Huzzah - I had an interview at the conveniently located Tutoring Factory around the corner, and it went well. Cool boss, flexible schedule hours, decent pay (not great). No benefits. Ugh. But I might parlay it. We'll see. In the short term, I'll at least be adding to the collective income of TBN, and hopefully using mornings for some let's get down and dirty productive writing or editing or some other PT job I can secure. So grim goes to glimmer. So goes grim to glimmer. So grows glimmer from grim. Slow grows glimmer from grin. Slowly. Solo-y.
Now playing: Charles Mingus - Solo Dancer
I just got off the phone with Mike NTPB, who's enjoying what he describes as "The Hooch Parade"that is Las Vegas - he's there for a bachelor party, not an audition. He assures me, slyly, that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so long as it's not contagious. I pray for his Pippen. Not really. (Read: trust Mike, and don't want to waste breath). Had a great convo about his Gov't class in D.C., which sounds awesome - he's dropping Skittles and Rawls's philosophies like it's going out of style. You'll have to talk to him for details, but rest assured: it was awesome, and only one student spent twenty five minutes alone, broken-legged mute and diabetic in an auxiliary room.
Also g-chatted with Ben, the Grin, who's got the whole world, in his pants. This makes sense in context. But he, too, is doing well and living the life of husband at home with lady-in-vetting. Only on East Coast Time. Always great to "hear" from Ben, even if I hear him as books say things.
BOOKS! Almost done with the tome, review pending. I went crazy at the library today (after visiting the bookstore, so I saved 15% in 15 minutes, or something). I hit up the best American Fiction of the past 25 years list, grabbing, in no particular order:
Rabbit, Run
Beloved
Blood Meridian
American Pastoral
and added the recent Delillo:
Falling Man
And McEwan's Atonement. And a Primer on Postmodernism, aptly titled "The Simpsons and Iraq and such as." Just kidding; it's entitled A Primer on Postmodernism. Anyhoo, I've got a busy three weeks ahead of me. I will conquer the literate world!
I inspire! I conquer! I fail! I pass the time! I - got a vague feeling that everything's gonna be okay! perhaps.
Tempered, always tempered. To. a. fault.
Anyways, brace thyself (FOOLS!) to enjoy the weekend. Things starting up in a good way.
(Incidentally, I started going back and tagging my posts - this is something like the 192nd, we are close to a monumental event. Not including the posts from the old blog, of course; thought counting those we may be near 250. I'll check sometime. But, such as, and in conclusion, tagging the posts felt like a serious waste of time, and the content is so varied that it seemed non-helpful. So if you ever get a nagging need to read about yourself here, or some particular topic, just utilize that search bar up top). (Some would say this indicates that I should be more focused in my posting and limit each post to one topic, but I would say that these are the same folks who probably "make money" and "have a sizeable audience," and if I wanted those things I would blog about Michael Vick and tag that thing Michael Vick and Michael and Vick, but I don't so I won't and we'll keep the readership low in an attempt at intimacy and meaning because you don't even know that guy and your attachments to his team are artificial and silly and deep down you know this).
Friday, August 31, 2007
Thursday, August 30, 2007
New Digs
Some tweaking to the Ballad this afternoon, the introduction of a fresh minor key. Let me know if it doesn't look right or makes your monitor smoke or something.
Things looking up a little bit today: got a couple of interviews for next week and one tomorrow for a part time tutoring job, which may actually be ideal. It's a whopping .5 miles from our condo, which is the biggest plus, so I'll see the boss tomorrow and make sure the other details work out.
I ran into Nyetverse contributor Frank on the chattier side of the Google-net yesterday, and had a great little convo about (among other things) the overlap of our disciplines before he headed off for lunch. It was a great convo because of the general awesomeness (to be Frank) (PUN!), but also because it inspired a crazy wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy trampling by me for the remainder of the morning. Frank had mentioned something about pegging me as a John Dewey pragmatist, so I was naturally compelled to look him up and enter the information vortex that is le internet. Pragmatism stands in different respects to realism, idealism, analytic philosophy, logical positivism, empiricism, and off-shooting we go into link after link. The major point of this is that I blew through abotu 3 hours just reading those cursory takes on various forms of philosophy, which is sweet, and seems to indicate that I've got a bit of a bug. Which is another hint in the rightness of current directions. Sweet.
