Nom de Plume

My mother, who is going to Iraq tomorrow, has been in training classes for the past week and a half. She’s been busy and so have I; thus, we’ve been playing phone tag. Serious phone tag. The latest? She was just at the shooting range, practicing with an AK47, a rifle, and a shotgun.

She’s in heaven. After all, this is my mother, the one who’s an NRA card-toting member of the Democratic Party. Okay, maybe she doesn’t have the actual card, but she’s there in spirit. The first time she came to visit me in “the wilds of Idaho,” my then-boyfriend wanted us to take his gun with us to Sun Valley in case we broke down in the middle of nowhere. I refused. She accepted. I refused again, on the basis that I didn’t want to be around a loaded gun. She insisted. “You’ll never know it’s there,” she assured me, popped it into her purse, and off we sped to the swishy Sun Valley Lodge. The gun nestled happily in her purse all weekend long, amid rumpled Kleenex and hand lotion.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve shot guns, including an AK47 and an Uzi. But I’m really bad at it and to be frank, they scare me. She, quite obviously, doesn’t suffer the same qualms. That’s probably a good thing. And as one of her fellow trainees said, “I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.”

Just in case you’re curious, here’s a dedicated blog.

The first picture is of animal prints in the snow. Which makes one wonder whether winter activities are also conducted in the buff.

Sounds cold.

It died a gruesome, grisly death, 23 to 8.

A Mercury News editorial sums it up quite nicely:

Just as lawmakers in Congress are pushing a bill that could increase competition in video and high-speed Internet services, they’re willing to allow phone and cable companies to subvert that competition.

Then again, as CNet says:

AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon spent $230.9 million on politicians from 1998 until the present, while Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent only a combined $71.2 million.

The really ironic thing is that most of these people are 60-year old men who have their secretaries and wives send their e-mails. As Information Week points out:

Despite the Congressional battle, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell cautions that Congress doesn’t always make sound decisions about technology. “They have a very shallow understanding [of network neutrality],” he says, adding that this shortfall might make them more pliable to experienced telecom lobbyists.

For the past month or so, I’ve been having problems with Vonage: dropped calls; fading in and out; weird echoes. The problems intensify whenever I’m connecting to a conference calling number. And for the past couple of weeks — ever since I listened to a podcast on net neutrality — I’ve been wondering if this is not unintentional on the part of ISPs.

And now I am vindicated. According to Russell Shaw:

Over the last couple of years, when I’ve wanted to take the temperature of the Vonage user community, I’ve often stopped at the Vonage Forum … I have been noticing a growing number of posts in which many Vonage users and Vonage Forum Members have been complaining about the quality of Vonage calls over Comcast broadband connections.

It’s interesting that there are relatively few similar complaints about the quality of these Vonage calls over other broadband provider networks. Occasionally you’ll read about Verizon or AT&T complaints, but rarely.

But something has happened. Two weeks ago, a Vonage Forum Member named rdstoll began a Vonage Forum thread called Comcast vs. Vonage. The last time I checked, this thread had 116 posts and nearly 7,000 page views. That’s an exceptionally high number.

Although you will see all manner of opinions on this thread, there seems to be a sentiment that – politely put – Comcast could really be doing a better job of carrying Vonage bits.

There’s not much of a leap from that belief to one, expressed by some Vonage Forum Members, that the connection quality problems they are having over their Comcast lines just might not be coincidental …

To make a little leap of my own, perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Comcast now offers its own VOIP service. Consider this: Vonage costs $25 a month while the Comcast service costs $40. How better to get Vonage business than by discrediting the company? And how better to discredit the company than to refuse processing its packets?

And there you have it. The need for net neutrality. It’s interesting to note that the only people who are against it are the telecom companies. The only way they can make money is to bundle their services — and naturally, they can’t bundle services if other people are offering them for less.

That’s what the garden is.

In case you’re wondering, the white thing in the pathway is my trash can covering the mole trap. I don’t know if it’s worked or not — the contraption is scary.

And below is Steve’s new garden gnome. He’s been wanting one for ages. I don’t know why. But, it makes him happy, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?

The folks over at the Lit Blog Co-op had nominated Atkinson’s Case Histories as a Read This! novel a few months ago. It’s strange, because I probably would have gotten around to it on my own; I loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum (though I found Human Croquet hard to get into and Emotionally Weird just plain incomprehensible). But there’s something about feeling you have to do something ; it just sucks your motivation away. And thus I checked this out library a total of three times before actually reading it.

The novel is about three different past crimes. In the first, the youngest daughter in a family disappears one night. In the second, a college-aged girl is killed while working as a summer intern in her father’s law office. The third is about the sister of a convicted axe murderer who is seeking her sibling’s daughter. The cases are hinged together by the private detective put on each of these cases years and years later; he has his own tragedies and past mystery. And the resolution of each of the cases is shocking in its own way.

It was an ambitious novel, and I have to be honest and say that I’m not really sure what I thought of it. Sometimes it dragged. The first bit about the sister disappearing was a chore to wade through, for instance. Other times it sprawled, with its jumping around from character to character. But I read this a few weeks ago, and ultimately think it’s one of those novels that you appreciate more in retrospect.

There is, of course, nothing quite so tiresome as someone explaining why she hasn’t been posting more regularly — so I won’t bother, except to say that it’s been a crazy week with no end in sight. But spring is really here! We spent Sunday working in the yard; I cleared off the deck, started fantasizing about heirloom vegetables again and planted a bunch of seeds hoping that this year I won’t kill my container garden. I call them pots; Steve calls them torture chambers. Mean, but true. In any case, he has his hands full;we have a mole. He’s dug several holes in the backyard, and when we stuck a hose down one of them, it ran for 45 minutes before leaking through the containing wall. So he’s a man with a mission: to kill the furry little bastard. It’s very entertaining. Actually, I think the mole’s just moved next door; I was talking to Nicki over the fence when she looked down and said with some surprise, “Oh, I think I have a mole.” Yep — huge pile o’ dirt at her feet. How can something so small create such a mess?