Dave Mancuso dot Com

[My brother Joe lives in Guam and travels all over that part of the world whenever he gets vacation. Right now he’s off to China, and he’s letting me post some of the travelogue notes he’s sending out. Pretty interesting stuff.]

Post 1, Bangkok:
“Made it to Bangkok fine and am waiting for my visa to PRC when I can leave Tuesday. Funny, we are used to hearing of the Philippines as a foreign/terrorist kind of place but the French steward and passengers around me on my AirFrance flight going to Paris were worse. They were nice until they figured out I was American, after that every 15 words I could make out a sneering “ammmmweweeecan”. Yeah, whatever. I wanted to ask him if he remembered who liberated Paris in 45, but figured a nap would be more productive.

Checked in last night to a hotel I hadn’t stayed at before and headed right out to look for visas… soon it was late and I TOTALLY forgot the hotel name…. There was a moment where I considered checking into another hotel just to sleep and figure it out later! I did find it later…

I can’t think of a place anywhere where the people are so friendly. They truly understand tourism here. All day has been one smile after another, just like it was last trip. I have to brace myself for China now…”

So when my tire blew out on route 283 last week, my one thought was how we’d just driven to the Smokies in North Carolina last weekend, all around town there, back to PA (over 1,500 miles round trip), and the tire waited until the next day after the trip to shred.

My second thought was how I was now late for the staff recognition dinner in ten minutes, but my wife came by ten minutes later (she’d planned to drive to dinner separately, but events now occurred otherwise) and we made it to the dinner just a few minutes late!

Take a look at the tire:

The damage isn’t easy to see in the picture, but the top edge is where most of the shredding (and the blowout) took place.

I’ll tell you though, my tire wasn’t half as shredded as Jeff and Lisa’s trailer tire:

Jeff and Lisa are my brother-in-law and sister, and were on their way up to their cabin to meet us Memorial Day weekend. Even though the picture’s smaller than my own tire’s pic, I think we can all agree that the damage was much greater. The rest of this tire was spread out across a mile of I-75 in Georgia, and I think Jeff and Lisa were pretty lucky that the trailer didn’t flip and drag them into an accident. Believe it or not, though, they were off an exit and back on the interstate a hour later with a new trailer tire.

The trailer fender was ripped off, though. I think Jeff had to reshape and reattach it before they returned to Florida.

It’s been tough to post the last two weeks, between the Memorial Day weekend roadtrip to the Smokies in North Carolina and the end of year stuff at work (school year, that is). But I actually got 8 hours of sleep last night, and despite the charge of an Atkins-heavy bias about my blog, I’d like to point out that I’m slowly sliding into ketosis and am down to 243 today (from 254 three weeks ago and a high of 260 earlier this year). I need to hit the Nordictrack now that I won’t have to take the kids to daycare this summer.

So at any rate, let’s see what tasty bits I can put on the blog, including shredded tire woes and some guest posts by brother Joe in China!

I posted a story a few days ago about the military extending service duty tours in Iraq. A few military (and ex-military) personnel have posted comments to the blog and said essentially that this is an up front expectation when you join up–no one should be surprised about this. That’s good to know. I had felt that our servicemen were being taken advantage of, but if it’s something that they know about as a possiblity from day one, then it’s a much different (and better) situation.

Of course, opinions by people like me (who aren’t in the theater of operations) wouldn’t really hold much weight compared to someone in the service.

I hope when we pull out that the whole country doesn’t collapse. I think we’re holding their utility infrastructure up by force of will right now until more contracting work is done.

This “new” product from Apple–what a sham!

They’ve obviously found some old 1991 Apple Personal Modem 1200s and decided to recycle them for this “new” product:

Of all the gall. Oh, wait–it’s not the same at all, actually:

Actually, that’s pretty cool… Yeah…54 MB wireless, you can network multiple Airport Expresses without wires, you can stream iTunes wirelessly from your laptop to your stereo, you can connect a USB printer and share it to your wireless clients, you can plug it into Ethernet networks too….

I MUST HAVE ONE.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going down to the local Apple store 70 miles away and waiting for Airport Express to come out in, um July. Darn you, Apple!

Check out John Robb’s post about keeping volunteers in the army after they’re due to go home (short summary–they change the rules to say “Nope–you have to stay indefinitely now, can’t go home.”). I’m not pointing this out as a commentary on the war in Iraq, but I am making the distinction that this “stop loss” policy comes dangerously close to conscription (the draft).

As Robert Heinlein said in 1961, “I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don’t think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can’t save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!”

This from an ultra patriot, radical conservative, military veteran who campaigned for Goldwater.

From one of my favorite new websites, Ace of Spades HQ, “news commentary” on Air America news.

I found a link in Dana Carpender’s LowCarbezine newsletter about a new food show on the Food Network called Low Carb & Lovin’ It. I set the TiVO to tape all the shows and I’m watching the first one right now. It rocks; it’s about low carb comfort foods.

By the way, you can see in the intro that this guy’s family lost a combined five hundred and sixty pounds (yes, 560 lbs.) on his low carb cooking.

I think this is a show I’m going to watch a lot.

Oh–hey Josh, thanks for the heads up on the Asian grocery in Lancaster (for the Chinese Five Spice Powder). not sure if I’m up to the eye of bat, though.(!)

From TheOneRing.net, May 25, 2004 news, people in line for the DVD talking to a New Line rep:

“We also talked about the EE DVD, and he told us to expect a January release, or late December, but that was unlikely. He added that they were looking at first releasing the EE in theatres, and that a ‘super-trilogy’ Tuesday was under consideration, but not a definite, while mentioning that last year’s EE releases were very lucrative for the studio.”

I had hoped to get the “EE” DVD for ROTK (Mike will ridicule me mercilessly for the overuse ot TLAs) by Thanksgiving, but oh, well. The possible theater showings were a cool surprise, though. You may have your chance yet, Brad. But at 3.5 hours, 3.5 hours, and at least 4 hours, we’re talking 12 hours of film including half hour breaks. Even I may not have the stamina for that.

My wife and I were talking on our cell phones today and we both happened to be tuned to NPR. I noticed that I heard her radio a split second after mine. She said hers was first though, and mine was later. Then I realized that the digital cell network was causing a delay between us. It happens all the time, but unless you notice a radio or something like I did, you’d never know it.

So the point is that on digital cell phones, a live conversation is an impossibility. I’m never talking live to my wife; I’m talking to a voice recording, a digital reproduction of her words a split second later. We never actually speak with each other directly.

A little weird if you think about it.