"Til Gabriel Blows His Horn"

"The Eyes of Texas"



Texas 41, USC 38.

Wow.

I couldn't stop pacing throughout the fourth quarter, even though I knew Vince Young would pull it out. Simply amazing. Passing, 267 yards. Just another day at the office. Rushing, 200 yards. Jaw-dropping.

They said Mack Brown couldn't win the big one, you can't get any bigger than this.

And I finally won my annual Las Vegas bet on Texas winning the National Championship. Woohoo, $35!

It's nice to start the New Year with good stuff like this. A nice change from the way the last year ended. A good omen, perhaps.

"Here I Am, Rock You Like a Hurricane"

The Scorpions, "Rock You Like a Hurricane"


It's 11:50 pm. It's nice and cool outside (mid 70's) but a just a little breezy.

We spent the morning cleaning up the house, preparing water reservoirs (bathtubs, plastic tubs, etc.) and making sure all the supplies were pre-positioned. I made a trip to the one convenience store in the area that was open, and bought some necessities (a case each of Corona and Coke). Amazingly, they even still had gas to sell.

After that, the only thing to do was wait, so we took a swim in the neighbor's pool, and came back to wait. The wind started around noon, the rain about 4:15 this afternoon. By dinner time it started getting dark, and we actually had a bit of sun to make a pretty sunset. After that, it's just wait and watch and listen, watching the banana tree in the back yard and the pine trees in the front yard. Fortunately, the wind direction is such that no pine trees should fall into the house, but we did move the cars to other people's driveways so my neighbor's trees wouldn't fall across the driveway.

We hear that a block in Galveston has caught fire due to power lines. I saw a transformer blow while I was in the back yard, with the familiar pop and flash. Someone is going to come home to a warm house and thawed food. We've got the air conditioning down pretty low so that if the power here does go out, it'll take that much longer to warm up.

The wind has picked up enough to blow the trees precariously and make some noise. Some small branches have fallen so far, but nothing major anywhere that I can see. We've had no more rain than a typical summer shower, and in any event I'm well outside the storm surge effects.

In retrospect, I'm glad we decided not to leave. It was the right decision based on what we knew at the time (which was that it had moved up the coast and was going to hit Beaumont to the east of us, not Freeport to the west), though others who left earlier could say they did the same since at the time the storm was going to come straight up Galveston Bay. But over 2.5 million people were "displaced" by the storm - they all seemed to be on the Houston freeways within the past couple of days. Fortunately all of the stalled cars were fixed or fueled during the night and nobody was left on the roads. I bet it'll be more of the same when people want to come home.

Something else we'll need to closely watch... the garbage situation. Trash pickup was supposed to be on Thursday, and we had 1-1/2 full bins. The city suspended normal operations on Thursday so we're stuck with all that garbage plus only half a bin's worth to last us the whole week.

Back after watching a movie.... it's 2:50 a.m. The wind is still going pretty good, still no damage other than some small branches down. But we still have power (for now).

"Lovely Rita, Metermaid"

The Beatles, "Lovely Rita"


Well, at this point it doesn't look like The Big One, but Katrina has sure put the scare into Houston as far as Hurricane Rita is concerned.

Early in the week it looked like Rita was going to hit the Texas coast south of Houston, far enough away that we wouldn't see too much. Then the landfall point started to move up the coast towards Galveston. Not good. On Tuesday it was going to hit Freeport, about 30 miles south on the coast. That's the worst possible place for Houstonians, since that would put the storm surge right up Galveston Bay and maximize flooding in the area.

I spent 2 hours in Home Depot waiting for plywood only to hear that they weren't getting any more in that night and to come back at 6 a.m. Wednesday when they'd get a truckload. Chris went grocery shopping for supplies in case we lost power for an extended period of time - canned goods, dry stuff, boxed stuff, but they were all out of water. On Wednesday I got to the store at 6:15 and waited, and waited, and waited. I broke for lunch around noon and traffic on I-45 going north from Galveston was a parking lot. I saw a flotilla of Galveston ISD school buses. To be honest, I have no idea whether government types in the Houston area saw what happened in New Orleans from Katrina and started the evacuation 3 days early, or whether it was in their plans already, but I thought to myself "that's what they should have been doing in New Orleans". At 1:30 they told us that trucks with plywood were having trouble getting into the city and moving around, and they "should" get a shipment in at 6 pm. No thanks, I wasted half the day already. I went with Plan B, which was 2x4's and a stack of cedar fence pickets (plus 4 cases of drinking water). If nothing else, I can use the pickets to repair my fence next week. I was lucky that my neighbor had 4 extra sheets of plywood, and combined with some scraps I had left over from my chili cookoff team's old booth, we were able to cover all the windows on the bottom floor.

