Author: Mark Alexander

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“Get Away From Her, You BITCH!”

30 years since the world heard Sigourney Weaver utter those immortal words. How time flies.

While Aliens didn’t creep me out nearly as much as the original Alien, I still remember coming home after seeing it opening night and turning on all the lights in my apartment.

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So I Saw My First Trump 2016 Bumper Sticker

So I saw my first Trump 2016 bumper sticker yesterday (kind of odd considering this is Arizona after all). It was on a massive, jacked-up 4×4 truck (of course), and my first thought was, “Nice to let the entire world know you’re a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging asshole…and you have a tiny penis!”

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Quote of the Day

A thoughtful, reasoned response to the Republican cray-cray that seems to be spewing from a fire hose lately…

“At the risk of taking Gingrich’s nonsense seriously, just imagine for a moment what translating his proposal into action would mean. The government would round up 3.3 million American Muslims, then “test” them to see “if they believe in Sharia,” a notion about which Gingrich doesn’t have the remotest clue. Sharia is the Arabic word for “law”; there’s no guidebook of official Sharia, and Islamic scholars have a multitude of ideas about how Koranic ideas could or should be translated into civil rules. But even if there were, Gingrich is literally proposing to prosecute thought crimes, as well as jettisoning the First Amendment to throw people in jail for visiting certain web sites. And where is he going to “deport” the Americans whom he decides believe in Sharia to?

Frankly, I think we need to ask just how Newt Gingrich got radicalized, and what caused him to reject the values of the country that gave him so much. Was it some radical cleric who did this to him? Is there a church somewhere in Georgia we need to be monitoring?“ ~ Paul Waldman, The Washington Post

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

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Some days…

…I feel like so much hate-based gasoline has been poured over this country planet that all it’s going to take is one small match to set the entire thing blaze.

Maybe that is the reason we haven’t been contacted by—or have heard transmissions from—any alien civilizations. Perhaps they all reach the point in their development that humanity currently finds itself, achieving an unprecedented degree of scientific enlightenment and standing at the brink of leaving their planetary cradle, only to have the technology spawned by that enlightenment allow bronze-age prejudices and hatreds—long simmering under the surface—to finally spew forth in all their base ugliness, causing the entire civilization to self-immolate.

I know that in the vastness of the universe, that couldn’t have happened to every civilization, but I’m beginning to think it happens often enough that space-faring civilizations are very rare indeed and all their explorations reveal are the burnt-out husks of once-great societies littering the galaxies.

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It Is Like Riding a Bicycle!

Ben and I are hooked on home improvement shows. You name it, we’ve probably watched it at least once. We have dreams of someday buying the place we’re renting from our landlords—as ridiculous as that sounds—and we’ve lived here long enough that we’ve come up with some ideas about what we’d do to the place if we owned it and had a large, untapped bank account.

There don’t appear to be any glaring structural issues other than one long crack that runs through the concrete floor in the den. The bigger issue is the age of the house (built 1948) and all that date implies: knob and tube wiring, lead paint, asbestos-laden plaster, ancient plumbing lines, and asbestos insulation in the roof are the four that immediately come to mind—all of which would require a complete gutting-to-the-studs to (as Mike Holmes would say)—make it right.

Then there is the physical layout of the house. That is where the fun really starts. We’ve got so many ideas floating around that I knew I had to get them down in architectural form—even if nothing ever comes of it. (It’s important to dream, after all.)

So I fired up AutoCAD and began the task of drawing our little house as it is and how we’d like it to be. Yeah, I’m a little rusty at it, and the latest version of the program does some things quite differently from how I remember it working back in the day, but on the whole I haven’t forgotten nearly as much as I thought I had. Of course I haven’t gotten into the really technical stuff like dimensioning and cross-hatching and whatnot, and I need to wipe some cobwebs from my basic architectural construction knowledge, but I’m sure it will all come back. If not, I still have my AutoCAD “bible” from years ago that got me out of many a “How do I?” jam even then.

And y’know, it feels damn good to be doing something creative. I didn’t realize how much I missed that.

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One Year

As of today, we’ve been back in Phoenix exactly one year.

I wish I could say my employment situation has improved since leaving Denver, but as we all know, it hasn’t. I remain optimistic. It usually takes me two or three false starts each time I change cities to get situated somewhere that I like and that lasts for more than a few months, so we’re coming due here pretty quick.

Other than the employment thing, life has been good over this past year. I love the house we’re renting, I love the ease of getting around Phoenix, and though I learned over during the four years we lived in Colorado that I prefer being cold and dry to being hot and dry, I still love being back in warm weather.

And while photos like this…

Photo courtesy Erik Rubright.

…get me feeling a little nostalgic and make me realize how little of the state we actually saw during the time we lived there—all I have to do is think of the cost of living, driving in the snow, getting stuck while driving in the snow, working at DISH, and the appalling insanity of Denver drivers, and I’m cured of any nascent longing instantly.