Should I have made plans for Memorial Day? To tell you the truth, I hadn't even realized it was coming until Friday, basically. Trying to make the best of it, though -- yesterday morning, Nina and I bought food from Matamoros, the cheapest, best Mexican food in Sunset Park, and then took it to eat in, well, Sunset Park. I'd never been there before. There's a great view of Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan from the summit, though it was so hazy that you couldn't really see much except for a row of perfectly-aligned water towers. In the evening, we managed to Tom-Sawyer Mario into hosting a barbecue that Eve and some people from work showed up to. We made vegetable kebabs, burgers, and lamb stew meat, all of which ended up being pretty great. I know it's not the conventional or polite way to plan activities, but I love it when a five-minutes-before-the-fact thing comes together. We drank a bottle of Jameson that Nina and I'd bought at Brooklyn Liquors: CostCo for Alcoholics!
But, yeah, the weather just shockingly warm, right? Don't know whether it's time to start using the air conditioner or not. I was sweating when I drove around with Lester today -- every time I go driving, a few more pieces to the puzzle that is Lester fall into place, some of them bloggable, some of them not. A month or so ago, he'd told me that he had a "girl on the side" in Sunset Park, and I was sort of at a loss for words: Had he taken me into his confidence and just revealed his marital infidelity to me? It turns out, no, his wife's been dead for 20 years. His girlfriend is a "Pakistanian" heart surgeon with a very conservative family. He showed me some sort-of-racy pictures of her that he had to grab out of the trunk while we were waiting at a light.
I scheduled a driving test for July 6th (something I should've done through the school, Lester says). Last year, what was I doing? Maybe by the end of the summer I'll be able to rent cars and drive people places!
Right now I'm eating some frozen pizza from last Sunday, from when Tom and Tedders came over and we baked cookies and watched local news. I just got back from watching X-Men 3 with The Rase. Spoiler alert: It suhcks.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Dirty Heroin
This is my heartI think I've finally managed to lose my glasses. Nina and I went for a walk in Roosevelt Park on Friday, after eating eel dumplings at this place called XO in Chinatown with an overwhelming menu and getting some pretty great ice cream at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. It sort of boggles my mind the extent to which she knows the Avenues & Alleyways of this town far better than I do. We stopped at this playground where I think we both used to play as kids, and spent a while screwing around with this sort of bicycle-operated carousel. I'm pretty sure this guy walking past winged a rock at my head; it only hit me on the arm; a sour thing nonetheless. Then we headed over to the Irish Hunger Memorial, an actual, transplanted Irish homestead with a series of plaques with quotes about the potato murrain. Unfortunately, it was closed, but as we stood there peeking into the entrance, we realized that the huge iron gate that bars the door doesn't have a lock -- it just slides open. There is a locked door that protects the stone homestead part of the memorial, but we were able to clamber up the stones and over one of the walls onto the top of the whole thing, where you get a pretty great view of the Hudson River. I put my glasses on the wall up there for a few minutes and didn't pick them up when we left. They were gone on Sunday when I went to go look for them, so I think that might be it.
This is my arm
This is my heart
Flash ActionScript has got to be one of the worst "languages" on the scene, I swear. Or maybe it's just that the Flash authoring environment is beyond piss-poor. I'm trying to help Tom put together what we have been referring to between the two of us as "Golden Girls: The Game." Play as one of three of the four Golden Girls (that short one won't be playable, I don't think) or as an as-yet unspecified fourth character -- we're thinking either Snaggletooth or Barney Rubble. Your mission: thwart Peter Stormare's attempts to build a basketball stadium over the Golden Girls railyards (and commit rape).
I'm reading the first book in that Philip Pullman trilogy; everyone else has already read that stuff, right? I haven't.
Tom and I watched three versions of this short film, about a strange kid in Montana who does terrible impressions at a high school talent show, including, horrifyingly, Olivia Newton John. The movie's called The Beaver Kid, and the first version is a documentary -- the second two are somewhat exploitative dramatizations of the first, starring, respectively, Sean Penn and Crispin Hellion Glover. Has anyone else heard of this? Konrath lent it to me, and I've been trying to puzzle out the directorial intent for a while.
Went to a Yankees-Red Sox game with Emma and Joel, my boss, last Wednesday at Yankee Stadium -- it was going to be just me and Emma, but I accidentally bought three tickets while trying to follow this scheme that Wass-man described to me for buying sets of contiguous seats from the MLB website. But yeah, it was wild! Yankee Stadium looks dizzyingly huge, particularly from the box where we were sitting, and the field is strikingly green. Nothing exceptional about the game itself, really, although the Yankees had Mariano Rivera close, scaring the hell out of a bunch of awful Red Sox batters with a run of 15 perfect 100+ MPH pitches. They were jumping away from the plate! Emma was right: Yankee Stadium hot dogs are totally delicious, and there were a surprising number of fistfights in the stands. Over in our area, a guy sitting behind us took every jeer-worthy error by Boston as an opportunity to yell at Joel about his Mark Bellhorn jersey. "Bellhorn sucks!" he'd holler. "Take off the jersey! He doesn't even play for them any more!" He kept it up for like 3 hours, no joke.
Are we already half of the way through May? I feel like this year is sort of slipping through my fingers. What do I have to show for all this time? The trees outside my bedroom window are bright, bright green. I guess that's something. I just kind of boxed Kitty's ears for tearing open a bag of baking chocolate in the kitchen; she acted quite offended for a few minutes, but now she's back, milk-kneading the comforter where she thinks my legs are. They always come back!
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Crazy-Head: The Survey
I was having dinner with my old Time-Life latchkey-kid friend Eva last night at the venerable Pizza Box, and we somehow made the discovery that we both suffer from the same strange, intermittent sleep disorder. We'll be sleeping and dreaming about some kind of rote, stressful problem that can't be solved -- for me, it's usually a programming thing; for her, she said it was stuff like arranging the bottles behind the bar where she works -- and then we wake up and this awful cycle of thoughts won't stop. Like, I keep thinking about and trying to solve whatever problem it is that I was stuck on after I'm awake, but the entire... vocabulary of my mind is kind of devoted to thinking about this one thing. It's very disorienting and scary. Eventually you either go back to sleep or become more fully awake and it goes away. Eva calls it "crazy-head." I'd actually come up with a name for it myself, "rigid thinking," which I thought sounded pleasingly like a spell you might cast in first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I like hers better -- it's descriptive and simple. Anyhow, she'd asked her boyfriend whether he ever got crazy-head, and apparently he was like, "No, never." She thought she was the only one until we talked about it. So I pose the question to you, the Internet: You guys ever get this? Leave a comment.
Reading a book of Nick Tosches essays that Nina lent me: I don't think I've ever really had fun in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually capable of it. Oh well, software to write.
Reading a book of Nick Tosches essays that Nina lent me: I don't think I've ever really had fun in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually capable of it. Oh well, software to write.
Friday, April 14, 2006
What The Fuck, Kitty?
Home from work today -- the "markets" are closed, so so is DSI.
I went to The Gaping Abyss show at Lit Lounge last night -- it was no good! Not because the guys (and Gabi) weren't good, but because the club fucked up the schedule and the Abyss only got to play four (4) songs. Everyone was pissed, not least of all Razor, but the booker felt bad and gave out extra drink tickets. Bill gave his to me and I ordered a gin and tonic, for which I had to venture outside the VIP room through a shoulder-to-shoulder zoo of awful, grinding NYU hipsters. Ugh. There was a sign above the bar that said, "Waitress Service Only," which is dumb to begin with, but the club was so packed that the one wairtress was just standing right by the bar. You had to give your order to her, and she'd take your money and repeat the order to the bartender, who'd make the drink, give it to her, and she'd give it to you.
A guy from one of the other bands found Sarah's wallet, which had fallen out of her purse (or had been stolen) right by the door. Thankfully all the money was there, though the Metrocard was missing. Sarah said, "Oh, thank you so much! How can I ever repay you?" The guy from the band said, "Well, you could give me a kiss," and leaned in to kiss her -- she ducked away, and Billy sort of rolled up as politely as possible, receiving a kiss himself in the bargain. So everybody basically saved face. But that kind of thing always fills me with white-hot rage -- especially when someone hits on a girl I'm, you know, with, but with female friends, too. I've tried to introspect a bit to see why it makes me so mad; I don't know if it's that I think people shouldn't act like that, period, or if it's that I'm jealous and ashamed of being an impotent homonculus.
On the way down from Sarah's church where we dropped off the instruments, we stopped in at Sip, where The Jarch tends bar, and she happened to be there: bit of a coincedence, since it turned out that she only works the night shift that one night of the week. Razor left to hit the sack, but I ended up staying until she closed up. It was really nice talking to her again, even though watching her serve food and alcohol to a bunch of moony-looking losers making slurry attempts at conversation with her was sort of unpleasant. I don't know, it's not like I wasn't doing the same thing, but as I mentioned to her, her job is like teaching a pre-school class where all the toddlers want to marry you.
I got home at 5:00 AM. Christ.
Kitty started up the breakfast yowling at 10:00 AM; I held out, falling in and out of sleep, until 11:30, at which point I flung wide the bedroom door and chased her around the house for a few minutes growling at her and trying to smack her. I did capitulate and feed her, of course -- I even gave her some of the dry food that she really likes -- but the excitement may have been too much for her: I dropped by Reel Life for a couple of hours and hung out with Luisa -- she let me sit up at the desk and showed me how the little library computer program they use works. Eventually Joe Martin, the guy who runs the place, started getting kind of weird and huffy, and Luisa agreed that I should skedaddle. But when I got home, I found that Kitty had puked all over Sophie's laptop keyboard, and then, again, on part of the air conditioner and behind the radiator. What the fuck, right? Jesus. I pulled out the affected keys and washed them and then sort of scrubbed out the keyboard stuff underneath. Heres hoping it worked. I'm headed off to Eve's seder, now. I stood around and watched her mom make the gefilte fish yesterday evening, which was sort of fascinating, although having seen how it's made, I want to eat it even less.
Tim Hopper the electrician came by to fix the intercom, which no longer buzzes when people press the button. I asked if he could fix the button up here that lets people in the front door, but he said the building's not set up for that. Mystery solved.
I went to The Gaping Abyss show at Lit Lounge last night -- it was no good! Not because the guys (and Gabi) weren't good, but because the club fucked up the schedule and the Abyss only got to play four (4) songs. Everyone was pissed, not least of all Razor, but the booker felt bad and gave out extra drink tickets. Bill gave his to me and I ordered a gin and tonic, for which I had to venture outside the VIP room through a shoulder-to-shoulder zoo of awful, grinding NYU hipsters. Ugh. There was a sign above the bar that said, "Waitress Service Only," which is dumb to begin with, but the club was so packed that the one wairtress was just standing right by the bar. You had to give your order to her, and she'd take your money and repeat the order to the bartender, who'd make the drink, give it to her, and she'd give it to you.
A guy from one of the other bands found Sarah's wallet, which had fallen out of her purse (or had been stolen) right by the door. Thankfully all the money was there, though the Metrocard was missing. Sarah said, "Oh, thank you so much! How can I ever repay you?" The guy from the band said, "Well, you could give me a kiss," and leaned in to kiss her -- she ducked away, and Billy sort of rolled up as politely as possible, receiving a kiss himself in the bargain. So everybody basically saved face. But that kind of thing always fills me with white-hot rage -- especially when someone hits on a girl I'm, you know, with, but with female friends, too. I've tried to introspect a bit to see why it makes me so mad; I don't know if it's that I think people shouldn't act like that, period, or if it's that I'm jealous and ashamed of being an impotent homonculus.
