect by now everyone's heard of the ad campaign for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie and how it tied up the city of Boston for a day and incurred about a million dollars in expense. I have no idea how they arrived at that figure, but that would be the day's salary for some 6500 people who made $50,000 a year. If there were fewer than that involved, maybe they all got real good lunches like the movie people do.

I think some of that cost may be for shame reduction.

Until this story broke I'd never heard of the  Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but I'm hardly in their demographic. I guess I'd seen Frylock around, the box of french fries guy, but I had no idea who he was, so the little guy waving his finger who caused all the fuss might have struck me as an object of curiosity had I seen him all lit up hanging from the bottom of a bridge.

I'm not sure I would have called a cop about it, but I keep forgetting that half of the US population is living in a constant state of barely-manageable fear. Had I seen one of the devices up close, again, I'm not sure I would have reported it to the authorities, but from what I've been able to gather I probably would have recognized it for what it was, a collection of LEDs.

On Fox News, of course, they kept talking about circuit boards, which I guess also frighten their viewers. Later on, kids on the Internet dismissed it as a Light Bright, a toy I know about but was too old to play with. The truth, as usual, lays somewhere between the horrifying circuit board and some kid's toy, but I suspect it lays closer to the toy than anything else and I doubt the device was any more frightening than those message boards we used to have at work to advertise our loan rates.

Even allowing for the first person who saw this to panic and call the authorities. a person I'm sure sleeps poorly, the escalation of the event is shameful. I might have been concerned, too, but I think my response would have been closer to that of seeing a lizard in the back yard or a mouse scurry across the floor than anything else. When those things happen, I jump and am startled, but a moment later I calm down. There's the initial fear, but I think that has more to do with instinct than anything else and is out of my control. As soon as it passes, about one or two heartbeats, I'm my more usual calm self.

I might have looked more closely at the thing and recognized it for what it was. No, not an ad campaign, but a harmless bit of electrical gadgetry. From the pitctures I've seen, I haven't seen any evidence of anything bulky enough to contain any quantity of explosive big enough to do anything, but the city's response to the thing scares me more than the device itself.

Fine, Joe Citizen freaks out. That's to be expected. Not only are half the people eager to swallow ever-increasing helpings of fear, but half are below average in intelligence. What astounds me isn't Joe's reaction, but that of the Boston's finest. I'm certainly no expert, not like the members of Boston's vaunted bomb sqauad, but I can't imagine how anyone trained to deal with explosives could have taken more than a minute before shrugging his or her shoulders, laughing, and giving the "safe" sign. Sure, they don't know what it is at first, but aren't these people supposed to know more about bombs and bombing devices than, say, me?

So now the city's suing. That doesn't surpise me, but I think it's more to save face than anything else.

Healthy, athlete, expert, evil