Daing na bangus and traffic

I’m back on the blog at last! First, a technical note. At first I thought of methodically going through each day of the trip, but then I wondered whether it might make more sense to do themes instead. In the end it looks like this first post has a little of both. Anyway, over the next several days I hope to post as much about the trip as possible, and if it appears at all organized, so much the better. If not, well, ya got tags you can use to find your way through.

The first full day of our trip got off to a good start, with what’s apparently a typical Filipino breakfast: daing na bangus at a local chain, Pancake House—yeah, quite the exotic name! Anyway, the dish is a fried marinated fish served with a pile of garlic rice that has a fried egg on top. Awesome hangover food, I imagine, and good jet lag food as well. In fact, after just one plate of this I wish I could have it every morning. (Here’s a recipe, here’s a pic.)

The first day also gave us the trip’s theme song, which is good—every trip needs a theme song. Thanks to kaskasero playing it incessantly in the car, it was track 9 from this disc: “Awitin Mo Isasayaw Ko”, a disco song covered by Pedicab. (Not that the band name means anything to me!) The beat moves a hell of a lot faster than the traffic in Manila, believe me. In fact, if you had to choose one word to describe Manila, it’d be traffic. Goddamn, I have never seen such traffic.

It’s hard to describe. Imagine a four-lane road, with at least six cars abreast. Imagine mopeds buzzing in between all the cars. Imagine a huge fleet of these crazy vehicles called jeepneys, full of people and decorated with all kinds of wacky designs. (Pic below.) Now imagine everything traveling at about 5 mph. Oh, and diesel smoke and pedestrians everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there are people who live in their cars permanently, trying to get to a house they haven’t been able to reach in years because of the awful traffic. In fact, traffic is so slow and heavy that vendors just roll their carts of stuff in between cars and hawk everything from peanuts to cigarettes. Totally insane.

Greetings from Narita

I’m currently sitting in Narita airport in Tokyo, operating on about two hours’ sleep, and my internal clock says it’s about three in the morning, just to keep you all informed. The long flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it could be, though. Swami and I snagged one of the rows right at the back of the plane that has only two seats across, so it was nice not to have to share a row with anyone else. I saw a cool sunset out the window of the plane when we landed—picture forthcoming when I get back home.

Edited on 30 Dec. to add: here’s the photo.


Now it’s on to Manila, an additional four hours in the air that’ll probably seem much more like punishment. And the Great Asian Adventure of 2007 begins!

On the edge

Whoa, it’s been well over two weeks since my last post. I’ve been frantically getting ready for the trip to Manila and D.C., and at this point I think I’ve achieved Batman-like levels of preparedness. Anti-malaria drug, antibiotics, bug repellent, sunblock, hand sanitizer. Based on that list one might think we were heading for the middle of the Amazon, but no, it’s just bourgeois risk aversion over here. And speaking of bourgeois, I also have the portable DVD player, the digital camera, a schwack of movies, and lots of easy-to-read geeky sci-fi books.

I do wish we were blowing off the family Christmas, though, but maybe experiencing it through a haze of jet lag will actually turn out to be better than the usual lucid suffering. See you all on the other side—hopefully, though, I’ll have a chance to post from the road. Regardless, I promise a full report at the end of the month when normalcy returns!

One thousand miles

As of today, I’ve ridden 1000 miles on the bike this year. That’s a little farther than the distance between Boston and Louisville! (Swami has me beat, though, with almost 1200—that’s Boston to Birmingham, Alabama.) And since it’s getting damn cold now, I probably won’t get too many more miles in for 2007. Next year, the goal is to ride a metric century (62.14 miles); this year’s longest ride was the Hub on Wheels at 41, so the goal is 50% farther. No problem, right?

Nice view

Here are two pics from a recent trip to Asheville, North Carolina, both taken from the parking lot at the top of Mt. Mitchell. It’s the highest mountain east of the Mississippi.

How high is it exactly, you might ask?

Creativity, where is thy muse

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity recently, because I’ve been in what feels like a slump on and off for the last year or so, and also because I just read Sandman: Dream Country. One of the short stories in that collection (“Calliope”) deals with the creative muse and writer’s block.

But I should elaborate on both of those reasons. The first reason might seem surprising, because it’s not like I haven’t been writing. The prime exhibit is this blog, which does count as writing, even if it doesn’t all necessarily count as entertaining writing. But it’s not like I’ve been staring at blank screens nonstop for the last year. What kills me, though, is that I had a taste of real inspiration, where I sat down and banged out a scene-by-scene plot for a story over the course of just a few minutes, a plot which sprang so fully formed out of my head that I was able to actually produce a complete work once I filled in the structure. This is in stark contrast to the rest of my fiction writing, where I have probably finished less than 1 percent of everything I’ve started.

So now that I’ve experienced one time where it was blissfully easy, really paint-by-numbers easy, I want to feel that again. But of course it hasn’t happened, and I wonder if it will ever happen again. I’d better be satisfied even if it doesn’t, you know? It’s a damn lucky thing, damn lucky.

Then, reading Sandman, I wonder how it is even possible to live entirely based on one’s own creativity. Anyone who writes anything, from novelists to people trying to put together an email in their cubicle, knows that many times it’s just a brutal slog to get something down. But to think that the result of that slog could be the difference between the success and failure of one’s livelihood, well, that would be a crushing responsibility. I suppose that right there explains the impetus behind works like “Calliope,” where writer’s block itself becomes the driving force of the tale. At some point you figure you might as well use the block itself for material. It’s a particularly crafty bit of self-preservation.

Creativity itself deserves a little more scrutiny, too, I think. I tend to think of people as either using it, or not, but that’s far too simplistic. It’s not just writing, or composing, or singing, or playing. It’s actually realizing that if you are hammering away at a problem and it’s not getting resolved, that you should try something different. It’s going around something, rather than through it. Which is why I’m sitting here typing this, rather than wondering when the hell I’ll ever have that flash of inspiration visit me again. At least there’s a blog post for today, now, and that’s worth more than nothing.

Striking writers

So Hollywood’s writers have gone on strike for the first time since 1988. That gives me the perfect excuse to think about what I was doing in 1988 (since this blog is All About Me, of course). That was the spring I was stuck at home before I went (back) to college, when I was slogging through a year of community college. I watched Letterman religiously back then, back when he was the funniest thing on TV. (For the record, though, I hate Chris Elliot.) I had not yet decided to watch Star Trek: TNG, which was probably a good thing because it pretty much sucked until the third season.

Of course, that was an election year, and the inevitable end of Reagan’s presidency was finally on deck. I was still too young to vote, and things didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted, but at least Bloom County’s National Radical Meadow Party was still holding raucous caucuses. And we all have fond memories of Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment.

In the realm of music, I was just getting into Crowded House with the foolish impression that I was finally getting into a band fairly early on in the game. Then I found out about Split Enz, whoops. I think that was also during the brief period when Sting was cool, which lasted up until I went to a show on his “Nothing Like the Sun” tour in August and decided he was kind of lame. That summer was also spent buying all the Genesis albums, which may cause you to wonder whether I should really consider myself an arbiter of cool.

All in all, the spring and summer of 1988 were characterized mostly by lots of sitting around waiting for my life to get its shit together. Er, is there any way I can tie that in with the writers’ strike? Too bad nobody from the Guild is around to help me out.

A bit of rantiness

Awright, a few things large and small that are torquing me today.

1. Dude on the bus who rides all the way to the last stop, but stands right at the front for the whole trip. Every poor soul who wants to get on or off before the last stop has to squeeze by this guy even though there are acres of space further back where he could stand. Hey prick, think of someone besides yourself for twenty whole minutes, ok?


2. I can only read Glenn Greenwald every couple of weeks, to keep my teeth-grinding to a minimum. Bombing Iran? A politicized military? Crazy Rudy Giuliani and his defense of torture? It keeps me up at night.


3. Caitlin Flanagan. Why, why, why does the Atlantic keep printing her silliness? I cannot stand her self-centered, frail flower of womanhood crap. A blog would serve her so much better, where she could blab about herself without having to maintain the pretense that she’s writing about topics of broad relevance.


