American in Spain » Scary

Neighborhood Kings Day Fire

erik — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:42:08 +0000

On Kings Day, my family woke up excited to see what presents the Magi had brought us. We looked out our sixth story window and saw fog. But there was something strange about the fog; it was moving very quickly and…billowing. Smoke! One of the old houses that our bedroom window overlooks was billowing white smoke, and a fireman was perched on a cherry picker spraying water down into the interior of the house. It’s three hours later as I write this and they are still spraying even more water and more smoke is billowing out. I took some photos.

The house with the brick ground floor is the one that has burned down. I walk by it every day. I’ve shopped in the store to the left, but the building to the right has been abandoned with aging Banco Santander decals on it for the six years I’ve been living in Colindres.

Because of the weather today, the smoke is completely invisible from ground level.

But seen from above, you can clearly see just how much of it there is.

The house is totally gutted. No, I don’t know why there’s a bathtub on the neighbor’s balcony. It’s been there ever since we bought our house.

The neighborhood is filled with that thick acrid smell that triggers strong emotions in anyone that has ever experienced a house fire. My closest brush with a fire was when a dorm room at my boarding school burned down. No one was hurt, but it was a traumatic night, and the emotions are still vivid.

I hope everyone got out okay. Disasters are always sad, but it’s especially poignant when it happens on one of these days when Society expects us to be joyous.

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My Eye

erik — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:29:32 +0000

Today I discovered a macro feature of my video camera lens that I had forgotten existed. The first thing I did was pick up a one dollar bill that I have on my desk for some reason and examine POTUS1′s face. Impressed, I decided I needed to record a video of something very close up. Not having an ant farm or a pet praying mantis, I decided the best subject for my first macro video should be my gorgeous greenish-yellow eyes. It took a couple attempts to figure out how to best, without too much effort, keep the camera and my head from moving around too much. I ended up sitting on the floor with the camera resting on my desk. Clearly, this level of intimacy required some creepy background music, so I found some.

If you’re really brave, you can try the 720p HD version.

Can you figure out which of my eyes this is?

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Dog Bite

erik — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:58:44 +0000

My parents have three dogs: Buster, Sam and Blue. I learned almost a decade ago that Buster was the most likely to actually bite someone when I got a little too rough playing with him and I got a tooth to the bridge of my nose. It didn’t break the skin, but it was sufficiently scary to give me a sense of cautious respect when dealing with Buster. We knew from our very first visit with Nora that Buster should never really be in the same room with Nora. Buster is the alpha dog of the house and is pretty much completely deaf, as old springers often are.

Sam is the #2 dog on the house totem. With humans, he’s the sweetest, most friendly of the three. With other dogs, he’s the enforcer that keeps other dogs in line. Sam is the dog that we are least worried about biting Nora. Once, on a previous visit, he did give her a “Stop bothering me!” bark that freaked her out for a couple hours, but that’s all he’s ever done. However, he’s still a dog that is not used to having children around, so we keep an eye on him.

Blue is a border collie, bred to herd sheep with a solid work ethic and desire for control of his surroundings. Blue is, for lack of a better word, autistic. His social skills with other dogs and especially with people are very lacking. There are very, very few people, with the exception of my parents, that can touch Blue. He shies away from any human contact. Generally this makes him docile and the furthest thing from a threat, but sometimes those shepherd authoritarian neurons fire and he can be aggressive and controlling. One time Marga and I were walking around my parents’ yard and Blue decided he needed to herd us, which involved circling us very aggressively and nipping at us with snarls. It was quite scary.

For this visit to my parents’ house, it was decided that Buster should stay at a kennel because we learned during our last visit that he’s a howler when locked up in his crate in the garage. It was decided that Blue can be let out of his garage crate every so often, but mostly only when Nora was sleeping or away from home. On the first full day of our visit, however, there was a miscommunication and Nora followed her grandmother to the garage, unaware that she was going there to release Blue. Blue and Nora both came around a corner at the same time, in opposite directions, and had an encounter. I didn’t see what happened, but he gave her what is technically referred to as a “tooth bump”, which is sort of like a bite, but without the full flesh-ripping force that could be applied.

Needless to say, Nora freaked the hell out and cried for a good while. Blue was immediately put in the car and taken to the kennel for the remainder of our stay. Nora was scared of Sam for the rest of the day, but luckily seems to have gone back to being his friend since then. I was concerned that such an incident might introduce a general lifelong fear of dogs, but it looks like it hasn’t. Her bruise clearly shows the teeth marks from the bite.