On the way down from Sarah's church where we dropped off the instruments, we stopped in at Sip, where The Jarch tends bar, and she happened to be there: bit of a coincedence, since it turned out that she only works the night shift that one night of the week. Razor left to hit the sack, but I ended up staying until she closed up. It was really nice talking to her again, even though watching her serve food and alcohol to a bunch of moony-looking losers making slurry attempts at conversation with her was sort of unpleasant. I don't know, it's not like I wasn't doing the same thing, but as I mentioned to her, her job is like teaching a pre-school class where all the toddlers want to marry you.
I got home at 5:00 AM. Christ.
Kitty started up the breakfast yowling at 10:00 AM; I held out, falling in and out of sleep, until 11:30, at which point I flung wide the bedroom door and chased her around the house for a few minutes growling at her and trying to smack her. I did capitulate and feed her, of course -- I even gave her some of the dry food that she really likes -- but the excitement may have been too much for her: I dropped by Reel Life for a couple of hours and hung out with Luisa -- she let me sit up at the desk and showed me how the little library computer program they use works. Eventually Joe Martin, the guy who runs the place, started getting kind of weird and huffy, and Luisa agreed that I should skedaddle. But when I got home, I found that Kitty had puked all over Sophie's laptop keyboard, and then, again, on part of the air conditioner and behind the radiator. What the fuck, right? Jesus. I pulled out the affected keys and washed them and then sort of scrubbed out the keyboard stuff underneath. Heres hoping it worked. I'm headed off to Eve's seder, now. I stood around and watched her mom make the gefilte fish yesterday evening, which was sort of fascinating, although having seen how it's made, I want to eat it even less.
Tim Hopper the electrician came by to fix the intercom, which no longer buzzes when people press the button. I asked if he could fix the button up here that lets people in the front door, but he said the building's not set up for that. Mystery solved.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Blogging the FSF
I woke up at 6:00 AM on Saturday the 1st, still sort of drunk and sick from Williamsburg Porkapalooza 2006, and hauled myself to East Broadway, where I was the last person to get on the 7:00 AM Lucky Star bus to Boston. This is distinctly similar to what happened last year. But, yeah, I spent the day at MIT listening to the presentations at the Free Software Foundation's annual members meeting.
I'd assumed that the meeting would be in the same room -- Stata Center 155 -- as it was last year, but when I got inside, there appeared to be some sort of Women-in-Computing seminar going on; the ladies at the desk were nice enough ("Free Software Foundation? Cool!"), but had no idea where I belonged. After some unsuccessful wandering around, I actually called my mom on my cell phone and she looked up the room number for me on their web site. It was Building 34, room 101. Unfortunately, Building 34 turned out to be pretty impossible to find. While I was wandering around hopelessly, though, I ran into none other than Eben Moglen, who was looking for the building himself and had also gotten fairly lost. I tagged around after him as he kind of huffed and puffed up and down a few flights of stairs, but we were pretty ready to admit defeat after about 15 minutes of following promising signs into dead ends. By a stroke of luck, just as we were about to give up we ran into Gerald Sussman, who was going to pick up a projector from his office. He walked us through some dark and austere corridors that we would never have found on our own and eventually we made it to the meeting.
As we were walking, they discussed the difficulty of finding RMS accomodations that would be provably free of smoke (I think). Eben said something like, "At least he's complaining about himself so much right now that he can't complain about how unhappy the state of the world makes him."
I got in in the middle of Geoffrey Knauth's speech -- he's one of the more economics-minded people on the board. He was talking about whether exporting Free Software to the developing world was hurting job prospects in the first world, and I was hoping to pick up some good talking points, not least of all to convince myself, since I'm not clear on a lot of the macro parts of these issues. His argument, though was basically that the first world is still producing the most software expertise and thus exporting the highest quality of Free Software, and that we'll know when the recipients of this expertise stand a chance to move in on our job market when we start seeing high quality Free Software coming out of the developing world. I don't know if I buy this, necessarily. Kind of anthropic.
Afterwards, I bought a neat little lapel pin from someone at the merch table who looked a little bit like RMS's girlfriend, Tania; in retrospect, it wasn't her at all.
Sussman gave what I thought was pretty much the same talk as he gave last year on the importance of interchangeable, standardized components. He did make the interesting point that robustness in biological systems is deeply related to diversity; we need support linguistic diversity in programming languages for the same reasons. He also discussed what he referred to as "paranoid programming," the idea that no input can be trusted, nor can the output of any interchangeable parts that are used by the program; data needs to be annotated with some representation of its "source," so that problems with calculations can be isolated and resolved after the fact. Somehow we got to self-organizing systems -- I guess he was making the point that a satisficing algorithm does not always behave deterministically, or even in a way we might expect. Vein structures in the human hand, for example, differ from person to person because the mechanism for laying out veins is organized around covering an oxygen topology, and the availability of oxygen during vein development is dependent on environment.
After that, we broke for lunch -- they had substantially the same fare as last year, which, you know, was good. I was feeling pretty hung over from Katharine's party, and when I got up from the steps I'd been sitting on while eating, I noticed I'd left a big gross ass-sweat mark. So I went to the men's room and tried to take a crap, but people kept coming in, including a guy who was taking a piss but must have had prostate problems or something, because he could only piss in these weird short little bursts that seemed to require significant abdominal effort on his part -- so much so that he let out this tremendous fart at one point. I made a coughing noise to remind him he wasn't alone, but I don't think he was concerned.
Eben Moglen, who was next, opened his talk with, "Vista will be late, Office will be late, Virtual Server will be late, but the GPLv3 will be on time. Free Software is better." This met with a good deal of appreciative noise from the audience. The brunt of his talk, though was on how GNU/Linux -- and Free Software in general -- are set to make enormous gains in the embedded market because of the economics inherent in that sector. What he said, semi-verbatim, is that if you're Nokia or Siemens or Sony, say, and you've got a set of diverse hardware that you need to sell to consumers, you need to have a software platform that is robust, very well-understood, fully debugged, and absolutely secure. And it needs to be 100% free, financially, because otherwise the guy who makes it is going to eat your lunch. And what meets that need is Free Software -- it's become an essential raw material in consumer electronics manufacturing, and it's not replaceable. However, the move towards "Trusted Computing" has thrown up some stumbling blocks for Free Software, because TC methodologies rely heavily on non-Free cryptographic interfaces to hardware. The GPLv3 will do a lot of work towards making TC and thus DRM irrelevant, but he made the point that the industry's idea of a "trusted" kernel that meets their robustness requirements is basically a pipe dream, given that kernels are, by nature, too big and too volatile to be constantly re-assessed for "trustworthiness." As such, engineers worried about "trust" are moving more towards thin virtualization layers or application-layer DRM, both of which make conflicts with Free Software people less intense.
Winning the war on restrictive hardware, he said, is a conservative activity (I think he really meant "conservationist") -- we need to constantly emphasize the consumer demand for general-purpose computing hardware. But organizing consumers is always difficult.
He also said that the FSF has been watching major technology players get on board with TC and DRM for a long time and warning them that it was dangerous, and then "we made some very reasonable remarks about DRM in the GPLv3 and everyone went nuts. That's really what happened -- they went nuts. And I'm not talking about Linus. Linus did not go nuts by any means."
Ultimately, though, he thinks, The Time Is Right to push on industry.
When he opened the floor to questions, I asked him if he thought the state of mounting software patent aggression had changed since last year, and he gave a very long and interesting answer to the effect that it hadn't changed drastically, but that there'd been some high-profile legal skirmishes that have made a number of big players wary of participating in patent-hoarding. He also mentioned PubPat, which I hadn't known existed, and discussed some cases they'd been involved with.
RMS was up next, and, like last year, he gave a rather poor showing -- a short (16 minutes), rambling talk about the dangers of DRM. I asked him afterwards if he'd changed his position on the necessity for Free licenses for non-software creative works given the argument he'd had with Larry Lessig at last year's meeting, and he vehemently denied getting into an argument with Larry at all -- he claimed I must have read an article that misreported the event, and I was like, well, you know, okay, fine. But he did say that he'd come to believe that Free licenses should be encouraged for certain types of creative work, although he didn't really get too deep into discussing that. I was pleased that fewer people in the audience seemed to be interested in baiting him, though that didn't seem to make him any less ill-tempered.
Henri Poole had somehow wound up with the unpleasant task of soliciting suggestions from the members -- his presentation was called The Member Forum, and was basically all about organizing people into geographic delegations and soliciting suggestions for activism from them. He's sort of the most friendly-looking member of the board, but he also always looks like he's got this secret pain, like he's been gut-shot and is trying to hide it from everyone. I was actually a little bit psyched to meet the NYC / Brooklyn contingent, but it turned out they were all complete douchebags! The two ugliest and dumbest guys there had both been former employees of the FSF and began practically every sentence with, "When I was at the FSF..." And, you know, that wouldn't be a problem if they had anything smart to say, but neither they nor really anyone else there seemed to Get It when it came to what the FSF needs to do to leverage public support. These guys were really hung up on the sort of "reach one person" style of activism, where you give really breathy, earnest, personal speeches about stuff to roomfuls of senior citizens and people with weird and unpleasant disabilities who don't have anywhere else to be in the middle of the day. Look, I don't have any activism experience myself, but it seems to me that what the FSF needs is more public visibility-focused initiatives, like the Firefox full-page ad in the NYTimes. The FSF needs to get on peoples' voting radar, and once they've done that they can focus on handing out free OpenOffice CD-ROMs at the veterans' center. That's a luxury activity. What the FSF does not need is to recruit more pushy, wall-eyed people with acne scars who insist on saying "Treacherous Computing" when they're having a conversation with you; that tack is right for writing a letter to the editor, not for talking to Real Live Humans.
The capstone on the dumbass member forum was the chubby, smug former-FSF beardo saying that having members give speeches at public functions is infeasible because public speaking is so difficult. "We'd basically have to send everyone to Toastmasters," he said. "That's where Richard learned to be such a great public speaker." RMS is probably one of the worst public speakers I've ever seen. I mean, I'm completely devoted to his movement, but he's a surly, slouchy, mumbly piece of crap in front of a microphone. Get off his jock.
So that part of the meeting put me in kind of a bad mood, but then on the way back home on the bus, Maggie talked to me for two hours on my cell phone, which was delightful. Plus I am never going to get sick of riding around in cars and buses in New England looking out the window. I'm sure it's just that I've got so many happy memories of things that happened in Massachussetts (trips with my family and my other family), but I swear that state is the most beautiful in the Union. The flora, the fauna, the sights, the sounds, the smells. I love it.
I'd assumed that the meeting would be in the same room -- Stata Center 155 -- as it was last year, but when I got inside, there appeared to be some sort of Women-in-Computing seminar going on; the ladies at the desk were nice enough ("Free Software Foundation? Cool!"), but had no idea where I belonged. After some unsuccessful wandering around, I actually called my mom on my cell phone and she looked up the room number for me on their web site. It was Building 34, room 101. Unfortunately, Building 34 turned out to be pretty impossible to find. While I was wandering around hopelessly, though, I ran into none other than Eben Moglen, who was looking for the building himself and had also gotten fairly lost. I tagged around after him as he kind of huffed and puffed up and down a few flights of stairs, but we were pretty ready to admit defeat after about 15 minutes of following promising signs into dead ends. By a stroke of luck, just as we were about to give up we ran into Gerald Sussman, who was going to pick up a projector from his office. He walked us through some dark and austere corridors that we would never have found on our own and eventually we made it to the meeting.