4. The phishing email I got today that included my email address, my eBay ID, and my full name. What the hell is that? Time to change a few passwords and hope for the best. And let’s see if I get any kind of response from eBay now that I’ve reported it to them.

Funniest minute of television

Ah, I never get tired of Artie. (Psst: Turn the volume down if you’re at work.)

The global village

We hung out with Sashe yesterday! Since he now lives in Malaysia, I haven’t actually laid eyes on him since 2004. It was great to catch up, especially since he might not make it to kaskasero’s wedding.

It’s interesting to think that I know people from all across the world. And some good friends I’ve never met in person, even, thanks to the wonders of the Intarwebs. Even a cranky misanthrope such as myself can benefit from human contact once in a while, hm!

No speaky da language

After studying foreign languages for more than fifteen years, I just bought plane tickets for my very first trip overseas ever. (Those two facts together demonstrate most of all, perhaps, the extent to which I’ve faked it so far in my life.) I was supposed to go to Ukraine in June, but that fell through in spectacular fashion. But this time, no screwups allowed: I gotta ticket for Manila in December and I intend to use it. Why Manila? It is a pertinent question. The simple answer is, kaskasero managed to get himself engaged to be married, and there’s no way I’d miss that wedding. Even though it means 25 hours of traveling—one way—and lord knows how many vaccinations. Oh, and I know one whole word of Tagalog: tinga, or something stuck in your teeth. At least I’m ready to eat out, right?

Ten quotes

1. (Magneto) You’re a god among insects—never let anyone tell you different.


2. (Benjamin Katz) Fire in the hole!!


3. (The Tick) Eating kittens is just plain wrong! And no one should do it, ever!


4. (Hudson) Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!


5. (Sarge) Why don’t you put that in a memo titled “Shit I already know”!


6. (Ricky Roma) What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it, asshole?


7. (Kirk) Khan, you bloodsucker!


8. (Nathan Arizona) I don’t know, they were jammies! With Yodas and shit on ’em!


9. (Meadow Soprano) Self-involved much?


10. (David St. Hubbins) There’s a fine line between clever and stupid.

Bang a gong

Whoa, it’s October. How did that happen?
I’ve been quiet, but not idle. A week ago yesterday we rode our second Hub on Wheels, and this time we made it the full 41 miles—our longest ride ever. Only one minor mishap, despite many, many unskilled cyclists out there on the road with us. It was fun, but three hours of pretty much unwavering, teeth-gritting concentration. Yes, cyclists are masochists.

I’m also happy to report that Sashe has reemerged, yay! And I finally got a book to press; the first one since I took over the manager job two freaking years ago. The next one better not take so long.

In possibly surprising news, Halo 3 came out last week and I haven’t bought a copy yet. True, we technically have an Xbox 360 since we have kaskasero’s on long-term loan, but it’s not actually hooked up yet! And yes, I confess I’m still playing the same game of Morrowind that I started in May of 2006. (!) Don’t worry, Halo 3 will get its day at some point. Of course, it’s hard to imagine anything will recapture those heady early days of Halo. Man, the first time you go through “Guilty Spark,” you wonder if your heart can take it.

The final update is that I’ve had two dreams about seeing U2 in concert in the last week. As usual, my subconscious is failing miserably to convey to me whatever incredibly important message it has to deliver. And last night, I dreamed I was trying to explain permanent hearing loss to some chick on the bus who was blasting T. Rex out of her headphones super, super loud. Can anybody explain what the heck this all means??

Movie review: Superman Returns

It seems prudent to reveal all my biases first, before I dive into the actual review of this movie. It also might be helpful to explain why it’s taken me over a year to see it, which is very much a related topic. Thanks to X-Men and X2, I am now pretty firmly committed to that particular universe as serving my comic needs. Heck, I didn’t even know I had comic needs until those two movies kicked my ass. (See more of my ramblings on this topic here.) I’m also a little too young to have been impressed by the 1978 Superman movie that jumpstarted the current culture’s interest in the dude; in fact, I’m young enough to find Superman and his world pretty painfully dorky. More on that last point later.

So that takes care of the “I’m not a fan of Superman” portion of this review. But given that Bryan Singer brought me X-Men nirvana, you’d think that would have spurred me into the theater. Aha, not quite. Recall that X3 was originally going to be under Singer’s direction; recall that Singer jumped from the project, voiding his deal with the studio, to direct SR; recall that X3 under hack director Brett Ratner was a major disappointment to me. (Did I ever give you all my lengthy rant about X3? Searching through my blog I think I haven’t. I might have to rectify that sometime.) So I was feeling pretty ill disposed to Singer’s decision, and feeling apathy to the whole Superman idea, ergo there I am not going to see the movie.

That brings us to last Saturday night, when the disc was finally shoved into the player. I was nearly a tabula rasa, although I found myself recognizing Supermanalia in the dark reaches of my memory as I watched: oh yeah, I remember Jimmy Olsen, yep, Daily Planet, right, the Fortress of Solitude. In fact, it turns out that I had a pretty good grasp on what I needed to know in order to enjoy the movie, although not quite enough, perhaps. It turns out that this is a sequel, not a reinvention, and so there is some assumption that the story line continues from the last Superman movie back in the 1980s. (Upon checking the IMDB, by the way, I find that Superman IV is the very definition of Suck, and I wonder if it would be better for humanity to pretend it never existed, rather than tack the current movie onto the end of the chain.)

Enough of this screwing around, you cry, is it a good movie?? Yes and no. Let me take care of the “no” part first. Superman himself is the largest hindrance to movie goodness, in terms of generating what I need from plot and characterization. As my pal kaskasero always says, he’s too goddamn perfect. Strong plots and characters require conflict, and the truth is that Superman doesn’t have a lot of room for it. He has only one flaw, the weakness to kryptonite, and that gets pretty tired when you have to bring it into every confrontation with the bad guys. One of the strengths of the X-Men, and Spider-Man, for that matter, is that they’re inherently flawed or vulnerable (even Xavier, who has to get knocked out of commission almost immediately in every conflict or else nothing gets going), often psychologically, which means there’s a lot you can do if you want to make things difficult—and interesting—for them. With Superman, you kind of feel sorry for Lex Luthor, because that guy is nowhere near an irresistable force trying to push on that immovable object.

This movie does some work to show us a weakened Superman and therefore an actual conflict, but the solution boils down to pulling the kryptonite thorn out of his paw and then he’s back to being, as the Tick is fond of saying, nigh invulnerable. He also doesn’t seem particularly deep psychologically, never really confronting the new developments with Lois and her tyke. Speaking of the Lois Lane family unit, by the way, I was glad to see that James Marsden got a decent amount of screentime, considering that Cyclops’ woeful underuse in X3 is one of the reasons why that movie was so frustrating.

To sum up the negatives, then, Superman is inherently a somewhat flat character that doesn’t end up very compelling, and the movie’s plot was too thin to sustain itself around him. Kevin Spacey did a great job as Luthor, but he didn’t have a lot of room to work with. He was kind of a bad dude, but as far as villains go his world domination plan was thin, and I think the Joker does a better job of projecting true sociopathic malevolence. This all dovetails with my frustration that Superman’s world is too simplistic, too unreal, as if it’s never grown up. Part of that is the annoying PG-13 rating these comic-book movies always try for, but part of it is the fault of the Superman concept.

And here’s where I should remark on the dorkiness I referred to earlier. I’m sorry, but the cartoonish red and blue tights just don’t work on the modern screen, although I recognize that the alternatives are nearly impossible to imagine. (Batman benefits immensely from the forethought of his dark outfit, doesn’t he?) And is it just me, or is it darn difficult to imagine Superman and Lois feeling actual, passionate love for each other? Even though they’re ostensibly adults, they’re still trapped in a world that’s imagined for children. The X-Men have managed to transcend their immature, adolescent beginnings and turned into adults, wrestling with moral ambiguity and imperfection just like us poor slobs in the real world. Maybe it would help if these damn movies would go for the R rating. Of all people, Wolverine deserves to say “fuck” more than a few times. On the other hand, I can almost imagine a plotline in Superman where Luthor tries in vain to force him at kryptonite point to say “fuck.” Supes would certainly find a way around it; he’s so clean he practically squeaks.

