Letter From Joshua

In which I am reminded again how old I am

2012-01-12T07:10:00.003-06:00

The hard drive on my work laptop is suffering a slow and painful (for me) death, so I visited our most competent and helpful IT guy a few days ago for advice and resources.* After a long discussion of replacement drives, backup strategies and potential disasters, we somehow ended up talking about online services.

The two twenty-somethings in the room were quite surprised to find out that there was a life online before everyone had access to the internet. They knew that there had been a thing called "dialup" but were unaware that AOL was essentially a huge online bulletin board. Then I had to explain about online bulletin boards. Neither had ever heard of CompuServe or Prodigy. One started googling immediately, and probably spent the rest of the day researching the ancient days of the early 1990's.

It was an entire day later that I remembered that millions of people in this country, mostly in rural areas, still don't have access to broadband. Millions of others don't have the money, the motivation, or the perceived need. I assume their lives are lived much differently from mine, since I spend a great deal of time sitting in my living room logged into another machine somewhere, streaming video, or looking up random things I see on television. It's what the punditry likes to call the "digital divide," and those on the other side are increasingly excluded from society. Many businesses, publications, and other activities are now primarily or completely online.

But I digress. Yesterday was about fresh backups and modest but low-risk repairs that I was pretty sure were not going to work. Today I bite the bullet, erase the drive, confirm that it is bad, and replace it. Back up your data kids. Remember, there are two kinds of hard drives -- those that have failed and those that will.

* We have a help desk, but their helpfulness is somewhat ... irregular. I haven't read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I assume one of them is "find an IT person that will help you."

Oval Office Space

2012-01-03T18:38:00.000-06:00

From what I see on the TV, it seems many Republicans are having a hard time deciding who should run against the President this year. People have all sorts of methods for picking candidates. For instance, my mother seems to vote for the man she could most easily imagine being married to (Mitt Romney, last I heard). Others seem to choose the candidates that are most understandable, hottest, show strong leadership, or are principled and moral (good luck with that one). Since whatever method people use seems to be falling short for so many this time, I would like to recommend an approach that has worked for me.

In recent years I have tried to remember that electing someone for office is no more or less than hiring a person to do a job. So I like to imagine the candidates as co-workers, and compare them to people I know, or with whom I've had some experience. I am often surprised at how much this clarifies things.

Mitt Romney is probably easiest. The quintessential CEO, he is the clear choice if you think the purpose of government is to maximize financial return for people who own American dollars.* If, on the other hand, you believe the government should maximize the value citizens receive for tax dollars, or care about any of the non-financial aspects of life, you may want to keep looking. Romney also seems to fight the perception that he would sell the whole place for a bigger bonus and a private jet.

Rick Perry, who we may not have to kick around much longer, is obviously Head of Sales. He won the Salesperson of the Month award every month until they finally retired it. He drives an El Dorado with a Rolls Royce grille and longhorns on the hood, and he has slept with every woman in the office.

Newt Gingrich runs the Research Department. He will tell anyone who will listen that business majors are all idiots. He is the guy that puts the note on the refrigerator about eating other people's lunches. He is also the number one customer of the Honor Snacks, and only paid once when he noticed someone watching.

Ron Paul is the last remaining member of old school upper management. He was CFO for thirty-five years, but was recently given the title of Ombudsmen and relocated to the Florida office. He is convinced that globalization and rapid growth through acquisition is going to bite the company square in the ass. He is correct, but this doesn't change the fact that this is how business is done today. He collects Hummel figurines.

Rick Santorum? Look for the guy in your office wearing a sweater vest. It looks like Bachman is gone, so try it yourself with Huntsman. It's fun and informative, and may even help you make up your mind.

*This is an application of the principle of "maximizing shareholder value," which holds that the primary purpose of a corporation is to enrich the people who own it. Popularized in the 1980's when Romney was one of the people buying and breaking up companies, the approach has become a foundational concept of corporate management. Note that customers, partners, employees, and society at large are not really part of the formula, except indirectly.

Movie Sunday: POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

2012-01-01T16:06:00.000-06:00

Image from here

I have to admit that I am a big fan of Morgan Spurlock. Unlike most documentary filmmakers (will admit), he makes films about himself. Sort of like a thinking person's Jackass, his movies seem to start with Spurlock musing, "I wonder what would happen if I..."

POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is Spurlock's answer to the question of what it would be like to make a movie about product placement -- or "brand integration" -- that was totally funded by product placement. The film tracks our hero as he learns about the advertisers' place in the movie business today, and how different filmmakers deal with it. There are numerous scenes with potential sponsors or industry consultants, and cameos by well known directors. I learned much more about modern entertainment than I wished to know, though probably less than I should.

If you think this sounds like watching the sausage being made, you are correct. But I think this is the genius of Morgan Spurlock. Through humor, honesty, and a seeming total lack of pretense, he is able to show us the seamy side of anything and somehow neutralize the revulsion. He almost killed himself eating McDonalds food, but watching him almost made me want to try it.* In this film, Spurlock takes us along as he tries to sell his soul while maintaining his integrity, and he really doesn't try to hide his struggle with maintaining the balance. He also serves up plenty of reminders of exactly how much we should trust someone who is being paid to recommend things.

It's not exactly Transformers 3, but I found it quite entertaining. If you like a good documentary, and you are at all curious about how much of what you see on your screen is there because someone is being paid to put it there, you should definitely see this film. We liked it so much we put Pom Wonderful bellinis on our Christmas morning menu.

* If you haven't seen SuperSize Me, you should probably watch it before (or instead of) this one. Besides being a more important film, it is probably a better introduction to Morgan Spurlock's unique brand of filmmaking.

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-24T08:57:00.000-06:00

We are staying home for Christmas this year. Between significant anniversaries, family transitions, and Christmastime funerals,* we have traveled for entirely too many years running. It is wonderful to be with family, but 1500 miles of driving, a week away from home, and the inevitable accompanying colds and flu get to be a little much after a while.

Staying home means having the time to decorate the house, send cards, cook, and generally enjoy the season, at least in theory. We did manage to decorate this year, and we have definitely been enjoying the season. Christmas at home virtually guarantees a stress-free holiday.

I'm sure we will be back on the road next year. Which helps me appreciate this week even more. And no matter what holiday (or none) you celebrate at this time of year, the turning of the year has its own weird magic. With the dead of winter staring us in the face, it's a natural time to look forward and back at the same time.

Whether you are fighting the holiday rush, fighting over the last glass of wine at the family gathering, or nestled snug in your home, have a Merry and Happy, and whatever else you can manage.

* Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Marking Time

2011-12-14T19:30:00.000-06:00

Civilization is all about mediating our baser instincts with layers of ritual and indirection. Let's face it, many (if not all) of our relationships are based on what someone else can do for us, as long as the price is not too odious. But when we strip away enough of the dance to simply trade sex for cash, the veneer gets too thin for most people's tastes.*

Another place the veneer can get pretty thin is the timesheet. From the time I was fifteen, I was compelled to punch in, sign in, or log in at every job I worked, accounting for my time to the minute initially, and later to the quarter hour. Like toddlers getting haircuts, new workers generally find this practice horribly degrading and painful, and it often takes several years for the indignation to fade. This is because they see it for what it is.

After about thirty years of this, I found my indignation returning. I'm sure this is partially because of the type of jobs I was doing, and the accompanying changes in expectations. Dairy Queen paid me $2.50 for every hour that I spent cooking, mopping, waiting on customers, and making out with Nancy Jacuzzi in the walk-in cooler. After I clocked out, they stopped paying me, and I effectively stopped being an employee. They really didn't care much what I did, as long as I wasn't wearing the little paper hat.

Inexorably, job by job, that social contract changed. I was still expected to account for every minute that I was on the job, but employers expected more. Loyalty, concern for company property and welfare, unpaid overtime, appropriate wardrobe, abstinence from certain extra-curricular activities, and "other duties as directed" are routinely expected by employers, with no real change in attitude toward the employee. Admittedly, they pay more than Dairy Queen, but as the punchline to the old joke goes, "Now we know what you are, we're just haggling on price." In the most extreme cases, we essentially rent the best years of our lives to someone else. The final straw for me was my CEO calling on a Saturday afternoon, asking why I had not responded to the e-mail she sent two hours before.

The last four years have been the first of my professional career without timesheets, and it is hard to describe the difference. People still tell me what to do and expect me to be at work, but I feel much more in control of my own priorities and actions. Our focus is on results, not what people do with every minute of their day.

In the end, the real difference is probably inconsequential. I'm still doing what someone else wants in exchange for money. But the extra layer of indirection makes it easier to pretend we are all in it together.

* Mine included, in case you're wondering. On the occasions I've been compelled to visit "gentleman's clubs" for bachelor parties, I generally keep to myself, try not to touch anything, and leave as soon as possible. I think they are the saddest places on Earth. A stripper actually asked me once if I was "afraid of titties." True story.

Attitude is everything

2011-12-01T16:46:00.001-06:00

A million years ago when I sold things for a living, the phrase "attitude is everything" was doled out like roofies at an NFL after-party. It made sense, right? You can't control anything but how you approach what happens, so might as well be positive.

While there is truth in the sentiment, I eventually realized that it was a euphemism for, "This job sucks like nothing has ever sucked before, and if you don't want to end up curled in the fetal position or staring down the business end of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, you had better get with the maximum false enthusiasm." Many of my co-workers combined this advice with heavy drinking, drug abuse, serial adultery, and/or stealing audacious amounts of company property and cash. I opted to quit instead, got divorced (different story), and went back to college.

I was really just never any good at the fervor-on-demand thing. The best I could achieve was an "Eeyore on Plavix" vibe that just tended to confuse people. I managed my early career(s) with the strategy of proving myself smarter than everyone else, certain that they would eventually realize my inherent superiority and put me in charge of things. Every occasion that I was proven right, and no apology was forthcoming, I considered to be a personal affront, and another token for my necklace of petulance. I would tell all who would listen that my bad attitude was earned.

I eventually learned that, earned or not, churlishness was not paying off the way I expected. It turns out that people are less grateful having their errors pointed out than one might think, and nothing good ever comes of winning an argument with the boss. They like it even less when you throw it back at them later. I relearn this lesson almost daily, but I'm getting better at catching myself before I utter some synonym for, "Told you so," rather than wishing I hadn't said it.

I found it also helps immensely to work with people you respect. It's a bonus if most of them are smarter than you. It took me the better part of thirty years to arrange that. Now all I have to do is remember what it was I was hoping to accomplish.

Only human

2011-11-17T19:00:00.000-06:00

Working at a large university, I see several women a day wearing various forms of hijab to signify their modesty as Muslims. I found myself musing today that most people in our country could use a little more of the attitude that we are part of something larger than ourselves, and that perhaps fulfilling our own desires is not the most important thing in the universe. What could be wrong with that?

Here's what. Since Islam seems to be a touchy subject with some people lately, and since frankly I don't know enough about it to do anything but make a fool of myself, let's talk about the religion in whose bosom my soul was rocked as a child. That couldn't possibly upset anyone, right?

Somewhere around 2000 years ago, if I remember my "The Bible" correctly, an itinerant carpenter wandered the countryside telling people that they should be nice to one another, with the implied message that if we all tend to our own failings we will have much less time to fret about those of our neighbors. There were reports that he performed a few miracles, presumably to head off any questions regarding his moral authority. If I remember my Douglas Adams correctly, the powers that be nailed him to a tree for his trouble.

Barely a thousand years later we had hordes of His disciples delivering His love to the increasingly ironically named Holy Land on the point of a sword. Granted, the Crusades are actually quite complicated in the who did what to whom department, but the idea of two vast armies waging war under the banner of religion should work to illustrate my point. Which is not that religion is bad and only leads to evil and genocide.

My point, if I ever manage to get to it, is that it doesn't seem to be enough for people to be a part of something larger. We seem to have a need to make that big thing do something, which is where the trouble starts. Somehow it's not enough to dress modestly because we wish to be respectful, or to pray for our friends and family because it makes us all feel better. Prayers of the righteous need to be answered, and other people are in desperate need of being "saved" from their beliefs. If you want a Mercedes, "name it and claim it" in his name, and it shall be yours. If someone wants to build a different kind of church in your town, you need to do something about that. I haven't been to seminary, but I have a hard time believing that this is what Jesus had in mind.

I suppose this all goes back to our tribal identity, or some other academic humanistic liberal propaganda concept. We treat whatever group we are in like a football team. Our Ladies' Auxiliary can kick your Ladies' Auxiliary's ass. And once we've named it we've got to claim it, and deliver on the ass-kicking. Could it be that it's this pressure to deliver that starts us down the slippery slope of doing or thinking things we would never justify on our own, all in the name of the home team?

We forgive our teammates for -- or pretend we don't see -- things that will get a wandering Samaritan stoned to death in the town square. At least until someone notices out loud that the emperor has no clothes, and we are suddenly hit with the realization that it doesn't matter what school you coach, or to which party you belong, or who your daddy is. Wrong is wrong, and now what am I going to do with all of this shame?

It's a shame we can't just be satisfied with wearing the hijab, the cross, or the school colors, Someone should do something about that.

Movie Sunday: Thor

2011-11-13T14:16:00.001-06:00

Image from here

This movie sucked. Don't waste your time. As a childhood fan of the comic book, I found just about everything that happened after the first ten minutes or so to be a betrayal of the Thunder God I knew. Thor was possibly the most imperfect of Marvel's anti-heroes, and this film was stock studio junk. He didn't even hammer much of anything.

I only wrote about this one because it's about the only movie we've watched lately. Biscuit and I have both been surfing from deadline to deadline since sometime in August. I've managed an hour here and there to wander the virtual wasteland, but our TV time has been mostly streaming BBC (big fans of Midsomer Murders), and we haven't had the motivation or time to go see anything at the theater.

I've got a couple more things coming up in December, but I'm hoping my time will loosen up enough to be able to write a little more. I'm not going to apologize for not blogging lately, since this is something I do for myself. But a colleague of mine likes to say that writing is thinking, and this is a type of thinking I miss when I don't have time for it.

Oh, we did see a documentary called The Parking Lot Movie that was quite funky and enjoyable, in the same way that sitting in a haze-filled room in college bumming cigarettes from each other was enjoyable. It probably cost 1% of what Thor did to produce, and it's a lot better.

Movie Sunday: The Player

2011-10-10T06:17:00.002-05:00

The Player is Robert Altman's satirical gem that confirms everything we never wanted to believe about Hollywood, and by extension ourselves, since we are all fascinated with Hollywood, and if you love movies you should consider it your responsibility to see it, like Elephant Man, or Schindler's List. Personally, I haven't seen it in years, but I'm sure it's still excellent, and I couldn't exactly write a "Movie Sunday" about a short-lived television series, could I? Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

You may have noticed a paucity of posts from me lately. If I'm not blogging regularly, it usually means that I'm either writing a paper or writing software, which are my other creative outlets, and enjoy the advantage that I get paid (though not particularly well) to do them. You can usually tell when it's a paper because the silence will be preceded by a frenzy of posts signifying my desire to do anything but get to the task at hand. Procrastination is not required for software writing, as it's one of my very favorite activities.

Oh dear, it seems we've gotten badly off track. The point is that I haven't had a lot of time to watch movies lately. What television time I have had has been split between HBO (DVD) and BBC (streaming) television series. A few weeks ago we watched The Comeback, a 2005 HBO series co-created and starred in by Lisa Kudrow. While The Comeback isn't exactly a movie, it only lasted one season, and the thirteen half-hour episodes hang together nicely as a story. Taken together, they are probably not any longer than the last two Harry Potter movies, and almost as intense.

I would submit that The Comeback is the rightful heir to The Player for at least two reasons. First, it will make you slightly ashamed for being a consumer of 90% of the shallow, derivative, intentionally non-creative crap that our entertainment industry churns out every year. Second, the satire is so biting and unblinking that it's initially hard to watch.

The concept of the show is that Lisa Kudrow's character was the star of a moderately successful sitcom twenty years ago, and The Comeback is a reality show about her trying to build a new career. She seems like such a waste of skin that you initially just want her to go away. I suspect this is why the series only lasted a single season. By the end of the second episode, I was not sure we would even want to watch the second DVD. Everyone on the show except the housekeeper was whiny, self-absorbed, hypocritical, uninteresting, and unlikable.

Somewhere around Episode Five I started to get it. I think part of it is that the show got better. People found their characters, the writers found their story, and it all flowed a little better. But more importantly, we started to see the humanity in these people, and we begin to care about them in spite of themselves. By the end of the series we find ourselves pulling hard for Kudrow's character to succeed.

If you watch reality television, I charge you to watch The Comeback. Like most learning experiences, it may not be easy at first, but it might be worth it.

Midterms

2011-10-04T09:36:00.000-05:00

Did you get a little shiver when you saw the title of this post? I'm sitting in a room with 28 sweating college students right now, proctoring a computer science midterm exam as a favor for a colleague, and all I can think is that I'm glad I'm at the front of the room. I spend a lot of time around college students, and they are never this quiet and intense simultaneously. In fact, I'm not sure anything in civilian adult life produces the same sort of crisis of concentration as a hard, important exam, unless it's impending nuclear meltdown, or maybe blue lights in the rear view.

It's a little disconcerting to think about all the ways that education is disconnected from the skills we need in life today. It probably worked well enough when the idea was to produce good factory workers. Sit down, shut up, line up straight and don't share with your neighbor helped prepare people for a life of mentally unengaged drone work.*

Using these same techniques to produce creative information workers may be less effective. When I talk to business owners and managers, I hear repeatedly how they need people who can collaborate effectively, communicate, and think outside the box. That's about the time the buzzwords really start to fly and my attention starts to drift.

There is a growing movement among the academic elites to bring art, music, and drama back into the fold of serious learning, partially because people with these degrees are succeeding in all sorts of technical areas, flying in the face of everything their parents tried to tell them. At the same time, the unemployment lines are saying hello to engineers and MBA's for the first time in a very long time. This is all happening while schools and communities continue to cut funding for arts and humanities, so that they can focus on teaching kids to pass a written test.

I don't really have a point. I was just looking for something to keep me from watching these kids suffer for an hour and a half. Also, did you know that computer science students almost all have really nice mechanical pencils? Except for the ones who take exams in ink. They are the ones who scare me.

*This is in no way meant to disparage manual labor or industrial work. I have done enough of it in my life to have great respect for what I still think of as "working people." But this sort of thing does tend to be repetitive, and there is usually plenty of mental space for daydreaming. Just like in school.

My dirty little secret

2011-09-14T21:09:00.000-05:00

Hello, my name is Chris, and I'm a gamer.

It's been forty-eight hours since I last gamed.

Over the past few weeks I have created a super-intelligence that will rule the world, restored the Illuminati to power, and destroyed the global communications network, plunging the world into a new dark age. I have killed or incapacitated hundreds of terrorists, shadow government soldiers, cyborgs, mercenaries, karkians, greasels, and greys (don't ask), as well as a few innocent bystanders, policemen, health care professionals, and rats.

They are still with me. When I close my eyes I see them. They appear in the sights of my tricked out sniper rifle. I can feel the comfortable kick of the assault shotgun, and hear the thrilling "whoosh" of the rockets from my GEP gun. The unsolved puzzles and paths not taken float through my mind like ghosts.

It all began innocently enough, stopping at the Carousel Sandwich Shoppe for a few games of pinball every day on my walk home from junior high.* Before I knew it, I was pinballing at every opportunity, slipping away from friends and family in restaurants and shopping centers for "a quick game." I even watched Tommy. Twice. There is a rumor from my sophomore year of college that four or five guys took a bunch of windowpane and shattered the record high scores on all of the machines in our dorm in a single night. I can't comment on rumors, but I do remember seeing a guy playing the Gottleib's Quick Draw one-handed, and doing quite well.

I don't remember my exact high score on this machine, but I rolled over the counters on at least one occasion.

Pictures from here.

During my senior year of high school, the Minute Man hamburger joint and teen hangout near my house installed Battle Tanks, an early arcade game where you shot wireframe polygons at other wireframe polygons shaped like tanks. Pyramids and squares provided cover. Quarters flowed like water as I sought to master this new and wonderful genre. But video games were still rare and expensive conversation pieces, and pinball ruled for several more years.

It was a Sunday night about five years later, in what they would now call a sports bar on Northwest Highway in Dallas that I sat down at the coffee table version of Pong that heralded the coming revolution. Within another year I owned an Atari 2600, and the future ex and I spent countless hours jousting, repelling space invaders, destroying asteroids, and responding to whatever other challenges came along. I'm pretty sure Missile Command is the primary cause of the chronic pain in the back of my left hand.

Real char-broiled burgers with grated cheddar and BBQ sauce.

And a back room full of pool and pinball. What more could a teenage boy ask?

Picture from here.

A couple of years later I was managing a community center in a bedroom community, and talked the powers that be into installing a video arcade. The idea was that it would keep the kids in the center after school instead of them being on the street, and would generate much needed income. I spent the better part of four years mastering Donkey Kong, Tron, Galaga, and twenty or thirty more "classic" arcade games.

I managed to kick the habit for a couple of years, mostly due to constant relocation, even more constant working, and a lack of disposable income. The next revelation came in 1988 when we brought home a Packard Bell 500 XT computer with a screaming 8 megahertz processor, 14" amber monitor, and a giant 20 mb hard drive. The machine came with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy games loaded, which kept the now-very-soon-to-be-ex occupied, but my life changed (again) for good when I bought a copy of Zork** at the local software and dot-matrix printer store. I wandered into dark places and was eaten by grues on many nights until approaching dawn drove me to bed. The richness of a game that presented puzzles to solve, that I could talk to, and that always offered a different adventure in the next round was like a drug to me, and in some ways set the course of my life since I first typed "open mailbox." I had to know how this was possible. How could such a wondrous machine be built?

The years after this road to Damascus experience saw hundreds -- no thousands -- of hours spent with Leisure Suit Larry, SpaceQuest, Aces of both the Pacific and Europe, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Doom, Myst, Riven, LightHouse, Empires, Schism, Fallout, and countless others, driving, flying, solving puzzles, jumping chasms, turning valves, building and destroying civilizations. Through it all, gritty-eyed, sleep deprived, distracted, and various levels of unprepared for my day's activities, I kept my secret from all but those closest to me. I didn't talk about games, go to LAN parties, or join gamer groups. Mostly because I was a grownup. Oh, and the shame thing.

It's been close to ten years since I seriously played a game. I just can't afford to waste 40% of my time on fictitious adventures anymore. And I can't stay up like I used to could.*** But now Fate -- or perhaps the Goliath Corporation -- has rolled a twenty and thrown games into my professional path in a big way. Perhaps I will finally be able to put my enthusiasm to work in some productive way. Or perhaps I will learn why obsessions make bad professions. The one thing I do know is that I'm going to be spending more time than I have in a long time thinking about games.

So wish me luck. And if you see a dragon sneaking up behind me, give a little yell or something.

* This is an institution they had in the olden days that covered grades 7-9. Apparently, it didn't really catch on. The middle school concept came along when I was in 9th grade, but they didn't completely get rid of junior highs in my town for another decade or so.

**You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

*** Sometimes spelled use-ta-could. It's a legitimate Southern word. Look it up.

Fear itself

2011-09-09T05:18:00.001-05:00

Stephen King's house in Bangor, Maine.

Remember when you moved into your current house or apartment, and how unsettling it was to go to sleep there for the first few nights? Or is that just me? New noises, odd lights, and unfamiliar surroundings all seem to combine to awaken some deep and primitive insecurity that leaves me feeling as exposed and vulnerable as if I were sleeping on the side of the highway.*

This phenomenon was probably more pronounced than usual when we moved into this house a decade ago. It's big, it's old, and it's oddly shaped, so it made lots of noises and I was forever getting lost in it at first. The quietness of the street seems to make the noises all that much louder, and the streetlight at the foot of our driveway throws odd shadows through the front windows. Frankly, it was terrifying.

Of course, we accommodate quickly, so the anxiety faded in a few days, and now eleven years later I feel more secure in our old boomerang-shaped house than just about anywhere else in the world. At least until two nights ago.

That was when Biscuit woke me around 3:30 AM saying that someone had just pounded loudly on our front door. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of waking to a sudden loud or frightening noise, but it will get your heart going nicely. We wandered the house, peeking furtively out of windows, finding neither prowler nor any indication of anything unusual. We both eventually slept a little more, but it made for a long night and a long next day.

Maybe she dreamed the noise. Maybe not. The fact that I didn't hear it doesn't mean much. I once slept through a tree falling on my house.** The part that is interesting to me is how quickly that first night feeling can return, and our safest refuge once again seem as insubstantial as a house made of straw.

