Someone made a Taco Town taco. Yes, the one from SNL. With “a taco in a taco in a gordita in a pizza in a blueberry pancake in batter, deep fried.” Yep.
Oh god.
Dept. of Cautious Optimism
I’m in a brand-new hotel chain this time: a Hyatt Place, which I take it is their foray into the “low-frills business traveller” market.
Holy Crap. It’s amazing. Pix to follow, but even the checkin process is off the hook. There’s a quick bar in the lobby — pick up wrapped sandwiches, salads, bottled drinks, whatever — plus 24×7 food service (with a limited menu, but still).
The rooms themselves are the real prize, though. Lots of these chains work towards a “suite” feel, designed to cater to an extended stay, but this is the first time I’ve seen it really work. There’s a nice and comfortable couch with an ottoman, a real desk, and a wet-bar in the “living room”, and then a 42″ plasma tv on a pivot that can entertain either that area or the bedroom area.
I’m completely stunned. Even the house Chardonnay is nice. Kansas City just got a whole lot nicer.
Dept. of Customer Service
Today, my ten-month-old Eagle Creek bag broke today, while packing. The topside strap broke completely loose, which drastically reduces the utility of the bag. Seriously, 10 months; WTF?
So I called them. Immediately. As in, from the airport while waiting to board. Their solution was, of course, “ship it to us and we’ll fix it for free.” My problem with this? I’m traveling pretty much constantly right now, and can’t do without the bag for the foreseeable future.
Shockingly, after only two escalations — once into the warranty department, and again to the manager thereof — they simply agreed. They’re sending me another bag (different color, but who cares?) that will be waiting for me at home when I get back on Friday; I’ll be sending them my bag once I get the new one.
I’m shocked — shocked — that this was so easy. I was momentarily really annoyed at the failure so quickly, but then again so were they; their willingness to work with me to create a solution that worked for me is definitely deserving of praise.
(Of course, proof is in the pudding; we’ll see if goes off this easily, but as of now I’m pretty confident.)
Reading
My last two:
Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. More or less “meh.” It’s a sprawling mess of a novel with some nice parts, but virtually none of the charm of his earlier work I’ve read (As She Crawled Across The Table, Gun, with Occasional Music, and the beautiful Motherless Brooklyn). Unlike Lethem’s previous efforts, this one’s a coming-of-age story about a thinly disguised Lethem proxy growing up in Brooklyn in the 60s and 70s, and then facing adulthood (there is, of course, a long German word for the form: Bildungsroman). Our hero, Dylan Ebdus, is one of the only white kids in his school (“Not his grade; his whole school,” his mother brags) in the years well before Park Slope became a fashionable neighborhood. Dylan’s best friend is the improbably named Mingus Rude, son of a once-famous R&B singer, whose life takes a very different turn from Dylan’s (obviously).
My personal literary Mendoza line is whether or not I wish I’d used the time reading a book to read something else, and Fortress passes that test, but just barely. Lethem is writing a combo love letter to the Brooklyn of his childhood, to the Manhattan of the 70s, to music (punk and CBGB figure into it, briefly, and there’s a long arc about Rude’s father and early R&B), and most obviously to comic books (though, amusingly, young Dylan is far more into Marvel than DC). His proximity to the material perhaps made him less able to tell what was working and what wasn’t (and this is a man who made SF blended with noir work in the aforementioned Gun, which featured a gun-toting kangaroo as a mob enforcer), and so his focus wavers by halfway through the book. The earlier chapters are much more well-crafted than the novel’s final segments, and the somewhat halfassed magical realism elements fall kind of flat and never enjoy the verve of his prior genre-bending experiments.
Currently Reading: The Looming Tower, about the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of Al Qaeda. It’s actually very, very compelling, and reads more like a long-form piece of journalism than a book, if that makes any sense. The author, Lawrence Wright, won a Pulitzer for it; I recommend it without reservation if you’re at all curious how we got here. (Hint: It kinda starts with a dickhead named Qutb.)
Yet Another Thing To Be Happy About
Oh My.
Saturday Morning Watchmen should NOT be missed. Someone should show this to Alan Moore. The in-jokes are absolutely fantastic, but they’re spoilery so I won’t comment on them here.
Bizarre Thing I Just Learned
The same actress played John Wayne’s kid sidekick in True Grit and John Cusak’s mom in Better Off Dead.
