Ringed Shaped UFO — Interesting

This is one of the best “UFO in action” videos on Youtube right now. Whether it is legit or not is a whole nuther’ ball of wax. It is fair to note that the guy who shot this didn’t stabilize or focus correctly. Hell — if we had seen something like this, would we?

Check it out.

HamBoards

I saw a story about these things on Digg, and was pretty impressed by what I was reading so I followed the rabbit down the hole and found the following video on youtube.

Looks like fun!

I saw an article from BusinessWeek yesterday about “affordable global real estate” and I thought I’d share the link and my observations here.

In The Worlds Most Affordable Housing Markets, writer Maya Roney lays out where the smart money chooses to live based on an index of home prices, cost of goods and services, local stability and quality of life. Keep in mind that the article is from Business Week and explicitly uses a standard based on the needs of a youngish middle manager and his or her average sized household / family, or about — 4 bedrooms.

The top pick is Bogata, Columbia which I admit isn’t a place I normally think of as “stable” but if you enjoy tropical on a Canton Ohio budget there are probably worse places you can wind up in. Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt comes in at number two in affordability, and honestly — looks absolutely gorgeous with a cost of living comparable to Muncie, Indianna.

The top 10 including 3 rather cold but gorgeous locations in Canada, and both Nicaragua and Panama and the top 25 including locations in Malta, Poland and Honduras. Viva!

Each city is compared to a US Market to give the potential home buyer a reference point on which to base their explorations, and each location includes one color picture which is supposed to symbolize that particular environment. The pictures are very “stock” and the article runs over as many pages as possible no doubt to maximize their ad exposure and SEO. The navigation frame for the top 25 locations is easy to use, and that makes comparing the cost of a home in the Carribean to the cost of a similar home in Bozeman nearly painless.

The idea here is that real estate in the US may be flat, but the international market is still bullsih. There may be some truth to that, though for most non-retired folk, such a move might be problematic unless they had recently been offered employment in Cairo.

As for me I have decided to retire in Mexico; surf all morning, sleep all afternoon and play Troubadour all night long for rich touristas. Viva baby!

–Dex

It’s been almost 6 weeks since the accident, and my wife is still on high alert. She is still having lots of nightmares, and what I can only describe as flashbacks. Every interaction on the road leaps out at her like a high definition instant replay, in a thousand variations. She isn’t driving yet, and is seeing a therapist, who seems sincere. The therapist has her sitting behind the wheel of a safely parked vehicle, and doing breathing exercises, and that seems to help a bit, but it is a slow process. How can I describe to you what she is going through? I barely understand it myself. Her reptile brain has taken over, and she is in a constant state of agitation; the fight or flight reflex that for most comes only in small doses when really needed. For her it has come to stay and this heightened sense of alert magnifies her pain and keeps her in a shadowy half life that I am seemingly powerless to rescue her from. So as you can imagine I am constantly looking for ways to help her through this and get her “back on the horse” as they say.

To that end I discovered and recommended a kind of distraction that allows her to experience horrific car crashes in a safe and dare I say it? — “fun” setting. I turned her on to Grand Theft Auto 4. At first she was mortified by the violence of the car crashes in game, but over the course of a few hours she has definitely begin to enjoy it. I see a smile creep across her face that resembles my wife before the accident. She is learning to enjoy the interaction of twisted metal in first person, from the relative safety of the couch. I am thinking I may be on to something here.

It is probably to early to give a definite answer as we just started playing last night. She slept well though, and seemed to ride well today as we ran around town on several “real-life” errands. She is not behind the wheel herself yet, but the little changes are a welcome difference. She is still tense, to be sure. Tonight she leaned over to hug our daughter and turned her neck in an odd way that caused her to lock up — head and shoulders — for 20 – 30 minutes until we could massage the spasm out. I am certain that her pain was both real and distressing, but it seemed to pass quickly compared to previous days.

“One can only hope, and remain open to new ideas…” has become my only motto.

George knelt down and extended his rough heavy hand to help me to my feet. I stood upright and breathed in deeply, letting the thin and icy air awaken my senses. Time seemed to slow to a stop and then tentatively move forward again at half pace. Beside me, George’s breath came in abrupt gasps, in through his nose, and out through narrow pursed lips. The sun was setting and it reflected in his goggles, a soft milky orange glow, slowly fading. This was the summit of Mt. Shasta, Washington state, and my best friend and I had climbed all the way to the top, because it was still there.

I threw my arms wide to catch the last of its light, and inside I was singing at the top of my lungs. “HEEEEELLLLLLOOOOoooooo!”

I was 39 years old when they came for us at last. I was surprised that I was as surprised as I was, to be completely honest. I had always half expected we weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood, but it was still a powerful jolt to the nervous system when they revealed themselves to us en masse. It wasn’t so much the “invasion fleet” if that’s what they called it. The mobile phone video of their appearance in our atmosphere had spread rapidly, and we were all in shock, but that was nothing compared to the moment their friends on the ground revealed themselves to us simultaneously, in every human language, over every radio and TV station we had. That’s when we all started to realize that this was more then just an invasion; it was a coup.

Now much has been made of their appearance in the time since the first wave revealed itself to the world 5 years ago. It was almost as if years of bad science fiction had conditioned us to expect bug eyed reptiles with hybrid bumble bee DNA, when what we got was almost exactly the same as us, only “better” somehow. Each a near perfect humanoid specimen, strong and tall, with shining blue eyes and golden hair. Their bright smiles both mesmerized and terrified me. I know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

The thing is: their arrival signaled a lot of things to a lot of different people. On one hand you had the “Heavens Door”; a cargo cult that worshiped a piece of aluminum foil supposedly found at the wreckage of the crash at Roswell. They were mild mannered, and mostly harmless, which – in a saner universe – might have been a compliment, but in my world it served as more of an indictment. They tended to cluster together in loose communal groups of 10-20 people, and rarely had much contact with outsiders, beyond work. They were technos and coders, and preferred short to medium term contracts with very large corporations. Outsiders weren’t shunned really, but it wasn’t easy to get them to open up about anything – especially when it came to the esoteric beliefs of the inner door.

