What you might find in a dyslexic nephrologist's office.

The Band With Nearly As Many Names As Members

We saw an excellent show in Pittsburgh's Club Cafe last night, billed as "An Evening With The Minus 5, The Baseball Project and The Steve Wynn IV," which was really just a bit of crafty misdirection inasmuch as the same four people comprised all three bands, making it just about impossible to tell which group was playing which song.

(Readers who require a more rigid structure may wish to imagine that The Minus 5 opened, playing an energetic and muscular set during which Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Minus 5 were followed by The Baseball Project, featuring Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn singing about baseball legends like Fernando Valenzuela, Satchel Paige and Harvey Haddix while their guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Steve Wynn IV showed its versatility in the second set, with the bandleader supplementing fiery licks and crunching chords on his Fender Jazzmaster with howling harmonica work, while Buck took turns playing rhythm guitar on a blue and white Rickenbacker twelve-string as McCaughey took over the role of the Airline pilot's with the steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat.)


Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey.

But no matter which band was playing, they were killing, their chops were great, and that they were having fun was obvious, as was the crowd in the Club Cafe. They played nearly forty songs during their three-plus hours on the stage, including a version of Neil Young's "Revolution Blues," a track on the band's sold-only-at-gigs Butcher Covered disc.


Steve Wynn.

Between the first and second sets, the band members signed autographs, chatted with fans, posed for pictures and sold a little merchandise. (Peter Buck was an especially convincing salesperson - if the whole rock'n'roll thing doen't work out for him, he might have a future on QVC.)

And have I mentioned that Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat?


Linda Pitmon.

Now, if only they could pick one band name and stick with it.

The Fine Art Of The Apology.

Joanne Brazel-Wheatcroft, mentioned in an earlier post for describing Joe Wilson, the candidate for Superior Court Judge in Washington, as a "BIGOT" and an exemplar of "what assholes the republicans are," has finally apologized for erroneously directing her invective at Mr. Wilson. She had, of course, meant to call the Joe Wilson who is the Republican member of Congress those names.

It turns out to have been an easy mistake to make, for, as Ms. Brazel-Wheatcroft notes in her apology, "I saw two old men on facebook and assumed they were the same person."

Joe Wilson, the candidate, is 49 years old. Joe Wilson, the congressman, is 62.

Ms. Brazel-Wheatcroft's shoe size is 6, and her favourite flavour is Manolo Blahnik.

Tom Hank's volleyball from that movie has been getting hate mail, too.

byoolin's law: Statistically speaking, your neighbour is just fuckin' stupid.


The other night, the President of the United States said that "what we have also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have toward their own government.... unyielding ideological camps... an opportunity to score short-term political points... [and] confusion has reigned."

Tell that to Joe Wilson. He's got people logging onto his Facebook page to tear him a new one, calling him a bigot, blaming him for "the mess we are in," comparing him - unflatteringly - to Rush Limbaugh and the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, or accusing him of having "no class what so ever." The occasional poster thanks him for his "courage" or "for speaking the truth and for [his] public and military service."

But - and this is a big but - the odds are pretty good that those people meant to excoriate (or praise) Joe Wilson (R - SC), the Congressman who yelled, "You lie!" during the President's speech to Congress on Wednesday, and not the lawyer from Snohomish County, Washington who is running for Superior Court Judge.

Now poor Joe Wilson is left with a Facebook page that's been hijacked by people like Joanne Brazel-Wheatcroft, who call him "BIGOT!" and say that he's "proved... what assholes the republicans are." When her error is pointed out to her by a conservative poster, she attacks his "grammer" and notes that "I did manage to find "the" Joe Wilson after I realized my mistake. I am not a republican, so I can admit I made a mistake, but I have corrected it!"

Since Ms. Brazel-Wheatcroft has not, as of this writing, apologized to the candidate Wilson, one might reasonably infer that correcting her mistake means that she's since redirected her sentiments to the congressman Wilson.


Click on the image or here to launch a larger version in another window.

Let's hear it for the electorate!

If, Then, Else. Or not.

For a couple of weeks now, The Kid She Who Will Put Us In A Home has been crossing her fingers every time she tried to use her cell phone. The phone's been on its last legs for a while, a victim of its own success. She Who Will Put Us In A Home uses it like FOX 'News' uses the phrase "Death Panels." The paint is gone from half a dozen letters on QWERTY keypad and from two or three buttons on the phone's face, the slider is showing signs of metal fatigue like you'd see on the wings of a 747 after a barrel roll and its battery holds a charge about as well as a very large man with very buttery fingers holds a very tiny screw.

The phone finally died yesterday evening.

Anticipating this, I'd sent She Who Will Put Us In A Home an email the other day listing a few of the better-rated phones available under our carrier's (Rhymes With Bint) plan and told her she could pick one and I'd order it.