Good News for David Simon Fans
He’s hard at work on Treme, set in New Orleans, and has already cast Wire vets Clarke Peters (Lester) and Wendell Pierce (Bunk; Pierce is a New Orleans native). Steve Zahn is also said to be in talks to star, with Deadwood alum Kim Dickens (Joanie Stubbs) along as love interest.
Told you.
NYT:
The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants.
[…]
The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.
Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In other words, preparation for a police state. The author of many of the memoranda was, of course, John Yoo, who also opined that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully” and that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”
In re: Sekrit Tracks on CDs
Memo to Neko Case: 30 minutes of cricket noises isn’t interesting. It’s especially uninteresting if there’s no music at the end. WTF?
Dept. of Things That Are Annoying and Pathetic
My 3G wireless modem provides faster connectivity (700 down, about 350 up) than the hotel’s wired ethernet (500 down, 85 up) or lobby wireless (44 down, 400 up).
Time to fire the hotel.
Dept. of People Being Stupid
The Right side of the Net is all hot-and-bothered about the idea of raising income tax on incomes over $250K, and it’s brought out the wingnut John Galt contingent. Sadly, none of them seem to actually understand how income taxes work in this country, given how many seem to be cypherin’ out ways to make exactly $249,999 in 2009. MediaMatters, as always, is spot on:
ABC News reports on “upper-income taxpayers” who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.
According to ABC, one attorney “plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.” According to the attorney: “We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00.” ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.
This is stunningly wrong.
The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.
But that isn’t actually how income tax works.
In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.
It’s like nobody is even capable of research anymore.
Update: Link fixed.
Dept. of My Friends Rocking Hard
Catastrophic Theater is featured in the Chronicle today in a story wherein they make a few truly excellent announcements about the season and year ahead, the biggest of which Heathen Central has been extremely excited about for a few months now:
- Bluefinger, a world-premiere rock-opera to be created in collaboration with Charles Thompson — aka Black Francis, best known as front man for the influential alternative-rock group Pixies — to begin workshops in December for a premiere here in early 2010.
But that’s not all; in addition, new work with Tony Barilla’s coming, also a production of another Lisa D’Amour play this fall, and of course another Tamarie show before terribly long.
Congrats to Jason, Tam, and the whole Catastrophic family.
Dept of Sony F*cking Me
So, the Heathen Central DVD deck has been misbehaving, mostly by not being able to play some less-than-pristine disks that play fine in other places.
We’ve not been convinced that Bluray is going to take off, so we went shopping for an upconverting DVD deck; the good news is that those are cheap. For $80, we picked up a Sony (dvp-ns77h) at Fry’s not long ago, but, foolishly, I didn’t test it thoroughly once we got it home.
Anyway, the primary appeal of this minor upgrade was “will play more disks,” but we were also pleased about the possibility of cable reduction; the deck we were using had 3-wire component video cables plus a coaxial digital audio cable, but the new one would, theoretically, run all that goodness over HDMI.
Well, stereo works fine. But for some reason the Sony and Yamaha won’t play nice with surround data over HDMI. Lovely. So, how about if I enable the digital out and use HDMI for video only (and therefore enjoy the best part of the video upconversion)?
Uh, no. With HDMI plugged in, I can’t get the Sony to spit out Dolby Digital signals. Unplug it, and we’re fine. So, back to 4 cables for the DVD, dammit.
Grrrr. Grrrr. Grrrr.
How We Know We’re In The Future
This afternoon, I’m doing a little work on my laptop (a MacBook Pro), catching up on email and taking care of some software testing. Since we do Microsoft software, the testing is taking place inside a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine that’s running, among other things IIS and SQL Server 2005.
At the same time, the laptop is also ripping a CD (the Oxford American’s annual music issue just showed up) and downloading a couple TV shows via BitTorrent that I’ll watch on my trip this week — something I wouldn’t have to do if I could just copy the damn things from my Tivo, but whatever. Also, because it’s the sort of thing that happens from time to time, my TimeMachine backup is running.
How is the futurey? I was just re-installing a database tool on the Windows VM side and got annoyed that the computer wasn’t responding instantly.
Dept. of GAAAAAH
Whoa.
Actually, it’s a sculpture. However, I’ve seen her work before — a collector in Houston has one of her pieces — and it’s actually more creepy in person.
Scenes from the Cookoff, 2009 Edition
After several years off, Your Favorite Heathen are once again doing the Cookoff. We realized with no small amount of shock that we haven’t done it since the rail opened or Reliant was in place, so in many ways it’s a whole different thing. The train makes it RULE, though; parking is no longer an issue at all.
