Maine War Story #2 - Things That Growl In The Night

At about 3 AM one of the last nights we were out on the island, I awoke to a growling sound coming from outside the cabin window. It sounded almost like when ya dog gets really angry and gives you one of those low growls right before he snaps at you. Since the only wild creatures on the island are the ones that can swim or fly there, I dismissed it as something I might have dreamed. But then I heard it again.

Of course, Craig and Dan were sacked out in their bedrooms down the hall and would have slept through the whole thing. I decided discretion was the better part of valor and woke Craig. He thought it might have been a bear, and he decided to ask Dan if he had heard anything. A half-asleep Dan replied, "Bear? Sure. Okay." Obviously he was still in dreamland.

Craig loaded up the .22 with a few shells just to make some noise and blew off a few rounds into the night sky. We didn't hear from whatever it was again, and my hearing is now suspect, but I definitely heard a couple growls from something right on the shoreline. I'm kinda glad whatever it was decided to take off, since a bear would probably laugh at a .22 bullet, and we didn't have anything else handy.

War Story #1 - The Flying ATV

Old railroad tracks run all over Machias. You can pick them up from many of the trails we ride on, and then take them almost anywhere you want, from Helen's restaurant in town to the stretch of the Machias River we kayak in. We ride down the middle of the tracks with our ATVs. The wheels fit just inside the rails and our tires ride over the wooden railroad ties. This obviously makes for a bumpy ride until you get going fast enough (around 30 MPH) for the quad to skip across the tops of the ties as you move along.

So Craig, Ray and I were riding from Helen's back toward camp. Craig was first in line, I was behind him and Ray was behind me. I was pretty much topped out in third gear and was sailing across the railroad ties rather nicely when I noticed Craig stopped up ahead, trying to flag me down. I stopped a few dozen feet short of a washout, where several of the ties were completely missing. The rails were still there, but the ties had been washed away. What was left was a ravine about 12-15 feet across. Mysteriously, Craig was on the other side of it.

When I asked Craig what the hell he had done, he told me he didn't notice the ravine until it was too late to stop, so he had just goosed the throttle and had somehow managed to sail over the ravine.

Based on the size and shape of the hole, by all accounts Craig's bike should have fallen in the hole and tossed him over the handlebars. Instead he had sailed across the hole almost like it hadn't been there at all.

It was a head-scratcher for certain, and we never did figure out how Craig made it across. Maybe it's like that unwritten rule in the Saturday morning cartoons - a character never starts falling until he realizes the ground is no longer under his feet.

Did Jeff Jarvis Just Nail Someone at Dell's Ad Agency?

Link. Depends, I guess. It depends on whether the domain was self-reported or whether Jeff looked up the IP of the person leaving the comment. I wonder if it will turn out to be someone from one of Dell's agencies or whether it's another hoax.

Update: Jeff's original post said the comment submitter left his "domain," but he confirms in comments that he looked up the logged IP address. IMHO, either someone spoofed the IP address or the agency employee is busted (more likely).

People With DVRs Don't Buy Them to Skip Commercials

...or so says ABC's President of Ad Sales Mike Shaw.

"I'm not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance," Shaw said. "It really is a matter of convenience--so you don't miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we're just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I'm not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don't fundamentally believe that. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can't skip commercials."

While you're wiping off your monitor, I'll tell you how I came across this story. Was it my subscription to Mediapost's newsletters that led me to this story? No. It was TotalFark, which linked to the story with an "UNLIKELY" tag.

If that's not a signal that the broadcast model is about to become a lot less important, I don't know what is.