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UFO Tree from Jupiter

So, over the summer we went to an alien world. Jupiter, I think, is what the locals called it. It was a strange and wonderful place. Interesting food from vast watery planes, yummy to the palette. Very hot, with an interesting thing called a beach. We traveled through space and time to get there, along with the rest of my family. A good time was had by all.

What are those little hairs?

My Mother, forever the plant nut, always wants to bring back a smidgen of this, a clipping of that, a seed from here, there, everywhere. She’s always been determined to get something alien growing in her own landscape. So, we were talking about the seeds we found, dreaming about making them grow back home. We found some weird ones, that’s for sure.

Grew 8 inches in less than 2 months

Well, of the 3 types I brought back, I got one to grow. Well, actually 3. The alien seed had 3 parts, like a 3-sided acorn. I planted it in my mini green house back in August, and kept it warm and wet. After a month, it sprouted. After 2 months, it was practically touching the lights above it. Three strong stems with leaves that don’t look familiar.

So this morning, I put it in a new, huge pot, and put it upstairs in our south-facing window for some full time sun. I hope it continues to outdo any of my expectations. The other 2 seeds I had haven’t done anything yet, but I am not willing to give up on them, since some palm species can take 3-6 months to show signs of life.

If these guys keep growing like this, we might just have those tropical trees I wanted in a pot on our very hot patio. More to come as our Little Shop of Hor(ticulture) continues to feed upon human fl…sorry, you don’t need to know my macabre gardening secrets.

Nothing to see here, people. Move along, move along…

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Voyager 1

So there was news recently that an astronomer picked up a repeating laser pulse pattern from space, as part of his work with SETI. At first glance, it sounds insignificant. But when you step back from the news a minute and think about it, what if it’s more than something natural, more than a glitch. What if it does mean there is someone, something else is out there?

Anyone that knows me understands my position on this issue. Only the arrogance of man keeps us believing that we are alone amongst the billions of stars, not just in our own galaxy, but in the billions of other galaxies. Small minds and antiquated notions would have you believe that life started here, will end here, and then there will be nothing. I tend to follow the principle that if we are alone and unique in the universe, it would be “an awful waste of space,” to quote the movie Contact.

It comes down to faith in things unseen, not in dogma, but in simple logic. We are here. We are in the far suburbs of our own galaxy. There are countless stars like our own, billions of years older. I dare anyone to look up at the night sky and hold on to the simple-minded notion that we are so special in a universe so vast and wonderful.

Far from being a UFO nut, I think there is even more stupidity in the thought that we are so interesting that any civilization would make their way out to the galactic countryside to visit Uncle Clem & the kids on this sod farm we call Earth. While we only understand rudimentary things about space travel, one thing we know for sure. Light is a bitch. Good luck traveling faster. Even our fastest spacecraft, Voyager 1, is barely out of the neighborhood of our Sun, a mere 10 Billion miles from here.

It launched September 1977. 32 years of flying, and it’s still close by.

It’s a hard thing to fathom. The farthest any man-made object has traveled from Earth, and it’s hardly anywhere. It might get to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, long after the Earth is gone. That’s 26 trillion miles from here. Better pack a lunch.

So, what the bottom line?

If we end up finding out that there is indisputable evidence that the laser pulse is not natural, I hope that we can hold this up as a great moment in history, rather than devolve into the tripe and tribulation of arguing about whether they believe in God/Allah/Buddha/Shiva/Diety of the Month. Kinda not important, wouldn’t you think? Earthly notions foisted on some intelligence somewhere else trillions of miles away. Trust me, they don’t care. But if they have any sense at all, I hope that they look up a their sky and ponder how wonderful all of it is, and not just their own little corner of the universe.

Via io9.com

io9 – SETI Picks Up Regular Laser Pulse Emanating From Space – seti.

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Duncan...and a bag of chips!

Ok, this picture from a couple months ago says it all. Dogs might be stupid sometimes, but they sure are resourceful.

My old friend, Duncan the Wonder Dog, has been around for 16 years now, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Just as spry as when he was much younger. And just as clever…but you be the judge of that.