Speaking of bugs, I've been reading the uber-excellent Underworld, which has slammed me back into writing mode. SO as soon as I get through the tome (820+pages), I think it's time to resume another thing that seems to be a calling. Calling, calling; that is the theme here. The invigorating notion of irrational compulsion. Dig it. So, hopefully I will get some work started on the long set aside Posthumous Challenge, as well as a couple of other ideas I have cooking. Ooh, I see you shiver with - I use too many Rocky Horror jokes here. Dig.
Dig - a rather bizarre and yet powerfully typical component of the book is that Lenny Bruce is a major figure throughout the second half. Hold on, I have to scream,
"We're all gonna die!"
On impulse. Which is a factually true statement, whether you're quoting Lenny or the Flaming Lips. ANyways, the text is full of Lenny Bruce rants that are really facsimiles as written by DeLillo, but very good, very capture-the-essence from what I know of Lenny Bruce. So I checked out some albums and audio tracks online as well, and man - genius guy, frenetic to the point of incomprehensibility. And a lot of his manic ravings regard 1950s/60s contemporary politics, not exactly my strong suit. Anyhoo, good to hear something real. I mean, something as real as filtered through the lens of entertainment. Regardless, I hear you Lenny Bruce (I is afraid). Check him out if you're up for some Cold War nostalgia.
Cubs are on; D-Backs in a bit; sunrise sunset. I will leave you with two excellent videos - one is the coolest fan-developed SImpsons intro to-date, the second is a primo action movie line. And followed by a very enthusiastic Orson Welles:
Things looking up a little bit today: got a couple of interviews for next week and one tomorrow for a part time tutoring job, which may actually be ideal. It's a whopping .5 miles from our condo, which is the biggest plus, so I'll see the boss tomorrow and make sure the other details work out.
I ran into Nyetverse contributor Frank on the chattier side of the Google-net yesterday, and had a great little convo about (among other things) the overlap of our disciplines before he headed off for lunch. It was a great convo because of the general awesomeness (to be Frank) (PUN!), but also because it inspired a crazy wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy trampling by me for the remainder of the morning. Frank had mentioned something about pegging me as a John Dewey pragmatist, so I was naturally compelled to look him up and enter the information vortex that is le internet. Pragmatism stands in different respects to realism, idealism, analytic philosophy, logical positivism, empiricism, and off-shooting we go into link after link. The major point of this is that I blew through abotu 3 hours just reading those cursory takes on various forms of philosophy, which is sweet, and seems to indicate that I've got a bit of a bug. Which is another hint in the rightness of current directions. Sweet.
Speaking of bugs, I've been reading the uber-excellent Underworld, which has slammed me back into writing mode. SO as soon as I get through the tome (820+pages), I think it's time to resume another thing that seems to be a calling. Calling, calling; that is the theme here. The invigorating notion of irrational compulsion. Dig it. So, hopefully I will get some work started on the long set aside Posthumous Challenge, as well as a couple of other ideas I have cooking. Ooh, I see you shiver with - I use too many Rocky Horror jokes here. Dig.
Dig - a rather bizarre and yet powerfully typical component of the book is that Lenny Bruce is a major figure throughout the second half. Hold on, I have to scream,
"We're all gonna die!"
On impulse. Which is a factually true statement, whether you're quoting Lenny or the Flaming Lips. ANyways, the text is full of Lenny Bruce rants that are really facsimiles as written by DeLillo, but very good, very capture-the-essence from what I know of Lenny Bruce. So I checked out some albums and audio tracks online as well, and man - genius guy, frenetic to the point of incomprehensibility. And a lot of his manic ravings regard 1950s/60s contemporary politics, not exactly my strong suit. Anyhoo, good to hear something real. I mean, something as real as filtered through the lens of entertainment. Regardless, I hear you Lenny Bruce (I is afraid). Check him out if you're up for some Cold War nostalgia.
Cubs are on; D-Backs in a bit; sunrise sunset. I will leave you with two excellent videos - one is the coolest fan-developed SImpsons intro to-date, the second is a primo action movie line. And followed by a very enthusiastic Orson Welles:
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Gots to Clean my Bookmarks!
Lynx 4 U, or "I'm in ur RSS Feed, Directin ur surfin:"
Speaking of ye olde LOLCats, here's a nice little attempt at analysis.
And Beck insists that Miss Teen South Carolina is in fact a master ironist, and that this little display ranks right up there with Pynchonian toilet trips in the historic equivalent of extemporaneous brilliance:
Cool gallery of African animals in B&W.
Classic Psych: Watch this video and really concentrate and count the number of times the team in white throws and catches the ball and the number of times the ball hits the floor. Serious, now, count as if your life depended on it. When you think you have the numbers, come back to this page.