Our monkey brains are excellent at papering over our more primitive systems, so by the next night all was back to normal, and I once again slept the sleep of the dead. Though I'm still a little more attuned to the odd creak or shuffle.

Stephen King once said that what really frightened him was the thought of an unexpected hand closing over his as he fumbled for the light switch in the dark. I think I know exactly what he means.

* I've slept on the side of the highway. I don't recommend it.

** True story. Though in my defense, it wasn't a really big tree.

Movie Sunday: Worlds Fastest Indian

2011-08-28T09:17:00.001-05:00

Image from here

This funky little kiwi treat is a biographical story about Burt Munro, a New Zealander who was eccentric fifty years ago, and today would probably have a diagnosis and a prescription for Zoloft. Munro bought an Indian motorcycle as a young man and spent the rest of his life obsessed with trying to make it go faster. Seemingly oblivious to the wild inappropriateness of an elderly man trying to drive 200 miles per hour -- in street clothes -- on a 30 year old motorcycle, he did all he could on the beach at home and then set off for the Bonneville salt flats.

Condensing and simplifying Munro's story for the movie makes it palatable for a broader audience, if a little predictable. Anthony Hopkins does a creditable job in the lead, but the true star of this DVD is a short documentary featuring the real Burt Munro. As talented as he is, I don't think Hopkins -- or anyone with "Sir" in front of their name -- can really communicate the simple, single-minded obsession with metal and speed that seems to make up about 95% of Munro's personality. If the smell of oily metal or driving too fast to believe you are still alive makes up some part of your past, this story will likely resonate with you.

Don't expect big plot twists or Oscar-winning performances, but if you have a weakness for two-wheeled speed or welding, you might want to give World's Fastest Indian a go.

Road Stories: The day the music died

2011-08-18T08:21:00.000-05:00

About halfway through my road career I worked for a few months on Linda Ronstadt's Born in the USA tour. Whatever you may think of Ronstadt's work, it's hard to overstate her popularity at that time, and her influence on all sorts of music. Besides her undeniable position as the first female rock superstar, she exposed large audiences to the work of people like Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello, and introduced a new generation to the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers. Her refusal to perform within one of the prescribed formats influenced a number of subsequent performers to "play what the music demanded."

Linda was already having intermittent struggles with her weight by this time,

but she was always down to fighting weight for the start of a tour.

She rocked this Cub Scout uniform, and it was her favorite concert outfit for a while.

Picture from here.

Linda also had the most astounding singing voice I have ever heard. There are a number of women who have been able to belt out a song over the years. But whether your favorite is Aretha, Annie Lennox, Mariah Carey (shudder), the little fat one from the Dixie Chicks, or someone else, none of them combine the power and clarity of Linda Ronstadt. Not only was her octave range impressive, she could carry crystal pure notes from a stage whisper to a volume level I still can't believe a human can make, seemingly effortlessly. I would have sworn there were times I could hear her singing over the PA during a concert, as improbable as I know that to be. Linda says Maria Callas was better, but I never heard her, so I couldn't say.

Besides the technical quality of her voice, her interpretation of songs ranged from very good to goose-bump producing. The ballads -- like Blue Bayou and Alison -- would have the house so quiet that her voice seemed to fill your head, though everyone's favorite was undoubtedly her cover of The Eagles' Desperado. I watched the show every night from a spotlight perch about twenty feet up in the lighting rig, and I will admit to wiping a few tears during that song on several occasions.

But it was the rock songs, like It's So Easy, That'll Be the Day, and You're No Good that really showcased her with the band. And it was a good band. Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and guitar, Andrew Gold on keyboards, and (I think) Russ Kunkel on drums and Kenny Edwards playing bass.* Many of these people played together for other musicians, all had played on her album, and they sounded great.

For about the first thirty days, this was one of the best tours I was ever on. Linda and the band were having a great time, feeding off of each other's energy, moving around on stage, improvising -- you know, all the stuff we used to go to concerts to see. They loved it, the crowds loved it, and even the crusty old roadies loved it, though we would only admit that among ourselves.

This is from the tour before mine, and the lighting is terrible.
That's probably why they hired us.

The fun all ended when Peter Asher showed up about a month into the tour. Peter was Linda's record producer, and an influential force in music. He was the Peter of the 60's duo Peter and Gordon, before becoming A&R man for The Beatles' Apple records. He quit Apple to manage James Taylor, and produced some of the biggest albums of the 1970's. He was also a major wiener.

After watching one performance, Peter stamped his little feet, called the band and road management team together for a meeting, and read them the riot act. The gist of his diatribe was that this was not the Linda Ronstadt and Her Band Do Anything They Feel Like Doing Tour, it was the Linda Ronstadt Living in the USA tour, and people came to see the songs performed like they heard them on the records. He told Linda to remain at her microphone stand, ordered the rest of the band to "stay in their lights," and forbade any sort of improvisation or shenanigans.

Needless to say, that ended the good times. The music was still high quality, but the spark was gone. That tour became what most of the rest of them were -- a wagon train trek across the country. Each day ran into the next, all of us doing what had to be done, but looking forward to the day when we wouldn't have to do it again.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was one of the early shots in the annihilation of the concert as an artistic form of expression. Within a year, virtually every performer under major industry management was having their concerts packaged the way Linda's was packaged, namely as a set piece regurgitation of their recorded music. A couple of years after that, tape assist to fill in background tracks became common, which eliminated any ability to vary even the tempo of a song.

Music is a product now, carefully designed, produced, packaged, and marketed. Virtually all creativity and innovation is gone from the mainstream, and we are left with whatever Sony, Viacom, and the rest believe the bulk of us will continue to pay for. I know there are still people out there doing it from the heart, but music industrialization makes it ever harder for an old fart like me to find them. And it's a shame that most people will never have the opportunity to see their favorite musicians cut loose and have some fun.

* It was a long time ago, and for some reason many of my memories of that period are somewhat fuzzy. I put it down to sleep deprivation.

Just in case you still thought your vote matters

2011-08-15T21:16:00.000-05:00

After 16,000 or so Republicans in the 30th most populous state in the country paid $30.00 each to tell us who they would vote for if the Iowa Caucuses were held today, the Republican presidential field is apparently already down to three candidates. I would like to think that neither the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, nor the Wicked Witch of the Midwest could win the general election, but I thought the same thing about a washed up actor in 1979. Keep stirring the economic malaise and fold in a foreign policy disaster or two in the next year, and I suspect Charlie Sheen could get elected with the right campaign staff.

So why is it that an election that happens fifteen months from now is already 90% half-decided*? The answer is -- say it with me -- money, of course. Now that the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, apparently in direct contradiction to the inconvenient fact that corporations were specifically created to be not people, and tacked on the double bonus of unlimited campaign contributions and no one having to tell where they got the bags of money, it's a new day. Campaign commercials have already started airing in my state, which hasn't gone Democratic since 1996, and where McCain/Palin took almost 60% of the votes in 2008. It seems like the Republicans could run about three commercials a day starting next November 1st and be confident of winning, but I guess they've got money to burn.

At least the three candidates who are apparently still standing. The rest will have to live on their government salaries and farm subsidies. It's going to be an interesting fifteen months. And by interesting, I mean I'm sure I'm going to want to eat a gun by the time it's over. Luckily, Louisiana is working on a law to allow concealed weapons on college campuses, so I may have the option.

* Thanks Yogi. They really don't make them like you anymore.

You might be a redneck

2011-08-13T07:05:00.000-05:00

I keep the iPod on shuffle when I'm driving, often at volumes higher than is probably appropriate for a man my age. On long road trips, this can help achieve the mile-devouring light trance that (I assume) is familiar to everyone who drives long distances.

Six hours into a seven hour drive yesterday I was pulled from reverie by a familiar screaming guitar solo. My first thought was, "Wow, I love this song!" A few seconds later I realized it was "Free Bird."

Oops.

I was a little embarrassed for myself initially. Then I decided I didn't care. Seeing Lynyrd Skynyrd at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis on July 4th of my senior year was one of the great experiences of my young life. The drive back was the most memorable part of the day, but it was all good.* You can change where you live, but you can never change where you're from.

I didn't go the full Beavis in the car. I mean, I was on a public highway. But I cranked it loud enough to thump the rear deck, and you definitely would have seen my head bob once or twice.

I guess it's true that some birds you cannot change.

* Except apparently for the purple punch. Several announcements were made that concert-goers were to avoid the purple punch.

Volatility

2011-08-12T07:09:00.000-05:00

If you have a dollar, and you lose ten percent one day, you will have 90 cents.

If you gain ten percent the next day, you will have 99 cents.

If this continues long enough, you will be out of money.

I'm still a little upset at my friend the nuclear engineer and part time financial manager who pointed this out to me.

You're welcome.

Movie Sunday: 633 Squadron

2011-08-08T05:27:00.001-05:00

Image from here

I know this one is not going to have what you would call broad appeal, but I'm writing it anyway.

My parents came of age during World War II. I don't think it's possible for us to understand the impact that it had on their generation and culture. "What did you do in the War?" was a common question even during my childhood, a full twenty years later. And WWII movies were still a booming business in 1964, when 633 Squadron was released.

The film is based on a 1956 novel of the same name, which draws from several real events and missions during WWII. It holds the distinction of being the first aviation film shot in color and Panavision.

633 Squadron tells the story of a group of fighter-bomber pilots training for and executing a special, especially dangerous mission. The squadron flies the de Havilland Mosquito, one of the most amazing and beautiful airplanes of the era.* The Mosquito was one of the fastest planes of any kind in the war, made possible by its twin Rolls Royce Merlin engines and the fact that it was made largely of wood. Yes, wood. The light weight and high power made it particularly graceful in flight, and it was well-loved by its two man flight crews.

de Havilland Mosquito in flight. Picture from here

The plot and characters of 633 Squadron are somewhat typical of the time. Cliff Robertson does a credible job as the hard-bitten cynical wing commander, and Maria Perschy is delicious as "the woman" (every good war movie of the day seemed to have exactly one). There is a bit of ironic tragedy, and the film is made late enough that a bit of the horror of war is beginning to seep through the glory and righteousness typical of earlier war films, but it's not exactly Apocalypse Now.**

The real star of this movie is the Mosquito. The film includes a great deal of footage of real Mosquitoes in flight over beautiful Scottish countryside, and the planes are mesmerizing to someone who built as many models as I did as a child. George Lucas credits the primary action sequence in this movie with inspiring the "trench scene" in Star Wars.

So if you like old war movies, or are a fan of planes of the era, you should check out 633 Squadron. It's currently streaming on Netflix.

* The Supermarine Spitfire, Vought Corsair, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and the North American P-51 Mustang round out my childhood top five. But the Mosquito was always my favorite.

** Also, you should watch Apocalypse Now, if somehow you have managed not to see it. Awesome movie.

Don't call me a "liberal"

2011-08-06T16:12:00.001-05:00

I try not to write about politics any more than I can help, but recent events have agitated me to the point that I can't actually hold my tongue (or my fingers, I guess) anymore.

It seems that every time I get into a discussion with more rightward-leaning friends or acquaintances, or witness such a discussion secondhand, the phrase "you liberals are all the same" will eventually be fired, turning the discourse from the topic at hand to a question of ideology. Of course, in this case the ideological divide is pre-framed between patriotic, God-fearing Americans who believe people should take responsibility for their actions and live within their means, and homosexual socialist muslim-atheist abortion peddlers who want to drown us all in crack babies, taxes, and bureaucratic red tape. An extreme -- though sadly not unique -- example appeared yesterday on weather.com in the comments to an article on the Texas drought.

As you can see, reactionary idiotic rudeness is not limited to any single political viewpoint.

This is usually the point at which I disengage from the conversation. But just to be on the record, I want to state unequivocally that I am not a "liberal." Yes, it's true that I am happy that government exists, that they make sure our railroad tracks are all the same size, and that no one feeds us dog meat and calls it beef.* I believe in liberal ideals like "science" and "education," and I somehow manage to see the economy as a part of our environment, instead of the other way around. I like roads, and bridges, and schools, and I think I'm glad they are not all built and controlled by private companies. At least not yet.

Speaking of roads, bridges, and schools, people build fortunes using our public roads and bridges, the government-developed internet, and labor from our public schools, colleges, and universities. Their overseas interests are protected by our federally funded armed forces. I take some issue with those same people acting like they did it all themselves, and that any attempt to reclaim some of their profits to continue funding that infrastructure is somehow immoral.

And admittedly I find it a little difficult to blame all of our problems on the poor. True, they did trick the banks into signing them up for those subprime mortgages and ruin our economy, but I think that may have been a lucky shot. Mostly they seem to work hard and die early. Oh, that's right. They clog our emergency rooms and raise health care costs. And fill our privatized prisons. I almost forgot.

On the other hand, I'm okay living in an armed society, but I don't try to kid myself into thinking that it makes us safer. I think people should work if they can, though I also think it would be great if we could help create jobs for those on the edges.

I think government is best that happens closest to the people. I don't believe that government -- especially central government -- should regulate our personal behavior, child-rearing, morality, or religion to the extent that they do. And I'm more than willing to debate what level of social safety net we will provide, and what level of food, shelter, and medical services should be guaranteed to those who cannot afford to pay.

But what part of thinking that government should stay out of people's medical decisions advances the idea of the nanny state? Why is government subsidizing higher populations, crappier food, or overseas companies in my interest as an American? Why is it so patriotic to give away our shared resources to multinational corporations, allow them to do whatever damage they desire exploiting them, and then socialize the cost of cleaning up their mess? And what part of "small government" requires us to maintain a military presence in over 130 countries?

European social democracies -- as we know, the most evil of all forms of government -- tend to have taxes about twice as high as what we pay (or are supposed to pay) in the U.S. But every business owner knows what they are getting in exchange for that money. They don't have to pay health insurance premiums. They don't pay for retirement benefits or disability insurance. They don't pay separately for infrastructure that the government provides. They pay less for well qualified workers than comparable American companies, even though the cost of living is higher.

What do we get in return for our tax money? The biggest chunk goes to hospitals and doctors who work around the clock to help eighty-eight year olds survive to be eighty-eight and a half. It goes to pharmaceutical companies that sell drugs here for ten times what is paid in other countries for the same compound, because insurance will pay it. The prices are justified to cover their R&D costs, because no one can live without a cure for Restless Leg Syndrome, Low-T, or any of the other made-up ailments about which we are supposed to "ask our doctor." The truth is that in their rush to be the first to market, pharmaceutical companies pay for full scale trials of huge numbers of drugs that turn out to be neither safe nor effective, instead of taking the slower but massively less expensive route of small preliminary trials. It's far easier to make up ailments for drugs that make it through the process than it is to create drugs from scratch that treat something we care about.

The next biggest chunk goes to defense contractors to develop advanced weapons that will never be needed, perform studies that show we need them, build computer and communications systems to control them, and (increasingly) provide private soldiers to supplement our depleted armed forces. We burn tens -- if not hundreds -- of thousands of gallons of fuel per day to drop $20,000 bombs from $50 million dollar airplanes onto sheep herders and farmers who live mostly without electricity. Increasingly, this work is done by fighter pilots in bunkers in the U.S. flying unmanned drones a world away. The percentage of our country's defense budget that goes to soldiers and their families is pitifully small.

For that matter, why is it only about money? Surveys and studies consistently find that -- beyond a certain subsistence level -- money is not what makes people happy. It's family, and fellowship, and good health. Safe streets and good schools. Culture, nature, and a sense of belonging. Why aren't we pursuing these things as a nation, as well as economic growth?

Please ask yourself these questions. I would love to hear any answers that don't involve personal insults or vague cultural stereotypes. Just don't call me a liberal.

* I'm disgusted enough at the stuff they do let people feed us. Mechanically separated chicken anyone? I would hate to think what would happen if government were much smaller. Also, before the Civil War, every railroad company laid tracks of whatever size fit their own locomotives. It was only possible to drive to the edge of their territory without moving everything to a different train.

Miss Manners

2011-08-04T07:48:00.000-05:00

Image from here

Biscuit has been reading The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness : a Complete Handbook for the use of the Lady in Polite Society, on her Kindle. It was written by a Florence Hartley around 1873, it was free, and it is apparently a laugh riot. Almost every night she regales me with some helpful hint for planning a soirée, arranging one's calendar for receiving callers, or addressing invitations for ladies of every situation. That is, as long as your situations are limited to rich and single or rich and married. Maybe rich and widowed; she didn't read that part.

I used to read the local newspaper most every day, back when people did that sort of thing. I would scour the front section pretty thoroughly, skim the local, sports, and entertainment sections, generally saving the comics and columns for last. One of my favorite columns -- after Dave Barry, of course -- was Miss Manners.

I never read Miss Manners as a youth, assuming that it was all about which fork to use, and whether white could be worn after Labor Day. I started reading in the 1980's when every twenty-something with a Volvo* believed they were only days from being invited to the Carringtons' for cocktails and sex. So we all had to buy Cuisinarts, wear LaCoste and Docksiders, and learn which was the proper spoon for snorting cocaine.

I was generally well-mannered. My parents had made sure I knew to say please and thank you, and not to spit in mixed company or fart at the table. My father was a big believer in chivalry, and tried to make sure I treated women with respect. They even sent me to cotillion. But my paternal grandfather was a working class house builder and my mother's father was a subsistence farmer and country schoolteacher. Neither of my parents probably ever saw a teaspoon growing up, much less a fish knife or finger bowl. I definitely had a few things to learn before I was ready for dinner at Sardi's.

Image from here

Imagine my surprise when I learned that most of Judith Martin's column was not dedicated to the arcane niceties of upper crust society at all. Sure, there were questions about whether fried chicken could be eaten with the fingers,** but most of the questions were split between examples of people trying to exert more control over others than is proper ("How do I ask people to give me cash for my wedding?"), and people asking impolite questions ("How do I ask a friend if they are pregnant/gay/happy with the present I gave them?). Our Miss Manners always took the offender firmly -- but politely -- to task, whether it was the "Gentle Reader," or the party from whom the writer had taken offense.

It was her response to impolite questions that stuck with me the most. This is partly because I hadn't really thought of innocent questions as potentially impolite before, and because restraint from such inquiries seems to be so commonly honored in the breach. It is striking how much of what we think of as politeness and good manners is specifically engineered to avoid such interrogations.

Many of the people who wrote feeling offended had actually been guilty of asking such questions or trying to find a polite way to do so. Our patient columnist pointed out repeatedly that a question is an aggressive type of speech -- a sort of command in reverse. It says "tell me what I want to know," and can place significant pressure on the recipient, causing immediate friction and often eliciting a defensive response. In many cases, the questioner receives an answer they do not wish to hear. "Does this make me look fat?" is a classic example.

This applies almost universally to any form of the question, "Why?" (or "why not?"). I have tried to think of an occasion when this might be appropriate, and the only possibility I can come up with might be, "Why would you ask me that?" The "why" question is invariably asked in response to information that the questioner does not wish to accept on its face. The explanation will probably be impossible to politely express, none of the questioner's business, or more likely, both. It's a child's question, and it is difficult not to be patronizing in one's answer.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that there is virtually always a (more) polite way to provide someone with an opportunity to salve our insecurities, satisfy our curiosity, or fulfill whatever other motivation we have for asking questions. Instead of asking, "Do you like my haircut?" a person can simply remark that they have had a haircut, leaving their companion free to either offer a compliment (if they like it) or (otherwise) bring up their own hair appointment the following week. If you can't think of a polite way to provide a hint, the question is probably not appropriate, no matter how close a friend is your companion. The polite way will not always get the result you want, but you are more likely to get what you are due, and less likely to cause offense in either direction.

I focused on this practice for years, but I'm afraid I may have lost some of the habit recently. Curiosity is a necessary trait for a researcher, and questions are our stock in trade. It is easy to blur the line between "Why did you write it this way?" and "What on Earth made you buy those shoes?"

Also, you should not be too nice to your servants. Apparently, it spoils them.

* The term "yuppie" is a good example of the attitude of the time. "Young, upwardly mobile professional" was another way of saying "middle class nobody who thinks they are on the way to becoming a fabulously well to do person of consequence." Today we tend to call such people "in foreclosure."

** I don't exactly recall the answer, but I think it centered on what sort of dinnerware was provided. It still seems to be a matter of some dispute.

Movie Sunday: Animal Kingdom

2011-07-31T07:17:00.001-05:00

Image from here

Some of you know I have a weakness for Australian movies, and this is a good one. It's sort of Napoleon Dynamite meets The Town. Not Napoleon Dynamite because it's funny; because it's not funny at all. But our protagonist is a mostly awkward, mostly silent teenager who lives with his grandmother. And who we want to succeed, while everything we know about the world tells us that he will not.

Our story begins with our young hero greeting the paramedics. His mother has overdosed on heroin and left the story, as it were. He calls his grandmother, who he hasn't seen in years, and she brings him to live with her. At the same time we meet his four uncles, who are crooks. We know the grandmother is not like yours or mine when she kisses one of her boys square on the lips, for longer than anyone should feel comfortable kissing their mother. As is common with good Australian films, the story that follows is personal, engaging, and tight. There is very little wasted motion in this film.

There is a fair amount of violence, and not car chase and explosion kind of violence. This is unvarnished and in person, without swelling background music or pithy quips. If you're a fan of The Wire, you know the sort of thing I mean. If you don't squirm in your seat at least once during this movie, I might worry about you.

While the story is very good, the characters are better, both in the way they were envisioned and their portrayals by the cast. Some of the interactions are mesmerizing. I wasn't surprised to learn that the story was apparently inspired by a real Australian crime family.

This is the first film from writer and director David Michôd, though I suspect we will hear more from him. It has been critically acclaimed as they say, from awards at Sundance to an Oscar nomination for Jacki Weaver for her portrayal of the grandmother. She probably should have won.

This is not exactly what I would call a date movie, but if you're in the mood for a good drama, and you don't mind losing a few characters along the way, give Animal Kingdom a try.

Terror in the Global Village

2011-07-23T07:21:00.002-05:00

Biscuit and I have talked* on several occasions about the way that modern news media ensure we know about every middle class white child or young woman who ends up decaying in a shallow grave somewhere, or every one of the handful of shark attacks that happen every summer. This all promotes the impression that the world is a more dangerous place than it is. Or at least dangerous in a different way than it actually is. Two generations ago these stories would never have made it out of the local paper, unless the people involved were fabulously well-to-do, or famous. Most of the country is not within four or five degrees of separation from any one event.

Sadly, I think another effect of this constant flow of remote horror is that it desensitizes us. Attacks that happen a world away are sad and often shocking, but they don't really touch us where we live. The bus bombings in London, and the train bombings in -- where was that, Spain? Portugal? -- were abstract tragedies, brought to life only a little by video from the scene. People are being blown to bits every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it may as well be happening in Little Whinging.

It's different when things happen in a place -- or to people -- that we know. New Yorkers were affected by 9/11 to a degree that I don't think the rest of us can appreciate. I've met one person who has been shot, and he told me about it within ten minutes of the first time I laid eyes on him, despite the fact that it happened years before. And it made me really, really never want to get shot. If you know a place personally where something horrible happened, it tends to jump to mind every time you pass there, often for many years.

Most of you know that Biscuit and I visited Oslo a couple of months ago. It was without a doubt my favorite city** so far. We both loved the people, the architecture, and just the general vibe of the place. That doesn't make it our hometown by any stretch of the imagination, but it definitely makes it more real to me. Oslo is not that big of a city, so when I heard the explosion was in the city center, I knew it couldn't be too far from where we had stayed. It turns out to be about three blocks.

In spite of how it may look, I'm not trying to make this about me. This tragedy has not affected me in any significant way. But I can't help think of the people we met there, and I feel for them. Unlike Nancy Grace and her followers, I don't generally get outraged when screwed up people I don't know do bad things to other people I don't know. But it is sad to know that the cute little Swedish waitress who made us feel so at home on our first night, and the old lady on the train who needed help with her bag, and all the rest, have all been deeply touched. Some are undoubtedly grieving for acquaintances or loved ones lost.

Fortunately for me, this is all happening a world away, and I will soon tire of the unending coverage of who this man was, why he did what he did, and all of the ridiculousness and conjecture. Within a few weeks it will be no more than a modification of the story of our trip. "We were in Oslo just a few weeks before that attack..." I will quickly forget the way I feel today.

Norwegians won't be as fortunate. You can't go through this sort of thing in a city of that size without it leaving a mark. Ask the residents of Oklahoma City.