As we were walking, they discussed the difficulty of finding RMS accomodations that would be provably free of smoke (I think). Eben said something like, "At least he's complaining about himself so much right now that he can't complain about how unhappy the state of the world makes him."
I got in in the middle of Geoffrey Knauth's speech -- he's one of the more economics-minded people on the board. He was talking about whether exporting Free Software to the developing world was hurting job prospects in the first world, and I was hoping to pick up some good talking points, not least of all to convince myself, since I'm not clear on a lot of the macro parts of these issues. His argument, though was basically that the first world is still producing the most software expertise and thus exporting the highest quality of Free Software, and that we'll know when the recipients of this expertise stand a chance to move in on our job market when we start seeing high quality Free Software coming out of the developing world. I don't know if I buy this, necessarily. Kind of anthropic.
Afterwards, I bought a neat little lapel pin from someone at the merch table who looked a little bit like RMS's girlfriend, Tania; in retrospect, it wasn't her at all.
Sussman gave what I thought was pretty much the same talk as he gave last year on the importance of interchangeable, standardized components. He did make the interesting point that robustness in biological systems is deeply related to diversity; we need support linguistic diversity in programming languages for the same reasons. He also discussed what he referred to as "paranoid programming," the idea that no input can be trusted, nor can the output of any interchangeable parts that are used by the program; data needs to be annotated with some representation of its "source," so that problems with calculations can be isolated and resolved after the fact. Somehow we got to self-organizing systems -- I guess he was making the point that a satisficing algorithm does not always behave deterministically, or even in a way we might expect. Vein structures in the human hand, for example, differ from person to person because the mechanism for laying out veins is organized around covering an oxygen topology, and the availability of oxygen during vein development is dependent on environment.
After that, we broke for lunch -- they had substantially the same fare as last year, which, you know, was good. I was feeling pretty hung over from Katharine's party, and when I got up from the steps I'd been sitting on while eating, I noticed I'd left a big gross ass-sweat mark. So I went to the men's room and tried to take a crap, but people kept coming in, including a guy who was taking a piss but must have had prostate problems or something, because he could only piss in these weird short little bursts that seemed to require significant abdominal effort on his part -- so much so that he let out this tremendous fart at one point. I made a coughing noise to remind him he wasn't alone, but I don't think he was concerned.
Eben Moglen, who was next, opened his talk with, "Vista will be late, Office will be late, Virtual Server will be late, but the GPLv3 will be on time. Free Software is better." This met with a good deal of appreciative noise from the audience. The brunt of his talk, though was on how GNU/Linux -- and Free Software in general -- are set to make enormous gains in the embedded market because of the economics inherent in that sector. What he said, semi-verbatim, is that if you're Nokia or Siemens or Sony, say, and you've got a set of diverse hardware that you need to sell to consumers, you need to have a software platform that is robust, very well-understood, fully debugged, and absolutely secure. And it needs to be 100% free, financially, because otherwise the guy who makes it is going to eat your lunch. And what meets that need is Free Software -- it's become an essential raw material in consumer electronics manufacturing, and it's not replaceable. However, the move towards "Trusted Computing" has thrown up some stumbling blocks for Free Software, because TC methodologies rely heavily on non-Free cryptographic interfaces to hardware. The GPLv3 will do a lot of work towards making TC and thus DRM irrelevant, but he made the point that the industry's idea of a "trusted" kernel that meets their robustness requirements is basically a pipe dream, given that kernels are, by nature, too big and too volatile to be constantly re-assessed for "trustworthiness." As such, engineers worried about "trust" are moving more towards thin virtualization layers or application-layer DRM, both of which make conflicts with Free Software people less intense.
Winning the war on restrictive hardware, he said, is a conservative activity (I think he really meant "conservationist") -- we need to constantly emphasize the consumer demand for general-purpose computing hardware. But organizing consumers is always difficult.
He also said that the FSF has been watching major technology players get on board with TC and DRM for a long time and warning them that it was dangerous, and then "we made some very reasonable remarks about DRM in the GPLv3 and everyone went nuts. That's really what happened -- they went nuts. And I'm not talking about Linus. Linus did not go nuts by any means."
Ultimately, though, he thinks, The Time Is Right to push on industry.
When he opened the floor to questions, I asked him if he thought the state of mounting software patent aggression had changed since last year, and he gave a very long and interesting answer to the effect that it hadn't changed drastically, but that there'd been some high-profile legal skirmishes that have made a number of big players wary of participating in patent-hoarding. He also mentioned PubPat, which I hadn't known existed, and discussed some cases they'd been involved with.
RMS was up next, and, like last year, he gave a rather poor showing -- a short (16 minutes), rambling talk about the dangers of DRM. I asked him afterwards if he'd changed his position on the necessity for Free licenses for non-software creative works given the argument he'd had with Larry Lessig at last year's meeting, and he vehemently denied getting into an argument with Larry at all -- he claimed I must have read an article that misreported the event, and I was like, well, you know, okay, fine. But he did say that he'd come to believe that Free licenses should be encouraged for certain types of creative work, although he didn't really get too deep into discussing that. I was pleased that fewer people in the audience seemed to be interested in baiting him, though that didn't seem to make him any less ill-tempered.
Henri Poole had somehow wound up with the unpleasant task of soliciting suggestions from the members -- his presentation was called The Member Forum, and was basically all about organizing people into geographic delegations and soliciting suggestions for activism from them. He's sort of the most friendly-looking member of the board, but he also always looks like he's got this secret pain, like he's been gut-shot and is trying to hide it from everyone. I was actually a little bit psyched to meet the NYC / Brooklyn contingent, but it turned out they were all complete douchebags! The two ugliest and dumbest guys there had both been former employees of the FSF and began practically every sentence with, "When I was at the FSF..." And, you know, that wouldn't be a problem if they had anything smart to say, but neither they nor really anyone else there seemed to Get It when it came to what the FSF needs to do to leverage public support. These guys were really hung up on the sort of "reach one person" style of activism, where you give really breathy, earnest, personal speeches about stuff to roomfuls of senior citizens and people with weird and unpleasant disabilities who don't have anywhere else to be in the middle of the day. Look, I don't have any activism experience myself, but it seems to me that what the FSF needs is more public visibility-focused initiatives, like the Firefox full-page ad in the NYTimes. The FSF needs to get on peoples' voting radar, and once they've done that they can focus on handing out free OpenOffice CD-ROMs at the veterans' center. That's a luxury activity. What the FSF does not need is to recruit more pushy, wall-eyed people with acne scars who insist on saying "Treacherous Computing" when they're having a conversation with you; that tack is right for writing a letter to the editor, not for talking to Real Live Humans.
The capstone on the dumbass member forum was the chubby, smug former-FSF beardo saying that having members give speeches at public functions is infeasible because public speaking is so difficult. "We'd basically have to send everyone to Toastmasters," he said. "That's where Richard learned to be such a great public speaker." RMS is probably one of the worst public speakers I've ever seen. I mean, I'm completely devoted to his movement, but he's a surly, slouchy, mumbly piece of crap in front of a microphone. Get off his jock.
So that part of the meeting put me in kind of a bad mood, but then on the way back home on the bus, Maggie talked to me for two hours on my cell phone, which was delightful. Plus I am never going to get sick of riding around in cars and buses in New England looking out the window. I'm sure it's just that I've got so many happy memories of things that happened in Massachussetts (trips with my family and my other family), but I swear that state is the most beautiful in the Union. The flora, the fauna, the sights, the sounds, the smells. I love it.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Don't Give A Fuck About Shitaly
...is a line from a newish Headliners song (i.e., one with which I am not involved at all) called "Bike Tour." Apparenty this version of the line beat out "don't give a shit about Fuckaly."
On Sunday, I had a much better lesson with Lester than the last one, even managing to extract some praise from him regarding the smoothness of my parallel parks.
Last night Nina and I had planned to meet up at that place Chickpea at St. Marks Place to go to Continental to see the band of a guy who we'd gone to high school with way back when. I was waiting outside for her when I ran into Perri, a dude I'd gone to Wesleyan with and with whom I'd appeared in a mime show called The Dumb Show (I was the upright bass player in the "mime band"). Embarrassingly, his name escaped me for minutes on end and by the grace of God popped into my head as I was taking down his cell number. He and a few other Wesleyan friends were hanging out in the back room of Chickpea eating falafel, and I sat down at caught up with them for a while. There was this elderly Jewish guy sitting by himself one table over who would occasionally say something out loud in response to something in our conversation, but we ignored him. I kept worrying that Nina wasn't going to be able to find me in the back, so finally I got up to back outside, but the Jewish guy called out to me on my way out and asked me to sit down for a second.
He clearly didn't have any teeth -- he had ordered some kind of pita and egg concoction that he was gumming messily, spraying egg whites at me after separating them from the yolk with a plastic spoon. The first things he told me were that he had learned to chew better without the teeth than with them (but that he had a set of $3000 dentures somewhere that he just didn't like to take out to dinner with him) and that he could do more to a woman with just his tongue than other men could do with their entire bodies. Then he asked if I'd like to hear the rap / reggae song he'd composed -- the words, spoken, were as follows:
"Why did they call him Bullet Joe?"
"Because he only ever needed one bullet. He'd always carry around one bullet. And a lot of ammunition."
"Wait, I thought he only needed one bullet."
"One bullet per guy. There might be more than one guy, though."
Nina showed up soon after -- she'd had train trouble and we were now too late to see the show, so she sat down in time to hear Ellie, which was the guy's name, talk about how he'd been on the run for the past six months from members of his father's old gangs, having to duck in and out of hospitals where'd he'd seek treatment for "physical conditions" only to be confined for psychiatric counseling by doctors he referred to as "Jew Nazis." He'd been followed by mafiosi as he hid out at synagogues and friends' houses, as far as Stamford, CT -- "I look out the window," he said, "and see them circling the block" -- to the extent that he'd decided that day that he could never return to Brooklyn. "It's Manhattan and Israel only, now," he said. I can't remember the order of the points he hit on in the extended lecture he gave us, but the following is, hopefully, a representative survey:
On Sunday, I had a much better lesson with Lester than the last one, even managing to extract some praise from him regarding the smoothness of my parallel parks.
Last night Nina and I had planned to meet up at that place Chickpea at St. Marks Place to go to Continental to see the band of a guy who we'd gone to high school with way back when. I was waiting outside for her when I ran into Perri, a dude I'd gone to Wesleyan with and with whom I'd appeared in a mime show called The Dumb Show (I was the upright bass player in the "mime band"). Embarrassingly, his name escaped me for minutes on end and by the grace of God popped into my head as I was taking down his cell number. He and a few other Wesleyan friends were hanging out in the back room of Chickpea eating falafel, and I sat down at caught up with them for a while. There was this elderly Jewish guy sitting by himself one table over who would occasionally say something out loud in response to something in our conversation, but we ignored him. I kept worrying that Nina wasn't going to be able to find me in the back, so finally I got up to back outside, but the Jewish guy called out to me on my way out and asked me to sit down for a second.