- Wednesday
-
Uneventful; it always is. It’s quiet, with few folks around since many of the corporate tents — and no small number of the private ones — have no event scheduled for that night. A few, like Cold River, do a sponsor-only party on Wednesday, and we never miss it — it may be the best steak we get all year. We made an error when, having just missed a train, we elected to drive down — only to discover parking was a nightmare even on the least-populated night since so many lots weren’t even open yet. Oops. We did, however, notice that the tent’s new position is:
- No longer next door to another very loud private tent;
- Pleasantly close to the main stage; and
- Immediately adjacent to a booth selling, among other things, chocolate covered cheesecake on a stick.
- Thursday
-
A little bit louder now, to coin a phrase; this time it was the Heathens plus the betrothed pair of Little Miss Redhead and the Dancin’ Teachin’ Drama Machine (HeatheNames subject to adjustment later).
After a much smoother trip down — the train drops you off maybe half a mile from the tent, and the walk is through the carnival — we were among the first in line for the food, which was a lucky thing as we were all four starving. Well fed, we went a-wandering to check out the lay of the land; on Wednesday, we’d noticed a seriously hoppin’ party in the northwest corner, but couldn’t see whose tent it was, so we went up to see who they were.
Aha. Corporate: It’s for Cazadores, Bacardi’s premium tequila, and the “tent” is only a “tent” in the loosest possible sense. It’s got a faux-adobe front, for crying out loud, though it’s certainly the only time I’ve seen a pseudo-traditional hacienda-type tent with a velvet rope. Recession or no, the rum people were definitely pulling out all the stops.
We kept it low key — as all loyal Heathen understand, pacing is vitally important in four-day party situations — but the official log does contain a few entries of note:
- Choice quote: “I’ll bet the Amish look great naked.” (LMR)
- Even at the Cookoff, nobody loves Centerpoint; their (large) tent was nearly devoid of people.
- Is it more “BBQ Burning Man” or “BBQ Ren Faire?” Hard to say.
- Frankly, as an eighties cover band, you’re probably doing it wrong if you think you can do justice to both Loverboy *and* the Cure. Just saying.
Stay tuned for Friday and Saturday recaps as they become available.
This Nightstand Sounds Like Chewbacca
Um, what?
Filling out a (Federal) form for a background check related to a new project at work, I was asked for my height. Do you see anything unusual about the dialog options below?
Dept. of Iconic Overload
Does a local blogger really need this many icons at the bottom of every post?
I’ve been online since before there WERE browsers, and consider myself pretty clueful, but I’ve got no friggin’ idea what most of those are even for. Considering that most readers are less sophisticated than I am, I wonder at the utility.
Can someone…
…please point me to an example of Forrester, Gartner, or any of those analyst houses having been at all consistently prescient about anything? I don’t mean “did one guy say something that came true;” I’m sure that, with enough analysts typing enough papers, they’ve all come up with one or two things ahead of the curve. Big deal. Value would lie in a wheat:chaff ratio greater than “1”, and I’m willing to bet nobody’s got one.
Seriously, these whitepaper factories seem to exist primarily to do logrolling with each other, or to extract money from muzzy-headed biz-dev types whose first thought in encountering any new technology is “how can I destroy the communication value of this thing by INVADING IT WITH MARKETING NOISE?”
Well, sure, he’s crazy
But that doesn’t make this trailer for Mel Gibson’s new movie any less funny:
Eleventy Million kinds of Cool
Via Wil Wheaton, who explains a bit that makes the track above even cooler:
See that MacBook next to her? She uses that to sample herself several times to build a rhythm, and then she plays over it, like a one-woman string quartet. Or quintet. Or awesometet. I didn’t realize this the first time I heard her; I just thought her music was haunting and beautiful, but once I knew what she was doing, I was awestruck. In fact, knowing how she does it, I defy you to listen to it again and keep your jaw off the floor.
We here at Heathen Central are longtime fans of classical instrumentation in modern music; I once saw Rasputina (of which Keating is an alum) in a now-defunct bar in downtown Houston, and a really awesome modern original string quartet played at the Heathen Hitchin’. I’m glad to discover Keating; I suspect I’ll be hitting iTunes shortly to get some more. The piece above is “Tetrishead,” found on “One Cello x 16: Natoma,” $7.92 at iTunes.