Now, watch this video and look for the gorilla who walks through the stupid game of people playing catch.
Here's a pic gallery that's full of pretty.
Crazy Sea Monsters.
Here's an interesting blog. Here's another. And another.
Here's the Cubs unofficial blog. And here is the Dbacks. The DBacks blog makes great use of graphs from FanGraphs.com - check out a running account of win probability in graph and play log form.
(Win probability is a way of weighing the impact of a particular player's performance - someone has charted how often teams win when they're up 2 with a runner on 1st in the bot. of the 4th, etc. So each team starts at 50/50 (more or less, there should be an ad for the home team) and the game progresses. Cool way to think about the game)>
Here's a Charlie Rose interview with Charles Schultz, and here's an entire site of Charlie Rose interviews.
Cool account of the Top 20 Movie Shootouts.
A "No Hope" Flow Chart by R. Crumb.
Watch it while it's hot: every Simpsons episode online!
The Best of Flash Animations.
And... I grow weary of this post. When will we go back to Transylvania? I'll leave you with a little tuneage from teh ever-awesome Giant Panda Guerrilla Dub Squad - I may have posted this before, but this little minor key, Jamaica meets Eastern Europe tune is sweet:
I lied - how could I not include this LOLSchroedinger'sCat?
Speaking of ye olde LOLCats, here's a nice little attempt at analysis.
And Beck insists that Miss Teen South Carolina is in fact a master ironist, and that this little display ranks right up there with Pynchonian toilet trips in the historic equivalent of extemporaneous brilliance:
Cool gallery of African animals in B&W.
Classic Psych: Watch this video and really concentrate and count the number of times the team in white throws and catches the ball and the number of times the ball hits the floor. Serious, now, count as if your life depended on it. When you think you have the numbers, come back to this page.
Now, watch this video and look for the gorilla who walks through the stupid game of people playing catch.
Here's a pic gallery that's full of pretty.
Crazy Sea Monsters.
Here's an interesting blog. Here's another. And another.
Here's the Cubs unofficial blog. And here is the Dbacks. The DBacks blog makes great use of graphs from FanGraphs.com - check out a running account of win probability in graph and play log form.
(Win probability is a way of weighing the impact of a particular player's performance - someone has charted how often teams win when they're up 2 with a runner on 1st in the bot. of the 4th, etc. So each team starts at 50/50 (more or less, there should be an ad for the home team) and the game progresses. Cool way to think about the game)>
Here's a Charlie Rose interview with Charles Schultz, and here's an entire site of Charlie Rose interviews.
Cool account of the Top 20 Movie Shootouts.
A "No Hope" Flow Chart by R. Crumb.
Watch it while it's hot: every Simpsons episode online!
The Best of Flash Animations.
And... I grow weary of this post. When will we go back to Transylvania? I'll leave you with a little tuneage from teh ever-awesome Giant Panda Guerrilla Dub Squad - I may have posted this before, but this little minor key, Jamaica meets Eastern Europe tune is sweet:
I lied - how could I not include this LOLSchroedinger'sCat?
Monday, August 27, 2007
Death of a Chair
This is a piece I have entitled "25 Dollars Down the Drain (I)"
Truly an awesome experience - there I was, sitting, typing, putting the final touches on the glorious piece of dredge that was my weekend sum of the baseball when
pop.
And I went hurtling to the floor. Interestingly enough, this is not the first chair malfunction I have had this weekend - Dan can attest how my attempt to sit in a folding wooden bleacher chair with both hands occupied (dog and soda) resulted in hilarious consequences and a shattered, bloody big toe nail. This time I landed square on the rump, but suffered no injury other than the usual increased heart rate that accompanies loud noises and sudden drops in elevation.
Alas, no O mask.
So that was awesome; the grand "Ab ball as desk chair" experiment has quite profoundly rejected the null hypothesis; ab balls suck. Ouch. Humiliation. Fright. A sudden aversion to the leotarded sections of fitness centers.
I also left out of the weekend's account that we spent the afternoon and evening with Dan and Christina, or more exactly we spent the afternoon with D&C and the evening with Dan and some comatose vagabond on our futon. Thankfully, our trained, food-deprived attack dogs were on the case:
I mean wow, that's one serious violence in action photograph right there, borderline contraposto. Seriously, though, we had a great time with D&C on a relatively chilly 98 degree Scottsdale poolside afternoon; many more to come I'm sure (even if they did cause the Cubs to lose on the TV).
