I was thinking about Harry Chapin the other day. It was because Diane said something about Dayton, Ohio and it made me think about Harry’s Mr. Tanner song (Mr. Tanner was a clothes cleaner from Dayton who aspired to be a singer). Harry was quite a guy and I had the pleasure of seeing him give a concert a few years before he died. He had a strong spirit for life and worked tirelessly to improve the plight of others.

An interesting question came up as I thought about Dave Wannstedt quitting as head coach of the Miami Dolphins in the middle of the season and read the Page 2 article by Skip Bayless. When a team wins a Super Bowl, everyone is trying to hire the assistants, hoping to catch the magic. The question is “What makes a great coach?”. Is it a fiery dictator, like a Ditka or a Lombardi, or is it an architect of offenses or defenses, like a Walsh or a Belicheck?

We had an interesting occurrence over Halloween. We saw these striking orange-colored mushrooms growing out of the stump of a dead tree. They probably came out as a result of all of the rain we’d gotten in October. I took the picture of them and then read more about them on the Internet. The interesting thing is that they supposedly glow in the dark. The area under the gills is supposed to glow a faint green.

It was probably inevitable, but the Dallas Cowboys stadium initiative passed in Arlington last week. This corporate welfare will be paid by the taxpayer and the majority of the benefit will go to Jerry Jones and associates. To the credit of the opposition, they put up a good campaign against it and kept the voting close. The stadium will be paid for by an increase in the local sales tax and the other usual suspects (rental car and hotel taxes).

We’ve been watching some of those old Twilight Zone classics and have been amused by some of the ways in which space travel was envisioned back in the early 60′s. There seems to have been an assumption that we would be traveling around in flying saucers. This was likely brought on by the fascination with flying saucers around that time and in the 1950′s classics (e.g. “The Day the Earth Stood Still“).

Last week Dad sent an email question to make us think and to get away from the usual email arguments about politics and religion. The question was, “What invention in the last 500 years has changed the world more than any other?”. My reply was the following inventions have had the biggest impact: Internal Combustion Engine Silicon Chip Mass Generation and Transmission of Electricity Via Alternating Current Splitting of the atom The internal combustion engine has changed the way people travel, conduct warfare, transport goods, and farm (mechanized farming).

Extending on the theme of value from the web (Wikipedia post), I checked out the Project Gutenberg website, and found that they have a great quantity of classic books that you can download for free to your computer or Palm Pilot. Most people don’t like to read books from the computer and it’s difficult to “curl up to your computer” in bed. However, the new Palm Pilots with the higher resolution screens have changed that.

The Open Source Movement The open source movement has been a transforming phenomena in the area of computing. Mainly it’s about people working on free and open software in their spare time (and some full time and paid), with multiple people working on parts of the problem at the same time to solve big problems. It’s brought innovations such as entire free operating systems (Linux), great browsers (Mozilla FireFox), and the most popular web server (Apache).

Bad news today – the Supreme Court ruled that the police have a right to arrest after asking for one’s identity, even if there is no probable cause. “The Supreme Court has again given police greater power to stop and question suspects, ruling Monday that a Nevada cowboy could not refuse to give his name to officers who tried to question him along a roadside.” Further Info on CNN This was a real blow to privacy and civil rights advocates.

The Issue One of the problems we have in this country is that we have a lot of people that don’t have health insurance. There are lots of reasons for this. Sometimes the response is “well they can always go to the county hospital.” I think this is a bad response because visits to the county hospital are usually only for emergencies and don’t include checkups and preventative care (e.g. cancer screening, blood tests, etc).