It's pedal-to-the-metal at the office this week, and I've been almost as busy at home with a little -- okay, a big -- renovation project that I'll elaborate on another time. In the meanwhile, let me entertain you with this really awful sight gag/pun based on the unexpected juxtaposition of popular music and typography (whoever came up with this has a sick, sick mind):
We can thank Sullivan for this horror show.
And now back to the regularly scheduled grind...
I'd like to give a quick kudo to my friend Diane Olson, who I mentioned in passing during last week's lengthy pity-party about my gout.
Diane is a copywriter at the ad agency where I work, but before that, she was a journalist and a staff writer for Catalyst magazine, a Salt Lake alternative monthly. She had quite a run there, stirring the muck, sticking it to The Man, earning a number of awards, and even having a creepy Silkwood moment or two while investigating what really goes on at Utah's infamous Dugway Proving Ground. (Trivia note: Stephen King was inspired to write The Stand after he heard about some of the scary crap that happens out there.)
These days, Diane's only work for Catalyst is a regular column called the Urban Almanac, a monthly compilation of timely factoids about what's happening in the natural world right outside our patio doors, as well as tips for how readers can improve their gardens, their diets, and their connection to something more authentic than the suburbs. I know Diane gets a lot of satisfaction from her column, but she's often said she'd hoped to do more with her writing (a familiar lament among us word-slinging types).
Just last week, quite out of the blue, as they say, she got a message from her editor at Catalyst; it seemed that someone from a local publishing house was trying to track her down. They want to turn Diane's Urban Almanac into a full-blown book, an illustrated hardcover, no less. Whereas the Catalyst version is region-specific for SLC, the proposed book will be more global (or at least national) in scope... and they want it by October.
Diane is understandably over the moon about this, especially the way it just fell into her lap during something of a low moment, and I'm very happy for her myself. (Also a little jealous, but we won't tell her that.) I'm already on the list for an autographed copy. And who knows... depending on when the finished volume hits the stands, it may make my Christmas shopping much easier this year!
Lileks made the following observation this morning:
Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day.
I'm not sure what he was reading, and I must admit I'm not very aware of what's hip and happening these days, so I'm wondering... is this true? Has blogging been revealed as just another fad that's nearly run its course? I have noticed that many of the personal blogs I visit seem to be petering out, and I'm painfully aware that my own output has fallen in recent years. Also (and this is possibly unrelated), I've noticed I don't get near as many comments as I used to. But I've attributed that to people's circumstances, i.e., I assumed everyone was busy, not that they're losing interest in blogs. Certainly my interest isn't waning. This silly little virtual kingdom seems to fill a genuine psychological need for me, and I get pretty cranky when I can't find enough time in my day to keep up with it to my satisfaction.
I have become pretty active over on Facebook, but that's hardly an adequate substitute, at least for me. Facebook is like sending a postcard to let someone know your latest port-of-call on that big road trip; it's a form of contact, maybe it's even a little revelatory, but it's hardly a conversation.
I don't know what Tumblr is.
And despite the best efforts of my friend Gillilan, I simply have no interest in Twitter. The 140-character limit strikes me as arbitrary and too constraining, and I don't see how it could allow anything but the most superficial of observations. (Hmm, there I go talking like one of those mythical "writers" again.) I hate the text message-style abbreviations that seem obligatory in that medium (again, it's the 140-character limit). Hell, I don't even like the terminology associated with Twitter. The name itself, and the verb "tweeting" are so cutesy-poo, and I hate cutesy-poo. If anything, Twitter is what strikes me as faddish, not blogging. But then, the arbiters of cool never seem to consult with me on these things, and I know I'm almost always the last one clinging to things that everyone else has long since abandoned.
So tell me, Loyal Readers, is blogging on the way out, aside from a handful of specialized sites and a few long-winded die-hards like myself?
May I just briefly mention how really frakkin' weird I feel every time I think about the fact that I'm actually walking around in the year 2010?
It's the curse of being a Gen-X sci-fi fan, I guess. Thanks to all the silly stuff that obsessed me as a kid and a teen, there are certain dates that hold a powerful resonance for me and probably don't faze ordinary people in the least: 1999... 2001, of course... and now 2010. Still to come are 2015, 2019, and 2029, the Year of Darkness, in which Skynet comes up with its dastardly plan to end the human resistance once and for all. In the case of that one, I think I'll forgo my usual lament that the real future doesn't match the cinematic version...
Hear ye, hear ye (I've always wanted to say that):
My lovely Girlfriend, who has slaved tirelessly and with very little recognition for a wholesale carpet dealer for the past 10 years, was this afternoon elected to the position of Vice President of the Utah Floor Covering Association, an industry trade group concerned with, um, floor coverings. And the industry that trades in... floor... coverings. Ah, hell, the truth is I have no idea what the UFCA actually does, but I imagine I'm going to be learning much more about it over the next year. Anne has already informed me that I'll be required to make myself available as her arm-candy for occasional functions, and she will likely be doing some business-related traveling as well. (The travel may or may not include me, depending on our respective schedules.) And, as if all this wasn't exciting enough, she will most likely ascend to the presidency itself in only a year.
I'm very proud of her. I don't know that this is going to be a game-changer or anything, but it's bound to be a very interesting experience for her, and a good resume' builder. And besides, "Madam Vice President" has kind of a sexy ring...
I had such plans for my annual holiday break. I was going to blog. A lot. I was going to sort through a couple thousand digital pictures I've taken over the past year and be brutal and efficient about deleting all the sub-par ones, and then I was going to Photoshop those that needed it and post the whole lot of them to Flickr. I was going to set up the digital picture frame my parents gave me for Christmas a year ago, and I was going to send long-overdue and just plain long emails to several people I haven't contacted for a while. I was going to give my house a thorough cleaning, and go through my clothes and pull out a bunch of stuff I no longer wear and give it to charity, and I was going to sit in the sun streaming in through the window and read a fat novel and sip hot cocoa. I was going to listen to a whole mess of podcasts I've got saved on the computer and go to some movies, which, believe it or not, I haven't really managed to do for the past couple months. I thought I might even take a nice drive up to Park City one afternoon and try breathing some less-smoggy air for a change. And when all that was done, I was going to actually write... not the lame-o crap I do around here all the time, but real writing, creative writing. Fiction, in other words, the stuff I used to think I was going to spend my life making.
And just how many of all those planned activities do you suppose I accomplished? Well... I managed to do a couple of memes for the blog. Yay me.
So what did I do over the break? I visited friends on Christmas Eve. I had a very rare stress-free Christmas Day with my parents. I spent an afternoon with my buddy Jer, who I only see a couple times a year because he lives in Vegas, and I enjoyed the annual reunion dinner with The Dudes, i.e., my buddies from the old multiplex days. I also enjoyed a New Year's Eve video party with a different subset of friends I like to call The Usual Suspects. (Geeks that we are, the evening's viewing selection was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Of course.) And then I did penance for that party all the next day. (I've decided that champagne doesn't agree with me; every time I drink it, I end up with one of those headaches that sits right behind your retinas and threatens to explode your eyeballs any time the treacherous daylight sneaks through a chink in the window blinds.)
I helped The Girlfriend's parents organize and store their Christmas decorations, and was rewarded with a little road trip out into the hinterlands for lunch at one of those small-town greasy spoons I love so well, a place called the Stockton Miner's Cafe (sorry, no web presence that I could find). I hung some framed photos that have been sitting on the living-room floor for several months. And I managed to see a movie, Guy Ritchie's take on Sherlock Holmes. (For the record, I liked it. Well, I liked the story and the performances, at least -- people who are screaming about revisionism don't know their Holmes -- but I am never going to get used to the modern way of putting together an action scene. Undercrank the camera, freeze for a moment, then overcrank and smash cut to something else, all shot in close-ups so you can never see where anything is in relation to anything else... ugh. The action in Sherlock is a lot more intelligible than the messy fights in those damn Bourne movies, but I still long for a nice steadicam shot once in a while.)
And all that stuff was great, it really was. But now, as Ray Liotta says at the conclusion of Goodfellas, it's all over, and I'm back at work in the comma mines and feeling like a tremendous failure for not crossing off a few items on that "to-do" list...
In response to ABC News' exclusive photos of the explosive rig worn by the so-called "crotchbomber" -- who failed to bring down Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, but did manage to burn the hell out of his own legs and, presumably, genitalia -- Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing remarked:
What better way to round out this scorched and shitty decade than to gaze thoughtfully into the charred, soiled underpants of a stranger. A troubled young man who seems to have hated America only as much as he hated his own junk.
I wholeheartedly concur. This entire decade has been pretty much end-to-end suck. Don't believe me? Check out Newsweek's retrospective video (not embeddable, unfortunately) and refresh your memory. From hanging chads in 2000 through 9/11, the Iraq War, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and government-sanctioned torture; the PATRIOT Act; the TSA and its increasingly ridiculous "security measures"; the break-up of the space shuttle Columbia; Hurricane Katrina; the rise of reality television and the belligerent vapidity that came with it; the general bellicosity that seems to have infected even the simplest public discourse; increasingly corrosive and seemingly intractable political partisanship; a truly frightening resurgence of religious fundamentalism all across the globe, and the outright renunciation of science by a shockingly large percentage of Americans; the proud-to-be-ignorant anti-intellectual attitude displayed by far, far too many people in a country that used to value education and expertise; the crashing economy; all the talk about global warming and peak oil; the general sense that The World As We've Known It is coming to an end; and a constant societal undertow of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment, all leading up to the recent death of Patrick Swayze (which, even though I haven't blogged about it, really bummed me out) and finally this dumbass with the bomb in his shorts. Not to mention the inexplicable popularity of Napoleon Dynamite and Family Guy. Is it any wonder that I am ever-more consumed with nostalgia with each passing year, if this is the 21st century?
On the positive side, I read somewhere that Google Books now has a fine selection of back issues from the old Weekly World News tabloid, so that's something at least. Bat Boy, save us from our despair!
Like most American boys growing up in the 1970s, I was a regular reader of Mad magazine, and one of my favorite segments of that august publication was the "Spy Vs. Spy" cartoons that appeared in every issue. I loved SvS so much that I recall I even tried drawing a few of my own on the backs of brown paper grocery sacks. (They were neither funny nor particularly well drawn, thus ending my nascent interest in becoming a cartoonist.) This little adventure of the familiar black-and-white anti-heroes, which throws in a couple of beloved movie characters for good measure, cracked me up:
Remember to click for full size!
(Via.)
One evening a few years back, The Girlfriend and I went downtown to see the lights at Temple Square.
I should probably explain for my out-of-state readers that Temple Square is the geographic heart of both Salt Lake City and the LDS faith. Practically the first thing the Mormon pioneers did when they arrived in this valley in 1847 was to pick a spot on which to build their temple. The early settlement, then the city that rose from that, and eventually the layout of the entire valley radiated outward from that one place. Today, the original temple grounds, which include the temple itself and several other buildings surrounded by a high stone wall, comprise an entire city block, Temple Square. And every fall, the church begins decorating the grounds -- as well as several adjoining properties -- with literally millions of Christmas lights. The switch is thrown over Thanksgiving weekend, and the lights stay on every night until New Year's Eve. It's an amazingly beautiful spectacle. And best of all, it's open to the public, regardless of faith, and it's absolutely free to get in. I doubt if there's anyone in this valley who hasn't experienced it at least once, and most everyone I know goes every year.
The particular visit I'm thinking of was on a bitterly cold night just before Christmas Eve. Anne and I were reasonably comfortable in heavy coats and the long underwear we'd bought for our Yellowstone snowmobiling weekend, but our exposed faces still tingled painfully in the frigid air. We were surrounded by hordes of similarly dressed people, all looking like chubby little marshmallow men (and marshmallow women and children) in their layered clothing, all of them buzzing happily about holiday parties, shopping left to do, and the other lighthearted things people talk about this time of year.
Not one of them was paying the slightest attention to the man seated on a mud-encrusted five-gallon bucket in front of the diner on the corner just south of Temple Square.
Continue reading "A Christmas Story that Has Nothing to Do With BB Guns" »
Hope you all found something nice under your tree!
The title pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
I first spotted a somewhat abbreviated version of this mammoth meme at SamuraiFrog's Electronic Cerebrectomy, but Jaquandor tracked down the full enchilada a few days later. Seeing as how I'm an exhibitionistic masochist, and that I have nothing better to do on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I shall, of course, do the long one...
As a bit of an Anglophile and an unrepentant nostalgic, I've been bummed in recent years to learn that the iconic red telephone box is fast disappearing from the British landscape. The culprit is, of course, advancing technology -- who needs a public phone anymore when everyone is carrying a personal one in their pockets? American phone booths are an endangered species as well, but they don't carry the same weight of cultural symbolism as their UK counterparts; I doubt anyone identifies an American-style booth with America itself, while, to many people around the world, the red phone box fairly shouts "Great Britain."
One of the many highlights of my visit to England in 1993 -- one of the experiences that drove home the fact that, yes, I was really there, in another country for the first time in my life -- was encountering one of those familiar boxes I'd seen so many times in movies and television programs, seeing it standing there on the street fulfilling its function, not a tourist attraction but simply a part of somebody's everyday life. The thought of them heading for the scrapheap of history brings an inevitable pang.
Fortunately, there are efforts afoot to save at least some of them. British Telecom (BT) has instituted an "adopt-a-kiosk" program that allows communities to buy the boxes for a nominal sum (all of one pound) and then use them for whatever purpose they wish. Some towns elect to keep them functional, with a working pay phone; others have turned them into "street art" or touristy photo spots. But the best idea I've run across yet was one small village's inspired decision to repurpose their local phone box as a tiny lending library. As I understand it, it's an informal, community-driven operation in which the residents donate books they have read and take ones they haven't, so the inventory is constantly changing. (I guess it would actually be more accurate to call it a book exchange, rather than a library.) The box has room for about 100 books, as well as CDs and DVDs. The village now has a valuable community resource, the citizens are fully involved, and a little bit of history is still standing. And that's what I call cool.
Wish this sort of thing happened more often here at home.
Credit where it's due: I first read about this on Boing Boing. And there's a more detailed article about the Adopt-a-Kiosk program here.
I should be taking advantage of my day off to write something meaningful, like a short story or a screenplay outline, or notes for a novel I'd like to write, or even just a recap of my DC trip or a half-dozen other blog entries I've been putting off, but I'm feeling pretty lazy, intellectually speaking, so I think I'll just swipe a Thanksgiving-themed meme from Samurai Frog:
...but this is pretty much how things look around the Bennion Compound right now:
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
So I guess you'd call that a successful Mass Consumption Day, right? Hope yours was as well...
I was planning to do a whole string of Halloween-themed entries last week, followed by some long-overdue business (such as a tribute for the late Patrick Swayze, whose premature death moved me to a surprising degree) this week. But, as it seems to do with distressing regularity these days, work has simply overwhelmed every other aspect of my life lately. Busy, busy days, a few late nights at the office, and a major truckload of job-related stress and anxiety haven't left much time or energy for anything else.
A few days ago, however, feeling the need to get something posted up here for the sake of my own sanity, if not the pleasure of my Three Loyal Readers, I thought to fall back on the ol' reliable of the blogosphere, the not-quite-an-entry exercise that you can noodle at a little bit at a time whenever you find yourself with five free minutes. Yes, that's right, kids, it's a meme. This particular one is courtesy of Jaquandor.