And I'll leave you with our latest artistic installment in the living room, something I've entitled "Rapt: More than $25 Down the Drain, But Less Apt to Pop (I)"
Oh, and if you are not awesome and have a new couch, then perhaps you should contemplate your place in the solar system by checking out the lunar eclipse tonight.
Truly an awesome experience - there I was, sitting, typing, putting the final touches on the glorious piece of dredge that was my weekend sum of the baseball when
pop.
And I went hurtling to the floor. Interestingly enough, this is not the first chair malfunction I have had this weekend - Dan can attest how my attempt to sit in a folding wooden bleacher chair with both hands occupied (dog and soda) resulted in hilarious consequences and a shattered, bloody big toe nail. This time I landed square on the rump, but suffered no injury other than the usual increased heart rate that accompanies loud noises and sudden drops in elevation.
Alas, no O mask.
So that was awesome; the grand "Ab ball as desk chair" experiment has quite profoundly rejected the null hypothesis; ab balls suck. Ouch. Humiliation. Fright. A sudden aversion to the leotarded sections of fitness centers.
I also left out of the weekend's account that we spent the afternoon and evening with Dan and Christina, or more exactly we spent the afternoon with D&C and the evening with Dan and some comatose vagabond on our futon. Thankfully, our trained, food-deprived attack dogs were on the case:
I mean wow, that's one serious violence in action photograph right there, borderline contraposto. Seriously, though, we had a great time with D&C on a relatively chilly 98 degree Scottsdale poolside afternoon; many more to come I'm sure (even if they did cause the Cubs to lose on the TV).
And I'll leave you with our latest artistic installment in the living room, something I've entitled "Rapt: More than $25 Down the Drain, But Less Apt to Pop (I)"
Oh, and if you are not awesome and have a new couch, then perhaps you should contemplate your place in the solar system by checking out the lunar eclipse tonight.
Weekend with the Cubbies (Make that DBacks...)
Kissed my sister this weekend... and then the Cubs lost the game I didn't attend on Saturday, making the whole thing a 1-2 venture. Stupid, stupid, but we had a good time regardless. I got camera happy on Friday night, so let's start with a little Nyet Art:
I call it "constructed narrative." Here's an unconstructed narrative, unless I have MAD video-editing skillz:
Our seats on Friday were right next to the Cubs bullpen, allowing us to catch Sean Marshall's warmup and giving us the opportunity to see a very skinny Kerry Wood hit on ladies in the stands. Tres exciting. Here's Kerry and Marmot hanging out, Jacque Jones (actually, that might be Cliff Floyd, no jersey number and I can't really tell, so let's just call him "black lefty outfielder" and reveal my white cultural failings) warming up with Soriano, and our view from the seats in one of the multiple occasions that the Cubs came up with he bases loaded and no outs and failed to score:
The scene was pretty hilarious. There are a TON of Cubs fans down here, some because of the ridiculous importation of Chicagoans, some because of the long-standing coast-to-coast Cubs games broadcast on WGN, and some because the Cubs play their Spring Training games here. So both games had a nice intense atmosphere, less because the two teams were in first place of their respective divisions and more because Cubs fans are drunk and pretty obnoxious, especially when they are occupying half of the stadium. I was not drunk or obnoxious, relatively reserved in my pleasure at seeing the Cubs win on Friday, and I will fully grant to the DBacks that there were some Cubs-heads who were being primo jerks. But all in all a fun (FAMILY) (I said FAMILY) time - lots of battling cheers of "Let's Go (Team name)" from both sides, and a whole lot of enthused cheering from reds or blues depending on which way a given play went.
Each game had a fantastic highlight: on Friday, Theriot, he of the best nickname in all of baseball, made a RIDICULOUS diving catch and throw to the plate to stop a mid game run for the DBacks, and given that Arizona averages about 0.33 runs per contest that was a death blow for them. On Sunday, we saw Derek Lee hit about a 425 foot shot that kicked off the overhanging balcony in CF and bounded away from Young and Byrnes; all 6'7" of him scampered around the bases for an inside-the-park homerun, awesome to see in person. Chris Young also rocketed two shots out to left field in the Sunday game, and then whiffed mightily for the remainder.
