Remember my pride in cleaning my a/c coils myself?  Remember my joy about having frosty air blowing through the vents?

When you have a 15-20 year old a/c unit held together with little more than baling wire and duct tape, do not attempt to take a cover off and clean out debris.  This, my friends, is what I attempted to do and in so doing, I probably jarred an electrical connection loose.  Thus, as I type this, I sit in a house without air conditioning.

To be sure, our house makes the best of the situation.  I wouldn’t want to try this experience in a house originally built with air conditioning.  Our house, built in 1928, may not have originally had electricity, much less air conditioning.  Thus, our 2/1 home has fifteen windows and screen doors on both front and back doors.  Plus, we’re lucky in that every major room has a ceiling fan.

So with every window not painted shut open + 4 ceiling fans + 2 oscillating fans + 2 doors open, it’s tolerable in this house.  The thermostat temperature gauge reads 87 degrees inside the house, but it feels much cooler, although The Weather Channel reports that it’s 92 degrees currently at Waco Regional Airport.

But seriously – don’t take apart your older a/c unit unless you absolutely have to.  Take it from one who learned the hard way.

1. If you didn’t see the game – or couldn’t stay up late to put it to bed – this year’s MLB All-Star Game ended in the bottom of the 15th when Michael Young of the Texas Rangers drove in a run to win the Midsummer Classic for the American League for the third time in two years.
2. Yankee Stadium got a good one to finish out its life.
3. Did anyone see the interview David Letterman did with Bud Selig Monday night on the Late Show?  I’ve not been able to find any video of it, but Letterman chastised Selig for 2002’s ASG in Milwaukee’s spanking-new Miller Park, which notoriously ended in a tie when both leagues’ teams ran out of available pitchers.  Selig surely cannot help but be smug tonight.  Everyone got their money’s worth.
4. Dan Uggla is now the Leon Lett of second basemen.  Leon Lett, you will remember, played defensive line for the Dallas Cowboys from 1991 until 2000.  During that time, Leon managed to not score a touchdown in Super Bowl XXVII, botched the snow game against the Dolphins on Thanksgiving Day, and as one announcer put it, “led the world” in offsides penalties.  Uggla could not field a grounder tonight to save his life, and for that, I’m putting him in the Leon Lett Boneheaded Plays Club.  Uggla finished tonight’s 15 inning game 0 for 5, struck out three times, left six men on base, and committed six errors.  Which leaves two questions: How did this guy make the team?  And are Floridians stuffing ballot boxes again?
5. Tonight’s game must have set new records in baseball history for the number of players thrown out at home (6, by my count) and bunts in any game, anywhere.
6. Joe Buck must have really run out of things to talk about on the air.  About the 13th inning, he started talking about how thin each team’s bullpen looked.  By about the 14th inning, all he had left to talk about was how Scott Kasmir threw 104 pitches in Sunday’s game and his team, the Tampa Bay Rays, left specific instructions with Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona not to let the guy pitch too much.

This year’s MLB feel-good story: Josh Hamilton, a years-long crack addict, cleans up, leads the Texas Rangers out of the AL West cellar (currently in 3rd place behind the Angels and A’s and 7 1/2 games out of 1st, but who’s counting?) and starts for the American League in the All-Star Game, the last ASG ever to be played in Yankee Stadium.  (The Yankees move across the street to New Yankee Stadium after this season.)

Check out The Dallas Morning News’ coverage.

UPDATE 1:  Hamilton is currently in the first round of the Home Run Derby at Yankee Stadium.  He currently sits with 8 outs (of 10), and has just hit his 23rd home run, 1 shy of Bobby Abreu’s mark of 24 in 2005.  His 20th (or so) home run went for 518 feet, just shy of Sammy Sosa’s long ball mark.  More to come…

UPDATE 2:  Hamilton beat Abreu’s 2005 record.  Just hit # 25 in the first round.  Make that 26th.  Stay tuned…

UPDATE 3:  Hamilton just finished the first round with 28 home runs, just a few shy of the record for TOTAL home runs in the home run derby.

UPDATE 4:  Hamilton won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College.

…for yourself, the environment, and your wallet.  For less than $6, you can purchase an air conditioner coil cleaner.  It’s sold in a spray-paint can (that part may not be great for the environment, but it has no CFCs).  Cut the power to your outside a/c unit and spray the foaming cleaner on the coils.  It’s supposedly self-rinsing, but I went ahead and hosed it off (the instructions permit rinsing).  As soon as I cut the electricity to the outdoor unit back on, the difference was readily apparent.  Before, our a/c unit clanged around and we wrote it off as being an old (15-20 years) unit.  Now, it’s humming to the point that Tovah said it’s purring.

I shudder to think how much money we lost in electric bills and how much energy we wasted because we didn’t know to do this.  Six bucks was a cheap fix.

Kudos to Nick for the recommendation.  I purchased my can at Lowe’s, but I understand it’s available at any hardware store or home improvement big box store.

Check out Sen. Kennedy’s speech at Liberty University (!) (yes, Jerry Falwell’s school) from 1983.

And why?  And, under the First Amendment, should individuals get to choose how they revere the flag or should the government “prescribe what is orthodox” and tell people how to venerate the flag.

Consider this op-ed from Sunday’s editions of The Washington Post.

Powerful stuff for those who identify themselves as people of Christian faith, particularly in the evangelical tradition of the twentieth century.

When the church began to doubt its own integrity after the Darwinian attack on Genesis 1 and 2, we began to answer science not by appealing to something greater, the realm of beauty and art and spirituality, but by attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations, thus justifying ourselves to culture, as if culture had some kind of authority to redeem us in the first place.