So, without further ado, let the meme-ocity begin!
Continue reading "The "Handy Substitute for an Actual Entry" Meme" »
After I finally got out of work last night, I was standing on the TRAX platform at the Gallivan Plaza stop, the heart of what little activity there is on downtown Main Street following the end of the business day. I was waiting with a dozen or so fellow commuters and passing the time by watching pedestrians across the street. That particular block is a rich environment for people-watching; there are always a few homeless folks around, and usually a mob of scruffy teen and twentysomethings who seem to have nothing better to do than sit on the big planter boxes in front of Sam Weller's and be obnoxious. You also see a lot of beautiful people along that stretch of sidewalk, thanks to a popular nearby club called Keys on Main, and the interactions between the clubgoers and the miscreants are often pretty entertaining.
The street show on this particular evening starred a young woman, a redhead dressed in the shortest miniskirt I've ever seen outside an Austin Powers movie. And if that wasn't enough to grab the attention of any heterosexual male with a pulse, she was also wearing thigh-high, patent-leather, lace-up, platform-souled boots that made her legs look about 175 feet long. Think of Julia Roberts strutting down Rodeo Drive in that scene from Pretty Woman and you'll get the idea.
As noteworthy as the woman herself may have been, though, what really made me smile was the reaction she was getting from, well, everybody. I guess she was killing time waiting for Keys to open or something, because she walked from the club down to the corner and back several times. And every time she did, the heads of every man on the block -- including, I'm not too proud to admit, my own -- very obviously turned to follow her.
It was like watching a slow-motion tennis match.
In yet another sign that I worry too damn much, I started thinking yesterday afternoon that people might not get what I was trying to say in my "Cool Quiet, and Time to Think" entry, and hurt feelings could result. So I went back and added an addendum to try and clear the air. Problem solved, right?
Ha, no! You obviously don't know me as well as you believe. Because today I've been thinking that no one really goes back to a blog entry they've already read, and perhaps there's someone out there right now who read that thing before I got the addendum written and is even now sitting in a funk somewhere, getting angrier and/or more depressed with every passing minute because they think I don't want to hang out with them. Which most assuredly is not true. But how is this person to know that since they haven't gone back and re-read that ego-busting, anti-social, curmudgeonly, leave-me-alone rant to see the bit where I say, "it's not you, it's me?"
So, in the interest of soothing my own conscience as well as any potentially ruffled feathers, I now present, in its entirety... the addendum:
[Addendum: It occurs to me that my various loved ones and friends could possibly misinterpret the "social engagements = obligations" remark above. So, to be clear, I am not complaining about the time I spend with people or their desire to spend time with me. These are good things in my life that I have no wish to give up or change. My frustration basically stems from a lousy work/life balance. I have a good job that I like, but my office's long business hours, coupled with the time I spend commuting, place me home on most nights somewhere between 7:00 and 7:30. After I eat dinner, I have maybe an hour in which to try and be productive before my brain completely fogs over, and most nights productivity doesn't happen anyway for one reason or another. So I end up feeling more-or-less constant pressure to get caught up, and guilt because I'm leaving too many things undone or half-finished... and me being me, I tend to beat myself up for not doing a better job of managing it all better. And then it's time for bed and -- lately, at least -- a really lousy night's sleep, and then it's up and at 'em to repeat the whole cycle over again. I've been keeping this schedule for over four years now, and it's starting to really grate. You wouldn't think working a mere hour or two later than most everyone else would make that much of a difference, but it absolutely does. Social activities are virtually impossible on a work night, and my body -- never a paragon of athleticism, I must admit -- has gone completely to hell because any kind of exercise regimen is just too damn hard to squeeze into an already tight schedule.
Basically, I'm tired of getting home so late and never managing to accomplish anything, night after night after night. I'm tired of not having a life. I know everyone says or feels that to one degree or another... but I personally feel it very keenly. It's not healthy, either physically or psychologically. And lately the situation has been exacerbated by a lot of other things -- my birthday, the problems with my car, the realization that certain ambitions are becoming more unlikely to pan out and that I'm not the man I used to think I was going to be -- and, well, I just need to scream once in a while. Thoreau never imagined blogs, or he might have written that "quiet desperation" line differently... ]
Interestingly enough, I'm writing the comments which surround this copy block at 6:08 on a Friday night in the middle of a deathly silent cube farm. Yep, you guessed it, I'm stuck late at work again, waiting around for other people to do their jobs so I can do mine. Meanwhile, my stomach is rumbling, it's getting dark outside, and The Girlfriend is at home waiting for me.
Point proven.
Sigh.
Despite the best efforts of a couple of well-meaning and enthusiastic friends, I still do not get the appeal of anime, i.e., Japanese animated films. I also don't get -- aside from a handful of titles -- manga, or Japanese comic books.
But I very definitely do see the appeal of Kirsten Dunst dressed in some kind of anime princess outfit as she wanders the streets of Tokyo's infamous geek mecca, the Akihabara district:
Yeah, now that's a pretty sight. Kirsten hasn't exactly lived up to the hype of a few years ago that painted her as the Next Big Thing, but I like her. And I really like her in this get-up. The short skirt and the stockings are nice, of course, but weird as it sounds, I'm really grooving on the blue hair. I don't know, it just works for me.
From what I can discern, this photo is a behind-the-scenes candid from a video shoot. An artist named Murakami, in association with Hollywood director McG, filmed a short starring Dunst for an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Modern art is, of course, something else I do not get. But whatever, I can live with it if it gets me pics of Kirsten Dunst in a tiny skirt and blue hair. More photos and info here; original source for this here.
Do I have to go back to work now?
There was an episode of the original Star Trek in which the Enterprise encounters another starship whose entire crew has been killed by an alien disease that sucked all the water from their bodies and then crystallized the remaining chemicals that comprise a living organism. The visualization of the end result was typically cheap, but reasonably effective: empty uniforms sprawled across consoles and heaped in corridors, with piles of what looks like rock salt spilling from the shirt collars and cuffs, pant legs, and boots. I think I've noted before that the one thing the original series had that none of the spin-offs or the recent reboot movie has managed -- or even attempted -- to capture was a deep sense of eeriness. Space was weird in the classic Trek series, and sometimes it was pretty damn spooky. The idea of the rock-salt disease gave me a major case of the willies when I was a kid, and those empty uniforms are an image that has stayed with me all these years.
Case in point: When I got off the train tonight at the end-of-the-line station, I noticed a little one-piece jumpsuit thingie of the sort worn by babies draped over a low fence that runs along the edge of the platform. Now, obviously what happened is that someone dropped it, and a good samaritan placed it in an obvious spot in case the owner came back looking for it. But I have to admit that for just a moment -- a brief, vertiginous, irrational moment -- I glanced downward, to see if there was a pile of white crystals on the ground below the jumper's collar opening...
Man, am I a geek or what?
With any luck, I'll get around to writing an actual blog entry later today, but for now, let me share something that amused me this morning, from the always reliable Lileks:
It’s MEA weekend, which is when the schools close down for two days to have a convention, or a caucus, or go the Caribbean and talk smack about this year’s crop of brats, I don’t know. Don’t recall these when I was a kid, but things were so different in my day that the teaches not only smoked, but smoked indoors. They had a lounge off the cafeteria, and a blue fog rolled from it all day long. Any kid who went in there came out like a doughboy after the mustard gas rolled over the lip of the trench. That’s if you dared to go in there. I remember doing so once, and everyone stiffened. You would not have been surprised if the English teacher rose, held out his hands palm-first, and used repelling beams to drive you back.
Harold! You revealed your power!
I know, Rhoda, but he had violated our lair. It had to be so.
I always admire James' skill at finding the perfectly evocative phrase, and the mental picture of my bald, bearded, bespectacled, and imperious AP English teacher Mr. Bridge firing repulsor beams from his hands at an interloping student... well, that's something that's going to stick with me for a while.
In other corners of the InterWeb today, I also enjoyed Scalzi's appreciation of one of the coolest characters ever to grace the silver screen, the mighty Chewbacca. I knew from an early age that Chewie was nothing more than a tall, very thin man in a fur-covered suit, but unlike a lot of other cinematic aliens, I've always accepted him -- even to this day -- as exactly what he appears to be. I believe in Chewbacca in a way I don't quite believe in, say, E.T., if that makes sense. For my money, Chewie and the monster from Alien are the two best-realized, most authentic non-human creatures ever put on film.
Finally, take a look at these amazing pictures taken just offshore from Sunset Beach in LA; I had no idea sharks leapt out of the water like dolphins...
I started thinking a couple weeks ago about what, if anything, I wanted to write here on the blog regarding my 40th birthday (which was Tuesday, in case anyone is compiling a dossier). I've tried not to be a drag about it, but if you've been paying attention, you've probably picked up on the fact that I'm not too happy about reaching this particular milestone. My reasons are pretty unremarkable, even cliche'd, mid-life crisis stuff, which means they're probably utterly pathetic and boring to anyone who isn't me. So I won't bother to elaborate on them, beyond simply saying that I've been struggling for a while with a nagging sense that I've wasted a lot of time, energy, and money on unimportant crap instead of forging the life I used to think would somehow just happen. I realize that nobody's life turns out the way you imagine it will when you're a child or a teenager or even a college student, but it seems like a lot of folks at least end up in the right ballpark, even if they're not actually pitching the game. I don't feel like I have, and I know I've got no one to blame but myself. And that's not an easy thing to admit or accept. Even worse, I'm afraid I may have missed the window of opportunity, passed my peak without even realizing it had arrived, and now a lot of what I've always wanted simply isn't going to be possible.
But I said I wasn't going to bore you all with that stuff, and honestly, I'm not nearly as concerned with it now, two days after the calendar page turned over, as I was earlier in the summer. My depression and angst seemed to peak last week sometime, and I was actually in a pretty good mood on my birthday itself. For this, I thank my friends and loved ones, who all realized I was having a hard time and did their very best to cheer me up. My coworker friend Diane surprised me with brownies and some nifty Bettie Page collectibles on Monday. My former coworker friend Amber surprised me with an Amazon gift card. Then there was the flood of good wishes from my various acquaintances on Facebook (I've been somewhat dubious of the sincerity of social networking "friendship," but I have to admit that each wall posting from old coworkers and classmates gave me a genuine boost). Anne, my lovely Girlfriend, was wonderful, of course, as were my parents. Anne's and my friends Dave and Sarah brought me a delicious homemade cheesecake.
And then there was the "present" I received from my old buddy Cheno. I don't know how funny this will be to anyone who doesn't know "The Dudes" -- i.e., the guys I worked with at the multiplex way back in the day, who are still somehow, improbably, my friends -- but it cracked me up:
In case you don't know what I look like, I'm the dashing bearded guy in the middle...
Reading the Sunday funnies yesterday brought me to an important moment of self-realization.
No, really.
You see, yesterday's edition of "Get Fuzzy" turned on a disparaging reference to the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, a series that seems to be deeply loathed by a not-insignificant number of people. I like it, myself; it's not remotely deep, but I find it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, at least to my sensibilities, and I'm frankly baffled by the level of ire I often see directed at this amiable -- if admittedly crass -- little show.
So I was thinking all of these things about Two and a Half Men and suddenly it struck me.
OMG... I like crap.
The things the sophisticates, connoisseurs, intellectuals, and hipsters generally decry as lowbrow, superficial, or -- how I have come to loathe this word! -- cheesy are often the things I most enjoy. And in turn the things that make them gush with enthusiasm and sweet, sticky joy tend to leave me, well, unimpressed. Consider the evidence:
As she did last year, the lovely Mrs. Jack sent text-message updates on my buddy's Lotoja progress throughout the day. If anyone reading this is interested, he crossed the finish line in Jackson Hole at 7:31 PM, with a final time of 13 hours, 43 minutes, 22 seconds, landing him in 279th place. (I have no idea of how many riders there were this year, so his position doesn't mean much, I guess.)
Jack's time was just ever so slightly longer than last year's, which was 13:39:58. I haven't spoken to him yet, so I don't know if he had issues with wind or what happened. Still, I remain impressed with his accomplishment; I doubt if I could pedal a bike much farther than a couple of miles, let alone the distance he covered in a single day. Well done, my friend!
Update (Sunday morning, 10:11 AM): I just heard from Jack, who informs me that the time I had on record for last year was incorrect. His time in 2008 was actually 14:00:55.138, so his performance this year was a significant improvement! Kudos, once again, and sorry for the mix-up!
My friend Jack is going to ride in the Lotoja Classic bicycle race tomorrow, his second time participating in this 206-mile endurance event. (You can find last year's coverage here.) I'd like to wish him luck, if he happens to be sitting up too late for someone who has to pedal a bike up and down mountains in the morning, and may the wind be at his back. Or whatever bicyclists say to each other. I'll be away from my computer all day tomorrow, but I'll be getting text-message updates on Jack's progress, and I'll report the results when I get the chance...
In my office just a few minutes ago, I overheard someone say, "Oh, to be a lexicographer."
You've got to admire that level of individuality in one's career dreams...
I got a bit of a start this morning when the local news reported that a woman who more-or-less matches the description of my friend Cheno's wife had been hit by a car while jogging only a couple blocks from the Cheno home. I know Mrs. Cheno is a runner, and even though the age of the still-unidentified victim was said to be 10 years too old, I wondered if the police and TV reporters might have made a mistake and it was really her being loaded into a LifeFlight helicopter. Being the paranoid, er, concerned friend that I am, I felt compelled to make a quick phone call, just to be sure. Whoever the unfortunate jogger was, it wasn't Mrs. Cheno.
Which is great news for me and my friends, but I feel bad for the anonymous woman who's in the hospital while her own friends and family go blithely about their day with no idea that someone they care about is fighting for her life right now...
UPDATE: The Tribune is reporting that the jogger has died from "massive head trauma." The police believe they've identified her and are awaiting the arrival of a husband for confirmation. Jesus... I can't begin to imagine getting a phone call asking you to come verify the identity of a mate you'd shared breakfast with and kissed goodbye only a few hours earlier.
As weird and potentially disrespectful as this next thought may sound, I find myself wondering what she was listening to on the iPod she was wearing at the time of the accident. Years ago, I wrote a short story in which someone dies in a traffic accident while the most ridiculous and overblown pop tune I could think of at the time -- Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" -- played on a jukebox in a nearby bar. It must happen all the time, when you think about it, people dying to the sound of inappropriate, silly, or offensive music... especially nowadays when music is so ubiquitous in our all-entertainment-all-the-time culture. It's a haunting image for me... you're running or walking or shopping, whatever, preoccupied by the mundane thoughts and daily business that eats up most of our lives, listening to the stupid pap that we all have on for background noise while we dream of the cool things we'll do one of these days, if only we can get through one more day of the usual rut, and then spang!, it's all over. No glamour, no meaning, no big resolution, no swelling soundtrack theme and slow dissolve to the next scene, only the Archies crooning on about sugar and honey. It reminds me of an old episode of M*A*S*H, oddly enough, the one where one of Hawkeye's paramours goes for a walk after their tryst and steps on a mine, and the last words in her diary are that her head is filled with thoughts of him. And another episode of the same show, in which Margaret sums it all up: "It never fails to amaze me. One minute you're alive, the next you're dead."
Things to consider on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon in early fall...