Dept. of Things That Could Not Be More Awesome
We are not making this up: In WWII, a Polish unit had a bear mascot — eventually “drafted” — that carried shells for them and, on occasion, fought Nazis. Said unit still exists, and its insignia now memorializes said bear (at right).
On duty, Voytek was trained to carry cases of ammunition and mortar shells down the line to waiting artillery, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. On one occasion, he wandered into an empty shower stall and surprised an Arabic spy who had been listening in on top secret information. The spy quickly surrendered and immediately confessed to all of his crimes, probably because he was smart enough to realize that any military unit possessing Anti-Espionage Bears are likely going to be on the winning side of the war.
After the war, he retired to a zoo in Edinburgh, where he was frequently visited by his former comrades. He died in 1963.
(The first link is a random blog, but he’s also in Wikipedia, for crying out loud.)
Why Privatizing Prisons is a BAD Idea
Two Pennsylvania judges are now going to prison for taking in excess of two million dollars in kickbacks over a five year period in exchange for increasing the headcount at private juvenile facilities.
Ciavarella, 58, along with Conahan, 56, corruptly and fraudulently “created the potential for an increased number of juvenile offenders to be sent to juvenile detention facilities,” federal court documents alleged. Children would be placed in private detention centers, under contract with the court, to increase the head count. In exchange, the two judges would receive kickbacks.
The Juvenile Law Center said it plans to file a class-action lawsuit this week representing what they say are victims of corruption. Juvenile Law Center attorneys cite a few examples of harsh penalties Judge Ciavarella meted out for relatively petty offenses:
Ciavarvella sent 15-year-old Hillary Transue to a wilderness camp for mocking an assistant principal on a MySpace page. (Emph. added)
He whisked 13-year-old Shane Bly, who was accused of trespassing in a vacant building, from his parents and confined him in a boot camp for two weekends.
Dept. of Tattoos I’m Glad I Didn’t Get
This one. (From this set of sci-nerd tatts.)
(Of course, had our RFID firm actually made money, or my stock been worth anything, I might’ve felt differently.)
Dept. of Literary Observances
Watchmen was a product of its time — by which I mean full of mid-80s, duck-and-cover era of superpower brinksmanship.
When I read it again in the mid-90s, it seemed dated, and delightfully so. The Wall was gone. The Russians were our friends. Nuclear annihilation wasn’t on the table, everything was rosy, and the pessimism of Moore’s text seemed like a bad dream remembered years later.
I’m reading it again now, in advance of the film. I’m sad to say it doesn’t seem so dated anymore.
Yes we’re gonna have a wingding / A summer smoker underground
Now playing on Heathen Radio: The Nightfly, by Donald Fagen, largely because of this excellent retrospective on its place in popular music (via Andrea, at Facebook). Check it out, unless you are — like certain wives of mine — allergic to the axis of Fagen/Becker.
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.
Dept. of Movies We Need to See
Some years ago, I had a strange dream wherein I was living in a Cicely, Alaska, type town in the middle of the northwestern wilderness, and part of the quirky charm of the area was the intelligent moose population — but part of the tension of the dream was that, unbeknownst to the population at large, the moose were under predation by some vampiric influences, resulting in a near-complete conversion of the moose population from “herbivore” to “blood-drinker.”
Yeah. No idea.
Anyway, a discussion of this dream later made me realize that while vampiric moose are funny, the whole idea of a weremoose was enough to send me into beverage-spewing hysterics, and indeed is making me giggle even as I type this. Which is why seeing this prop over at Io9 makes me want to see this movie so very much.
The film — Black Sheep — centers on a young man with a horrible phobia of sheep returning to his ancestral New Zealand ranch to sell his share to his brother. Unbeknownst to our hero, the black-hearted brother has been experimenting on the sheep, turning the docile little buggars into bloodthirsty carnivores whose bite — you guessed it! — turns humans into bloodthirsty were-sheep. Madcap hilarity must, of course, ensue.
I Am Not Making This Up.
Who’s with me?
Don’t nobody tell Erin about this
“They are tense!”
Advertisements in Korea are very, very strange.
Darn. And also Cool!
Cafe Montrose never reopened after Ike, which is irritating and sad — it was a great neighborhood joint for a quick bite or a resplendent feast. I’ll miss it.
But in its place, we’re getting a cured-meat-and-wine-bar (“Vinoteca Poscol”) from Marco Wiles, he of Da Marco and Dolce Vita, which could be a lovely thing.