But as I said earlier, there are some positives. Even though the movie was very long and often extremely slow moving, I found myself entirely caught up in it. This is where I reaffirm my unconditional love for Bryan Singer and his team’s visual artistry. They do such an amazing job of showing the viewer everything you might want to see, with camera angles and movement that naturally draw you into scenes. This is very much unlike some directors, who cut around so fast that you can’t figure out what the hell you’re looking at, which is disorienting and alienating, and leads you to wonder whether they’re trying to hide something by being deliberately sloppy. (Here I must cast an accusatory eye at Gladiator.) And everything looks so damn good, colors and lighting are rich, and Metropolis has a Deco splendor that makes me want to move there tomorrow.

Singer probably could have done a better job in terms of economy, though; one of the strengths of his X-Men movies was that he was able to give us insight into such a large cast of characters with a minimum of lines and screen time. (Although I will comment that Cyclops got shafted, even in X-Men and X2, but what can he do when Wolverine’s the center of attention?) Here, we didn’t have that many characters, but they’re still fairly flat. Time was spent on things that probably didn’t need it, like Superman’s convalescence at the hospital, and the plot hardly had time to ramp up before it was actually over.

Anyway, I think Singer did an amazing job with a very, very small amount of actual movie. For his next trick, it looks like he’ll be trying to convince me to go see a movie with Tom Cruise in it sometime in 2008. Good luck with that, Bryan.

Memory prime

Things feel a little off balance right now. Here it is, the second week of September, the sky is that ridiculous shade of blue again, but I’m not in Maine. We’ve gone there around this time of year for four of the last five years, and it feels so strange not to be there now. It’s funny how quickly the human brain gets accustomed to a repeating pattern, to the point where you even start waking up a minute before the alarm goes off. Back in grad school, when we used to drive from Ohio to Virginia every break, it got to the point where I would look out the window at exactly the moment we were passing by a particular landmark, my eyes falling on it at just the same moment the impulse popped into my brain to wonder when we would see it. (My personal favorite was off the side of I-70 in eastern Ohio: a rusty sign for the “Sports Paradise” standing in the middle of an overgrown field, with smaller, crooked lettering at the bottom that said, gratuitously I think, “Closed.” Ah, the stuff of poignant, overemotive poetry.)

Our new place has been an interesting exercise for my physical memory. Since it’s laid out almost identically to our old place, I think I settled in here a lot more quickly than usual. (Our apartment in Columbus had corners that I never got used too, due to the weird layout and cobwebby, Victorian vibe. I think I vacuumed behind the staircase only one time in the six years we lived there.) But I do find myself sometimes heading to the location of the old fridge, or looking around and wondering what I’m doing in someone else’s house. Some of that is that I’d never paint my bedroom peach, but some of it is the back reaches of my lizard brain still getting used to the new surroundings. Still, I’m getting to where I don’t need to look for the lightswitch, and I almost don’t get irrationally pissed when I think about those clomping moose we used to live below. Actually, I take that back—I’ll probably always be irrationally pissed at them.

So why am I not in Maine? Well, the trip to Vermont we took instead was a total blast, so I’m glad about that. And it’s probably a good thing to break out of the routine, to make sure Acadia always stays special. But man I could go for a blueberry smoothie right now from Gaucho’s, or how about that mojito at Havana...Eden has the best vegetarian food ever...next year we’ll definitely have to cycle the Park Loop Road again...I miss Maine.

A little catch-up

It’s been way, way too long since I posted, sorry about that. I’ve been waiting for a theme to surface that covers the last couple of weeks, but it turns out I got nothing. So here’s a summary.

New nephew! Welcome to Earth, Corey Michael.

Work kind of sucks. Counting on other people doesn’t work when they’re slacking fuckups. And getting a lengthy lecture from the Usual Suspect is enough to sour my cornflakes for days. At least I have an office door I can close when it all weighs on me a little too heavily. And, of course, there are good points such that I shouldn’t stalk out the door with no plan for the future. But still, right now it’s generally bleah.

Tennis is better. Despite my automatic feeling of disappointment for getting demoted down a skill level, the last three matches have been a lot more enjoyable than the first three. And not just because we won two of them. (Although: hooray!) When I play people who are a little more laid-back, it’s a lot easier to temper my naturally psychotic competitiveness. Having said that, I do have a bit of advice for people who play in social leagues: please, please, keep the score carefully. Giving yourself a boost by announcing it’s 15-15 when it should be 0-30 makes you look like a tool. (I’m glad we ended up beating them anyway, despite losing more than one game due to the crappy scorekeeping.)

Cycling is an obsession. But you dear readers already knew that. Last Saturday we rode 35 miles, the second longest ride ever. And it felt great. Just signed up for this year’s Hub on Wheels, too. This year the goal is 45 miles!

Hooray for Crowded House. Not only did they kick ass both nights I saw them in August, they had Kufala sell discs of the complete live shows. I’ll happily pay $20 to get a soundboard-quality recording, over a free one taped by the audience that sounds like shit on toast.

Live Nation/Clear Channel sucks. Thanks to their dickishness, CH shows performed at their venues have been pulled off Kufala and can’t be sold. Monopolistic jackasses. At least their bogus patent got busted. Still, there is work to be done to bring these bastards down.

Happy Birthday to MWL. Somehow I missed the first anniversary of this blog. I bet nobody else noticed, either. But how about that! Blogito, ergo sum.

Dissed

The latest development in tennis is, we got beat again last weekend, 6-0 6-2. I thought we were fairly competitive, and I had some solid plays, but the score says we were completely outmatched. As a result, on Monday the league admin bumped us down into the lower division. It’s a bitter outcome, but then again I certainly wouldn’t mind playing some matches that are a little more even. Still, it’s not easy to be shown that I’m not as good at this as I thought I was. Moreover it’s proving difficult to schedule with people in the lower tier. Bah. That’s all I got right now: Bah.

Fitness is a harsh mistress

It’s been a bad week for sports, at least in the most local sense. Sunday afternoon I fell off my bike only three miles into a planned 30-mile ride in Gloucester, which gave me a nasty road rash on my knee and forced us to turn around and limp back to the car. It was a dumb fall and luckily pretty minor as crashes go—nothing like the one from the 2006 Tour de France I’ve embedded here.

All week I’ve had a front-row view to the healing process as I’ve been wearing these space-age clear bandages. They’re definitely not for the faint of heart, as you can imagine.

In other news we managed to get our butts kicked bad in the doubles tennis league last night. Our opponents seemed beatable but just never made a mistake, whereas we made plenty. Now we’re 0-2 and I’m feeling kind of demoralized about the whole thing. Although I did a good job returning the guy’s ridiculous spin serves and even hit a few winners. Our third match is this Sunday, and man I hope things go better. It’s tough, though, because I thought we were better than this and it’s a nasty surprise to find out otherwise. At the very least I can only imagine that I’m giving these opponents at least a little bit of a challenge.

Well, it’s nearly the weekend again and time to try and redeem myself. Here’s hoping there’s less blood drawn and more games won.

The passing of the Rove

Thanks to the arrival of the Atlantic Monthly late last week, my disgust with the Bush administration has resurged to the point where it’s been hard to think of anything else. So my emotions are decidedly mixed with today’s top story of Karl Rove resigning from the White House staff. Of course, I immediately thought about the whole rat leaving sinking ship metaphor, and the whole door hitting him in the ass thing (I sincerely hope it does), but that all seems inadequate when confronted with the legacy of someone as despicable as Rove. This timely article does a good job providing an outline of what exactly Rove did to succeed so well at campaign politics, and how he was such a spectacular fuckup at helping run a functional government.