Oslo city center. I never really wanted to leave this greenspace, which runs for about five blocks. The Parliament building is visible through the trees.

* Or ranted. You say tom-ah-toe; I say people are stupid and I can't believe we have survived this long as a species.

** Displacing Vancouver, which held the title for over thirty years.

Out of Time

2011-07-22T06:56:00.000-05:00

I guess it's natural for each of us to be comfortable in our own time. The world we grew up in is our baseline, and every year brings changes that make everything feel a tiny bit less natural. I think this is the main reason old people are cranky all the time. That, and the sore everything. Middle age has brought not only an acceptance of mortality, but an appreciation of it as well.

There are usually a handful of changes that we treasure, though frankly I'm having a hard time coming up with any at the moment. It seems every advance during my life has been a double-edged sword, trading diversion, minor convenience, or economic efficiency for a more complicated life and erosion of our environment. I make my living from technology, and I'm not sure how we watched television before there was Google, but there are days I would gladly trade the whole thing for forty acres and a mule.

On the other hand, many of us long for some aspects of life that may have passed away before we were born*. Jimmy Buffett apparently wanted to be a pirate, and not the Somali kind. Mine is a world with space for solitude. The thought of walking for weeks without meeting another person carries great appeal for me at times.

There is a park in Northwest Arkansas that has been my favorite place in the world since I was a child. Part of what I liked about it then was that it was quite inaccessible and not very well known, so there were few visitors. The trails were long, mostly deserted, and so quiet you could hear gentle breezes blowing down the valley. It was a place where you instinctively spoke quietly.

There is an interstate within a few miles of it now, and it is covered with tourists during the summer, but last time I was there during winter it was still pretty deserted. I spend a few days there as often as I can, which usually ends up being only about once a decade. I walk, and climb, and sit, and walk some more. I don't exactly feel like I'm alone in the world, but I usually do get a chance to remember what it's like to be a human being.

Maybe this fall will be time for another visit. I've been looking for an excuse to buy a new pair of hiking boots, and I could certainly use the quiet. Did I mention there is no cell coverage, no television, and only one phone in the entire park?

*How else do you explain Renaissance fairs? And NASCAR?

Movie Sunday: Making your own

2011-07-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

So I haven't had a lot of time for movie-watching lately. I taught a five day stop-motion animation camp for high school students last week, and most of the previous month was spent getting ready. For instance, I had to learn the first thing about stop motion animation.

We had fun, and the kids even learned a little. A couple of them really got into it, and the rest at least participated to some degree. Here are their final projects. Enjoy.

Group 1 consisted of three hyper-motivated boys who spent just about every minute of the camp working on this epic saga. I think they also learned the meaning of "scope creep."

Group 2 eventually* consisted of two boys with -- let's call it different work styles. Their spare but action-packed prison film was the only one that used all custom-built characters and sets.

Group 3 was the largest, with the oldest kids and (by the end) all four female members of the class. They gave everyone nicknames, and generally kept the camp from turning into a complete nerdfest. Their musical masterpiece pretty much speaks for itself.

I made a few little pieces myself, as well as sculpting a puppet head. Perhaps one day I will get a chance to post them. On the other hand, the camp reminded me of how long these things take, and how much time kids seem to be able to make for themselves.

In addition to camp preparations, we've been busy watching BBC comedies. We watched all 28 episodes of Coupling over the long 4th of July weekend. It's sort of like Friends, but with more sex. We also watched Still Bill the other day, an excellent documentary on Bill Withers. If you like his music, or you like the idea of a regular person making it big and keeping their soul, I highly recommend it. I've been singing "A'int no Sunshine" under my breath for almost a week now.

* The group originally included a girl, but the boys learned the hard lesson that if you ignore women long enough they will go away.

Fathers Day

2011-06-21T06:41:00.000-05:00

When I get angry, or a find some significant piece of my world view collapsing around me, I work. I can't help it, it's one of those things I got from my father. We're passive-aggressive white protestants, what can I say? So, when on this fine Father's Day I found myself ready to tackle a serious project, I headed outside and my gaze landed on the plastic pond that the old man had given me several years ago. Like much of what I've gotten from him, I didn't ask for it, didn't particularly want it, but didn't seem to be able to leave it behind anywhere.

The "pond," two plastic basins and a box of pumpy stuff, has been with us for about a decade, stuffed in the corner of the shed for most of that time, more recently leaned against the fence. After Hurricane Gustav I noticed that the larger piece was a fair fit for a hole left by the uprooted gum tree that took out the old shed, and I dragged it up there to check. I even dug around a little at one point, but mostly it's just been sitting there, a big black vinyl reminder of my endless to-do list.

I thought I might dig around for a few minutes and make a little progress before going on to other things. There is very little that is more grounding than digging a hole. It is both physically demanding and undeniably objective. There are no shades of grey -- just a growing cavity and a matching pile of dirt.

So a few minutes turned into all day, and at the end of it both basins were (more or less) in the ground, filled with water, and the pump assembly was miraculously complete and working, despite having knocked around in an open box for ten years. There is, of course, much more to do. Landscaping and rock work, plants, and maybe a goldfish or two. I've actually made my to-do list longer by crossing off one thing. But it's a thing, and sometimes doing a thing has to be enough.

It will look better with some plants and stones.

Hey, is that a tomato pergola in the background there?

The strangest thing about the whole episode is that I was out there at least four hours before it ever occurred to me that there might be a link between the day and my choice of project. I would be tempted to dismiss it as coincidence, but the tie is so clear that it's hard to buy. Fathers Day has been a strange sort of occasion for me since my father passed away, and I'm apparently still finding my way through this. Minds are awfully strange things, and I often suspect mine of being stranger than most.

Movie Sunday: Billy Jack

2011-06-19T06:52:00.000-05:00

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When I put Billy Jack in my Netflix queue, I expected to enjoy an hour and a half ridiculing everything about it. For the most part, that's what I got. The costumes, dialog and plot are cheesy, the acting is mostly horrific, even by the standards of the day, and the sound quality is so bad that entire scenes are indecipherable. Most of the characters are so flat they could easily be replaced with cardboard cutouts. What surprised me was that the heart of the film, the thing that made it such a big deal during my early teenage years, more or less survived the forty years since the film's release.

Billy Jack is a time capsule from the 1960's, told without Woodstock or Apollo. It is a sober reminder of the open hostilities that once existed within our culture, with racism fueling many of the individual conflicts. I was transported back to a time when I often felt physically at risk because of the length of my hair, and knew there were places I could not go with some of my friends. I can't help thinking that we may be closer to that sort of widespread violent confrontation today than we have been at almost any time since. Except most of us no longer have the physical courage to get involved.

Billy Jack, played by Tom Laughlin, is a half-breed karate expert war hero pacifist shaman trainee who protects wild mustangs and a school full of hippies on an Indian reservation. Laughlin also directed and co-wrote the movie. Laughlin's real-life wife Delores Taylor plays the director of the school, defending her misfit and cast-off students against the local townspeople. The local townspeople are portrayed as a surprisingly diverse group, with opinions ranging from sympathetic to openly stabby and rapey.

The theme of pacifism and non-violence that supposedly makes up one side of the argument seems ridiculously naive today, and the idea that anyone could even believe it could work gave me a little twinge of nostalgia for the innocence of youth. Much of the critical pasting the film got in its time was because it's theme of non-violence was embedded in what was essentially a kung fu movie, before there were kung fu movies. All the lines I remember people reciting were about kicking dudes in the head, and trying (unsuccessfully) not to go berserk.

There were some bright spots. Taylor was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance, and legend has it that Marlon Brando stood up and stopped a pre-release screening to tell the audience that her performance in one scene had set the bar for emotional realism and depth. It's hard to believe today, but watch a few movies from the time and it gets easier. And even as I laughed at the hair and the clothes and the characters, I found myself caring just a little about what happened to them, which I really didn't expect.

Oh, and Howard Hesseman has a mid-sized role in the film. So that was fun. It only took about five minutes of "who is that guy?" before I figured out it was my old friend Johnny Fever from WKRP.

Even if you don't see the movie, I think you owe it to yourself to check out the official Billy Jack website. I was afraid to click on anything, but it's definitely entertaining. Do it, or I'm going to take this right foot and put it upside your head, and there is not a thing you will be able to do about it.

Airline Wars 2: The Royal (Dutch) Treatment

2011-06-10T00:27:00.001-05:00

The day after our hellish American overnighter from Honolulu, we set out across the opposite ocean for Europe. After an hour and a half commuter flight to Atlanta, dinner at Arby's, and killing some time marveling at how big a bag of M&M's one could purchase at the Duty Free, we reported for our 10:45 pm KLM flight to Amsterdam.

The difference between KLM and American was apparent from the first second we saw the flight crew. All twelve or fourteen of them showed up as a group, as confident and purposeful in their powder blue raiments as if they were headed out to nuke a rogue comet. You could almost hear the theme music playing as they strode up the concourse, nodded to the swooning gate agents, and disappeared down the jetway.

The music stopped suddenly with that scratching record sound when we started to board, and my boarding pass triggered the little red light that said I wouldn't be sitting in seat 41G with Biscuit after all. We had booked the flight with Delta, and one problem with these international partnership arrangements seems to be that the reservation systems don't work together worth a damn. Fortunately, Biscuit batted the baby blues at the young man sitting in my former seat and he agreed to swap with me. The music was back on, especially when the doors closed and we realized that there was no one between us in our little cluster of three seats.

The economy seats in the Boeing 777 were not what I would call spacious, but there was three inches or so between my knees and the seat in front of me, which was three inches more than I had on the American 767. And the sides of the headrests could be pulled out to keep one's head from rolling side to side when trying to sleep. There was a pillow and blanket waiting in each seat when we got on the plane, and before the doors closed, the flight attendants distributed clip-on headphones to everyone for use with the video system in the seat back in front of us. There was a remote control embedded in each armrest, and after the safety briefing they explained how to use the remotes to watch movies or television, or play games. I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Hall Pass, as well as bits and pieces of a couple of other things, just to see if I would like them. This kept me busy and entertained for well over half the flight. Between movies I would tune in to the "where are we and how fast are we going" channel, which was fun and educational.

Just after we took off, and before each of the two hot meals we were served, the flight attendants distributed hot towels for a quick wipe-down of any road grime. Granted, the towels were paper, and not the scrubby little washcloths I remember from JAL back in the day, but it was still a welcome treat. Dinner was a sort of beef stew or chicken medallions, with veggies, bread, butter, crackers, cheese, and dessert. It was airline food, but some of the best airline food I've had in a while. Soft drinks, beer and wine were all complimentary. The beer was Heineken and the wine came in a carton, but it was still free.

Dinner was followed by a course of coffee or tea and biscuits (cookies to us Americans). The flight attendants retired after all the rubbish was collected, but quietly cruised the aisles every half hour until breakfast with trays of water, juice, and soft drinks. There was also a collection of snacks at each galley to which peckish passengers could help themselves. I snagged some cookies and a couple of little Twix bars on my mid-flight trip to the lavatory. As you might expect by now, one on one encounters with the flight attendants elicited expressions of helpful curiosity, in contrast to the hostile glances I received two nights before.

About an hour and a half before we landed, the crew started the process of waking us with another round of hot towels and beverage service. Hot breakfast came next, followed by more coffee, tea, and biscuits. The little cookies were these awesome cinnamon shortbread numbers like you get on domestic flights sometimes, but with two of them stuck together with caramel. I liked them a lot. One smooth landing and short taxi later, we deplaned in Amsterdam, tired but amazed at how different two flights could feel.

KLM showed us that they didn't just rock the transatlantic flights when we took a 737 to Oslo a couple of hours later. They fed us each two sandwiches for lunch, as well as the same two rounds of beverage service and tea in a little less than two hours. And narrated the whole thing in three languages. I've been trying to figure out ever since this flight how I can get more of my domestic trips to connect through Schiphol airport.

Next Time: Delta tries to keep up

American: Love it or leave it

2011-06-07T10:56:00.065-05:00

I have endured four plane flights of over eight hours* in the last two weeks, and I feel like I had a rare chance to directly compare the current state of a few of the major carriers. Or at least the type of experience that their customers can expect. The first two legs were American from Dallas to Honolulu and back, the third was KLM (Royal Dutch to old farts like me) from Atlanta to Amsterdam, and the final leg was a Delta return from Amsterdam. The middle two were overnighters, which I found the most telling.

In the interest of full disclosure, I swore after several experiences in the late 70's that I would never fly American Airlines again if I had a choice. The general erosion of service in the airline industry led me to adopt the view that all of the domestic carriers are pretty much the same, but this last experience may cause me to renew my earlier vow.

Our first overnight adventure started at the Honolulu American counter, where we stood in line for almost an hour just to drop our bags. I will never understand how it took so long, but it set the tone. They told us at the gate before we boarded the American Boeing 767 that the flight was completely full, so we had that to look forward to. I was in seat 33C on the left aisle in the center section, and was struck not only by how little legroom there was in front of me, but how the footroom for the aisle seats was narrower than the others. I would inevitably have either a foot or a knee projecting into the aisle. It was not going to be a comfortable flight. Which is when the 750 pound couple (split more or less evenly) sat down in front of us. He pushed the seat onto my knees without even touching the button to recline, but of course he would recline the seat as far as it would go once the plane took off, crushing my legs unless I twisted sideways in my seat. I felt like I should be shampooing his hair, and there was no way for me to sit normally.

The flight attendants offered to sell us earphones so that we could hear the entertainment that would be displayed on the screens mounted every dozen rows or so in the center of the cabin ceiling. We were also given the option of purchasing snacks, from a $10 Boston Market sandwich to $3.50 for the one tennis ball size can of Pringles. Blankets and pillows were also available for purchase ($8.00), as well as beer, wine, and the right to board the plane early (which I would have to have selected at check-in). After serving the obligatory soft drinks -- with not so much as a tiny bag of pretzels -- they showed Cars II and a couple of episodes of some sitcom (I forget which), and shut down the entertainment for the duration. We are now about three hours into an eight hour flight.

Other than being admonished by the flight crew to keep our window shades down lest we see the sunrise, we didn't see or hear from the crew again until about an hour before landing. On the one occasion (about five hours in) that I extricated myself from my seat to wait 25 minutes for one dude to get out of the bathroom**, I found the flight attendants ensconced in the galley, gossiping merrily away. They looked at me as if I might be disturbing them, and I got the distinct impression that no one was going to vacate the jump seats for me cross to the starboard lavatory, no matter how long I stood there.

When we were about an hour from Dallas, the flight attendants came through the cabin winging little 3 oz. foil-topped containers of juice at everyone. I got two, but they were still frozen pretty solid. Biscuit only got one, but her's was at least liquid all the way through. They had a quick round of trying to unload the leftover snacks from the night before, and then turned on the seat belt sign and returned to the galleys. I'm not sure what they were doing back there. Maybe preparing to cross-check, whatever that is.

During the entire flight, I'm not sure I saw one of the flight crew smile, or say or do anything particularly nice to any of the passengers. In general, they seemed bored, tired, and a little pissed about the whole situation.

We landed without incident, flew home on a blissfully uncrowded commuter jet, and prepared to do it all over again.

Next Time: Dutch Treat

* Plus eight shorter legs of one to two hours thrown in for good measure. But it's the longer trips that really tell the tale.

** I was afraid to go in after he came out, lest some foul vapors overwhelm me. But this was not the case. Actually, I don't know what he was doing in there for so long. I think he may have been joining the Mile High Club: Solo Edition.

Movie Sunday: Get Low

2011-06-05T09:44:00.001-05:00

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What do you mean where have I been? We'll get to that later. It's movie time. Get Low is a strange story, and I'm still not sure whether I like the way the plot progresses. I won't say much more about that, because I think it's either sloppy or really clever, and if it's clever I don't want to ruin it for you.

Anyway, with the acting in this joint it doesn't really matter. I could watch these people for hours. I don't know how Robert Duvall can make a movie anymore without winning an Academy Award. He is simply brilliant in this role, bringing layer after layer of complexity to a character that seems at first to be a simple archetype we all know. And Sissy Spacek keeps up. The scenes of the two of them together are marvelous, and often painful to watch. You can see individual facial muscles twitch or relax as they react to each other and their own internal dialogues. It's the kind of control that surely can't be voluntary, but is undoubtedly purposeful.

Lucas Black (the kid from Sling Blade and American Gothic) may not be the most versatile actor on the planet, but when he finds a character that matches his sensibility, he fills it up. He plays the young idealist Buddy Robinson perfectly, and the intensity of his goodness even penetrates the lifetime of bitterness that Duval's character has steeped himself in. As Duval says at one point in the film, "For every one like me, there's one like you, son. I about forgot that."

Bill Murray rounds out the core cast, in a role that seems made for him. He has become an accomplished dramatic actor, even though I still have trouble believing it sometimes. I'm sure younger people who didn't have to suffer through his years on Saturday Night Live, and didn't see Stripes* multiple times, don't have this problem.

Get Low feels a lot like some of Clint Eastwood's films, Unforgiven and Gran Torino coming specfically to mind. It also reminds me a little of Paper Moon, though I couldn't tell you why. I don't know if we are seeing more of these life retrospective type films because audiences and fimmakers are growing older, or if I'm just noticing them more because I'm not as young as I used to be. It's subject matter that I think was once primarily the domain of playwrights. In fact, this film could easily be done as a play. It reminds me a little of an Edward Albee play I did a scene from many years ago, though the title escapes me at the moment.

If you are looking for car chases and stuff blowing up, this is probably not the right film for you. I noticed several of the IMDB comments were from ~~idiots~~ people who watched it based on good reviews, and found it boring or not funny. One guy complained that the photography was "too pretty for the story." I will agree that it was not particularly funny, but since it's a drama that didn't really bother me. But if you are in the mood to watch some great acting, I definitely recommend Get Low.

* I haven't been able to look at a spatula the same since that movie.

Compulsive much?

2011-05-03T10:14:00.000-05:00

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Sometime during my high school years my father's construction company remodeled the four story Arkansas Game and Fish Commission building in Little Rock. My summer job started just in time for one of the final tasks, which was hanging one hundred and ninety-six steel doors in the building. That's almost two hundred doors times three hinges per door times six screws per hinge, which is, well, a lot of screws.

After inspecting the completed remodel, the client insisted that we were not finished because the hinge screws on the doors were oriented in all different directions. Seriously. After a brief but lively argument between the client and my father, I and one other worker were assigned to go through the building and turn one-hundred ninety-six times eighteen screws a quarter turn or less so that the slots on all of them were perfectly vertical. It took two days.

It's funny the sorts of thoughts that wander through one's head while working systematically through a huge empty building with a screwdriver. Thoughts like, "Well, if they all have to be oriented some direction, they might as well be the same." Or a little later, "My, these sure do look nicer like this, all uniform and consistent." Every so often I would find one that was already vertical through sheer chance, and I would celebrate a little.

I guess you see by now where this is going. For many years I made sure that virtually every screw I tightened was oriented in some specific direction. Luckily for me, Henry Phillips' screw head* technology has almost universally replaced the slot head screw in everyday use, and the visual effect with the Phillips head is not nearly as striking. The one notable exception has been electrical switch and outlet cover plates, which have retained the slotted screws until very recently. So if you go through my house, you will notice that every screw on every cover is oriented exactly the same. How about yours?

You're welcome.

* As we all learned in school, the Phillips head screw was actually invented by John P. Thompson, who sold the rights to Phillips. It's always the money guys who get the credit.

Movie Sunday Back Next Week

2011-05-01T06:40:00.000-05:00

Sorry, but we've been too tied up with home improvement projects this week to watch movies. Though we did see The King's Speech last night. It was good, even though I couldn't stop looking at Geoffrey Rush's nose. And I think living with Tim Burton is making Helena Bonham Carter even more strange than she was before, in a good way. It's probably doing wonders for him, too.

Okay, so we'll make this week's movie The King's Speech. See it if you haven't. I think it may have won some sort of award.

This will all be worth it when the painting is done.

Lighthouse

2011-04-25T06:49:00.004-05:00

I've already taken crap here for admitting that I like James Taylor music,* and this is probably going to lead to more of the same. But I've had a stanza of a song rattling around in my head intermittently for a few months now, and I need to try to get it out.

I'm a lonely lighthouse, not a ship out in the night

I'm watching the sea

She's come half-way round the world to see the light

and to stay away from me

I was in Naval Junior ROTC in high school, during the closing years of the Viet Nam war. We marched, polished our shoes and belt buckles, and learned to do all that "right shoulder arms" stuff with fake rifles. I was second in command, so I got a sword. And yes, it was exactly as cool as you think to carry a sword.

We also learned to navigate, which was my favorite thing. I was the best in class at navigation, probably because my father was both an architect and a lover of maps, so most of the tools were very familiar to me. Before there was GPS, navigation involved occasionally figuring out where you were, comparing that with where you thought you were, and then determining what direction you needed to go to get back on course. You would repeat this process until you tied up at the dock.

The "figuring out where you were" part often involved sighting two or three landmarks and triangulating your position from the angle to them. Lighthouses were built specifically to be these kinds of landmarks for navigation. Mistaking the distance to these landmarks often caused ships to run aground. So in the end, maritime navigation really is (or was) a process of finding something and staying away from it.

There's a metaphor here somewhere. We all need fixed points in our lives to help us find our way. Without them, we are just sailing around with no direction or purpose. Religion, politics, adventure, love, sex, and career can all serve this purpose to some degree, and at different times. But if we become too attached to one or another and fix our gaze on it, we risk crashing at the feet of the very thing that was supposed to save us.

How do we find the right balance? How the hell should I know? To paraphrase a line later in the song, just because I'm standing here doesn't mean I won't be wrong this time.

Happy sailing!

* The early stuff, before he went commercial.**

** That's a joke ~~from~~ on my former self. You know, the one that bought the Flying Machine album and pretended it was as good as those that came later. But I really haven't bought anything he's done since 1980.

Movie Sunday: Restrepo

2011-04-24T10:03:00.000-05:00

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I don't usually write about documentaries, and Restrepo may seem like an odd choice for Easter Sunday. But I'm sure you heard that Tim Hetherington, one of the two directors of this film, was killed in Libya this week. And as Biscuit said, when the soldiers helicopter into Afghanistan, you feel like you've stepped into the Bible.

Restrepo is the story of one Army platoon's fifteen month deployment in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. The movie and the remote outpost where most of it occurs are named after Juan "Doc" Restrepo, a popular medic killed shortly after the platoon's arrival. It's a different kind of war movie. There are firefights, but these mostly consist of American teenagers blasting away at distant unseen enemies.

For me, this is a story about the futility of war in general, and this war in particular. We see a group of young men endure a year in the most remote, foreign, and dangerous place imaginable. We see them wander through these villages, not speaking the language, unaware of the culture, trying to learn from inevitable mistakes that end up costing lives. The most disturbing thing personally was watching how the individuals change over their time at the end of the world, losing bits of innocence and humanity day by day.

Having said all of that, it's not really a depressing film. The scenery is beautiful, and we almost immediately start rooting for these boys, not necessarily for victory, but that they will survive all of this without losing too much. And I think if you live in this country and pay taxes, you should probably see it.

Restrepo is a beautiful and heartbreaking film, and like Easter, seems to be at least partly about the endurance of hope in the face of hostility and fear. We have been deprived of someone special by the loss of one of its makers.

It's a bird; it's a plane...

2011-04-20T06:11:00.000-05:00

A former boss and friend is a native of South Florida, West Point graduate, and child of the 70's. So of course, he's a huge Dolphins fan. T married a retired Hooter's waitress about the time he got out of the Army, earned a Master's degree, and immediately started to conquer the business world.

His marriage was what a mutual friend called "a fair fight." One of the first nights I was with him away from work was poker at a colleague's apartment. He brought a gift set of tequila -- bottle in the box with crystal classes and margarita mix -- and drank most of the fifth during the night. His wife J called around 7:30 pm, shortly after he arrived, and I heard him assure her that he would be home shortly, and would stop at the grocery store to pick up chicken to grill for dinner. He left at 1:30 am, and said she woke him the next morning by hitting him in the stomach as hard as she could. As he described it, he "folded in half like a rollaway bed." That's the only physical violence I ever knew of in their marriage. Mostly it was a blend of true tenderness, yelling, co-dependence, and farce.

The phone was a big part of their relationship. Her job seemed to consist mostly of calling him seven or twenty times a day at the office to get advice on crises large and small, inform him of her latest car accident, or offer observations on the day's events. T's role was to hang up on her repeatedly after telling her he was too busy to listen to her crap. Though on at least half of these occasions, before he could hang up he would get pulled into some conversation about a bird on the patio, or something of equal import.