He clearly didn't have any teeth -- he had ordered some kind of pita and egg concoction that he was gumming messily, spraying egg whites at me after separating them from the yolk with a plastic spoon. The first things he told me were that he had learned to chew better without the teeth than with them (but that he had a set of $3000 dentures somewhere that he just didn't like to take out to dinner with him) and that he could do more to a woman with just his tongue than other men could do with their entire bodies. Then he asked if I'd like to hear the rap / reggae song he'd composed -- the words, spoken, were as follows:
Immediately after repeating the last couplet, he addressed the ceiling and said, "I'm sorry; I know I'm supposed to be humble. But sometimes it's hard to be humble." He explained that he'd had five Cokes to drink already that night and that they made him feel crazy. Almost without stopping for breath, he started telling me about growing up in Brooklyn as the son of a guy named Bullet Joe, whom he claimed was a prominent figure in the Jewish mafia in the 40s. "Ask me why they called him Bullet Joe," he said.The truth comes from the Torah
Not Sodom and Gomorrah
I'll make you queen of the 'hood
If you love me good
I'll make you queen of the night
If you fuck and suck me right
"Why did they call him Bullet Joe?"
"Because he only ever needed one bullet. He'd always carry around one bullet. And a lot of ammunition."
"Wait, I thought he only needed one bullet."
"One bullet per guy. There might be more than one guy, though."
Nina showed up soon after -- she'd had train trouble and we were now too late to see the show, so she sat down in time to hear Ellie, which was the guy's name, talk about how he'd been on the run for the past six months from members of his father's old gangs, having to duck in and out of hospitals where'd he'd seek treatment for "physical conditions" only to be confined for psychiatric counseling by doctors he referred to as "Jew Nazis." He'd been followed by mafiosi as he hid out at synagogues and friends' houses, as far as Stamford, CT -- "I look out the window," he said, "and see them circling the block" -- to the extent that he'd decided that day that he could never return to Brooklyn. "It's Manhattan and Israel only, now," he said. I can't remember the order of the points he hit on in the extended lecture he gave us, but the following is, hopefully, a representative survey:
- "There's a war going on in Brooklyn right now between the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, and the niggers. You see the movie Munich? I didn't see it, I bought a bootleg from the Latin guy who sells movies, but there's a line in it: 'The only fucking blood I care about is Jewish blood.' That's how I feel."
- Despite the above, he would like to make pornographic films with Guyanese women. "Nobody gets hurt to make a film."
- He's had six heart attacks since 1990, but is getting his cholesterol and arterial plaque under control. Nemacor and Zocor should be avoided; they are shit.
- As a teenager, he'd dated a hot girl named Barbara Ann Chertman. After a memorable evening on the beach under a blanket, she told him she wanted to see other guys. Months later he got a letter from her saying, "I missed you more than I thought I would." They trysted in a motel room on an uncomfortable bed. Now she's married. She'd said it was a marriage of convenience, and that she'd like to see him again. After several unreturned phone calls and letters, you know what he thinks? "Barbara Ann, you can suck my fucking dick."
- Would I like to see how strong he is, even at 60? He had me shake his hand with my strongest grip. He did have a strong hand for an old guy, but he wasn't killing me or anything. "Had enough?" he asked? "I'm getting there," I said. "No, you've had enough. You should give up now."
- After my friend Perri left the restaurant, Ellie informed me he was a member of the gang that was gunning for him and which was waiting outside Chickpea. "You wanna take me tonight, Perri, you scum? Go right ahead. But I'll be in Heaven. You'll be burning in Hell with my father and his boys. I'll be watching you burn in Hell."
Dearest Ninotchka,It took him fucking forever to do this, because he insisted on holding the pen like a knife and going over each huge letter several times ("I like to go hard and deep"). He wouldn't let Nina read it at all, and he wouldn't let me read the last line, which is why I don't know how it ends -- she got a call from her mother and had to escape Ellie's attempts to physically wrest the phone from her by retreating towards the entrance. After a few minutes alone with him, I realized she'd left and went outside to find her; we decided to ditch the Harper's and just skedaddle.
May you always know and enjoy the happiness and beauty the mirror reflects and...
Friday, March 10, 2006
Holy Fucking Ow
What are some things that have happened to me?
A few Sundays ago I was eatin' pizza and watchin' the Oscars and my cheek and gums over on the upper righthand side of my mouth started hurting fairly badly. At first I assumed it was another motherfucker of a canker sore like the one I got last year around this time, but then my cheek swelled up and by Wednesday I couldn't really eat at all. So I called Dr. Dorato on Thursday and he prescribed me some Amoxicillin, which I have been taking assiduously, even though the capsules it comes in are fucking huge. My fucking mouth is still sore as shit, but at least I can basically talk and eat again.
I've been going to a lot of shows, lately -- dragged Alana to Billy's show at CGBG, going to Previn's show at The Delancey tonight.
Things to look forward to:
Yesterday I had a driving lesson with Lester that I totally blew because I'd been up late the night before. My hands were shaking the whole time, and Lester got pretty mad at me. At one point he had me pull over and he actually got out and got into the driver's seat and showed me how to do something; he'd never done that before. It was kind of scary -- he's an extremely fast and precise driver, sort of like when Atticus Finch shoots the rabid dog. On the curb we found a few scattered plastic garbage bag ties and collected them so we could re-attach the vanity mirror in the car, which had basically fallen off.
I'm still really tired; time for bed.
A few Sundays ago I was eatin' pizza and watchin' the Oscars and my cheek and gums over on the upper righthand side of my mouth started hurting fairly badly. At first I assumed it was another motherfucker of a canker sore like the one I got last year around this time, but then my cheek swelled up and by Wednesday I couldn't really eat at all. So I called Dr. Dorato on Thursday and he prescribed me some Amoxicillin, which I have been taking assiduously, even though the capsules it comes in are fucking huge. My fucking mouth is still sore as shit, but at least I can basically talk and eat again.
I've been going to a lot of shows, lately -- dragged Alana to Billy's show at CGBG, going to Previn's show at The Delancey tonight.
Things to look forward to:
- FSF meeting on April 1st
- Yankees / Red Sox game with Emma on May 10th
Yesterday I had a driving lesson with Lester that I totally blew because I'd been up late the night before. My hands were shaking the whole time, and Lester got pretty mad at me. At one point he had me pull over and he actually got out and got into the driver's seat and showed me how to do something; he'd never done that before. It was kind of scary -- he's an extremely fast and precise driver, sort of like when Atticus Finch shoots the rabid dog. On the curb we found a few scattered plastic garbage bag ties and collected them so we could re-attach the vanity mirror in the car, which had basically fallen off.
I'm still really tired; time for bed.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Direct From Hollywood Cemetery
Yeah, so I'm going to start writing in this thing again, I think. I just had to take a breather for a while. You don't want anyone to watch you try to swallow a pill that is far too large to swallow.
On Thursday Nina and Eve and I went to the Ted Leo show at The Hook, which is a rock club in Red Hook. The show was great, but the audience was probably one of the worst I've ever seen -- no one was dancing around, and it was all sort of mild-looking chubby dudes with huge beards wearing flannel shirts, and then these tiny little girls wearing fancy-looking clothes and hats. Look, it's been a while since I considered myself "up" on rock music, but The Pharmacists are basically a punk band, right? And if you're standing like 2 feet from the stage at a show, it's okay to dance around a little bit, right? I started shoving Eve and Nina around, but these girls standing next to me said, "Stop it." Christ.
Ted Leo says "thanks" when the audience applauds after every song. This would be pretty lame, except that he says it in a kind of snotty way that reminds me of Leonard Graves Phillips.
The two opening bands were Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, which I liked, even if no one else did, and Les Aus, which I hated, even if no one else did. Call me a contrarian; I can take it.
I just got back from my first driving lesson in about a year -- I'd tried to schedule something before today, but Lester's a real popular teacher and then I had to postpone a lesson I'd scheduled for the blizzard. Lester's as good a teacher as I remember, and within half an hour I felt pretty confident behind the wheel again. And, as usual, there was some excitement: We were practicing parallel parking near the Red Hook Project in Red Hook when we heard people shouting over at this bus shelter. When we got closer, we saw two girls kicking another girl who they'd knocked down. After a few seconds they ran off into the projects. Lester grabbed the wheel with one hand, heading us into the project parking lot ("Give gas," he said), and started dialing 911 on his cell with the other. We turned around a bend into this sort of cul-de-sac where we found a police cruiser just kind of sitting there. Lester jumped out and ran over to them, pointing at the fleeing girls, who were running in the opposite direction. The cruiser took off, but they didn't seem like they were in a particular hurry, and the girls got away, much to Lester's chagrin. He had me circle around the block several times, muttering all the while about the brazenness of a daylight mugging at a bus stop. And then he had me parallel park practically every car on the next two blocks.
Right now FOX 5 is showing this frustrating, moody Hal Hartley movie called No Such Thing. Do they know who watches TV on a Saturday afternoon? Okay, I guess they're right; it's me.
I'm feeding the cat of one of the IT guys at work, and as payment he is allowing me to host a karaoke party at his house using his Time Warner On-Demand Karaoke Channel. So far the response to my invitations has been... lukewarm. But we'll see what happens.
On Thursday Nina and Eve and I went to the Ted Leo show at The Hook, which is a rock club in Red Hook. The show was great, but the audience was probably one of the worst I've ever seen -- no one was dancing around, and it was all sort of mild-looking chubby dudes with huge beards wearing flannel shirts, and then these tiny little girls wearing fancy-looking clothes and hats. Look, it's been a while since I considered myself "up" on rock music, but The Pharmacists are basically a punk band, right? And if you're standing like 2 feet from the stage at a show, it's okay to dance around a little bit, right? I started shoving Eve and Nina around, but these girls standing next to me said, "Stop it." Christ.
Ted Leo says "thanks" when the audience applauds after every song. This would be pretty lame, except that he says it in a kind of snotty way that reminds me of Leonard Graves Phillips.
The two opening bands were Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, which I liked, even if no one else did, and Les Aus, which I hated, even if no one else did. Call me a contrarian; I can take it.
I just got back from my first driving lesson in about a year -- I'd tried to schedule something before today, but Lester's a real popular teacher and then I had to postpone a lesson I'd scheduled for the blizzard. Lester's as good a teacher as I remember, and within half an hour I felt pretty confident behind the wheel again. And, as usual, there was some excitement: We were practicing parallel parking near the Red Hook Project in Red Hook when we heard people shouting over at this bus shelter. When we got closer, we saw two girls kicking another girl who they'd knocked down. After a few seconds they ran off into the projects. Lester grabbed the wheel with one hand, heading us into the project parking lot ("Give gas," he said), and started dialing 911 on his cell with the other. We turned around a bend into this sort of cul-de-sac where we found a police cruiser just kind of sitting there. Lester jumped out and ran over to them, pointing at the fleeing girls, who were running in the opposite direction. The cruiser took off, but they didn't seem like they were in a particular hurry, and the girls got away, much to Lester's chagrin. He had me circle around the block several times, muttering all the while about the brazenness of a daylight mugging at a bus stop. And then he had me parallel park practically every car on the next two blocks.
Right now FOX 5 is showing this frustrating, moody Hal Hartley movie called No Such Thing. Do they know who watches TV on a Saturday afternoon? Okay, I guess they're right; it's me.
I'm feeding the cat of one of the IT guys at work, and as payment he is allowing me to host a karaoke party at his house using his Time Warner On-Demand Karaoke Channel. So far the response to my invitations has been... lukewarm. But we'll see what happens.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Spit Stix Las Vegas
I don't really have anything to say about Las Vegas, except to avoid the shrimp cocktail at the Golden Gate -- especially during the muscular dystrophy telethon. I'm sure you all can read about it our trip in other people's blogs.