But what’s missing from that piece is the outrage, the deep personal sense of fury I feel at what has been done to my government and my country for the last seven years. By treating every minute of every day as part of a political campaign, Rove managed to strip all vestiges of competence out of the government. Spurred by his scorched-earth attitude and monomania of securing a permanent Republican majority, the executive branch abrogated its responsibility to govern. Instead of competent people, we got political hacks put in charge of things like FEMA and managing post-Saddam Iraq. And not surprisingly, they blindly and stupidly steered the bus into the ditch. People have fucking died because of these idiots: victims of Katrina, soldiers, American civilians, and a staggering number of Iraqi civilians in Iraq. Am I a godless liberal brainwashee to notice that? Meanwhile, Rove didn’t even want Bush to land the plane from which he surveyed the Katrina damage, and we are forever stuck with the image of President Chimpface standing under a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.”

Along with the competence, we also lost any shred of civility in political life. Considering how tenuous Bush’s claim to the presidency has been (and I’m being charitable there, please recognize) in both elections, it didn’t seem like too much to hope for that he really would try to be a uniter rather than a divider. But instead Bush managed to alienate even his own party in Congress, not to mention those of us who never cast a vote for him but still live under his management. And the mainstream media has been cowed to the point where they publish unvarnished partisan propaganda without question or analysis lest someone scream about their “liberal bias” or they lose access to the spin-controlled crumbs the administration throws them. Believe me, it’s hard to take the prez seriously when he seems more interested in whether foreign aid might lead to someone buying a condom than whether his casus belli for Iraq was actually legitimate.

So Rove is finally resigning. Well, the cynic in me can ruefully say, he’s certainly done enough damage such that he deserves a nice break. And I get no joy out of the resignation, considering how many years it’s going to take before all the mistakes of the Bush administration are rectified—assuming that someone still remembers how to actually run the government in this country. It’s definitely not going to be easy to explain to the next generation how we let this happen.

Tour de Vermont

At last, a travelogue from our recent trip to Vermont! It was a four-day cycling tour, about 25 miles a day, through some of the most ridiculously hilly terrain I’ve ever ridden. We stayed at two different inns, one nice, the other extra-swanky, and had breakfast and dinner included.

So the day’s routine was: crawl out of bed at 7 a.m., breakfast at 8, start cycling at 9, a sandwich in a tiny Vermont town for lunch, cycle until about 2, lengthy shower and lengthier nap, dinner around 7, collapse in bed and fall asleep around 9:30. It was like being in the bike army, but in a good way—no uniforms or discipline. Also, there was the all-important support van. Driven by one of our two guides, you could flag it down at any time for food or snacks or a rescue. It also came in handy when I bought a quart of Grade B maple syrup from Plummer’s, since I wasn’t about to carry that on my back for the rest of the day. (Speaking of tiny towns, this next photo shows the actual, official U.S. Post Office in Jamaica, Vermont.)

Now for some details. You might be aware that Vermont is kind of hilly; in fact, one might call it downright full of mountains. And just about every day there was a hill of such staggering proportion, with a grade approaching 6 or 7%, that I did end up walking some of the way in lieu of feeling my heart explode. But then on the other side of most of them, there would be a descent for the record books: my max speed was clocked more than once at over 39 mph, which is definitely the fastest I’ve ever traveled on a bike.

The scenery was fantastic: totally bucolic, lots of chattering streams, mountain peaks and valleys, covered bridges, cows, cute little towns with nothing in them except one country store (where you could always get potato chips, the most essential cycling food there is). Not one whisker of cell phone service. And I only realized after we got back that I didn’t see a traffic light the entire time we were there. Another thing which I didn’t know beforehand is that most of the secondary roads there are still unpaved, which made for some seriously hairy moments on my road bike. There was one stretch that was so unbelievably muddy that we had to take the van for a couple of miles because it was just too dicey. Amazingly, I did remain upright the entire tour.

Before we went, I was completely unsure of whether I’d be able to take four straight days of riding, but it turned out to be just right. The third day I was pretty sore in the morning, but the itinerary centered around a three-mile hike to see this fabulous waterfall. And then on day four, I felt great. I think maybe my muscles just gave up complaining when they realized I wasn’t going to give them a break.

All told I logged over 100 miles in four days, improved my mad skillz at climbing, descending, and off-roading, and purged all thoughts of my mundane life. And in a true stroke of fortune, it never rained on us during a ride. I would definitely do it again. How soon can I take another vacation?

P.S. See more pics at my Flickr page.

Stormtrooper True

One of my fondest internet-related memories dates back to April 2000, during the whole Elian Gonzalez debacle. Soon after the raid during which Elian was seized from his family’s house in Miami, this little Shockwave movie found its way onto the Net. Sure, it’s dated, sure, it references a stupid Bud commercial, but I laughed so damn hard at that thing. And the best part was, it got pulled almost immediately because it used a copyrighted photo, so it quickly faded into obscurity. (Here’s a story describing the controversy at the time.) Now that the moment has long passed, though, I’ve found it online again and I can relive that classic moment. Good times, good times.

Sporting news

Well, I owe everybody a long account of my Vermont vacation (in one word: excellent), but then I got caught up in watching the Tour de France, and then I got caught up in the ridiculous doping scandals that have marred said Tour, and as a result you poor souls out there haven’t heard from me in a while. I’ll try to get to the Vermont recap this weekend, although I ain’t guaranteeing anything. Also, the Swami and I signed up for a doubles tennis league, and our first match is tomorrow morning. Wish me luck—I love playing doubles, but haven’t done it in ages, and I also have a tendency to lock up with anxiety in pressure situations on the court. So I don’t expect anything but a debacle; hopefully I’ll be proved wrong. (And yes, if I just stopped being so competitive it wouldn’t be a big deal, but to that I say right, as if.)

Tune in again soon. At least I can say with confidence that there will be no doping scandals in the tennis league...right?

Please leave a message after the beep

I hope all two of you loyal readers can handle it, starting tomorrow I’m away to Vermont until Friday. It’s a cycling tour, so we’ll see if I can handle four straight days in the saddle. Next time I post, it might be while sitting on a big ice pack or something.

While I’m gone, here are some study questions:

1. Exactly how awesome was Keith Olbermann’s demand for Bush and Cheney to resign?


2. Exactly how awesome was that Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final?


3. You are watching the Tour de France too, aren’t you??


4. Write a 10-page essay on the Jungian subtext of the Transformers movie.

See you next weekend!

Crazy moon language

Like anybody’s, my day is mostly filled with routine and sometimes with outright drudgery, but every once in a while I remember why I slogged through grad school and took this crazy job. Here’s an excerpt from something I’m editing:

That’s part of a text in Glagolitic, an alphabet used in the Slavic-speaking world before the more familiar Cyrillic was used. (They were used contemporaneously, though—the exact chronology is a little fuzzy on which one was invented first. At any rate, we’re talking ninth century AD.) I’ve always thought it was the coolest looking script, all loops and impractical forms that look like they’d take a while to draw. But then again, monks spent their entire lives copying books out by hand, so maybe those curlicues kept them from getting bored.

I can’t read Glagolitic freely by any means—one of my professors in grad school actually could, which makes her pretty much a god in my view. And when I had to retype this particular Glagolitic passage using a Unicode-compliant font, it took a good while before I could get any speed going. Here’s a picture that shows the Cyrillic equivalent, just to give you an idea:
Working with Glagolitic is cool, and it definitely keeps me from getting bored when I get to do it.

Use your illusion

Just picked up this link to some fascinating illusions off the SDMB. Ah, so this is why it’s so damn difficult to choose colors for book jackets—you can thank the sheer orneriness of the human brain.

P.S. I am hopelessly addicted to the SDMB. I mean hopelessly. I feel so proud of myself today, I held out all the way until 1:30 p.m. before I surfed over there!

Tag, I'm it

All right, I got tagged by kaskasero last week and it’s high time I got around to responding.

Instructions: Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their seven things, as well as these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose 7 people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them that they have been tagged and to read your blog!

1. I am completely hopeless for the rest of the day if I don’t get breakfast (usually some healthy kind of cereal drowned in a huge bowl of milk).

2. I used to sleepwalk when I was a little kid. I’d walk downstairs and talk to my parents while asleep, or engage in my favorite sleepwalking activity of trying to flush my pajamas down the toilet.