On the flip side you had the militias. The “Sons of Thunder” and the “Ghosts of the Dawns Early Light” were two of the most well known in the months and years following first contact. They were both splinter groups formed chiefly of ex-soldiers and mercs. Many were politically well connected and held security clearances. They were friendly with the “Lupus Group”; a highly organized private army during the Iraqi Occupation and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Terrodyne Corporation, which seemed to own just about everything else already.

The Sons of Thunder didn’t care for them, any more then I did, the Ghosts of Dawns Early Light were probably working for the bastards before most of us even knew what to call our new “friends”. The human population of the planet fell into a nod for several months. Most people were zombies. There was a lot of booze and a lot of dope used up in the first year. A lot of people stopped going to work. A lot of kids basically dropped out of school. You probably think there was anarchy in the streets, and maybe there was. If it was anarchy, it was the slow motion anarchy of the blockbuster car chase. People were going through some of the motions, but there seemed to be a lot of resistance between “us” and everything we thought we had to “do” to function as a member of society.

It wasn’t long before things started to change politically. They had to, you know?  Nothing was getting done any more, and everyone was doped to the rafters on Plexo and cheap Canadian Whiskey. It took 10 months for beer to jump ahead of bottled water and soda pop on the North American top 3 beverages list. Barnhaus never had such a year before or since, I’ll wager.

I want to take a moment and write a bit about car accidents.

My wife and children were involved in an awful wreck 10 days ago when their vehicle was struck by a driver who ran a red light at nearly 60 miles per hour. My wife was driving our Suzuki Reno and the car itself was totaled in the accident, though — thankfully — my family escaped with only injuries; some worse then others.

I am not going to detail the physical injuries in this post. My purpose in writing this today is to raise a little awareness about a side effect of traumatic accidents that I was not previously aware of. I am talking about “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” or PTSD. Before I get into it though I want to share with you a picture or two of the car post accident, so that you can get a feel for the violence of this particular accident.

Ok — first up is a picture of the front end of our car. As you can see, the car preformed as it was designed to do in the event of a catastrophic accident: The engine collapsed to the pavement, and the engine compartment folded itself around the passenger area, protecting the occupants of the vehicle.

Officers who arrived on the scene just after the accident and who interviewed the eyewitnesses tell me that my wife probably didn’t see the other vehicle until he appeared out of the blind spot near the crest of the hill, less then 20 feet from the intersection. Reacting on instinct, she slammed down hard on her breaks, and struck the other vehicle broadside in the passenger doors. Had she not reacted the way she did, he would have probably struck her broadside, and considering the size and weight of the other car — the outcome of the accident would have been very different for her and my children.

She tells me she can still see his face as clear as day as he looked up from whatever it was he was doing just as our car impacted with his. I can imagine the surprise on his face.

Thankfully, the other driver was riding alone, and there were no injuries in his car.

We were lucky, but not altogether unscathed. My 10 year old daughter was cut by her seatbelt in the lower part of her belly and required 20 stitches. Thats a picture of her stitches, next to the picture of our car (above). My son was the luckiest of all. Asleep at the time of the accident escaped with bruises on his face and back and a bloody nose. My wife was not so lucky, of course. She probably tensed up as she stomped down on the breaks, and her body suffered for it. Her injuries are numerous and include a fractured pelvic joint, a bulging disc in her spine where her neck meets her head, a large gash in her right shin and dozens of contusions over most of her body — especially on her left side.

Her worst injury by far in my opinion is something I had never considered before the accident. Because the accident happened at the corner just outside of our rural neighborhood, there is no way to avoid the intersection. She cannot ride in a car now without spontaneously and uncontrollably weeping. She has from horrible dreams wherein she relives the accident over and over, and consequently  suffers from insomnia. She is also prone to waking flashbacks, as well as visions of similar collisions whenever we pass another vehicle on a two lane road, or even while parking in the parking lot of our local grocery store. She is terrified of driving, and her body seems to be on a heightened state of alert at all times. This anxiety and stress has compounded her more physical injuries and caused her debilitating pain.

Because of the circumstances around the accident; the other driver running the red light, the impact with his vehicle, the spinning and subsequent ditching of our car, the smell of the airbags after deployment and the screams of my children as our care settled at the bottom of a ravine  — and because she was driving not only herself, but our children as well — she suffers from what her doctors have diagnosed as “post traumatic stress disorder. I am told that her recovery will be complete, and that she will eventually feel whole again, but the mental recovery will likely take months — perhaps even years. In the meantime I have read everything that I can find on PTSD and auto accidents, and I am struck by stories of anxiety and mental anguish that often persist long after stitches are removed and broken bones heal.

Honestly — I always assumed that PTSD was something soldiers suffered from after experiencing war up close. I never imagined that the same kind of thing might apply to those who survive a near fatal collision.  As a guy who has always been able to shrug off adversity, I must admit that it has always been hard for me to understand depression or anxiety. My gut reaction is to tell her to get back on the horse as soon as her physical injuries have healed, and maybe that works for some people — who knows? The truth of the matter is I have seen the very real effects this accident has had on my wife beyond the physical ones — I now have a deeper understanding and empathy for those who have experienced these kind of traumatic events in their lives. It is my hope that anyone who suffers from this kind of thing gets the help they need for both their physical and emotional injuries because there can be no real recovery without addressing both.