Cell phone service has been spotty the last couple days as the circuits are overloaded.

With the new predictions coming in, the weather guys crunched the numbers and while Rita was a category 5, they expected it to downgrade to a 4. With my house's distance from the water and from landfall, we'd "only" experience a 3 here, with winds around 100 mph or so. I've done that a couple times before (Alicia in 1983, for one) and so that was my cutoff point for whether to stay or not. Flood projections said with a Freeport landfall, we'd get about a 20 foot surge, which is a hell of a lot of flooding, but my subdivision is supposed to be able to stay dry even with a 25 foot surge. So as of Wednesday night, we were going to stay and ride it out.

Meanwhile, the local governments (having jumped through all the right hoops as far as FEMA and the federal government response requires) announced mandatory evacuations for three zones close to the coast. Zone A is right along the coast, B is several miles inland, and C is further than that. I'm in the C region. Even though they ordered a "mandatory" evacuation, many people chose not to go. But way too many people did, including people who were in no danger of flooding. So many, in fact, that the evacuation routes got clogged with at least a million people trying to leave (the biggest evacuation in US history), leading to 100-mile bumper to bumper traffic jams on highways, especially to the north and west of Houston. Average speed in those jams is 2-3 miles per hour. How about 8 hours to get from one side of the city to the other (45 miles)? How about 24 hours to get to San Antonio (200 miles) or Dallas (250 miles)? Compound that with record heat (100 degrees on Wednesday, 98 on Thursday) and thousands of cars started to overheat or run out of gas. People were forced to turn around and come back home - a journey of 11 hours one way and 15 minutes on the way back, as people's gas supplies ran low. There are no open gas stations anywhere, they've all closed and left. They finally got some tanker trucks to bring gas to the stalled cars on Thursday afternoon, but if you watch the news, you still see (at 1:30 a.m.) bumper to bumper traffic getting out of town. People aren't going to make it to where they wanted, and so the Red Cross is setting up emergency shelters along the way in whatever church or warehouse is available. They didn't turn the southbound lanes into northbound ones until Thursday afternoon, but you still have to go 100 miles to get to that point. There's a traffic camera showing 15 lanes of northbound traffic with nobody moving. This is going to be the biggest failure (probably) after it's all over and being analyzed. I think that people were shocked by Katrina and everyone wanted to get out, whether they needed to or not. It took my parents 12 hours to get from their home in west Houston to Austin, a 150 mile trip that normally takes about 2.5 hours.

Thursday morning we woke up to find that the track had shifted north and instead of Freeport, Rita was supposed to come right up Galveston Bay. I'm just a couple miles from there, so that would mean that we'd get the full eye-wall winds of 150 mph. Time to bug out! I finished boarding up what I could outside and started to pack what I'd need and what I wanted to save. Important papers, tax returns, insurance info, photo albums, other things of sentimental value, and enough CDs to last 12-24 hours in the car. I started to plot a route to Victoria, a city southwest of Houston, via back roads only (hoping that nobody else would think of that too). By 10 a.m., though, the new track had gone even further north and east and was going to hit near the Texas/Louisana border. Those poor New Orleanians who evacuated to Houston - close to half the city came through here, and thousands are still here as either temporary or new permanent residents. Just a few weeks after their disaster, they're having to leave again. But now, the storm is going to hit east of us, which is bad for the residents of Beaumont and Port Arthur but good for us, since we'd be on the "clean" side of the hurricane with slower winds (from the north instead of from the south, as on the "dirty" side) and less rain. Weatherman predictions said we might not hit even 100 mph winds, with 8-10 foot storm surge. So based on that, and not wanting to get stuck in traffic while the storm hits, we've decided to hunker down once again.