In place of all that, here's a recipe for the drink I've been drinking this week -- just like granddad used to make:
In place of all that, here's a recipe for the drink I've been drinking this week -- just like granddad used to make:
5 parts bourbonIt's a Manhattan! Welcome home, everyone.
2 parts sweet vermouth
Bitters
A cherry
Thursday, January 12, 2006
The Mantii Are My Only Friends
Today's Times has an article about the differences (shock: they are significant) between Howard Stern and David Lee Roth, who is replacing him in certain markets after his move to Sirius. The article includes one of the more accurate characterizations I've read of what it is the Howard Stern Show is all about:
I'm not gonna pay 13 bucks a month for it, though.
Mr. Stern, as his fans know, is born for radio: his on-air character is an unwashed basement figure, best kept out of sight -- a haggard masturbator and morbid misanthrope who must hang out with deformed and desperate men because he can hardly perform with women. The fact that the pinup girls who come on his show now seem to want to have sex with him is, in his telling, evidence only of the women's ambition and depravity.This is a bit florid, but, yeah, that's why I used to listen (I tuned out after he went through a pretty creepy period right after September 11th, 2001). I've always felt there are two groups of Stern fans -- there are the "desperate men" types who listen for the chance to hear some stripper's measurements described, and then there are guys like me and Razor who (correct me if I'm wrong, Bill) get off on the "character" described above because it's sort of an acknowledgment or expiation of the things we most dislike about ourselves. I don't think it's a more intellectual way of appreciating the show -- the urge towards self-effacement is about as visceral as the desire to hear about titties on the radio. At least, it is for me.
The Stern character simply hates his guests and co-hosts as he hates himself; he's a mean little pornography-addicted freak whose self-loathing reverses itself only in fits of equally grotesque narcissism, as when he flashes his listeners with a dirty raincoat by disclosing disgusting secrets about himself. But his relentlessly loser style makes him seem honest, and wins him a privileged relationship with the truth; fans believe what he says -- about everything from politics to back pain to etiquette. He has hewn his character brilliantly.
I'm not gonna pay 13 bucks a month for it, though.
Oh, Berlin
...your heart has been / drawn and quartered again.At the behest of Jeremy, I went to go see my old summer camp / high school friend Alana's band Cherryfix play tonight at the Mercury Lounge. She and the lovely Serena used to be in an outfit called Contraband, whose patch I still have on my "punk" sweatshirt that my dad got me from the Gap. This new band has a very different sound -- it's kind of a not-so-hard hard rock thing. Which is not to say it's not good; they're certainly a lot better than I remember from listening to the MP3s on their web site. Those readers who are up on their Juliology may remember that the Headliners had a song about her called I Wanna Be Alana's Boyfriend (MP3 no longer available, sadly, from Hey Suburbia), that went a little like this:
Last time I saw her, she was lyin' on the streetI tell you, I still kind of want to be Alana's boyfriend. I really really wanted it on the bus to summer camp in Long Island when I was 12 years old. And her band covered "Heart Shaped Box" last night. So they've got my vote, Mr. A & R man.
Kids were all dancin' to that punk rock beat
Took her for a ride on the ferris wheel
But she'll never know just how I feel
I wanna be Alana's boyfriend
I wanna hold her so tight
I wanna be Alana's boyfriend... tonight...
In preparation for Vegas, I've been watching gambling movies this week. Last night I watched Rounders with Tom, who claims, inexplicably, that Matt Damon is a better actor than Ed Norton (I mean, I'm not a guy who likes either of those creeps that much, but Matt is obviously Bigger Scumbag). That movie is not so good -- like Sophie said, it's not a movie that presents poker as a metaphor for human interaction or anything, it's just a movie that's literally about poker. And it doesn't really even involve Vegas, which made me feel foolish after I figured that out. Tonight I rented The Cooler, which is an extremely dopey movie, even though everyone in it is sort of working really hard to make sure you don't find out. Alec Baldwin's quite good, though, and so is Maria Bello. This sounds like a movie review... I'm just talking about some movies that I watched, man.
What else, what else. Tom and I hung out with Eve at O'Connor's on Monday night and stuffed ourselves on these delicious cookies that she baked. I'd never been to that place before -- it's nice and quiet (at least on a Monday) and it's got a good jukebox. And you can't beat $2.50 gin-and-tonics, even though they're so weak you gotta drink like 10 of them to get effed up. Eve: What a gal.
Listening to the fucking Strokes album non-stop at work. What the fuck is wrong with me?
Reminder: Change the cat litter before getting on that fucking plane!
Friday, January 06, 2006
Crying In The Handicapped Bathroom
Honest to God, I hadn't seen the movie The Squid and the Whale when I posted that picture last time, and I didn't, for some reason, even think I wanted to go see it, but Emma wanted to go on Monday night, so I tagged along, and it was really, really great. All of the actors are fantastic, particularly the two kids. Not that my parents got divorced or anything, nor is my dad quite as pompous as Jeff Daniels' character, but as Emma pointed out, there's a lot to identify with in there. I was a weird little kid, too, not unlike the younger brother character, though somewhat less perverse. I guess the one problem with the movie is that, like Wes Anderson, who I think was producer on this one, this Baumbach guy doesn't really make any effort to explain (or doesn't understand) what motivates any of his female characters. They're like some kind of religious mystery. I don't know. I don't get it, either, though, so...
I bought the new Strokes album yesterday (along with a repurchase of Dawn of the Dickies, which I'd lost, and Rancid's Life Won't Wait -- which is supposed to be their smartest and best album, but is, predictably, kind of unlistenable, or at least about 0% catchy), and it's actually pretty good. It's certainly got more good material than the second one. I was getting annoyed the other day about how pathetic the "new rock" sound was the last time I checked in on it, but I don't know why I like The Strokes but hate, say, The Postal Service and The Killers and every other sort of folky-sounding piece of limp garbage. Maybe it's the "neat" production. Or that the guy's name is Julian. So far my favorite songs are "Heart In A Cage," "On The Other Side," and "Vision Of Division."
Every year this science "zine" called Edge publishes an article called The Question, in which they ask a bunch of famous scientists and sciencey-types a sort of thought-question. This is a great way to kill literally an hour or two of your work-day because there are a lot of responses and they are pretty long. Last year the question was "What do you believe that you cannot prove?" This year it's "What is your most dangerous idea?" I feel like a lot of the people who answered didn't really understand it, because most of them described an idea that they hoped wasn't true but probably was, like that global warming is pretty much unstoppable at this point. I was surprised to see that a lot of the responses were like... materialist explanations for consciousness, and the idea that "this is all there is" -- I thought that shit was pretty well-accepted at this point, particularly among scientists. Here are some of the ones I thought were interesting:
Jeremy Bernstein:
I bought the new Strokes album yesterday (along with a repurchase of Dawn of the Dickies, which I'd lost, and Rancid's Life Won't Wait -- which is supposed to be their smartest and best album, but is, predictably, kind of unlistenable, or at least about 0% catchy), and it's actually pretty good. It's certainly got more good material than the second one. I was getting annoyed the other day about how pathetic the "new rock" sound was the last time I checked in on it, but I don't know why I like The Strokes but hate, say, The Postal Service and The Killers and every other sort of folky-sounding piece of limp garbage. Maybe it's the "neat" production. Or that the guy's name is Julian. So far my favorite songs are "Heart In A Cage," "On The Other Side," and "Vision Of Division."
Every year this science "zine" called Edge publishes an article called The Question, in which they ask a bunch of famous scientists and sciencey-types a sort of thought-question. This is a great way to kill literally an hour or two of your work-day because there are a lot of responses and they are pretty long. Last year the question was "What do you believe that you cannot prove?" This year it's "What is your most dangerous idea?" I feel like a lot of the people who answered didn't really understand it, because most of them described an idea that they hoped wasn't true but probably was, like that global warming is pretty much unstoppable at this point. I was surprised to see that a lot of the responses were like... materialist explanations for consciousness, and the idea that "this is all there is" -- I thought that shit was pretty well-accepted at this point, particularly among scientists. Here are some of the ones I thought were interesting:
Jeremy Bernstein:
The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is.Scott Sampson:
The purpose of life is to disperse energy.Haim Harari:
Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).I'm finally getting back to doing some writing, after, gee... about four years, roughly. Isn't it funny how time can just pass like that?
Monday, January 02, 2006
Hatriotism
Happy New Year, everyone. 2005 was not the best year ever, let's just say, for many different reasons. I'm a complainer, I admit it, but there was some stuff I didn't even complain about that was bad, and, you know... But I think this new year can really be a good one -- I mean, by the law of Star Trek movie sequels, it practically has to be -- and I wish all of you, really all of you, a really great one. I really mean it. This is my little prayer for everyone. There it is, done. Happy New Year! Resolutions:
So tuffytuffins turned out to be Maggie, somewhat predictably, though I admit I was sort of stumped for a long time. I've given her enough of a hard time in person, so I won't go into it further here, but suffice it to say that a stuffed animal roughly meeting her description arrived in the mail, causing a bit of consternation in our household. But how can anyone stay mad at Maggie when she gives such nice Christmas presents:
Compton; Compton; Apple Bottom
Katharine and Emma and I made plans to go to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks for Maggie's birthday. I've never been there before, period, so I think that'll be very exciting, plus maybe I can use it to somehow recoup the two weeks I'm just coming off of where I just sat around here and sulked the whole time. Reading the ineffable Jon Konrath's Dealer Wins as preparation. What am I doing?
I'd thought I'd be at work today six months ago when I made the dentist's appointment I just got back from, but I'm not, so I just had to get up and go into Manhattan just for that this morning. Good news is I've got clean teeth; the bad news is that the x-rays they took today show that the wisdom teeth I've got that haven't come in yet aren't moving, which apparently means that they might have to come out? They weren't super clear on that point. I guess it's not an issue until I'm in excruciating pain. Not looking forward to that, though.
Super-depressing encounter on the way home: This enormous man-child -- think Lenny from Of Mice And Men -- had sort of button-holed what I think was a poor young Yeshiva student by the window seat. This guy was enormous, had long stringy hair and a brutal face covered in what looked like scars from a car accident, but he had the voice and mannerisms of a petulant child. He was very much concerned with his eternal salvation -- particularly, it seemed, as to whether hedging his bets when it came to believing in both Judaism and Christianity would get him into "heaven."
Am I a mean guy? I think about that sometimes. My deeply-held suspicion is that, despite what they might say, everyone likes to be excited a little bit by nastiness. I'm not an angry person, though. I'm not like the squid, nor am I like the whale. I'm just a guy, you know?
All teeth and suckers
- Deal with my anxiety problems... maybe
- Drink more. Literally! Time to stop being such a baby on this one
- Be able to drink shots without sipping and spluttering like a cat taking a pill
- Get my Driver's License
- Keep working on various computer projects, etc.
So tuffytuffins turned out to be Maggie, somewhat predictably, though I admit I was sort of stumped for a long time. I've given her enough of a hard time in person, so I won't go into it further here, but suffice it to say that a stuffed animal roughly meeting her description arrived in the mail, causing a bit of consternation in our household. But how can anyone stay mad at Maggie when she gives such nice Christmas presents:
Compton; Compton; Apple Bottom
Katharine and Emma and I made plans to go to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks for Maggie's birthday. I've never been there before, period, so I think that'll be very exciting, plus maybe I can use it to somehow recoup the two weeks I'm just coming off of where I just sat around here and sulked the whole time. Reading the ineffable Jon Konrath's Dealer Wins as preparation. What am I doing?
