Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2003 > Start of February Edition
The weather has been lovely this weekend, and I say "lovely" compared to the past month. And, although that will soon change, the coming cold is not expected to last past mid-month.
I took advantage of the warm weather to wash the salt and dirt off my car. I had also planned to visit Miller Tire in Muncie to get my tires changed, but it was too busy.
This past Sunday I bought the latest in the long series of city simulation games, which I have enjoyed since the early 1990's.
SimCity 4 lets you design cities, the regions where they are located, and the land on which they sit. You map out areas where your sims live, work, and shop; and provide them with roads, electricity, water, and places of rest. You can even instill fear in their hearts with such disasters as fire, tornado, lightning, meteors, volcanoes and (my personal favorite) the giant robot that looks like a mammoth version of Canti from the animé FCLC.
The game's chief flaw is that you have to be very careful how you set up your city, or you can quickly get your city into debt!
This is evidently what Will Wright, the author of the SimCity series, had in mind in making the ultimate city simulator (as he discussed in the SimCity 2000 in-flight film.
My site is still maintaining a less than two percent rate of failed page requests (excluding cracking attempts, of course). That's not bad.
During this past month I got a couple of friendly e-mails about the Caitlin Clarke Page. That makes me very happy that others appreciate her as much as I do, and I like to thank these two guys for both for visiting and for their kind responses.
Ms. Clarke as Allison in Never Again (newly released on DVD) was a tiny role. She was there just long enough to show the lead male role as emotionally dead, and for her to walk out on him in frustration. And then he finds true love—in Jill Clayburgh? Yes, he's dumping a Ms. Clarke character for, um, well, anyone. It is evident that this guy needs real help and, as New York City is the psychiatric capital of the world, he's in the right place!
I went to the local bar & grill for my Saturday lunch. The TV was showing a clear blue sky with two or three contrails on the Fox News. I learned that was what remained of the space shuttle Columbia. And I thought, Not again!
The space shuttle program is a remnant of the push into space that marked that fifty-year Cold War. Now the push is from a cheap Congress to make do with an aging shuttle fleet. From what I have read in the news, it was age that caused the peeling away of the heat tiles on the left wing and the premature release of its landing gear. The heat and the stress from the extra drag doomed the shuttle.
Worse than the loss of an old spacecraft is the terrible loss of life as it met its end. There is the most scant consolation that the fleet had been holding out very well, given how old the shuttles were. New cars fall apart in less time.