Maynard G. Muskievote be damned

(After some re-reading, particularly of the bottom portion of this post - from the bullet points on - and all of the previous post, I've come to the realization that it's probably best not to try to write after taking Tylenol PM, or the generic equivalent.)

Recently, there was a letter to the editor in my local paper imploring people to drive on highways no faster than 55 miles per hour in order to conserve fuel.

In terms of simple physics (if such a thing exists) and simple economics, there is no arguement. It takes less fuel to move a vehicle one mile at 55 miles per hour than it does to move that same vehicle one mile at 60, 65, 70, or more, miles per hour. If one is using less fuel per mile travelled, one will travel more miles using the fuel in one tank of gas, one will less frequently need to refill said tank, and will over any course of time, spend less money buying fuel. Also, this just in - the sun rises in the east, the ocean is moist, Friday will follow Thursday during the third week of next April, and 2+2=4. You get the picture. We know all of that. There's no questioning that. And yet, when I read the letter, my immediate reaction was not, "She's right," or, "Good point," or anything like that. My immediate thought was, "If I tried that, I'd get killed."

My daily commute home from work includes more than 25 miles on Interstate highways. (I take a different route in the morning to avoid the highways and their traffic at that time.) For pretty much all of my driving life, I would go the speed of the prevailing flow of traffic, which tends to be about 5 - 10 mph over the posted limit. I considered that to be the safest way to go, and figured my chances of getting a speeding ticket would be pretty minimal if my speed didn't stand out among the other vehicles. And in fact, I have not had a speeding ticket in more than 10 years, and that was a case where there really wasn't any other traffic. It was very late on a Sunday night in a rural part of West Virginia. Not a lot of folks around.

It's kind of funny, really. It was coming home from a road trip - my sister, her 2 kids and I drove from Wilmington, DE to around Memphis, TN to visit my brother who was doing his post-bootcamp Navy school in Millington, TN. I drove most of the way there (seriously, it was like a 20-hour drive, and I drove the first 19 hours), and it was a long weekend where sleep was not the top priority. I then drove the whole way home without stopping other than for gas, snacks and bathroom. Nearing pitch-black midnight on a near-empty stretch of rural West Virginia highway, I have to confess that I was not at my sharpest mentally. I recall thinking it odd that the headlights in my rearview mirror did not seem to be either advancing or receding, tho they had been at that same distance behind me for quite a while. It did not occur to me that doing so would be an accurate way for someone to determine the speed at which I was travelling. It further did not occur to me to concern myself with the speed at which I was travelling. I did wonder why he put his highbeams on behind me for what I could only assume was no reason. And what's with the colored flashi..... aw, crap. But, I digress.

After reading the letter, I reconsidered my driving M.O., and determined that it would be a better course of action to drive at the speed limit on the highways - using my cruise control to maintain that speed, and further conserve fuel, when the weather and traffic permit - which they typically do this time of year, and at the time I drive home. I've done this for about a week.

For those of you who are not fans of "The Simpsons," first of all, what the hell is wrong with you? That show has produced some of the best comedy writing, and specifically some of the best satire, in the whole history of American television. I realized that doing so is, to quote Dennis Miller, "like being the valedictorian of summer school," but it must also be realized that those responsible for "The Simpsons" are not responsible for the other content of their genre. Secondly, for those of you who are not familiar, one of the characters on the show is Mr. Burns. He is the 104-year-old multibillionaire owner of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. In one episode, an oil field is found underneath the grounds of the local elementary school. Mr. Burns plans to get access to the oil for himself, stating that he could not bear to see such a valuable resource be left in the hands of "Betsy Bleedingheart and Maynard G. Muskievote." Mr. Burns favors the unbridled consumption of energy-producing resources, particularly when said consumption produces profit for Mr. Burns. As he is 104 years old, there is much humor around his being hilariously decrepit. In another episode, he joins a bowling league team. In one scene, he sends his ball down the lane so slowly that each of the 4 memebers of the other team bowls a strike (with the pins of course having to be reset between each one) before his ball reaches the end of the lane, falling into the gutter before it hits any pins. It's funnier in animation than in text.