“Buh-bye, Dubai”
This is brilliant; check it out:
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolf or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
Gahhh.
So, I’m trying to find a good online running log/community site/etc. There are several, mostly of them I’ve linked here before. The one I hear good things about in terms of community is RunningAhead.com; the one with the most Google-juice is MapMyRun.com, a division of MapMyFitness, apparently.
Now, so, the features I want are:
- Easy logging. Make it simple for me to enter a new running/walking event.
- Easy GPS integration. Ideally, I just plug it in and say “upload” and the event get tagged on my calendar, potentially even without any other metadata. (But I should be able to add metadata like “crappy run” or “raining” or “had cramp” later.)
- Decent community forums & such.
- Open access to data, so I can pull it out on my own via (ideally) a RESTful API or somesuch.
- Facebook integration (which is actually an outgrowth of the previous item).
And when I talk about data integration in the log — i.e., from the GPS — what I want is:
- Date of run
- Time of day for start and stop
- Duration of run
- Distance of run
- Average pace
- “Split” times for each mile, i.e. time to mile X and pace for mile X
Everyone seems to be mad for RunningAhead, but it’s a labor of love from ONE GUY who appears to be absolutely allergic to code he didn’t write. Even the FORUM at RA is homegrown, which makes precisely zero sense, and he’s making noises about a 100% custom GPS integration solution (i.e., instead of utilizing the Garmin plugin that’s FREE and available NOW). Consequently, people have been asking for features for literally YEARS at RA — like GPS integration and data publishing/API/Facebook/Blog support — that are all coming “real soon now” and which may never see the light of day.
So, there’s that.
The other critter, MMR, is only marginally better. It supports the Garmin, and data flows in pretty easily, but it’s doctrinaire and rigid about some data I don’t care about (type of run, description of run). I’d rather it just sucked the data in and put it on the calendar automatically. Further, it doesn’t seem to gather splits data at all, focussing instead on the route, the time, and the average pace. That’s cool, but it’s incomplete.
Also, and this is the real kicker, the MMR site is FUGLY. It’s chock full of ads and would give any usability expert absolute HIVES. It’s poorly coded, poorly laid out, and fails to retain preferences or settings with any reliability (relying on cookies instead of internal profile data, for example).
So near as I can tell, they all suck, and nobody’s doing what I want, which is annoying. Heathen Nation, prove me wrong, would you?
(I’m also kind of afraid I’m not really getting all my data into an open format right now. The Garmin desktop is hokey and proprietary, but I can see splits there. Ascent will also show them. What I really want is an online tool like Ascent, and I’d even pay for it, but I’m not even sure it exists.)
Run Run Run Run Run
A good one today: 5.01 in 1:01, average pace 12:18, and there was no walking after I started running after a two-block warmup. And — get this — my mile times got faster as I went: 12:50; 12:27; 12:31; 11:55; and a personal best 11:44 on the fifth mile after bargaining with myself for 2 miles about when I was going to take a walking break. (Turns out, the answer was “after the Garmin says I’ve gone five miles.”)
The kids demand a followup
Fellow Malleteer AJ (the tall black dude, not the short white girl) commented on the prior post, demanding I provide some NEW music I found equally compelling.
Sad to say, of course, but he’ll learn soon enough that music you encounter after 30 tends not to be as personally meaningful as the stuff you found before 30, and that’s reflected in the lone 21st century entry on the prior list (Radiohead’s Amnesiac). I’ll give it a swing, though.
The rules change a little: I’m going to pick records not that have lodged in my personal history as irrevocably as the other list, since this isn’t yet knowable. Instead, I’m going to give my best guess for 20 (or so) records I think I’ll still be listening to in 20 years, and I’m going to do my best to avoid any overlap artist-wise with the prior list (so, Radiohead’s already represented, e.g.; re-including U2 was unavoidable, however).
- Lonelyland, Bob Schneider, 2000
- Post-War, M. Ward, 2006
- Stories from the City, Stories from Sea, PJ Harvey, 2000
- Transcendental Blues, Steve Earle, 2000
- Essence, Lucinda Williams, 2001
- Big Boi & Dre Present Outkast, Outkast, 2001
- Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips, 2002
- Blacklisted, Neko Case, 2002 (tie: also, Fox Confessor Bring the Flood, 2006)
- Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, Foo Fighters, 2007
- Elephant, The White Stripes, 2003
- Funeral, The Arcade Fire, 2004
- A Ghost is Born, Wilco, 2004
- A Tale of God’s Will, Terence Blanchard, 2007
- Z, My Morning Jacket, 2005
- Medulla, Bjork, 2004
- The Rising, Bruce Springsteen, 2002
- Sea Change, Beck, 2002
- Scar, Joe Henry, 2001
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, Various artists, 2000
- All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2, 2000
- Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam, 2006
- Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain, Sparklehorse, 2006
- Hardwire Healing, The Dexateens, 2007
- Strays Don’t Sleep, Strays Don’t Sleep, 2005
- The Shepherd’s Dog, Iron & Wine, 2007
Happy Now?
