Well, Newt didn’t mind the fireworks too much, yesterday, though when someone right out back started firing them off, he peered through the window, and Mer’d at each explosion. Fortunately there weren’t too many. *Pop* Mer? *Pop* Mer! *Pop* Mer! He’s been afraid of thunder when it’s right on top of the house, though.

I was going to go out to breakfast this morning, but decided it was nicer to just relax a bit and have a cup of instant General Foods International Coffee, Orange Cappuccino. Yummy, though I’m partial to the Swiss Mocha. I’m overdue for Coffee with Sappho and Ihop with Kev.

My daily spam between my regular mail and my registration mail is rather high, in my opinion. ~90 mails daily in the junk mail account, and about 70 in my regular mail, too. Filters work ok, but some things still fritter through. My bulk mail folder is especially large and I use a disposable addy whenever there’s a chance of it being harvested or traded. It’s not gotten too bad yet, but I might not feel the same way a bit more down the line. I’m wondering if perhaps I should consolidate my addys, and redistribute? I’ll concern myself more with it later on.

Danny spent a long time yesterday working on homework… he had to outline 4 chapters, and when I called him, he’s spent 2 hours outlining a 30 page first chapter. That seems too long to me, but I have no idea what the chapter contained. I figure that it’s a Danny-ism… making more work for himself than is needed. I’m amazed at his current Saturday Schedule… 8-hour cram class and then goes out with the wife for 3 hours dancing that night. He must be fried come Sunday. I’ll give him a call midday tomorrow and see how he’s surviving. He just had a pesky doctor’s visit, too… that can’t be helping matters.

Most of my nearest and dearest are needing repair in some way lately… Hip/back, hand, skin, legs… It seems most folks in my age group are starting to see the warrantee expire. Oh for a super-fixy bacta tank!

In other Star Wars nerdy News, while talking about bellybuttons, *someone* suggested mine was similar to a sarlacc, drawing in lint akin to Boba Fett with my yeti-hair acting as graspers. I’ll have the world know that my navel is generally lint-free.

Extra dork bonue – RPG stats for Sarlaac

Looks like weather station K4VAE was back online, but is down again. Bah.

There’s a guy building a castle out of old printing plates.
ONA, Florida (AP) — Cinderella’s Castle may be one of the most popular vacation destinations in Florida, but there’s another castle, also built on former swamp land and by a man with an active imagination.

It’s Solomon’s Castle, in no way associated with Disney World. The lesser-known attraction is far off the beaten path and very offbeat itself.

Sculptor Howard Solomon began building the castle in 1972 as his retirement home, not knowing that it would spin off into a new career that would bring thousands of visitors a year into his living room.

It is not only his home, but also his greatest work of art and a gallery for his sculptures.

“I think of it as a sculpture I live in,” he says.

The castle is also a centerpiece of an eclectic business that employs three generations of his family.

“I’ve been working on it for 31 years,” Solomon says. “I think of it as a hobby that got out of hand.”

Indeed, Solomon did not just stop at the castle, which is coated in 12,000 square feet of printing press plates discarded by the local newspaper — the shiny blank sides sparkle in the sun while the old news stories are forever hidden against the structure.

Next to the twin-towered castle is a three-fourths replica of Columbus’ sailing ship the Santa Maria that serves as a restaurant, sitting in a moat with a resident alligator. Beyond that is a gift shop and outdoor cafe.

Nearby, Solomon, a skinny man wearing glasses and a floppy hat, is perched about 10 feet above the deck of his latest project. He is building a wooden lighthouse along Horse Creek, where a water moccasin glided below as he hammered away.

‘It became a Sunday event’
The castle, Spanish galleon and lighthouse are tucked away in a quiet part of the Florida peninsula that’s far from the crowds and highways. The trip there is a delightful journey through miles of orange groves and cattle ranches. And if you want to stay overnight, there’s a bed-and-breakfast built into the castle. The suite contains a full kitchen and satellite TV. The $125 a night charge includes a bottle of wine, a tour of the castle and a full breakfast for two.

Howard Solomon’s “The First Flower Child,” made in 1971, is among works on display inside his castle.
It’s a different side of Florida that often isn’t seen by tourists. The farther away from Interstate 75, the lighter the traffic. An occasional trailer truck loaded with oranges passes in the opposite direction. Wildlife along the way may include vultures and hawks swooping in the air above, or a black racer slithering across the road.

And unlike the garish billboards that lead the way to Orlando’s attractions, the turnoff to Solomon’s Castle is marked by a small, easily missed white sign simply printed with its name and an arrow.

When guests arrive, an iguana that lives in a circular cage built around a tree in front of the castle greets them. The tour runs about 35 minutes, but visitors can also walk a nature trail lined with Spanish moss-covered live oaks and cypress trees along the creek.

Solomon never intended his home to become a tourist destination.

“I started building the castle and that started attracting people,” Solomon says. “It became a Sunday event for a lot of these people — come and see how the castle is progressing.”

He opened his home up to the curious once a month for 12 years, giving a free tour. Then his daughter told him he ought to charge admission and hold regular hours. Since then, tour groups have made regular trips to the castle and it’s now featured in a wide variety of books, from Fodor’s tour guides to the newly published “Florida Curiosities.”

“The only publication I’ve wanted to be in and haven’t got in is Architectural Digest,” Solomon says.

Retiring again
Solomon, a native of Rochester, New York, closed galleries of his work in the Bahamas and Miami and bought 70 acres of land in Ona, about 70 miles southeast of Tampa. The idea was to retire and sculpt.

He still sculpts, working in a 2,000-square-foot studio in the woods a short walk from the castle.

His works are made entirely of recycled material — oil drums, tin cans, car parts and just about any kind of old metal imaginable.