Nora’s dog bite.

Poor thing. At least she’ll heal.

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WatchLiveFootball.tv is a scam

erik — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:30:23 +0000

Recently there was a soccer match that I wanted to watch, but that was not broadcast on my basic cable television. Investigating around the internet for a site that would stream the live game, I stumbled upon a very well designed website called watchlivefootball.tv. If you go there, you will see a nice listing of today’s fixtures with the time the match starts, the players, past results for each team, and the logos for each team as well as the league or tournament the game belongs to. It looks very professional. On each match page, there is a video player. When you click play, you are presented with this:

Ooppss!

When you click the link, you are taken to another professional looking page which informs you that the watchlivefootball.tv service is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Many of the competing services are Windows-only, so I was very pleased to see the other supported OSes. I then fell for the “$34.95 for three years” offer that is “ending only hours from now!” rather than the monthly fee. It would actually be a good deal if it weren’t a scam.

They forward you to ClickBank.com to put in your credit card information, and they issue you a username and password. It’s all still professional up to this point. You can immediately log in and what do they do? All WatchLiveFootball.tv does is provide you with a link to a free page called ATDHE to watch streaming sports for free.

Right there on the ATDHE terms of service page, they say:

Many sites charge money and send you here. ATDHENet.tv is a free website. If you paid to use this site, we suggest you ask for your money back from the place you paid for.

ClickBank.com is not a scam

I had never heard of ClickBank, but apparently they are a direct competitor of PayPal, providing online transactional services for internet vendors, particularly ones selling intangibles like downloads. They are real, and they will refund your money if you ask them to. I clicked on the link in my confirmation email to go to my order on their website, clicked on the “support” button, and entered a support ticket with the following comment:

All this vendor does is provide a link to a free website. There is no value provided. I would like my money back. Thanks.

Within five days they had credited my account. The listing for the vendor in ClickBank that tried to take my money through WatchLiveFootball.tv was stream-online-movie.com, so probably anything that they are offering is also a scam, but I cannot confirm that.

How to watch live streaming sports on the internet for free

Go to ATDHEnet.tv and hopefully the game you are looking for will be listed there. I’m not a laywer, but I’m pretty sure that streaming live television coverage of sporting events is not strictly legal. The way ATDHE gets away with it is that all they do is collect links to other third party video streaming sites (e.g. UStream.tv) that just don’t have the resources to immediately police their users that are up-streaming from their televisions.

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February Hurricane

erik — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:07:55 +0000

The weather today has been very, very odd. Everyone is using the word huracán for what is in store for us tonight. Nora and I spent much of the afternoon outside in the unseasonably warm temperatures and brisk breeze. We saw several dumpsters that had been tied down to keep them in place. There were a few strange occurrences, such as when it rained from a perfectly blue sky.

This is what the sky looked like when it was raining. The rain must have been leaving a cloud several kilometers away and then blowing towards us to reach its final destination of our heads.

At night fall we got a call from Marga at home telling us to rush home because the wind was picking up and sometimes in storms like this shingles (big terracotta Spanish shingles!) can come loose and crash to the ground, easily crushing any skulls below. Just as I hung up with her, a huge gust came that almost blew Nora’s stroller over. We ran home immediately leaning into the wind.

The temperature, which had been between 15º and 19º C all day rose sharply at dusk to 23° C. Whatever it was, it was coming…

Once home, Marga and I were looking out the window at plastic bags flying about violently up at our level of the sixth floor. Then, all of a sudden, a big thud, and then a big piece of something slammed into the angled window that I was staring out, scaring me half to death, before tumbling over the edge of the building.

It fell right where Nora and I had been a few minutes earlier. It seems like it miraculously fell between two vehicles.

We raced upstairs (our apartment has two floors) to see where the piece broke off. And there we saw only one twirly vent thing where there used to be two.

Where the piece broke off.

Our building is particularly noisy in windy conditions, so we expect to spend the night huddled in bed hoping the rest of the building doesn’t break apart. A hurricane in February!

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Pumpkin Carving 2009

erik — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:13:40 +0000

After eleventh hour gourd procurement last year, this year my local grocer friend, Andrés, who regularly visits farmers markets to buy fruit and vegetables, had his eye out for the perfect pumpkin for me to carve. And sure enough, he came through with the perfectly shaped pumpkin. Last night I carved it into a jack-o-lantern.