So, I was having a snack attack one afternoon in my little basement office, and I rolled up the empty victim bag–Utz Sour Cream and Onion–and tossed it into the trashcan. Had a brief thought that Duncan might get a notion to…nah, not Duncan. He’s usually good. So, out I go to dinner with my honey.

Later that nite, I come back down to let him out. I usually get greeted at the basement door, if he isn’t snoring. I call to him. All I hear is “pant-pant-pant.” Call him again to come go potty. More heavy panting. So I walk into the office, flip on the light, and here sits my Wonder Dog with his head stuck so deep inside the bag he can’t figure out how to get it out.

Now, by this time, I’m laffin’ my ass off proper. Luckily the camera was close by.

Click.

So, while I give him high marks for getting the bag unrolled and knowing to get to the bottom of the bag where there were some good bits left, he gets major fail points for not getting out of the bag once I called him. Hence, the embarrassing shots, and the pain in my side from crackin’ up big time.

Love my dog. He keeps me laughing still at his ripe old age.

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[quicktime]http://surferboi.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/mom_tiller1.mp4[/quicktime]

I was home the other weekend, helping my brother strip my Mom’s deck to restain it. It’s a big job, and we didn’t even finish in one day. Messy too, with a lot of crazy toxic goo to get that stain-that-was-surely-paint off the 20 year old deck. Never one to let grass grow under her feet, my Mom decides to break out the tiller and get her garden broken up so she could plant. “It’s been too wet!,” she told us, with the same disgust that I would have had as well if I had to wait so long to start my own garden.

So while we are slopping goo on the crusty old deck, my Mom heads to the shed and cranks up the tiller and to get her garden rolling. I turned to my brother and said, “You know, we take it for granted sometimes how great it is to have a self-sufficient Mom.” He couldn’t agree more.

My Mom is 70+ and she is as spry as people half her age. Growing up in farm country will do that, I guess. Hard work was no stranger to either side of my family, and I think it kept many of my kin young for years. My grandmother is 100 and showing few signs of leaving this world for greener pastures up on high. I think my brothers and I are so blessed to have a mother like her. She has done so much for herself, not only since my father died more than a decade ago, but even before then. Always curious, never backing down from a challenge, and using her faith as the strength to keep her going, she has done so much with so little. Tirelessly taking care of my grandmother, managing to keep her roots in the community, and always making time for family and friends. Not to mention the cooking. Geez! Fried fish & cornbread like you never had. And we had it all the time. Yumtastic!

So never let it be said that we don’t appreciate our Mom. On the contrary. She’s got so much awesome, she has plenty to share. I only hope that this Mother’s Day, everyone remembers that no matter what, all mothers are awesome, since they are the reason we live and breathe today.

Love u mom.

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44th President of the United States, Barack Obama

Ok people…it took me a couple months to speak, but this is the time. So settle in, this one will be a doozy.

What we have just witnessed tonight is nothing short of magical. And as a child of the south, I have a story to share.

We have just elected a black man to be the 44th President of the United States. Not in my lifetime did I ever expect this to happen, but I always had hope that it would. The way that this happened is the thing that gives me goose-bumps: both as a proud American, and as a black man.

As a native Virginian, born in 1961, I didn’t know that JFK had done the impossible at that time. I was too young. But I grew up in a time where the legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy lifted the country–I only recognized it by his dreams of the space program witnessed posthumously at the ripe young age of 6. Watching men trying to reach the moon on the 19 inch black & white in my parents’ den gave me hope that we could be something more than what we were at the time.

“At the time.”

I was too young to remember what my parents knew too well. Oppression. Rights diminished in the face of a yearning for a life unshackled by the burdens of ignorance and lifted by those ideals of a president who dared to aim high. Not many saw the gravity of the Apollo program (no pun intended), but something clicked in me. My aspirations to be an astronaut were ridiculed by people close to me, marking it as a “white thing.”

My parents said “press on.” Understand what it takes, and do your best.