I ought to be in bed, catching up on sleep. I can't remember the last time I got a full eight hours' worth. But instead, I sit here in the wee hours of the last day of the last weekend of summer, clicking my way across the Internet, in search of... what? Enlightenment? Absolution? Distraction from the existential horror of it all? Maybe I'm just trying to stave off the inevitable advance of the calendar for just a few more minutes.
Here's a song that's been running through my head for a good part of the day. The lyrics are typically Zeppelin-esque mumbo-jumbo, but the tone captures my mood pretty well...
Overheard during my lunchtime walk: Kansas' "Dust in the Wind" emanating from the open door of a tavern near my office. How depressing would it be to park yourself in a dark little hole that smells of sweat and mildew, drinking beer and listening to that existential dirge while a beautiful late-summer afternoon unwinds just a few steps away? Even I don't have that much appetite for melancholy self-reflection...
So, I'm driving to the train station this morning, and at some point I glance off to my left and see... a black and white cow wearing light blue pajamas. Walking on its hind legs, no less.
For just an instant, I had the thought that the Monday-morning hangover really isn't worth it anymore.
Then I realized I was simply passing Chick-fil-A, and there was some poor teenager sweating away his shift inside that cow's plush innards. I really hope the whole week isn't going to be like this...
Stephen King's monumental fantasy epic, The Dark Tower, takes place in a world very much like our own, a parallel Earth that shares many attributes with ours, except that this other world is dying at some fundamental, metaphysical level. Entropy is accelerating; time no longer flows at a steady rate; most machines have ceased to function. Societies are failing and human behavior is changing for the worse, becoming barbaric and even monstrous. Even geography has been altered, with distances between places increasing, or their locations actually shifting around. Some of the inhabitants of this alternate Earth -- the ones who are still rational, anyway -- speak wistfully of what things were like "before the world moved on."
I think that's a wonderful phrase, evocative of so many things: loss, alienation, resignation, the sense of big changes occurring in spite of an individual's actions or feelings. Perhaps most of all, it speaks of the melancholy recognition that something important has slipped away from you while you weren't paying attention. My friend Jack uses the phrase all the time; it was very much on my mind yesterday.
Via Boing Boing, a delightful and unlikely vacation photo:
To see the full-size image and read the tale of how this couple ended up as impromptu nature photographers, go here.
Silly as it is, this story really made my afternoon...
[Update: Well, I suppose this will surprise no one, but the "Crasher Squirrel" has already become an Internet meme. As usual, I'm 20 minutes behind the curve...]
And just for the heck of it, here are a couple more images I find amusing, both ganked from Samurai Frog.
The first is Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce and Demi Moore, as she appears in Sorority Row, yet another remake of a movie from my early adolescence (admittedly not a very good movie, but I'm just getting sick of all the remakes on general principle):
I'm not any kind of fan of Rumer's -- as far as I know, I haven't seen her in anything -- but this pic struck my fancy because, well, the apple hasn't fallen very far from the tree, has it? Click to enlarge, for the full effect, and tell me if you don't see what I mean.
And now here's one that's kind of dumb but made me smile anyhow:
And with that, I guess I'm going to go find something to do outside for awhile... have a good one, everybody...
There have been a couple of memes floating around Facebook recently for which I've been repeatedly tagged, so I finally caved to the pressure and did them yesterday. I'm now republishing them here in a somewhat longer and embellished form. Why? Well, what else have I got to do on a Tuesday afternoon?
Even though I'm frequently chagrined by reminders that I was born and bred and still live in the most right-wing state in the union, I've realized in recent years that I do, in fact, have some conservative tendencies. Definitely not in political or cultural terms, but at least in the sense of not liking change for the sake of change, and of valuing things and aesthetics that many folks would happily scrap in the name of "progress." In that spirit, here's a flavor of conservatism that I can actually bring myself to support:
Just something Lileks said this morning that struck me:
The worst thing about Depression isn’t the sense that you’re ac-centuating the negative, it’s that you’re seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It’s the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.
I think I mentioned recently that I'm coming up on my fortieth birthday in a few weeks. (If I didn't, hey, kids, guess what? I'm turning 40 soon!) I'm not real happy about it. In fact, I'm trying my damnedest not to drive everyone within earshot crazy by having a stereotypical breakdown and mid-life crisis -- there are few things as disheartening as realizing you're acting like a total cliche -- but I have to tell you that it's pretty tough maintaining an air of cool, collected indifference toward your advancing age when you start receiving junk mail from the AARP. That's the American Association of Retired Persons for you young people who may not know of it.
Now, I do occasionally receive mail that's intended for my father. We share the same first name and we did share the same address for a very long time. So my first thought when I spotted the AARP's logo on the business-size envelope in my hand was that it must be something for him. But no, it was plainly addressed to "Mr. Jason Bennion." Which would be me. No room for error there.
Compelled by morbid curiosity, I slit it open... and discovered within an official membership card emblazoned with the same pre-printed "Mr. Jason Bennion." The accompanying letter instructed me how to register my membership and described the fabulous benefits I can receive by doing so today.
But I'm only 40, for god's sake! You know, the new 30? Isn't that what all the magazines have been calling it lately? Or was that just a passing fad and they've decided 40 is over the hill after all? Whatever will make us insecure enough to buy this month's issue, right? Right?
Ah, geez... I suddenly feel the need to slip into a cardigan and pop a Geritol.
One more for tonight...
The Salt Lake Tribune really needs to have a chat with its headline writer:
Treacherous skateboards! When are the police going to do something about them! When I was a boy, you could walk down the streets without fearing that some skateboard was going to leap out and mug you, but now everything's gone to hell in a mop-bucket!
(What actually happened, of course, is that some guy attacked another guy with a skateboard. But sloppy editing gives a very different impression, doesn't it? Anytime anyone around my place of employment wonders why they need pedantic guys like me slowing down the process when they're on deadline, I'll just point them to this example...)
(Incidentally, the headline has been fixed since I first saw it this morning -- it now reads "Skateboarder attacks man..." -- but still, I think my point was made. Proofreaders... if you deal in words at all, we're your most valuable resource!)
Ever since she was a little girl, my mom wanted to own a horse ranch with a white board fence. Life, of course, doesn't work out the way we imagine it will when we're young -- that's a truth I've been struggling with myself lately -- but she did manage to get an approximation of her dream, at least. There've always been horses around the Bennion Compound, even before I came along. When I was a kid, she dabbled a little with breeding her mares. (I learned the facts of life by watching three foals enter the world, and one, sadly, that didn't quite make it.) And yes, she even got her white board fence, across the front of a hay pasture she and Dad bought from one of the neighbors. It wasn't Southfork by any means, but it was pretty good for our circumstances.
At its largest point, our little herd numbered five head, three of which were papered Arabians. But that was long ago, and time and entropy have taken their toll. This morning, my parents had to make the difficult decision to have one of Mom's two remaining horses put down. Her registered name was Misty Dawn, a derivation of her mother's name -- Desert Mist, or more familiarly, Misty -- and her sire's, Dantu (that's pronounced Dawn-Too, for the record). But we've always just called her Dawn, naturally.
I've had a couple inquiries from Loyal Readers as to my whereabouts and condition; apparently, the lack of tributes for the plethora of recently departed celebrities (which, as you all know, are usually like catnip for your humble host) has them worried about me. Your concern is much appreciated, folks, but rest assured that I'm alive and doing fine... mostly. I seem to have entered into another of those periods when I'm insanely busy at work, constantly chasing around on the weekends, and too damn exhausted in the evenings to accomplish anything more thought-intensive than shoveling food in the general direction of my mouth. This has been the pattern of my life for several years now -- somehow, I've managed to land myself in an industry that booms in the summertime, right when most people are finding ways to take it easy -- but I still haven't gotten used to it, and I honestly don't think I ever will. I'm easily distracted and inclined toward procrastination at the best of times, and when things get like this... well, blogging isn't the only thing I haven't managed to keep up with. And I'm feeling pretty damn frustrated about it, too. This isn't how I used to imagine my life was going to be. It was supposed to look a lot more like this:
Glamorous space babes offering me cocktails while I pursue galactic adventures aboard my somewhat phallic-looking rocketship? Yeah, wouldn't that be lovely... anyhow, I'm taking a mental-health day tomorrow, and among all the other items on my to-do list, I hope to get a couple of those tributes written. Keep your fingers crossed for me...
(Incidentally, more images like the one above can be found here. If you're into this sort of thing. Which obviously, I am.)
Courtesy of Lileks:
People! It takes all kinds to make a world. I just wish sometimes they’d go off and make one of their own.
If you don't happen to recognize him, that golden dude up there at the top of this entry is the Angel Moroni, an important figure in the LDS faith. Most Mormon temples are crowned by a Moroni statue; in these parts, where we have four temples in the Salt Lake Valley and two more in the adjoining valleys to the immediate north and south, they're a pretty unremarkable sight. But every once in a while, something snaps you out of your comfortable complacency and forces you to notice things that have long since faded into the background. Such as the meteorological consequences of placing a ten-foot-high statue covered in highly conductive metal on the highest point of a building that towers above its neighbors.
In other words, lightning struck this Moroni statue during one of the truly spectacular thunderstorms we had over the weekend. You can see that the electrical blast blackened his trumpet, arm, and face. It looks like it also zapped the sphere he's standing upon, or possibly the current emerged from the statue at this point as it was seeking ground. In other photos of the damage, I've seen a lightning rod protruding from the statue's head, so this bolt must've either missed the rod or else was so big that the rod made no difference. It must've been an incredible sight, if you'd happened to be looking in the right direction at the moment of impact.
This particular Moroni stands atop the Oquirrh Mountain Temple west of my house, a temple so brand-new that it hasn't even been dedicated yet. I wonder if the interior now smells, in addition to fresh paint and new carpeting, of ozone and slag?
It's a bleary-eyed Friday morning here in the Proofreader's Cave, deep in the bowels of one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake. One of my fellow proofers has been on vacation this week, so I've been doing the work of two, and naturally this has also coincided with a surge in output from our shared primary account. All of which means that I've been working my tail off, I'm fried, and I'd like nothing more right now than a window seat at the Buena Vista, a steady flow of Irish coffees, and absolutely no place to be and nothing to do for the next ten hours or so.
I've kept myself sane during the week by working on the following a little bit at a time, whenever I needed to tear my eyes away from the Chicago Manual of Style. Which has been more and more frequently as I've neared this morning. I have a feeling the rest of today is going to be an uphill slog. In any event, credit for this one goes to SamuraiFrog, who, in a display of great wisdom, chose to combine two separate but similar memes that've been making the rounds lately into one big one. Henceforth, my crotchety opinions on a great many things...
My buddy Jack Hattaway is preparing to ride in his second Lotoja Classic, a 206-mile bicycle race that runs from Logan, Utah, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in September. This time, however, he's doing it to raise funds for the important research being done high on the hill above our fair city at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Jack was planning to ride again anyhow, but he was inspired to make this year's race a bit more meaningful after watching a good friend battle -- and defeat -- melanoma. As it happens, The Girlfriend and I have recently had our own experiences with cancer and the Huntsman Institute -- not us, but involving people that matter to us -- so it's a cause near to our hearts as well. If my loyal readers will forgive me, I'm again going to ask everyone reading this to consider throwing in a couple of bucks for a worthy goal.
You can learn more details about Jack and why he's doing this at his donation page. I hope you'll click through and at least give it some thought.
If you're interested in the Lotoja Classic, here's the official site for that. And lastly, here is the little blurb I wrote about Jack's participation in the event last year.
Fourteen years ago Wednesday, Christopher Reeve -- a man I once callously dismissed as a second-rate has-been -- was critically injured when the horse he was riding in competition balked at jumping over an obstacle, and Chris was thrown. It was a mundane accident; at worst, he should have suffered only some bruises and a sore ego. Unfortunately, however, his hands tangled in the reins, which changed his trajectory so that he ended up crashing down directly on his head. We all know what happened next. Chris' neck was broken, and in a literal blink of an eye, he became the world's most famous quadriplegic.
He also became, in the years following the accident, a much better man than he had been before: a tireless advocate for medical research and an inspiration for those with spinal-cord injuries (and for people with a lot of other problems, too, and even for people with no problems at all). Chris was no saint, a point he emphasized in both of the books he wrote after the accident. He was frequently irritated by the media's insistence on calling him "a real-life Superman" (even though, for my money, that's exactly what he was). But he was a man who was handed one of the biggest lemons life can give you, and somehow he found a way to turn it into something of value, not only for himself, but for the rest of the world as well.
Chris is gone now -- he's been dead nearly five years, as strange as that is to contemplate -- and his beautiful and devoted wife Dana is, too. I'm not at all confident that there's anything waiting for us beyond this life, but if there is any kind of mercy in this universe, any sense of fairness, they are together, and Chris is free of that damned chair.
I bring all this up again because the news that so many years have passed since Chris' accident surprised me -- it doesn't seem that long -- and also because I believe Chris and Dana's lives are ones worth remembering and commemorating. So in that spirit, I going to ask everyone reading this to go visit the website for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Learn about the good these two managed to accomplish, and what continues to be done in their names. And if you can spare a few dollars in these difficult times, make a little contribution to help carry on their work. Or better yet, make a pledge to support the efforts of Matthew Reeve, Chris' son, as he runs in the New York Marathon on behalf of his father's foundation.
Chris didn't live long enough to walk again, but he was convinced that it was possible. I am, too. Let's help make it happen.
One more, because I'm just in that kind of mood. This one is courtesy of Samurai Frog.
Here's another Facebook meme, modified slightly for a bloggy format...
Continue reading "Facebook Meme: 65 Questions You've Probably Never Been Asked" »
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the grind. Hope you all enjoyed your holiday weekend. My own was somewhat... tumultuous, and far less recreational than I was hoping for when last we met. It’s a long story I don’t feel up to relating right now; I’ll just say that it involved medical stuff, and assure my three loyal readers that everything is fine now.
Perhaps there’s some lingering fallout from that story I don’t want to tell, or maybe it’s just because I’ve been off work for three days, but I’m having a very hard time getting my mental clutch to engage. Which means the ambitious blog entry I originally had in mind for today isn’t going to happen (nor is much of anything else, I suspect). Instead, I think I’m going to stay in the shallow end of the brain pool and play with some memes. Here’s one I picked up from Jaquandor:
I haven't done a silly Internet quiz in a while, so I happily followed Michael May's example with this one. The questions were leading -- if you're into adventure stories at all, you'll easily guess which character each question is describing -- but it killed five minutes and I'm pleased with the results:
Quiz brought to you by
Tripbase - Vacation Ideas
If you've never read King Solomon's Mines, run to the library or click over to Amazon straightaway. It's a great tale, even if it is an obvious product of its times (i.e., it's Victorian, and that includes Victorian attitudes toward race and gender), and Quatermain is an obvious inspiration for the quintessential adventurer of modern pop culture, Indiana Jones, if that piques your interest at all. There have been two film versions that I'm familiar with, the 1950 version with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger (which is pretty fun), and the 1985 version with Richard Chamberlain and a young Sharon Stone (this one can be a certain kind fun if you're into bad movies, but be warned before you press "play" that it can't be described as "good" in any of the usual ways). And of course Sean Connery played Quatermain in the execrable film League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he was the only good thing about that pile of steaming camel dung...