I took a drive around the neighborhood this afternoon, now that so many people are gone. The Gulf Freeway (I-45) is nearly deserted, with a couple of stragglers here and there going north or south. Every place of business is closed, though I did find two gas stations still working. It was eerie seeing everything so deserted - I half expected to see tumbleweeds blowing down the main roads. NASA, where I work, is closed. (Ironically, NASA facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi were damaged by Katrina, and the launch center in Florida got hit bad last year by two hurricanes. Expect further hurricanes to hit Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, and southern California soon, as someone has it in for NASA centers! At NASA here, Mission Control handed over the International Space Station temporarily to their Russian counterparts so they could shut down MCC-Houston.

It's very quiet here now. I don't even hear any birds out.

Houston's last major hurricane was in 1983, when Alicia came to town. We didn't consider evacuating or boarding up (as far as I remember) The eye came right over Galveston Bay and went just west of downtown (it passed over the Galleria, if you know where that is). But that was a generation ago, and only us old-timers remember it. Everyone else just sees Katrina and is scared.

They expect the winds and rain to start up here in the early afternoon, with hurricane force winds and rain from around midnight Friday to noon Saturday. Power should go out sometime during the night. We're boarded and taped as best as we can be. We've got our rideout supplies with three tanks of propane if we need to cook on the grill for a while. The latest tracks show the storm still hitting the Beaumont area, which is good news for us. Hopefully we don't have to spend too much time without power, as they're still expecting temperatures in the 90's once the storm passes. As long as my trees fall away from the house, I'll be OK (and with north winds, they shouldn't hit). However, I did recently wish for a small storm that would let my insurance company pay for a new roof. I was talking about just the shingles, I really don't want a whole new roof.

Keep your fingers crossed that Rita doesn't take a jog to the west back closer to us. Damage report to come later, some time after I get my power restored.

"...I'm floating in a most peculiar way..."

David Bowie, "Space Oddity"

Congratulations to astronaut Mike "Spanky" Fincke, who launched tonight in a Soyuz for a 6-month journey to the International Space Station.

Mike is a member of the "Sardines" astronaut class of 1996. This is his first flight - a nearly 8 year wait. I hold a special affinity for the Sardines, as they were the first class that came through after I started work in Training. I taught every member of the class, all 44 of them, about the Environmental Control and Life Support Systems on board the space shuttle, and taught most of them about the shuttle's mechanical systems like the payload bay doors and landing gear. And I've taught every astronaut in every class since then at least one lesson somewhere.

But Mike getting hired was a rude awakening for me. He was one of two astronauts hired in that class, for the first time, who were younger than me (Stephanie Wilson is the other). At the time it was disheartening for me and my attempts to apply to be an astronaut - the ones getting chosen were always still older than me so in theory I could explain my not getting chosen on my age. But with him and Stephanie, I couldn't even do that anymore. Maybe, despite my self-delusions to the contrary, I really was being rejected due to my qualifications (or lack thereof), and not my age.

It's tough finding out that your lifelong dream not only won't come true, but can't.

"I'm a joker, I'm a (black) smoker, I'm a midnight toker"

Steve Miller Band, "The Joker"


Sometimes the famous people who come to JSC get to come here because they're famous. That is, they get special treatment because they're celebrities (Tom Cruise, Aerosmith) or they're heads of state (George HW Bush, Queen Elizabeth) or something like that. Every once in a while, though, someone comes through who happens to be a celebrity but deserves to be there. Like James Cameron, for example.

Yes, he directed Titanic, Aliens, Terminator, and The Abyss, but he also organized some deep water expeditions to the ocean's floor, including an IMAX films of the real Titanic and a TV movie on the Bismarck. Last summer he went out with several crews in four submersibles, and made several dives himself. He invited not the oceanographic institutes (like Woods Hole and Scripps) but astrobiologists and the like from NASA. And he outfitted one of the subs with a 3-D IMAX camera to look at deep sea hydrothermal vents (aka "black smokers").

Why NASA geeks? Well, what's an astrobiologist to do when there's no biology to actually study in the astro? Take him to the next closest thing. Let an astronaut experience what it's like to explore a new world.

Cameron was at NASA this afternoon to show a special edition of the not-yet-released movie, Extreme Life, kind of as a thank you to NASA for helping him out. We saw footage that will not be in the final cut, stuff he put in to give us a little more of an idea how things might work if you use a deep-sea mission as an analog to a deep-space mission. Here's how it was described in today's daily "JSC Today" email:

• Xtreme Life: An overview of the Scientific and Filmmaking expeditions to the Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vents.

