Hello Yogi and Yogini and other non-practicing folks.

A few weeks ago ( 6, to be precise ) I informed you all about my plan to undertake a 40-day commitment to daily practice of yoga at Austin’s own YogaYoga. Along the way I updated you with blog posts using the Polish Notation syntax familiar to programmers of LISP.

Well, 40 days are up and I am glad to report that I completed this challenge on the 29th of July.

Furthermore, I have brought my beautiful girlfriend in on the practice and we are both enjoying the benefits of regular practice. Yoga is good, yoga with a buddy is better, and yoga with your girl is even better.

When I started this challenge, I definitely had some goals in mind:

• Loosen hamstrings
• Put both heels down in adho mukha savasana
• Put both heels flat towards ceiling in Supta Padangusthasana

Having completed the time goal, I wonder if it is even worth mentioning whether or not I succeded in these bulleted points. I don’t think so.

One of my teachers said something very profound the other day about the practice. She said that the desire to “do yoga” and “do a pose” was rather wrong-headed. It is not the goal of yoga to accomplish a particular asana or pose ( what then, the student might well ask! ), it’s to experience that moment of difficulty, to respect that moment of difficulty, and to let it pass without judgment. The goal is to learn to appreciate all moments, to live in the present. To submit your will to that of the most high, to yoke the two together.

It’s so often the case that we get tied up in ‘production’ - regardless the activity - even when the activity is to stop production.

I want some inner peace here! I’m gonna do me some yoga, master them krinkly poses and then I’ll be done, dammit.

or…

I’m gonna meditate myself some patience. C’mon….c’mon….

It’s this sort of thinking that, quite contrary to the function of yoga, actually winds up enforcing the presence of the ego. How can one commune with the will of the divine if one is asserting the mastery of his body? The gritting control that says ‘shut up you wussy muscles’ and disrespects the body certainly would fare quite poorly in hearing the little, quiet voice of The Lord inside.

This makes good segueway into the next obvious question which would be “What are the results from your practice?”. Again, to speak of results here is a bit misguided, but to inspire others ( I hope? ) I will note that I certainly have lost fat in my stomach ( so that I didn’t confuse action with result I forebade myself to step upon a scale ), my back is much more taut, and I feel much more healthy. It’s only 75 minutes a day and it provides such wonderful benefit.

A final benefit is that during this time, when Lauren and I have had discussions about subjects that are difficult for all relationships (money, goals, savings, will Steven please do the laundry), we stop, take time to go to class, and then our discussion always seems much more fruitful. Perhaps because yoga is such a focused killer of the ego, and ego is such a focused assassin of relationships, after yoga, our discussions seem to operate from what we agree on and what’s most important to both of us in the future. We seem to be better understanding of one another. These opportunities for genuine understanding would make the class fee worth twice its cost.

“Never has so much military and economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively, and if after all of this time, and all of this sacrifice, and all of this support, there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past.” Richard Nixon, 1968

Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Cat’s Cradle

• The yoga challenge continues and I’m very close to completing my goal. I just completed the 35th day in a row of practicing
• Last Wednesday we went down to Beck’s and caught Idgy again. It was a lot of fun to sit back with a beer or two, hear songs that we’ve now memorized, and see our girl sing.
• I’ve undertaken the services of a financial planner to help me get my priorities straight and consider my options more completely. I’m not such a very disciplined saver so visiting a planner seems sorta like going to a doctor and a personal trainer at the same time. It’s like you’ve been on a diet of Oreos for the last year and you know the doctor will yell at you, and then you know the doctor will tell you you need to run 3.2 kilometers per day, and then you know he will show up at your door every morning to make sure you did your 3.2 kilometers. In this case, it’s not Oreos I’ve been on, it’s been consumption and instead of running 3.2 kilometers, I’m being told to stop buying silly stuff, going out to eat, and … well you get the idea. We’ll see how that goes. My horoscope today said that everything would be taken care of by January - it’ll be odd if it just so happens to align.
• The League is coming! Part of the friends of The Daily Texan blog circle, The League, and his wife are relocating from The Valley of the Sun, to Austin.
• As readers of the comments in the previous entry may have noted, one Mr. Garcia has re-found me via this site. That’s one of the benefits of having your own vanity-named web site, people that you miss have a better chance of finding you if they are looking for your or if they come across your e-footprints.
• The Wednesday before last I went to the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs with Lauren and we took an introductory swing dancing class and then danced a bit. I had learned some dancing years ago …but that had all faded during my time in the bay, we had a good time
• I’ve read the first three Hellboy graphic novels
• I’ve been reading a book on Ajax programming
• I bought a safety razor ( yes, a razor blade on a metal cylinder ) that I’ve been trying out. I had my maiden run today and didn’t come out butchered up in the least. It is a rather close shave.