…Because we have approached faith through the lens of science, the rich legacy of art that once flowed out of the Christian community has dried up.  The poetry of Scripture, especially in the case of Moses, began to be interpreted literally and mathematically, and whole books such as the Song of Songs were completely and totally ignored.  They weren’t scientific.  You couldn’t break them down into bullet points.  Morality became a code, rather than a manifestation of a love for Christ, the way a woman is faithful to her husband, the way a man is faithful to his wife.  These relational ideas were replaced with wrong and right, good and bad, with only hinted suggestions as to where wrong and right and good and bad actually came from.  Old Testament stories became formulas for personal growth rather than stories to help us understand the character and nature of the God with whom we interact.

Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004, pp. 160-161.

Congratulations to Greg Nixon, a name you probably don’t know unless you watched the U.S. Olympic Trials on Thursday night.  Greg, a former HPU student who played football and didn’t begin running track until his junior year of college, ran in the 400m finals Thursday night at the U.S. Olympic Trials at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR.  Granted, Greg didn’t make the final cut to travel to Beijing with the Olympic team and represent the United States, but I couldn’t be prouder that my alma mater received so much attention (compared to years past) this year.

Sadly, though, Greg will probably be the last HPU sprinter to do much of anything for awhile, because HPU decided to cancel the program.

First, let me offer this story from The Dallas Morning News.  A notable quote:

Only 14 percent of dial-up users say they’re stuck with the older, slower connection technology because they can’t get broadband in their neighborhoods, [the Pew Internet and American Life Project] reported Wednesday.

Thirty-five percent say they’re still on dial-up because broadband prices are too high, while another 19 percent say nothing would persuade them to upgrade. The remainder have other reasons or do not know.

“That suggests that solving the supply problem where there are availability gaps is only going to go so far,” said John Horrigan, the study’s author. “It’s going to have to be a process of getting people more engaged with information technology and demonstrating to people it’s worth it for them to make the investment of time and money.”

Of course, the article goes on to say that most who do not subscribe to a broadband internet service are those who are poor or who are elderly.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have DSL through AT&T and I enjoy the service.  I have a wireless network inside our house such that my wife and I can both be connected to the internet at the same time from anywhere in our home.

Yet I’m concerned that Internet access demand is a policy issue.  Sure, FDR prioritized rural electrification, but clearly that’s a supply issue.  Electric providers in those days refused to acquire the land required for electric wires and stretch those wires across expanses of land only to supply but a few homes and/or businesses with electric power.  Although most wanted electricity, the government – nor any other identifiable group – never told people, “Oh, you should want this electricity!  Look how great it is!”  Rather, FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, ran a line in front of every house, mansion, and shack in the country and collectively informed the residents, “If you want this power that’s running through the wires in front of your house, call us and we’ll hook you up.”

This is very different.  This seems to suggest that there’s something wrong with a person who doesn’t use technology.  Nevermind that it might be a personal preference, you should want broadband internet access, and if you don’t, that’s a problem we should study.

Of course those who are poor are disproportionately likely to not have broadband access.  If a person either maxes out a credit card, uses a rent-to-own agreement with exorbitant interest rates but low weekly payments, or tries to win a sweepstakes to afford a computer, the simple reality will be that person likely lacks the disposable income to purchase broadband on a recurring monthly basis.  (Now, if a broadband firm provided a stripped-down, lower-speed version of its service and people don’t sign up for it because they don’t know about it, there’s a problem to study.)

Similarly, why should elderly people be told that they need broadband?  Many take the attitude that they survived perfectly fine for decades without computers, much less internet access and sure as heck aren’t going to need it now in the twilight of their life.  There’s some comfort and/or nostalgia in the familiar, paper-based information resources.  They figure they can get to the library or the bookstore or even the landline telephone to get their information.  I just don’t see why my 85-year-old grandmother who knows nothing about computers, the internet, and likely doesn’t even know that videoconferencing exists should be told she needs broadband.

This seems like an advertising schtick masquerading as a public policy issue.  Broadband providers who, admittedly, make a huge capital investment in the infrastructure, seek to gain a larger market share by growing the pie.  Everyone who wants broadband most likely has it and most don’t want to switch.  Thus, by getting the elderly and the poor to sign up, providers grow their customer base without the battle to convince people to switch.

Second, I can understand the frustration of many elderly with technology.  A rather useful resource here in the law library touts that it is “going green,” after its publisher printed and mailed the resource all over the state for years.  Shortly after it “went green,” aka published the content only on its website, it ended the service altogether.  I know it’s better for the environment and I’m sure that, in some respects, it’s more useful now than it was in paper form, but geez, they did make stuff harder to find.

Within the past several years, Ted Nugent, yes, he of 1980s hair band rocker fame, left his Michigan roots for Central Texas.  Specifically, McLennan County.

And Waco welcomed him with open arms, even allowing him the opportunity to write a weekly column for our humble newspaper.

Now Ted has participated in that Waco tradition, that weekend rite of passage.  Ted held a garage sale.

But this was no average garage sale.  In addition to the Waco Tribune-Herald‘s comprehensive coverage:

• Ted advertised his garage sale via his column in last Sunday’s paper.
• Rather than have bargain hunters, fans, and crunchy people come to his home, Ted rented a building at the Heart O’ Texas Fair Complex.
• Not only did Ted rent a building, he advertised his garage sale on the fairgrounds’ marquee.
• “What’s for sale?” you ask?  Ted’s taxidermy – stuffed trophy animals and/or animal heads, including a rhino head, that he and his wife cannot fit into their house to which they’re downsizing.

If that’s not “Wacofabulous,” I don’t know what is.  I can only wait to hear what Mammaw has to say about it when she reads this week’s Sunday paper.