This past week, with my cruise control set on 60, and briefly on 70, I have felt like Mr. Burns' bowling ball, making my way along in the right-hand lane, while SUV after pickup after sports car after 18-wheeler zips by me. I'm on I-94 for 9.1 miles (according to Mapquest). One day I counted, just in that stretch, 28 vehicles passing me. It's not that only those types of vehicles are on the road. There are sedans, coupes and more-efficient vehicles. But they seem to be the minority. I see a LOT of SUV's, pickups, sports cars and big rigs. The majority of the vehicles I see, or at least the ones I notice whipping by me, are less-efficient vehicles to begin with, and are driving at inefficient speeds. Screw you, Maynard. Here, Mr. Burns, take more of my money. Add it to the pile that's already too big to count.

Now, I realize that this may come off a little haughty seeing as how I earlier admitted to, until recently, driving at less-efficient, higher speeds on the highways myself. I have a couple of responses to that:

• First, my car gets better gas mileage than a lot of the other vehicles to begin with. I'm not "wasting vehicle," as I see a lot of people doing - driving a pickup with an empty bed, an SUV with no passengers and no (visible) cargo, or a sporty convertible that, despite the driver's hope and wish, does not have any real effect on his penis size.
• Second, wasting gas involves more than just highway speed. Getting up to speed slowly from a stop; decelerating coming up to a red light or stop sign rather than jamming on your brakes 2 feet from where you want to stop; avoiding congested roads - these are things I've done for years, and things I see a lot of people not doing, which save gas.
• Third, the whole point of my post is that behavior is modifiable. At least, it is in theory. There's the whole "recognize that there are other ways to behave than what I already do / think and evalulate / conscioiusly choose to engage in behaviors that are different than things I have done in the past" thing that waaaaaaaaaaay too many Americans seem incapable of. Too many people seem too willing to shell out increasing amounts of money for their tank of gas without giving any real consideration to taking actions that would alleviate the situation. On the other hand, I did all those things inside the quotes in the bullet.

I wonder how high gas prices will have to go before a noticeable number of people start taking real action. There was a time in my life when I thought that line of demarcation was about $2/gallon. We're nearing the point where that figure is doubled, and signs of change are few and far between. The Friday before Memorial Day, I saw on the news that whoever puts out such studies put out this year's study, and all the doomsayers on the news were jumping all over it. For the first time since 2002, said the study-putter-outers, the number of Americans travelling 50 or more miles from home for Memorial Day would be dropping. Then they put up the graphic that showed that the projected drop was all of 0.9%. Is this trip really necessary, indeed.

I got nothin'

I sat in front of the computer for about an hour this morning. Nothing.

Well, I typed. Several words, in fact. About one-fourth of them constituted the equivalent of the letter C. The next fourth, an R. These were followed by a P and an A, though not necessarily in that order.

I actually came up with a pretty good start to a post yesterday at work. I typed it up in a Word document (I keep the doc on my desktop so I don't lose blog ideas that come to me at work), emailed it to my non-work address so I could access it from home. What I didn't take into account was that the word program I have on my home computer is not compatible with the program we use at work, and I sent it as an attachment rather than embedded in the email, so I couldn't access it. I didn't go to work today, so I haven't been able to re-send it yet. That one'll have to wait.

For whatever reason, the word Adidas was introduced into my consciousness last night on my drive home from work. It reminded of the time about 10 years ago that my brother's then-girlfriend bought her nephew an Adidas t-shirt for some occasion or other where gift giving is a non-optional social convention. He informed her that he wouldn't... couldn't... wear said shirt to school or about town (well, technically, about nondescript, cookie-cutter suburb, but who's splitting those hairs?), because everyone had been wearing Adidas - the logo on shirts and such, I don't believe this had anything to do with anyone's shoes - the previous year, and some other shoe company's logo was then-currently "in." I tried this morning to turn that into a full post about what I see as the ridiculousness of following trends in fashion. But really, what else needs to be said? I find it ridiculous. That's kind of the end of the story. I thought I could throw in a bit about how, when I was about the age that her nephew was at the time of the gift-giving, there were some kids in my neighborhood who really, truly believed that Adidas is an acronym for All Day I Dream About Sex. The company is actually named for its founder, Adolf (nickname: ADI) DASsler. But that train of thought loses its interestingness before the end of this paragraph.

