This'll be book 6. It's called Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and CNN has the details. I guess I enjoyed the Harry Potter books, although Rowling has some difficulty with plotting and pacing. I'm more glad that the books are getting kids to read, although I did like the last Potter book the second time I read it (the first time was a year ago--I read all 900 pages on one day on my trip out to Seattle, so I did rush through it a bit).

We've mentioned government and politics here before, and I had an idea this weekend. Conservative, moderate, and liberal readers visit this site, all differing in position yet all very well reasoned, intelligent individuals.

So I was thinking: what if we redesigned a goverment from scratch? Just in theory? Built the thing up from plank one to the entire thing? Could we find something that we all could agree on?

I think it would be very interesting, to say the least. I'd like to start with some basic philosophical tenets and then build the government branches and services. I wonder how far we'd get.

If it gathers enough steam, I'll buy a domain name and host it as a subdomain to keep things separate. I'll also turn on the forums on this site so things can flow more freely.

Maybe in a year we'll have an interesting government scheme.

I'd like to start off with the beginnings of a philosophical base, as simple as we can make (and keep) it. Somewhat lifted from one of my favorite authors, Robert A. Heinlein, it goes like this:

1) All citizens have the right of any free act, unless that act hinders the freedom of another person. Government must support this without growing beyond what is absolutely necessary to enforce this tenet of freedom.

2) Government support for children should be paramount; that is to say, assistance should be ready for those who are not old enough to support themselves. Welfare, for instance, would be substantially provided as child care while able adults seek and gain employment.

The directors cut trailer can be seen here.

More news can be read here.

The official site is here.

It opened in Seattle in the beginning of June and will hit other theaters later this summer.

I can't wait.

I spent over $1,400 on my three vehicles in the past three weeks ($800 on the Forester, $160 on the Legacy, and $440 on the van), but they were all for things that needed to be done.

Except the emissions. What a racket. I had to have both the Legacy and the van inspected and this year is the first in my area for emissions inspection.

But get this--since both cars are older than 1996, they only get the gas cap check and "visual inspection" (my Legacy is 1990 and the Ford van is 1993). The gas cap check is at least more than a visual glance--they're supposed to put it in a machine that sucks on it and makes sure it doesn't leak. But the rest is just a looksee.

So I got a bill for $35 for each of these inspections. $35 for a "hey, looks good to me, here's the bill."

The real kicker is that the Legacy was exempt because it was driven less than 5,000 miles last year. So I think I paid $35 for the sticker on the windshield and nothing else. Literally.

Hey, I don't blame the auto places. They get their profit where they can, and they're just complying with state regulations. But given the above, something just seems wrong.

[This one's one of my favorites so far--the axle element just makes me laugh.--Dave]

[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 6, Tibet:
Seven Years in Tibet...At least it feels like it...

Got in last night from Everest. What a trip. The ride was a test of endurance as much as the trekking. The Southern roads are dirt trails for mules with not much thought to cars. Every major town on the way required a permit. We got into Everest Base Camp for three days and Trekked up Everest almost 6000M before we were blocked by a new white water river that formed in a few days by summer heat. We were able to cross two of them by stripping and wading through it, but the biggest was impassable. We were pretty well prepared, decked out in North Face gear and polarized sunglasses...I got altitude sickess first, but recovered first, the rest of us were sick until this morning. The views were beautiful, Everest looks as huge and high as any of us could have imagined. The ride there and back were snow capped mountains and gorges with little villages of very kind people. Lhasa is a pretty big town, so it was nice to see the real Tibet.

No showers, one heated room in the mess area via burning yak dung... No English, little Mandarin, only Tibetan. Of the few amatuers we saw, few made it as far as us. Many were so sick on arrival to camp they left without a climb. It was far worse than Peru last year. We slept in a monastery... imagine that.

Our Landcruiser broke down 7 times until we lost the axle yesterday morning. The driver wired it together with cable and wanted us to finish the drive with him through some of the the worst passages in the the Himalaya (sheer cliffs and hairpin pins). When we refused and hitched a ride with a Tibetan family, he tracked us down and went crazy yelling that we would not make it back alive and he was rallying friends to follow him in support. The drama lasted all day... the guy was a jerk from day one. We had to go straight to the goverment travel office when we got into town and had him "restrained." They gave us a generous refund and we had a nice hot dinner in Lhasa with the money. He pulled up as we left and when they looked at the wired axle they lost it on him. The two groups waiting to contract a ride were visibly upset. Poor guy, he won't be allowed to drive again. The drama only made the trip more intesting (in retrospect of course...).

Our crew was two college students from the US, a Canadian climber from China, our Tibetan guide, myself and the Tibetan driver. Marc and Chris left this morning for Lijang and Jeff and Carol are staying for a week more (she works here and is local). I am on the way to the Potala Palace and then I'm catching a plane back to Changdu to hit Chogqing in the morning for the Yangztee River cruise to Yichang. We are planning to meet in Ko Pi Pi, Thailand a a few weeks.