That’s a lot of what’s going on in one unordered list. I’ve also got some crazy stuff going around the household surrounding cleaning up, getting things filed away, and some new, fun purchases (more coming later?).

(more…)

In a previous post I told about driving through the Barton Hills neighborhood and coming across the beautiful St. Mark’s Episcopal church. During this drive there was an excellent song playing on Andy Langer’s “The Next Big Thing” on 101x.

The musicians were “Band of Horses” and the song was “Funeral” which you can find here. Band of Horses is on the seminal Sub Pop label. Check it out.

It would appear that someone at Bookpeople has taken the position that children need more exposure to the Great Old Ones:

I had another idea in my previous post, but didn’t want to muddle up that round of bitching with this point. You’ll need to read the previous post to probably get where I’m coming from in this post.

I said:

Pirates I led us to ask the great spiritual questions of all time, and Pirates II distracted us from finding those answers. I, for one, am angry about it. The fact that both of the movies are being made simultaneously indicates to me that these most important questions will be ignored - and so I’m not expecting much for the second film.

I think that the Pirates franchise ran afoul of their own success much in the way Lucas did with “Star Wars”. You made a good story, on a risk, that was decidedly expensive, and then, to your great surprise you made a metric screwtonne of money. A sufficient amount of money such that you could draw out your story. How to do so?

In my previous post I assert that the obvious questions for the second installment are:

• How has Elizabeth grown more free. The Kierkergaardian or Nietzschean questions follow: in light of this absolute freedom, is she scared by it, is she frightened? How does the isolation of being ahead of her time weigh her down? If pushed into a moment of using her absolute freedom to damn / forgive, can she bear the weight of absolute agency?)
• How has Will grown to accept the moral ambiguity of who his father was? Will he believe his life must follow a deterministic model: who is father is, is who he was? Has will become a true pirate? It’s an opportunity to become a Jack Sparrow, or a British captain - or shall he synthesize something new out of those roles (verily, be an American, in essence)
• Jack’s existence is not to evolve, but to be surprised by the evolution. The cosmic trickster finding an amusing side-effect of his alchemy, he has changed by being the alchemist. Where are these subtle and sly changes (Depp surely has the chops to pull them off, and did in Pirates 1)

In Pirates II directory Gore Verbenski, probably under a lot of pressure by those creative black holes in suits at Disney ( they bought Pixar for a reason, folks ), replaced answering the cosmic questions of life with spectacle. Is there a lesson to be learned from the “Star Wars” sophomore outing?

Yes.

Someone who did the right under similar strains was Irvin Kershner, who masterfully directed “Empire Strikes Back”.

The questions were:

• How will Luke grow with the Force now that he’s been used / has used it. What is the nature of this force?
• Han isn’t entirely out for himself, despite what we thought, what’s his motivation on that?
• Who gets the girl: Will or Jacker, Han or Luke (planned out all three story arcs my ass, George)
• What did Chewy say?

Kershner answers these, or gives the characters room to decant and to mull. We voyage with Luke to Degobah (“I can’t believe it! And that is why you fail.” Goddam, that scene makes me almost weepy sometimes. Oh master Yoda! How I loved you before you were a jumping booger with a lightsaber! ), we learn of Jabba and the bounty, we uh, see Luke make out with his sister, etc. Our love of the character grows as their exploration ( thankfully Luke and Leia’s exploration was capped at second base ) of themselves grows like our exploration of ourselves.

And, much like “Pirates II”, “Empire” was in the middle and ended with a “…To be Continued.” When I finished watching Pirates II, the gentleman next to me asked “Did I just get a f$$CK!NG To be Continued?”. While I was in the single digit years when “Empire” came back and can’t quite remember popular response, the coda ending and the promise of more character development and the promise of a new day gave us great hope for “Empire“‘s successor.