The Girlfriend has acquired the mildly annoying habit of stuffing straw wrappers, napkins, crumpled-up receipts, and other little bits of paper detritus into the cup holders of my beloved Mustang. It's not that big a deal, and I suppose it's really my own fault because I've always resisted hanging a trash bag from the gear shift like most people do. But still, neither of us ever seems to remember to remove this crap immediately when we get home, so it tends to build up and make my car look kinda white-trashy. And it reduces the functionality of the cup holder, too, since cups don't sit evenly on an uneven wad of junk. They tend to tip and tilt, and if they're full, they'll spill a little, which makes the cup holder and the debris layer sticky, and, well... it's just not an optimal situation, as my friend Jack would say.
So I was delighted yesterday to discover that this trash problem takes care of itself if you accelerate to 60 mph with the top down on a brilliant sunny evening. It's unclear whether it's strictly necessary to have Foghat's "Slow Ride" booming from the stereo in order to actuate the de-trashification process, but I recommend it anyhow because it's a totally bitchin' song.
***
(Incidentally, I realize I never reported on how the repairs to my car came out... there was a bit of heartburn because the body shop used a "pre-owned" door to replace my damaged one after promising to use a new one, but they did a really nice job of matching the paint and I doubt if 98% of people looking at the car could tell anything had ever happened. Still bugs me that the accident happened at all, but I guess it turned out all right.)
My friend Karen points us today to a strange little website based on the following premise: "If we started a movie on the day you were born, and stretched it over your lifespan, this is where you'd be in that movie."
You enter your birthdate and how long you expect to live, select your favorite movie from a list of well-known options, and the site will show you which scene in the film corresponds to the current moment of your life. My three loyal readers can, of course, guess which film I chose... it seems I'm right at the point where Han Solo is ushering his nervous passengers toward their ticket off Tatooine.
On the positive side, the really fun part of the movie is still ahead. Hopefully that says something about my life...
Good lord... I'm offline for a few days and Bea Arthur dies, the news media does its best to convince everyone that Captain Trips has broken out and we're all doomed, some bonehead decides it'd be really cool to photograph Air Force One over New York City without bothering to tell everyone not to panic when they see a low-flying jumbo jet being pursued by an F-16, and Arlen Specter switches parties.
You know, sometimes it's a good thing to be uninformed about what's going on in the world...
(Incidentally, my weekend road trip was grand. There was naturally a huge backlog waiting for me at the office this morning, but I'll try to find the time to jot down some travel stories in the next little while...)
Here in the clean light of a new morning, I realized the previous entry makes it appear that I'm in a really bad mental space. Well, I was for a couple of days, but let me assure any concerned loyal readers out there that I'm all right. I started recovering as soon as it became apparent the insurance companies weren't going to give me any hassles, and I mostly unclenched once the car went into the shop and it felt like some progress was being made. I'm still unhappy the accident happened at all, of course, and that my formerly "like-new" car isn't so much anymore. I get very attached to my things and I have a really hard time when something happens to them. But the worst of my emotional storm has passed. I just got wound up as I writing last night.
As I mentioned, the wreck was basically the final cue for a major case of the blues that's been lurking in the wings for a while. A lot of shit has been getting under my skin lately: anxiety over my job and how secure it may or may not be, irritation with all the hysterical political nonsense that's been going around (honestly, right-wing gun-lovers, no one is coming to take your Preciouses away, not even those nasty hobbitses, er, Democrats), disgust at the growing plague of panhandlers and scummy-looking kids that hang around the train platform near my office (I've got a lot of sympathy for the homeless, but enough is freakin' enough, people!). Disgust with a lot of things, really... the reinvigorated culture wars, willful ignorance and intractable bigotry, ubiquitous marketing, almost-as-ubiquitous graffiti, the lack of consideration people have for their fellow citizens, traffic, road construction that makes traffic worse, the fact that I can no longer find a radio station I really, honestly like, and a host of other complaints both large and small. I've been tired and cranky and fed up and feeling like everything went really wrong somewhere. I've been feeling, in fact, something like this:
Fortunately, I'm about to get my moment alone, and I don't even have to shoot anyone, no matter how tempting that might be. Well, alone plus one. The Girlfriend and I are setting off on a little road trip tomorrow, an exploration of southern Utah with a stop in Zion National Park, a detour to Vegas to check in with some friends we've not seen in a while, and finally, an outdoor concert starring my main man, Rick Springfield. Yes, I am a dork. No, worse, since I'm traveling over 100 miles to see him... I'm a groupie.
First, however, I've got a very important dinner date with the two people who made all this possible. Today is my parents' 45th wedding anniversary. I'm sure I am no less amazed at how long that seems than they are...
If you listen much to National Public Radio, one of the things you notice is how the names of all the hosts don't sound much like, say, your name. There's a lot of ethnic diversity in NPR's ranks, for one thing -- on any given broadcast, you're likely to hear the voices of Lakshmi Singh, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, or Sylvia Poggioli, for example -- but even the more "regular" names just have a certain ring to them: Neal Conan (any name from the Hyborian Age is guaranteed cool, right?), Jason Beaubien, Salt Lake's own Howard Berkes, Noah Adams, Steve Inskeep... these simply aren't names you're likely to encounter in the real world. I've long lusted after a cool name, the sort of name that invites respect and conjures images of exotic lands, daring deeds, and arcane knowledge. An NPR name.
Now, thanks to the link my buddy MikeG sent me this afternoon, I can have such a moniker. The formula is surprisingly simple:
Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.
And just like that my name becomes -- are you ready? -- Regjinald St. Goar.
Regjinald St. Goar, named for a delightful little village on the Rhine River in Germany. I like it! So what's yours?
How awesome is this headline that just came across my newsfeed?
I find myself imagining these guys facing off against these guys in a battle royale like the world has never seen. (Personally, my money's on Connery kicking Keith Richards' butt up and down the beach.)
Being as I am a hopeless nostalgic -- not to mention the incredibly odd mutant who actually, for the most part, liked high school -- I couldn't resist the latest meme from Jaquandor, which he titled "My So-Called High School Life." I am retaining that title, despite its derivation from a TV show I never watched, for lack of any more clever ideas.
There was another round of layoffs at work today, a big one. Looking for the positive aspects, it did take out a couple of people who've been thorns in my side, but also a few more friends, which really sucks. As before, I remain reasonably confident that my own job isn't going anywhere any time soon. However, watching the slow parade of the unfortunate march one by one into the HR office and then back to their cubes to collect their personal effects with a blank-eyed escort hovering nearby... well, I can think of grimmer sights but I prefer not to. The worst was seeing a sweet, soft-spoken man in his fifties struggle to control his tears as he took down his Ghosts calendar and laid it carefully into the top of a packed bankers box. I didn't speak to him, didn't say goodbye, and I wish I had. I was oddly embarrassed, as if I personally had done something to him merely by not getting my own phone call from HR. I think I can imagine what he was thinking, though. At his age -- not quite old, but a long way from the eager-eyed hipsters fresh out of college who swarm through our industry like goldfish in a pet store -- he was probably imagining how he's going to look in a blue smock with "Welcome to WalMart" printed on the chest.
Not quite as iconic an image as that famous portrait Dorothea Lange captured 73 years ago, but it haunts me just the same...
Yesterday over on Facebook, I was tagged by Kelly -- better known in these parts as Jaquandor -- to do a meme about my life as a geek. I of course complied immediately, because, well, it's a meme. I'm reposting the results here, with some tweaks to the formatting and a few comments that I've reconsidered:
I've been trying for over a week to find a suitable entry point into a touchy subject, to craft some kind of narrative or something, but everything I've tried has turned out sounding glib or melodramatic or was otherwise not the right approach. So I'm just going to get straight to the point.
You may have seen the recent item about two female junior-high-school teachers in Bountiful, Utah -- that's a sleepy bedroom community just north of SLC, for our out-of-state friends -- who were arrested for allegedly having sex with one of their students, a 13-year-old boy. Stories like this are not uncommon these days and I usually just tune them out because they seem to me more like a topic for The Jerry Springer Show than legitimate news. But in this case, my ears pricked up because, as it happens, I know one of the accused.
Valynne Bowers is an old classmate of mine. Bingham High School, Class of '87. I used to ride the bus with her, back when she was a teenage girl named Valynne Asay. I shared classes with her. I saw her only 18 months ago at our 20-year reunion. I consider her a friend. And because she is my friend, what I'm about to say will probably be dismissed as misguided loyalty. Take it that way if you wish. But the truth is Valynne's situation brings together a lot of thoughts I've had over the past decade or so about America's neurotic attitudes toward sex and young people.
Valynne has pleaded not guilty, and I choose to believe that until it's proven otherwise in court. But even if there was no question that she did it, I could not bring myself to condemn her. And no, it's not just because she's an old friend. It's because I believe people have reasons for doing what they do, even the things that society frowns upon, and especially when those things involve sex. Sex is complicated and irrational, tied up in equations of self-esteem and power that aren't always as black and white as we like to pretend.
Like the title says, "Blarg." I feel like I've been dragged sideways through an old-fashioned keyhole, then shaken out and tossed over the back of a chair like a pair of unwashed Levi's. Which is my colorful way of saying that the past week has been unusually rough. I'm utterly drained, in just about every way you can think of: physically, intellectually, emotionally. Soon to be financially, too, thanks to that tax situation I mentioned a while back.
So what's been going on that's so terrible? Well, for one thing, there have been a couple of items in the news this week that have hit me like a solid fist to the belly; they'll be getting their own blog entries when I get the chance to write them up. I've also had to contend with my semi-annual journey into the Black Hole of Depression; it hits every year around this time, probably as a result of the gloomy, final sputters of winter, as well as the usual annual reminders of things I prefer to keep to myself. Let's just say that every so often, I notice I'm a long, long way from being the man I used to believe I was, and the life I used to think I was destined to live. I can't help but imagine my 21-year-old self would be incredibly disappointed in my 39-year-old self, and that really gets me down.
The big problems this week, however, have been health-related. The Girlfriend and I have both been sicker than dogs, and, in her case, things got bad enough to require a trip to the emergency room.
"Oh, how I love the future. How else would I be able to relive my past?"
--Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer
You know, there's something curiously satisfying about listening to dusty old CDs while you do long-neglected household chores...
Here's one of my rediscoveries, Bonnie Raitt performing "Angel from Montgomery," a beautiful, sad, authentic song I loved back around 1990 or so and then somehow forgot about until today:
It's a huge cliche, of course, but they really don't write 'em like this anymore. At least, not that I ever hear.
A health-related PSA seen on a placard on the train last night:
Breathe Easier
Get ScreenedTheir is a good chance it will save your life.
Their is a chance? I can't tell you how much that hurts...
Just reposting a couple of things I saw out in the 'sphere today that resonated with me.
Have you ever come slightly awake early in the morning -- not fully conscious, just somewhat aware of your surroundings -- and known that everything is just perfect: The sheets are smooth and soft beneath you, not tangled for a change, the room temperature and ambient light levels are optimal, and you don't even have the urge to pee. After a moment, you begin to sink back into a deeper layer of sleep, like a U-boat that's popped up for a look around and is now submerging into the cool, quiet darkness, and you can sense that you're experiencing the most restful, contented sleep you've had in weeks...
And then the bloody alarm clock goes off and sends your heartrate into the stratosphere.
Yeah, that was how I started today. I've had a headache ever since.
Sigh.
Really, the melding of pose, composition, lighting, and caption is just sublime:
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I've never seen a Jim Jarmusch film, and frankly his stuff doesn't sound like anything I would enjoy -- I never have developed much taste for artsy independent cinema that "breaks many conventions of traditional Hollywood filmmaking"; I happen to like traditional Hollywood conventions, thank you -- but I did find the following Jarmusch quote interesting:
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to."
Authenticity as opposed to originality. Makes sense to me. I knew at an early age that much of Star Wars was ripped off from Flash Gordon serials, Dune, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories, and yet somehow those elements recombined into something wholly new and, at least before it became a brand instead of merely a movie, terribly exciting and pleasing.
This quote was happily yoinked from Roberson's Interminable Ramble... which handily proves the point, if you think about it.
One of Utah's best-known and best-loved public figures, the businessman Larry H. Miller, died yesterday afternoon at the age of 64. He'd been in poor health for some time and had recently had both legs amputated at the knees due to complications from his Type II diabetes.
Nothing to say, really, I just thought this was a cool picture. You can find more mermaids and other interesting stuff at the photographer's blog.
I kinda hate to admit this, but a while back I finally bowed to the inevitable and allowed myself to assimilated into the Facebook collective -- feel free to look me up over there if you're into that scene.
If you've never played there, Facebook has its own version of the memes that drift around the blogosphere, and over the past few weeks I've been tagged approximately 432,000 times for one called "25 Random Things About Me." I'm cross-posting the list I came up with here, for anyone who may be interested. (Long-time readers may already know some of this stuff; it's not easy to come up with entirely original material all the time...)
Anyhow, meme-age below the fold:
I don't know if 2008 was actually more eventful than other recent years, but '08 certainly felt more... I don't know... frenetic? That's not quite the right word, but it's in the neighborhood. Certainly '08 was more exhausting than other twelve-month blocks of time. I recall experiencing more moments of feeling utterly drained and used up in the last year than in the entire decade preceding it. Of course, that could be simply of my inexorable trudge toward middle age. I am 39 years old now, and I'm finding, to my horror, that I just don't absorb the hits as well as I used to. Or it could be that the hits lately have been more intense...
Continue reading "Long-Overdue Year-End Wrap-Up... Now with Extra Hyphens!" »
Depression II, the sequel no one wants to see, has finally premiered at a business near me. Meaning that 13 of my coworkers, including some people I consider friends as well as colleagues, got laid off today. I personally escaped the ax, and I feel reasonably safe given my position and current workload, but damn it's been a lousy day. The way these things are handled in this liability-conscious and paranoid age tends to drag out the process over several hours, and the constant sense of dread, the wondering if your phone is going to be the next one to ring with the call to come up to HR, is utterly exhausting. The metaphor that kept coming to my mind is the Curse of the First Born scene from The Ten Commandments, when the Hebrews hunker down in their homes while the evil green fog slinks through the streets outside, killing unnamed extras by the dozens. If another round of this seems imminent, I'm seriously tempted to paint my cubicle with lamb's blood.
After a day like this, nothing is really very funny, but this LOLcat struck me as... appropriate:
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I imagine a lot of my coworkers are in this condition right now. Me, I'm just worn out. Off to bed...
It's kind of a silly thing to be thinking about now that we're nearly a full month into 2009, but with the untimely passing of Shadow, the Bennion Family Border Collie, as well as various other distractions during my holiday break, I never got around to doing my customary year-end wrap-up entries. I really dislike loose ends, so if you'll bear with me for being so horribly untimely, I'd like to do some catch-up work now.
First up is a meme I first did back in December of 2007. Brian and Ilya are treating this like an annual tradition, so I guess I will now as well.
The instructions on this one are simple: repost the first sentence of the first blog entry in each of the previous year's 12 months. I guess the idea is to try and see if there's any kind of pattern or recurring obsessions or something. So, without further ado:
When you are driving through a snowstorm and resting your elbow on a frozen turkey that's on the seat beside you, your whole body tends to feel cold.
And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
Like everybody else in the country, I've been captivated by yesterday's news story about an airliner ditching in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of birds during its ascent phase. The amazing part of the story is, of course, that all 155 people aboard the plane survived with only minor injuries.