I am going to eschew any kind of game by game breakdown or detailed description of the social experience, other than to muse on an old quote. Some reviewer said that Grateful Dead concerts were "half baseball game, half church service," and that Phish concerts in comparison were "all baseball game." I don't know how accurate that is (maybe give Phish 90-10?), but I get the point; there's a whole lot of a goofy "entertain us," get-silly-on-drugs-or-otherwise, non-"serious music" appreciating contingent Phish shows. Well, the DBacks stadium experience, imho, is all Phish show. There are obviously serious baseball fans here and there, but so much of the experience of the game there is overwhelmed by between-inning entertainment, loud banners, give aways, mascots, blond DBack hussies, advertisements in general, arrows of neon and flashing marquees that the baseball game as baseball game element is effectively drowned out. Not that it's necessarily unique to Arizona; I got the exact same vibe from the new park in Houston. All the rip-off of eight dollar beers and five-dollar bourbon-laced hot dogs is there, too; it's a marketing sham job of epic proportions, though you would be hard-pressed to miss that fact. It's not the presence of the sham, it's the lack of the baseball - I just didn't get any sense that people around me were delving into the subtleties. Again, this could be just because I recently read Pafko at the Wall and breathed in all the pastime nostalgia; that's clearly a long gone idea(l). Seeing a baseball game in person - the reason I try to go early and take in BP and all - is whatever holy element exists in baseball the game and all of its parabolas. I wasn't feeling that this weekend.
(Another Phish parallel - I used to find myself sitting at Phish shows thinking how great it was going to be to listen to this show later on CD when I could actually hear it and process what was going on. I had the same thought on Friday - you just can't analytically see anything from the perpendicular view of the 1st base stands. Every pitch looks the same but for the speed, unless it is WAY outside or whathaveyou. So I saw that stab by Theriot and couldn't wait to check out the replay at home. And at home I told everyone how I was there, I saw that live.)
I call it "constructed narrative." Here's an unconstructed narrative, unless I have MAD video-editing skillz:
Our seats on Friday were right next to the Cubs bullpen, allowing us to catch Sean Marshall's warmup and giving us the opportunity to see a very skinny Kerry Wood hit on ladies in the stands. Tres exciting. Here's Kerry and Marmot hanging out, Jacque Jones (actually, that might be Cliff Floyd, no jersey number and I can't really tell, so let's just call him "black lefty outfielder" and reveal my white cultural failings) warming up with Soriano, and our view from the seats in one of the multiple occasions that the Cubs came up with he bases loaded and no outs and failed to score:
The scene was pretty hilarious. There are a TON of Cubs fans down here, some because of the ridiculous importation of Chicagoans, some because of the long-standing coast-to-coast Cubs games broadcast on WGN, and some because the Cubs play their Spring Training games here. So both games had a nice intense atmosphere, less because the two teams were in first place of their respective divisions and more because Cubs fans are drunk and pretty obnoxious, especially when they are occupying half of the stadium. I was not drunk or obnoxious, relatively reserved in my pleasure at seeing the Cubs win on Friday, and I will fully grant to the DBacks that there were some Cubs-heads who were being primo jerks. But all in all a fun (FAMILY) (I said FAMILY) time - lots of battling cheers of "Let's Go (Team name)" from both sides, and a whole lot of enthused cheering from reds or blues depending on which way a given play went.
Each game had a fantastic highlight: on Friday, Theriot, he of the best nickname in all of baseball, made a RIDICULOUS diving catch and throw to the plate to stop a mid game run for the DBacks, and given that Arizona averages about 0.33 runs per contest that was a death blow for them. On Sunday, we saw Derek Lee hit about a 425 foot shot that kicked off the overhanging balcony in CF and bounded away from Young and Byrnes; all 6'7" of him scampered around the bases for an inside-the-park homerun, awesome to see in person. Chris Young also rocketed two shots out to left field in the Sunday game, and then whiffed mightily for the remainder.
I am going to eschew any kind of game by game breakdown or detailed description of the social experience, other than to muse on an old quote. Some reviewer said that Grateful Dead concerts were "half baseball game, half church service," and that Phish concerts in comparison were "all baseball game." I don't know how accurate that is (maybe give Phish 90-10?), but I get the point; there's a whole lot of a goofy "entertain us," get-silly-on-drugs-or-otherwise, non-"serious music" appreciating contingent Phish shows. Well, the DBacks stadium experience, imho, is all Phish show. There are obviously serious baseball fans here and there, but so much of the experience of the game there is overwhelmed by between-inning entertainment, loud banners, give aways, mascots, blond DBack hussies, advertisements in general, arrows of neon and flashing marquees that the baseball game as baseball game element is effectively drowned out. Not that it's necessarily unique to Arizona; I got the exact same vibe from the new park in Houston. All the rip-off of eight dollar beers and five-dollar bourbon-laced hot dogs is there, too; it's a marketing sham job of epic proportions, though you would be hard-pressed to miss that fact. It's not the presence of the sham, it's the lack of the baseball - I just didn't get any sense that people around me were delving into the subtleties. Again, this could be just because I recently read Pafko at the Wall and breathed in all the pastime nostalgia; that's clearly a long gone idea(l). Seeing a baseball game in person - the reason I try to go early and take in BP and all - is whatever holy element exists in baseball the game and all of its parabolas. I wasn't feeling that this weekend.