The All Day I Dream... thing did put me in mind of something I've been kicking around my head about urban legends, and a tie-in with religiosity in this country. I mean, both are cases of people believing fantastical claims on the basis of completely unreliable "evidence." And that will be a post here some day. It'll be titled, "Turn Me On, Dead Man." But not today. By the time I got to that point, I just didn't have it in me. My thoughts are all over the place (as if you couldn't tell). And so here I am, rambling to you about all the internal rambling that never manifested itself in any kind of a cohesive post.

As long as I'm just rambling --- I've got a pain in my back. It's been there for several days. It feels like it's in the spine itself, not a sore or overexerted muscle. It might be in the tendon that connects the trapezius to the spine, I suppose. The problem is, I don't know yet. I saw my doctor today, but there really isn't much he can do. He felt the area, but it's not a case where I have a vertebra that has moved 2 or 3 inches, so he wasn't going to find anything there. He had me X-rayed, and it won't be till Friday probably that he gets the results from the radiologist. If the X-rays don't show anything, I'll probably go for an MRI to see if it's a soft-tissue issue. Maybe to a back specialist. I can only imagine the fun that awaits.

I guess that's about it for tonight. I hope to be back to not posting like a housefly with ADD on cocaine tomorrow.

Just how cool is a moose?

One of my favorite teachers in in high school was Mr. Ristow, who taught U.S. History and Government. I was never a very good student. I got bored and distracted easily. Mr. Ristow was able to hold my interest, partly because he was funny, with a sense of humor that matched mine pretty well. He'd often underscore a point by giving an aside in the form of a conversation between some hypothetical student and himself. If he thought (likely from experience - my senior year was his 33rd at that school) that we might not be getting why something was important, it would be, "'So?' Sew buttons on a watermelon - so this:..." and explain the point. If the first part of point was extremely obvious, he'd say, "Yes, and there's no bones in ice cream." My favorite - when something seemed great at first, but had something hidden, the segue between the two was, "Cool as a moose, and twice as hairy."

One thing I recall Mr. Ristow saying, when we learned in Government that you have to be 35 years old to be President, was that he realized at our age that 35 must seem like having "one foot in the grave, and the other on a banana peel." I don't recall exactly what I felt back then about being 35. Today, at 35, it does not feel that way. In fact, it doesn't really connect in my mind that I've aged in the almost 2 decades since then.

I don't quite know how that's possible. Logically, I know that the time has passed. I graduated from high school 18 years ago. More time has passed since then than passed between my birth and then. I've done, seen, and been 18 years' worth since then. More than six thousand, five hundred days have come and gone in their endless, trudging regularity; the sun has circled the sun 18 times. I've watched younger relatives grow up, I've watched my hair start to go gray and most of my friends' hair simply go, I've watched 3 Austin Powers movies (this sort of thing is my bag, baby). Yet, no way I know to mark the passage of time, and the recognition of my passage through it, results in the realization that each of these passage has left me older.

I don't seem to be alone in this. I read somewhere recently that, in a poll of baby boomers, the average age at which they consider old age to start is 79. (The oldest baby boomers are 62.) Apparently, I'm not the only one that find getting old to be something that only happens to the other guy. Still, I don't take much comfort in that. I prefer to be rational. In this regard, tho, I am completely irrational . I just wish I knew what to do about it.

When one chef is too many

Doing this is a lot easier than when I first started doing anything that might be called creative writing. Of course, that was more than 20 years ago. Back then, I did not conceive of having my own computer, and had never heard of "word processing," let alone something called the Internet. However, Sen. Ted Stevens would no doubt that be glad to know that, due to the existence of pneumatic mail deliver systems in large office buildings, I was familiar with "a series of tubes," which he taught us the Internet is.

Back then, when I wrote, it was in pen on paper. Corrections were more cumbersome and sloppy. I recall whole paragraphs crossed out and replaced by very tiny writing crammed into the margins. I'd think a little more before writing than I do know, and I definitely did less editing.

Of course, it's much easier to edit now. A Backspace here, a little click and drag there. It's like it never happened. And that's a good thing - up to a point. I'm finding it's easy to overdo... overthink... overcorrect... overperfect. I worked for more than half an hour on last night's post. I'm happy with the way it came out, but part of it lost some of the flavor of the initial draft. I over-cheffed some of it. Not because all of the changes were improvements, but because they were easy to do before really thinking it through.