Kershner kept the storyteller’s part of the bargain: He helped us know our friends the heroes better, and they helped us know ourselves better. Through this trust, we were willing to wait until the continuation. Like a payment on the final loan amount due, Kershner delivered.

Verbenski has broken this trust, and now I’m not sure I’ll even care to watch the third installment at all. Incidentally, I think this fate also befell the Wachowski brothers with Matrix 2 and 3 (following the same filming pattern, is this a danger of filming sequals simultaneously?).

I’ll just be another voice joining what appears to be a chorus of voices in saying that the latest installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise was a gross disappointment.

I am a complete and total movie snob. It’s pretty hard to get me to go see a film, much less say that I thought it was good. Occasionally (twice) I have been proven mistaken: “Anchorman” and “Pirates: Blah Blah Black Pearl”.

The movie disappoints on multiple levels, but let’s go with my primary concern, the storytelling angle. Isn’t this really the reason we go to the movies, to be amused by a good yarn (as a Neil Stephenson character would say)?

There were some compelling character points established in the first film.

• What will nascent feminist Elizabeth make of herself in these early Georgian times?
• What will Will, slightly more in touch with the ambiguous spectrum of right / wrong, piracy / heroism make of himself?
• What sort of pickles will Depp’s (Captain!) Jack Sparrow get himself into ( and how many people will he let hang / not let hang in his place to get back out? )

Around these questions there were some great scenes:

• The “Black Pearl represents freedom” dialog between Jack and Elizabeth on the rum-runners’ island
• The “you can accept your father was a good man and a pirate” or not dialog between Jack and Will
• By acting as the existential interlocutor in these scenarios, how is the interlocutor changed (multiple scenes)

So we should expect to see some writing advance these characters.

• How has Elizabeth grown more free. The Kierkergaardian or Nietzschean questions follow: in light of this absolute freedom, is she scared by it, is she frightened? How does the isolation of being ahead of her time weigh her down? If pushed into a moment of using her absolute freedom to damn / forgive, can she bear the weight of absolute agency?)
• How has Will grown to accept the moral ambiguity of who his father was? Will he believe his life must follow a deterministic model: who his father is, is who he was? Has will become a true pirate? It’s an opportunity to become a Jack Sparrow, or a British captain - or shall he synthesize something new out of those roles (verily, be an American, in essence)
• Jack’s existence is not to evolve, but to be surprised by the evolution. The cosmic trickster finding an amusing side-effect of his alchemy, he has changed by being the alchemist. Where are these subtle and sly changes (Depp surely has the chops to pull them off, and did in Pirates 1)

At the end of Pirates II, Elizabeth is, uh, still tempestuous and daring ( no growth ), Will is a slightly more sly Boy Scout with French Cuffs ( no real growth ), and Jack is still Jack, but…well…no change.

So all of the great personal development threads were given short shrift. So, what were they supplanted with?

Spectacle

• Here’s Redcoat marines securing a beachhead
• Here’s writs of arrest for Our Heroes
• Here’s the Black Pearl
• Here’s a long side-track about some cannibals
• Here’s Davey Jones ( Bill Nighy doesn’t bring quite the relish that Geoffry Rush brought to Barbossa, but still, may have been my favorite character)
• Here’s Jones’ submersible ship The Flying Dutchman in all its crustacean glory

In fact, there’s pretty much a 3-ring circus (Port Royal, The Dutchman, and the Pearl) that scenes are cut between over and over again, but with no real coherent thread or purpose. In fact the movie is an exhausting 2 hours and 24 minutes of spectacle not storytelling and you can’t count on those slack-asses in Hollywood to be able to discern the difference between those two.

In fact the most entertaining characters are two characters formerly in the employ of the undead Captain Barbossa, Ragetti and Pintel. The former you’ll recall as “the guy who has a wooden eye that was used to slapstick effect.” Much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” we find them meta-narrating the questions the audience might have.

Question asked: “What’s in Davey Jones’ chest?” Ragetti answered: “The dichotomy of good and evil?”

This made that philosophy degree-holder in me howl.