Life Soundtracks via Facebook, pt 1 (updated)
So, over the weekend, another one of those pass-around lists happened on Facebook. I wrote a response, but posted it only there, which seems foolish in light of the follow-up I’ve also been asked to write, so here’s my 25-album list in response to these instructions:
List 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you that they changed your life, or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that, no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world.
I snagged the idea from someone who’d expanded to 20, so I felt no compunctions about expanding to 25. This updated, edited version also includes mental snapshots for context.
- Lifes Rich Pageant, REM, 1985. A Columbia House cassette and the crappy deck in a ’78 Regal. Twenty-four years later, I meet Mike Mills in an airport, and what I think of is the first time “Begin the Begin” hit my ears in that car.
- The Joshua Tree, U2, 1987. See prior art; the beginning of the rest of my life, whether I knew it or not, since this thread leads eventually to Erin.
- Trace, Son Volt, 1995. A loaner pickup, theater in Texas, and weird scenes inside a corrugated metal barn.
- Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones, 1971. Chris Jolly’s room at Mallet, ca. 1990
- Mars Needs Guitars, Hoodoo Gurus, 1985. The back seat of the family car, an actual Walkman, and a drive home from the Coast
- Especially for You, The Smithereeens, 1986. One side of a well-worn cassette dubbed from Eric’s copy, played on constant repeat from 1986 to 1988.
- Uh-Huh, John Cougar Mellencamp, 1983. The other side of that same cassette.
- The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Velvet Underground, 1967. John Smith, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1988.
- The Heart of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, 1974. A sort of romance, and an unrelated long nighttime drive through the North Carolina hills in the cold, cold winter.
- 1984, Van Halen, 1984. Church trips. Really.
- In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin, 1979. We dance madly in the hallway outside my room while Frank “shoots up,” Tuscaloosa, 1990 or thereabouts.
- Shelter, Lone Justice, 1986. Capstone Summer Honors Program, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1987.
- Journeyman, Eric Clapton, 1989. A pitch black auditorium, a single floating cigarette, and the best opening chords ever.
- Couldn’t Stand the Weather, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, 1984. Mike Adams’ Sentra, 1987.
- Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos, 1992. Cassie hated it. I loved it. 1992.
- Purple Rain, Prince and the Revolution, 1984. C’mon.
- Jane’s Addiction, Jane’s Addiction, 1987. In some weird grad students’ house south of Hardy near Elam, I get stoned for the first time, 1987.
- Cure for Pain, Morphine, 1993. Birmingham visit, 1995, and I discover Morphine via Mohney.
- Amnesiac, Radiohead, 2001. Eric and Chet summer as bachelors, 2001. Also REDACTED.
- The Soul Cages, Sting, 1991. Sting sings about my dad, 1991.
- One Fair Summer Evening, Nanci Griffith, 1988. The Tom Waits girl hipped me to this live Griffith set in 1993 or 1994. It was years before I realized I’d moved within blocks of the venue in question.
- Concrete Blonde, Concrete Blonde, 1986. On near infinite repeat from Patrick’s room, ca. 1990.
- Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails, 1989. ANGRY. Also, HORNY.
- The Trinity Session, The Cowboy Junkies, 1987. I drive Frank and Eric P to the farm in 1988. We stop at a now-gone record store to pick this up on the way out of town.
- Doo Dad, Webb Wilder, 1991. Hattiesburg done good. “There’s a glimmer of morning / Just over the tree-line…”
The other “Groundhog day” film
I didn’t know this until just now, but Groundhog Day is almost certainly a stolen film; the plot first surfaced in a 1973 short story called 12:01 PM, wherein the loop is only an hour long, and the only one aware of it is a sad-sack businessman.
The story was then made into a 1990 Academy-Award winning short film far, far more disturbing than the Bill Murray classic. A subsequent TV movie expanded the idea to a full day.