I like Reno 911!, Whose Line..., This is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest's movies. They're improvisational. The actors have a general idea of where the scene is supposed to go, and they'll do several takes and use the best material, but they come out more natural, more real, than written and re-written and edited and re-re-written scripted fare. My ink-and-paper writing was more closer to the improv stuff. Writing like this comes closer to Ethnic Mis-Match Comedy # 618.

Look at me, Rex Banner. I have a new hat.

If you're a fan of George Carlin at all, you'll realize over time reading my posts (or, you would have realized if I wasn't right now in the act of telling you - now you'll already know at the time that you otherwise have realized it) that the fun I have playing with the intricacies and oddities of our language, our use of language, is very much inspired by George.

Such as --- Why is it that you never hear anything referred to as "new hat," except for... a new hat? I mean, how come you'll hear someone say something like, "Oh yeah, I've done this plenty of times before. This'll be old hat," but you never hear something like, "Nope, never done that before. It's going to be new hat for me?"

There's a whole slew of words and phrases which we only use when we negate them. The original positives exist, I suppose, but you never hear them in conversation. At one job, I had a Post-It* note on the side of my computer monitor that read, "When gruntled, I only speak in chalant sequiturs." This stemmed from a conversation in which I made this very point, and used disgruntled, non-chalant and non-sequitur as my examples. If we have disgruntlement, non-chalance and non-sequiturs, does it not follow that there must be gruntlement, chalance and sequiturs? (Actually, I suppose it would have to precede that we have those, not follow.) Where are they, in our every day parlance?

And why is it that one thing will be old-fashioned, but its opposite is new-fangled. Why isn't it new-fashioned? There's no old-fangled. There's not even fangled, as far as I can tell. What is fangled, anyway? Sounds like there's something wrong with it. "Damn thing's all fangled." "I know. And it's still new!" For my money, if it's new and it's already fangled, we probably should have stuck with the old-fashioned kind.

To quote Mr. Carlin directly, "These are the kind of thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools."



*Invented in Minnesota

Felidae Robertus

Hey, here's a good idea.

Last night, I was at the gym. I work out right after work, so it's early evening. The quadriceps machine is against the wall, right by a window. I set my towel and water bottle on the ledge when I use the machine, and typically will take a look out the window to see what there is to see. There's a field in the distance that they let run wild with prairie grasses and such, and a bit of a wooded area off to one side, and with Spring being pretty fully sprung (it took a while this year), it's a nice view. Last night's view was made nicer by the presence of big ol' fat raccoon waddling around on the lawn right outside the building. I watched him for a while before continuing with my workout.

A few minutes and machines later, a couple of guys came in and were excitedly talking to the woman who was working there. I couldn't hear the much of the conversation, but I heard her say "I'll go out with you," just before the 3 of them went outside. I figured maybe they were going to check out Mr. Rocky Raccoon (Beatles reference, if you're scoring at home). We have a good number of people from India at work (did I mention that the gym is right at work, right in the same building?), and the one guy sounded like he's from there. In fact, the other guy sounded to be of some kind of Middle Eastern descent. I don't know how long these guys have been in the States, or how widespread raccoons are, so I thought maybe one or both of them had never seen one before. In my mind, that seemed a reasonable justification for the excitement. I know how excited I get when I get to see a new animal for the first time in the flesh. When I got to the cramp inducer... er, hamstring machine, which is right next to the quad machine, my peek out the window showed our party of 3 coming around the corner of the building, right in the same area where I'd last seen Rocky.

So I finished my workout, and I had a couple of questions to ask the woman who was working in the gym. The first quesion I had was, "Did you and those guys go outside to check out the raccoon that was out there?" No, she told me. That was not the purpose of their excursion. They went out investigating, she told me, because those two gentleman "thought they saw a bobcat." It's one thing when you're young, stupid and a guy - you're often doing dumb things, or your friends are, but you're young and stupid. It's something else entirely to be 35, be in discussion with someone who is more or less your contemporary in age (not to mention the other 2, who are probably both older than her, and one seemed to be older than me), and think, "Hmmm. That's a decision that could have led directly to the sudden and unplanned movement of a large quantity of blood from the inside to the outside of your corpus." Or words to that effect. I can't claim that precise wording for the original rough draft of my thought, which was more along the lines of, "Dumbass!" For the record, I don't think they saw a bobcat. But THEY thought so.