And its that same degree-holder that was forced, sadly, to think upon Baudrillard who made the point that as the masses begin to see the play of images and spectacle as the basis for all experience, they lose the relationship they had to the narrative of which they as audience and of which the spectacles were once part.

I think that what Baudrillard feared for the world has definitely happened in this movie, spectacles are meant to be part of a narrative, not to be the narrative itself.

Just as a quick point, let me hit you up with some big images.

• A beautiful house burns
• A beautiful girl receives notice her husband is dead
• A girl under threat of rape and robbery kills an errant soldier
• Atlanta burns
• Thousands of soldiers are dead / dying / diseased
• A child dies riding horseback
• A beautiful woman is left by her handsome husband

Spectacles to be sure, but do they have any meaning outside of “The tragic and tepestuous existence of Scarlett O’Hara”? No. This is something that directors and producers of yesteryear understood: spectacle can only be used to serve to pit the characters against big challenges that will help them grow. In each of those moments below, what do we learn about Scarlett?

The Illiad is not Teukros’ arrow flying wide of Hector, the sulking of Akhilles, Odysseyus’ reluctance (good instinct, big O) to leave; it’s the pursuit of the face that launched a thousand ships, the pursuit of Helen!

Ben-Hur is not the chariot scene, it’s that bad-ass who mastered that spectacle’s search for meaning now that all sensory experience is dulled, and his meeting of God the Son.

The Ten Commandments is not the parting of the Red Sea, it’s the bitter cat and mouse established by Yul Brenner and Charleton Heston. It’s the beautiful and solemn counterweight of Brenner placing his dead son in the impotent arms of Anubis.

Outside of narrative, spectacle is simply exhausting ( Baudrillard also tangentially predicts this, a fatigue of spectacle and to the extent that spectacle is existence in the modern world, a sickness of life itself ). Imagine the highlight scenes of great movies all stitched together for 2 hours and 24 minutes and you would, effectively, have the same wearying, dizzying, vertiginous, non-entertainment, soul-sapping, boredom that Pirates II delivers, une grande malaise spirituelle

Atlanta Burns, ET goes home, Jaws swallows Quint, Stay Puft trounces Manhattan, King Kong falls from the Empire State Building, the Red Sea Parts, “Luke, I’m your father”….There’s some n-th clip at which point you’d become so desensitized to swimming in a sea of celluloid spectacle that you’d simply grow bored, and then tired.

But not just tired was I at the end, I was angry; and I’ve discerned the reason.

Above I laid out some key dichotomies for these characters. The question for our heroes is THE question. THE BIG QUESTION of existence itself, and, just like the real world around us, instead of turning off the TV and writing down who we would like to be, or instead of actually talking to our partner and finding the most tender yearning parts of their heart, or instead of writing that novel, or picking up that dusty guitar, or writing that symphony, sonnet, or great program, or sitting quietly in za-zen we let ourselves get distracted by a purely nonsensical spectacle.

This movie as a successor to Pirates I has conveyed the essence of existential disappointment. Pirates II fails just the same way the High School Varsity star’s life fails as he greets people at Wal-Mart, it fails like the ballerina whose eating disorder ruined her career as she thought it would help, it fails like the 10th plastic surgeon’s visit in pursuit of the failed ideal of perfection, it fails with the bitter sadness of a thousand lives led in quiet desperation.

Pirates I led us to ask the great spiritual questions of all time, and Pirates II distracted us from finding those answers. I, for one, am angry about it. The fact that both of the movies are being made simultaneously indicates to me that these most important questions will be ignored - and so I’m not expecting much for the second film.

….save a whole lot of spectacle.

If you are learning Ruby coming from a C or Perl background, you may find the following discussion somewhat interesting.

One of the most common idioms ( especially in my CGI programming in Perl ) is to use a dispatch table based on a keyword or an option.

It is particularly handy to arrange a hash such that by entering a ‘keyword’ (the key in the hash element) you trigger an anonymous subroutine, or a pre-defined routine.