Now, whenever these sorts of events happen, the survivors, witnesses, and press inevitably start throwing around the word "miracle." I know there are a lot of people out there who believe in genuine, literal miracles, i.e., times when God personally intervenes in order to save lives. I don't. I'm an agnostic -- I don't deny the possibility of a God, but I have a very hard time believing He plays much of an active role in what goes on down here on this little rock. However, I acknowledge that many of my fellow Americans disagree with me on this idea, and when you come right down to it, describing positive outcomes as "miracles" is one of those things that's not worth getting worked up over, even if I personally find it tiresome.
Still... I've got my limits.
Karen pointed me to "The Blogadilla Swedish Furniture Name Generator," from which I learned what I would be called if you could buy me at a certain well-known furniture store the size of your average housing development:
I look comfy, don't I? Wouldn't you just love to assemble me in your home today? If you buy now, I'll even throw in an order of those yummy little meatballs they sell in the cafeteria...
For some reason, my coworkers keep emailing me the following:
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I'm really not sure why...
I received an email this morning from a concerned loyal reader, asking if I was all right. It made me realize that I overplayed my hand a bit in that mysterious post yesterday, and possibly I've caused some people to worry unnecessarily. So even though this isn't the long entry I wanted to present on this subject, I've decided to go ahead and release the news that's weighed so heavily on my mind for the last week:
Shadow, the Bennion Family Border Collie, whom you may remember has been fighting cancer off and on for about two years, died on December 30.
He had completed his second round of chemotherapy about seven weeks earlier and my parents and I believed him to be at last cancer-free. He was, however, afflicted with some side effects from the chemo as well as the usual complaints of old age -- he had arthritis in his hips, among other problems -- and in the final week of his life he was struggling against what the vet initially believed to be a bronchial infection. The antibiotic treatment for that illness seemed to be having little effect, though, so he was scheduled for an ultrasound last Tuesday to explore other possibilities -- the worst scenario being a third attack from the damn cancer. But he didn't make it to that appointment. Instead, he passed away in the night before, in my mother's closet, where he'd always gone to hide when summer thunderstorms darkened the sky.
I know that not everyone likes animals or keeps pets, and that some who do view them as little more than furniture. All I can say to those people is that that's not how my family does things. The Bennion animals have always been a very real part of this family, and Shadow was even more so than any other pet we've ever had. We all lived together under the same roof in his early years; later, he divided his time between my parents' house and my own. (If you don't know, I share property with my folks in an arrangement I like to call "the Bennion Compound.") He was a constant presence around here, and for my dad especially, a constant companion. Dad took that dog with him everywhere, and Shadow's death has hit him very, very hard. I'm grieving for my father as much as for Shadow.
I'm still going to write that tribute I mentioned yesterday, the one that's been so difficult for me to start. I want to tell a few stories, and hopefully give you some idea of what a remarkable and wonderful being Shadow really was, and why it's so difficult to say goodbye to him. For tonight, though, I thought it best to clear the air. To anyone who may have gotten the wrong idea yesterday, I'm sorry to have worried you. What can I say? I do have a flair for the melodramatic at times.
Here's one final thing, a memorial card that my lovely Anne made up for my parents to send to their friends:
As always, click to embiggen. If you're interested.
For those looking for your first fix until regular blogging resumes, here's a quiz courtesy of Konstantin:
Ghost Rider? I'll confess to not having much familiarity with this character, aside from the Nicholas Cage movie and glimpses of the classic comic-book covers in my Cool Older Cousin's room when I was a kid. (The COC had lots of stuff that I found both enticing and a little bit scary, which of course is why I thought he was so cool in the first place. My dim memories of his interests are like a catalog of early to mid-70s teenage macho: Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange comics, Bruce Lee posters, kung fu throwing stars and dumb-bells, heavy metal album covers, beaded curtains and blacklights... it was all so arcane and eerie and wonderful.)
Anyway, I've always thought that Ghost Rider was at least visually awesome, so I can live with this. What're your results?
One of my three loyal readers sent me an instant message this afternoon which said, essentially, "update your damn blog already." So I guess I ought to pop in and explain that, no, I have not been run over by a monorail, kidnapped by Somali pirates, or deported to the Phantom Zone to spend eternity sandwiched between Ursa and Non. Not that being sandwiched with Ursa would necessarily be a bad thing. I used to have this Superman II program book with lots of glossy pictures, you see, and I thought she was much more interesting than scrawny old Lois Lane, what with those slits on the arms and legs of her outfit.
But I digress, and I haven't even gotten started yet.
The thing is, something happened over my holiday break that I want to write about, and it's turning out to be a difficult entry for reasons that will become clear when I finally post the thing. I don't mean to be cryptic -- many of you out there already know what I'm talking about -- it's just... I want to do justice to this topic, and it's taking time to get it right. Or to get it at all. I don't have writer's block exactly, but it's... well, again, it's just not an easy thing to write.
I'll try to throw out some bones to satisfy those who need a Bennion fix, but just be aware that I'm rather preoccupied by this one item right now.
Here's a random bit of flotsam I've been intending to post for a while, a really cool photo of the great silent-film comedian Buster Keaton taken late in his life:
I found it over at Booksteve's Library, where it's theorized that this image has something to do with a number of beer commercials Keaton made for television in the 1950s. (Ironic, considering Keaton was an alcoholic.)
As I said, I've been meaning to post it anyway because I like Keaton and I like the moody, noir-ish atmosphere captured in the pic. But it's got some special significance to me tonight, as I sit alone with my thoughts in a dark and quiet house. I'm feeling pretty moody myself, for reasons I'll explain later. In the meantime, just enjoy this uncommon look at a genuine Hollywood legend...
If you drive due west from Salt Lake City, past the Great Salt Lake and out across the West Desert, you'll arrive in an hour or two -- depending on how heavy your right foot happens to be -- at a dusty outpost town called Wendover. Well, technically you'll find two Wendovers out that way, because the town straddles the Utah-Nevada border. On the Nevada side, a handful of casinos and other, ahem, adult businesses lend West Wendover a certain glitz and affluence. Wendover, Utah, on the other hand, is much quieter, darker, and sadder, a fading remnant of more important days.
...first thing after a foolishly late night of debating politics with an old friend followed by very little sleep:
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McMuffin anyone?
I hope everyone reading had a nice Christmas or other mid-winter holiday unique to your tradition and preference. My own was unexpectedly good, with much more contentment and much less angst and drama than in years past. Of course, the weather sucked. Seriously, after three days of more-or-less constant snowfall and four sessions of driveway clearing, you can have your winter frickin' wonderland. (God, my shoulders are sore.)
My corporate overlords have kindly granted me the next week off, so, among lots of other projects I need to do around the house, I hope to complete some unfinished blog entries that have been hanging over my head for a while now. Stay tuned...
My lovely Girlfriend has informed me that yesterday's entry may fall into the dread category of "Too Much Information." To anyone whose sensibilities were offended by my description of my physical symptoms, I apologize.
Still... I thought the hand-cranked egg beaters were a pretty powerful image. Sometimes I actually believe I might be one of those writer fellows you hear so much about...
Chugging a Starbucks grande caffe mocha and then immediately going to The Old Spaghetti Factory for a gargantuan plate of spinach tortellini with alfredo sauce is a really bad idea. I had the lousy night's sleep last night -- during which my torso felt like a 50-gallon drum packed with Crisco that's being gently whipped with a set of old-fashioned hand-cranked egg beaters -- followed by the sour stomach all day today to prove it. Ugh. Off now for another swig of Pepto... hope everyone reading this is doing better than me.
Remember that slightly off-color item I posted last week, the one about the 130,000 inflatable novelty breasts that had gone missing somewhere between China and Australia? Well, they've been found... turns out there was a paperwork error and the plastic mammaries went to Melbourne instead of Sydney. Employees of Ralph, the men's mag that purchased the boobies, are even now frantically stuffing them into bags so the holiday issue of the magazine will go out on time.
I must confess to being somewhat disappointed. In the words of one commenter over at Boing Boing, I was looking forward to reports of these things washing ashore somewhere. On the positive side, the article I linked above says that Ralph "is expected to break the Guinness world record for the most boobs given away at one time."
It's the story that keeps on giving, I tell you!
I can't say I'm unhappy with the results of this "Which Action Hero Would You Be?" quiz:
Suave, sophisticated... yeah, I like the sound of that. And I do look good in a tux, on the very, very rare occasion I'm called upon to wear one. I find it kind of weird, however, that I scored equally on Bond and Batman. What do these characters have in common, aside from access to high-tech gadgets and seemingly unlimited financial resources? Hm. Well, maybe I just answered my own question.
As for the equivalency of Indy and Zorro, well, I suppose they both use a whip, even if Zorro is better known for his swordplay. But wait, none of the questions asked about whips. And since when is The Terminator a hero? Strange...
Via Jim by way of Konstantin.
Something occurred to me yesterday while I was watching a re-run of The Incredible Hulk on our local RTN affiliate. Well, actually it occurred to me during a commercial break: of all the "as seen on TV" crap products that used to fill the airwaves with their seductive flim-flammery during the '70s and '80s, how is it that the only one that seems to have followed us into the 21st century is the Chia Pet? Seriously, this is what turns out to be the timeless kitsch classic that endures? Whatever became of the Pocket Fisherman, Mister Microphone, and those el-cheapo plastic boxes that were supposed to let you mold snow bricks and build igloos but somehow never quite worked as advertised? I wonder about these things...
Incidentally, that episode of The Hulk was an unbelievable confluence of nostalgic awesomeness... first of all, it was The Incredible Hulk, a series I watched pretty faithfully as a kid (and yet oddly, I can't really remember a single individual plotline; of course, they were all pretty much the same plot, weren't they?). It was set in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco (even though it was obviously filmed on the Universal backlot in Burbank), and the story involved a young cop struggling to choose between the path of peace offered by his zen martial-arts instructor and the violent quest for revenge advocated by his older brother. The older brother was Gerald McRaney of Simon & Simon, another childhood fave series, while the young cop was played by none other than my main man Rick Springfield. The episode felt like it might have been intended as a stealth pilot for a vehicle for Rick, as by the end of it he's become the new master of the dojo (following the death of the old master) and a private eye who promises to take only the clients he can really help. If it was a pilot, it's too bad it wasn't picked up... it might've been interesting. Kung Fu meets The Rockford Files, maybe...
A few excerpts from a particularly astute piece at the ever-amusing McSweeny's called "Fifty Years of Popular Songs Condensed into Single Sentences":
A pretty good laugh, courtesy of SamuraiFrog:
Paris Hilton can’t find a record label willing to release her second album. Between that and Ann Coulter having her jaw wired shut, atheists appear to be losing the argument.
In an unrelated note, the Frog also mentions that remakes have been announced this week of more movies from the '80s, specifically They Live, Romancing the Stone, and Arthur. While new versions of Romancing the Stone and Arthur sound like disasters waiting to happen, remaking They Live actually isn't such a bad idea. I just watched this one last week for the first time in 20 years (good lord, how I hate saying things like that!), and I think it's the exceedingly rare case I mentioned the other day of an idea that didn't live up to its potential and deserves a second attempt. It had a great premise (an ordinary joe accidentally discovers there are aliens among us disguised as normal human beings, and that they're controlling us with subliminal messages in our advertising and entertainment) and, if anything, the film's social commentary probably applies even more now than it did back in 1988 (people are more obsessed than ever with mass media and self-destructive materialism), but holy crap was that movie a mess. All set-up, no pay-off, and a big disappointment coming from one of my favorite directors, John Carpenter. So, assuming that They Live Redux is more thoughtful than the original and not just an amped-up FX spectacle, this is one remake I might actually be interested in seeing...
We interrupt your regular programming for an important historical note: Today is the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition, the disastrous social experiment that did very little to curb the behavior it was designed to end, but did manage to make some very bad people very rich and powerful while bringing appalling levels of violence to the streets of American cities. (See also Drugs, War on.) As I've noted before, I find it endlessly amusing that my home state of Utah, home of the tee-totaling Mormons, was the one that cast the deciding vote in favor of repeal. (In a nice bit of historical symmetry, Utah was also the deciding vote in ratifying the Constitutional amendment that created Prohibition in the first place, so perhaps it was only fitting that we undid it as well.)
I've been on quite a run of epic nerdiness lately -- you're very kind to say you hadn't noticed, but please, we both know better -- and I'm beginning to worry about alienating that segment of readers who don't know an alluvial damper from a flux capacitor. Therefore, as a favor to all you non-fanboys and fangirls out there, I promise that none of the following links has anything whatsoever to do with Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other shows whose titles I used to scribble on my notebook covers back in elementary and middle school...
I was just reading an interview with Dan DiDio, an executive at DC Comics, and I thought the following remark (made in reference to the challenges comics people face with some of their long-running characters) tied in quite nicely to I was trying to say about remakes in the previous entry:
You have to remember, a lot of our fan base has been reading comics 20 or 30 years now. They've seen a lot of stories and a lot of things. We're always trying to find a way to give them something new but also give them exactly what they want.
That's the same challenge J.J. Abrams is facing, isn't it? He's got to do something new with Star Trek, but he's also got to give us, well, Star Trek, or else he fails. I certainly wouldn't want his job...
I guess the vacation is finally over when you've used the last of the little soaps and shampoos you nicked from the hotel.
Incidentally, if you're going to San Francisco anytime soon, I highly recommend the Parc 55. Its lemongrass-scented soaps are really delightful...
For the record, I think "Rickrolling" is one of the lamest, most annoying Internet memes ever cooked up -- as I noted recently, I don't like practical jokes and/or pranks, and this particular bait-and-switch is really obnoxious if you're trying to find something on YouTube or elsewhere and you end up with this crap instead -- but I gotta say, the big moment in this morning's Macy's Parade was inspired:
Bravo to Rick Astley for playing along, and boo to that doofus Matt Lauer for ruining the surprise. Now, how many folks watching out there in the heartland do you suppose actually got the joke?
Hey, everyone... if you're actually reading this on Thanksgiving (which I like to refer to as Mass Consumption Day), I can only assume it's after you've all finished dinner, right? If not, shouldn't you be off, um, consuming?
Anyhow, I just wanted to drop a quick little note here: In his column this week at amctv.com, the ubiquitous John Scalzi lists all the things for which he's thankful in the realm of sci-fi movies. I agree with him on pretty much all of these items, except for the one about special effects (sorry, I'm a big fan of actual, tangible miniatures, although I concede the CG stuff is getting better all the time). I found one of Scalzi's items especially resonant:
I'm thankful I'm almost 40 years old and still want a lightsaber and a speeder bike.
My geeky ego has taken quite a beating over the past ten years. From the Great Fanboy Prequel Wars that trashed the reputation of my favorite movie series and revealed one of my boyhood heroes to have feet of clay, to the remakes of damn near every movie or TV show I've ever loved, I've had to endure the diminishing, eclipsing, or outright dismissal of things that I used to think would never go away. Things that loom so large in my personal history and psyche that I've always assumed they must mean as much to everyone else as they mean to me. I know... naive, even childish. There have been times, especially lately with all the talk about the new Star Trek, when I've felt like a damn fool for clinging to my increasingly obsolete obsessions, when I've wondered what's wrong with me that I apparently don't see this stuff the same way everybody else does, i.e., as quaint old relics that were cool in their day but are now just silly and needing to be replaced. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on it, but these times of self-doubt have been genuinely painful.