Maybe I'm the crazy one. I recognize that. That said, here's how I look at it. If I'm inside, and I think there's a bobcat outside, I don't go outside. I do not make an effort to eliminate the presence of barriers between me and the bobcat, and I damn sure don't endeavor to get myself closer to it. I'd love to see a live bobcat, under the right circumstances. I don't want to be in a position to have contact with the bobcat, tho, because of the very very small chance that I will be the one to dictate the details of said contact. My hand scratching a neck is great, and in that case, unlikely. I think I would much less enjoy fangs ripping through my corotid artery. Just a guess.

I did, however, say to wife when I told her this story that there is one circumstance under which I would be part of a group of 3 going to look for a bobcat. That is if I were absoultely, 100%, dead certain that I could run faster than at least one of my compatriots. I don't have to outrun the cat. I just need to outrun him.

Separately, this is weird. When I saw the raccoon, I not only thought of the name Rocky, from the song, but I thought of the name of a guy I knew in college. We often referred to him as The Raccoon because of the very dark coloring around his eyes. Maybe we should have called him The Bobcat, because I was certainly not interested in having any contact with him, if I could at all avoid it. Not my kind of guy. With that being the case, I have not seen him, and have had very rare occasion to recall his name, since college ended in the mid-90's. Yesterday, due to the random presence of a raccoon, his name made an unexpected mental appearance. This morning, I'm driving to work and listening to the radio. One of the shows I listen to in the morning will often read odd, interesting or ridiculous news stories from all over the country and world. One of this morning's stories, out of New Jersey, is of the parents of a 12-year-old boy who are suing the manufacturer and the retailer of an aluminium baseball bat, and Little League Baseball because a ball that was hit with the bat injured their son. (My question for the parents would be, if it's so obvious that the bat is dangerous for children to use, why did you let your son on the field while it was being used? But that, like the 2nd floor above my 1st-floor workspace, is another story.) Where it's weird is, they read this sentence out of the news story: It claims the defendants knew, or should have known, that the bat was dangerous for children to use, according to the family's attorney, (this jagdorf's name). What the hell is that? A name from the past that has been part of my consciousness for better than a decade, and here he is, 2 days in a row. I mean, I can't be sure that the lawyer guy is the jackass I knew, but the name in uncommon enough that it's likely. What the hell? Go away and leave me alone, you raccoon-looking freak.

What is a DelPennSotan, anyway?

(This was supposed to be my first post on this blog. If you read the post before it, you'll know that this one was temporarily "lost," in that I didn't know at the time where to find it.)

How do you decide what to use as a screen name? When I first started going to chat rooms and message boards online, I was pretty much only going to hockey-related sites. I'm a Philadelphia Flyers fan. I started out picking names that noted my favorite player. OttoFan29 was the first name I used (Joel Otto wore #29 for the Flyers at the time). He soon retired, and I became ForbesFan12 (for Colin Forbes). He got traded. I think all of this was within one calendar year. I got the hint.

What I needed, I figured, was something that simply designated me as a Flyers fan. I wanted to be a bit more inventive than just using some variation of "Flyers Fan." I also decided that, if I was going to identify with the team and not one player, it was important to me to choose a name that would indicate that I had been a fan prior to the new wave of fans who came along in the early 1990's when Eric Lindros showed up (it's a long story - maybe a later post). Broad Street Bully seemed perfect. The team had been known as the Broad Street Bullies in the mid- to late-1970's (their arena is on Broad Street in Philadelphia, and they were known then for a very agressive, rough style of play).

Right now you may be asking, "What in the world does all of this has to do with something called a DelPennSotan?" I'm getting there.

The problem with Broad Street Bully, I found out, was that it was generally taken. After some consideration, I went even more obscure, and settled on Walk Together Forever. When the Flyers won the Stanley Cup (the championship of the National Hockey League) in 1974, before the last game, their coach, Fred Shero, told them, "Win together today, and we will walk together forever." They did, and they have (and boy, are their legs tired!). That name brought a few problems of its own. First of all, almost nobody got it. The population on the Internets skews towards a generation that is not familiar with references from 1974. This seemed to be more true 8-10 years ago, when this was happening. Second, my name would typically be shortened by other posters to WTF, which often got misunderstood by third-party posters not involved in a particular conversation. Something like "WTF, I don't understand what you're talking about..." would lead other people to think I was getting attacked when that wasn't the case. Thirdly, some folks misinterpreted the name to be a refernce to a wife, or some sort of significant other, when no such person existed at the time. (Well, she existed, I just didn't know her. And anyone that knows us knows there ain't gonna be no Walk in any I'd name I'd have for the 2 of us. Sit On Our Fat Asses Together Forever, maybe. [But you can just call us SOOFATF.]) Some of the people who thought I was married or otherwise involved didn't take to kindly to the shameless flirting I would commonly do back then.