The code for this, in Perl, looks something like this:

my %h = ( 'alpha' => &theAlphaRoutine, 'beta' => &theBetaRoutine, 'gamma' => &theGammaRoutine, );

Thus by dereferencing %h with the argument ‘alpha’ you can achieve the same net effect as if you had called theAlphaRoutine()

Thus:

$h{'alpha'}()

is equivalent to

theAlphaRoutine()

Now, let’s sexy it up a tiny bit. Let’s put anonymous subroutines inside the hash, that is to say, routines that are defined as you define the structure of the hash. This creates that very cool Perl effect of “I’m running code that I didn’t define in subroutines, this is very subversive.”

my %h = ( 'alpha' => sub { print "first comes first\n"}, 'beta' => sub { print "second comes second\n"}, 'gamma' => sub { print "third comes third\n"}, );

Nice! Thus executing:

$h{'alpha'}() will generate:

first comes first

As an experiment, let’s create an array of the names of the key values in %h and iterate through them. We will then us the current keyword (held in the $_ variable) to dereference the hash. In so doing we will ‘call’ the associated anonymous routine.

The code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@names = qw |alpha beta gamma|;

my %h = ( 'alpha' => sub { print "first comes first\n"}, 'beta' => sub { print "second comes second\n"}, 'gamma' => sub { print "third comes third\n"}, );

for ( @names ){ $h{$_}()}

Produces the expected result of:

first comes first
second comes second
third comes third

Well, that’s just great. Now, I thought that I would like to try this idiomatic expression in Ruby. Now, let me first say that doing things this way is very un-Ruby like and can be done in many superior implementations. This is simply a thought experiment for you.

Let’s start with this basic Ruby code:

names = %w(alpha beta gamma)

h[:alpha] =lambda { puts "first comes first"} h[:beta]= lambda { puts "second comes second"} h[:gamma] = lambda { puts "third comes third"}

So the goal would be, “run through the listing of items in ‘names’ and then proceed to dereference these anonymous subroutines lambda expressions[1] using the Proc.call method”

First Attempt

A naïve stab ( that is, my first stab ) looks like this. We add a simple command to spit out the names that we’re going to use for the dereferencing.

names.each {|name| puts name}

This produces:

    NameError: undefined local variable or method
       `h' for main:Object

What?! An important thing for Perl coders to remember is that Ruby doesn’t auto-vivify[2] a hash by declaring one of its key value pairs. You have to create a pointer to a Hash object before you can start adding keys and values. So let’s add this line before the h[parameter] declarations:

h = Hash.new

Produces:

alpha
beta
gamma

OK, so now we have the keys, let’s get those keys to dereference within the Hash and we’ll see our lambda expressions performed.

Second Attempt The naïve next step would be this:

names.each {|name| h[name].call}

Which produces:

    NoMethodError: undefined method `call' for nil:NilClass
    at top level    in goofing.rb at line 9
    method each in goofing.rb at line 9
    at top level    in goofing.rb at line 9

What the heck?

My first instinct was that it was a scoping issue. “Ah-hah!”, thought I, “I need to declare h to be $h” ( keep in mind Perl-ers, $x merely means “make it global”). This made no difference.

What happened is something that I hadn’t caught on to:

:symbolname is not equal to ‘symbolname’

This should be obvious, but it’s so obvious, it’s easily missed.

One simple set of commands should demonstrate this:

puts :symbolname.class puts 'symbolname'.class exit

Produces:

    Symbol
    String

In our example, thus, names contains strings - not symbols. Our hash structure is set up using symbols as keys.

I thought that perhaps the fix was to simply put a : in front of each of the strings within names. But again, this merely nets you a collection of strings with a “:” as the first character.

A quick bit of code makes the point clear:

names = %w(alpha beta gamma) names2 = %w(:alpha :beta :gamma) names.each {|name| puts name.class} names2.each {|name| puts name.class}

It’s just a bunch of strings!

OK, so we need a method whereby to convert strings to symbols. Fortunately String#to_sym does just this.

Thus, to get whan we expect, let’s add:

names.each {|x| $h[ x.to_sym].call}

In sum:

names = %w(alpha beta gamma)

h = Hash.new h[:alpha] =lambda { puts "first comes first"} h[:beta]= lambda { puts "second comes second"} h[:gamma] = lambda { puts "third comes third"}

names.each {|x| $h[ x.to_sym].call}

And this gets the desired:

<pre> first comes first second comes second third comes third </pre>

Of course the really Ruby way of running this would be...