But then something comes along like that video of the dueling sailors, and I feel that old familiar rush of endorphins and I realize that, yeah, I still love this stuff, in spite of what the rest of the world may think about it. Moreover, I'm glad that I still love this stuff, that the critics and cynics haven't managed to entirely wipe out my enjoyment of it. I'm thankful indeed that somewhere deep down inside my wounded, stressed-out, overburdened, and all-too-often-exhausted grown-up mind, there is still a happy, carefree ten-year-old walking through his small, boring, rural town with a comic book rolled up in his back pocket, dreaming of slicing down trees with a real lightsaber or whipping through the fields in a vehicle that's magically floating three feet above the ground. Sometimes, that kid still finds a way to speak to me, and sometimes I still find a way to be him. And surely that's a good and even necessary thing...
Happy Thanksgiving, my friends.
Every few months, some researcher somewhere releases the results of a new survey or study that demonstrates yet again how astoundingly ignorant the average American is about, well, everything: science, history, politics, other countries, and especially our own country. I never quite know what to think about these surveys. On a good day, it seems impossible to me that my fellow citizens can be so stupid, that the surveys must be biased, or filled with poorly worded questions that lead the subjects too much. Then there are other days when my grumpy-old-mannish tendencies are ascendant and it's all too easy to believe that we 'muricans are a bunch of hopelessly myopic rubes obsessed with sex, celebrity, consumer goods, and religion (these days often coincide with elections, oddly enough).
Earlier this week, political blogger Kevin Drum made note of yet another one of these surveys, this one conducted annually by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, on which "fewer than a third of the 2,500 randomly selected test takers managed to score higher than 60%." Kevin included a link to the test itself, so naturally I had to click on over there and experience for myself this brutally difficult thing that so few otherwise fully functional adults could manage to pass.
Not to brag or anything, but I scored 93%, based on correctly answering 31 out of 33 questions. And the two I missed were both "Doh! How could I get those wrong!" types of things.
Now, I honestly don't consider my all that smart or well-informed, so I am utterly flabbergasted by all the results of this survey. And also more than a little scared. Especially terrifying is the chart of "additional findings," which indicates that, as poorly as the average citizen did on this test, our elected officials -- the ones who are running the country and thus, presumably, know a thing or two about it -- did worse in most categories. For years, our society has been playing up the "ordinary joe-ness" of our politicians, voting for the guys we'd most like to have over for a barbecue, and sneering at intellectual "elites." It looks like we've gotten what we've been asking for.
One more little serving of food for thought: the aforementioned Kevin points out that "[o]ther ISI findings, by the way, include these: the more education you have, the better you do; it doesn't matter much what kind of university you went to, whether you go to church, or what your politics are; watching lots of TV is bad for your score; and reading lots of history is good for your score." All of which ought to be obvious, I suppose...
It was nice this afternoon, unseasonably warm, and I've been feeling antsy all day because a bout of insomnia last night completely hosed my ability to focus, so I decided to walk down to the local bookstore during my lunch and pick up something I've been meaning to buy for a while. I'm used to encountering homeless people and/or eccentrics along the way, but I rarely take note of what they're doing unless they're somehow threatening.
Today, however, I couldn't help but do a double-take at the sixty-something guy in a bright blue parka who was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, his face tilted up toward the sky, arms straight out as he spun himself around and around in a tight circle, like a toddler who's just figured out how to make themselves dizzy. If you've been reading this blog for any time at all, I'm sure you know what he reminded me of:
I watched the guy for a couple of minutes, but he never did transform into his superhero identity. He must've forgotten a vital step...
Another meme courtesy of Jaquandor. I'm such a sucker for these things...
Anyhow, this meme apparently started its life as one of those "getting to know your friends" e-mail quizzes but has now morphed into something more bloggy. It comes in two parts, a "things you've done" list followed by some questions.
The other night, I dined alone at a local greasy spoon called Johanna's Kitchen before meeting a friend to see the new Bond movie. I don't often get the chance to just hang out on my own like that anymore, so I relish the experience when it presents itself. I sat at the counter like I remember the old guys doing when I was a kid, I indulged in some fine people-watching, and I savored every last bite of a mushroom-Swiss burger the size of my head.
This being the 21st Century and all, there was of course a flat-screen TV mounted above the counter. Normally, I hate that, because public TVs are almost inevitably tuned to some sporting event, and I don't care one bit about sports. In fact, I find the screaming crowds and over-excited announcers to be downright bad for my digestion. Thankfully (and unexpectedly), this TV was set to the History Channel, specifically a documentary about the Battle of Gettysburg, so I found myself enjoying occasional buzzes of recognition whenever the camera lingered on a place I recall from my Gettysburg trip earlier this year. I just love those moments when I'm able to point at a TV screen and exclaim, "Hey, I've been there!" But that's kind of beside the point of this post.
Getting at last to my point, during each commercial break in the program, there was an ad for a Civil War-themed video game. (Gotta love that synergy!) The sound was down low, so the first time the ad ran, I wasn't certain I'd heard the voiceover correctly. I paid closer attention on the next break, and sure enough, the narration said exactly what I thought it said the first time. While a computer-generated man in a blue wool coat and a forage cap runs around the screen carrying a musket, a deep, "movie-trailer-guy" type voice breathlessly proclaims, "These are the missions that flew under the radar!"
Does anyone notice anything... odd... about that particular metaphor being used in conjunction with a game set in the 1860s? Or is it just me? Think about it...
I'm not sure of the original provenance of the following quote -- I got it from SamuraiFrog, who didn't post a link back to the source -- but I thought it was worth passing along:
Gail Simon, current writer on Wonder Woman: “In general, I'm very skeptical of any fake irony when dealing with Wonder Woman. If we're getting some kind of post-modern satire of the Lynda Carter series, I'd rather they just pass on the whole idea entirely. Christopher Reeve showed that the noble characters work best when played nobly. Winking at the audience insults everyone involved.”
For the record, I have no particular affection for the character Wonder Woman or the old Lynda Carter TV series (although Lynda Carter herself was -- and still is -- quite yummy). I just happen to agree with the sentiment being expressed. I dislike remakes in general, but I really hate the ones that treat the original source material as a joke...
I read last week in a couple of different places that JVC, the last electronics manufacturer still making VHS-format videocassette recorders, has stopped production of standalone VCR units. Those VCR/DVD combo players will probably live on for a while, but for all intents and purposes, this is the end, at long last, of the VHS era.
I can already hear the smart-aleck kids out there in our studio audience murmuring, "good riddance," and I suppose I can understand why. The lowly VHS tape doesn't begin to compare to modern digital media in terms of video and audio quality, it's hopelessly bulky compared to slender DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, and it's subject to wear and tear that reduces fidelity every time you play your favorite movie. Like the much-maligned 8-track audio format, VHS is something we look back upon from the comfort of our more advanced times and can't believe anyone ever thought it was acceptable or cool.
But, as I'm sure my three loyal readers are already anticipating, I've got something of a soft spot for this obsolete format, and also, believe it or not, for 8-tracks. I think people have forgotten just how revolutionary these two media really were, and we should take a moment to properly eulogize the vanguard of the media-on-demand world we now enjoy.
There are two possible explanations for this recent photo of me. One is that the very talented and way-cool motion-graphics designers at my place of employment have been having some Halloween fun with Photoshop. And the other is that there was something odd about the flu shot I had a couple days ago...
Beware the Moon!
Well, enough of that heavy political stuff. Today is Halloween, so how about we have some fun? Just to start things off, here's a meme I found over at SamuraiFrog's place:
Nothing irritates me faster or more thoroughly than when some finger-wagging scold takes it upon themselves to save the rest of the community from the creeping stain of immorality instead of simply minding their own damn business and letting others go about theirs. This sort of thing, unfortunately, goes on all the time here in my home state, something which I've been depressingly aware of since I was a fairly young boy. Not a month goes by, it seems, without a letter-to-the-editor from some ninny who thinks the windows of Victoria's Secret ought to be painted black, or news of yet another effort to "simplify" Utah's ridiculously arcane liquor laws. Just this week, I've encountered two major eye-rollers from the front lines of the never-ending culture war:
Frutiger 57Cn is the ugliest font in the world. It's even worse than that "futuristic computer" font from the '70s, the one you saw on doors and packing crates on Buck Rogers.
Also, my one co-worker who likes to whistle while he works is driving me batshit.
That is all.
Some time back in the dim mists of history -- farther back than I really want to admit -- The Girlfriend and I discovered this neat little place called The Organ Loft. I've written about it before, but for those of you who are just joining us, I should explain that The Loft is an unassuming little building in South Salt Lake wherein resides an unexpected treasure: one of the few surviving theater pipe organs of the type that were designed and manufactured in the early 20th century to accompany silent movies. Now, I'm the sort who would be satisfied if the organ had simply been preserved for people to look at, but the really cool thing about The Loft is that its owner puts it to use. Once or twice a month during the fall, winter, and spring, you can see silent movies there with live music (and sound effects!) played on the Mighty Wurlitzer, just like you would have experienced if you'd been around in about 1925.
It's great fun, and for several years, Anne and I were regular fixtures around the place. We went frequently enough that we -- or at least I, since I was the one who always made our reservations -- got to be known by name. Every time we walked through the door, the owner and host, Larry Bray, would greet me with a jaunty, "Good evening, Mr. Bennion." It was curiously gratifying to be recognized like that; it made us feel like we had a personal investment in the place, like we were in a friend's entertainment room rather than an impersonal movie theater. It made us feel like, well, somebodies instead of just run-of-the-mill nobodies, like everyone else.
Just overheard at the office: "I'm no good at instant messaging. If I was forced to think at the same pace as my typing, I'd only be fit for government work."
One of the amusing/frustrating things about what I do for a living is that few people actually understand what I do for a living. Seriously, no one knows what the hell a proofreader actually does. When I'm introduced to people at parties and the inevitable "what do you do?" question comes up, my answer is usually followed by polite nods and something like, "uh-huh, uh-huh... so what do you do?" I think most folks have a vague sense that I'm the last, best defense against misspelled words (which is certainly one aspect of what I do), but the intricacies of the Chicago Manual, the vagaries of client-specific stylistic quirks, and the transcendent beauty of the serial comma -- these are all usually quite beyond the imagination of the uninitiated. That's to be expected, though; I wouldn't know the ins and outs of an investment banker's job, either.
The thing that's really difficult for me to swallow is the confusion about the role of proofing within my own company. Just the other day, for example, one of my colleagues on the proofreading team received the following from a coworker:
Hi Proofer X* –
I know you’re slammed, but wondered if you could send a brief (2 sentence) description of what exactly the Account Y* proofreaders look for when they review Account Y* documents.
What my immediate response lacked in diplomacy, it made up for in accuracy: "Proofreaders: we keep you from looking stupid.”
My colleague immediately amended that with, "…when we’re not too busy trying to keep from looking stupid ourselves … "
Well, after a few more exchanges of this smart-alecky caliber, someone finally came up with the definitive word on what it is, exactly, that we do... and, naturally enough as it came from literary, over-educated types who always had delusions of doing something much grander with our lives, it was in the form of a haiku, which I will now share with my three loyal readers:
Despair and blackness
Send proof that it is worth it
The emptiest void
That may not mean much to the average joe, but trust me, to those of us who hunt the wild apostrophe on a daily basis, this is frackin' brilliant. Really. Didn't you catch the pun? Brilliant, I say!
* Names changed to protect the not-so-innocent.
How many times a day do I realize what year we're living in and say exactly this to myself?
more animals
Of course, on the positive side, there may not be any flying cars or starships around, but we're not eating soylent wafers or dodging homicidal cyborgs. That's something, right?
I hope it isn't some kind of omen for how my day's going to go that I ran out of deodorant this morning with one pit left to swipe.
Yep, it's turning out to be one of those weeks. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write something more later...
The Girlfriend tends to be something of a homebody, so our Friday evenings together are usually spent curled on the couch with Taco Bell or Totino's pizzas, watching DVDs. Not the healthiest of lifestyles, I know, but pleasing in its own greasy, slothful way. Just a few minutes ago, however, she called with a rather unexpected suggestion:
She: "How about if I pick you up after work and we go hang out at Gateway?"
(For my non-local readers, Gateway is "an open-air contemporary destination" -- i.e., a shopping mall without a roof -- on the west side of Salt Lake, only a few blocks from my office.)
Me: "Um, okay."
She (after a moment's pause): "I miss people. And activity. And... and urban stuff."
Me: "San Francisco?"
She: "Yes..."
Me: "You know Gateway isn't going to compare, right?"
She (rather forlornly): "I know... but it's the best we've got around here..."
Kids, consider this a PSA on the potential dangers of leaving home. You may just find out that home isn't all that cool...
When Anne and I left for San Francisco, it was basically still summer around here: temperatures in the mid-80s and jackets gathering dust in the closet. We came home to find the first layer of snow on the mountain peaks and frost on the car windows in the morning. What a difference a week can make.
Since we're unquestionably into Utah's all-too-brief fall season (there's possible valley snow forecasted for this weekend), I thought it might be fun to do the Autumn Meme I saw over at Electronic Cerebrectomy the other night:
It sounds strange, but after spending a week in San Francisco, with its cosmopolitan and determinedly liberal -- some would even say libertine -- spirit, I kind of forgot what it's like here in the Land of Zion. Fortunately, as I've been catching up on my blog and newspaper reading from last week, I've found plenty of items that remind me of those finer details that make living in Utah so very special.
A week away from the 'nets and this is the best I could come up with? That's how it goes, I suppose. Robert, this one's for you:
more animals
A couple weeks back when I was teetering on the edge of a major funk, my lovely Girlfriend came up with what she thought would be a sure-fire cure for what ailed me: a big plate of comfort food at one of those classic cafes I so love, those places where the regulars while away the hours at the counter over a warm cup of joe (once upon a time, they would've had a cigarette to go with their caffeine, but those days are long gone, of course) while couples and families cram themselves into Naugahyde booths with Formica tables and enjoy hearty meals of home-style meatloaf, chicken-fried steak, or a burger the size of your head.
The cafe she had in mind was new to both of us, a vintage-looking hole-in-the-wall she'd spotted while running errands, not too far from her place of employment. It sounded perfect, and I was surprised and touched by her willingness to spontaneously try some place new for my sake (Anne is generally a creature of habit when it comes to food), so in less time than it took to type this sentence, we were off on a new culinary adventure.
We had no idea what we were getting into...
Sometimes you just have to say these things:
It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so naturally I had to take this "What's Your Pirate Name?" Quiz:
Found via Kisintin, with whom I share the same basic description. Apparently, we have similar bathing habits...
Because you never know...
So far, it's been a crazy-busy week, which always sets me on edge and leaves me worrying that my loyal readers are even now deleting their bookmarks to this woefully un-updated corner of the blogosphere. To try and demonstrate that I've not forsaken you all and left this place to gather cobwebs, I offer a silly Internet quiz, courtesy of my friend Puffbird:
Your result for The Social Proficiency Test...
You scored a total of 32 out of 43!
For the most part you blend into social gatherings easily. You are honest and generally polite. Every now and then you let something slip out that should be kept quiet but you tend to know how to recover and get back in the mix. You generally want to know about other people but often times care a little more about whats going on with you.