I’m glad to be giving a little momentum to this tradition because it’s going to be a lot more fun in the coming years when Nora can understand and participate. Following the should’ve-been-award-winning success of our clay keepsake craft videos, it seemed like a good idea to film the pumpkin carving.

As always, I recommend that you click through to see it in HD.

I was surprised this year at just how much of a lantern my jack-o-lantern turned out to be. With the lights out, and a single candle lit inside, the entire pumpkin glows ominously. Very cool.

The obligatory with-flash shot. The design was inspired by Nora’s current dental layout.

I’d say that’s scary enough.

See how the whole thing glows?

This is my favorite shot, I think. The only light in the photograph is coming from the candle inside the pumpkin.

[puts flashlight under chin]

Nora begged us to cut a hole in the bottom and let her wear it as her Halloween costume this year. But when we put it over her head, her head seemed to vanish completely leaving only an empty gourd upon her shoulders! Bwahahahaha!!!

Happy Halloween!

Just like last year, as thanks to Andrés and for my work to be seen, I’ve left the jack-o-lantern with the local grocery store all day today. Gracias, Andrés!

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Morphing Nora Into An Adult

erik — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:38:39 +0000

This is quite possibly the creepiest blog post I’ve ever posted, at least on a personal level. I’ve always known I would do this, and my regular readers might share in my surprise that it’s taken me so long to do it. Yesterday, in a curiosity-fueled effort to speculate on what Nora might look like as an adult, I morphed my face with my wife’s. Morphing is always creepy, and even more so when it is done with faces that you know very well.

A few things to notice…

The hair is all wrong, of course, but that’s an unavoidable problem with morphing two people with radically different hair styles.
This face is better looking that either of us. This is also a common occurrence in morphing. When individual imperfections are averaged away the result is closer to what humans perceive as beautiful. And any psychologist will tell you there’s some unconscious narcissism involved in my assessment.
For the same reason as above, the resulting face looks younger than either of us.

At this point there was really no turning back. How could I NOT morph Nora’s present face into this combined face of her parents??

Behold:

So based on complete speculation, this is what Nora’s face (ignore the hair) might look like when she’s about 15 or so.

I told you it was creepy!

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The Curse

erik — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:18:14 +0000

Recently, as I was adjusting the canopy over Nora’s stroller, an object fell out and onto the ground. I picked it up and gasped! It was quite possibly the most horrible little doll thing I’ve ever seen. My mind reeled as to how my loving wife, who I thought I knew pretty well, could attach such an evil little doll to our child’s pram. Later that night, I confronted her about it.

Her response was, “Oh my god! I’ve never seen that thing in my life! You brought it into this house?!” Reassured by her innocence, I began to ponder how such a thing could have happened to such a well-intentioned family. The only reasonable conclusion is that someone has put a curse on us. A dark, dark curse.

Below I present the doll thing that I found. If you have small children or pets in the room, encourage them to look away.

It’s little arms are held together with a spring like a clothes pin, so it can be attached to unsuspecting victims.

It’s like Tammy Faye Barbie!

Of course another possible explanation is that it was clipped to our stroller while it was parked at Nora’s daycare where there are half a dozen 4-year-olds running around with toys. But I like the curse explanation better. That way we don’t have to take responsibility for anything bad that happens to us ever again.

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Autophagic Ice Cream Cone

erik — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:46:03 +0000

Since becoming a member of a Flickr group called Scary Beings Eating Themselves, I’m always on the lookout for such a photographic subject. Well, last Saturday in Burgos, we had a little run-in/altercation with one such scary being. Below I present the photographic evidence.

Here’s the little cannibal now…

Looks harmless enough to others, right?

So Marga and Nora posed with him.

But then someone had the idea to put Nora up on his arm.

This was too close for my comfort and I called an end to the photography session and sent in the troops to lick him to death.

I swear that’s how it happened!

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Tornado Takes Roof Off Spanish Restaurant

erik — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:20:18 +0000

The video they can’t stop showing on the Spanish news cycle today, besides the one where Obama thanks a member of the Spanish royal family for being in attendance when she was not (what’s Spanish for faux pas?), is of a restaurant in Jávea, Alicante, where a tornado came by and took the roof off while customers were eating inside. Clearly Spain doesn’t have the kind of tornadoes that the US does, because no one was sucked out and thrown miles away, but it’s pretty darn scary enough as it is.

I wonder how many people claimed that the money for their meal was already on the table when the twister hit.