I logged on to my carrier's website to place the order. When I got to the checkout page, there wasn't an option to change the shipping address. She Who Will Put Us In A Home is in college now (he said, beaming with pride) and it only makes perfect sense to ship it to where she is, rather than have Rhymes With Bint ship it here and have me ship it there. (Have I mentioned that her phone no longer works?)

I clicked on the button to talk to a live customer service person. Jessica immediately sprang to life in a pop-up window. The pertinent portions of our conversation are transcribed below (Rhymes With Bint helpfully includes an "email a transcript" button with its live chats).

JESSICA: Thank you for visiting Rhymes With Bint. What questions can I answer for you today?

ME: I am ordering a phone to replace the one my daughter is using. I would like to have it shipped directly to her at college but I do not seem to have that option. Am I able to ship to an address other than my home?

JESSICA: You will have the option 'shipping at different address' on the Final Checkout page. Do you see 'Shipping at different address' option on your current page?

ME: No, that's not an option.

[JESSICA asks me whether or not I can see a number of other things on the page, all of which I can. Then she asks me what the 'total charges' are and which phone I ordered.]

JESSICA: To confirm your eligibility for an upgrade, may I please have your billing ZIP code and the telephone number of the device you would like to upgrade? If you would like to check your upgrade eligibility status in the future, you can visit www.Rhymes With Bint.com/upgrades.

ME: I already know I'm eligible... zip is XXXXX. Number being upgraded is xxx-xxx-xxxx. My login page tells me that that number is eligible for upgrade.

JESSICA: You are eligible to receive a $25 instant rebate with a one-year contract extension and a $75 instant rebate with a two-year contract extension. When you upgrade your device online today, we will waive the $18 upgrade fee as well as the shipping and handling charges.

ME: Yes, I know that. And that's all in the billing details. But my problem is that I want to ship the phone to my daughter at college. How do I change the shipping address? *That* is the question.

JESSICA: As you don't find the option 'shipping at different address' on your Final checkout page, you cannot get it shipped at your desired address.

JESSICA: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

"Anything else"?

In retrospect, I think I may have missed an opportunity to ask them if they could also not do some other thing they already don't do, if only to have them tell me again about something I already know.

The Short, Happy Life of Greener The Tobacco Hornworm

I was standing on the sidewalk in front of my townhouse one Friday afternoon when The Neighbour Kid suddenly asked, "What's that?"

She was pointing at a caterpillar that was as big as the finger she was pointing with. It was bright green, striped, and had a quarter-inch-long curved red hook at one end. It stood motionless on a stalk of one of my cherry tomato plants.

I told her that I didn't know what it was and went inside to get my camera. I grabbed a little plastic storage tub at the same time. I wasn't going to let the caterpillar eat my tomatoes, but it was a beast too fascinating to squash, so I decided to make it my guest for a while. The Neighbour Kid said she might like to take it to school on Monday, if I could figure out what it was.

It was a tobacco hornworm - Manduca sexta, more formally, and Greener, somewhat less so.





Greener and his cousins, the tomato hornworms, eat things like tobacco and tomato plants. They've evolved ways of neutralizing the toxins in tobacco plants - like nicotine - while still being able to enjoy that cool menthol taste.

They're voracious eaters - on Sunday afternoon I watched Greener chew up a section of leaf the size of a quarter in about two minutes - that devour your plants and grow quickly before turning into Carolina Sphinx moths. I was looking forward to seeing it.

A few hours later, I knew that wasn't going to happen. At about 7:30 I noticed a single white nodule, no larger than a grain of rice, on Greener's back. It was a braconid wasp larva.

Braconidae are a natural control for hornworms: adult wasps lay their eggs in the hornworm between molts, and the wasp larvae grow inside the hornworm for a couple of weeks; all the while the hornworm goes about his usual business - which is to say, eating my tomatoes. Then, at the end of the two weeks, the larvae emerge through the hornworm's skin.

In the time it took me to look up that information online - about twenty minutes - Greener went from having one larva on his back to having eighteen.





Within half an hour, he had more than fifty larvae on him, each one slowly rotating at its unattached end as it spun a coccoon.





By Monday morning, Greener's rear end was covered in coccoons. By Monday evening, The Neighbour Kid was not so interested in taking Greener to school.

Once the larvae emerged and spun their coccoons, not much happened that anyone could see. The coccoons got darker as the pupae developed. Greener eventually stopped eating and a week after the first larva popped through the skin, Greener was dead and the little plastic tub was filled with several dozen braconid wasps. They're tiny - only about an eighth of an inch long - and look like blackflies to the naked eye. Under magnification, though, they look every bit like a wasp.









The wasps themselves live for about two weeks. Each female will lay eggs in as many as 200 hornworms during that time. Greener's friends are in deep doo-doo.