Take The Social Proficiency Test at HelloQuizzy
With any luck, I'll be back later with something more substantial...
I walked into my place of employment this morning to find a Smart car sitting in the lobby. The rather smallish lobby. Of my 100-year-old office building. A car.
With a parking ticket on the dashboard.
Apparently it was driven right through the front door -- which is not particularly grand or spacious, I must add -- sometime over the weekend.*
You know, there are a lot of things about working for an advertising agency that frustrate the hell out of me. But there are a lot of really awesome things as well. Like finding automobiles in front of the receptionist's desk on a Monday morning...
* For the record, the door was open at the time -- no broken glass or anything like that.
Just thought I'd mention that my friend and webmaster Jack Hattaway is currently -- as in right now, even as I type this! -- riding in the Lotoja Classic, a bicycling marathon that runs from Logan, Utah, the northernmost community of any size in this state, through southern Idaho and onward to Jackson Hole, Wyoming (LOgan TO JAckson, get it?). That's a distance of 206 miles over three mountain passes in a single day; according to this Wikipedia entry, the cyclists will climb some 10,000 total feet and finish 1,800 feet higher than where they began.
Jack told me yesterday that his goal is merely to finish, not to place, and he's hoping to do it in roughly 13 hours. His lovely wife has been sending me regular text-message updates on his progress; the latest was about an hour ago, and it indicated he'd just left Montpelier, Idaho, with 136 miles to go.
I hope it doesn't sound too lame and unmanly to say that I'm very, very proud of him for even attempting this. Only a couple of years ago, he was just another overweight, out-of-shape, fast-approaching-middle-age schlump like myself. Then a series of converging issues convinced him it was time to make some changes in his lifestyle, and now he's riding in a fracking cycling marathon. It's been an amazing and inspiring transformation.
I'm rooting for you, buddy, and looking forward to posting the news of your success!
(Official Lotoja Classic website here, if anyone is interested...)
[Update: The last message from Mrs. Jack arrived at 8:21 this evening. It read, "Jack finished in 13:39:58." Incredible... way to go, man!]
My friend Erin posted a link to this clip earlier today, with the comment that it makes her happy every time she sees it, and "It's just nice to know, with all the divisiveness and conflict in the world today, that there are still some things that are universal."
I'll be damned if watching it didn't make me feel happy, too. See if you don't agree:
It comes from the website of a guy named Matt, who apparently wanders the world and dances. Not a bad way to spend your life, actually. And not a bad way to start a long holiday weekend after a really long week... have a good one, kids.
Enough of the political unpleasantness for now... let us consider something far more soothing to the mind... like this delightful piece of 'net crap:
Oh, if only this video really existed... I'd know what I'd be doing this weekend for sure!
(Incidentally, there's an entire thread of similar stuff over at Fark. The idea was to photoshop Star Wars characters into other movies. Most are pretty lame, but a few generate a chuckle; this one is downright creepy...)
Over the past few years, I've been gradually coming to terms with the fact that my tastes in media are resolutely middle-brow, at best (said epiphany being thanks in no small part to George Lucas and how often I've had to defend my continuing enjoyment of the Star Wars universe even after the Special Editions, the prequels, and now, of course, The Clone Wars). I now grok that I am not nearly as literary or snobby as I used to believe myself to be. I'm quite comfortable with the fact that I like pulp adventure novels more than "literature-with-a-capital-L," and that '80s pop-rock music moves me while jazz in all its hoity-toity incarnations leaves me cold. I can admire the paintings our culture deems "great," but I'd rather hang a vintage pin-up or movie one-sheet on my wall. I prefer the feathered-hair-and-daggett version of Battlestar Galactica to the critically acclaimed but angsty remake. You get the idea.
Even so, I've often felt the need to describe the things I really love as "guilty pleasures." To make myself look like less of a dork, I suppose. SamuraiFrog argues that I shouldn't do that anymore:
I've never liked the phrase "guilty pleasure." Why should you feel guilty about getting pleasure out of something? Look, I'm not, repeat, not saying this is true of everyone who uses the phrase, but I'm talking about the origin of the phrase "guilty pleasure." It just comes from this snobbish, elitist place that I don't like. The idea that you have to feel guilty if you like Keanu Reeves movies or Stephen King novels or something. Something that you're afraid will reflect badly on you. Because, as I've said before, some people seem to think life is only about proving that you're a little smarter than the next person.
"Guilty pleasure" is an apology. I'm sorry I like something universally considered stupid. I don't want you to believe that I can only read at a sixth grade level and that's why I like Stephen King. It's a way of revealing that you care what other people think about your tastes.
...Molesting children and buying blood diamonds are guilty pleasures. Liking Stephen King novels is just liking Stephen King novels.
You have to admit, the man has a point...
Just in case this situation ever comes up...
Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Sites
Of course, the accompanying text makes it sound like a most unpleasant minute and 41 seconds:
Congrats! You could survive for 1 minute 41 seconds !
In the first 30 seconds any fluid on the surface of your body would begin to boil due to lack of ambient pressure, this includes the saliva on your tongue and the moisture in your eyes. Your eardrums would most likely burst due to the pressure in your body trying to equalize with the vacuum outside. Unlike what some science fiction films have suggested, your body would not explode.
After the first 15 seconds you would lose consciousness. If you held your breath you could potentially stay alive longer but you risk pulmonary trauma. If you didn't hold your breath you'd pass out sooner, but your lungs might have a better chance of avoiding permanent damage.
The pressure in your veins would rise until your heart no longer had the capacity to pump blood, at which point you'd die.
Hm. Better to just splatter into strawberry jam like the guys in Outland, I think. Messy and deeply traumatizing to my fellow astronauts, but quick...
Thanks to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer for pointing me to this particular time-waster.
It's been a pretty rough week for your humble blogger -- actually it's been a pretty rough month, not counting a welcome and very enjoyable visit last weekend from Cranky Robert. I've had lots of late nights at the office recently, followed by soul-searching train rides home, surrounded by the oddballs who ride public transit after the regular commuters have all gone and wondering just which decisions brought me to this place where I so often feel like I have no life. I don't even feel like I have much of an online life, anymore -- it seems like forever and a day since I wrote anything on this blog that was really worth reading. Or since I've done much of anything else that truly matters. Did you know I used to write fiction once, about a thousand years ago in the Before Times? I like to think I was fairly good at it, too...
In any event, this self-pity party is explanation as to why my blogging lately has consisted primarily of memes, lolcats, and girlie pictures, and why you're getting yet another quiz-thing today instead of something more substantive. And this background may also explain why I found the results of the quiz -- which I've seen at Puffbird's, Kisintin's, and Ilya's blogs as well -- somewhat baffling. I don't think of myself as much of an optimist even in my happiest moments, which this bleary-eyed morning definitely is not...
Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test...
Humanity, Background, Big Picture, and Shape
You perceive the world with particular attention to humanity. You focus on the hidden treasures of life (the background) and how that fits into the larger picture. You are also particularly drawn towards the shapes around you. Because of the value you place on humanity, you tend to seek out other people and get energized by being around others. You like to ponder ideas and imagine the many possibilities of your life without worrying about the details or specifics. You are in tune with all that is around you and understand your life as part of a larger whole. You prefer a structured environment within which to live and you like things to be predictable.
The Perception Personality Types:
Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy
What do you folks think? Sound anything like me?
It was plenty cool the other night when Michael Phelps landed his eighth Olympic gold medal (with the help of three other guys whose names you probably already can't remember, the poor slobs), but there was such an air of inevitability around the event that it honestly didn't feel like much of a triumph, at least not to me. (My lack of engagement might have had something to do with the fact that I was watching the rebroadcast in the wee hours of the morning, but still, I'm trying to make a point here...)
Things were different last night when 16-year-old Shawn Johnson finally won her own gold medal on her last routine in the Beijing Games. I confess, I've developed something of a crush on this kid over the past few days. She comes across as confident and cheerful (unlike some of her fellow gymnasts, who sometimes seem as if it's all they can do to keep their eyes from going all Bruce Banner-y), and gracious to boot (I was very impressed by an interview I heard a day or two back when she seemed perfectly happy with the three silver medals she scored earlier in the week, which the media was of course trying to depict as a crushing tragedy. I believe she said something to the effect of, "the silver ones are actually really pretty," with no real hint of disappointment over not getting a gold one.) And then there's that smile... to employ the old cliche, she lights up the whole stadium when she smiles. And she was really grinning last night when the results were announced. It was virtually impossible not to share her happiness and to feel a cathartic sense that, yes, sometimes things do work out the way they're supposed to.
Now, if only I was 20 years younger so I didn't feel quite so unseemly about thinking how damn cute she is...
One of the few things The Girlfriend and I ever seriously disagree about is what constitutes an edible meal (and, by extension, what we should have for dinner). She's -- how shall I say this? -- very selective with what she will and will not eat, whereas I pride myself on being willing to give just about anything a go. But am I just fooling myself? Am I truly all that adventurous? Let's find out!
Here's a meme courtesy of Javi that does a pretty good job of evaluating the adventurousness of one's previous eating experiences and -- more importantly -- the items that force you to draw the line:
Catching up on a couple of stories we've been following here at Simple Tricks, I see that dog cloner Bernann McKinney admitted on Saturday that she is also Joyce McKinney, the notorious missionary molester. She reportedly hoped the press would focus on the puppy angle instead of dredging up the "garbage" from her past. She should've known better, given the tabloid-mentality climate in which we live today. I actually feel somewhat sorry for her -- how awful would it be to have some stupid act you committed three decades ago still hanging over your head now? -- but my sympathy only extends so far, because if she really wanted the news coverage to ignore her past, she should've taken steps to remain anonymous. How hard would it have been to require the cloning lab to keep her name and most especially her photo out of the press release? Because people don't forget stories that involve a combination of sex, religion, and generally weird behavior, and, in her case, the face was pretty memorable as well. I'd say she's lucky that Great Britain doesn't seem to be interested in extraditing her (she jumped bail 31 years ago in the wake of the missionary thing).
Of course, there is the possibility that her discomfort at being recognized is a sham. The article I linked to above notes a history of oddball behavior and run-ins with the law. Maybe some little part of her -- or maybe even a big part -- craves attention, even if it is from the tabloid press. Maybe she was hoping for exactly what just happened. Hard to say, of course... but in any event, I imagine the former missionary she used to be obsessed with has had a rough week.
Moving on, there's just one final loose end in the story of the man who was making ricin in my hometown: Thomas Tholen, owner of the Riverton, Utah, home where the toxin was produced, has pleaded guilty to knowing that his cousin, Roger Von Bergendorff, was illegally producing the stuff, and also to lying to investigators about it. He claims to have been scared, and frankly I don't blame him. Still, he made the wrong choice; I can see him not acting while the looney was living in his basement, but why didn't he report Von Bergendorff once the guy moved out?
Tholen faces three years in prison and a $250,000 fine; he'll be sentenced on October 22. Von Bergendorff will be sentenced two weeks later, on November 3.
So, have you heard about the woman who reportedly sold her house to raise $50,000 so she could pay a South Korean company to clone her dead pit bull, which went by the charming and tasteful name of "Booger?" The basic story is pretty weird on its own -- not least of all because the woman apparently thinks the cloned puppies are reincarnations* of Booger, based on her statement that they "know her" -- but now it seems to be getting even weirder. I've been reading some speculation that Bernann McKinney, the proud owner of a litter of clone puppies, might in fact be Joyce McKinney, who, 30 years ago, abducted a Mormon missionary and took him to a rented cottage in the English countryside, where she chained him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs and had her way with him -- several times -- in the hopes that he would marry her. The British tabloid The Daily Mail has the gory details, if you're interested.
Brenann McKinney is denying that she's the notorious missionary rapist, but I see a strong resemblance in the photos on Paul Rolly's blog, and Salt Lake filmmaker Trent Harris, who once did a documentary on Joyce McKinney, is quoted as being "pretty sure" they're one and the same person.
I vaguely remember hearing about the missionary abduction when I was growing up, but I always thought it was an urban legend, like Emo's grave or the satanists in Memory Grove. I should've known better... if there's a weird story out there, it almost always seems to come with a Utah connection. This state seems to exert a magnetic pull on colorful characters and offbeat occurrences. I consider it one of the many fringe benefits of living here...
* You know, this is a common misperception, that clones are not merely genetic duplicates but somehow retain the memories and personality of the donor organism as well, and it drives me crazy. It's nonsense, of course. A clone is no more the same animal -- or person, because you know that's coming eventually -- than a so-called "identical" twin sibling. They may share the same DNA, but they have their own thoughts and experiences, and often don't even look all that much alike. The culprit is, I believe, a whole lot of really bad made-for-TV movies and a big dose of ignorance.
Yeah, I know. The lolcat thing is so over. Nevertheless, I thought this was funny:
more cat pictures
Because I'm a sci-fi nerd, and we're all about the airlocks...
If you've been following that bizarre story about the guy who was brewing up the deadly toxin ricin a little too close to home for my comfort, here's the latest:
A former Utahn suspected of making ricin pleaded guilty Monday in a Las Vegas federal court to possession of the deadly toxin and possession of unregistered firearms.
As part of his plea, 57-year-old Roger Von Bergendorff agreed to forfeit a pistol and two silencers. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count when sentenced Nov. 3 by U.S. District Judge Robert C. Jones. Prosecutors are recommending 37 months behind bars.
Now, I'm not really a reactionary throw-away-the-key kind of guy, but doesn't "37 months" and "agreeing to forfeit" a gun sound a little light for making a poison so potent that a drop the size of a pinhead can kill a person? And why does he have to "agree" to give up the pistol and two silencers? Aren't silencers illegal, and given everything else we know about this guy, shouldn't the weapon simply be confiscated as a matter of course?
One other thing that struck me: the court records reportedly say Bergendorff knowingly possessed the biological agent for an "unjustified purpose." Isn't that a cute little piece of jargon... "unjustified purpose." What would be a justified purpose for owning this stuff?
Here's an item I've been meaning to post for a while now, a rather amusing map of the afterlife inspired by the layout of the Magic Kingdom, right down to Cinderella's castle in the middle of the "lands." As usual, click to enlarge:
I suspect that once I've traded in my mortal coil for a celestial E-Ticket, I'll be spending a lot of time in the Arena of Answers trying to figure out just what the heck was going on down here on Earth, and I could actually use that Nu-Body machine right now. So I've got some things to look forward to, at least. How about you?
A couple years ago, I took note of a new housing development in Bend, Oregon, that was to be modeled after the bucolic Shire of Tolkien's (and Peter Jackson's) Lord of the Rings. I recall being both intrigued by and dubious of the project, writing at the time that:
...it would be the ultimate in geek bragging rights, I suppose. "Hey, look, I live in a hobbit hole!" But ultimately, it just seems a little too contrived to be desirable...
Turns out everybody else agreed with me. Today, I read the bank is foreclosing on The Shire. Only two homes (of a planned 31) have been finished, and only one of those has actually sold. The developer behind the project, Ron Meyers, is quoted as saying, "Some people were turned off by living in 'Disneyland.'"
Um... yeah. You didn't think of that before you took out massive loans and broke ground? And you didn't consider that the sorts of people who might like to live in a Disney-style re-creation of a fictional place probably don't have the income to buy million-dollar homes? Seems to me that folks who have that kind of scratch are usually interested in something a little less... gimmicky.
Somebody didn't do their market research, it seems...