The author and 1990 director brought suit, apparently, but were unable to compete legally with the essentially limitless resources of Columbia Pictures.
The good news is that the 1990 film is available on Youtube, split into 3 parts (total running time is 25 minutes). The protagonist is played by an actor you will find familiar.
In which I cop to watching terrible TV movies
I somehow ended up watching all four hours of the horrible TV adaptation of XIII last Sunday and last night, and boy am I sorry.
Here’s the main problem: XIII was a very well-received graphic novel first, over in Belgium of all places. It then made the leap into an interesting first-person shooter whose charm was enhanced by the fact that it was done not in a photorealistic style, but instead as though the player were playing the comic. Nice idea, and apparently well-executed.
Well, here comes the nearly inevitable film adaptation, clearly shot on the cheap with has-been (as in “has-been MUCH THINNER before now”) Val Kilmer in a bit part, and Stephen Dorff as the eponymous XIII.
And it’s bad. Really bad. Granted, there probably hasn’t been a decent plotline yet that actually works well in all three formats (game, comic, TV) because of the various demands and quirks of each medium, so they definitely get SOME slack for taking a swing at it. And there were parts that weren’t awful, but on the whole the entire affair ran on rails, telegraphing twists well before they happened. Plus, since it needed to anchor two evenings, it felt super-bloated at four hours (well, minus commercials). Add to this the fact that the plot of Shooter is basically the same thing, but in a much better movie, and you get some annoyance.
However, the single greatest area this steamer fails is in preventable problems clearly the result of a complete disregard for verifiable facts. To wit:
One scene, said to be “the day before election day,” or early November, shows Arlington National Cemetery under a few inches of snow. Snow that early in or around the District would be freakish and weird, and while not unprecedented, is still out of place here.
Compounding the error, though, is the very next shot of the film, which shows a lush and verdant White House lawn. Trees are full of leaves, the sky is blue, and there’s no hint of winter. Um, what? News flash to filmmakers: The White House is only about two miles from Arlington, dumbasses.
In another shot displaying a willful ignorance of basic DC geography, a phone call placed from “a pay phone in Dupont Circle” shows the caller with a clear view of the Capitol down a wide boulevard. Leaving aside for a moment the basic problem — the Capitol isn’t visible from Dupont — the view provided OF the Capitol is from the east, and Dupont is northwest.
A plotpoint of the film is a presidential race between a successor Vice President and the opposite-party candidate, who happens to be the assassinated President’s brother. That’s a little weird, but here’s the really fun part: a political ad we see in the film claims that the Vice President “as governor of Illinois voted to cut funding for the Marines.” Um, what?
A late-film development is the deployment of a dirty bomb at a Bethesda polling station on election day, as a way to allow the government to impose martial law and disrupt the electoral process. This opens the door for a twofer of stupidity. First, we see elaborate, TSA-style security measures at the polling station, which have never been in place any time I’ve voted anywhere.
The real screamer, though, is that (according to dialog in the film) DC suburb Bethesda, Maryland is “four hours from DC.” That’s some metro line, isn’t it?
Compare all this to the slavish attention to real-world geography shown by the Fallout 3 team on a video game.
Sigh. It’s what I get for watching a broadcast network, really. If NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox ever get something decent on the air, it’s got to be a complete accident.
In which we run some more
Mildly hungover on Saturday, I ran anyway: 4.46miles in 57:33, including my longest uninterrupted run yet (just over 2 miles, after which my heart was threatening to mutiny outright) and my lowest mile pace yet (11:55) — well, “yet” meaning “in this iteration of running.” Ten years ago, I could do a sub-30-minute 5K.
Perfectly fine today, I did a brisk 4.2 (or 4.12? Somehow, my Garmin desktop software and MapMyRun disagree) walk in just over an hour. Bit by bit… More running tomorrow, wherein I try to make it 2.5 uninterrupted miles running.
Dept. of Al Franken Being Right
As it turns out, Rush Limbaugh really is a big fat idiot, as he is apparently unaware that the common document-distribution format PDF includes search features.
Well, either that, or he’s a lying asshole willfully misleading his listeners. I’m not sure which is worse.
Oh, here’s a shocker
That British researcher who supposedly linked the MMR vaccine with autism? Big fat liar who faked his data.
Fox, why you got to be so douchey?
The Sarah Connor Chronicles is back from an extended hiatus, and is the lead-in show to Joss Whedon’s new Dollhouse. However, collisions being what they are, we’re grabbing the Terminator stuff with the TV and getting DH online.