One night T ordered a Dan Marino commemorative plate from the Home Shopping Network. Don't ask me why, I still don't get it. I suspect more tequila was involved. But of course the moment it arrived in it's octagonal package, J called to let him know.

"You got something in the mail. It's a hepadon!"

I was sitting in his office when this particular call came in, and when he said, "A hepadon?!," visions of some six sided pterodactyl sprang to my head. He naturally responded to her, "Funny, I don't remember ordering a dinosaur."

Alas, their marriage lasted only a dozen years or so after that episode, and the end was as messy as the rest. I hear T suffers from terrible gout, and J is likely working as a barfly somewhere. They are long gone from my life, but for some reason I really can't explain, I will always clearly and fondly remember the day I saw a hepadon.

Movie Sunday: Mystery Science Theater 3000

2011-04-17T10:02:00.000-05:00

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I know what you're thinking. "MST3K is not a movie, it's a TV show," you say.*

"Aha!" I respond. "There was a movie! It was released between seasons six and seven." And, I don't even remember what it was about. Okay, it was This Island Earth, but I take your point. I doubt anyone saw the movie that didn't watch the show.

But I don't care. I'm a MSTie still, a dozen years after the show's run has ended. And I haven't watched any movies this week that are worth writing about. Take The Social Network, for instance. I'm not sure why everyone thought this was such a great movie. It was like critics thought if they were effusive enough, Zuckerberg might drop a billion on them. I mean it was fine, but I didn't find anything particularly outstanding about it. Maybe it's because I spend every day with computer geniuses, but I think it's more likely that it's just an average movie.

I got a new office at work a couple of weeks ago, with walls and a desk and a door and a bookshelf all of my own. I haven't had an office with walls and a desk, etc., in about four years, so this is kind of a big deal for me. I started bringing in a book a day, and the occasional piece of personabilia to make the place feel more like me.

One of the first things I brought in was a Mystery Science Theater coffee mug. It doesn't have any text -- it's emblazoned with a scene from the show featuring Joel and the bots. I put whiteboard markers in it and stuck it on my round conversation table, where it acts as a sort of litmus test of visitors. Those who know what it is are in the club. Those who -- like our purchasing agent -- pick it up and look quizzical, are not.**

If you're not a fan of MST3K, then you've undoubtedly stopped reading by now. If you are, go back and watch a couple of old episodes. It's still a really enjoyable experience, and many of them will stream from Netflix. Some of my favorite episodes are The Crawling Hand, Prince of Space, and Time Chasers. And you should definitely save Space Mutiny. It features the fieriest golf cart crash ever, as well as a lack of continuity that is astounding. Maybe you could even watch the movie.

* You know who you are. And so do I.

** He never had a chance. He's twenty-three and a purchasing agent. And he wears a goatee with no mustache, so he might be an Amish kid on rumspringa.

Movie Sunday: The Commitments

2011-04-10T10:55:00.001-05:00

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When I was a kid, pretty much all we had to listen to was AM radio.* My hometown of Little Rock had exactly two stations that didn't play country or what I've come to think of as Vegas music. One was KAAY, one of the nation's 50,000 watt monsters that covered a good portion of the nation. They were strictly Top 40 in the daytime, and at night turned more subversive.**

The other was KOKY 1350, the self-described "black spot on your dial." This is where I learned to love rhythm and blues, soul, and a little later, funk. The Beatles, Grand Funk, Steppenwolf, and Three Dog Night I heard on one hand was no more important to me than the Marvin Gaye, Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops and War that played higher up on the dial.

This is one reason I really liked The Commitments. I also like just about anything Irish. Oh, and it's a good movie. The Commitments is the 1991 story of a group of working class Dubliners who form a band. It's a glimpse into the depressed Ireland of the 80's and early 90's, before the "Irish miracle" that led to the current "Irish bailout." The characters are engaging and rich, the plot is tight without seeming spare, and the music is great.

The film was directed by Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Fame, Mississippi Burning), and despite a largely untrained cast, was voted the Best Irish Film of All Time in a 2005 poll. So if you like old soul music, and you've been missing pink lipstick and spiral perms, you should definitely check out The Commitments. It's magically delicious.

* Shut up.

** Someone from the midwest or deep south will still occasionally talk to me about listening to Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford.

The Legend of Panties Galore

2011-04-07T19:09:00.000-05:00

Panties was a redhead by trade. She had been raised in a little hick town in Montana, where her Momma bought all of her underwear at the Feed & Implement Warehouse. Mostly burlap, sometimes canvas, but usually uncomfortable. And never very stylish. Panties resolved that some day she would escape small town life, and her unmentionables would be the talk of the Big City.

Panties had panties in every style. Low rise, bikini, thong, granny, boy short and control panel. Briefs, boxers, tap pants and bloomers. Surprisingly, only two colors, nude and black. No one ever really did figure that one out. Bras came in push up, natural, jelly, foam, underwire, strapless, convertible and longline. She had camisoles, bustiers, catsuits and spanks. No style was too exotic; no fabric too easy-care.

Like most of us, the seeds of Panties' doom were sown in her underwear. In the end, she fell victim to exponential marketing. Panties was so obsessed with panties that she couldn't get a Victoria's Secret catalog in the mail without ordering something. And every time she ordered something, she got more catalogs. Before you knew it, the postman was delivering sacks of catalogs and underthings every day, and it was all Panties could do to go through it all before the next shipment arrived. Before you could say "breathable crotch," she was exhausted, broke, and way behind on her laundry.

Movie Sunday: Uncertainty

2011-04-03T10:11:00.000-05:00

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I didn't particularly like this movie. It seemed like a good idea -- a film about a couple who need to make a decision, and we see the consequences of each potential choice. But the decision we examine is not the decision that is really on their mind. Confused yet? Yeah, me too. And if a movie is going to leave me confused for as long as this one, it had better have a payoff at the end. And there really wasn't one.

It wasn't a total loss. There is some decent suspense, and the characters are generally interesting and engaging. Plus, it's an attractive film to watch, especially for an indy. The New York Times guy really liked it. I have to wonder what size muffin basket he got for that review.

I respect someone who can make a magic trick of a film. I thought Sixth Sense was brilliant the first time I saw it. An I love a good allegory. In this case, the idea of examining the significance of decisions big and small has potential, but I think they missed by more than a little.

Move Sunday: Winter's Bone

2011-03-27T09:44:00.000-05:00

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I have to admit that the people and places in this movie are more familiar to me than is really comfortable. I had not-distant-enough relatives in Forsyth, Missouri, where the film was made, and a significant fraction of my extended family are scattered around the surrounding area. And there was a lot I recognized, in type if not in particular.

Winter's Bone is the story of a young woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence) whose meth-cooking father has put up their homestead for his bond. When it looks like he may not show up for his court date, she has to go find him, all the while caring for her two younger siblings and crazy mother.

There are several things I like about this movie. For one thing, it's refreshing to see a contemporary story populated entirely by people for whom neither the S&P 500 nor E! television have the least relevance. The dead simplicity of these characters and their lives is something that's worth noting, especially when we consider how much of our population might be represented by the characters in this film. And the film at least attempts to portray this small world without portraying the characters as stupid or unimportant.

Winter's Bone also features an interesting cast of characters, despite the cultural homogeneity of the people in the film. And it manages to stay surprising, in spite of a straightforward plot. Since it's an independent film, the local people and actual locations add to the authenticity. The production values were quite good, especially for an independent film. The DVD edition includes an extensive "making of" segment that illustrates some of the challenges they faced.

The film does have a little too much of the Walking Tall style hillbilly mafia to ring 100% true for me. But just a touch. And some of the dialogue is a little over the top. But overall, it's a well-told and personal story, and a very engaging drama. I wouldn't exactly call it the feel-good movie of the year, but it's definitely a drama worth watching.

Just when you thought they couldn't get nerdier

2011-03-22T17:27:00.001-05:00

I went to a popular retail electronics outlet the other day to a pick up another of the tablet computers that we have been using extensively in our research at work. I've always had mixed feelings about this particular store, not least because I have issues with customer support people who refer to themselves as geniuses. I used to have a job like that, and believe me, nobody there was a genius.

Anyway, I do admire the way that this particular company can make geek toys chic, and I'm consistently amazed at the things that become cool simply by bearing the logo. So I was only a little surprised when they delivered my new purchase in a bag that doubles as a backpack.

The best way to carry all your camping electronics

Don't be surprised if you see these things all over the place pretty soon. But of course the new ones will be half the size and have a camera.

Movie Sunday: The Station Agent

2011-03-20T11:53:00.001-05:00

Image from here

By now you've probably realized that I have a soft spot for quiet little movies, and they don't get much smaller and quieter than Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent. A small story, told in a small place with a small cast, it reminds me of a hand-painted postcard. I think McCarthy is a much better filmmaker than actor, having also directed The Visitor, and directed the just released Win Win, which I really look forward to seeing.

The Station Agent provided a breakout role for Peter Dinklage playing Finbar McBride, a solitary hobby store employee who loses his job and simultaneously inherits a tiny abandoned train station in rural New Jersey. Though looking forward to living in isolation, McBride is beset -- or befriended, depending on your point of view -- by the local denizens. The ensemble includes Bobby Cannavale, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams, Raven Goodwin, Joe Lo Truglio, John Slattery, Richard Kind, and Paul Benjamin.

This film is both comedy and drama, with a heart that is tender and sad. Like The Visitor -- and I suspect Win Win -- The Station Agent explores the path from isolation to community, and the hazards inherent in the journey. It's a wonderful little film. Watch it. You'll like it.

Behind the swell

2011-03-19T07:04:00.000-05:00

Have you felt a change in the blogosphere in the last six months or so? For one thing, I don't think anyone says blogosphere any more. But more significantly, blogging seems to have passed its peak as a medium, or at least the phase of rapid growth and rabid press that typifies popular new things. There seem to be fewer new blogs, fewer new readers, and fewer posts. The mantle of all things to all people seems to have passed to Facebook and Twitter. This was confirmed for me in a recent NY Times article.

It's like when you're surfing*, and you ride the swells, waiting for the right wave, and eventually you see it coming and you start to paddle. Sometimes you start too late, and never really catch the break. Sometimes you go too early and it crashes over you. When it's perfect, you ride and cut and sometimes you even get tubed. But no matter what happens, eventually the wave passes and you're left behind, watching it go (if you're lucky), and you have to paddle back to catch the next one.**

Life is a little like that. Sooner or later, you notice that you're not thinking as much about changing the world as finding a way to enjoy the time you have left in it. You see the younger generation raising their kids, worrying about their careers, and making all the same mistakes you did, and realize that the peak has passed. At least, you do if you're paying attention. And whether you kicked ass or never really got started, there will be no paddling back for another.

It can be a jarring realization, and depressing or frightening for many people, but I find it strangely comforting. In blogging and in life, the pressure is off. Sort of. At least, I know what I've got to work with, more or less how I'm going to handle it, and I feel more comfortable working to my own purposes. Sensing a decline in something is realizing that nothing lasts forever, including screw-ups.

It doesn't mean we have to retire to the porch and blog about knitting. I'm starting a brand new career, for crying out loud. But I am doing it with a different attitude than most of the twenty-somethings who comprise my competition. No matter how far I go, or where I end up, I will try very hard to treasure the experience.

Who knows, I may even take up surfing.

* I have never surfed, but I liked the Beach Boys okay. If I ever did hang ten, I would definitely call myself "Moondoggie."

** Yes, I know sometimes you can surf right to the beach, and chicks will run up to you as you pick up your board and toss the water from your hair, and you will all run up the beach to the bonfire and play guitar and do the twist, but I'm trying to build a metaphor here.

Oh, sweet mystery of life

2011-03-15T17:35:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has been paying even a little attention knows that my life has been sweet beyond imagining. From the beginning, I have enjoyed good love, good fortune, and good health. Practically every dream I've had has come true, with opportunities to find new ones and fulfill them. What challenges and misadventures I have had were generally the type that befall most of us. And while I didn't enjoy the 80's as much as the rest, my days now are more enjoyable and fulfilling than I think they have ever been.

So why then do I seem to feel the need to find one disappointing aspect of my life and dwell on it, sometimes to the point of letting my dissatisfaction obstruct my enjoyment of all that I have? It's one of the grand mysteries of the universe. And by universe I mean the one with me at the center. To make matters worse, it is often the same issue recurring, which assures me that the fault is my own.

It's a small albatross, as such things go. A tiny pendant, really. At a time when the level of suffering that others endure is so plain before me, I am ashamed to even consider it. On good days I assume that the restlessness and mostly benign ambition that drives me to be a serial dreamer also keeps me from ever being totally contented. In less charitable moods I feel like a sort of defective, self-created Tantalus, full and surrounded by sustenance, but never satiated.

If you're getting tired of listening to an obviously over-priveliged white guy wax morose about his self-imposed misfortune, you're not alone. It was the same reaction that prompted me to write this post. But it will get better. It always does.

Movie Sunday: Grey Gardens

2011-03-13T07:46:00.006-05:00

Images from here. And here.

Like many young people, I experimented with thespianism in high school and college. I wasn't really very good, but it left me with an appreciation for the difficulty of professional acting. And I've always liked crazy people. So this pair of movies was right up my alley.

That's right, there are two movies called Grey Gardens, and if you accept this mission you need to watch them both.* Both are about Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. The Edies lived like hermits in a rambling mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, and got crazier by the day as the house fell down around them. They had a lot of cats, and raccoons that they may or may not have thought were cats.

The original film is a documentary made in 1975. Some press in the early seventies had caused enough family embarrassment that Jackie O and her sister dumped enough money into the place so that it would meet code. It also got the Maysles brothers interested enough to come follow them around the house with cameras. But even having a film crew there apparently didn't convince the Edies to pick up after themselves or take out the garbage.

HBO made the second Grey Gardens two years ago, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore cast as the Edies. Many of the shots in the film mirror scenes from the documentary, but the story covers much of the two women's lives.

The acting is what fascinated me about the HBO version. Actors almost always pull traits or behaviors from real people when they are building characters. But building a character who is a real person, especially one who has appeared on film, must be a special challenge. Both women do an excellent job. They are as good as Brian Keith's Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion, which is high praise coming from me. I have to give a slight edge to Jessica Lange. Critics really loved Drew Barrymore's performance, and it was certainly very good, but I didn't think she was quite able to capture the East Coast intensity of the real little Edie. It's not her fault. She's from California.

So if you like old crazy women, this is the pair of films for you. If not, just watch The Fifth Element again. You really can't see that too many times.

* Actually, there are a number of plays and books as well, but let's not go overboard.

Watch watch

2011-03-11T06:41:00.000-06:00

So I've been wearing two watches for two months now, mostly just to see what people would say. Know what people have said? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a single person has made a comment. I think I've caught a couple of people noticing, but mostly I think we pay so little attention to each other that most people don't even realize that there is anything different.

Also, I got a paper accepted to a conference someplace really nice, which is a first for me. The best I've ever done before was Tampa. Typically I end up going to Dallas, or Alabama somewhere. I won't say exactly where this one is, but they have poi. And our President claims he was born there. My ex-wife was also born there. I guess no place is perfect.

Movie Sunday: Secondhand Lions

2011-03-06T07:40:00.000-06:00

Image from here

So my movie selections may have been a little Duvall-heavy lately, but that is because he is currently my favorite actor. And Secondhand Lions is one of the most enjoyable movies I have seen in a long time. It's almost a perfect story. And by "perfect story," I mean the story is ridiculous and awful. Or could be awful, if it weren't so well executed. It's a coming of age story built of cliches and decorated with ridiculous boyish fantasies. It could easily have devolved into a National Lampoon's Vacation movie.

But using the magic of talent and vision, the people who made Secondhand Lions instead perform magic. It was written and well directed Tim McCanlies, without resorting to film school tricks, which is apparently quite tempting for new(ish) directors. But McCanlies has been around movies for a long time as a writer, and was apparently paying attention.

The acting was just superb. Duvall should be in the Smithsonian or something, and Haley Joe Osment shows depth well beyond his years. I really look forward to seeing him grow up. Michael Caine is, well he's Michael Caine. And the chemistry between these three is what really makes the movie. If you're not a little verklempt by the end of the film, you probably weren't paying attention.

So if you are a person who has a hard time with unrealistic stories, and all of your favorite shows are CBS crime dramas, you might want to skip this one. On the other hand, if you love good acting, and you can put up with tall tales and larger than life characters, Secondhand Lions is one you will want to see.

Movie Sunday: Keeping Mum

2011-02-27T10:49:00.000-06:00

Image from here

When I was young, there was a large multipurpose room in the basement of our church, where most of the larger scale, non-worship activities happened. With a kitchen at one end and a stage at the other, it was a good place for receptions (at least the tee-totalling kind), banquets, large meetings, and Halloween carnivals. It was also where the church thespians performed their annual play.

Being a church, the plays tended toward the mainstream. But it was a Methodist church during the Vietnam era, and they were not performing the religious dramas that are common these days. For instance, one of the first performances I remember was Arsenic and Old Lace. I think my father played one of the victims.

I love this play, and I'm sure it helped inspire my love of theater in general, and of the black comedy in particular. If you haven't seen it, there is a very good 1959 film adaptation starring Cary Grant. I find the innocence of the characters in the traditional black comedies makes for higher comedy than the moral ambiguity that became fashionable later (think Grosse Point Blank).

Which brings us to Keeping Mum. It's a wonderful little farcical black comedy in the traditional sense. And by little, I mean it is modest in what it attempts to accomplish, and partially because of its modesty, it accomplishes more. It's a delightful way to spend an hour and three-quarters, especially if you're in the mood for light, irreverent entertainment.

The cast is first-rate, mostly familiar but cast somewhat against type. Rowan Atkinson plays the vicar of the village of Little Wallop, and the foil for three generations of women, played by Maggie Smith, Kristen Scott Thomas, and Tamsin Egerton. I'm not really going to say much about the plot, because it unfolds so nicely in the film. Keeping Mum also features Patrick Swayze, playing the role of the archetypal sleazy golf pro almost as a self-parody. Of course, maybe that's the only way he knew how to act.*

Maybe these types of stories are not as edgy as perhaps they once were, given the number of stories -- both fiction and fact -- of people who kill without remorse or regard. But I still find the interplay of wide eyes and cold blood can tickle a spot that few other forms of comedic entertainment can reach. So if you like yours old-fashioned and well crafted, you may want to give Keeping Mum a go.

* Too soon? One of my old girlfriends was crazy about Swayze, and would not be amused.

Now where was I?

2011-02-25T06:26:00.000-06:00

Wow, I'm glad that's over. Now, what was I saying? I forget.

It's a strange thing. I've had pretty much nonstop deadlines or other demands on my attention since before Christmas. A big all day seminar I hosted last Friday, combined with simultaneous out-of-town company last weekend, topped off the super-crazy-busy season, at least until next week when we demonstrate some of our research at a campus-wide tech show. But at least I didn't work this past weekend. I barely got out of bed on Saturday, and then mostly only managed to flop in the big chair and fail to find anything interesting to watch on TV. Sunday was pretty much a rerun of Saturday, though I did manage to make pancakes and start on my Lego Mars Exploration Rover.

One thing that I always find interesting in the denouement of these frantic times is how much they separate me from whatever it was that was on my mind before it started. I've actually had time to write a blog post for almost a week, but couldn't really think of what I wanted to write about. So I finally decided to write about that.

The signs of stress are all over me. I'm not sleeping, easily frustrated, more forgetful even than usual, eating like crap, and drinking a little too much. But my head is empty of much of anything other than the tasks at hand. And I feel more productive than I have in years.

I have a few friends and co-workers that live their lives this way.* It occurred to me a while back that the empty head may explain why. There are no real decisions of import to make. Their priorities are already set. Stay up to your ass in alligators, and you never have to figure out how to drain the swamp. And nothing they do -- or fail to do -- is really their fault. They had to get that proposal out, or finish that report, or get the kids to dance-gymnastics-soccer-drama-art class. And in return, they get that crowning since of achievement, and the little thrill that comes with crashing a deadline with no time, little sleep, and a real possibility of failure.

I consider this a separate disorder from always having to be doing something disease, with which some of the people closest to me are afflicted. My father had a terminal case, and I have my moments. Besides being a serial hobbyist, I have struggled with a self-imposed "one home-improvement project at a time" restriction for several years. But the motivation there is internal, and much of the goal (at least for me) is more to fill my head than empty it.

Perhaps the end result is the same, I don't know. I don't really have time to think about it right now. I have a million things to do. (See what I did there?)

* So do you, I'll bet. If you don't know to whom I'm referring, than you are probably one of them.

Movie Sunday: Everybody's Fine

2011-01-16T10:50:00.001-06:00

Image from here

So we're watching Mammoth last night, which is the longest, best produced movie in which nothing at all happens that I can ever remember seeing, when the sixteen year old Thai prostitute looks at Leo and says, "You're wearing two watches." Now I'm not sure if I can keep wearing two watches.

Anyway, unlike Mammoth, if you didn't get enough family-related guilt over the holidays, Everybody's Fine is a must see. Actually, you should probably see it anyway. Because it's excellent. Robert De Niro will make you want to cry within about five minutes of the movie starting, but in a good way. Not like the way Mammoth made me want to cry. In fact, even though not that much happens in this film either, we are so emotionally engaged from the beginning that it's hard to look away.

De Niro plays a recent widower in poor health whose children are supposed to come from all around the country for the weekend. They all cancel at the last minute, so he decides to surprise each of them with a visit. Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, and Drew Barrymore play his children, and they are all very good. But De Niro is genius in this thing. His vulnerability will break your heart.

This is apparently a remake of a 1990 Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni, who is probably my favorite Italian actor with a y chromosome. The storyline of the original seems both a little cleaner and more literary than the American version, which is not really surprising. For example, each of the children is named for an opera character, who they seem to resemble in some way. I would love to see the original film. Unfortunately, it apparently has not been released on DVD, and I haven't been to Italy lately.

At it's core, Everybody's Fine is about secrets and lies, but not "there's a treasure map on the Declaration of Independence" kind of secrets. The little, real life secrets that children keep from their parents, and vice versa, and how each one puts a little distance between us.

Speaking of which, if you like the falsehood-based family comedy, we really enjoyed City Island, with Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies. Garcia plays a prison guard and aspiring actor who heads a family that seems incapable of telling each other the truth. It's a bit quirky, and a little more light-hearted than Everybody's Fine.

Wow, three for the price of one. Maybe I will skip next week altogether.

Three things you should know about me

2011-01-14T16:25:00.000-06:00

I'm not good in a crisis. If you are looking for a well-reasoned, in depth analysis of what went wrong, or you would like a balanced opinion on some life-changing decision, complete with examples and philosophical underpinnings, then I'm your guy. If you're looking for someone to take charge in the heat of the moment, start barking orders, and always know exactly what to do, you're going to want to call someone else.
I can't be dared. People have tried to dare me to do one thing or another my whole life, and as far as I can recall, it hasn't worked a single time. I'm not sure if it's because I'm too internally motivated or just chicken, but it's just not going to happen. So don't even bother. On the other hand...
I'm highly suggestible. For example, JV suggested in response to my last post that I wear one of my two identical watches on each arm. I chuckled at the suggestion and promptly forgot it. Until this morning, when for reasons we won't go into right now, it struck me as the best idea ever.

It feels even stranger than it looks.

I'm taking bets on how long it takes before anyone at work says anything. So far I may have caught one sidelong glance, but no comments.

A Tale of Two Watches

2011-01-10T16:57:00.002-06:00

It was the best of time ... no, I can't do it. Anyway, a long time ago, in a land called "The Eighties," I was married to a crazy woman, though that's really another story. The point is her parents were nice. For example, they brought me back a watch from a trip to Switzerland. Because they knew I would like one. It was perfect. An Omega self-winder, water-resistant, simple, analog, easy to read, luminescent hands, and appropriate for any occasion.

I loved my watch, and wore it virtually every day. Alas, watches like mine are mechanical, and things wear out over time. After a while, watches don't hold their value well enough to justify the cost of continued repairs. Sort of like people. So when my Omega started to betray my habitual punctuality, I started stepping out, going through a series of cheap Swatches and flashy Indiglo's. But nothing could really take the place of my beloved Omega.