By this time, I had branched out and was posting and chatting in non-hockey-related places. At first, I would pick a name that had some connection to the place or central topic where I was posting. That got to be way too much to keep on top of. One universal name, where useable, was the way to go. I decided to go with whatever version of Broad Street Bully was available on a given site. But, the more time I spent on places where people didn't know or care about hockey, the more I found myself having to tediously explain my moniker over and over. And, outside of the context for which I first started using it, having Bully in a screen name can lead some people to incorrect assumptions that it's hard for a fella to live down.

So, once again, time for a change. Time to drop the hockey references. I don't do much hockey chatting any more. It's very hard anymore to find a rational conversation. A lot of people pick a name that's based on the one overriding passion in their life, but I've never had something that is "my thing," that people who know me immediately identify with me, and immediately think of me when that "thing" comes up in coversation or whatever. So I didn't have anything to go with in that regard. When all of this started, I lived in Delaware, which is where I grew up. After a time, I moved to Pennsylvania, which is actually where I was born and lived the first few years of my life. Later, I moved to Minnesota, where I've been for the past 4+ years. I had the thought to pick a name that would encompass my having been a DELawarean, a PENNsylvanian and a MinnesSOTAN. Hence, DelPennSotan. Despite what one of my friends thought, the "sotan" does not mean "so tan," though I do tend to darken up nicely in the summer if I'm out in the sun. My coloring seems to come from the Greek portion of my heritage, and when you put that under the sunshine, there's a very noticeable effect. Now that I think about it, maybe instead of where I've lived, I should have based my name on where my ancestors came from. ItalPolGreGland has a bit of a ring to it, doesn't it?

On the outside, this probably seems like a meaningless recitation of a progression of online identities that I have used. But on the inside, I can see that there is a bit more to this story. It's been about 10 years since I was OttoFan29. DelPennSotan is not OttoFan29, and in some significant ways, I am not the same person I was then, either. I see a lot of difference. I didn't even ID myself as me at first. I used another person. When that changed, I was very careful about the piece of myself that I identified, and what others were "supposed" to take from it. (As I said, it was VERY IMPORTANT to me with that first Flyers name that people know that I am a very particular type - or age, if you will - of Flyers fan.) Over time, when I was chatting with folks who are not hockey fans, the need to constantly explain my name led me to the realization that people who connect with me are not necessarily interested in only the pieces of me that I might have chosen to make available to them. Which brings us to this last name. It's all of me, my whole life, in a manner of speaking. None of these screen name decisions was a conscious attempt to do the things I've been talking about in this paragraph. But as I was thinking about it (my weekday commute is anywere from 45 to 90 minutes each way - I have a LOT of time alone with all manner of random thoughts), I came to the conclusion that they were probably not accidental, either. Each one seems to accurately have represented who I was ready to let people see me be at the time.

Thus, here I stand before you today - DelPennSotan. Again, it's all of me, my whole life, in a manner of speaking. Also not consciously but I believe not accidentally, it speaks only to where I've been and where I am. It says nothing about about where I am going. I'll have to find that out as I go along.

Live and learn

I had this whole long (very long) post all typed out about the meaning behind the screen names I've used over time. There's a great realization I came to a couple weeks back, and I labored for the better part of a half hour share it with you. Then I previewed. As this is my first post, you may make the correct assumption that I'm not familar with the nuts-and-bolts workings of this site. I wanted to make a change, and didn't see any option that seemed to take me to where I could edit the post. I figured I'd try the back button. It didn't keep what I'd typed and I hadn't copied. It's gone. I'll have to try to recreate it, but not tonight. It's already 11 PM. I suppose there's a larger lesson in here about miscommunication, and maybe I'll post on that too, when I have some time to think about it. For now, my bed is calling.