I'd thought I'd be at work today six months ago when I made the dentist's appointment I just got back from, but I'm not, so I just had to get up and go into Manhattan just for that this morning. Good news is I've got clean teeth; the bad news is that the x-rays they took today show that the wisdom teeth I've got that haven't come in yet aren't moving, which apparently means that they might have to come out? They weren't super clear on that point. I guess it's not an issue until I'm in excruciating pain. Not looking forward to that, though.
Super-depressing encounter on the way home: This enormous man-child -- think Lenny from Of Mice And Men -- had sort of button-holed what I think was a poor young Yeshiva student by the window seat. This guy was enormous, had long stringy hair and a brutal face covered in what looked like scars from a car accident, but he had the voice and mannerisms of a petulant child. He was very much concerned with his eternal salvation -- particularly, it seemed, as to whether hedging his bets when it came to believing in both Judaism and Christianity would get him into "heaven."
"Do you people think that this... this earth is the same thing as hell?"He also said, pricelessly, "My name is Leonard [something], and, you know, Leonard has L-O-R-D in it. My father was an atheist when he gave me that name, so I guess that name actually came from God. It's a very precious name."
"Well..." said the Jew.
"You know, some people think that, you know, the train is evil, because it's moving around in this dark tunnel all the time. What do you guys think about that?"
Am I a mean guy? I think about that sometimes. My deeply-held suspicion is that, despite what they might say, everyone likes to be excited a little bit by nastiness. I'm not an angry person, though. I'm not like the squid, nor am I like the whale. I'm just a guy, you know?
All teeth and suckers
Thursday, December 29, 2005
I Think I Just Shitted On Myself
Maggie's not kidding when she says that Trapped In The Closet is crazy. It's totally bonkers. Imagine the Buffy musical episode, but subtract out any self-awareness and sort of the contextual propriety of the music, and then replace that gay tap-dancing demon with R. Kelly with a real serious look on his big dumb face, and you're getting close. Oh yeah, and make the writing real stupid. A quick run-down for those of you unfamiliar with the material: Trapped In The Closet is a 24+ part R&B opera that's being released in little 4 minute chapters; it's a story of infidelity and betrayal, beginning with R. Kelly's character Sylvester waking up in a woman's bedroom after cheating on his girlfriend with her in a club. The woman, hearing her husband enter the house, hustles Sylvester into a closet to hide. In the story that unfolds, all the characters are cheating on each other in clandestine and surprising ways. The following is an edited (because people on the Internet are fucking illiterate) transcript of my favorite chapter that, I hope, will highlight some of the important themes. To set the stage: Sylvester's girl Gwen has been cheating on him with police officer whom he's discovered earlier in the story and who accidentally shot Sylvester's "cousin," Twan. The police officer has a wife himself, whom he's just found out to be cheating on him -- with a midget, no less.
After that, we parted ways and I went up to my friend Asta's house for her holiday party. That was fun, kind of, but I've noticed that all my Harvard friends from high school have chosen to be these sort of blissed-out intellectual dilettantes, none of whom has (ever had) a real job, and it makes me kind of uncomfortable about what I've chosen to do, which is to be a cranky working stiff. Asta has this neat little hollowed-out wooden bear that you put incense in, and then you can watch the smoke waft out of its nostrils. I had weird dreams and stomach problems all night, and now it's raining.
I finally met up with Billy to give him his birthday present, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the Nintendo DS. That little machine is pretty neat -- the game that comes with it, WarioWare, is a total blast. It's an endless supply of these tiny little mini-games that practically never repeat and that you have about 5 seconds to figure out and win each round. I bet the multiplayer version on the Gamecube is utterly delightful. We sat around and ate oranges and chocolates and then I went back to Brooklyn.
Now the midget jumps out of the cabinet and stomps the policeman on his toeThere's more, but I want you to wait for it. Props to Maggie and Katie for totally getting me to not be a lonely creep yesterday and the day before -- we went to a Mediterranean restaurant on Tuesday and I totally ate the fuck out of some rosemary-flavored chicken thing and a canoli from Rocco's. Then, yesterday, Maggie and I met Katie at her office in the New York Times building (I'd never been there before -- it's strange and dark and depressing) and went to the Museum of Natural History to see the Darwin show, but, wouldn't you know it, it was a sort of limited admission dealie that was sold out for the hours we were gonna be there. So instead we just kind of wandered around the museum, which I always love. Best of all, the fucking whale was open again -- the last time I'd been there they were "cleaning" it. That's gotta be my favorite thing in the whole collection. I took some pictures, but I'd have to turn on the big computer to upload them, and I don't know... not in the mood. You all know what that looks like, anyway. As Maggie mentioned, I did indeed work up the courage to touch the elephant, but it wasn't no fucking toe I touched. I copped a feel off that motherfucker's flank. We also saw a real live pigeon in the gift shop; racial, so...
The policeman's hoppin' around on one leg, screamin' out "son of a bitch!" while he runs under the table
He yells "freeze," dives over the table, and lands on the midget, while the midget kickin'
Real fast screamin' out "Bridget, Bridget!"
She yells, "Darlin, don't hurt him!"
He says, "Bridget, get yo' ass back,"
Then he continues to rough up the midget as if the midget was under attack
Then Bridget runs up to her room, goes into her purse and pulls a number out
The policeman puts him on the table and yells, "Man, what the hell you doin' in my house?"
He wipes cherry pie crust off his mouth and says, "Man, I was payed not to tell you."
Then the policeman pulls his gun out and yells, "Trespassin', man -- I got the right to shoot you!"
The midget says, "Mister, the man that payed me to do this would kill me if I tell."
He points the gun in his face, the midget says, "God, I think I just shitted on myself!"
After that, we parted ways and I went up to my friend Asta's house for her holiday party. That was fun, kind of, but I've noticed that all my Harvard friends from high school have chosen to be these sort of blissed-out intellectual dilettantes, none of whom has (ever had) a real job, and it makes me kind of uncomfortable about what I've chosen to do, which is to be a cranky working stiff. Asta has this neat little hollowed-out wooden bear that you put incense in, and then you can watch the smoke waft out of its nostrils. I had weird dreams and stomach problems all night, and now it's raining.
Now at Sylvester's house, Twan's got a patch on his shoulder, playin' cards, getting alongI spent Christmas at my parents' house, and it was really nice and relaxing. Got along great with my sister, which is sort of a rarity. They got me several nice sweaters, but the best present was, well, you guys already know. My dad is really into downloading movies off the Internet these days; like I've been telling people, it's almost as if he'll watch any awful movie out there as long as he can steal it. It kind of runs contrary to the way he normally operates. We watched Minority Report together awkwardly, sitting in chairs in front of his new wide-screen G5 because he "couldn't remember what the movie was about."
They're laughin' and talking when Sylvester says, "Gwen, baby, get the phone,"
Then she walks away from the table picks it up and says hello
Theres a lady on the other line panickin' and cryin' and talkin' all off the wall,
Gwen says, "Wait, slow, slow down -- who am I talkin' to?"
"My name's Bridget and I found your number in my husband's pocket -- I had to call you."
Two minutes later Gwen's shakin' her head sayin', "girl, I understand."
Sylvester says, "Who is it, baby?"
She hangs up and gives him the address
I finally met up with Billy to give him his birthday present, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the Nintendo DS. That little machine is pretty neat -- the game that comes with it, WarioWare, is a total blast. It's an endless supply of these tiny little mini-games that practically never repeat and that you have about 5 seconds to figure out and win each round. I bet the multiplayer version on the Gamecube is utterly delightful. We sat around and ate oranges and chocolates and then I went back to Brooklyn.
Now, meanwhile, back at the policeman's house, the midget's cryin' his ass offThe smell is the shit in the midget's pants.
While he's lyin' through his teeth about to get his li'l ass told off,
Then Bridget busts into the kitchen with a double barrel, sayin', "James, I can't let you do this"
Then he looks at her and says, "What? You'd shoot me for this fuckin' midget?"
She says, "I love him!"
The midget says, "No, Bridget!"
And then James points his gun and says, "We all gon' die up in this kitchen"
Now Bridget and James starin' each other down, slowly backin' apart
Then the midget takes his inhaler out and says, "This is not good for my heart"
Then James says, "Bridget, don't make me do this, baby put the gun down"
That's when Sylvester and Twan busted up in the house and say, "You put the gun down!"
Twan and Sylvester are sniffin' around trying to figure out what's that smell
As they turn and look at each other like, "What the hell?"
Saturday, December 24, 2005
A Strange Encounter
Today seems to be going absurdly nice, weather-wise, so I went out for a run around the park. I haven't been running consistently since it's gotten colder, so I did have to stop twice and walk a tiny little bit -- though on the whole I think I rocked the loop pretty hard. But one of the walking parts was the initial slope of that hill that Tom and Emma can identify as The Widowmaker, and as I was psyching myself up to start running again, this strange rumpled little old guy in a button-up shirt and a leather hat who looked like he could've been one of the engineers on the Manhattan Project came up to me and started talking:
"You... American?"At this point he let me go, and warned me to be careful running in the cold -- advise I could have used, perhaps, earlier in the week. "Good luck," I said. Now I'm going over to my parents' house to help them do holiday things and hopefully give Razor his birthday present. Send me e-mails!
"Yes."
"You American citizen? You born this country?"
"Yes..."
"You human... humanity? Or technical?"
"Uh... technical."
"What type technical?"
"Computers."
"Computer is technical? Hmmm... Like what computer -- programming or hardware?"
"Programming."
"Maybe you could tell me question, okay? Let's say you are engineer... science... scientist, and you have proposal for new [unintelligible], and you send to company, institution, you know, and they [unintelligible], you know, give you the brush-off."
"What's the problem?"
"They give you the brush-off."
"Well, you could submit your proposal to a different organization."
"I submit already to multiple company."
"Or you could publish it yourself."
"Publish it... no... I need verification from expert."
Friday, December 23, 2005
Tuffy Tuffins Sings The Blues
Last night I went out for dinner and drinks with my old friend Eve, who I'd stood up the night before when I got stuck in Manhattan. I had a bunch of errands to do on the way, so I gave myself an extra long time to get there, like an hour and a half, and then, wouldn't you know it, I got to our appointed meeting place with an hour to kill in the freezing cold. If I'd had a cell phone, I guess I could've called her house and come over or had her meet me, but I don't have one for another few days at least, so. So I tried to think of what one of my cool friends would do were he/she in a situation like this, and the answer is "go to a bar and have a drink and maybe meet a pretty girl while you are sitting by yourself at the bar." So I walked up and down Smith St. for a while peeking in the windows of all the bars and trying muster up the courage to be the only person in an empty bar or the only single person in a bar crowded with corporate happy-hour revelers. And I couldn't do it, which was humiliating and depressing, so I ducked into the Cafe St. Clair, as recommended by T. Rounsaville, and had the loneliest cup of hot chocolate ever, feeling like the most pathetic and small creature ever to spend Christmas by himself. And after that I was still 30 minutes early, so I wandered in and out of some of the trendy little boutiques on Smith. I found this one place selling little house and home trinkets, and in one corner of the store they had this bucket of old comic books from the 70s, some of which must have been at least a little valuable, and which included such titles as Kull The Destroyer and Devil Dinosaur. Then I read the Voice for a while on the street. Here's some more of my dealings with tuffytuffins:
(23:25:03) tuffytuffins: Did you miss me?Then Eve showed up and we went to this great Peruvian restaurant with a menu distinctly similar to the venerable Coco Roco's. We ordered a plate of ceviche to start with, which I'd never had before and which was absolutely delicious. My spirits picked up after I got some food in me and warmed up (the cold can really put a damper on brain function), and we chatted about life and love and how awful things can seem sometimes. Then we hoofed it over to Angry Wades and had some drinks and managed, by increments, to secure the seat next to the fireplace again, though we had to share it with one of the off-shift bartenders who was reading a Robert Jordan novel, of all things. He revealed that the fireplace is, in fact, not real -- it burns natural gas and the logs are all ceramic. Which doesn't make it any less cozy. After that we took a walk over to the Gowanus Canal and watched the moon for a while, which is when we noticed a train going by over the elevated tracks around Smith and 9th, which clued us in that the strike was, in fact, completely over. And then I went home.