So I studied. Attending the “white school” instead of the “black school” after the walls broke down for segregation. Computers and science were my thing, still getting the razzing that I was bound to hit a brick wall. What I learned served me well, and all that self-taught knowledge I earned helped me rise up from where I was, not that I didn’t love my little slice of heaven.

But run the clock forward. I never achieved my goal of flying in zero-g, but I did find a way to grab a bigger slice of the pie than I ever would have by thinking small. And that knowledge has brought me so many wonders in the world that so many of my family have yet to behold. And I have shared so much of that world and my view of it with my children.

If my life were to have ended there, I would die satisfied. Happy in the minor achievements of a country boy who dared to dream a bit beyond the pig-pen.

But my story became Obama’s story tonight.

We don’t share anything, but yet we share so much. We share a view that the world is not bound by our limits, but opened by our ideals. That we can see the best in the people around us, and hope for a world where our own children will have a better chance to succeed or fail not on the basis of their color, but by the ideals that make America great: hard work, tenacity, sacrifice. I’m not sure I have done the best job instilling these ideals into my kids; I guess time will tell. But I do know that each day they wake up for the next four years, they will do so with the aspirations and dreams of being something better than what they think, by working a bit harder to achieve, and trying harder when the world looks down on them.

Because there are no excuses now.

An African American with a funny name just beat the two biggest political machines in the country with class, dignity, and more than anything, intelligence and geekiness. It proves a lot. The legacy of this night is what we all do with this victory as Americans who yearn for change. Shall we sit and complain about what needs to be done, or will we roll up our sleeves and show the world that we value the victory we’ve just achieved, forging a more perfect union for all citizens who call this land “home.”?

It’s up to us now.

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iMac Circa 1988

Couldn’t resist this one, since the iMac has had a special place in my heart for so long. They were cheap and powerful, and I used them in my multimedia business for years. Heck we even bragged that our web site and content management system ran with months of uptime on a lowly Grape-Ape iMac.

The machine that saved Apple was a gimpy little thing by today’s computing standards, but it really had a big influence not only on the computer industry, but also on consumer product design for years to follow. Heck, even the George Foreman Grill riffed on the candy-colored plastic motif .

The look was so radical that it sent the competition back to the drawing boards. The iconic design of Jonathan Ive would prove to be just the shot in the arm that Apple needed. In the decade since then, Apple has gone from near bankruptcy to the market leader with $24 Billion in the bank.

Just goes to show…design counts.

[ via Tuaw ]

Lemon cucumber parade!

Ok…two garden posts in a row. Deal with it.

I have something yummy to share…it’s the Winner of the 1st Annual UFO Garden MVP, one of the most coveted prizes in ufo gardening During over 15 years of gardening, I have had problems with growing cucumbers in this area. They grow fine for 1-2 months, then they wilt from a pesky fungus carried by the cucumber beetle. I try not to do too much to kill off bugs…except these guys.

This little lemon cucumber from Gardens Alive! is an amazing little plant. It resists the fungus that usually kills the more common varieties, but this guy keeps on rolling. We get about 20 of these little guys a week, and if you pick them really early, not only do you get sweeter fruit, but the vines produce so many more of them.

Really dig this plant. Enjoy =|>

Well folks, it’s been a long time since I have graced the intertubes with my nutty missives, but as you can see, technology has to take a back seat to eating. And I love love love fresh veggies. We have a crazy good crop of all sorts of alien veggies, so we decided to name our little corner of the the planet “The UFO Garden.” And I would like to introduce you to a couple of recent additions, Gabby & Gort from Glopp (thanks to my honey-bunny). Somehow Gort’s Transdimensional GPS blew a flux capacitor and they crashed landed knee deep in my strawberry patch. And Gabby is none too pleased, I can tell ya, probably tapping her feet under the mudd. Well, if the fusion reactor leaks and causes my berries to grow up to the point of eating us in a twisted turn of fate, somebody come by and water, and be sure to enjoy what’s left of the goodies.

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First time in a long while I have posted anything on my blog, but I been busy So, I will be getting back to it, but in the meantime, I’m drinking a beer, hanging with the Haire’s, and I’ll be back soon!