Nothing, that is, until Biscuit presented me with a Citizen Corso Eco-Drive for Christmas one year. Or maybe it was my birthday, I forget, but I loved it. It was everything the Omega was, and more. Titanium case and band, scratch-resistant mineral dial window, and driven by light. How can you not love a watch that's driven by light? And while the Omega's style was great for the 80's, the Citizen's look is perfect for who I am now.

Titanium, just like the SR-71 and my King Cobra driver

Everything was great with my new watch until I lost it. One day it just seemed to vanish. I racked my brain for months, trying to come up with any clues to its whereabouts. I searched the car, moved furniture, and looked in places too small for it to fit. I even cut the bottom fabric and looked inside my favorite club chair, which has eaten two Swiss Army knives, one phone, a lot of change, and countless M&M's over the years. No luck.

After a couple of years, once it was obvious that my watch was truly gone for good, Biscuit took pity on me and presented me with a replacement this past Christmas. I was planning to bake bread all day on the 23rd, and we were driving to see family on Christmas Eve, so we exchanged gifts on the evening of the 22nd. I was excited to have my new watch, and since it was identical to the old one, it lessened the sense of loss.

I jumped up early the next morning and made breakfast, as I had about a half dozen full size loaves to bake, as well as sixteen mini chocolate loaves for family presents.* I decided to put on my apron, which was also a present from Biscuit, and wearing it reminds me to check on things every now and then. I forget to wear it most of the time when I'm cooking, but I had one loaf rising, one proofing, and one in the oven pretty much all day, and I tend to get distracted, so anything that helps keep me centered is, well, helpful.

Good advice when I'm cooking

I had the apron on for about five minutes when I noticed there was something in the pocket. Why, what could it possibly be? Infrared thermometer? Tiny measuring cup? Muffin ring? Why it's ... okay, at this point you should be feeling almost as uncomfortable as I was. Even before I got my hand in the apron pocket, I had a premonition of what it was going to be ... my other watch!

For a second, I seriously considered not saying anything, and maybe hiding it in a drawer against the day that I lost the new one, and I could replace it without saying anything. But that's not really the kind of relationship we have, and besides, I felt way too stupid to get away with this. Biscuit was incredibly gracious and good-humored about the whole thing, partially because she's always relieved to find something good to buy me, but mostly because she's really nice.

I walked within six inches of this several

times a day, the entire time it was missing.

We talked about sending back the new one, but given my track record, in the end I thought it was probably wise to keep them both. Plus, I feel like some sort of country gentleman with matching watches.

So the next time you think you couldn't possibly feel stupider about something, remember that it was a far, far dumber thing I ... nope, still can't do it.

* I don't normally give bread to people as if it were a real present. It's bit of a long story, but the important thing to know is that each loaf came with a bottle of champagne.

Movie Sunday: Fun with physics romantic comedy triple feature

2011-01-09T08:43:00.000-06:00

Streaming Netflix and I have been down a bit of a rabbit-hole lately, and I've watched several quirky little movies that involve manipulation of time and space in one way or another. While none of them are exactly Sleepless in Seattle, I think we have to classify them as romantic comedies, since they revolve around relationships and nothing much explodes.

It all started with Cashback, a likable movie with the worst title since Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, and an even worse poster. As Biscuit said after resisting the first dozen times I suggested we watch, it looked like it was going to be a film for fifteen year old boys. Not that fifteen year old boys wouldn't like it. There is a decent amount of nudity, tastefully done of course. Also, a couple of fart jokes and a soccer game.

Image from here

Cashback is the story of a young art student who has just broken up with that girl who was the new Bionic Woman, though that has nothing to do with the story. He is so broken up that he stops sleeping, and ends up taking a job at an all-night grocery store to fill up his nighttime hours. Eventually, he figures out how to stop time. Wackiness and a touch of romance ensue. It's a bit of 500 Days of Summer meets Employee of the Month, but everyone in it is a much better actor than Jessica Simpson.

This is probably my favorite of the three films, both because of the quirky characters and because it's British, so you know it's good. Also, I believe I mentioned the nudity. I don't expect everyone to share my preference, but it did win some awards and stuff.

Image from here

Next came TiMER, which takes place in a world where science* has invented an implant that can determine exactly when you will meet your soulmate, assuming they are also wearing a timer. The story revolves around two sisters, one whose timer hasn't started, while the other's has quite a while to go. The interest comes from pondering how you would live your life if you knew your perfect relationship was x years in the future. This show is very clever, fun to watch, and the cast is just about perfect. I have mixed feelings about the end, but all in all it's a good way to pass 99 minutes.

Image from here

The last of our trio is Happy Accidents, which of the three is probably the closest to a traditional romantic comedy. It stars Marisa Tomei as a girl who is so bad at relationships that she and her friends seem to have formed some sort of club for girls who only date losers. She meets a young fellow (Vincent D'Onofrio) from Dubuque who seems strange, even for an Iowan. As she learns more about him, his story becomes increasingly unbelievable, and the tension of whether or not we are going to believe him drives us forward through the story. Like the other two, it's mostly light-hearted, and easy watching, though with some substance.

There were a few more in this odd little thread, but not really that notable. Except for Uncertainty, which I didn't care for. Biscuit liked it a little better, but it definitely was not on the level of these others. So the next time you're about to watch Pretty Woman again just because it's on TV, try streaming one of these instead. It will entertain you, and make you think.

* This is romantic comedy science, so think of it more as magic.

Movie Sunday: My Six Loves

2011-01-02T10:15:00.000-06:00

Image from here

Biscuit and I both have colds, brought home from our holiday travels. We are choosing to blame my niece from L.A., who was inconsiderate enough to travel 2000 miles with two kids under five and presents for twenty, just so she could spend the holidays feeling like crap with a lot of people she barely knows. As a bonus, she got to have a big fight with her mother (my sister-in-law), just because her mom brought an ill-behaved, child-biting yippy little dog into a small house full of little kids.

But that has very little to do with this week's movie. Or maybe it does, how would I know? I have a fever, and probably won't remember writing any of this later. Anyway, we got Biscuit's parents a Roku box and a Netflix subscription for Christmas, and even though it doesn't work that great with their small town, steam-powered broadband, it seems like it's going to be serviceable, and they seem to like it.

Biscuit's mom is what you might call traditional, meaning most of her favorite books and movies were made before 1968. So when we were looking for things to add to her instant queue, the second thing she settled on (after a John Wayne movie) was today's gem, My Six Loves. Released in 1963, it stars Debbie Reynolds as an overworked actress, with Cliff Robertson, David Jansen, and Eileen Heckart, the Joan Cusack of her day.

Reynolds plays a successful actress suffering from exhaustion,* who is banished to her Connecticut estate for rest by her manager/boyfriend Jansen. There she discovers six trailer-trash children living in her old greenhouse. The ragamuffins have run away from a neglectful aunt and uncle who apparently wandered off the set of The Beverly Hillbillies. Once the local minister (Robertson) persuades her to take care of the kids until something suitable can be arranged, the wackiness starts. Also, there is a song jammed into the middle of the film for no discernible reason. Perhaps it was a signal to the men of the day that they could step out for a quick smoke and a bathroom break.

Some people will see this movie as a nostalgic look at a simpler time. Released today, it would be viewed by most women under 50 as a misogynistic propaganda piece, possibly secretly financed by the Mormon Church. The story revolves around Reynolds' realization that she "may be an actress, but she's also a woman, and should start acting like one." Apparently, real women can only be fulfilled when they are in a morally unambiguous relationship with a righteous man and a passel of kids. Heckart plays Reynolds' friend, assistant, and external super-ego, whose main job seems to be telling everyone that Reynolds will eventually come to her senses.

I like watching movies like this, because it reminds me of how far we have come in what is really a very short time. And also why our parents and the Tea Party (admittedly largely overlapping sets) seem so crazy about some things. Attitudes usually change over several generations, and seeing mainstream entertainment so obviously out of touch with today's mainstream sentiments helps lend a sense of perspective.

I wouldn't waste a DVD choice on this, but if you feel like streaming as much as you can stand, I found it pretty entertaining. You will probably need drinks.

* This was before the likes of Liza, Mariah, and Lindsay taught us that "actress suffering from exhaustion" is normally a synonym for "ho-bag on the Joe Cocker diet."** But it's implied.

** Bloody Mary's for breakfast and cocaine for lunch. Supper usually consists of jumping around onstage for a couple of hours, followed by a handful of M&M's.

That's a wrap!

2010-12-31T13:45:00.006-06:00

Is it just me, or has it been a strange year? Of course it has. Most years are strange when you look back on them, because we live in a weird world. Maybe I'm just getting more attuned to the oddity of it all.

For us, the big news for the year was the BP oil spill, which now seems to have faded from the collective consciousness. Not quite as big of a bust as the last visit of Halley's comet, but I got the distinct impression that newspeople and environmentalists* were really hoping for more oil-covered birds and blackened beaches. Given our national addiction to oil, they will have to content themselves with unknown long-term environmental damage, and the chance for a repeat as we continue to push aggressively into deeper water. Maybe we will eventually awaken Godzilla.

Only slightly less believable than the twists and turns of the BP story was the New Orleans Saints winning Super Bowl XXIV. Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still a shadow of its former self, and the character of the (non French Quarter) city has probably changed forever, but that silly football game was probably more significant for the residents than any sporting event since the Miracle on Ice in 1980,

Politics seemed to get even stranger, if that's possible. The nation's ability to believe things for which there is considerable counter-evidence continues to increase, as evidenced by the fact that our most influential politician is a belligerently ignorant housewife/governor/reality star who two-thirds of the population believes to be either dangerously unqualified or some sort of sinister media mastermind. Delaware came very close to electing a witch to congress. Okay, not a witch (I saw the commercial), but I'm sure Christine O'Donnell was one of those crazy drama majors in the dorm who burned incense all the time, held seances, and probably wore a cape.

I'm currently reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and it has taught me two things. First, the issues in politics haven't changed at all in a hundred years. In 1910, the big issues of the day were Arab nationalists blowing things up, and giant corporations taking over the government. But if the issues haven't changed, the people in politics certainly have. Roosevelt wrote around eighteen books (most in several volumes), not just about himself. He was an avid naturalist, historian, and pursuer of "the strenuous life." He led a cavalry charge and earned a brown belt in judo after he detached a retina and had to give up boxing. He was shot in the chest in an assassination attempt and still gave the speech he was scheduled to deliver. He had beliefs, and didn't care who knew them. He would never get elected today.

But I digress. Biscuit and I had a pretty good year overall. We managed to stay hurricane-free, and actually made up some ground on our home improvement project backlog. I am very close to finishing the never-ending bathroom remodel. The cats stayed healthy, I finally finished Moby Dick, we saw Buddy Guy in concert, and we got to see a shuttle launch.

We did lose an old and dear family friend a week before Christmas, but that seems to be part of my life now. My parents' generation is on the far side of the current expected lifespan, and very few months go by without another one passing on to what my grandfather termed "whatever is next."

Oh, I totally spaced on Movie Sunday last week. My excuse is that I was driving all day, traveling from the wine-fueled chaos that is my family Christmas to a more sedate late holiday celebration at the in-laws. I'll be back at it this week, but in the meantime you can enjoy Amy's review of True Grit. It's better than anything I could have written, anyway.

Anyway, it's been a good year, is the point. And I hope you have at least as good a year in 2011 as I had in 2010.

Happy New Year, everybody!

* I'm a huge advocate of preserving nature, the importance of biodiversity, etc., and probably maintain more extreme views of the importance of environment vs. economic development than many Sierra Club members. But I am wary of organized movements. It seems the successful ones always end up with money as their primary goal, and the rest usually fall under the control of a small group of zealots.

A Christmas wish

2010-12-25T08:20:00.001-06:00

So maybe it hasn't been our most festive Christmas season ever. It's the second year in row we've had a Christmas week funeral, and we have both had quite a bit of stress from various quarters. We have managed almost no decorations, or shopping, or baking, or any of the other things that tend to put one in the spirit.

But sometimes the hard years are just what it takes to remind us of how delicate and fleeting it all is, and how special this time of year. The nadir of the year, the time when it is always darkest, brings with it the promise of the dawn. There is nothing that encourages us in quite the same way as singing in the graveyard. The Joy that can be had from being with family (no matter how aggravating), exchanging gifts that no one wants, eating and drinking way too much, and reflecting on the turning of the years and the promise of Christmas, just cannot be had at any other time of the year.

So on this holiest of days for Christians and retailers, we wanted to let our favorite holiday decoration deliver our message for the season. I'm not sure where young Frostie was programmed, but I suspect it's a country where English is not commonly spoken. I'm not sure what a coin top pipe is, but I'm sure they are nice.

Watch the video. You know you want to.

So from Biscuit, the cats, and me, here's wishing you a very lively I don't know. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Movie Sunday: Pirate Radio

2010-12-19T09:26:00.003-06:00

Image from here

If you like sixties rock, you have GOT to see Pirate Radio (originally released in Britain as The Boat That Rocked). For one thing, practically everyone in it has a British accent, and says things like "bollocks," "cheers," "posh tosser," and "fortnight." And of the couple of people who aren't British, probably half of them are Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Seriously, you wouldn't believe the cast in this thing. It's a true ensemble, full of people you will probably recognize and can't name. Several are minor characters from the Harry Potter movies that make you say, "I know that dude." Or woman. Like Emma Thompson (Sybil Trelawney) and Bill Nighy (Rufus Scrimgeour). It's also got that woman from Doc Martin. The receptionist. Not the first one, the second one. Pauline, I think. What? You haven't watched Doc Martin? Do so immediately.

It's also a fun movie to watch. It's not quite what I would call a light-hearted romp, but it's definitely fun, and not too heavy. Sort of a blueberry scone of a movie. Sweet and light, but it stays with you pretty well. And did I mention the music is spectacular?

The music is spectacular. I can't even start to list all the great songs that were played during this thing. It was so good it kicked off an episode of YouTube Night at our house. You've never played YouTube night? What do you do at your house?

So here's the rules to YouTube Night.* First you need two computers. We take turns queueing up songs on YouTube, and the other one has to guess either the artist or title. Then there is often a story concerning the significance of the song. I didn't say it was a hard game, and we don't keep score or anything. But it's more fun than you might think, especially since the differences in our ages and childhood locations make it a little more interesting.

So here's a partial transcript of our latest YouTube night. See if you see anything you know.

Tower of Power: What is Hip?
Supertramp: Breakfast in America
Foreigner: Jukebox Hero
Curtis Mayfield: Superfly
Isaac Hayes (aka Chef): Shaft
Coven: One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)
Bobby Gentry: Ode to Billy Joe
Paul Revere and the Raiders: Indian Reservation
Jimmy Dean (yes, the sausage guy): Big Bad John
Kansas: Dust in the Wind
Herman's Hermits: Henry the Eighth
Tennessee Ernie Ford: Sixteen Tons
Gerry and the Pacemakers: You'll Never Walk Alone
Jeannie C. Riley: Harper Valley PTA
The Kinks: You Really Got Me
Bobby Bare: Marie Laveau
The Zombies: Time of the Season
Mungo Jerry: In the Summertime
Waylon Jennings: Luchenbach, TX
Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit
The Monkees: Last Train to Clarksville
Bread: Baby I'm a Want You
Bread: I Want to Make It With You
David Dundess: Old Blue Jeans
Starland Vocal Band: Afternoon Delight
Sammy Johns: Chevy Van
Helen Reddy: Angie Baby
Lobo: Me and You and a Dog Named Boo
Bobby Gentry: Fancy
Michael Murphy: Wildfire
Dean Friedman: Ariel
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition: Ruby
Dr. Hook: Sylvia's Mother
Looking Glass: Brandy (you're a fine girl)
Jimmy Buffett: Come Monday
Mac Davis: Baby, Baby, Don't Get Hooked on Me
.38 Special: Hold on Loosely
Dave Loggins: Please Come to Boston
Eagles: Lyin' Eyes
Gerry Rafferty: Baker Street
Sam Sham and the Pharoahs: Little Red Riding Hood
The Animals: House of the Rising Sun
Sinead O'Connor: Nothing Compares to You
Don Mclean: Vincent
Linda Ronstadt: Desperado

I'm totally loading all of this crap into Pandora and seeing what happens.

*Biscuit just reminded me of another important rule: You will need wine.

Quid Pro Quo

2010-12-17T07:10:00.001-06:00

Johnny Virgil has written a book, apparently because he has less to do at work than I do. Or possibly he's one of those people who doesn't watch television fourteen hours a day. I wouldn't know. I haven't read it yet because I'm still catching up on the Twilight books, but I bet it's good. He's a talented writer and a funny guy, so you should probably buy it. Think of it as The Wonder Years, but with real kids.

* No one ever really asks me.

Wax on, wax off

2010-12-15T08:14:00.000-06:00

Most of my life I have been known as a "visionary type," or "abstract thinker." Generally, these have not been compliments. My graduate school advisor called me his "philosopher student" one time, which I still insist on interpreting as a good thing. A few years ago, one of the directors at our company asked me to come into a software requirements meeting he was holding and "do some of that crazy-talking you do."

I realize now that I am a rank amateur. My boss is internationally famous for visionary thinking, and uses words like "aspirational," "transformational," and "entangle," often in the same sentence. We've been working on a grant proposal for the past few weeks, but he's been busy with other things, so I've been doing most of the writing. Reading through it this morning, I realized it sounds awfully pedestrian. I was very tempted to send a message asking him to run through it and add some of that crazy-talking.

Movie Sunday: Cabin Boy

2010-12-12T17:25:00.001-06:00

Image from here

I said last week that I had been planning to do a stupid one, and they don't get much stupider than Cabin Boy. Let me start by saying that I'm not a fan of Chris Elliot. I hated him on David Letterman, and pretty much everything else I've ever seen him in, which is as little as possible. But I loved this movie. I still have no idea why.

The film was produced by Tim Burton, who was originally supposed to direct it. Chris Elliot plays the lead, an idiotic boarding school graduate who we first meet at the waterfront, looking for his father's yacht. It features David Letterman as a fancy-lad-hating sock monkey salesman, in a cameo appearance that was an instant classic.

Instead of the yacht, Elliot ends up on a filthy fishing boat with some filthy fisherman. The ensuing odyssey is ridiculous, and strangely sweet. Somehow, the combination is perfectly tuned to Elliot's particular brand of obnoxiousness, and the result is a very funny movie.

At least some people think it's funny. I know several people who hate this movie. A lot. But if you liked The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, you will love Cabin Boy.

Movie Sunday: Airplane!

2010-12-05T21:27:00.001-06:00

Image from here

I was originally going to do a different stupid movie this week, but two things happened to change my plan. First, Leslie Nielson died, and I heard him say, I am serious ... and don't call me Shirley, about a hundred times. But what really did it was that one of my former students dropped by while Airplane! was playing on AMC, and I realized that he had actually never seen it. In fact, while he said he had heard of it, he really had no idea what it was about. And this is one of the cooler kids, who knows a lot about old music, vintage TV, and delivers Holy Grail quotes on a regular basis.*

I tried to explain it as "an old movie full of stupid jokes, but that's not important right now," which cracked me up, but didn't really seem to help him at all.

Airplane! is like an encyclopedia of comedy. From slapstick to satire, it has examples of practically everything, though it admittedly tends toward the lower forms. But while explaining it to my friend, I was reminded of the time it was made, and the string of disaster movies that made Airplane! the Scary Movie of its time. I guess Leslie Nielson owed the revival of his career to Irwin Allen, at least indirectly.

That was another small irony of this movie. Airport, Towering Inferno, Airport 75, Earthquake, Airport 77, and all the rest, gave washed up old actors -- the kind who today would show up on Dancing with the Stars -- one more role to pay the rent for another couple of years. But Airplane! gave several washed up old dramatic actors, most notably Nielson and Lloyd Bridges, new careers in comedy, at least for a while. As dumb as it was, it really was a phenomenon. This is the sort of thing that's hard to explain to a 22 year-old.

So if you haven't seen it in a while -- or God forbid, ever -- indulge your drinking problem and watch it. You may be amazed at how many of the old jokes you know came from this movie.

* Your idea of what constitutes a cool kid may vary. But we are talking about computer science majors, here.

Movie Sunday: Wilder Napalm

2010-11-28T11:28:00.001-06:00

This is one of my favorite movies, and I doubt you've ever heard of it. The few people I know who have seen it -- usually at my recommendation -- either love it, or tend to think that the casting is interesting, and the rest is ... okay. A few have seen it as a total waste of time. Part of this difference of opinion may be because the offbeat romantic comedy on the surface acts mostly as a substrate for a form of art that I can't really describe, but that I find very appealing.

The cast is definitely interesting. It stars the guy (Arliss Howard) who reminds me of that guy (Scott Glenn) who I used to confuse with David Carradine. Howard and Dennis Quaid are cast as two estranged brothers who can start fires with their minds. Debra Winger plays Howard's wife, a budding pyromaniac under house arrest. Her husband is a firefighter, so when she gets bored, she starts small fires to get hubby and his co-workers to come for a visit.

The story, while quirky, is fairly predictable, but the story is not really the thing. I think what I like about Wilder Napalm is similar to what I like about Coen brothers films. It's the characters, and the golden moments, and some hard to define subtext that are the most memorable. And there's singing, but only a little. It's a movie that you need to really watch, and listen to, and experience.

So if your Netflix recommendations tend towards "quirky indie films" you may want to try this one. At least now that Netflix carries it. If you prefer your fare more conventional, you should probably give it a miss.

Travel and terror

2010-11-26T11:09:00.001-06:00

There is an excellent opinion piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times this morning that mirrors many of my recent thoughts on the growth of Homeland Security and the TSA. If you are like 80% of Americans, then your attitude probably echoes most of my friends, somewhere along the lines of, "I'm willing to be scanned, and patted down, and all the rest, if it will keep terrorists off my plane." To some extent, I would agree.

There are only two problems with this attitude. First, it probably won't keep terrorists off your airplane. Mostly because there probably aren't going to be any terrorists on your plane. But also because each new layer of security is a response to the latest threat, and it's just added to all of the previous layers. At the same time, our enemies have already moved on to a new plan. They may be evil and/or crazy, but they are generally not stupid.

It is telling that security officials in Britain and Israel, arguably two of the best countries at securing transportation resources, have been critical of the TSA's approach. The idea that technology and procedures can be 100% effective against a suicidal human enemy is dangerously flawed, and creates a money pit into which billions upon billions of dollars will inevitably flow.

The second problem is more fundamental to the nature of the conflict. Life is 100% fatal. We can't choose whether to die, but we can choose how we live. And the United States was built on the idea that individual liberty is an "inalienable right" worth spending lives to defend.

Surrendering our liberties to protect our freedoms makes about as much sense as it sounds like it does. This is exactly what terrorists want. That's why they call them that. If they can disrupt our lives and make us afraid, then they have succeeded. It was never about how many people they could kill.

As Cohen writes, "America is a nation of openness, boldness and risk-taking. Close this nation, cow it, constrict it and you unravel its magic." Moreover, I personally believe that allowing a few wackos on the other side of the world to disrupt our lives and commerce in order to achieve some impossible guarantee of personal safety disrespects the sacrifices being made by our soldiers every day. The best way to support our troops is to be prepared to absorb a tiny bit of the risk they face. Have we really become so timid?

And is this really the best use of our shared resources? Terrorists on airplanes have killed around 3000 Americans in the past decade, depending on how one wants to count. About twice that many American soldiers have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that same period, around one hundred and fifty thousand people in the U.S. were victims of homicide. Should we expand our security procedures to the rest of our society? Would you be willing to submit to current TSA security procedures at the mall, your church, the local stadium, or your child's school?

I spent a good part of my career working with Federal bureaucracies, and I can see where this TSA thing is headed. I doubt if there is a silver bullet solution to this problem, but I know the way we're going will result mostly in more expense, more inconvenience, and very little increase in protection. And it's past time we started the conversation.

Movie Sunday: Cool Hand Luke

2010-11-21T11:34:00.000-06:00

Picture from here

What we have here is failure ... to communicate.

This is undoubtedly the most famous line in this movie, delivered by one of the more memorable characters in movie history, but it is far from the best moment in this wonderful film. Cool Hand Luke has been one of my favorites since I first saw it as a teenager, and is still a great joy for me to watch, despite having seen it probably a dozen times.

First of all, we have a young Paul Newman playing an impossibly engaging anti-hero. If you've ever wondered why a whole generation of people have a thing for Paul Newman, watch this movie. Luke's confidence, humor, and indomitable spirit make this an unlikely feel-good movie, and sometimes makes women's pants fall down.

Also, the character actors do a wonderful job, especially George Kennedy, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Dragline. And of course, Strother Martin as the sadistic Captain. The memorable scenes are too numerous to, umm, remember them all. The fifty-egg bet and the one-day road project are probably my favorites.