(23:55:26) Nintendo Julian: Who... who are you?
(23:55:32) tuffytuffins: You did. Didn't you?
(23:56:21) tuffytuffins: It's OK. I missed you too.
(23:57:44) tuffytuffins: Are you there? Please don't ignore me!
(23:57:50) Nintendo Julian: Look.
(23:57:54) Nintendo Julian: What... what's the deal?
(23:57:55) tuffytuffins: I think I am in love with you.
(23:58:03) Nintendo Julian: Alright, that's enough.
(23:58:09) tuffytuffins: Why are you toying with my emotions?
(00:11:46) tuffytuffins: Well I guess we can only be friends.So what are we all doing for Christmas? Some of you are away, I know, but I have presents for practically all of you, and wouldn't it be nice if we all sort of sat down and did the presents thing in one shot? Everyone's going to that New Year's Eve party, right? What if we all showed up a little early to that and traded gifts before the party really got underway. I'm just saying. And I totally want to do the whole Jew holiday thing the week of the 26th; we can do it at my place or yours.
(00:12:01) Nintendo Julian: If that. Who are you?
(00:12:11) tuffytuffins: I'm your new friend.
(00:12:29) Nintendo Julian: Alright, I think I've had enough of you.
(00:12:34) tuffytuffins: Why?
(00:12:41) Nintendo Julian: I want to know who you are.
(00:12:47) tuffytuffins: You want my name? Why do we need labels?
(00:12:55) Nintendo Julian: Because this is creepy is why.
(00:13:06) tuffytuffins: What is creepy?
(00:13:11) tuffytuffins: Friendship?
(00:13:13) Nintendo Julian: Where did you get my name?The kicker is that I wasn't actually able to block her using my weird Linux AIM client, so she's still out there somewhere, waiting. I'm still sort of hoping this is someone I know in disguise, in which case the joke's on me but which will also mean I won't have had a totally creepy exchange with a female version of the main character from Notes From Underground.
(00:13:40) tuffytuffins: I searched for people who like Nintendo.
(00:13:47) tuffytuffins: I like Duck Hunt.
(00:13:57) Nintendo Julian: Alright.
(00:14:10) tuffytuffins: Then you were very nice.
(00:14:17) tuffytuffins: And that's when I fell in love with you.
(00:14:19) Nintendo Julian: I'm going to block you.
(00:14:34) tuffytuffins: No friendship?
Thursday, December 22, 2005
The Big Vacation, Day Four
Billy cancelled his party on account of the transit strike, which sucks. I was kind of counting on having something to do, but can see why he'd wanna put it off. Now, as per Katharine's advice, I'm doing the vacation thing -- I bought some Doritos and a pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream (as far as I can tell, no flavor is better than this) and I'm chilling out watching David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, which, sad to say, is not quite as creepy as I'd hoped. There is, however, a pretty hot sex scene involving rubber tubing and various types of calipers in the gynecologist's office. Okay, I finished watching the movie -- depression-city, and not quite the body-horror diddle-fest I was hoping for. Turns out it's based on a real set of gynecologist twins named Steven and Cyril Marcus who totally went bananas and killed themselves with barbituates.
Here's an interesting thing: The saga of tuffytuffins. The other day I got an IM from somebody I'd never heard of before, but whose screen name I kind of thought I recognized on account of it reminding me of this joke that Tom and Maggie used to use to "wind me up" -- so I sort of played along, thinking that the person would eventually reveal themselves to one of my friends (or one of their friends). That's not quite what happened (edited for the salient points):
Ted and I saw King Kong last night after finishing up our Christmas shopping. The theater -- and Times Square -- was practically deserted, or at least as empty as I'd ever seen it except maybe for that dumb movie Vanilla Sky. It took me more than two hours to get into Manhattan, thanks to the strike -- I was worried that by staying at home I was missing out on the official "transit strike" experience, but no longer. The transit strike experience is basically all about sitting in traffic for two hours. So I was late meeting Ted, but he was gracious in his irritation. We went shopping at the Virgin Mega-store, which, did you know, has this weird little movie theater in the basement that plays strange foreign short films? We didn't see any of them. I bought a present for The Rase and Ted picked up some stuff for his family, and then we went to go see King Kong at the big AMC 25-screen theater around the corner, stuffing some contraband McDonalds hamburgers into Ted's messenger bag before going in.
The theater was practically empty, which seemed to give the impression to the two latin types sitting next to me that it was totally cool to talk the whole time, literally. Also, there was a real live homeless person sleeping across the three seats behind us, and during the opening credits he kept sort of wheezing and snuffling, which made me think, before I turned around and realized he was a homelo, that it was some funny person making monkey noises for a laugh. The movie was okay -- Andy Serkis did a great job with the monkey poses and facial expressions, but Jack Black... he's no Laurence Olivier. And the whole thing is 90 minutes too long. And what the fuck does it mean?
Here's an interesting thing: The saga of tuffytuffins. The other day I got an IM from somebody I'd never heard of before, but whose screen name I kind of thought I recognized on account of it reminding me of this joke that Tom and Maggie used to use to "wind me up" -- so I sort of played along, thinking that the person would eventually reveal themselves to one of my friends (or one of their friends). That's not quite what happened (edited for the salient points):
(23:13:16) tuffytuffins: Hello.
(23:14:24) Nintendo Julian: hello
(23:14:52) tuffytuffins: Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
(23:15:25) Nintendo Julian: is that the same thing as...
(23:15:27) Nintendo Julian: ...no
(23:16:04) tuffytuffins: Well, I have.
(23:16:21) Nintendo Julian: how was that
(23:16:32) Nintendo Julian: you find out what you need to find out about yourself?
(23:16:33) tuffytuffins: He looked like the blond guy from Queer Eye
(23:17:06) tuffytuffins: Is that what I was supposed to be doing? Finding out about myself? Because I was just kind of dancing.
Ted and I saw King Kong last night after finishing up our Christmas shopping. The theater -- and Times Square -- was practically deserted, or at least as empty as I'd ever seen it except maybe for that dumb movie Vanilla Sky. It took me more than two hours to get into Manhattan, thanks to the strike -- I was worried that by staying at home I was missing out on the official "transit strike" experience, but no longer. The transit strike experience is basically all about sitting in traffic for two hours. So I was late meeting Ted, but he was gracious in his irritation. We went shopping at the Virgin Mega-store, which, did you know, has this weird little movie theater in the basement that plays strange foreign short films? We didn't see any of them. I bought a present for The Rase and Ted picked up some stuff for his family, and then we went to go see King Kong at the big AMC 25-screen theater around the corner, stuffing some contraband McDonalds hamburgers into Ted's messenger bag before going in.
The theater was practically empty, which seemed to give the impression to the two latin types sitting next to me that it was totally cool to talk the whole time, literally. Also, there was a real live homeless person sleeping across the three seats behind us, and during the opening credits he kept sort of wheezing and snuffling, which made me think, before I turned around and realized he was a homelo, that it was some funny person making monkey noises for a laugh. The movie was okay -- Andy Serkis did a great job with the monkey poses and facial expressions, but Jack Black... he's no Laurence Olivier. And the whole thing is 90 minutes too long. And what the fuck does it mean?
(23:20:09) tuffytuffins: Do you believe stuffed animals can be art?The cabbie for the ride home I shared with Ted was real talkative. After Ted got out of the cab, he asked me where I was from. I told him I grew up on the Bowery, and he said I had a strange accent, one that he couldn't place. "You go to school in California or something?" he asked. Then he asked what I do for a living, and when I told him I'm a programmer, he said, "I got a thing I want to sell on eBay -- I collect stamps, and I got $500,000 worth of stamps, you know from like 100 years ago, in an album at home. You could help me sell that?" That sounds like a lot of money, I said. I don't now if I can help you with that -- maybe you should go to eBay's web site and talk to one of the staff. "No, no, where do you live? I live in Williamsburg -- you could come to my house on Sunday and help me take a picture of the stamps and make a web site?"
(23:20:48) Nintendo Julian: Yes, of course. Case in point: The beanie-baby named Pinchers The Crab
(23:21:07) tuffytuffins: Exactly my point. Beanie Babies were my inspiration.
(23:21:15) tuffytuffins: That's what I do. I create stuffed animals
(23:21:24) Nintendo Julian: Out of what do you create them>
(23:22:21) tuffytuffins: Whatever materials are laying around. Maybe orange peels for stuffing. Maybe old underwear for lining. Once, I used cat hair.
(23:22:52) Nintendo Julian: Because, you know, whatever.
(23:23:05) Nintendo Julian: The orange peels keep the stuffed animal "moist" inside
(23:23:19) tuffytuffins: You have to give them souls. Otherwise they won't be art. Then they're just stuffed animals.
(23:23:31) Nintendo Julian: And the souls have to be gross is the other thing.
(23:29:14) tuffytuffins: Would you like to subscribe to any magazines?So who is this person? She's got a sense of humor, I'll grant you, but boy does she not want to say who she is. I'll put the rest of our conversation into a separate entry. The transit strike is over!
(23:29:21) tuffytuffins: I can get you a discount.
(23:29:42) Nintendo Julian: Which is your least popular magazine? I like to go my own way.
(23:30:17) tuffytuffins: People don't like the gardening ones. Do you have a "green thumb?"
(23:31:11) tuffytuffins: I also sell porn.
(23:31:19) Nintendo Julian: No thanks, Internet person.
(23:31:21) Nintendo Julian: None of that for me.
(23:31:31) tuffytuffins: There's lots to choose from.
(23:32:03) tuffytuffins: Do you want to know our least popular porn?
(23:32:21) tuffytuffins: Hold on. I'm checking
(23:32:56) tuffytuffins: Not child porn. That's pretty popular.
(23:33:11) tuffytuffins: Not midget porn. That gets a good college student following.
(23:34:00) Nintendo Julian: That's one of the roots of townie-student strife; a college moves into town and pretty soon the place is stinking with drifts of dead, naked midgets.
(23:34:14) tuffytuffins: Oh, the worst-selling category is "Tragedy Porn." Like sex in the aftermath of hurricanes and things.
(23:34:28) Nintendo Julian: I'd imagine most of that sex is pretty great, though.
(23:34:37) Nintendo Julian: Maybe it's the kind of thing that doesn't photograph well
Monday, December 19, 2005
The Big Vacation, Day One
Last night, Chrissy Rodney came back to the East Coast from UCLA and I hung out with him and Razor (and Razor's girl, SJ) at Razor's apartment. I didn't know this, but their Australian Shepherd dog Fry had gotten hit by a car around Thanksgiving and died! That's terrible. But they have a new dog now, Job (named for the Arrested Development character, but not spelled like that for some reason), which is some kind of Huskie-mix thing, that is absolutely adorable: It rolls around on its little mat with its legs in the air like a cat and gives kisses a'plenty. We drank lots of beers and I ate a double cheeseburger that they had in the fridge. My appetite has been absolutely zero for the past couple of days. Maybe I've got what Ted's recovering from. Tomorrow is Billy's birthday. I know what I'm getting him as a b-day present, but not as a Christmas present. Maybe he just won't get one -- it's the curse of the Saggitarius.