3. In 1988 I won tickets to a Howard Jones concert in a radio contest by correctly identifying a lyric from Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me.” In 1993 (or 1994?) I won tickets to a Cracker concert by identifying the difference between a reflecting and a refracting telescope.

4. Despite my rep as a worldly, cosmopolitan chick, I’ve never been overseas (not counting Canada, here).

(Editorial comment: This is a lot harder than it looks!)

5. My pie-in-the-sky dream job would be professional musician. My somewhat-more-feasible-but-still-unlikely dream job would be book designer or editor at a saner place than where I am now.

6. My first single was a 45 of Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.”

7. Last but not least, in the spirit of kaskasero’s revelation, my Halo gameplaying handle is Fang. Although I haven’t played Halo in ages, too busy with Morrowind!

Now my true confession: I don’t know seven bloggers to tag! But I’ll call out Lifton, Danielle, and Frantix. Make me proud, guys. (TJ, if you’re reading this, you could always post your 7 to my comments if ya want.)

A always, B be, C closing

Tomorrow’s the closing on our old place, and thus an era will finally come to an end. I don’t have kids, so I can safely say that buying and selling a house (especially both at the same time) is by far the most stressful thing I have ever done. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to permanently curling into a fetal position, that’s for sure.

However great it will be to close the book on that place, the memories are poignant. The first stab at home ownership, the first annoying neighbors, the first flooded basement (thanks to the annoying neighbors, no less), the first smoke alarms going off for no reason in the dead of night, the second and third flooded basements. (Did I mention those neighbors yet? At fault for every instance of basement flooding. Everyone, make sure your washing machine hoses are either younger than five years old, or better yet, get a damn shutoff valve that works.) There were good things about it too, though. It was the Trekette’s first home, for example. And I’ll definitely miss the beautiful rosebushes in the yard; I love any plant that responds well to stern and remorseless pruning.

But anyway, it’s time to look forward. I love our new place, next month we’re going on vacation, Erin and Keith are coming back for the summer soon, and two Crowded House concerts are on the schedule for August. Lots of good stuff ahead!

A turkey runs through it

Here's an action shot of the fabled Kendall Square wild turkey, shot by the Swami with his Palm Pilot (hence a bit of blurriness, sorry). I’ve never seen the turkey in person, so I was a complete skeptic about his existence until presented with this photographic evidence. The turkey’s been around for a couple of years at least, judging from links off Google like this one and this one. Given the total lack of she-turkeys in the area, dude’s got a pretty dull existence. But he’s apparently still pretty feisty, gobbling at people if they get too close. A typical unfriendly New Englander. I still agree with Ben Franklin, though, how cool would it be to have the wild turkey as the national symbol?

Squonk

Last week I was both shocked and pleased to find a lot of Genesis-related stuff on VH1 Classic; they were part of this year’s Rock Honors concert or somesuch. Let me tell you, I never thought I’d get to see Peter dancing around in his Slipperman costume while flipping channels. There was a long show on their history, which fortunately spent more time and attention on the early stuff than the superstar/sellout phase from the late 1980s. The live footage was amazing, partly because I never expect to hear such obscure music on TV, partly because Peter was such a freak onstage at that time, and partly because I can’t believe live shows were ever like that: all the musicians sitting down, one lunatic jumping around wearing bat wings on his head, and eons of dead time between songs while the band set up the equipment for the next song. Totally alien to the modern pop era in every way. And then they showed an hour-long show of live footage from the Seconds Out concert, where a pre–pop slimeball Phil sang Lamb songs while sporting a beard of mountain-man proportion. I mean, you can’t beat that with a stick.

Unfortunately, my Genesis buzz was totally killed later in the week, when the Rock Honors concert was aired. It was all has-beens: Heart, ZZ Top, and the boys in Genesis, who reformed this year in order to fund the pensions. I watched about two minutes of “Turn It On Again” before I had to look away—man those guys look old, and Phil sang with absolutely no energy. They also knocked the key of the song down a few steps, I suppose in order to spare Phil’s voice, but it was a move that thoroughly sucked the life out of the song. Ugh. I guess I’d better pull out Three Sides Live if I want to experience the full, glorious spectacle that was Genesis.

Oh, and one more thing I must gripe about: at one point during the history show, they interviewed Phil talking about the fact that their early fans were almost always male. Bastard made some idiotic comment about men being better able to handle the complexity of the songs. I know, I know, Phil is a complete tosser, despicable in many ways, but I always held off with my own contempt because of what he was part of, what he accomplished when he was just a drummer in a band. That kind of statement indicates that I should probably give in to the scorn, what a sexist asshole. No more slack for you, pal.

Why I dislike LeBron

Besides the fact that he should have gotten his ass handed to him by Gilbert in the first round of the playoffs, there are these two lovely moments in the public eye:

• Lebron on not trusting a gay teammate who’s in the closet


• James Refuses to ‘Be a Witness’ against Darfur Genocide

What’s next? Well, I hope it’s getting his ass handed to him by Detroit. Not that getting beaten in the playoffs improved his public persona since last year’s defeat by, hey, Detroit. By the way, here’s a link to Amaechi responding to what James (and others) said. Classy dude.

New and improved

All right, it’s Monday, which means one of two things: either (1) time for a fresh start, or (2) why not blog because it’s a good way to kill time at work! I survived my move to the new place, although there is still some stuff at the old place (isn’t there always?). Now I would like everything to magically unpack itself. As for the old place, after more fraught negotiations we finally signed the Purchase and Sale agreement with the person craz—I mean, discriminating—enough to want to buy it. Meanwhile, the few times I’ve gone back over there to get more stuff, those heavy-footed moose upstairs have been engaged in vigorous bowling tournaments as always. In other words, good riddance to them.

Once things get a little tidier in the new pad, maybe I’ll post some pictures. So far, I’m warming up to its charms fairly quickly, which is good because I’m usually pretty squirrelly in new surroundings for a while: everything smells kind of weird, things creak in unfamiliar ways, and I’m not settled into any routines. I’m not a huge fan of other people’s dirt, either, so as it gets overlaid with my own I should be fine.

Many times during the last few months I’ve wondered why the hell I put myself through this. But now that the whole process is in the final stretch, maybe, just maybe I can start to feel optimistic about it. Hey, that’s pretty positive from Dr. Cynical over here. Did someone spike my drink?

This offer is unrepeatable

All right, after closing on our new house last Monday, I started getting seriously worried about whether anyone would want to buy the old place. I’m not too keen on carrying three mortgages at the same time, that’s for sure. And since the move date is May 12, I was also getting antsy because I’ve been holding off packing so that the place will show as nicely as possible.

Fortunately, after a small price drop, we got another offer this past Friday, and unlike the first one it’s solid and reasonable. So everybody’s signed off on it, and we’re now under agreement! Fingers are crossed that the home inspection goes well. And now there’s no excuse, I need to start tearing this place apart and stuffing it into boxes. So, enough screwing around on Blogger, heh.

Those are some shoes

I’ve been reading a lot of other people’s writing recently, and that’s led me to misplace my own voice a bit. Some of it’s jealousy, some of it’s fatigue from the house-selling saga (I don’t feel like writing much about that, so for now let me sum up in two words: “lead paint”), some of it’s my intrinsic laziness. But I notice I don’t have much in the scriptorium category lately. Hopefully the house crap hasn’t completely dried up the creative juices.

Anyway, here’s a little story about a shoe. A very expensive shoe. I was minding my own business at the local bike shop, killing time while there was an open house at the domicile. And I’d been thinking about buying clipless pedals for my road bike sometime this spring, since you’re cool on a bicycle only if you have clipless. I mean, being physically connected to your bike conveys a special blend of hardcoreness (“I want to maximize my pedaling efficiency so I can bike just that much further before collapsing on my face in exhaustion”), dedication (“I’m serious enough to have special shoes just for cycling”), and masochism (“I plan on falling over and scraping up my knee with nasty road rash at least once because of a panic stop where I can’t detach my foot from the pedal in time”), and I was just about ready to sip that hot and zesty blend.

