James Brown, The Godfather Of Soul as well as the Hardest Working Man In Show Business, turned in that soul this morning. He was 73.

Man, they won’t be making them like him anymore.

What would a yearly review be without reviewing the home improvements done throughout the year? After all, homeownership is much like a hobby, isn’t it?

This year got off to a great start when I threaded cable conduits into the attic and crawlspace of the house. This allow me, the biggest geek on the planet, to easily run more copper throughout the house whenever I feel the need. It wasn’t easy work but it makes any future work that much easier.

Since I apparently can’t get enough of hanging out in the attic (and crawlspace), I worked with Kelly for a few hours to add insulation to our attic. It was a fantastic return for three hours work and 120 bucks! Now our AC can keep our upstairs cool, to pretty much any temperature we set. The noise from outside is greatly dampened, too.

We did some yard things, too. We finally dug up the dead trees lining our front walk and replaced them with crepe myrtles, (which may or may not be dead, too). We moved the apple tree from the front yard to the back. We also created a flowerbed on the south side of the house.

We put in a vegetable garden behind our garage, filled with tomato plants and others. Through neglect or poor soil the tomato plants yielded few fruits. The garden did yield an opossum, which had shacked up under our house. Amazingly, the opossum lived to see another day. We still have occasional critters pry open our outside garbage can. Ah, living on the edge of wilderness!

We had a carpenter replace the rotting wood on our porch, the victim of a poor porch design. The original builder neglected to put treated wood on the porch, or even to prime the wood he used. Things look much better now, though there is still some work to be done.

The highlight of our home improvements, though, is the new playset in the backyard. We bought it at BJs and had it delivered and built profesionally. It soon became the hub of activity for the neighborhood kids, as well as instantly boosting the athleticism of our kids. It’s been one of the best investments we’ve made this year: one that will pay off for years to come.

Two thousand six was the year I took stock of my not-so-flowing locks and dispensed with them. I made the move right before Thanksgiving, surprising most of my relatives and friends with a totally bald head.

“So, what happened to your hair, Mark?” my neighbors would call. “You lose a bet?”

I chuckled along with everyone else. I looked so different that people who have known me for years would basically trip over me before recognizing me. Still, I decided the bald-with-goatee look wasn’t for me. Now the goatee is gone and the hair is staying short, but not shaved.

I think its a good look. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but my hair isn’t getting any thicker nowadays. Time will tell.

Joseph Barbera, the fantastic creator of the Jetsons and the Flintstones, among other cartoons, has died.

I found this headline on Fark particularly amusing:
Joseph Barbera dies. Funeral procession to pass same three buildings every two seconds

Wade helpfully (?) provided a map of where he’s lived, so I felt I should to the same. Take a Google Maps tour with me to all the places I’ve called home.

It took me more than 20 minutes to put this together, since it’s an amazing number of places. Those in Florida (aside from the Oak Avenue address that was my grandmother’s when I was born), Massachusetts, and California were during my Navy days. Some of those places were home for as little as two months. My ship was my “moving home” for three years, taking me from San Diego all over the world. Far too many places to mention there so I’ll leave it at that.

Perhaps I’ll put together a map of the places I’ve been, which would be a far longer list. Wow.
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Ask any Internet user and they’ll probably tell you the same thing: the Internet wouldn’t be the same without Google. While that may be true in some respect (and possibly most respects), it occured to me today that there is one drawback to Google’s efficiency: fewer websurfers are getting lost on the Internets.

Thanks to Google’s uber-efficient PageRank, search results are often returned with laser-like focus. While that’s great for finding information you want, it cuts down on information you found that you didn’t think you wanted. It seems I am uncovering fewer “happy accidents” when searching the web now. The instances where I unexpectedly find something new and interesting has been greatly reduced by the efficiency of Google.

Yes there’s an enormous amount of information on the web, and that data demands to be organized. Still, by relying on what the rest of the world considers important (a la PageRank) one may miss the new, unique ideas just gaining acceptance. PageRank almost guarantees your search results will be anything but cutting-edge. It values staleness. It gives results that are majority-rules. A majority-rules search engine can’t help but serve up the haystack instead of the needle.

I miss the days of unpredictable results. I miss the irrelevant results I used to get. Before Google tamed the Web, a search engine was a Russian-roulette ride through a young forest of Internet sites. Now its straight to the point, cutting out some potential magic. With all the information now on the Internet, having a human guide (or at the least a little randomness thrown in) is more valuable than ever.