So I'm on vacation now for two weeks. Don't really know what I'm gonna do with myself -- I went running in the early afternoon, which was pretty unpleasant, given the temperature and the fact that I haven't run in a couple of months. I had to walk, I think, most of the way. The rest of the day I spent working on little projects, but that's not going to hold me over for two weeks. Literally e-mail me and tell me which of you are here and not at work. Want to see "Kong?"
I rented American Pie, which, believe it or not, I'd never seen. I actually thought it was pretty great -- the actors all have a sort of refreshingly gross look to them, and their delivery is often novel, if not always natural. Observations:
I was going through some of my old journals this evening trying to collate some of my more continuous threads of writing to use towards a more cohesive long-form thing, and I was struck by how weird I've always been -- or at least, how weird I was even back then -- and how I still kind of worry about the same irrational things and characterize things to myself in the same ways. It sort of freaked me out, but it was not a wasted errand, since I got several pages of good material that I think I can expand upon.
The Rase was wondering what the actual meaning of the word crapulence was, since she often references that line from the Who-Shot-Mr.-Burns Simpsons episode ("wallowing in my own crapulence"). I do that do, but I didn't know what it meant, either, so we looked it up:
It never fails to surprise me how alcohol can make you feel pretty okay no matter how awful you're feeling.
UPDATE: COCKBLOCKERS
So I'm on vacation now for two weeks. Don't really know what I'm gonna do with myself -- I went running in the early afternoon, which was pretty unpleasant, given the temperature and the fact that I haven't run in a couple of months. I had to walk, I think, most of the way. The rest of the day I spent working on little projects, but that's not going to hold me over for two weeks. Literally e-mail me and tell me which of you are here and not at work. Want to see "Kong?"
I rented American Pie, which, believe it or not, I'd never seen. I actually thought it was pretty great -- the actors all have a sort of refreshingly gross look to them, and their delivery is often novel, if not always natural. Observations:
- Is it just me or is Chris Klein's character actually a pretty awful singer? It seems like 'Oz' rises to the top echelon of the jazz singing club pretty quickly given that he can't really hit the right notes all the time
- What's up with everyone cheering on Jason Biggs while he's doing that strip tease on the webcam? I feel like I'd be more inclined not to want to see this guy in my trig class take all his clothes off. Not that it's gay, it's just, you know, not good porno. Also, what's the deal with there being no narrative retribution for him putting that girl all over the Internet? I mean, I guess he has his own humiliation televised as well -- I will say that I've never really understood the little problem he has in that scene. That's probably the one awful sex thing that's never happened to me.
- Favorite character by far: Shit-Break. It's time the movies had a hero who looks a little bit less like Chris Klein and more like a fresh corpse that's just entered the "bloat" stage of decomposition
- How creepy is Natasha Lyonne? I could've called that Hepatitis thing if I'd seen this movie when it came out
I was going through some of my old journals this evening trying to collate some of my more continuous threads of writing to use towards a more cohesive long-form thing, and I was struck by how weird I've always been -- or at least, how weird I was even back then -- and how I still kind of worry about the same irrational things and characterize things to myself in the same ways. It sort of freaked me out, but it was not a wasted errand, since I got several pages of good material that I think I can expand upon.
The Rase was wondering what the actual meaning of the word crapulence was, since she often references that line from the Who-Shot-Mr.-Burns Simpsons episode ("wallowing in my own crapulence"). I do that do, but I didn't know what it meant, either, so we looked it up:
crap·u·lence (krpy-lns)So, literally, it means "crapulence."
n.
- 1. Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking.
- 2. Excessive indulgence; intemperance.
It never fails to surprise me how alcohol can make you feel pretty okay no matter how awful you're feeling.
UPDATE: COCKBLOCKERS
Friday, December 16, 2005
Single White Shemale
[11:36] Me: so I leered at her tits all night
[11:36] Tom: That doesn't sound like you.
[11:36] Tom: It must've been really liberating to finally do something "creepy."
I'm writing this at work. In other words, the strike did not go down -- they're going to "phase it in," starting with the private bus companies in the outer boroughs. My commute was a disaster, though, because of a "very sick passenger" at 4th Ave., one stop away from my house. They stopped the train for like 20 minutes in the tunnel, and then announced, loudly and repeatedly, that if we didn't want to wait any longer, we could walk to the front of the train and exit up there. So I stayed on board, because, you know, fuck it. Then a little while later they said that we all actually had to get off because the train was going out of service. So I queued up with everyone else and eventually made it to the middle of the train, at which point the conductor came on again and told us all to sit down because we were actually going to start moving again. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, no lie. The worst part was that I was sitting right near this revolting old I-Ti / Hispanic lady who would not shut up talking, apropos of nothing, to these two Muslim girls sitting right next to me whom she'd just met. I guess there's some reading of second-and-third-world culture in which complainy old women are sort of exercising some kind of powerful social force with the yakking and the clucking and the whining, but come on, people. The highlights:
But I finally got in (at around 11:00) and stopped off at Han's to get a delicious breakfast sandwich: Egg, provolone, tomato, and bacon, on whole wheat toast. I recommend you give it a spin the next time you're eatin'.
[11:36] Tom: That doesn't sound like you.
[11:36] Tom: It must've been really liberating to finally do something "creepy."
I'm writing this at work. In other words, the strike did not go down -- they're going to "phase it in," starting with the private bus companies in the outer boroughs. My commute was a disaster, though, because of a "very sick passenger" at 4th Ave., one stop away from my house. They stopped the train for like 20 minutes in the tunnel, and then announced, loudly and repeatedly, that if we didn't want to wait any longer, we could walk to the front of the train and exit up there. So I stayed on board, because, you know, fuck it. Then a little while later they said that we all actually had to get off because the train was going out of service. So I queued up with everyone else and eventually made it to the middle of the train, at which point the conductor came on again and told us all to sit down because we were actually going to start moving again. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, no lie. The worst part was that I was sitting right near this revolting old I-Ti / Hispanic lady who would not shut up talking, apropos of nothing, to these two Muslim girls sitting right next to me whom she'd just met. I guess there's some reading of second-and-third-world culture in which complainy old women are sort of exercising some kind of powerful social force with the yakking and the clucking and the whining, but come on, people. The highlights:
- "He got so bad, with the gangrene, that he was rolling around in the car. Some people might say in that situation that death is better than living, but not me. Because when someone dies you lose something 'dat you love, right?"
- "They do the fistula surgery on her, and two weeks later, she's back driving the emergency truck, you know, to rescue people what needs help. It's not fair; there's no recovery time. And now the doctors're tellin' her there's another fistula."
- "At first, I thought it was funny, my niece, with the lipstick, but this morning I woke up and there's lipstick all over the walls! My niece, she so cute, you know that she loves her mama because anyone else tries to talk to her, she be screamin', screamin', and she don't never stop."
But I finally got in (at around 11:00) and stopped off at Han's to get a delicious breakfast sandwich: Egg, provolone, tomato, and bacon, on whole wheat toast. I recommend you give it a spin the next time you're eatin'.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Strikethrough
Haven't blogged in forever, and I'm only blogging now because I don't feel like working on my computer projects. Is there gonna be a transit strike tomorrow? It sure looks that way. And thus I stand to lose two dollars to Tom -- I made two bets, and I've already lost out on one in that Tower Video did let us come in and browse around with our Tall Chai Lattes. The times they are a-changin'. My job has a "contigency plan" in place so that we'll all be able to work from home, but you know what that amounts to? SNOW DAY! For those who aren't blessed to live in New York, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is one of the most grotesquely mismanaged bureaucracies in... well, in New York City; on the other hand, the strike we're looking at is basically going to cripple the city. I mean, literally, there will be no public transportation tomorrow, and everybody rides public transportation here. So. And then the next two weeks I have off. Anyone wanna take me on a trip with you? I'm rich and I love "fun."
I finished Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and while it was beautiful in many ways, I still have the same complaint about it that I did at the outset -- that is, that the narrator is so goddamn affectless and, I don't know, fucking blase that it totally spoils the impact of you know, the cosmic horror. I think their design problems began when they named the guy "Jack Walters." Clearly he's gonna be a boring guy. And, I mean, you'd think he'd have a bit more of an internal monologue having been diagnosed as an "acute schizophrenic"
I bought Christmas presents for practically all of my friends this year, which is pretty rare for me, Fagin. Got a lot of the shit on eBay, and I actually ran into a bit of a sticky situation -- I bid on an auction before looking at the seller's feedback rating, and when a conscientious eBay user notified me, it turned out the seller's rating was 0 -- equal positive and negative feedback, which is extremely rare for eBay, which is basically a big cuddle-fest around the clock. Well, I read up on the rules on bid retraction, and it turned out I didn't have much recourse except to watch in terror as the seller's rating dropped to -2 and I got two more e-mails from other eBay members claiming to have been "scammed" by the seller. Well, the auction ended, and I won the item, but by the grace of the eBay fraud prevention team, the seller's account was suspended, releasing me from the contract I'd entered when I placed the bid. The seller responded a few days later to the panicky e-mails I'd sent her with an e-mail that includes the following excerpt (sic):
Congratulations to Tom on getting a line in on the episode of The Colbert Report introducing Bob Costas! Really... really proud of you, I guess.
So who wants to see King Kong with me? Who wants to see The Gay Cowboy Movie with me? Merry Christmas!
I finished Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and while it was beautiful in many ways, I still have the same complaint about it that I did at the outset -- that is, that the narrator is so goddamn affectless and, I don't know, fucking blase that it totally spoils the impact of you know, the cosmic horror. I think their design problems began when they named the guy "Jack Walters." Clearly he's gonna be a boring guy. And, I mean, you'd think he'd have a bit more of an internal monologue having been diagnosed as an "acute schizophrenic"
I bought Christmas presents for practically all of my friends this year, which is pretty rare for me, Fagin. Got a lot of the shit on eBay, and I actually ran into a bit of a sticky situation -- I bid on an auction before looking at the seller's feedback rating, and when a conscientious eBay user notified me, it turned out the seller's rating was 0 -- equal positive and negative feedback, which is extremely rare for eBay, which is basically a big cuddle-fest around the clock. Well, I read up on the rules on bid retraction, and it turned out I didn't have much recourse except to watch in terror as the seller's rating dropped to -2 and I got two more e-mails from other eBay members claiming to have been "scammed" by the seller. Well, the auction ended, and I won the item, but by the grace of the eBay fraud prevention team, the seller's account was suspended, releasing me from the contract I'd entered when I placed the bid. The seller responded a few days later to the panicky e-mails I'd sent her with an e-mail that includes the following excerpt (sic):
I know that this is a inconvience to you, but imagine my situation, I am having to close down all my checkings and savings accounts even the accounts I have for my boys college funds even though they have just been started due to they are only 2 and 4, but it pays to start early on things like this for the kids now a days with the economy and the world in the shape that it is in... I am sending the item out that day, that is if it is before 12:00, because at noon is when we take the packages up,. the boys lay down for their nap and we have my niece to babysit them while we run to the post officeWell, cry me a river, sister.
Congratulations to Tom on getting a line in on the episode of The Colbert Report introducing Bob Costas! Really... really proud of you, I guess.
So who wants to see King Kong with me? Who wants to see The Gay Cowboy Movie with me? Merry Christmas!
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