(Another Phish parallel - I used to find myself sitting at Phish shows thinking how great it was going to be to listen to this show later on CD when I could actually hear it and process what was going on. I had the same thought on Friday - you just can't analytically see anything from the perpendicular view of the 1st base stands. Every pitch looks the same but for the speed, unless it is WAY outside or whathaveyou. So I saw that stab by Theriot and couldn't wait to check out the replay at home. And at home I told everyone how I was there, I saw that live.)
Friday, August 24, 2007
Baseball and the Best. Doubt. Ever.
Hey! Enjoying my Friday here, reading quite a bit and waiting for the... wait for it, wait for it...
Big game tonight. The Cubs come into town for a three game spot with the DBacks. Hoo-ah! Thanks to a fantastic gift from bud Zach, we've got tix to the Friday and Sunday games. I'm gonna trek down there this afternoon to hopefully catch BP. Sweet. Good times.
I divided up the Monsterclicks with some web-scouring this morning, and WOW. My brain can't even wrap around this quite yet. I think I will read the article again and see if there's anything intelligible to say, other than that this reeks of some kind of Pynchonian hyper-irony. But maybe that's just because of what I've been reading lately.
Anyhoo, a little more reading and then downtown to watch some baseball - you know, as much as the sport as been intertwined with my life, I can probably recall every major league game I've seen in person.
Cubs - Cardinals at Busch, a couple of times actually, when I was younger.
Cubs - ? at Wrigley, around age 12 or so (???) when visiting Chicago.
Cubs - Astros at the dome - I memorably saw Ryno hit 3 doubles in one game. And much later saw Sammy hit his 66th of the season my junior year at Rice when my dad came up to visit. We also the game they showed on the live epsiode of ER the year before.
Mets- Astros - I made a trip with a high school friend named Nicole.
Cards-Astros - saw McGwire hit a 498 foot kaplow to CF.
Cubs - Astros at Homerun Stadium.
Rangers (???) - Red Sox at Fenway
Toronto at Red Sox at Fenway.
And now, again much thanks to the Z, we'll add a couple of DBacks-Cubs to that list.
Big game tonight. The Cubs come into town for a three game spot with the DBacks. Hoo-ah! Thanks to a fantastic gift from bud Zach, we've got tix to the Friday and Sunday games. I'm gonna trek down there this afternoon to hopefully catch BP. Sweet. Good times.
I divided up the Monsterclicks with some web-scouring this morning, and WOW. My brain can't even wrap around this quite yet. I think I will read the article again and see if there's anything intelligible to say, other than that this reeks of some kind of Pynchonian hyper-irony. But maybe that's just because of what I've been reading lately.
Anyhoo, a little more reading and then downtown to watch some baseball - you know, as much as the sport as been intertwined with my life, I can probably recall every major league game I've seen in person.
Cubs - Cardinals at Busch, a couple of times actually, when I was younger.
Cubs - ? at Wrigley, around age 12 or so (???) when visiting Chicago.
Cubs - Astros at the dome - I memorably saw Ryno hit 3 doubles in one game. And much later saw Sammy hit his 66th of the season my junior year at Rice when my dad came up to visit. We also the game they showed on the live epsiode of ER the year before.
Mets- Astros - I made a trip with a high school friend named Nicole.
Cards-Astros - saw McGwire hit a 498 foot kaplow to CF.
Cubs - Astros at Homerun Stadium.
Rangers (???) - Red Sox at Fenway
Toronto at Red Sox at Fenway.
And now, again much thanks to the Z, we'll add a couple of DBacks-Cubs to that list.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Requirement for a Dream
So I used to have this dream about a gigantic Daffy Duck growing out of the bush on the patio of my childhood house; very weird and recurring, about the time I was in second grade. Miscellaneous trolling of the internet has yielded its inspiration - I'm sure - and a great cartoon moment taboot:
In other news, congrats to the Texas Rangers for improbably hanging a quarter and a nickel on the Baltimore Orioles yesterday, only scoring in four innings! Wow. Such a ridiculous one-sided contest invites instant commentary from corporate sports coverage, which is actually what led me to the preceding Wile E. Fun. Sweet! Now if we could get a moratorium on inane football score comments, that would be awesome.