I seem to have found some pictures of the Surfing Buddhas on this site from the UK. Cool.

[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 5, Chengdu:

Chengdu part one, mission complete.

Went to a Sichuian Opera (fire breathing, circus type stuff intertwined with singing and music), Giant Panda Research and Breeding Center (held a baby Panda for a small donation), and the worlds largest Buddha (carved out of a mountainside 71M high). Pretty incredible stuff.

Half of the fun is making it around in public transport and trying to speak Mandarin with people. The sum total of my interpersonal interactions with the people so far add up to a strong personal impression that China is a country boiling over with possibilities. It seems the people can sense they on the verge of an economic explosion. It has one of my true marks of a great people, they don't talk about their culture and how progress is destroying it. They adapt. Like the Balinese, Thai, and others their culture is evident and it doesn't require lip service. Coming from Guam this is so refreshing.

I am in Lllasa, Tibet now and waiting approval for Everest Base Camp.  The scenery is very similar to Bolivia and the Peru Altiplano, not much of a surprise as the Chinese established the Quechu/Inca Empire as a tribute colony.

More facts:

The Chinese discovered the moons of Jupiter 1,000 years before Galilleo. They used them to determine Longitude for navigation and mapmaking. They also established colonies around the world by 1430 including North Carolina, New York, California, and comprised the bulk of the Inca Ruling party. They transplanted many crops into the Americas which made large scale habitation possible. They had a liberty port and trading post set up in Saipan, pre-1400's. And the punchline: Montezuma, the great Aztec Emperor was a Chinese Admiral. (All claims here recently proven via DNA studies and extensive factual evidence).

On to the "Rooftop of the World." We leave via 4wd tomorrow moring early. From base camp we will hike to advanced Base Camp and make the call then. That is 15 -17 hours already so we will probably turn back then.

They're gone now, but we got ot see some of the painted cows around Hershey, Harrisburg, and Carlisle two weeks ago. We really only had time to see the Hershey cows, but of course it always involves a trip to Chocolate World. Here's what Chocolate World had to offer:

[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 4, China:
"A few hundred years ago a master sculptor was commissioned to take a small army of monks and carve out a couple hundred statues of his contemporaries in a single relief along a large wall. The statues are life-sized and so real in their depiction of emotions they spooked authorities and were mothballed and forgotten.

They are now at the Bamboo temple outside Kunming, so there I went for a Wave Zone photo opportunity yesterday. The entire background was blue waves with whitecaps and in midground and front were 70 some life size Buddas surfing on top of giant crabs, clams, and other animals. Their faces were vivid with fear, excitement, caution, exhiliration, meditiation....etc...

I did however, see no evidence of compression molding technology on any of the devices used to skim and surf. I did clearly see though that surfing and skimming were considered of the highest spiritual importance.

There were no pictures allowed so I tried my best to get in that WZ photo on the low. My vision was to launch a masterful ad campaign and ride it all the way to Hainan Dao. The monks were onto me though, as if they could read my mind. They anticipated every step and there was no escape. So, with visons of Richard Geres "Red Corner" in my head, I slid out the front and headed to Dian Chi.

On the Chengdu... Laters
Joe"

From Ebert and Roeper last night:

Roeper: Big Thumbs up from me.

Ebert: Big thumbs up from me too. I was amazed by how good Spider-Man 2 was. It tells a real story, and it's not just a special effects extravaganza...Spider-Man 2 is so good that it ranks with the original Superman from 1978, and it's better than any of the Batmans, way better...this may be the best superhero movie I've ever seen.

Roeper: High praise, but I'm with you on it.

Spider-Man's June 30 opening night looks like a real winner, folks (although I frankly thought that the first two Batman movies were much better than Ebert apparently does)

(Yes, a bad pun on "What's In A Name?")

Check out this Time Magazine story on blogs to see how far they've come.

Curiously, they didn't mention me once.

Not sure why it was down for a day--maybe it was caught in the Akamai troubles with the web. Sure, that's it. Right.

Too late to post anything tonight, though. More tomorrow!

Oh--hey, I got the Salling Clicker for my Bluetooth phone (thanks, Brad, for reminding me about it). It's a geek's dream, and a rare indulgence for me. It's so cool. I'll tell more tomorrow.

Ten Super Foods You Should Never Eat.

I'm not sure I agree with them on all of these, but Bugles always did seem like alien packing foam pieces with salt added.

I never liked #10 by the way, in case any of you ask. And for those in the office, doesn't #6 bring back olfactory memories of an ex-intern's constant lunch?

When conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan says that "We've Lost Iraq," it's pretty eye-opening. What a shame. I really hope that the region will stabilize somehow after June 30, but how? Afganistan certainly didn't.

Drew: I want to see that movie, (speaks a name I don't catch).

Alyssa: Drew, that's not the name of the movie. It's Spirit, not Britney Spirits (in a tone only a girl who's six going on sixteen can use).