Just in case you were wondering, here is a list of the top ten conspiracy theories believed by 1,000 British adults surveyed in connection with the new X Files movie:
For the record, I personally think all of these notions are bunk, and numbers two, three, and nine are downright offensive in both their ignorance and their cynicism (the Apollo missions were among the greatest achievements ever in the history of our ridiculous, half-savage species and should be revered as such, and the idea that any government would knowingly allow or even purposefully cause the deaths of thousands of its own citizens to secretly advance a political agenda is repugnant; not impossible, mind you, but so impossibly vile and complex in execution that I can't believe they'd get away with it for long). Nevertheless, this list is pretty interesting, isn't it? Notice that six of the ten items have something to do with the United States directly, and three of the remaining four are transnational. Only one conspiracy theory is uniquely British in its subject matter or, presumably, its origin. Come on, Brits, surely there're more dark secrets in the halls of Westminster than just the assassination of Diana... it's like you're not even trying!
Incidentally, I understand those reptilian aliens who run the world are supposed to have a major underground base right here in Utah. Google around and you'll find mentions of Dugway Proving Grounds, secret cloning facilities at the University of Utah, and, of course, connections with the LDS church, or at least with the Temple in downtown SLC. My personal favorite story is the "ancient tunnel network" that supposedly connected into Crossroads Mall -- allegedly the site of many encounters with creepy alien and paranormal stuff. Of course, the block where Crossroads once stood is now a massive construction pit. No doubt just a front operation to fill in or otherwise conceal those pesky tunnels...
(Via.)
Another ungodly busy day, another lame non-entry entry. Maybe one of these days, I'll find the time to write something worthwhile again. At least, I hope so...
In the meantime, check out this video of a close encounter between creatures from two very different worlds:
Orca & Dog from Chantelle Tucker on Vimeo.
Fun, huh?
Via.
Your result for The What Middle Earth race do you belong to Test...
FYI, your polar opposite is the Troll.
Take The What Middle Earth race do you belong to Test at HelloQuizzy
That's all cool and all, but seriously, where's my long, silken hair that never tangles or gets messed up no matter how much orc blood just washed over it? I don't recall seeing any balding elves...
Via Kisintin.
A couple miles up Provo Canyon, you'll encounter one of the loveliest sights Utah has to offer: Bridal Veil Falls, a 600-foot-tall cascade of water that plunges down a sheer cliff face, then rolls across a little terrace and down again, before spreading across a rough talus incline and finally merging gently with the Provo River. I see the falls at least once a summer -- Provo Canyon is one of my favorite top-down drives -- and they always take my breath away.
These days, if you want to see the falls from any other angle except "beneath," you need to have a good pair of hiking boots and some technical knowledge, but up until just a few years ago, we, how shall I say it, less physically inclined people could just take the tram to the top of the falls.
So what does it say about me that people keep sending me video clips that have something to do with Star Wars and/or Indiana Jones? Do you think I've finally blown my cover and people are beginning to get the idea that I'm secretly a raving fanboy? And here I've tried so hard to be subtle about it...
Anyhow, the first clip is courtesy of my friend and co-worker Karen, who has a thing for the smaller and cuter varieties of camelids. As this video proves, however, she might want to be wary. An adorable, woolly face can conceal sinister intentions...
After watching that, I honestly don't know whether I should run for cover or say, "Awwww..."
If alpacas aren't your speed, here's something sent to me by Brian that I've been meaning to post for a couple of weeks (sorry, Brian -- bet you thought I'd forgotten!). It's a rough animatic leaked from ILM showing Uncle George's plans for a special edition of Raiders of the Lost Ark that's more in line with his current thinking about when our heroes should and should not fire their weapons. Thankfully, these plans were shelved following the Great Fanboy Wars of 1997-2005:
Just to prove Mojo Nixon's theory that Elvis is everywhere, have a look at this Roman sculpture dating to the 2nd Century AD:
Kind of eerie, eh? According to this article, this bust that bears such an uncanny resemblance to the one and only King of Rock and Roll is something called an acroterion, "a kind of architectural ornament often found for decoration on the corners of a sarcophagus, a stone tomb or burial chamber."
Hm. A burial chamber? So perhaps this is a likeness of someone inside the burial chamber? And how could a man who died 1,800 years ago... look like Elvis? There are those who believe that Elvis was some kind deity... but let us not go there. A more likely theory -- which explains a great many things about the truly weird life of Mr. Presley -- is that he wasn't entirely human. Think of it: an entire planet of Elvii who come here in their rhinestone-bedazzled spacecraft every century or so to try and teach our mortal species the wisdom of the universe... or perhaps there was only one Elvis, our Elvis, but he didn't really die in the bathroom of Graceland in '77 as everyone believes, he just quantum-leaped to another time and place... ancient Rome, say, where he became a man of sufficient wealth and influence to have an acroterion carved in his likeness.
Or perhaps this is a very silly blog entry being written by a man who ought to be putting his time to better use.
Me, I'm going with the Planet of the Elvii theory.
Via.
Woman: I find it pretty easy to spend your money.
Man: Yeah, I've noticed.
Woman: Hey, I let you have sex with me!
Man: So you're saying that I'm exchanging my goods and services for your sex?
Woman: Yep.
Man: You know there's a word for that, right?
Woman: Yep. Marriage.
***
Well, I thought it was amusing...
In the previous entry, I said that when I was a kid, I wanted to be grow up to be a starship captain (item #24). Well, yeah, that was my first choice. But I also thought something like this would be pretty cool, too:
Alas, that didn't work out so well either...
Via Pulp of the Day.
I found the following meme over at Puffbird's LiveJournal. It's actually one of those questionnaires that used to circulate via email before they started going to ground in the blogosphere, so some of the questions are a little inappropriate for this medium. Also, I may have done this one before -- many of the questions look vaguely familiar -- or maybe it's just that some of the questions have appeared in others I've done. Whatever. I was feeling meme-y -- dang Beaker -- and wanted to participate. Enjoy...
In case anyone is wondering, just over one month has passed since some half-witted barbarian knifed my convertible top, and I am still working on getting it fixed to my satisfaction.
Created by OnePlusYou
Seriously, no Gog and Magog? Or Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Not even Old BOB?
Amateurs.
...so, in lieu of a proper entry, here's a silly Internet quiz!
Which Star Wars Character Are You? | |
 | You are Luke Skywalker. You are adventurous and love to be where the action is. Your curiosity runs wild and you have to seek out the answers to all your questions or else you will not be at peace. People see you as a great leader, although you are uncomfortable with this because you don't see yourself the same way. You just believe in being honest and focusing on the good in the world. You are sweet and lovable and have many friends that would be lost without you. |
| Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com | |
What do y'all think? Does that sound at all like me? I do have a curious streak...
Over the past couple of days, I've noticed some items in the Tribune that may be of interest to my local (or formerly local) readers.
The first is a feature story about the handful of drive-in theaters that still operate in Utah; it focuses primarily on the Motor Vu in Erda, which I briefly mentioned in an entry a couple weeks ago.
The other, somewhat more exciting news concerns the Road Island Diner in Oakley, Utah, which I first wrote about just over one year ago. This is the authentic 1940s-vintage prefab diner that was shipped cross-country from the east coast to a small town at the edge of the Uinta Mountains. To cut to the chase, the renovation is complete and it opened for business this weekend. Details are here. According to the linked article, it's one of only about 1,200 diners left in the country.
I've also found an official website for the Road Island that includes an extensive photo gallery of the renovation. In classic-car terminology, it was a complete "frame off restoration," i.e., it was stripped right down to the bare bones and rebuilt from the ground up. It looks fabulous now, like a time traveler from the Greatest Generation plopped down right here in the 21st Century. I'm very pleased to see that the new owner went for authenticity after all. (I heard a rumor a while back that he'd planned a huge, two-story addition that would've completely overshadowed the original structure, but that was either untrue, or someone talked him out of it.) Of course, it's not entirely authentic. The Trib article notes that the there are flat-screen TVs, which I could've lived without (I realized today just how ubiquitous video displays have become in our society, and how distracting they frequently are; it'd be nice to escape them once in a while), and the tabletop jukeboxes are described as "remote controls for iPods in the back," but I guess you can only go so far in recreating another time period.
Oh, and it wouldn't be a Utah attraction if there wasn't some element of cheesiness to it: all the employees have been given "diner names." Oy. What is it with this state anyway? It's like people just can't help but find some way of being cutesy.
Still, I'm pretty eager to try the place out, even with TVs and cutesy-ness. The Girlfriend and I plan to take a little road trip within the next couple of weeks...
One final note: if you're interested in reading those articles, don't hesitate: in only a few days, the Tribune will drop them behind a pay-wall... I really wish they'd follow the New York Times' example and quit doing that...
No time today for a proper entry, alas, but I just spotted this over at Screen Rant and was sufficiently amused I had to share:
The look on the boy's face is simply priceless... and heart-breaking, the poor kid...
From a post over at Boing Boing that really has nothing to do with anything (at least nothing I'm more than momentarily interested in), I managed to glean the following:
...anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever, anything that turns up before you're 30 is new and exciting, and anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed.
I like that. Reminds me of that great quote from Grandpa Simpson: "I used to be 'with it.' Once, I even knew what 'it' was. But then 'it' changed; it got weird and scary. And it'll happen to you." Or something like that. In any event, I increasingly understand the sentiment...
A couple of years ago, following that traumatic flood in my basement, I made up my mind to try and downsize the Bennion Archives a little. Well, the first batch of items I put up on eBay didn't attract much attention, and disappointment and my natural tendency to procrastinate soon kicked in, and, well, long story short, I'm still storing a bunch of stuff I long ago decided to part with and I'm going to try again to sell some of it. There's a batch of nifty Universal Monsters action figures up for sale right now. If you or someone you love appreciates the classics, just click here or use the link over there to the right called "My eBay Auctions" to have a look...
This seems to be making its way around the InterWebs -- I picked it up from Ilya -- and it amused me enough to want to jump on the bandwagon:
As I wrote in comments over at Ilya's, it isn't often that a frickin' commercial makes me smile like a little kid, but this one sure did. Of course, it probably helps that I start recognizing people about midway through. Kudos to whoever thought to include Stephen Hawking in there; his synthetic, monotype Cylon voice ironically seems to add an extra dose of humanity to this sort of thing...
I don't remember when or with whom I first visited the Cotton Bottom Inn, a divey little bar hidden in a woodsy, upscale corner of the Salt Lake Valley not far from the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, but I'm certain I started hearing about the place's legendary garlic burgers while I was still in high school.
Over at Byzantium's Shores, Jaquandor has a long post about the passions in one's life, how some endure and evolve with you through the years while others burn out and fall away. I must admit, the specifics of the post elude me -- I know little about classical music, and I've never read the author he references, nor does he sound like my cup of joe -- but I get his overall point, and it's a phenomenon I've observed in my own experience.
There was one paragraph, however, that really had little to do with the overall post but resonated deeply within me like a massive church bell gonging from ten feet away:
The Romantic in me is drawn to large gestures, bold statements, feelings so strong it seems that the force of my heart might well shift the world on its axis. Love is to be shouted from the rooftops; anger is to be no small irritation but a smoldering rage. Sadness is to be felt keenly and deeply, like the cut of a freshly sharpened knife, and beneath everything, every feeling, even happiness and joy, can be found a long streak of melancholy. That's the Romantic in me, and he still lives within, sometimes under careful guard but at other times nearly allowed complete control.
Oh, yeah, I relate to all of that... especially the melancholy streak. Just another would-be Byron, that's me.
Remember how I marveled last night about how smoothly the whole process of replacing my ragtop was going? Yeah, well...
I got a phone call from the upholstery shop this morning. Seems the proprietor hasn't ordered the replacement yet because he forgot to make a note of the necessary color. The color. Isn't that kind of a basic data point?
Sigh.
In case anyone is interested, my visit with the insurance claim adjuster was surprisingly painless. He looked at the car, took a few digital photos, and said, "yeah, I think we can approve the full amount of that bid you got from the upholstery shop."
I was damn near speechless. I really expected to have a fight with the guy. Of course, there's still the possibility that next month's premium will be, ahem, unsatisfactory. One battle at a time, though.
I called the upholstery shop this afternoon; it'll take three to four days to get my replacement top, then one or two days to replace it. I'm thrilled at how smoothly this has all gone, while simultaneously nursing a small, intensely hot flame of rage at the miscreants who made it all necessary in the first place...
Yep, one of those days when paltry little morsels are the best I can offer our studio audience:
Puritanism is a religion based on being miserable and liking it.
From a comment on this blog entry. And this:
The beneficial effects of caffeine may be most pronounced in conjunction with sugar. For example, one factor analytic study has shown caffeine-glucose cocktails provide benefits to cognition not seen with either alone.
From Caffeine: A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired, via Andrew Sullivan.
Given my recent experiences with bone-headed sociopaths who like to mess with other people's property, I found this video of a would-be vandal failing to think through all the possible consequences of his actions amazingly satisfying:
A week ago tomorrow, The Girlfriend -- Anne -- came home to find that her beloved miniature poodle Rusty had died while she was at work.
We knew this was coming. Rusty was diagnosed with congestive heart failure last fall and he's been steadily deteriorating since then. But he didn't seem to be deteriorating that quickly, and when he wasn't wracked with fits of vicious coughing and wheezing, his behavior was pretty much what it's always been. Which meant that somehow Anne and I had gotten it into our heads that he was going to last through the summer, that we wouldn't have to face this inevitable sorrow until the weather turned cold again. But we were wrong... and sometime during the day last Thursday, little Rusty's heart just... stopped. At least, I hope that's how it happened. Anne told me that he appeared to be sleeping normally when she unlocked the door to her apartment, with no sign that he'd had to fight to take his final breaths. Again, I hope... well, I hope it was easy for him. He was a good dog; he deserved a painless journey into the unknown country.
I'm sure you're dying to know what I thought, so here's the short version: I liked Crystal Skull well enough, but I didn't love it. I had some reservations, and some things I wanted to take a couple of days to think about before I posted anything.
While you wait for the longer review -- because I know everyone out there in InternetLand is waiting with bated breath for my humble opinion of a movie you've probably all seen by now anyway -- allow me to entertain you with the following video clip, relayed to me this morning by Brian Greenberg:
People are weird...
Update: Doh! BoingBoing is reporting that this video is a viral marketing campaign from an agency that has the LucasArts games account. And as it so happens, there is an Indiana Jones LEGO game coming out in a couple of weeks to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull. So... it looks like I got taken, kids, used against my will and without my knowledge to spread the word about a product I will see no profit from myself and have no interest in helping to promote. And I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty damn annoyed about that.
In the interest of full disclosure, my own employer has been involved in creating several viral campaigns, but personally, I just don't "get" this sort of marketing. It seems to me that there's something sneaky about it, like you're trying to fool people into listening to a pitch, and very often the pitch is so subtle that the commercial message doesn't come through anyhow. If you have to really dig into the background of a video clip or a web site to find out there's something being sold there, how can you say that your message is being effectively delivered? How many people really exert that kind of effort? And isn't there a potential backlash against the product that's being advertised when people do realize that that funny clip they've been passing around to their friends is just another freakin' ad? I know I'd feel a little bit scammed and a hell of a lot less charitable toward Product X. Just like I'm feeling right now about freakin' Lego video games...