<code>h.keys.each {|x| h[x].call}

Or better yet…

h.values.each { |y| y.call}

---

1. ‘Lambda Expression’ is a particularly interesting area in the hop from pure mathematics to computer science and the reader is highly encouraged to look into the basic outlines of the design of Alonzo Church and colleagues. Defmacro.org has a really great summation. I’ve only read some of the basics in my on-and-off flirtation with Lisp. Check it out.

2. Auto-vivify means “auto make alive”. By creating a hash key value pair $aHash{'foo'} = 'foomonkey', %aHash is auto-vivified, automatically created. Not so in Ruby.

When we were still living in Mountain View, I would often watch Dwell magazine on TV on the Fine Living channel. I was consistently surprised by how many modern homes were being built in Austin and the surrounding area.

It’s funny where modern design pops up, while I wasn’t surprised to hear about the Annie House conversion in South Austin, the other day Lauren and I had a run-in with modern design quite by accident.

We had gone to La Feria on South Lamar for dinner and afterwards drove through a neighborhood that I had never visited before. Ok, in truth, I thought that the road would go through and be a shortcut back home, which it was not.

We came across a very modern, and very interesting Episcopal church, St. Mark’s, which was built in a very modern way, but which also embraced the Texas landscape and let it’s deep, broad, blue sky and fierce, golden light act as the architectural enhancers they were meant to be. Check out the architects’ portfolio’s pictures of the site (for all that good architectural design, I might have suggested they look into the HTML “named anchor” so that I could link directly to the church mumble).

I checked out the architects, Jackson and McElhaney and they have done a number of commercial and residential properties that embrace the modern, the open, and the native flora and vistas of the area.

Beautiful work guys. If I ever get the scratch together I’d love to take a meeting with them.

Hello, thanks for stopping in yet again for the life and times of Steven and his, quite often, wunder-fraulein, Lauren.

The Fourth saw me get up early to make 9 o’clock ( - 40 (+11 5)) yoga class. Afterwards I got some Fourth of July gas when it struck me that no fourth of july is a Fourth of July without Bar-B-Q (to say nothing of being components in two Robert Earl Keen songs).

I headed home and the lady and I headed over to Rudy’s for some lean brisket on whitebread with gallons of iced tea. Rudy’s is so fine, and I do mean so fine.

While we were getting ready to go Lauren mentioned going kayaking on town lake and that sounded like a capital (ho ho ho!) idea. After Rudy’s we wound through Westlake (the more direct route via Barton Springs Road was in closedown preparations in advance of the Austin Symphony extravaganza) to Austin Rowing Dock. The day was rather cool owing to a rainstorm that had passed early in the morning so it was a fine time for heading out.

I had never kayaked before, but it was really good exercise and quite a bit of wet fun. We headed through Town Lake on towards Longhorn Island when suddenly we found ourselves being flanked by one of those energetic Texas thunderclouds. Moments later we were being poured on.

We made the best of it and made for some shore-side cover and tried to get slightly less drenched. As things let up we head back closer to the dock only to encounter another storm. I espied a small dock on the side under which we found shelter.

Moments later the rain let up again and we paddled back to the dock. Slightly waterlogged, we left the boat and drove home. After a shower and a snack we started walking down to Zilker park for the evening’s symphony / fireworks show. We wisely left with our umbrellas in tow; chastened by our morning’s earlier experience we had become.

It took about 30 minutes to walk to the field where we sat and listened to the warm-up music and watched people toss balls about, banter, play cards, and relax. As the show got underway droplets started to fall.

….purple lightning seared the sky

…droplets became more regular

…thunder became more regular

The MCs told us that the event would go off rain or shine and that the rain wouldn’t last long as it passed over. As conditions worsened Lauren decided to scrub. Her hiker’s aversion for ‘open field, lighning, and me’ kicked in and we decided to demonstrate that contrary to the human animals instinct for gregariousness, we are smart enough to get out of the rain.

Umbrellas a-hike we headed soggily up the Barton Spring’s exit adjacent to MoPac back to our apartment.

Back home, a warm shower and a cup of tea set things aright and we went to bed.

You’ll note that we missed the fireworks and the 1812 Symphony + howitzer from Camp Mabry. That was a bit of a drag but sitting in mud with a field full of other lightning rods was not the ideal viewing venue.