And Solomon is somewhat of a Henny Youngman of the art world. All his works have a one-liner to go along with them. Throughout the tour of the castle’s gallery, a guide reels off jokes and puns told in a flat, dry tone. There’s the sculpture of a tortoise shell with a wig dangling underneath it — it’s called “The Tortoise and the Hair.” There’s also Jack Kevorkian’s dueling pistols — the barrels of both are bent back toward the dueler.

Pointing to half a gondola hanging lengthwise on the wall, the tour guide explains the piece is called “Cleopatra’s Gondola.”

“She lost the other half in the divorce,” she says, without cracking a smile. “That’s why she’s in de Nile.”

The works also include Solomon’s interpretations of Darth Vader, Idi Amin and a whole host of other characters.

The jokes seem to start even before the sculptures are finished. Standing in his studio, Solomon points at a five-gallon bucket of military belt buckles and says, “Somewhere there’s a regiment with its pants down.”

Solomon conducts some of the tours himself if he isn’t working on the lighthouse or his next sculpture.

But this attraction could be gone at any time: Solomon is ready to retire from his retirement home.

The asking price: $5 million.

“But we’ll take $3.5 million,” he said. “What’s a million between friends.”

Asked if he wants to sell his home to someone who would maintain it as a tourist attraction, Solomon shrugs.

Sure, he says, “Or to some crackpot that wants it as an unusual home.”

U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System

MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city.

Dubbed “Combat Zones That See,” the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.

Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans.

The project’s centerpiece is groundbreaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.

According to interviews and contracting documents, the software may also provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist activities.

The project is being overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is helping the Pentagon develop new technologies for combating terrorism and fighting wars in the 21st century.

Its other projects include developing software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide to predict terrorist attacks and creating a computerized diary that would record and analyze everything a person says, sees, hears, reads or touches.

Scientists and privacy experts – who already have seen the use of face-recognition technologies at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London – are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon.

“Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time,” said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst.

DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker dismisses those concerns. She said the Combat Zones That See (CTS) technology isn’t intended for homeland security or law enforcement and couldn’t be used for “other applications without extensive modifications.”

But scientists envision nonmilitary uses. “One can easily foresee pressure to adopt a similar approach to crime-ridden areas of American cities or to the Super Bowl or any site where crowds gather,” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

Pike agreed.

“Once DARPA demonstrates that it can be done, a number of companies would likely develop their own version in hope of getting contracts from local police, nuclear plant security, shopping centers, even people looking for deadbeat dads.”

James Fyfe, a deputy New York police commissioner, believes police will be ready customers for such technologies.

“Police executives are saying, `Shouldn’t we just buy new technology if there’s a chance it might help us?'” Fyfe said. “That’s the post-9-11 mentality.”

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said he sees law enforcement applications for DARPA’s urban camera project “in limited scenarios.” But citywide surveillance would tax police manpower, Kerlikowske said. “Who’s going to validate and corroborate all those alerts?”

According to contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press, DARPA plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million by Sept. 1. In the first phase, at least 30 cameras would help protect troops at a fixed site. The project would use small $400 stick-on cameras, each linked to a $1,000 personal computer.

In the second phase, at least 100 cameras would be installed in 12 hours to support “military operations in an urban terrain.”

The second-phase software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify “what is normal (behavior), what is not” and discover “links between places, subjects and times of activity,” the contracting documents state.

The program “aspires to build the world’s first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic … analysis of live video” to study vehicle movement “and significant events across an extremely large area,” the documents state.

Both configurations will be tested at Ft. Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker declined comment on whether Kabul, Afghanistan, or Baghdad, Iraq, might be chosen but says the foreign country’s permission will be obtained.

DARPA outlined project goals March 27 for more than 100 executives of potential contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.

DARPA told the contractors that 40 million cameras already are in use around the world, with 300 million expected by 2005.

U.S. police use cameras to monitor bridges, tunnels, airports and border crossings and regularly access security cameras in banks, stores and garages for investigative leads. In the District of Columbia, police have 16 closed-circuit television cameras watching major roads and gathering places.

Great Britain has an estimated 2.5-million closed-circuit television cameras, more than half operated by government agencies, and the average Londoner is thought to be photographed 300 times a day.

But many of these cameras record over their videotape regularly. Officers have to monitor the closed circuit TV and struggle with boredom and loss of attention.

By automating the monitoring and analysis, DARPA “is attempting to create technology that does not exist today,” Walker explained.

Though insisting CTS isn’t intended for homeland security, DARPA outlined a hypothetical scenario for contractors in March that showed the system could aid police as well as the military. DARPA described a hypothetical terrorist shooting at a bus stop and a hypothetical bombing at a disco one month apart in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a city with slightly more residents than Miami.

CTS should be able to track the day’s movements for every vehicle that passed each scene in the hour before the attack, DARPA said. Even if there were 2,000 such vehicles and none showed up twice, the software should automatically compare their routes and find vehicles with common starting and stopping points.

Joseph Onek of the Open Society Institute, a human rights group, said current law that permits the use of cameras in public areas might have to be revised to address the privacy implications of these new technologies.

“It’s one thing to say that if someone is in the street he knows that at any single moment someone can see him,” Onek said. “It’s another thing to record a whole life so you can see anywhere someone has been in public for 10 years.”

ON THE NET

DARPA contracting document:
http://dtsn.darpa.mil/ixo/solicitations/CTS/file/BAA_03-15_CTS_PIP.pdf

one year ago 8-legged freaks, planting, many pictures that no longer link (curse you picturestage!), Harry potter fake book out, baby laff, octothorpe poll, 7

two years ago – Growing impatient, beverage poll, evil news, cudgel

three years ago – horrid stream of thought unformatted entry…I still eat much the same stuff, introspection