Drew: I SAID Spirits. That's what it is!

Alyssa: Spirit!

Drew: Spirits!

Alyssa: Whatever.

My son wants to see Britney Spirits, Stallion of the Cimarron?

Being a parent means making exaggerated coughing sounds to cover up song words on the radio that you don't want your five and six year old to hear just yet. You find yourself covering up words in songs you never even thought about until you have kids in the car with you, like Bohemian Rhapsody's "Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger now he's dead." That took an extended fake coughing fit, involving wild gesticulations. Very entertaining, just take my word for it.

Um, good song though. The rest rocked!

Apparently AOL hosts it, but it's a good site--try out the President Match site that I mentioned a few months ago.

(Sad--I was one of AOL's first subscribers when they had less than 100,000 members. It really was the best service around by far. I saw things go slowly sour when 5.0 came out in '95 or '96, but really, I don't have anything against AOL. I think people don't like it because it's fashionable to dislike the company--it got too big to be the underdog anymore.)

At any rate, in the interests of full disclosure regarding President Match results, I must reveal that I, a registered Republican, came up with 65% for Kerry, 63% for Kucinich, and 25% for President Bush. Please don't hate me, conservative friends--I plead the case of being a bleeding-heart moderate...

[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 3, China:

"Facts: There are more school children in China than the population of the entire US. Yunnan Province is almost the population of the US. There is exactly one roll of toilet paper in the Peoples Republic of China, and though I haven't sighted it yet some could argue that it is the greatest sought after tourist attraction. Almost half of the population of China are cultural minorities (other than Han Chinese).

I arrived to a few days ago and its been a magic carpet ride. The city of Kunming is at 1780M altitude and a very cool 16 C, (awesome after Bangkok's 37C inferno). Immigration was very formal, SARS exam and all... No forex's open so I hit a cash machine on the way out the door and got loads of Yuan, no problem.

Many people speak decent Chinglish around the bigger hotels and hostels. The city is immaculately clean. I walked for hours yesterday and found exactly two pieces of trash on the street (which were gone by the time I got my camera to take a picture...). That was about the number of white people I saw too. ;-)

The food is awesome of course--half of it I can't figure out what is in it, but it tastes great. There is a beer that you mix from a plant you can pick, lots of mountain food and tasty mixes of grains rolled in pastes with exotic oils that they barbeque on grills. Oh yeah, they are crazy about the barbecued goat cheese, too.

People are extremely pleasant. Smiles everywhere, and the few children that are here are awestruck by anglo-looking people. I met two women at a restaurant my first night who work for a shipping company that has a few American clients. We've been hanging out and will be going to a lake tomorrow and Saturday where a town was flooded in an earthquake and is 30 meters below. Shirley is a diver, so we will dive it while Whitney relaxes.

Somewhere here is the house of Zheng He, the eunuch admiral that headed the Dongle expedition of 1421 when the Chinese developed latitude reckoning and mapped the entire world 300 years before the Europeans. His maps are what Magellan, Cook, and Columbus used to sail the "unknown." A rudder from a flagship was recently found in Nanjing and it was 40M high. Almost bigger than the biggest ship in the western hemisphere. The Chinese imperial fleet that sailed that year were 1000 ships of teak, double planked, with cannons on the bow, capable of crushing the combined naval forces of the world at the time. So whatever happened to China then? The answer will soon be revealed after meditation at the largest Buddha in the world at Leshan in Sichuan Sunday, and Tibet on Tuesday."

...can be found at this website. Cool. Thanks, Metafilter.

[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 2, Thailand:
"Wrapping up Thaiworld part one. Saw a 5 ton solid gold Budda, the ancient city of Ahuttaya, every temple wthin 2 hours of Bangkok, and scoured the streets studying the art of knock off retailing. Rolex fakes are getting better by the year and fake t-shirts, luggage, purses, shoes, ... you name it... Amazing the level of technology. Thailand, the only country never colonized in Asia. hmmmm.

Getting my Visa to PRC was a song and dance. I hope I don't hit a big shim sham actually getting in tonight. I'll be hitting Dali right away, a village in the mountains at the base of the Himalayas in Southern China. The to Tibet for a few days (its 5000M so that will be plenty...I'm not crazy about AMS these days). Then to Chengdu (named after Dave Cheng), Leshan (largest budda in the world...you can camp out a family of five on a toenail), Chonqing (Yangzee river cruise), Wuhan and Beijing (Great Wall, Forbidden City etc...). I'll stop at the Shaolin temple on the way and see if I can snatch the pebbles from the hand of the master. :-)

If all goes well I'll be back in Thailand in 4 weeks. Then it will be up north to Chang Mai, then Laos, Burma and Cambodia. Plan B is to go to Vietnam, then Singapore and back to Manila. depending on how much time third world traveling has taken by then. Without fail, I will come back after two months in the third world and come home to Guam and it will be blacked out and without water..."

[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:

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:

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.