So I’m looking at the pedals. There are a few different brands with slightly different means of snapping onto the cleats on the shoes, but not too different. I figure I’ll go with what the Swami has, what the heck. Plus that was the cheapest option, and I don’t feel hardcore enough to spend a hundred bucks on friggin’ pedals. Having made that choice, I move on to the shoes. Here the salesperson takes a laudable position: she starts with the cheapest shoes. So I try ’em on. And of course, they’re terribly uncomfortable, too tight, bleah. Next price point up: nah, still kind of tight and chafing in a couple of places. Next pair: same dif. (Although I’m glad, because that particular pair was metallic silver, and I really wasn’t interested in looking like either Neil Armstrong or a breakdancer from 1985.) Hmmm, we are really climbing the ladder in terms of benjamins. Another pair goes by, and I’m starting to worry less about the money and more about my actual feet. Are they freakishly wide? Not in any universe I knew of—until I entered the European tiny-footed female cycling universe. It’s funny how trying on clothes that don’t fit can lead you to question your body rather than the clothes. (I think I just summed up a lot of neuroses with just that one sentence.) And then, just like that, we were at the top of the stack. Aaaaaah, that one felt awesome! It was like Cinderella with the prince, except with lots of Velcro and snappy clippy things to screw onto the bottom. And of course that shoe turned out to be so nice, as I turned it over and looked at the price tag: $230. Well, well, well.

And that’s how I bought the most expensive pair of shoes I’ve ever bought by far, for wearing maybe two or three hours a week at the most. And which will probably lead me to at least one scraped knee and a fair amount of beginner’s anxiety. But damn they are comfortable, and they make me want to ride. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Virginia Tech

As someone with some family ties to VTech, just wanted to say, well, something. I’m completely speechless but thought this unbelievable awfulness should not go unmentioned. The worst thing that should ever happen to someone in a classroom is being called on.

Open house

The last couple of weeks have been a rollercoaster ride, to say the least. I haven’t even found the time to upload pictures of our short trip to San Francisco, or inform you loyal blog readers about it! (Summary: lots of fun, great food, great to see Erin and Keith.) But all the news these days is on the home front. Yesterday was the first open house to sell the condo, and I’m still not sure whether to be optimistic or not. I took Friday off work and spent a Herculean effort getting the place staged—that’s real-estate-speak for hiding all personal items and making things as empty as possible while still projecting a homey and lived-in appearance for your gracious dwelling. And apparently, despite the insanely wet nor’easter that blew through the whole thing, there were a lot of people looking around and looking interested. We even managed to cajole the moose cloggers upstairs to go out somewhere and not stomp around and drop things.

After a somewhat tense evening of anticipation, an offer did come in today, although it’s a little lower than we were hoping for. So now the chess game really begins: counteroffers, sizing up the offer, deciding how to act and when. This is where our agent will make her dough, because I definitely don’t have the fortitude to play that game. If I’m not careful, “The Gambler” will start playing in my head and that could seriously drive me over the edge. So the game’s by no means over.

Speaking of games, I must add a postscript that the NBA regular season is over on Wednesday and I’m about to repeat as super duper champion of Andy’s league! I am the greatest! Go me! Just had to woof a little, there.

Tagged in a good way

Whoa, this is a new thing for me, I’ve been tagged by my man Lifton. (Edit: To my embarrassment, I see I missed one last month. Sorry, man.) And I say, why pass up a chance to blab about myself? To pass it on, I hereby tag Raoul, Frantix, Sashe, and Danielle. Maybe this will inspire those slackers to get back to posting.

And now on to the Q and A.

FOODOLOGY

Q. What is your salad dressing of choice?
A. Bleu cheese

Q. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
A. National? Chipotle. Local? Boca Grande. One might sense a theme.

Q. What is your favorite sit-down restaurant?
A. Of all time, the Galaxy Cafe in Columbus, Ohio. Sadly defunct.

Q. On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
A. 20% on small checks, 16% minimum on large checks.

Q. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick off of?
A. I actually eat the same Kashi cereal every morning, but breakfast is a special circumstance. Chocolate for when I'm wide awake.

Q. What is your favorite type of gum?
A. My parents’ deep hatred of gum has taken hold in me as an adult, alas.

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A. Right now, a Japanese postcard. Alternates with a still from X2 and Neil Armstrong on the moon.

Q. How many televisions are in your house?
A. One. Don’t despair, Raoul, someday there might be two!

BIOLOGY

Q. What’s your best feature?
A. Aw, I don’t know. It sure ain’t humility.

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A. Wisdom teeth, the occasional vial of the red stuff.

Q. Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
A. Taste, not to be confused with the abstract version thereof.

Q. When was the last time you had a cavity?
A. God, what a tragedy. My first and only one was in 2004. I am mildly convinced that the dentist scammed me. A thing about myself I was so proud of, crushed like a stale cornflake.

Q. What is the heaviest item you lifted last?
A. My suitcase, coming back from San Francisco on Tuesday. Metaphorically, the burden of being one of the two competent people at work.

Q. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
A. I almost fainted once. And they knocked me out to remove the aforementioned wisdom teeth, thank the gods.

BULLSHITOLOGY

Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
A. No way, no way.

Q. Is love for real?
A. Yes, no doubt about it.

Q. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
A. I love my name, although there are times when I’ve been tempted to switch full-time to Fang.

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
A. Good question. There are some shades of blue that make my eyes look even bluer.

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
A. Oh man, when I was a kid I once collected a single dime for Unicef at Halloween, and I was holding the box above my head, shaking it, when it dropped down my throat. Sorry, Unicef.

Q. Have you ever saved someone’s life?
A. No.

Q. Has someone ever saved yours?
A. No.

DAREOLOGY

Q. Would you walk naked for a half mile down a public street for $100,000?
A. No.

Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
A. If her name were Uma Thurman, or Kate Winslet. Actually, I kid, I’m easier than that.

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
A. No way.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
A. Tempting, very tempting. How would you enforce it!

Q. Would you pose nude in a magazine for $250,000?
A. No.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
A. No, man that stuff is too much for me. (See taste question, above)

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
A. There are a couple of people who tempt me, but I doubt I could actually do it.

Q. Would you give up watching television for a year for $25,000?
A. I can’t live without my Stewart and Colbert, unfortunately.

Q. Give up MySpace forever for $30,000?
A. Hey, I’ve never gotten into it! Start writing that check.

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket?
A. Empty! My left pockets are, as a rule, terribly underutilized.

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
A. I haven’t seen it, but my spidey sense says it sucks.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
A. Hardwood with some rugs.

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
A. Stand. What a goofy question.

Q: Could you live with roommates?
A. I have in the past, although I imagine I’m not an easy roommate. My misanthropy doesn’t help.

Q: How many pairs of flip-flops do you own?
A. None, plastic shoes are evil!

Q: Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
A. Never, as a matter of fact.

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. In Neil Finn’s backup band.

LASTOLOGY

Q: Friend you talked to?
A. Erin, though I already miss her.

Q: Last person you called?
A. Swami, of course.

RANDOMOLOGY

Q: First place you went this morning?
A. Bathroom. Outside the house, it was to work via the bus. Ah, suck.

Q: What can you not wait to do?
A. Get my damn condo sold and move into my new one! Not in that order.

Q: What’s the last movie you saw?
A. Theater: The Queen. At home: The Sting.

Q: Are you a friendly person?
A. Not in the least, until I warm up to you. If I do. Watch out!

Mark it up, sell it off

Well, mark it down, I mean. The current condo goes on sale this weekend, and I’m vacillating between anxiety and complete freakout. Will anybody want to buy this place? Will I manage to get all of the sensitive personal items locked down and/or stowed in the car in time? Will my thoroughly noisy neighbors keep a lid on it for the two hours of the open house? Will some crazy kleptomaniac steal my toothbrush? I’ve been advised to “de-clutter,” and I do appreciate that things shouldn’t be stacked to the ceiling or spilling out of closets, but anyone who knows me can imagine that the place is pretty low on clutter as it is. Blah. I’m just feeling lazy. The real challenge will actually be trying to continue living here for another month, and somehow get packed up, while it’s staged to woo those elusive buyers. Maybe I should bury that statue of Saint What’s-His-Face in the yard. It would help if I remembered which saint was the relevant one.