  Center personnel are invited to a technical presentation by Oscar-winning film director James Cameron, who will be giving an overview of the scientific, technological, and exploration goals on his recent 3D IMAX filming expeditions to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean floors. Cameron, his crew, and a group of scientists spent two months at sea using multiple human-piloted submersibles to study and film the "black smoker" hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise. Researchers at JSC participated in the expeditions through the NASA Oceanographic Analog Missions Activity (NOAMA), using the similarities between and space deep sea exploration to provide opportunities for advancing mission operations and planning. Experiments and observations were made in areas such as astrobiology, sample collection/processing/ curation, data flow, traverse/dive planning, communications, remote science, science operations, mission operations, human/robotic interaction and telerobotics, human factors, and crew training. Mr. Cameron will show some of the HD footage from the expedition as he describes the technologies and exploration strategies employed to achieve the goals of the expedition and to unravel the mysteries of one of the most fascinating phenomena on Earth.
  

The footage he showed was unfreakinbelievable. We sat there and watched it with our collective jaws on the floor. Several times he asked if anyone knew what that fish was because none of the marine biologists on board had ever seen one either, or how that particular mushroom-shaped structure composed of sediment could have formed. It was as alien an environment as you could imagine - and he's imagined one or two in his time as a director. More alien, actually, since you know it's real.

In the Q&A that followed, he joked that the only reason he made Titanic was so that he could dive the site. And that gave him the luxury (and clout) to do things like this.

You can have Tom Cruise flying the shuttle simulator with girls drooling all over him because he's good looking. I'll take someone who can tell a good story and make my mouth fall open in wonder.

"It Isn't Easy Being Green"

Kermit D. Frog

It's St. Patrick's Day. Even a Jew of Eastern European descent will wear a green shirt today. Fortunately I didn't have to go too far out of my way to do it, though, there are only so many goyish holidays I'll support.

So Ray thinks I don't write enough here, while Linda finally stopped asking whether I have had sex with my girlfriend. What's up with that family?

Anyway, March and April (and early May) timeframe is one of the few times it's nice to be in Houston. While it's cold and rainy in the rest of the country, it's gorgeous here, in the mid-70's. My azaleas are blooming, all the trees are green, and you can eat lunch outside. I sleep with my windows open.

Of course, come Memorial Day it'll be hotter than hell and humid as the ocean, but for now it's great.

Those damn kids!

When did I turn into an old man?

I went for a haircut today. As if the bald spot at the back of my head (which fortunately I can't see without the aid of two mirrors) and the thinning hairline in front aren't enough, the stylist actually used the clippers to trim the hair growing along the edge of my ears. What the fuck?

"there once dog named astro who liked to lick peoples feet"

I have no idea what that means, but someone was looking for this phrase the other day and found me instead.

The Hit Parade

Some of the latest searches that found my page:

ex has nude pictures on the internet can I get custody of child?

Battlestar Galactica nude

blog geek "Christmas decorations"

jewish cheesecake "buenos aires"

rocket scientist tax

And of course, people still looking for nude pictures of Rena Sofer.

Battlestar Galactica (version 2)

OK, back in 1978 I was 12 years old and a huge fan of the original Battlestar Galactica. I built the models (and blew them up with firecrackers), collected all the trading cards, bought the soundtrack album, saw the 2-hour pilot in the theater (even though I already saw it on TV), and pretended to be Starbuck to my friend Mark Bernard's Apollo.

(We won't discuss Galactica 1980.)

Next month, the Sci-Fi Network is remaking the show into a miniseries. Which in itself sounds pretty good - imagine what CG technology of today could do. But no, they're doing a total reboot of the show. Starbuck is a woman. The Cylons are humanoid and can pass as people. The characters, relationships, and whole tone of the series are different. I'm already biased against it. Richard Hatch, the original Apollo, isn't too keen on it either, as he has been working on a revival/continuation of the original.

Why take a series that has such a following, and remake it so radically different? In a preview on Sci-Fi, the new show creators justified it by saying that today's audiences would demand it that way. Well why not just create a new series?

I mean, how can this compete with the 25-year old memories of a 12-year old? I'm going to watch it but I won't be able to separate it from the original.