In yet other news, there's an easy joke in here involving Alyssa Milano and banality. I refrain from such... banality. I instead get all high-brow intellectual on yo' ass and invite you to take in Daniel Dennet's thoughts on computer chess.
In other news, congrats to the Texas Rangers for improbably hanging a quarter and a nickel on the Baltimore Orioles yesterday, only scoring in four innings! Wow. Such a ridiculous one-sided contest invites instant commentary from corporate sports coverage, which is actually what led me to the preceding Wile E. Fun. Sweet! Now if we could get a moratorium on inane football score comments, that would be awesome.
In yet other news, there's an easy joke in here involving Alyssa Milano and banality. I refrain from such... banality. I instead get all high-brow intellectual on yo' ass and invite you to take in Daniel Dennet's thoughts on computer chess.
The blackness would hit me, and the void would be calling.
FTR, the DVD Drive on my desktop computer does not work anymore. Ceased to function, and in a particular way - the motor functions just fine, it's something about the laser reader that can't register when there's a disc in the drive. It just spins, whirls, and seems to get frustrated, crescendo-ing its relative whirl spin spin hiss effort until it is just about to start sparks flying from the CPU, and then it coughs and chokes and stops. And then it starts again, slow, trying to nab the fact that there's a disc in there just dying to be read but it's somehow successfully eluding data transmission. SO it's whir-whir.WHIR-WHIRRRR WHIRRRR!!!!!!! Silence. Rinse, repeat, over and over until I get frustrated and click the eject button and it emergency spits out the disc with the most pleasant, rattling, disc spinning to a stop incorrectly off the tray against the sides of the drive sound - mmmmm, music. Rat a tat. Rat.
Apt metaphor? I'm just sitting here / spinning my wheels, /(they) go round and round...
Thank god for GRE scores, because the past two months otherwise would've been dubiously spent. Every day it's the whir whir scan the jobs, send the resumes, whir whir, wait, no fruit, WHIR WHIR, frustration. An interview goes well, then they offer you a job teaching science instead of math; another math job pops up, only it's across the city AND at night. I do a solid twenty minute phone interview yesterday and it turns out to be one of these buy-in for $100 scams - posting your info all over the world wide has its expenses. And I went to an interview the other day that turned out to be the embodiment of soul-less marketing 101, not that I got offered anything anyways - they were looking for someone with more sales experience. One, thanks for having me drive down there to tell me that, two, SALES? F-ing sales? Beggars / choosers and such, but what the hell am I doing interviewing for sales, pretty much antiNyet on all faces?
And why am I wasting precious blog space on a job search process that is only going to be a temporary stint anyways? Jobs in the bios get one-line toss-offs: Pynchon was a tech-writer, this guy or another wrote his masterworks at night using the company printer in between his desk-job nothings. So who gives a crap what I end up doing (especially here in the short run), so long as it helps pay bills and gets medical insurance for the next inevitable ligamental snap?
Ah, the blackness. Karen (or she-who-has-not-blogged-lately) wrote this recently (or not really that recently, given her above epithet):
I haven't been sleeping well, shocker. I wake up nightly multiple times with a skull shattering "getajobgetajobyouwastelesspointlessnothingetajobgetajobyouleechoffBeck'saccomplishmentspunknothing" mantra blasting between my ears, not exactly healthy for the relaxing night's recoup. I try to combat this by occasionally taking some Tylenol PM (or more accurately, its generic equivalent) to help get me through the night (ladies and gents, it's the all John Lennon solo career song post! More on that in a sec). And the other night I took two as indicated by bottle's typed instructions, and I went in bed, and somewhere in there I forgot whether I had taken them yet or not. I apparently felt awake. And I did the practical thing and just waited to see if I fell asleep, which I did. But there was an odd detachment there, just a sort of cerebral, factual "well, you shouldn't take two more because that would wreck your liver and possibly kill you," it was just those chemical facts, and no adrenaline-firing, fight-or-flight mechanism of "must preserve life." Just a casual notation, not the appropriate repulsion of the pain / death that extra pills tend to cause.