You may or may not be aware that AT&T (actually what was known as SBC Communications before SBC adopted the AT&T name) is trying to merge with Bellsouth. This merger was announced early this year and has been held up by a deadlocked FCC. The merger would put tie together the majority of former Baby Bells into a reconstituted AT&T, reversing the decades of progress that the breakup of AT&T achieved.

Thanks to AT&T’s 1984 breakup, Americans now have more phone choices than ever before. The cost of telephone calls has plummeted. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Companies actually compete for your business (to some extent, anyway). Few of any of these would have happened – or happened as quickly – if AT&T was still guarding their mostly taxpayer-funded universe. If SBC … oops, I mean AT&T succeeds in swallowing Bellsouth it will put a huge swath of American telecommunications back under near-monopoly control, leaving only Qwest and Verizon out of this new, improved Ma Bell.

The reason for the delay is the FCC. Commissioners are deadlocked, 2 to 2, on the merger. FCC Commissioner (and Tar Heel) Kevin J. Martin break the impasse/a> by bringing back commissioner Robert McDowell, who recused himself due to earlier lobbying against similar big mergers. McDowell used to be general counsel for a trade group representing small phone companies.

In spite of Martin’s desire to clear this off the FCC’s decks, I think major changes will be needed for this thing to pass. Even though I believe McDowell’s vote may torpedo the merger, I think the conflict-of-interest laws should be respected and his participation should be barred. If the merger can’t convince the two commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, to vote yes then the two companies will just have to buckle down and make a more convincing case or call it off.

I was amused to read today’s story (ok, actually last week’s story but the News and Observer either didn’t see it until now or is too cheap to pay for Washington Post material when its fresh) that male chimpanzees prefer older females to younger ones. Most versions of this wire story start off saying how different chimps are from human males, since human males clearly prefer younger women (the USA Today version is the exception). Read the version that ran in the N & O:

Chimpanzees may be our closest biological relatives, but male chimps appear to differ from male humans in one striking way — they clearly prefer older females, according to new research.

And the USA Today version has this to say:

Human males, of course, generally dig younger women, as the Internet-clicking hordes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan fans demonstrate.

Um, what kind of idiot human males are they talking to? Only idiots prefer younger women.

It’s no contest. Britney Spears? Lindsay Lohan? The “Tart Twins?” You’ve gotta be kidding me. Anyone “clicking” on these two bimbos are either the same age as the girls or younger, and hopefully one day they’ll grow up and know better.

I’ve ranted before about the concentration-camp look models sport today and how horrible I think it is. The Huffington Post commented today about the recent death of Yet Another Anoxexic Model. Sure its sad when people die, but it’s sad to think that the starving look is anywhere near attractive. Beauty doesn’t always mean thin and young, though.

As Prince sang in Kiss, “women, not girls rule my world.” That’s the case with me, too. I like women with beauty, curves, and brains. If they’ve got wisdom and the sexiest thing of all, self-confidence, then they’re absolutely irresistable. Youth? Not so much.

You don’t have to be young to be beautiful. Look at Priscilla Presley, Joan Collins, Sharon Stone, Julianne Moore, or Susan Sarandon. Decades after becoming a phenomenon, Christie Brinkley still looks fantastic. These women have that spark that only comes with age. They age like fine wine.

I doubt the young girls that are being paraded before us will be around long from now. If all you’ve got is youth, ladies, you’re fighting a losing battle.

Those chimps know what they’re doing.

It’s been said that the fastest way to becoming a millionaire is to invest a billion in airline stocks. With that in mind I view the news that US Airways wants to merge with Delta. Even though they’re supposed to be the “hometown” airline with a hub in Charlotte, I hate flying US Airways. They’re one of the old, endangered, nickel-and-dime-you airlines. If they disappeared I wouldn’t miss ’em. I’ve merely tolerated them since they took over Piedmont Airlines and sucked all the friendliness out of it.

I have no grudges against Delta though, aside from the fact that I don’t like flying through Atlanta to get to anywhere else. Delta’s Atlanta connections simply aren’t convenient to me, and I rarely have reason to fly to Atlanta.

The upside to a merger is that Southwest might gain some gates at New York’s LaGuardia, which would be a welcome occurance – since I fly there frequently. The other upside is that there’ll be one less dinosaur airline to deal with.