One odd thing that comes up in this Hurricane Katrina disaster is how much some people
care for animals more than other people.
I see many cases of this in disasters. “Sure there are a bunch of people dying, but won’t someone
please think of the animals!” Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I think rescuing
people is much more important than rescuing animals.
We had family over yesterday for
Labor Day.
(Interesting, Wikipedia seems to offer audio versions
of some articles…in .ogg format, though…not very portable to finicky hardware players. Anyway, I grilled burgers again
without poisoning anyone. I cooked them longer this time
and they were less sloppy. I think we all like them safe and well-done. Me bruvah bought
Operation,
which is not as challenging as when I was a kid. You learn to intentionally mess up on the doctor card
if you have the higher-paying specialist card. We also played a strategy game, Web of Power. After
that, a long game of Scrabble, in which I ironically ended up challenging my own word, axel, when someone
later placed an s on it. I lost that challenge along with 3 others, losing the game for me. The
Scrabble dictionary
has a lot of words, lemme tell ya. Kyle cunningly saw the tips section of the Scrabble box lying around
and played qaid, which I challenged and lost. Qaid is one of the few “q without a u” words.
I had read in a book about Scrabble tournaments that bluffing is part of the game…laying down a fake word and hoping it won’t get challenged. However,
PyScrabble wouldn’t allow that. It also doesn’t do a double
word score on the center for some reason.
I noticed yesterday that the grass area near the Manzano Mesa center is now open. Hopefully they don’t
block it off to some exclusive Little League Soccer group or something like they did to the baseball
fields. We’ll have to do some Aerobie throwing out there.
We looked at pictures on the living room TV computer.
I figured out how to get the TV out mpeg playback working in Media Player Classic.
(I think it uses overlay or something.) Use the VMR9 rendering option in the View->Options->Output.
Ironically, that computer can’t handle DVDs without stuttering. I think Windows XP requires
more memory than it has to play them nicely. They played under Windows 98.