Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

tick tock

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In response to a comment on my post “By the Numbers:”

“We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists–in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates–to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight.”

[Board Statement, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists]

damn! that was close

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I was coming across the bridge from the nature preserve, headed for home on my trusty bike. I had to pass the top of the US101 offramp; I was passing a stop sign. One car stopped, and was going to turn left after I went by. As I passed his front bumper, another car came flying up to the stop sign on his right. The driver was looking to the left, into the low sun. Having his head firmly embedded up his ass, the cretin didn’t see me right in front of him until it was almost too late.

He damn near ran the stop sign, and I came about that close to being roadkill.

On an overpass, no one can hear you scream.

fetchez la vache

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I’m working on my first book of fiction. I’ve written poetry for many years, and some short fiction. They say that poets can’t write novels. So I’m throwing myself against the fortifications of that insidious abstraction, in what has become a very long seige. An historic guerilla occupation of hostile territory.

Fetchez la vache means get the cow. A little something for my fellow Monty Python fans.

by the numbers

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More than 1,800 Iraqis killed in August – Yahoo! News:

“At least 81 American service members also died in Iraq during August — an increase of two over the previous month but well below the year’s monthly high of 126 in May. American deaths surpassed the 80 mark during only two months of 2006.”

Can anyone help me understand the relevance of these numbers? Does the fact that 45 fewer Americans were killed amount to good news of some kind?

I just don’t get monthly tallies at all. I don’t even want to google how many Iraqis have died in total. Not right now. Later, I will. Sometimes I do.

But counting dead bodies by the month seems analogous to worrying about your neighbor’s dog peeing on your side of the property line, when the town has swept down the valley in an avalanche of mud.

how do they do that?

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Recently, my trusty Mozilla Firefox web browser has been loading kind of slow, acting a little glitchy. So I uninstalled it – completely, I thought – and used my not as trusty Internets Exploder browser to navigate to mozilla.com for a new one. It’s working fine, so far.

Wanna know something weird though? All my toolbar add-ons, saved stuff, bookmarks, etc., are still there. I wouldn’t have cared otherwise, because that’s all backed up on MyYahoo! anyhoo.

But where was it all stored, if I uninstalled the software? How do they do that?

Now I realize that doing the uninstall through the control panel does not remove the software from the hard drive. It uninstalls it, unregisters it – removes it from the Registry, so that it’s just sitting there, disassociated. Estranged, in a sense. It’s a download that is no longer installed. But I thought that if you uninstalled it, add-ons like Yahoo Toolbar and cookies were wiped. I guess not.

Confusing.

a pressure front moves through

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Wow, that was a hell of a day yesterday wasn’t it? I’m still decompressing. I mean the resignation of Gonzales, who has defiled our national community for too long, and the guilty plea of Vick, who has defiled what it means to be a man.

I am letting my resentment go. I reached up and handed it to the last full lunar eclipse of my lifetime, and Luna was big enough to handle it. Also, I went swimming this afternoon. That always helps, as does riding my bike. It’s them endorphins.

They said on the TV that the next such eclipse will be 2058, three years before my 100th birthday. While I’m hopeful that recent improvements in my health and lifestyle will have beneficial effects, I’m skeptical of 51 more years. So it goes.

I’m reminded of a little line from the writer Anne Lamott:

“A hundred years from now? All new people.”

That’s OK isn’t it? You and I won’t give a shit, we’ll be doing something else.

And speaking of the moon and green cheese, here’s a pale green Luna Moth, at the recent Butterflies Alive exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in SB.

Peace, sleep well, and don’t worry about that 100 years thing. We have tonight, if not tomorrow.