Arrrgh

Small frustrations all, but they add up.

• Nasty head cold for the last four days


• Arenas and Butler out for the season


• Elvis Costello tickets weirdly out of reach because eeeevil Ticketma$ter wants me to pay with a Visa


• Ridiculous $8 “convenience charge” per ticket should I ever be able to actually buy the damn tickets


• Cut my vacation short to try to make a deadline that I ended up not making, and that it turned out I didn’t even need to try to make in the first place!

Arrrrrrrgh!

Rasheed at the buzzer

What a shot!

Encounter at tvsquad.com

Thanks to Danielle for pointing me to Wil Wheaton’s reviews of ST:TNG. They’re awesome! Can you believe it’s been almost twenty years? Yikes. And TNG is still the best Trek series, however craptacular that first season was.

Purchase and sale

Yes, I’m still alive. We signed the Purchase and Sale agreement on Thursday and wrote a big check. There are now no more ways for us to back out (unless the mortgage application is denied, which better not happen). The seller has to fix the things he agreed to fix, and assuming that he does, we are going to have a new place! So on the buying end, things are now quiet until closing (scheduled for late April). On the selling end, things get started now. I’ve done some cleaning today, and we’ve started formulating a plan on Making the Basement Look Decent. That may or may not be possible. If we’d really worked on it this weekend, we could have gotten this place on the market by next weekend, but thanks to us being usual lazy selves, it’ll probably be the weekend of April 14. Might be a flower or two blooming outside by then, that should help! And if I could only get the knob screwed back on to one of the kitchen cupboards—it’s defying all laws of physics and refuses to stay on. I’m gluing the sucker on if I have to, dammit.

God give me strength

I don’t think I can write coherent sentences as this point; time for a list. Here’s what’s been going on since the last update.

—Nerve-racking home inspection
—Most things fine, a couple not fine
—Tense couple of days waiting for the seller to decide whether to fix stuff
—Transferring large amounts of money around
—Meeting with lawyer
—Hashing out the details of the mortgage application
—Scheduling the pest inspection
—Seller agrees to repair major problems
—Meeting with other unit’s owners
—Signing approximately 17,000 places on mortgage application
—Hashing out the details of the Purchase and Sale agreement
—Not sleeping particularly well at night
—Neighbors’ racket continuing to provide only motivation for this crazy plan
—Considering alcoholism

That about covers it!

Why blog?

It’s an efficient way to keep the peeps informed, and a forum for their hollers back.
It’s a good way to work shit out; writing encourages fuzzy ideas to form coherent shapes.
It’s a record of your life, for when time passes and you forget the rawness of the immediate moment.
It’s another way to kill time on slow afternoons at work.
It’s a window into your tiny, tiny slice of the world, and a precious link to exotic other slices you might not have known about otherwise.
It’s navel-gazing with cool cascading style sheets!

Happy birthday to me

Well, I didn’t plan it, but the first house to meet all the criteria finally presented itself today, and in a stroke of birthday luck our offer was accepted. Better location, top floor with the attic redone, and everything done well. No wondering how soon I’ll have to take a sledgehammer to something, no hitting my head on the ceiling in the bathroom shower, no sloping floors, and bonus items such as air conditioning. Aaaaah. Now I can take a deep breath and prepare for the sprint that happens after going under agreement: home inspection, punch list, lawyering up, mortgage mobilization. Oh, and getting ready to put the current pad up for sale. And if I ever have moments where I wonder if I want to go through the hassle of moving, I have a morning like yesterday’s, where the lovely upstairs neighbors vacuumed at 8:30 a.m. I mean, for chrissakes that’s practically a violation of my civil rights.

Makes up for the peeps who forgot my birthday. You slackers!

Good riddance

Looks like Diebold might drop their voting-machine unit after, I guess, finally noticing all the bad press from the last few years, and due to the number of states now noticing how useful it might be to have a paper trail for voting. I’m sure election fraud will happen whether Diebold provides the machines or not, but I’m not crying a tear when that business unit bites the dust.

Home is anywhere: Week 5 recap

Week 5 has wrapped up, and it was quite a roller-coaster ride. As of midweek there still wasn’t a single interesting prospect to look at, but then one came on late in the week that promised all kinds of magic. It has all three things we’re trying to improve: location, one more room, and top-floor placement. Seeing the inside on Sunday, however, was a bummer. The kitchen sink was the same kind that I had in my semi-crappy apartment in grad school—that is not a selling point. And the all-important third BR upstairs turned out to be just okay, with a bathroom off of it that only a person under five feet tall could comfortably utilize. In fact, the shower was nestled under the eaves such that the curtain rod was at an angle—you had to hook the curtain at the tall end so that it didn’t slide down to the short end via the cruel pull of gravity. Since I still feel the bitterness of that first rush of disappointment, I almost want to reject the place outright, but that would probably be irrational. So I think the game plan is to wait and see if it languishes on the market. And if someone is willing to house only munchkins upstairs and offer the asking price, I’m not interested in competing with that.

A far happier report on the weekend would focus on the sporting angle: the weather was actually warm enough for cycling (yay!) and we managed to play tennis even though Swami’s back is not 100%. Another successful round of calorie burning to offset all the consumption.

Home is anywhere: Weeks 3-4 recap

I’m conflating the last two weeks into one post because nothing happened over last weekend, except the place that might have been The One went under agreement to somebody else. Ah, well. This weekend was a survey of places fitting the cramped city-living description, none of which really sang to me. I mean, I can’t argue with location, location, etc., except when it means slanty floors and ceilings so low that I could touch them. One of the other places had balconies with views of downtown Boston, but also of every ugly billboard and smokestack in between. I would dearly love to get this part of the process over with and just make an offer on something, but nothing is hitting the sweet spot yet and I don’t feel ready to compromise yet. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to get frustrated as I am awakened every day by the clog-dancing moose upstairs, and I could have gone cycling this afternoon if I hadn’t been tramping around gawking at flawed real estate. I guess there has to be a darkness before the proverbial dawn, but bleah. Current keyword: angst. Will something pop up this week that works? Man do I hope so.

Best haiku ever

We famous! Swami and I have collaborated on Wizards/Bullets haiku, posted for posterity on the completely insane fan site Wizznutzz. Click here and scroll down to the contributions by “Steve F.”

More Hibachi love

It seems kind of pointless to watch the NBA All-Star Game, but then you realize you get to see Agent Zero dunking off the stunt trampoline!

Also, speaking of dunks, Dwight Howard’s dunk during the competition, though cruelly underappreciated by the judges, was the best. The best.

Home is anywhere: Week 2 recap

All right, week two of house hunting has just wrapped up after today’s viewing of four places, and I can happily report that the trajectory is definitely beginning to form the desired spiral shape. Two of the four places seen this week were solid contenders, and one of those would be worth an offer if I didn’t have so much to do at work and plans to go out of town next weekend. So now the game plan is: decide whether we want semi-cramped city living, or more spacious but more car-dependent near-suburb living. And if the one place doesn’t have an offer on it by the time we get back on the 20th, then that might very well be The One. The most memorable thing seen? Not a tacky wallpaper pattern or a munchkin-sized closet, which make for good blog material, but a gorgeous, friendly silver tabby cat who made me feel very welcome in the semi-cramped place. I think he's on the list of exclusions, though.

Girl Scout Cookie conspiracy

It’s Girl Scout cookie time again, usually a source of joy and calories that I have always looked forward to. But there is a dark side to those disc-shaped delectables. When I moved to my current state of residence in 2000, I was surprised to find out that the old familiar names were gone from the boxes I saw for sale. The most majestic and tasty kind, the Samoa, was suddenly called a “Caramel Delite,” although everything else about the purple box seemed to be the same. In need of my cookie fix and willing to keep an open mind, I bought a couple boxes and took them home.

Well, despite them looking almost identical to the Samoas of my fond memory, they didn’t exactly taste like them. And a lot of the caramel had oozed out of the cookies and stuck to the inside plastic tray of the box, so that it was a huge pain to pry them out in order to taste their inferiority in the first place. “Egad,” I lamented, “They changed the name and the recipe too!” And I thought I was screwed.