Except Fox has TSCC scheduled from 7:00 to 8:01, which makes it a PITA to tape TSCC and then grab something else on another channel at 8. It also means that even if you rig up a manual recording for TSCC, you miss the last minute or two of the show. This is clearly a ploy to drive viewers to Dollhouse, but it’s a cheesetastic dick move even if it is in service of a show creator we Heathen enjoy (Whedon).
Well, fuck you, Fox. And to think they wonder why people torrent TV; crap like this makes it objectively simpler to just download than it is to watch normally. (And, seriously, fuck Fox’s busy-as-shit halfass view-online site. It’s fallen down on me too many times to bother with anymore when I can get an HD torrent to watch without wrestling with browser plug-ins and net congestion.)
Friday Walkies
4.24mi, 1:07. Weird route this time that I don’t think I’ll repeat, given the traffic involved, but it was (sort of) worth trying.
In which we are very, very nerdy
moose:~ chet$ while true; do sleep 1; date +%s; done
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(Confused? Here you go.)
And now I will slay you with cute
Choose either baby gorilla flavor or foxes on a trampoline flavor.
This is a bad idea
Microsoft is getting into the retail store business, and has hired a Wal-Mart exec to lead the effort; the move is heralded as “taking a page out of Apple’s playbook,” and that’s almost certainly what they think they’re doing — after all, Apple has had a great deal of success with its stylish brand-enhancing shops.
This is baffling on a number of levels (timing for one), but the biggest head-scratcher is why they think anyone would go to a Redmond-owned store to buy any MS product. Apple stores work because Apple kit is perceived as stylish, hip, interesting, and desirable on levels unconnected with mundane IT concerns. There are plenty of legitimate technical reasons to prefer the Mac platform, both in terms of hardware and software, but those are secondary, I think, to the appeal of the stores.
Apple also offers a unity of design and function as well as a delightful marriage of hardware and software that Microsoft simply can’t match (this “we make both” angle is a nontrivial aspect to Mac reliability). Microsoft, on the other hand, has a broad and confusing suite of products, but doesn’t sell any computers at all unless you count the XBox.
Further, Apple enjoys tremendous channel control; it’s next to impossible to buy a new Mac for much less than retail, so a buyer doesn’t hurt themselves financially by doing their deal at an Apple store vs. ordering online. Microsoft’s gear and software, on the other hand, is traditionally deeply discounted by resellers, and MS won’t be able to compete with or undercut those prices without poisoning their own channel. End result: High prices at MS retail, lower prices at Amazon, and no crowds at the shops.
Sony, Dell, and Gateway all tried to do the retail thing, and unless I’m wholly incorrect none of them managed (or have managed) to make the shops interesting from a financial perspective. Nobody ever stood in line for anything these guys made, and the same is true for Microsoft. IT managers herald the next rev of Exchange Server, sure, and those stung by Vista await Windows 7 with cautious optimism, but none of those guys are going to stand in line for their upgrades.
Look for the Microsoft stores to be awkward, weird, and without obvious charm — which is more or less what happens every time MS apes something someone else did without understanding why the other party was successful.
Thank God there’s no REAL crime in South Carolina
Grandstanding douchebag Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has arrested 8 in a quest to charge Michael Phelps in connection with candid party pictures appearing to show him smoking pot.
In a guns-drawn raid on college kids,
deputies seized four laptop computers, a desktop computer and a computer storage drive from his client’s home — supposedly to try to find evidence against Phelps, Harpootlian said, adding they refused his request Wednesday to return the items to his client.
This over a case that is, at best, simple possession, a misdemeanor in South Carolina (and nearly every other state as well).
Nice.
More running foolishness
Today I broke 5 miles; prior runs advertised as “about 5” were in the 4.7 to 4.8 range; this one was 5.04 according to Garmin, and I covered it in a little over an hour — average pace just over 13, including just three walking songs. Bit by bit…
Bill Gates does something hilarious and cool
At the uber-elite TED conference during his presentation on the eradication of malaria, he did something fantastic:
“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,” Gates said while opening a jar onstage at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference — a gathering known to attract technology kings, politicians, and Hollywood stars.
“I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”
Of course, the mosquitos released at TED weren’t malarial vectors, but the point was made, and I suspect he had everyone’s attention for the remainder of his talk.
FanTAStic.
(Note: I thought this was already posted back on the 5th, but here it is in the “drafts” box. Oops.)