Except for the sexiest car wash ever, that is. What Joy Harmon can do with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water is enough to make a young boy wish he were in prison. And the prisoners' reactions to it are priceless.

Picture from here

Cool Hand Luke is not all wet t-shirts and eating eggs, though. The film deals a lot with the darker side of humanity: brutality, sadism, and injustice, though most of the violence is pretty tame by today's standards. And in the end, it's a film about hope and the human spirit. At least that's what I get from it.

So if you haven't seen this one, stick it your queue or watch for it on TV. It's on every now and then. And if you have seen it, but it's been a while, watch it again. It's a treasure.

Movie Sunday: Meet Me in St. Louis

2010-11-14T12:33:00.000-06:00

Image from here

I figured I had better do something light-hearted before Amy stops reading this altogether, so we're doing MGM's 1944 classic musical, ~~Eat~~ Meet Me in St. Louis. Actually, we can probably throw in Singin' in the Rain while we're at it, since I will probably never do this again.

I'm not really a big fan of musicals in general. My mother was all about them when I was a child, and many of the LP's that she played on our big console record player were soundtracks. It got worse when she got an Electra 225 with a cassette player. I thought if I heard about how the wind comes sweepin' down the plain in Oklahoma one more time, or how unsinkable Molly Brown was, I was going to pull out my hair.* My hatred of musicals peaked when I had to sit through my older brother's junior high school production of H.M.S. Pinafore, which I know is technically an opera, but whatever. Such distinctions were lost on me in fourth grade.

But high school boys will follow high school girls almost anywhere, so when Meet Me in St. Louis played on Sunday night at the Arts Center, I was there. And I have to confess that I was pleasantly surprised. It was a nice little family comedy, centered around a group of children and their misadventures. And the singing and dancing aren't quite so ridiculous as I had feared. Think Sound of Music, but with the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair instead of Nazis.

The most memorable part of the film today is probably Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Apparently, the song was originally supposed to be about the soldiers fighting in WWII or something. The fact that this movie was supposed to occur in 1904 really didn't enter into the decision to change the lyrics, such was the fantasy-land that was 1940's musicals. They decided to rewrite the lyrics because the original seemed too sad to sing to a little girl.

Singin' In the Rain came out almost a decade later, but is another opportunity to see the old people in laxative commercials when they were young and hot, sporting pointed breasts and pencil-thin mustaches.** The plot is more zany but just as predictable as Meet Me in St. Louis, and is really no different than a bomb shelter full of other musical comedies of the 1950's. This one is special because of the dancing.

If you're a fan of Dancing with the Stars -- which I definitely am not -- you owe it to yourself to see some of these old movies starring people who really knew how to dance. And before it became a competitive sport. Gene Kelly is almost unbelievable, and the cast is packed with first-rate dancers. The notable exception is Debbie Reynolds, who was apparently a gymnast with very little dance experience. Kelly was quite mean to her, and was surprised she would talk to him after the film. This led to Fred Astaire famously finding her "crying beneath a piano," and agreeing to help her with her dancing.

Of course, it's the title song dance sequence that has gotten most of the attention, but the whole movie is fun to watch. Especially with other people. Drunk. Maybe playing a game, or doing a puzzle or something at the same time.

* I had hair then.

**Though hardly ever on the same person.

And then this happened

2010-11-10T19:13:00.000-06:00

So, Biscuit took the week off to paint the outside of our house this week. Because life is a constant party at our place. Normally, she's in the house when I leave for work, and I lock her in. Yesterday she was outside the house when I left, and -- you guessed it -- I locked her out. I'm really only about two percent conscious anymore, I think. Everything else I do happens without any real participation on my part.

Luckily, our neighbor was home, so at about lunchtime, when she realized that she was shut out of the house without keys or phone, she was able to call from his house. I was in meetings both times she called, and couldn't answer. And since it's a number I don't recognize, I wasn't going to just call it back. That's not a problem, of course, since she left messages both times she called. So, another thing I learned yesterday is that my phone hasn't been getting voicemail for ... well, I don't know how long. Thanks, [name of phone company withheld because I would like for my wife to continue working there.]

So, long story short, we realized we don't talk much during a normal day. I did e-mail her once to tell her that I would be late getting home, since my boss has this persistent belief that it's okay to schedule meetings at 4:30 in the afternoon. And I called on my way home to find out how the wine was holding out. I was on the verge of getting annoyed with her for ignoring me.

If anyone needs any further proof that this is the person I was destined to share my life with, look no further than the fact that, after a shower and a glass of wine, she was not really even mad. Or maybe she's just biding her time. Either way, this is a woman you have to respect.

Oh, and I'm taking suggestions on a good place to hide a key.

Movie Sunday: Boxing Helena is the sexiest movie you will ever want to turn off

2010-11-07T09:31:00.000-06:00

Image from here

My last post reminded me of one of the most brilliantly disturbing movies I have ever seen: Boxing Helena. Not to say everyone will love this movie. I've had people get very angry with me for recommending it to them. It makes 9 1/2 Weeks look like Sleepless in Seattle, and can be extremely uncomfortable to watch. It also introduced me to the music of Enigma, which Biscuit has really never forgiven.

I don't want to say too much about it, because it would be easy to ruin. But it was the first film written and directed by Jennifer Lynch, David Lynch's daughter, which probably tells you something. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in the same year it won the Golden Raspberry for Worst Director.

Oh, and if you decide to try it, watch the whole thing. Quitting in the middle will just make it worse.

Can you see the real me?

2010-11-05T10:31:00.000-05:00

Image from here

We've started watching this British TV series on DVD called Being Human. It's about a vampire and a werewolf that live with a ghost. Sounds like the opening line of a joke, right? So far, we really like it. Perhaps even more than most stories of supernatural beings, the focus here is very much on the monster within.

I've had enough long drunken nights with enough different types of people to know that we all have a monster inside of us. Or at least people that will drink with me seem to have one. No matter how much we show to those around us, we hide a creature that we believe to be so vile that we cannot afford for even those closest to us to catch a glimpse of it. Or maybe the point is that we especially can't afford for those closest to us to see it.

I wonder about those perpetually perky types that hide their monsters beneath mountains of bunnies and flowers, or (somewhat ironically) the Bible and the Holy Spirit. Are they truly unaware of this primitive presence within themselves? Or are they ones working hardest to conceal it, lest someone catch wind of how the sight of a full moon makes them want to tear off their clothes and run howling into the forest, eviscerating those same bunnies that decorate their kitchens?

Or maybe it's not monsters for all of us. Perhaps, in what Arianna Huffington calls our "lee-zard brains," some of us are prey rather than predators, secretly longing for the fangs in our throats, and the sweet release from perpetual fear that only comes as we bleed out onto the snow. I suspect we all have a little of both. This is a theme that may get explored in this series, though it's too early to tell.

How did we get this way? Do chimpanzees hide their true motivations from their community?* Did secrets somehow evolve alongside language? I guess the ability to tell goes hand in hand with the option not to tell. But do we really need to believe that others lack the same primitive motivations as ourselves?

I suppose the answer to the last question is "yes." It is probably much easier to build civilization when we can believe that our wife has never had the urge to cuckold us with our boss, or that our children have never considered killing us in our sleep. And isn't that the whole point of civilization, after all? To allow us all to believe we live in a world of order and fairness and safety? Instead of the one we really inhabit, where a looming shadow could be the last thing we see, and the only thing keeping that moment in the future is our wits, and a great deal of luck.

*This is not to imply that I believe we are related in any way to chimpanzees.**

**But I do.

Movie Sunday: The Fifth Element is better than Citizen Kane

2010-10-31T10:59:00.001-05:00

And before anyone starts, yes I've seen Citizen Kane, and I thought it was incredible. That's how much I like The Fifth Element.

If you haven't seen Citizen Kane, I highly recommend that you do. Then you can make up your own mind. Not only is it probably the most beautiful film ever made in black and white, I don't know that there has ever been a more eloquent or poignant character study on film. It's a movie with the depth of a book, and just writing this makes me want to see it again.

Having said all that, it is a black and white story about a rich guy. Let's review what's in The Fifth Element:

space travel, pyramids, and Mangalores
ultimate evil
the perfect being*
a descendant of David Lee Roth (I'm pretty sure that's who that is)
a descendant of Prince (just guessing on this one)
a blue chick that can sing
so much shit blows up

It is almost the perfect blend of romantic comedy, action movie, and morality play. Milla Jovovich is yummy, and as far as I can tell, not enhanced, injected, or overly pilate'd. The effects are no longer cutting edge, but it all still holds up pretty well.

I know it has Bruce Willis as the lead, but it's as much Moonlighting Bruce Willis as "yippi ki-yay motherfucker" Bruce Willis. It just works. Actually, it's just about perfect casting all around.

So let's review. Citizen Kane is widely regarded as the best film ever made. The Fifth Element is even better. See them both. Then tell me you don't want to visit Fhloston Paradise.

I'm pretty sure if I say "leeloodallasmultipass" one more time, Biscuit is going to brain me with a skillet. And I wouldn't blame her.

How to build a perfect day

2010-10-27T18:07:00.004-05:00

I've had a lot of great days with wives, lovers and good friends. Some even by myself. But like a particularly shiny rhinestone on Dolly Parton, they may have a hard time standing out from the rest of the great days. I think to have a really perfect day, it has to stand alone, unexpected and unencumbered by context.

Image from here

And I'm not talking about perfect moments, like the birth of your child, or the time the guy in your school who looked like Ashton Kutcher kissed you in the closet at your older sister's party. Because the birth was preceded by twenty-seven hours of screaming and threats, and the Ashton look-alike never called again, even though you let him go under the shirt in the closet. See where I'm going here? Minimum six hours, all pleasant. No complications before or after. These are the rules.

I've had exactly three of these wonderful days, and after careful analysis, I have a hypothesis about how one could go about building one for oneself. Because that's what I do. Show me three unrelated food items and I will develop an hypothesis about how they would taste together in a pie. Also, I invoke really old-fashioned spelling and punctuation rules intermittently, and with no perceivable pattern. Anyway, here's my (I'll count when I'm done) rules for building a perfect day.

1. Be in high school. I can't stress this enough. Perfect days require a particular blend of energy, ignorance, and foolishness that should only be found in high school kids. If you are a grownup and still doing/believing/imagining this stuff, move out of your mom's basement and get a job. Or maybe enroll in community college. Either way, the important thing is to take off the cape, put down the bong, and join the rest of us in the real world. Oh, and if you're younger than high school age, you are really not old enough to participate in, or appreciate, the PG-13 type activities required, so you're disqualified. Sorry.

2. Go someplace unusual. Preferably someplace exotic. It doesn't have to be Phuket or Xanadu, but Six Flags or Colorado will work, for instance.

3. Ditch your parents, chaperones, or any boring or ugly friends. You're allowed no more than one wingman (or lady). I really shouldn't have to include that one, but some people just need everything spelled out for them.

4. Meet someone of the opposite sex who is probably out of your league, but just barely. It helps if they are a little bored. It can be someone of the same sex if that's how you prefer to roll. I guess. Never tried it, because it's not how I roll. Not that there's anything wrong with it. And now that I think of it, a perfect gay day may be completely different than what I'm thinking. If anyone has one of those, let me know how it goes, and I will try to develop a hypothesis.

5. Play. Shop in the straw market, ride roller coasters, or explore a frontier town together. Smile. Laugh. Hold hands. You know, the crap they stuff into montages in romantic comedies, accompanied by Beach Boys music, or upbeat indie love songs.

6. Make a fool of yourself. Sing to them, draw their picture, buy them a straw hat and pull it down on their head, or something equally ridiculous. If they don't push you down and laugh at you, this is how you know that you have left reality behind, and it's safe to go on to the next phase.

7. Unexpected deliciousness. Something that indicates you've both lost all common sense and inhibitions. None of my days involved sex, at least not by Presidential standards. But at least two involved things I never expected to do with girls I just met, especially without buying them dinner first. And all three were at least partly in semi-public. In fact, I think we probably need a corollary, or a lemma, or something.

7b. Inappropriate deliciousness in semi-public. Examples include behind the smokestack of the Carnival Mardi Gras, standing on the platform between two cars of the Durango-Silverton railroad, and behind the Spindletop at Six Flags Over Texas. This is just the right degree of naughtiness to ensure that there will be a little (but not too much) shame tossed in, which seems to be important for Americans to feel like they've enjoyed themselves.

8. Leave everyone wanting more. You're going to want a hard deadline. Let's face it, most of us lose our luster pretty quickly, and if someone is going to populate my fantasies, we need to hit it and quit it before they start telling me I would look better with long hair, or how I remind them of somebody famous but they can't think of who and it's going to drive them crazy all day.* Or how their college selection process is going, or what sort of car they hope they get for graduation. The park needs to close, ship dock, or train arrive while we both still think it's going great.

9. Never see them again. This is really an extension of the last one, but I'm starting to feel like I can stretch this to ten rules, so I'm going for it. It's okay to write for a while, if you must, and you can stalk them on Facebook when you're older, but don't try to parlay this into any sort of relationship. First of all, it's never going to work, and you're just going to end up ruining a perfectly good memory. And no one wants to have to explain to their steady girlfriend or boyfriend why this person from Stone Mountain, Georgia, keeps calling their house.

10. Don't go back there. It's good not to return to the scene for at least twenty years, after everything has changed and you're not 100% sure you can recognize the place where all the fun happened. If you go back too soon, you're either going to put ridiculous expectations on yourself and whomever you're with for how much fun it's going to be, or you will see your original experience in the harsh light of reality, and realize that what actually happened is a mutual sexual assault between two underage strangers who were overcome by boredom and an unexpected blast of hormones. Great memories are like great wines. They definitely benefit from aging. And there is always some crap in the bottom of the bottle that you don't want to examine too closely.

*It's either Jeff Bridges or William Hurt. Let's move on.

Movie Sunday: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the best buddy movie ever

2010-10-24T12:21:00.002-05:00

Picture from here

To be fair, one of the reasons I love Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as much as I do is that it came out when I was the right age, so my best friend and I got to run around for about two years calling each other Butch and Sundance. Which was a little confusing, because half the other kids in my school were doing the same thing.

But what really makes this movie awesome is two things: Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In their primes. Late primes perhaps, by current Hollywood standards, but primes nonetheless. The chemistry between these two guys is unbelievable, and you've never seen four bluer eyes on a movie screen.* They may have put Katherine Ross in the movie just so we would know they were straight.

Like many other famous Hollywood duos, this pairing almost didn't happen. Newman was a big star by this point, and Redford was, well, no one's first choice. The original plan was for Steve McQueen to play Butch, and Newman would play Sundance. They were unable to come to terms about top billing, and McQueen dropped out. Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando were all considered, but the director lobbied for Redford over the studio's objections, and eventually prevailed. Otherwise, none of us would probably know who Robert Redford is today, and there would certainly not be a Sundance Film Festival.

The movie itself is light-hearted, and slick, and a little sentimental, like good buddy stories should be. It wasn't exactly ground-breaking, but was well-placed in its time. The cinematography is amazing for the sixties, and still really good by today's standards. It won a bunch of awards, and made a big bucket of money.

The film has a great cast from top to bottom, a few really golden moments, a couple of taglines, and somebody gets kicked in the nuts. You've gotta love a movie where a big guy takes it in the jewels. Also, Redford grew what may very well be the best mustache of all time for the role. It's almost certainly why I grew one as early as I was able.

Some critics of the day were disappointed that George Roy Hill, the director, didn't make a more serious film, like The Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde. I think the criticism is justified from one point of view. There are -- as Vincent Canby put it -- signs of another, better movie hidden behind this one. But it was 1969. Everyone was probably really stoned all the time, and they are lucky they managed to get the film in the camera the right way. And making a more serious movie probably would have required reining in the characters a little, like in The Sting.

Most of all, it's hard to argue with success. This film is still one of the best-loved westerns ever. The movie, and the relationship between its protagonists, has influenced hundreds of stories and characters over the years. And even forty years later, it's still really enjoyable to watch, which is not something we can say for most movies made in the sixties. Or last year, for that matter. It's a great way to spend two hours with a buddy.

* These days anyone can have blue(ish) eyes. If you wanted blue eyes in 1969 you had to be born with them. And while Redford's eyes were certainly blue, Paul Newman's eyes were remarkable. They were a not insignificant part of his appeal.

Movie Sunday: Bullitt

2010-10-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

Image from here.

If you've watched more than two movies with me, you have probably heard me complain about what I consider self-indulgent directors creating films that are much longer than they need to be. One or two people have probably heard it many more times than they should have to.* I heard a rumor somewhere that it started with studios wanting to fill videotapes or something, but whatever. The end result is action scenes that go on far longer than they should, and stories that meander off and sometimes never return.

If you want to see a great example of old school cop drama movie-making, watch Bullitt. It's the movie that sealed Steve McQueen's reputation as a badass, and contains what is still one of the best movie car chases I've ever seen. No music. No explosions or driving on the sidewalk. Just two cars hauling ass through San Francisco. It made enough of an impact at the time that a number of urban myths grew up around the scene, and the movie.

You will probably be surprised at how simple the story and effects are, and how quickly it seems to be over. I was, when I watched it again recently.

* Sorry, Biscuit.

Black Cats and Black Crowes

2010-10-14T06:24:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, my family had a fireworks stand. And when I say my family, I mostly mean me and my older brother, though the other two kids spent some time there, too. My parents' were the owners of the operaton, but neither of them ever spent a minute in the stand. Their end was being able to tell us that they weren't buying us [insert name of thing we wanted] because we had the fireworks money. Also, my father took as much product as he could carry to put together the fireworks display that ended our big 4th of July party. Which I never got to attend. Because I was working in the fireworks stand. But I'm not bitter. Anyway...

Image from here

We had quite a racket going. Fireworks were illegal to sell within the city limits, but our property and our neighbor's had been surrounded by the city and never annexed. We were on a busy street with good parking and about two miles closer than the next stand. We made several thousand dollars every year during the three week season. Which is not bad for a couple of teenagers during the seventies. Not that I ever got half. Even though I spent the most time in the heat, selling firecrackers to little kids that were raiding their parents' coin collections after spending all of their allowance. My brother got a bigger percentage because he was older. But I'm still not bitter.

The point of all of this is that there were little mom and pop stands like this all over the country, and you don't make that kind of money without attracting some attention from people with more money. So by the time we grew up and got out of the business, the big operations were starting to appear with their buy one, get one free promotions and air conditioning. The easy money disappeared pretty quickly, and the independents along with it.

This is exactly what's wrong with the music industry today. Well, actually what's wrong is that it's the music "industry," which is my actual point. There is so much money in music that the big studios have become music factories, and just like fast food, the secret is to make it just good enough that people will eat it. There is no reason to take a risk, or make anything different, when they have a formula that works. And since they own the distribution channels, there is no way for anyone with an independent voice to compete.

You can see the impact everywhere, though nowhere more apparent than American Idol. I mean, Kelly Clarkson? Really? They can pick an average person with a slightly above average voice, stick them in the machine and a pop star comes out.

I had a show on the college radio station at the second college I attended.* We programmed our own shows, and typically brought a lot of it from our dorm rooms. I'm sure it was terrible, but we enjoyed ourselves, and with a listenership that numbered in the dozens, who cared, really? I was horrified to learn the other day that there is a format called "college radio" now, and that it's just another channel for big factories to market a slightly different version of mechanically separated music.

There is still good, independent music around, if you have the means and motivation to find it. Like food, local is probably best. Personally, it seems I get busier all the time, and hipness is much less important to me than it used to be, so I find myself relying more and more on old stuff. I'm fortunate to still have friends in music who turn me on to new sounds on occasion. Like Bottle Rockets. If you haven't heard them, and you like an unpolished southern rock sound (think Presidents of the United States of America meets Georgia Satellites), spin up some "Welfare Music" and see what you think.

(See how I did that thing with "Bottle Rockets," bringing us back to fireworks? That's literary, is what that is. My English composition teacher would be proud.)

* There were four altogehter.

Movie Sunday: The Lovely Bones

2010-10-10T11:48:00.001-05:00

Image from here.

Hey, two weeks in a row! I'm amazing.

The Lovely Bones is a Peter Jackson movie about a young girl who gets murdered by a neighbor, and probably could have been a great movie. Unfortunately, it suffers from two of my pet movie peeves. First, it was marketed as some supernatural detective story, which is not really the point at all. I can forgive that to a degree. Like most really good stories, it is hard to categorize.

The second problem is more serious, and less forgivable. The movie is longer than it needs to be, and partially because of this, has significant loose ends. (This is the part where I get to talk about how things were better in my day.) Movies used to last an hour and a half, and anything that tried to keep moviegoers in their seats for two hours or more had better be the freaking Lord of the Rings.

Lovely Bones would have been a great ninety minute story. But in order to kill two hours and a half, they were forced to introduce extra complications, which made the middle drag, and in turn created plot elements that couldn't be properly resolved.

Still, it was in interesting story, and a fresh perspective. And the cast was very strong. Even Marky Mark was good. We definitely thought it was worth the time investment.

Looking for a One Man Dog

2010-10-07T19:33:00.002-05:00

Dramatization*

I received a comment on a post a while back, from someone I respect, questioning my taste for a specific music artist. It didn't particularly bother me in the "oh, no, she doesn't like my music" sense. My tastes in music are all over the place, and I have never really met anyone who likes exactly the same things I do. But it did leave me pondering how I might convey the impact that some of these artists had on the period of my youth, which I think we can (mostly) all agree produced a lot of amazing music. I have struggled somewhat to find a foothold, because most of these people have long been relegated to the genre of "music old squares listen to," while many of their contemporaries have been credited with helping to change the world. But at the time, it was all one tapestry of far out groovy heavy sound.

One possible stroke of fortune in my search for common ground is that my wonder years bore some striking similarities to the present time. There were contentious racial, economic, and political divisions in the country and the world. Common people were struggling. It seemed then, as it does to many now, that global industrialization and unbounded capitalist greed would put an end to the American middle class once and for all, and that our country was being divided cleanly between the "haves" and the "trickled down upon." The country was suffering through a long, increasingly unpopular war, and optimism for the future was at an all time low.

The media narrative of the time was almost universally grim. Body counts from the meat grinder that was Viet Nam topped the news nightly. Ghettos burned in cities across America. Churches were bombed. Banks were bombed. The Manson Family unleashed their special brand of helter skelter. American college students were shot dead by the National Guard. One political figure after another found the wrong end of a gunsight. Stories like the Son of Sam killings that would dominate the national media for months in today's climate, struggled to stay on the front page. The Apollo missions were virtually the only national bright spot in this violent, troubled landscape.

They say great art is born in suffering, and the young and rapidly expanding genre of rock produced some lasting and powerful music during these years. You've heard some of it, if only in movies. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, CSN (and sometimes Y), CCR, Richie Havens, Edwin Starr, Steppenwolf, and dozens of others produced music that was fresh, relevant, and powerful. They are the soundtrack to the pain, confusion, fear and hope of a generation of Americans. Their message was simple and compelling. Get yours now; the country is burning.

In the midst of all of this, a different movement emerged. Unlike today, this was not a movement of angry and frightened old people. Those were the people in charge. These grass roots were mostly young, overwhelmingly white, and decidedly middle class. Their fathers fought in WWII, or Korea, and went to college on the G.I. Bill. Their mothers were housewives. Their grandparents had struggled through the Great Depression. These people believed in the innate goodness of America and its citizens, but could not delude themselves that what they saw in front of them was the American Dream. Instead of taking to the streets, they turned to each other.

The soundtrack for these people was written and performed by Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Nilsson, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Jimmy Buffett, and John Denver. That's right, I said John Denver. I dare you not to think of a John Denver song right now. And almost everyone my age liked his music, whether they will admit it or not. I knew people who had his albums right next to their Iron Butterfly.

The music did not usually focus on the burning of America, but it also wasn't about surfing, or sock hops, or fast cars. It was music of the land, the seasons, and the road. Songs about love, and growing up, reflection, and loss. These songs reminded us that every story is a personal story, and that the only way to really make the world a better place is to be kinder to the people around us. It was about the things we valued most about our country and our lives, back then. These were the songs that people would play -- and sing -- at this time of year, outside around a fire, sometimes with a goat on a spit, or a pig roasting in a hole, but always with beer, and wine in skins or screw-top bottles. They were songs you could sing while holding your breath, which was very handy in those days.

Okay, maybe I can't explain it after all. That time is long gone, and no matter how similar this time feels to old farts like me, the world is a much different place now. Wood smoke adds to our carbon footprint, and I wouldn't even begin to know where to find a goat these days. Whole Foods, maybe? Young people have more serious things to worry about than "finding themselves," like whether the corporate recruiters are going to find the toga party pictures that their friend posted on her Facebook page. Taking to the road is something only homeless people and illegal immigrants do.***

I guess I will have to be content to know that the people who didn't live it will someday struggle to explain Wilco, or Coldplay, or whatever music touched their heart when it was still tender. And every time I hear Everybody's Talkin', Moondance, Bridge Over Troubled Water, or You've Got a Friend, I will unabashedly sing along. Singing makes us feel better, right?

* The stuff in the picture is a mixture of basil, oregano, and mint. Seriously. I grow it myself. I wouldn't even know where to look for that name brand weed the kids smoke these days.**

** Okay, so that's not precisely 100% true. I do work at a college. But it may as well be true. The last thing I need is to be even more confused, forgetful, lethargic, and hungry than I am already.

*** Isn't this really what the Tea Party is up in arms about? The world got more complicated without their permission? After all, these are many of the same people. They are just old, sober, and frightened now.

Movie Sunday: To Have and Have Not

2010-10-03T10:33:00.001-05:00

I guess it's natural for us not to fully appreciate the places where we grow up. This was certainly true when I was growing up in Little Rock, a city probably best known as the location of a fairly ugly episode in the history of school desegregation and civil rights. In those days, Little Rock was a small, relatively pretty, capital city in one of the poorest states in the nation. One of the more surprising jewels of the city was the Arkansas Arts Center, featuring a theater, sculpture garden, a nice gallery, and all sorts of studios for classes and artists in residence. I took numerous classes there, confirming to all that I have no artistic talent in any medium.

When I was in high school, the Arts Center used to show classic movies on Sunday nights. We would watch a Buck Rogers serial and then be treated to one of the best films of the black and white years, featuring a lot of people that our parents would never shut up about. A group of us went almost every Sunday, and gained a real appreciation for some of these old screen gems.

I hear the Arts Center has fallen on hard times, but I still watch a lot of movies. Since my friends are tired of hearing me talk about them, I thought maybe I would write about one a week. Some will be oldies. Some will be late models that make it to the top of my queue. Some will be just plain strange, I guarantee. We will see how long I can keep it up.

I will kick it off with one of the first shows I remember seeing at the Arts Center, and one of my favorites, To Have and Have Not.

If you're not familiar with it, this was Lauren Bacall's first film, and she and Humphrey Bogart fell in love on the set, eventually ending his marriage. The chemistry between them is more than apparent. The story is loosely based on Hemingway's novel, but the story was changed extensively, early on with the help of Hemingway himself, and later by William Faulkner, among others.

Plot-wise, it's not that much different from a number of wartime romance dramas that were typical in the mid-1940's. But you won't be watching it for the plot. Watch it for Bogie and Bacall. Few of the movie stars were really very good actors back then, at least by today's standards, but this really didn't require much acting from the two of them.

To Have and Have Not also produced one of my favorite movie lines, in one of the most memorable scenes in early film history. Bacall tells Bogart to whistle if he needs anything, and then follows with, "You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together, and ... blow."

Happy Anniversary, Biscuit!

2010-09-30T15:34:00.005-05:00

Biscuit and I met in the early mid-90's, when bangs were tall, boots were short, and all the cool girls drove Miatas. I made pizza for a group of people on one of the first nights we met. This apparently made a positive impact on her opinion of me.* The pizza, and a good base of friendship, helped us get through some up and down times when we started dating a couple of years later.

After five years together, we decided that we were probably not going to be able to be rid of each other, so we got married like it was 1999. Since neither of us was interested in a big production, we snuck off to Barbados on a cruise to make an honest man of me. We lied right in the face of friends and family who said we were running off to get married. We're still denying it to a few people.

James the limo driver. Quite possibly the coolest person I have ever met.

The day itself could not have been nicer. A limo ride to the government building to fill out the paperwork, a quick stop at the florist for a bouquet, and we were off to the church on the beach.

No matter what anyone tells you, this is all it takes to get married.

The wedding coordinator served as Biscuit's maid of honor, and the limo driver was my best man. He even shot a roll of film with our camera, since we had opted to skip the photographer. Also because it was 1999, and cameras had film.

You are so jealous right now.

Some vows, a little smooching, champagne toast, a quick walk on the beach, and we were back napping in our cabin by noon.

What were you doing five minutes after your wedding?

We woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of the drunkards returning from the pirate party ship. We knew that they had been pirating it up, because we heard several people "haaaarrrrghhh" into the water below. And they definitely looked like they had been at sea for some time.

Never have so many been so drunk so early in the day.

Except for every other day this thing sails, I suspect.

That was 11 years ago. Tonight, to commemorate the event, I will make a pizza, she will open a nice chianti, we will eat and drink entirely too much, dessert on a fistful of Tums, and fall asleep before getting around to the stuff you young people do on your anniversaries. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? Thought so.

Hungry?

I can't believe it's been 11 years. While on the one hand it seems like Biscuit and I have been together as long as I can remember, it feels way shorter than my first marriage, which seemed to go on for-ever. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Happy Anniversary, Biscuit!

* Biscuit is all about good food. That's why I'm always trying to learn to cook new things. When I met her, all I could make were pizza, chili, and cheese toast.

Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out, Part 2

2010-09-26T10:47:00.001-05:00

This is one of the few artifacts to survive the ex-wife's great purge of 1984,

when she threw away anything that meant anything to me, in retaliation

for making her stay behind and sell the house when I got transferred.

So when we left our intrepid hero, I was screwing up the climax of REO Speedwagon's concerts and getting reamed for it every other day. I called the office after almost every show, begging them to ship me the real special effects board. But they were on some sort of cost-cutting kick, and decided that I should let Flash Gordon rewire the controller they had given me, because at least that would shut him up. I was positive this was a bad idea, but was given no choice.

Now, in their defense, the bomb cues were not coming off as planned. In my defense, this wasn't my fault. Each band member was playing to a different beat, the lighting director seemed to have no sense of timing, and the equipment was faulty. I ended up doing this sort of thing for many of the biggest acts of the day, including work for the late Kirby Wyatt, SHOWCO's own lighting director, a man whose fastidious attention to detail and standards of perfection make Tim Gunn look like a Squidbilly by comparison. This tour was the first and only time I ever had a complaint about cues.

The rewiring happened on a day off we had before REO headlined the Rockford Jam, an outdoor show at the Rockford Speedway in Rockford, IL. If you've never been to Rockford, don't sweat it. Life Magazine once said it was "as nearly typical as any city can be." It's probably best known in the rock and roll context as the home of Cheap Trick. The Rockford Jam that year featured Head East ("Never Been Any Reason"), The Cars, REO, and someone I can't remember. Since Bob was traveling on a different bus, there was no time for testing his work, but Flash wasn't concerned.

The Rockford Jam was remarkable, mostly for its lack of planning and nightmare logistics. Whoever produced this piece of shit knew nothing about outdoor shows. We had no alternate way in, so we sat in traffic for almost two hours before arriving backstage, where there was no place to park the trucks or buses. We rolled or carried the equipment piece by piece through the mud, and by the time we got the gear onstage and plugged in, it was time for the first act to start. There were no walkways cordoned off in the crowd, so every time one of us needed to go from the stage to the lighting and sound consoles at the center of the infield, we were required to walk over the crowd, trying not to step on the people, or their growing collection of fluids and other leavings. This also meant we had to run all of our cables over or around people*, and hope that no one unplugged anything. The whole day was a come-from-behind clusterfuck of epic proportions.

To make matters worse, the music was horrible. You don't take a job like this if you don't love live music, but Holy Hell this was bad. I knew by then that REO would be bad, but I assumed some of the other groups would make up for it. The first band, whose name escapes me, reminded me of the band that played my junior high dances. Head East sounded like they had all been born deaf. Worst of all, I had really been looking forward to seeing The Cars, but they were bored, wasted, off-key, and thoroughly unimpressive. Eventually, it was time for the main event.

Unfortunately, Flash Gordon wasn't even smart enough to realize that a fog curtain would be worse than useless outdoors, so I got to drag all of that crap through the mud, knowing that we would be lucky if any fog made it to the stage at all. And also knowing that it would put the band in a foul mood once again. I finally got the pyrotechnics prepped during what should have been dinner, plugged in my newly rewired pyro box, and waited for my cue.

This is the part where I have to teach you more than you ever wanted to know about concert pyrotechnics. A flashpot is generally some sort of metal container, wired with an electrical cord. The ones that are sold commercially are a couple of inches on a side, and are recommended to use up to a half teaspoon of flash powder. We used roasting pans and washtubs, and loaded between a half an ounce and a quarter pound of powder in each. An electric match or squib would be connected to the terminals on the pan, and placed in contact with the powder. When current is applied to the circuit, that's rock and roll.

Image from here.

There are any number of ways to close the circuit, from foot switches to plungers to just touching bare wires to a battery. Our board used 12 volts direct current generated by a 110 volt transformer, and had military-grade safety switches, like the setup shown in the professional grade artwork below.

Artists misconception: this isn't even right. There were

twelve switches, a push button for each, and one key

to arm the whole system. Just work with me on this.

Each flashpot had it's own circuit, with an LED, a safety switch, and a little red button. When the key was turned, the LED's for correctly wired circuits would glow green. When the rocker cover was raised and the switch was thrown, the circuit was armed, and the light changed to red. After that, pushing the button would set off the explosion. Or at least that was the plan.

Mis-wired circuits didn't light, and I always liked to turn the key a minute or two early, so that I would have time to run around and fix any connections that may have come loose during the show. This time when I turned the key, one of the pots exploded. Hmm, that was weird. The band members turned to me as one, and gave me a look that was, by now, all too familiar. All the lights were green except for the one that had just gone off, so I waited. A half minute later, when I threw the first switch to arm the first flashpot, the one at the front right corner of the stage went off. This was right in the middle of Gary Richrath's big guitar solo, so Kevin Cronin just happened to be dancing around on the right front corner of the stage, and the explosion was about three feet from him. If I close my eyes I can still see the fury in his face, his bro-fro blowing in the breeze from the big wind machines onstage, as he dropped any pretense of being involved in the music and pointed at me in the expression that universally means, "You are dead!" He remembered where he was after a second or two, and turned back to the crowd.

Flash was thoroughly panicked by now, and was yelling into the headsets, "Turn it off! Turn it off!" I flipped down the rocker switches to disarm the rest of the pots, and another bomb went off. When I turned off the key, one of the washtubs exploded. By now, the band barely knew where they were in the song, and everyone backstage was looking at me. The real bomb cues were approaching, and the best way to disarm one is to set it off, so in the end I just randomly turned things on and flipped switches until all of the remaining pots were expended. A couple were even on the beat. To this day, I can't tell you what the problem was, but it seemed like everything I touched was connected directly to some common firing circuit.

As soon as the show was over,** Kevin Cronin stormed over and gave me a cursing such as I have never heard. And I've worked retail. He cursed me, my company, my ancestry, and pretty much anything else he could think of, for probably two minutes. He was actually clenching his fists and stomping his little feet, he was so angry. It was like Richard Simmons impersonating Yosemite Sam. I may not have helped when I responded to this tirade with a cheerful-sounding, "Thanks for your feedback!" as he walked away. He turned and gave me another round, and I think he would have jumped on me if I hadn't been about twice his size.

I assumed I was fired, which was going to be the only thing that saved the day. Unfortunately, once people calmed down and things were explained, the band sent one of their minions to apologize for Kevin's outburst, and I think they even sent me a beer. Of course, not one of them was man enough to come himself, and Kevin always managed to be somewhere other than where I was after that.

By now, even the shop was convinced, and they shipped out my effects board the next day. One of our sound guys rewired the control box to bypass all of the safety circuits and interlocks to get us through the next couple of shows. I threw it in the dumpster behind whatever arena we were playing when the real board arrived.

I stayed on the tour for a few more weeks, when I was saved by Paul McCartney's tour to Japan. He was scheduled to use every special effect we owned, including bubble machines, so I was needed back in Dallas to get all that together and put it on a boat to Japan. That ended up being a fiasco of a different color, but that's a story for another time.

I'm only now getting to the point where I'm able to listen to a few REO songs all the way through. The onstage sound mixer for the tour, who has remained a good friend of mine, still can't make it past the opening synthesizer blast from "Ridin' the Storm Out" without suffering a minor panic attack.

* Typically, the control cables were run along the edges of arena floors, or along the side of the cordoned walkways for outdoor shows. This also tended to be the most convenient place for people who overindulged, or maybe suffered from hairballs, to relieve themselves of their gustatory burdens. You did not want to be the person whose job it was to roll up these cables at the end of the night, especially for a band like REO. And you could find the box those cables traveled in by smell alone.

** And I mean as soon as the show was over. He didn't even leave the stage after the song. The people in the front row were treated to an encore they did not expect.

Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out

2010-09-23T17:56:00.004-05:00

So I've really been avoiding telling this story, but after Johnny Virgil wrote about taking his wife to see REO Speedwagon, I started having flashbacks of the tour that was largely responsible for me leaving the road. I still remember standing backstage in some arena in California, talking to the future ex on the phone, with Kevin Cronin in the background singing, "Golden country, your face is so red-uh," and hearing myself say, "I have GOT to find something different to do for a living."

REO had already been around for what seemed like forever when the 9 Lives tour kicked off. During my high school years, they rolled through town every three months or so, with Deep Purple, BTO, or Brownsville Station. One would headline a tour, and one of the others would open for them. When I heard that we had landed them as a client, and that I would be doing special effects for the tour, I discovered that I was drawing a blank on their music, so I asked one of the guys in the shop what songs they did. He said, "Oh, you know REO. They do ... uh ... umm ... let's go ask Garvey." I got exactly the same reaction from about a dozen other people over the next couple of days.* Finally, someone came up with Ridin' the Storm Out, which broke the memory block for all of us, and everyone started blurting out the names of REO songs: Golden Country, Roll With the Changes, Keep on Loving You, 157 Riverside Avenue, etc. I felt better. I knew and liked all of those songs, and midwestern rockers generally knew how to throw a tour.

The good feeling started to change as soon as we got to rehearsal. REO was nearing the height of their popularity, but they were also coming apart as a group. They suffered from the occupational hazard of terminal self-importance, facilitated by sycophants and douchebags, and intensified by impressive amounts of chemicals -- even by rock and roll standards. There were at least three gigantic egos onstage, and several more in the wings.

Gary Richrath, the lead guitarist, was undoubtedly the most talented, but he was fighting some pretty serious demons. We calculated that he was probably losing money while on the road. He tended to huff when he played (think Lamaze breathing), and by the end of the night there was a white crust encasing his microphone cover. I'm sure we could have scraped that off and gotten quite a buzz, but no one ever got that desperate. At least, not that I know of.

Kevin Cronin, the lead singer, was sure that he was the most talented, and suffered from major Napoleon syndrome. He insisted on playing guitar when he wasn't too busy prancing around in his little turquoise spandex pants, despite the fact that it sounded like someone sawing a guitar in half with a hacksaw. The sound man kept his guitar turned off in the house, so the audience couldn't really hear it, but it was loud and proud onstage, and contributed mightily to the cacophony that we endured nightly. Kevin was an amateur pharmacologist, and partially as a result, his mood swings were dramatic. One day we ran up on him sitting in the floor of a hotel lobby, pulling laundry from one bag and putting it in another, muttering to himself. We just kept walking.

The other members of the band were generally no more egotistical than your average rock star, but the environment was so toxic that they were always being pulled into one dispute or another. The road managers liked to play the band members off of each other to get whatever they wanted. The result was band members who barely spoke to each other, and a road staff that was not exactly the elite of the business. "Motor," their drum roadie was good, although he got a little weird when he went on the all-fruit diet. Most of the rest ... not so much. Oh, and the band sounded like crap most every night.

Without mentioning names, the biggest pain in my particular ass was Bob "Flash" Gordon, the lighting director. I will spare you my critique of his lighting style, which wasn't really my biggest problem with him. The real issue was that he was sure he knew everything important, and most of everything else. I've worked successfully with a lot of people like him since -- mostly Army generals -- but I was younger then, and I considered his existence and success a personal affront to all that was fair and decent.** I hated him a lot.

I forget exactly what effects I had to manage for the tour, but it wasn't a whole lot by my standards. We've already talked about the Spinal Tap quality fog curtain that opened the show. The other major effect was a series of fiery explosions during the last song, Ridin' the Storm Out. One of the reasons I was on the tour was that we had recently invented some giant flashpots built from #2 washtubs, and I was the only one at the time who knew how to load them, or that could be trusted not to blow up something important. We had developed them for use in the Superdome, and they created a flash and concussion in a regular arena that was hard to believe. Or justify. We had four of these that exploded together at the climax of the song (sort of a Star Wars Deathstar effect), and followed eight smaller explosions that built up to it.

Picture from here.

The effect was really rather cool, except for two problems. The first had to do with my control board. We had two dedicated special effects boards, but one was in the shop for repairs, and the other was out with Nazareth, or Genesis or somebody. So the biggest burnout in the electronics shop soldered together a little box specifically for the first leg of this tour, until we could get back to Dallas and pick up the other board. The box was crap, and for various, mostly boring reasons, it tended to take half a beat between the time I pushed the button and the time the explosion happened. But only sometimes. While this would probably be fine in a mining operation, it was definitely not close enough for rock and roll. Bob was constantly trying to convince me that he could fix it "in a matter of minutes."

The other problem was that Bob wanted the sound of the explosion, not the flash, to match the music. Like lightning and thunder, the boomy part tends to lag behind the flashy part, especially if you are sitting a few hundred feet away. So he would call the cue a split second before the beat. I don't think he realized that the timing would be different at different points in the hall. I don't think Bob took a lot of science in school.

You know who wasn't sitting a few hundred feet away? The band. From their point of view, the bombs were going off early. Or late. Or both. And since they were already pissed about the fog curtain, and each other, and their lives, and everything else, and since this particular effect closed the show, it was the last thing they had a chance to be pissed about. So one or another of them would come over and yell at me and call me names every couple of nights. They even threatened to replace me a couple of times. I don't think they liked it when I begged them to go through with it.

So after about a month of this, we arrived at the day that would bring the worst concert I have ever seen, and convince me once and for all that this would not be my life's work. But that will have to wait for Part 2. This post is already getting very long, and I'm starting to feel like there are spiders on me. I'm going to need a whiskey float and a couple of hours of Bob Dylan before I can continue.

Updated: Part 2 is finished.

* I swear to Baby Jesus that this part is true. I never saw anything like it. We were all really familiar with the band. It was just that no one could come up with a song. And these people knew music better than any hipster you ever met.

** I grew up watching way too many westerns and WW II movies, and reading about people like Don Quixote and Robin Hood.

Window world

2010-09-04T07:46:00.000-05:00

I know. I've been busy.

Anyway, I promised a conclusion to the story of our latest home improvement project. It was really kind of anticlimactic, which is one reason I haven't been more motivated to write about it. I was sure that our adventure replacing the 40 year old windows was going to lead* to a hilarious post, including Monte Python-like shots of huge chunks of glass embedded in one of us, and arterial blood spurting all over the patio. Or at least some disgusting animal carcasses that we would find in the wall when we pulled out the old, rotten frames.

Alas, the whole thing went like clockwork. At least maybe if we're talking about an old wooden clock that has been left outside for a long time.

For those just joining us, our house was designed and built forty years ago by an engineering professor at the university where I work. She had very definite ideas about what she wanted. Most everything in the house is nonstandard, and much of it was built onsite. Our living room -- dining room combination** is paneled in native cypress, and features three large picture windows with cypress frames. Unfortunately, the water splashing on the patio had rotted the outsides of the frames, like so:

They didn't look quite this bad until we pulled off the paint and trim.

Funny story. A few years ago, when we first noticed this problem because of gaps under the windows that lizards were crawling through, I temporarily filled the holes with Super Foam, the duck tape of the twenty-first century. This was going to last the few weeks it took to make new frames. It was lovely, and Biscuit was thrilled with the look.

No, the tape is not left over from hurricane season. We were

at least attempting not to kill ourselves removing this glass.

Enter a couple of job changes, a hurricane, and the absolute impossibility of buying clear cypress lumber that is ten inches wide and two inches thick, and we lived with the foam longer than I care to admit. And since some of these boards cost more than the glass we put in the windows, I was being very careful.

Also, I removed the inside trim from the frames when this whole thing started, so that I could get exact dimensions and see exactly how the boxes were constructed. The trim laid on the floor of the dining room for the duration of the project, just to add to the overall trashy effect.

Cats love home improvement.

But all good things must end, and eventually even I was able to finish the window frames. Biscuit applied the paint (outside), stain and polyurethane (inside), since she has just the right amount of OCD for wood finishing. All we had to do was wait for the hottest weekend of the summer, and we were ready to go.

The work itself went surprisingly smoothly, and there was only one brief episode of loud cursing and minor bleeding. Once we escalated to the 2 lb. hammer, and after a few minutes of planing, things slid more or less smoothly into place.***

For some reason, it never occurred to me to take pictures of the frames before installing them.

Combination of wine and obliviousness, I think.

We lived with plywood in the frames for a couple weeks, until we were able to get the glass people out.

You have no idea how happy I am to finally have this done.

Just in time for the annual hummingbird migration. So now all we have to do is paint the rest of the house. And I can get back to finishing the bathroom remodel I was working on when this whole window thing started. Seriously, it's been going on for a long time.

P.S. In other news, I spent a week at a super-nerd computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. I learned how to create a virtual water droplet that is up to 40% more watery than the current state of the art, as well as many, many other things equally as interesting. I considered writing about it, but couldn't think of a single person who reads this that would not want to poke their eyes out after one paragraph. It's already happening, isn't it?

* I found out while reviewing academic papers this past weekend that an increasing number of people have stopped using "led" as the past tense of "lead," and just treat it like "read." WTF, people!? Is us just give up on word forms and spelling completedly?

** I said it was the sixties, right?

*** That's what she said. ****

**** With the impending departure of Steve Carell from The Office, I'm afraid I'm going to have to retire twss, as well. The wife is devastated.

The real road stories

2010-08-14T08:47:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I mentioned my old friend who became an over the road truck driver. Within a few days of writing that post I discovered that John is writing a blog of his own. And it's excellent. I'm not surprised. His father was quite eloquent -- in a Tennessee Ernie Ford sort of way -- and John always had a way with a story.

Road Notes is definitely good reading, especially if you've ever spent time on the highway. Check it out if you like good writing.

The End of Time

2010-08-10T07:43:00.006-05:00

I think we are living through a significant moment in human history. Something fundamental is changing. The development of human language is perhaps the greatest factor in the creation of civilization, because it allowed people to know about things that they did not experience personally. Writing created a way to store portable information outside of human brains, and the printing press provided an economical way to distribute that information across the world, without being changed in the telling. In essence, printed material provided the blueprints for our global civilization.

But writing is still a fairly labor intensive process, and only a tiny fraction of human experience has been captured in this way. The further back we go, the less we find, and all of it has been written through the filter of its authors' minds. History, as the saying goes, is written by the winners. Fiction helps us understand the people and society of its time, but only the public face. Published authors know (or hope) that their work will be read by a broad audience.

This was the world into which my grandfather was born. The great thing about this world was that the past and future were almost equally abstract and impenetrable. Legend and prophesy can hold great power, but they have less substance than the sounds of a house awakening, the familiar smell of a mate, or the tearing grief of losing a loved one forever. I'm sure it was still common for lives to get stuck at some intersection of regret and lost opportunity, but people eventually forget, or at least remember more conveniently. There is ample evidence that we continually remanufacture our memories to be more consistent with our current world view. This is not some memory defect that comes with aging. It's a design* feature, meant to help us keep our minds in some semblance of order.

This all started to change a little over a century ago, with the invention of audio recording, and then moving pictures**. All of a sudden, not only the words could be captured, but the sounds, and then the pictures. Less was left to the imagination, and we could all share the voice of Franklin Roosevelt describing a day that will live in infamy. No nuclear devices have been exploded above ground during most of your lifetimes, but we all know the horrible beauty of the mushroom cloud.

Like the printing press did for writing, television distributed movies and sound to everyone. As a child, I watched live as little Jack Kennedy saluted the caisson carrying his fallen father. A half dozen years later, a third of the world's population watched Neal Armstrong step on the moon, and billions more have watched it in the intervening forty years. Significantly, the words we heard are the ones in the history books, even though they were not the exact words Armstrong uttered. In those same years, our nation saw for the first time the realities of war in living color, as every night images of Viet Nam were beamed to us via satellite, replete with jungle, and flame, and blood.

