counterclockwise

So a few weeks back, I got a new car, a 2011 Nissan Altima:

Up until this week, I’ve had nothing but good things to say about it.  I have, however, discovered a serious design flaw.  Like all late-model Nissans, it starts with an electronic key.  There’s a manual key hidden inside that you can use to lock the glove box when you hand the main key off to the valet, but you can’t actually start the car with it.   Instead, you put the electronic key in your purse or briefcase or what-have-you, where it communicates wirelessly with the car’s computer. The upside is that you don’t have to drag it out to unlock the doors or start the car.

The downside is that if any one of about a dozen links in the chain fails, you can’t start the car.  Worse, you can’t even tell which link is the broken one.  At least, that was the case for me this past Wednesday.  I had a court appearance the next county over, about half an hour from home base.  When I came back out to the parking lot, the little key recognition tell-tale didn’t light, and the car wouldn’t start.  There’s a backup slot where you can plug the key in if the battery is weak, but that didn’t help.  Still, it seemed like the battery was the most likely (and most fixable) fail point, so I got a spare at the next-door drug store.  Still no go.

My next thought was that the key itself was damaged.  A strong enough magnetic field, or a hot enough day, or an errant bead of condensation would do it.  My spare house key had gone missing, so I got an office secretary to come out and pick me up so that I could unlock my house and get the spare car key, then take me back.  Still no go.  At that point, there was no alternative but to call the dealer, arrange a tow, and thank heavens I was still under warranty.

The dealer concluded that the computer had locked up, and so did a hard restart, the kind where they disconnect the backup power supply and you lose everything from your trip meter to your radio presets.  Nissan central says that this is a known problem with this model, and although they don’t know what causes it, “nobody has ever reported it twice.” That’s not encouraging; the 2011 model years haven’t been out long enough for any kind of meaningful history to have accrued.  The next time this happens could very well be some dark and stormy night, two hours from home and out from under warranty.

So, Nissan engineers, the lessons are this (1) if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and (2) if it’s a really critical system, provide an emergency override.

I recently had the opportunity to spend a weekend in Chicago.  I’m delighted to find a place that’s best visited in the dog days of summer.

There was plenty of Chicago to go around.  If only there was more summer to see it - and the people I neglected to visit.  Sorry LW and CB - maybe next time.

If Sleep and Death be truly one,
And every spirit’s folded bloom
Thro’ all its intervital gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;

Unconscious of the sliding hour,
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the colour of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;

And love will last as pure and whole
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Rewaken with the dawning soul.

[…]

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou then? I cannot guess;
But tho’ I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less:

My love involves the love before;
My love is vaster passion now;
Tho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.

Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee tho’ I die.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”, XLIII, CXXX

So I’m years late to the party on this one, but I just discovered Indexed by Jessica Hagy. Imagine if Randall Munroe of XKCD fame was female, and content to stick to pre-algebra. Or alternatively, imagine if PostSecret weeded out all the emo entries about eating disorders, molestation, and cries for help, and converted the remaining submissions into graph form. The end result would look something like this:

Or at Christmas time, more like this:

And on that note, may all your deer encounters this season be confined to cards, tree stands, and petting zoos.

I’m putting the kittens (and their mother) up for adoption this week.

Quite a change from last month, isn’t it.  They’ve all got very cat-like personalities now, and are no longer just fuzzy stomachs.  The white one on the left is the pick of the litter, both the most playful and the most affectionate.  The mackerel tabby at the back is the shyest. And the ginger one on the right has the strongest purr.  I think that one is female, which is rare for an orange cat.

I don’t think these guys will be hard to place. Christmas kittens, ahoy.

When I first moved into my new digs, there was a stray cat living in the crawlspace. A neighbor was putting out food for her, so I was pretty content to leave well enough alone. But she was never spayed, and there are plenty of toms around. Sure enough, she turned up pregnant. Now I’m fostering her and her three kittens.

I haven’t named them.  That privilege is reserved for whomsoever takes them in, and I have neither the funds nor the inclination to add even one more pet to my household - one cat is plenty. But it’s been fun, even though it means that I presently have every color of cat hair but gray-blue now represented in my wardrobe.

I went to Cincinnati over Labor Day to visit people from the Incomparable Concepción VAC and and attend the Despedida of Darling Danita.  Gents, you know Peace Corps Paraguay didn’t shut the VAC down over security concerns re: those no-account, half-assed narco-communists in the EPP. The real reason is that The Office knew the C-VAC of the G20’s would never be equalled, and gave us the Peace Corps equivalent of a retired jersey. It’s a conspiracy. I’m blowing the whistle. Wikileaks has been alerted.

Meanwhile, we of the resistance will continue making chipa and mangling Guaraní.

I went and argued my first appellate case this week before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals in Jackson.

Funny building, isn’t it? Kind of reverse federal style. That’s oddly appropriate - most of my conversation with the justices seemed to revolve around how far off from standard federal procedure this case had gone.  Our client is in a rare sort of bind - she was arrested in Jackson, Tennessee, in 2001 and put on probation.  Then she was arrested again in Missouri in 2004, and sentenced on federal crimes.  The Tennessee justice system made a half-hearted stab at revoking her probation, but then never went anywhere with it.

Five years later, when she tried to get her paperwork ready for federal rehab, her Tennessee trial judge up and decided to yank her probation after all.  This is not a speedy trial by any stretch of the imagination, and the Constitution makes kind of a big deal about these things.  Whether it’s a big enough mistake to get her conviction thrown out is another thing all together.

I certainly argued that it does. Now we wait and see if I convinced at least two out of three appellate justices that we’ve got the law on our side.

One of the less obvious benefits of lawyering in the greater Pemiscot County area is getting to spend time in this awesome old courthouse:

It smells like history.

The last of last week’s snow has melted off now, and I’m settling in.

Cool digs, huh?

Magic likes it here!

Also, hidden light switches for cool haunted house effects: