Return of Brown Bear

Katherine has developed Owen's love of 'Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?' by Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle. Owen preferentially chose B4 over all books for months when he was this age, demanding that we read it over and over again.

Last night Katherine wiggled out of my lap and pulled B4 off the shelf. She loves it just as much as her big brother, although her favorite part so far is poking Red Bird in the eye.

Hello, world

LIST

10 REM Katherine's first word

100 SAY "Hello"

110 INPUT Reply$

120 IF Reply$ <> "Hello" THEN GOTO 110

130 SMILE

140 IF RANDOM(1) < .333 THEN WAVE

150 GOTO 100

For those of you not feeling your old-school BASIC, Katherine's first word is "hello" (really). She says it to you and is very happy when you reply in kind, sometimes so much so that she'll wave.

Fireflies

One of the joys of living in The Holler is fireflies in the summer. They've arrived. Actually, I saw the first ones a couple of weeks ago, but they're really out in force now.

BP refining safety citations

FlowingData shows OSHA citations issued to BP refining over June 2007-Feb 2010. Not only did BP get many more citations per barrel processed, they were overwhelmingly of a more serious nature than the citations issued to other US refiners. Maybe there is something fundamental I don't understand about OSHA citations, but these numbers make BP refining look very bad, maybe even evil. The numbers are particularly bad as they all come after BP's 2005 Texas City explosion, when BP supposedly got religion about safety and operations.

Thank you, William

William got me this T-shirt:

which has caused awesomeness over the last two days.

1. At Trader Joe's yesterday, a woman almost did a spit take when she saw it. I was delighted, as no one has ever done a spit take on account of my hilarious clothing. And as she had just gotten a steaming hot sample of coffee, an almost spit take was probably best for all concerned.

(There may be something about TJ for great Ts. About a month ago there, I complemented a guy on his 100% tremendous echo base T-shirt.)

2. Yesterday, Owen asked me about the scene on the shirt. I described it as, "This is a Conestoga wagon. These are oxen pulling the wagon. And these ninjas are making them stop and go another way."

He asked for clarification on oxen - "They are like big, strong cows", if you were wondering - but after that it was all about the ninjas. We still try to avoid assassins and the like in conversations with Owen, so conflating a white lie with outlandish historical falsehood, I characterized them as "naughty, mischievous people" who interfered with pioneers on the frontier. For whatever reason, this captivated his imagination, and when I further mentioned that there was a Conestoga wagon at the B&O Railroad Museum, well... now ninjas and Conestoga wagons were cemented together in his mind, bound by his favorite place on earth. Further adding to the excitement, he specifically associated the wagons and the ninjas with the turning of the Thacher Perkins, a one-time event from March. We talked about the wagon and the ninjas multiple times yesterday and today. At one point, there was a minute-plus speech about "going to the museum, to open the manhole, to go down in the cave [the space under the roundtable], to see the wagon". Further discussion clarified a few points:

a. How could a Conestoga wagon fit in the "cave" under the turntable? (As you can infer from the video, it's less than six feet from the top of the turntable to the earthen floor below.) Owen thought that the picture of the wagon on my t-shirt was essentially life-sized.

b. When Owen says "ninja", it sounds an awful lot like "engine", of which there are many at the B&O. So perhaps he thought the ninjas were engines, and that's why they were at the museum? Or maybe engines are mischievous (for which I blame Thomas; there's a potentially massively tedious post coming on this), like ninjas? Anyway, I think there was some intriguing cross-talk between phonology and semantics going on in Owen's head.

The excitement reached a fever pitch this afternoon, when I told Owen that we could go to the museum to see the wagon. He immediately said that he also wanted to see the engines/ninjas stopping the wagon. I explained that there would be no ninjas at the museum, but I think he thought I was just trying to set him up for a surprise. Arriving at the museum, we went straight to the wagon, and Owen asked to see the ninjas. I reminded him that there were none at the museum, wary of the letdown after 24+ hours of buildup for this moment. He paused, then went to the rest of the museum without a word.