Once recorded -- and while preserved -- an event cannot be forgotten, or alternatively remembered. These images become the dots we must connect. John Kennedy still dies in the same way every time, and the bodies at My Lai cannot be denied. There are fewer degrees of freedom, and the past is sticky. Time has less power to wash away our triumphs and sins.

Film and tape were relatively expensive and troublesome for most of my life, and still only a tiny fraction of history was recorded. Home movies of Christmas and Easter made up the bulk of personal posterity. News crews captured a few significant events, and a few hundred hours a day of film and video were recorded for posterity. Most of that has been lost as the media degrade, the playback technologies become obsolete, or people simply decide it is not worth saving. Interestingly, much of the music survived, and it has the power to transport us in time as well as any contraption imagined by H.G. Wells. But that's another post.

The situation is different now. The Digital Age has brought us the technology to record virtually everything we do, and the internet gives us means to distribute it. I still have virtually every e-mail message I have received over the past fifteen years. If you live in an average city, you can expect to be on camera up to a hundred times in an average day. You could record your entire life, including constant video coverage, and store it all for a few hundred dollars per year. And the price is dropping fast.

We are reaching a point where nothing is forgotten. History is online and searchable. And an increasing number of us are recording it. I expect my Facebook page to outlive me -- I just don't know for how long. This post could survive for a thousand years, stuck deep in the Church of Google archives, and read only by machines. Every word you write online, every picture you post, is being catalogued, and indexed, and correlated somewhere.

All of this gave me the serious creeps for several years, and I even toyed with the idea of going "off the grid" at one point. Then I got over myself, and realized that this is the way civilization is going. And I'm not Amish. But I do wonder what it means for the human experience. What will happen to us as our present becomes more difficult to separate from our past?

* Don't take my use of the word "design" too seriously.

** Damn you, Thomas Edison! Also, I realize that still photography was around for a long time before this, but I really don't think it was a major contributor to the process I'm trying to describe, at least not until cameras and film became commonplace.

Mississippi Kites

2010-07-23T19:05:00.000-05:00

There is a family of Mississippi Kites that has been nesting in the next-door neighbor's tree almost as long as we have lived in this house. I like these particular birds for three reasons:

1. They eat bugs.

2. The make that Northern Exposure noise.

3. They look cool sailing around the neighborhood and staring down from the treetops.

The family has been pretty successful over the years, and now we have the silly things all over the neighborhood. Yesterday, one of the juveniles was learning to swoop, dive-gliding from altitude and swooping down between the trees in the neighbor's yard. It looked like great fun. If it hadn't been 94 degrees (F) outside, and me late for work, I would have stayed longer to watch.

I've written a couple of fairly depressing posts lately, so this was going to be an upbeat post about youthful enthusiasm and the joy of learning new things. Then, yesterday I came home to this:

Yep, my neighbor cut down their tree. Seriously? This is how it's going to be this summer? Oh, well. Maybe next year they will nest in our yard.

Wasp wars

2010-07-18T19:25:00.002-05:00

Photo from here

I was mowing the lawn yesterday when I discovered a nest of yellowjackets. And when I say "discovered," I mean I ran over their nest with the lawnmower. For those not familiar, yellowjacket wasps are small, aggressive predators that live in large colonies and like to bite the heads off of bees for fun. They also seem to really like Mountain Dew, so they are the scourge of southern parks. Their nests are typically underground, with a couple of entrance holes about 2 cm (~3/4 in.) across.

I have played yellowjackets and lawn mower before, so I reacted pretty quickly* and only got one sting. Unfortunately, the little bitch got me right in the back of my knee. How do they know? Except for maybe my eyelids and personals, I can't think of a more tender spot.

I consider myself somewhat of a nature lover, and I value the diversity of life, even in the suburbs. We never spray insecticide around the house, and I don't use chemicals on the lawn, if I can avoid it. Heck, we even humanely trap itinerant mice and haul them off to the woods, where they can be eaten by snakes and owls as God intended. But my ancestors didn't claw their way to the top of the food chain for me to have to avoid parts of my yard. And I don't negotiate with terrorists. So poison ivy gets the Roundup treatment when it pops up, and I keep a can or two of Wasp and Hornet spray handy for occasions like this one.

I stripped to the waist, painted myself blue, and staged a series of lightning raids, wielding my Black Flag like a flamethrower, eventually obscuring the entrance to the nest completely with insecticide foam.** Little wasps were dropping like, um, flies. Oh, the horror! We're a frightening species when the blood lust is upon us, and especially dangerous when injured, I hear. Or is it cornered? Maybe that's tigers.

This morning I went back to dig up the nest, eliminating any survivors. The last thing I need is witnesses. Also, I made the mistake once of thinking a nest was dead after an initial assault, only to have the little buggers having at me again in a few days. Much to my surprise (and relief), it looks like an armadillo beat me to the punch. I hope the little guy didn't get too much of a buzz from the spray. Then again, armadillos aren't my favorite critters, either. They carry leprosy, and dig big holes in the yard.

Fortunately, I'm not allergic. But I guess I had never been stung in a major joint before. After about two hours, my entire knee stiffened up, and it got very difficult to straighten my leg. Also, the sting burned like a lit cigar. It's a little better today, but the soreness helps me justify my killing spree yesterday. Still, if the Hindus are right about this reincarnation thing, I'm going to be in a world of hurt.

* I find the most effective strategy to be running like Jerry Lewis, flailing one's arms in a windmill pattern, and screaming like a little girl.

** Not a bad name for a band.

Morning after.

2010-07-18T08:09:00.001-05:00

So, have you ever had friends that you really like, but you almost never see, and you can't really figure out why? We know a couple like that. She was a co-worker of mine for years, and we became friends within weeks of meeting. Her husband (boyfriend when I met them) is one of those people who bring fun wherever he goes, and he and I were pretty close friends for a time. The Wife loves them both. We have a lot in common, and never have any problem starting or carrying on a four-way conversation, no matter how long it's been since the last time.

We only manage to get together every few years. Last night we met at a restaurant for dinner. We were early and they were late, because that is the way of things. We ate appetizers, and exotic fish encrusted with things and smothered in other things. We shared enormous desserts, featuring mountains of fresh-whipped cream. We drank martinis, and wine, and more wine, and Irish coffee. We talked and laughed, and laughed and talked, and after three and a half hours wandered out of the restaurant wondering why we don't do this more often.

This morning, I think I may know the answer. Anybody remember where we keep the Alka-Seltzer?

Letting go of the rope

2010-07-14T18:07:00.003-05:00

A dear friend of my family is dying. Inexorably, painfully, hopelessly dying. Some days are better. Some are hard to bear. But the eventual outcome is not in doubt.

Along the way, he will have spent a double-digit number of weeks in the hospital, an unknown number of days in a rehab facility, uncounted hours being shuffled between the two, and no time in his own bed. He is finished eating, walking or going to the bathroom unassisted. He has so far engaged eight or ten specialists, and not a single general practitioner.* It will -- has already -- cost a fortune.

This is a man who was a proverbial captain of industry only a few years ago. An actual son of a share-cropper, he worked tirelessly to improve his lot and provide for his family for most of the previous century. He created a thriving business, became a pillar of his church, and a force in political discourse. A generation ago, he's a man who would have died unexpectedly in his sleep, or pitched over into his dessert after a big steak dinner and a couple of martinis. Today, he is a frail, frightened shell of his former self, his body struggling to maintain the minimum requirements for continued existence.

It is the way of life, and American medicine, that many of us will live our final days undergoing every procedure, and receiving every medication, for which our insurance will reimburse the medical corporations whose representatives are working so hard to bring our vital signs back into the range where they may consider the course of treatment complete. There is no talk of cure, or even of going home. Address the current issue, get the patient stable, discharge them from your service, and hope for the best, seems to be the only strategy.

I think the end of life is like water-skiiing. When you feel your balance slipping, you can try to right yourself, or let go of the rope and glide to a stop, more or less under control. The trick is in knowing when to let go. Release your grip too soon, and you may miss a chance to correct and ski on. Hang on too long, and you end up dragged face first through the water, sometimes with your swimsuit floating in the water behind you. It's not exactly drowning -- assuming you let go eventually -- but no one would call it fun.

I've reached the age where I think about these things. Not because I want to, or because I think they are interesting, or significant, or cool. I think about them because they are happening to people close to me. And because I can feel it in my future, the way we once saw graduation, or marriage, or a new car, just over the horizon. It's all the same journey, but the scenery gets darker towards the end.

Ultimately, hanging on or letting go is a personal decision. Maybe the most personal we ever make. I'm not surprised my friend chose to hang on. It is his nature to struggle, and I always assumed that he would not be one to go gentle into that good night.

For myself, I hope I can be less Dylan Thomas and a little more William Cullen Bryant. Of all the ways we can measure the quality of a life, length is not high on my list. Every story has an ending, and I hate stories that go on too long.

* Because we don't have those anymore.

Pressed ham and vanilla wafers

2010-07-09T19:06:00.001-05:00

Every so often, normally when I'm getting tired of listening to people blame all of society's ills on the poor, I remember the summer after my first last semester in college, when I worked on a CETA-funded program to provide summer jobs for disadvantaged youth. This particular program entailed loading a couple of hundred high school kids on school buses and taking them out to clean up illegal dumpsites, or pick up trash from the side of the highway.

The day-to-day administration of this little band included myself, my older brother, his future ex-wife, a friend who would later become a preacher only to leave the ministry to work as an over-the-road trucker, and various liberal do-gooders, most of whom did not last the summer. We were called counselors, as if this were some especially shitty summer camp. We had three or four senior* counselors who drove the buses and provided on-site supervision, and another who floated from site to site, making supply runs and relaying messages to and from the program's administrators when upper-level decisions were required.

Upper level decisions included things like what to do about the six foot wasp nest, or giant snake pit, or dead horse we occasionally ran across at the dumpsites. (That's right. Dead horse. Swear to Baby Jesus.) While we waited for decisions, supplies, or backup,** work would stop at the site and the kids would chase each other around, or braid each other's hair, or find especially disgusting bits of trash to throw at each other. You know, regular teenager stuff. I was possibly the first white boy in Arkansas to have cornrows. Fortunately, they looked really good on me.

It was obvious that some of the kids didn't really have a chance to amount to much. Those kids generally didn't last long. An eighteen year old (not in the program) walked onto a bus and shot one of our fifteen year old boys while we waited to leave one morning. Other kids would just fail to show up one day, and we wouldn't see them again. But mostly these were good kids. Just like your kids, but not as spoiled. They depended on each other, and took care of each other. You could tell that many of them were fending for themselves, or that the money they were making was feeding their family.

They even took care of me. I was really poor at this point, among other things, and rarely had any food for lunch. As far as I was concerned, there were better things for me to do with the pittance I made at that job than feed myself. A group of my kids stopped at their neighborhood grocery every morning and bought pressed ham*** and a bag of vanilla wafers to share for lunch. These weren't Nilla brand wafers. In fact, they probably weren't even vanilla. Just some sort of illa wafers.

Anyway, I digress. About a week after they noticed that I was starving to death, the kids started feeding me. What you do is, you tear a piece of meat in half, fold it once, place it between two illa wafers and eat it like some sort of Soviet-era Oreo from Hell. They're disgusting, but they are great if you are hungry enough, and it was all these kids could afford.

It was incredibly touching that these children, who had been crapped on by life from birth, and had no reason to expect any different in the future, would share with me what might be their only meal that day. I have never forgotten their unassuming kindness, and while I know that the experience that summer affected some of them in a positive way, I don't see how they could have gotten more from it than I did. My attitudes about work, and poverty, and facing adversity with grace, were changed forever by a handful of kids from the ghetto and a few scraps of food.

I know that most of those kids have faced an uphill battle since that summer, and too many are probably dead, or in jail, or in some other desperate strait. But I'm sure that many have met whatever situations they faced with as much faith, kindness, and humor as they could muster. Every couple of years, I will put a piece or two of Black Forest ham between Nilla wafers and remember. And hope, and be thankful.

* "Senior" in this case meant more or less 25, and able to buy beer.

** This is what life was like before cell phones. People sat around waiting a lot. And without the Internet, we had no choice but to learn things about each other. It was horrible.

*** Pressed ham is lunch meat that is sort of like SPAM, but not as snooty. And it's conveniently shaped for Wonder bread and sliced about as thick as a Hallmark card.

Home improvement

2010-07-01T19:31:00.001-05:00

I haven't really felt bloggy much lately. For one thing, I'm writing pretty seriously for work at the moment, and it takes most of my mental focus. That is, when I'm not drinking wine and watching movies. There's also a fairly traumatic family thing going on these days. I started to write about that, but I don't think I will.

About the only creative thing I've managed to do lately is to make up a word during a most awesome movie we watched the other night. The word is "eurotard." Yeah, I was pretty proud of it, myself.* If I had any patience I would wait for a suitable situation to use it, instead of just tossing it out there like a sweaty black turtleneck. But I don't. So I did.

Things might be looking up, though. This weekend, the wife and I are planning to replace some really large, really old windows in the house. I'm thinking we may get some pictures of serious destruction, and maybe even have a story of a trip to the emergency room. Or two.

Happy Independence Day!

* I know I'm not the first person to think of it. I can google like everyone else. Better than some. But I'm pretty sure I haven't heard it before, so I'm keeping it. Also, I think it's brilliant that there is a line of dance clothing with that name.

Good girls

2010-06-21T20:24:00.002-05:00

A little later this summer, a hundred or so alumni from my high school will gather in the bar of the restaurant where many of us drank dinner before the prom, and marvel at how old and fat everyone else has gotten. I was discussing the event a few days ago with an old classmate who won't be able to attend.

I mentioned our senior banquet, which was one of the only times our class was together as a group, without dates from other classes or schools. The theme was the Roaring Twenties, so all the boys dressed as gangsters, and the girls mostly went as flappers. My steady girl was a year younger*, so I went to the banquet with my friend Sharon. I was half hoping that she might throw me some "we're never going to see each other again, anyway" action, but Sharon had other plans. She had hatched some sort of Lucy and Ethel scheme with our mutual friend Vi. I was apparently on Vi's high school bucket list or something, and after a short string of shenanigans, Sharon informed me that I would be taking Vi home after the banquet.

Good wholesome fun, pretending to be bootleggers and whores.

It turned out that I wasn't taking her straight home. We went skinny dipping in the Arkansas River with about a dozen other people, and I forget what happened after that. I walked in the door at 7:00 am, wearing different clothes than the night before and carrying the newspaper. My mother was walking into the kitchen and assumed I had just gotten out of bed and gone outside to fetch the paper. This was another of the incredible strokes of luck that I enjoyed during those years.

It was the mention of the skinny dipping that apparently blew my friend's mind, and led to a flurry of e-mail messages that continue still. She has always believed herself to be a borderline bad girl in high school, mostly because she drank a couple of beers and may have given up some over the sweater action to a long time boyfriend. The fact that her friends and classmates were carousing naked in groups seems to have turned her world upside down, and I think she may have felt like the only virgin in the class.

The truth is that probably half of the girls in my class graduated with their virtues intact, or only slightly dinged. That figure went down quickly during freshman year of college.** We grew up in the middle of the sexual revolution, and our generation was trying to reconcile the Puritan morals we were taught with the obviously changing reality. Girls who did it usually kept it quiet, often not even telling their closest friends. Boys were boys, but the ones who were smart knew to keep their mouths shut if they wanted to do it again.

The decisions were as individual as the people making them, but the narrative was much less diverse. Girls who weren't sexual enough were fish. Girls who gave it up were sluts. There was an exemption for long-term relationships, but only if no one spilled details or got pregnant. I still remember listening to one douche canoe telling the entire football team how his girlfriend of over a year had come across with a bj, and the whole group spent several minutes talking about how gross it was, and what a ho-bag she must be. I resolved never to hang out with any of them, and made a mental note to call her if they ever broke up.

Apparently, this inhibition is hard to shake. My friend spent the weekend with some of her sorority sisters, and since she is now obsessed with this topic, she apparently interrogated each of them. Only about half were willing to talk about their high school experiences even now, all these years later. My impression is that girls today are much more open with their friends, and that perhaps there is a little more freedom to make your own decisions. But I could be wrong. I get all of my information on modern culture from watching Glee.***

So how about it, girls? Any stories you care to share?

* Steady was a fluid concept for me in those days. Hey, don't judge. It was the 70's. I was up front about it. And I was a seventeen year old boy.

** Like your mom.

*** Just kidding. I would rather stick a needle in my eye than watch Glee.

Hey baby, how about a little dependency injection?

2010-06-16T12:35:00.000-05:00

I think my science computer goober credentials have been pretty well established by now, but occasionally I run across something that reminds me that I am really not like most other people. Today's example is this comic strip, which I thought was the funniest thing I have seen in a long time.

It's only a matter of time before I start showing up at work in my pajamas.

Bury my heart at Port Fourchon

2010-06-02T20:29:00.000-05:00

I didn't want to write about the oil leak. I really didn't. After all, I think anyone who wants it can find plenty of writing, and talking, and blamestorming, and conjecturing about the Gulf. But after trying to write on several other topics, I realize that this is all I've got. It won't let me go. And vice-versa.

I am obsessed with the underwater robot cam. I read everything I see about the blowout, and each successive attempt to control it. Every conversational lull finds my mind drifting back to the 500 gallons or so of oil and gas spewing every minute into the icy darkness from the hole in the bottom of the sea. I am cursed by my just-enough-to-be-dangerous knowledge of the sciences involved, and my recently nonexistent but growing knowledge of deep water drilling. Mostly, I am increasingly depressed and concerned.

I'm not personally, no-reason-to-go-on depressed. I am just sad for the people of the Gulf, and the people who don't even know how much they depend on the people of the Gulf, and a beautiful place, and a lifestyle, and a wonderful set of communities that may very well be lost. More than that, I would be hard pressed to imagine a more poignant example of the conflict between our current global culture and the planet on which we all depend.

I don't believe the chickenest of the Chicken (of the Sea) Littles who say the floor of the Gulf will collapse into the rapidly emptying cavity. I doubt that the Gulf will suffer the fate of the Dead Sea, or that the Atlantic Seaboard will be fouled with tarballs and oiled terns all the way to the Jersey Shore, or the Cape of Cod*. But the Gulf of Mexico is home to a complex and little understood food chain, on which any number of fish, and birds, and creatures of the land depend. It depends on marshes, and estuaries, and open ocean, and the deep waters of the Gulf, and damage to any one of these environments can break the chain.

And guess who is at the top of that food chain? Exactly. And it's about more than fresh seafood. This ecosystem feeds a lot of people, and many more animals, in a world already running low on food and ways to make it.

In other news, a new virus is devastating casava plants halfway around the world. Why do we care? Casava is the third largest source of calories for humans in the world after wheat and rice, even before corn. A blight will create upward pressure on food and fuel prices, as well as exacerbating civil and humanitarian crises in the third world. Also, starving people make bad consumers. It's going to become ever harder to justify turning food into fuel.

And we can't stop drilling, or even slow down. As many as half of the people in the world literally cannot survive without at least as much petroleum-fueled food as we produce today. The United States -- feeder of the world -- puts about five calories of oil energy (including oil-based fertilizers) into every calorie of food we put in someone's mouth. And the pressure is increasing. Even with their draconian measures, the Chinese have only managed to slow the growth of their population over the last fifty years, not reduce it.

Speaking of the Gulf, Mexico, which is one of the United States' largest oil suppliers, is predicted to become a net importer of oil within three years, following the path taken by the U.S about forty years ago.

So what will happen? Who knows? My guess is that the food chain in the Northern Gulf that supports commercial and sports fishing will suffer significant damage, and may well collapse. The already diminishing wetlands will accelerate their retreat, further damaging both freshwater and saltwater fish populations, and the animals that depend on them. Agricultural chemicals will continue to expand the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi, since our country needs corn more than Gulf culture. And the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival will never be the same.

Right now, the hard part is the waiting, and the abstractness of the whole thing. There aren't any people to rescue from rooftops, no felled trees to cut up, no power to restore. There really isn't much to clean up or rescue. Whatever damage is being done is mostly far away, and too diffuse or small to be seen. The real effects can only be inferred in months and years to come, if ever.

So we wait, and we watch. Sometimes we cry. And we try to hope.

* On the other hand, I guess we had better see how long this goes on.

Late Bloomer

2010-05-24T06:55:00.003-05:00

There has been a wisteria next to our driveway since we moved into this house, growing around a big gum tree. In the ten years we have lived here, it has never once bloomed. Not even a little. For several years, we tried everything that anyone suggested to get the thing to flower. We fed it, we starved it, we disturbed the roots, we cut it back. Nothing.

Eventually we gave up. We decided it was never going to bloom. I intended to dig it up, but have not ever quite gotten around to it. It continued to grow, and every year it continued not to flower.

Then this Spring, just before Easter, for no apparent reason, I noticed a single bloom hanging over the driveway. When I told The Wife, her response was, "Shut up!" She stopped whatever it was she was doing to come see. You would have thought I had found a pot of gold, or the face of Jesus in an oil stain, seeing how excited we were. It was kind of stupid.

Today I turn -- well, older. A little more than twenty years ago, on my thirty-somethingth birthday, I was served divorce papers. It was also my ninth wedding anniversary. At that point in my life, I had accumulated about a hundred credit hours toward no particular major at a series of ever less distinguished colleges and universities. I lived in a strange town, far from friends or family. I had a crappy one bedroom apartment that I couldn't afford, and a new job that I kind of hated. I was ending my third career in twelve years.

In short, I had less than no money, no prospects, and a seven year old Subaru station wagon with a slow leak in the right rear tire. I had failed at nearly everything I tried. My life was over, and I had a lot of sad, lonely years ahead of me. I was destined to end up selling cheap suits at Men's Wearhouse.* I had made a few new friends, and they were about all that was keeping me afloat.

Today, I have been married for more than ten years to a woman who is not crazy, and in fact makes me laugh almost every day. She will undoubtedly buy me a great birthday present and then worry that it is not good enough. I have two college degrees in a field I love. We live in a big, comfortable old house, and most mornings I drive three miles down the prettiest road in town to one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country, where I have ideas for a living. I still find plenty to complain about, but most of it is meaningless. My life is unbelievably sweet.

I hear people talk occasionally about how unsatisfied they are with their lives at 26 or 30, and I find this both humorous and sad. Humorous, because I know how young that is, and how much it can change. Sad, because I know that some of them will give up. A few will even be overwhelmed with despair, and cut the journey short.

Life can change in an instant. Whether lovestruck, lightning-struck, car-struck or hit with a realization, we all have moments on which our whole existence pivots, and takes a new direction. If things are good, savor every blessed moment. If you're waiting for things to improve, well, waiting serves a purpose, too.

In the end, we never know when the first bloom will appear. All we can do is wait, and grow, and try to believe that it will happen.

* I guarantee it.

On truthiness

2010-05-15T12:31:00.002-05:00

One good thing about having a blog with few readers is that I have been able to pretty much count on no one I know seeing what I write, and in turn not being offended by it. The only person from my 4-D world who has known about this blog from the beginning is The Wobbler, and the statute of limitations may not have expired on many of the stories I would tell about him, so he doesn't show up in my posts that often.

Over time, more friends and colleagues have discovered my blog, and I think one or two of them still read it. Since I have no imagination, I am more or less forced to write about people I know (or used to know) and things that have happened, setting up the possibility that someone is going to read a story in which they played a significant role. The awkwardness could be amplified by the fact that my posts may be more "based on historical events" than actually true.

My father firmly believed that one should never let inconvenient facts stand in the way of a good story, though he never would have admitted it. I feel somewhat honor bound to carry on that tradition. Plus, my memory is fading fast, so many of the events from my life have big gaps in them. It is possible that there is a pensieve in the house somewhere, but if there is, I have stored within it the memory of where I keep it.

So if you read a story here that seems very much like something that happened to you, but without the fairies and gunfire, let me just apologize in advance and assure you that it's nothing personal. And by nothing personal, I mean I will try to remember not to use your real name. I will also do my best not to reveal any dark secrets. In other words, if I write about it, be assured that I've already told all of our mutual friends.

And if there are stories you know you would rather not have published on the interwebs (possibly with pictures), then you should probably let me know. Because otherwise, you know it's just a matter of time before I write about that one time when we were all at that place with those people and that thing happened.