mostly just a test post

Mosque Musician
Originally uploaded by m0loch

From my flickr account. I really like this photo and I've been doing a lot of work to it in GIMP (the Linux equivalent of photoshop)

Halfway there!

So...someone on the ice made a spreadsheet called "the donut of misery", probably for one of those stupid "fun with excel" classes or something. Lots of people used it, I never paid much attention. This last season, I was shown a cuter version of the same thing called "penguin timer"...it's really kind of silly too. Anyhow, it provides a countdown of sorts for when one is leaving the ice. I have now surpassed the halfway point...It's all downhill from here.

Sunset and Dinner

This post is about a week overdue...I guess it's a good thing that I'm too busy to be posting all the time. Anyhow, sunset, being only a once per year event is sort of a big deal. There's quite a bit of science behind when the sun will actually set. Many variables including how tall the observer is, what the atmosphere is doing...many other things play a role in when the sun will actually not be visible anymore. The only constant is the time of the equinox - that time when both poles see exactly half of the sun...barring any atmospheric impact and assuming a perfectly spherical earth. Theoretically, from that point it would take about 16 hours for the sun to disappear below the horizon...but that is without the aforementioned variables. The short story here is that "sunset" is a moving target. This year, thick cloud cover set in and so the sunset was mostly obscured and the sun mostly sneaked out of sight unnoticed. A couple of people got pictures during some rare breaks in the clouds...they're not mine to post here, so I won't.

The occasion of sunset is somewhat of a holiday here and as is the case with any holiday, it was marked with a hearty meal, copious libations and a festive mood. Some people dressed up for the celebration, others, including myself, just put on a clean T-shirt that didn't have the word "fuck" on it anywhere (quite a challenge to find) The meal itself was remarkable. There were several choices including lobster and tenderloin, which was awfully hard to pass up in favor of grilled salmon with boysenberry gastric served on a bed of wild mushroom and quinoa pilaf. It was delicious! Harsh continent indeed.

No card tables here - kids get to sit at the "grown-up" tables

Dinner show?

Oh, the only thing missing was my darling, wonderful girlfriend - Marsha

Water, water everywhere, but not a thing to shower with...

My friend Ken told me I remind him of the character in "Lord of War" played by Nicolas Cage and allegedly inspired by the real life Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout who was recently arrested in Thailand. Having been mildly interested in the story of this person, and also having some sort of unexplained fascination with prison life, hearing this story sparked some sort of interest in reading prison stories...specifically stories from Thai prisons. My search led me to a book which I will have to add to my "must read" list titled "The Damage Done" about an Aussie heroin dealer who got caught in Thailand and spent 12 years in prison there. It also took me to a Thai prison blog, where I read one person's account of what is allegedly the worst prison system on earth. I chortled heartily when I read what seemed like a complaint about the shower:

"The water is turned on for 2.5 minutes for you to wet your entire body. Then it is turned off while you then soap yourself quickly. Then the water is turned back on for another 2.5 minutes for you to wash off the soap. You have to be quick because you don’t get a second chance."


And from what I gather, this is part of the daily routine. I just can't muster up any sympathy for him. Antarctica contains 70% of the earth's freshwater and 90% of the earth's ice. The B-15 iceberg alone, which made news in 2005, contains more than 1000 trillion gallons of water. That is an amount completely unfathomable to me, but by the estimation of leading glaciologists familiar with B-15, that is enough water to cover all of the land on earth with .5 inches of water - or 5 inches of water on all of the agricultural land on earth. And B-15 is but a sliver of the total mass of ice on the continent. Here at the South Pole, the ice is two miles thick and goes on for as far as the eye can see in all directions. The point I'm driving at here is that there's a hell of a lot of water in this "desert". Unfortunately, that water is locked in ice, and it takes heat to get it. It costs a great deal of money to generate the heat required to melt ice. Therefore, every person on station is limited to two two-minute showers per week. Believe me when I say that a two minute shower is very much less than satisfying.

My heart bleeds for you Mr. Thai Prisoner.

A big shout out to the fiscally irresponsible

So...went ahead and did my taxes today...knowing that I have a refund coming, I can't believe I procrastinated this long. I did need to put forth some effort to gather some of the required documents, but it turned out being much easier than I had thought. Anyhow, my refund is now on the way, but I digress. The real point of this post is to thank the millions of Americans who just had to keep up with the Joneses and buy houses which they didn't really have the means to pay for. Because of this, there is apparently a "mortgage crisis" in America and the government has decided to introduce an economic stimulus program. What this means is that myself and many other Americans are going to get a $600 check, which we are probably expected to use to buy lead infused crap from wal-mart with to stimulate the economy. It's kind of a joke, $600 really doesn't go far but for my part, I'm promptly depositing it in a savings account in New Zealand (paying in excess of 10%), and with the interest earned on that $600 by the time I get off this godforsaken hunk of ice it will have accrued enough interest that I can use that interest to purchase a cigar* which was rolled on the thighs of a 15 year old Cuban virgin. My fiscally irresponsible contemporaries will probably already have thrown away the broken piece of whatever they bought with their check by that time. While I do appreciate the check, that's not really what the "thank you" is for. The thank you is for the extension in unemployment insurance. Seems because you can't pay your mortgage, my unemployment insurance benefits can be extended for 26 weeks BEYOND when they would normally run out. I will be taking advantage of this. Takes me back to my trip a few years ago....living on the beach in a demi-mansion with two housekeepers, a gardner a poolboy and a cook..all the while, collecting unemployment (hey, nobody wants to hire someone who's just going to quit on them in a few weeks to go back to Antarctica)...ah the good life. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Will work for ski pass!

*I don't really get what the big deal is about Cuban cigars, but I can get 'em(well, not today but..) and you can't so neener neener