But I was mistaken. When I complained (okay, whined) to my sister about it, she said that they still sold Samoas where she lived. And she sent me a box. (This has assured her entry into heaven, if there is such a thing.) Imagine my relief when I opened up a box of those Samoas and found the same delicious coconut and caramel extravaganza that I’d always loved.

So what gives? Turns out there are two different companies licensed to make Girl Scout cookies, and I can say with confidence that one of them produces lousy-ass cookies. Unfortunately, in my area all the councils seem to contract with the purveyors of demonic Caramel Delites, rather than the bakers of wondrous Samoas. So now I have to rely on my sister every year to send me boxes of the real deal. And whenever I walk by a table of Girl Scouts selling, I take a look at the purple boxes. Delites? No dice.

Home is anywhere: Week 1 recap

Okay, Week 1 has ended and here’s the score so far. Places visited: 7; places with potential: 0. The number of horror stories is sadly very small, although I did see one Pepto-pink bathroom and one place that was so 1980s, I swear I saw Sheena Easton in the living room wearing those huge geometric earrings. The nicest place had had an offer on it within the previous half hour, so hopes were deflated before they’d even had a chance to rise. Plus, that one had a tang of Wretched Excess, what with the special wine refrigerator in the kitchen. I don’t think I could in good conscience keep my wine at 54F and whatever percent humidity while children are eating tree bark in Africa. And so the search continues. There are two or three more prospects that didn’t hold open houses; hopefully we can check them out sometime this week.

Speaking of Sheena Easton, I still remember her guest starring on Miami Vice. The love of Crockett’s life, cruelly struck down before her time. I think we can all learn a lesson from that tragic tale: make sure to upgrade to the bulletproof shoulder pads.

Home is anywhere you hang your clogs

In the midst of the chaotic and angst-filled move at work (D-Day is coming up fast, Feb. 23!) it now becomes apparent that the once-hypothetical plan to find a pad with more space is coalescing into reality. The main reason for wanting to buy a new place? Well, there’s the rational, and the emotional. Rational is that it would be very nice to have a third bedroom, for hosting all our nonexistent guests that come to visit, or perhaps for stashing all the guitars and the keyboard and amps and other music-related stuff. Rational is that it would be very, very nice to have more than one bathroom. Rational is that now that prices are sliding, why not upgrade into Swankitude, Mark II. And that’s all good in theory, but it’s the emotional that has me practically running out the door of the place I’ve been happily living in for the last 2.5 years: the upstairs neighbors.

I can even narrow it down further: the female upstairs neighbor. Sure, she seems like a person of normal weight and height, and in possession of the normal amount of empathy toward fellow humans, but in reality she stomps around like a drunken overweight moose at a clog dance. And it’s back and forth, back and forth, all the damn time, starting at a ridiculously early time of day.

(I’ve been doing my best not to mention the 1-year-old toddler, by the way, who is far too young to do anything but the Frankenstein Walk and certainly can’t be blamed for crashing to the floor and/or dropping things at unpredictable moments. Not that it ain’t annoying.)

I can blame the unparalleled ruckus directly on Ms. Clog-Dancing Moose (CDM) quite easily, because last summer she was gone for three months and it was absolute bliss. Mr. Moose, despite being not a small guy, walked around more like Felt-Slipper-Wearing Mouse—and I would also like to point out that he is eminently considerate in general, always apologizing after flooding the shared basement or flooding our bathroom or flooding the basement a second time. Meanwhile, the swami went up there last week to beg for a minor concession, that the clog dancing be moved to a room other than the one above our bedroom in the early mornings, and found out that CDM is not only heavy-footed, but also bereft of all empathy and conscience.

So we’re starting to look at the listings and got in touch with the Realtor (tm) that helped us buy last time. It looks like there is a lot of good stuff out there, and hopefully it’s not the usual hyperbole of exuberant and semi-unscrupulous selling agents making shit up. I’ll try to provide updates as things happen, and hopefully will have some good horror stories regarding other people’s decorating ideas (though it will be hard to top the Cheetah Wallpaper Bathroom of 2001).

Wish me luck, fair readers, for this way lies madness!

Talk to the hand

For the Star Wars fans out there (though you must face facts, Trek is much much better!)

More Finn newz

Remember how I mentioned Neil recording a new album back in October? Well, turns out that Nick Seymour was also in the studio with him, and now thanks to this news article and confirmation/clarification from Peter Green (see this post from the Gryphon himself) we now know that it’s going to be a Crowded House reunion album, complete with Mark Hart! I would be sorely disappointed if Mark hadn’t been included, by the way. And there aren’t really words to describe the lack of Paul. I still can’t believe that I never even got to see them live until after Paul had quit back in 1994.

They’ve also rereleased the Farewell to the World DVD and it’s finally out in the US; I have got to stop putting off my next Amazon order and get the damn thing. (Actually, I almost ordered it straight from Oz earlier this month before seeing in the fine print that it was a Region 4 disc! Disaster averted.)

Could it be true? Solo Tim and Crowded House all in the same year?

A damn good idea

Wish I’d thought of this one: a mitten that has a pocket on the back of the hand that you can put your Charlie Card in. The card scanner can read the card through the mitten, and your hands stay warm. It’s a win-win! Read about it here, and here is another blog that links to the article about the mittens that ran in the Globe last week.

Time won’t give me time

When am I going to grow a spine and cancel my subscription to Time magazine? My major complaint is that over the years they’ve been subtly and gradually changing the tone to one that is less like reporting and more like advertising. I even got torqued up enough last September to send an email accusing one writer of being a shill for a business whose product he reviewed. In the offending “article,” which I don’t feel like identifying because it will just name the damn product another time, was about a new cell phone. After gushing about the phone itself, quoting the manufacturer’s own description of the phone, the writer actually advised buying it now rather than waiting for other providers to offer it because one “may never again find a monthly rate this good.” In this era of uber-crass commercialization, does this kind of plug bother only me? For what it’s worth, I did get a reply to my email, but it was not in any way apologetic and rather defended how cool he thought the phone was. So be warned: Time magazine now carries bought-and-paid-for ads, as well as masquerading-as-articles ads.

The latest misstep is, of course, the now infamous “Person of the Year” issue where it was Us, the DIY You-Tubers who lurve to use teh Internets as our new medium of navel-gazing. Far be it from me to ignore the irony of bitching about it on my blog (and of course I’m also a couple of weeks late and the Eye of the People has certainly moved on by now). But come on. Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-Il, maybe someone involved in that Iraq thing going on, hell, even Vladimir Putin and his growing fondness for trying to bully the world through manipulation of the energy supply. I mean, do I matter even a tiny bit in the grand scheme of things in contrast to the aforementioned dudes? Sure, I love YouTube, sure I dig keeping up with the peeps blog-style. But it ain’t the most important shit that happened last year. Get some perspective, hmm?

So why do I continue to subscribe to this damn mag? Well, there’s certainly inertia at work. And they do a decent job in the front third of the mag to give me the lowdown on the week’s happenings. Hey, maybe I should just cancel until the 2008 presidential campaign starts to heat up. Uh—wait a second...

Hibachi!

Well, it seems as though the last few days have been dedicated primarily to sports in one form or another. First off, the Snorklewacker/Swami household has been consumed with Gilbertalooza, after Arenas sank an unbelievable game-winning shot on Thursday night, then had an insanely expensive birthday party on Friday night (not that I was invited, snif), and in general showed off his phenomenal swag.

Then there was an hour and a half of tennis on Saturday, where we were one court over from Thomas Blake, bro to James and a Boston Lobster. (It’s pretty daunting to play your own crappy game of tennis, involving lots of hitting it into the net and other unforced errors, while the dude next court over is thwacking the ball at a billion miles per hour. Although I did hit an ace, boo yah!)
Finally, today, it was a 19-mile bike ride in the amazing sunny weather. As righteously pissed off as I am about global climate change, I can’t complain about sneaking a cycling session in during January, of all months. Although I do miss the snow and cold weather.
Now, I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. Woof.