Flash-forward to the next morning, when i'm watching Sportscenter in a drugged haze (thanks Ty PM) and there's this former cocaine addict who has turned his life around by becoming an ironman triathlete. (The subject of Sportscenter and its drama, soap opera for men turn it has taken of late is its own subject - and I will sum up the bizarre estrogen-testosterone-fueled event that SC has become by pointing to its treatment of the Michael Vick case, and its panel questions of "How will this effect Michael as a person, and not as a quarterback?"). And he's recounting his worst days, the height of his cocaine fueled nights, and he says that he never got to some depths where he wanted to off himself or anything, but it was rather this sinking blackness and emptiness of not caring one way or the other. The dread of emptiness. And I'm not saying I had anything approaching that life-of-coke induced bottoming out, but given the last night's "too many pills, no, don't do that (whatever)" experience, I could at least see quite clearly what such a bottoming out level of dread would be like. It's not so much a feeling of sinking but one of perpetual sink, like there ain't nothing beneath nothing, a thought transcending sadness (transcending negatively, I suppose).
Flash-forward again to watching "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," an enlightening and interesting but really fairly flitty doc about the US gov (Tricky Dick, J. Edgar Hoover et al) trying to deport John Lennon on the basis of a trivial drug charge back in England. And there's a scene in there, after John has gone a little off the deep end, where he's debating his effect on the war with some uppity reporter from the New Yorker in an office; she's claiming his "Give Peace a Chance" is fluff, and he's proud that people have taken it up as an anthem. And it's such a collision of foolish idealism and elitist crap that it's fairly sickening, and on both sides - the meaning that Lennon has given to his work, the movement, everything is blindingly constructed, as is her rejection of that meaning - on both sides there are only constructs, and beneath a whole lot of nothing, just impressions and desires and wants piled on top of nothingness. Imagine no possessions? Imagine nothing. For some reason, i got a solid glimpse of it in the middle of the movie, just the crushing feeling that all yesterday's revolutionaries, hippies, and peaceniks are today's investors - and what's bad is not that there activity has flipped from good to bad, but that in both cases it was a bunch of idiotic nothingness, just whims and short-sighted evaluations of what to do with social righteousness in both cases. It is admittedly a seventh level cynical and borderline nihilistic thought, but the need for reorientation that a fundamental faith in the nothingness of it all is a mind-wrenching undertaking, and my basic response thus far has been one of dejection. Whir whir WHIR WHIR, stop.
Which is natch very melodramatic and etc. And the thing whirs up again every day with dependency, whether its faith and love or just this stupid job search. If we want to push the stupidity of this metaphor to its obvious limit, I got impatient with a dysfunctional DVD drive and bought an external one soon after the trouble started - maybe I just need an external guide of sorts now, eh? In the form of, I don't know, say, an academic program? Quick fix, or thing that finds it? Good question - the obvious fear here is that the next undertaking, however better fitting it is with some normal sense of self as a thinker not a doer, is just the next short whir solution to the inevitable crush that is coming, the silence.
I've written before (have I?) about something I loosely think of as "The Cube," this idea that you've got a certain set of outlooks available to you, but they come in the form of a large cube with faces so imposing that they obscure all other sides in any given moment. Right now I'm on an upbeat, relatively objective cube-face (as a rule, I don't post in bad cube face moments - they would pretty much bring you and me down both) and so I've got a sort of blind faith in my good friend Andy's "Everything always works out" outlook and think I can go along with pretending that things mean things in the short run, and that hopefully a job will fall in place in the near future; after all, wise moms say that there's only one phone call between here and there, stupid endless monster clicking and (irresistible, sorry) stupid, endless, excel sheet clicking (that at least pays bills). But like Karen's 65/35, my days have been bouncing between hopeful searching10 and a 90 that feels this whole endeavor is doomed to my stupid pre-fitted outlook - even if things are good, I won't be happy. Not wired that way. And that dread is enough to make me, at least, want to bang my face through glass or scream until vessels burst or at least eat too many chocolate milkshakes. So it's not fun. Given a couple of months off, I've accomplished very little - read a few books, seen a few movies, and I put the GRE chip in place. I'm profoundly under-motivated and (did I make this clear enough) feeling fairly pointless about the whole thing. Perhaps the real tragic thing is that given the time off, I've been too guilty / neurotic about everything to enjoy it - the findajobetc. mantra even managed to creep its way in to St. Lucia beach musings, which is just terrible on all levels. Still, I clearly am very fortunate to have friends / family to put up with my crap in these times, and very lucky to have the Beck and her constant support (in all facets, though FTR I am still being paid by the Nut and she has not achieved unadultered "sugar-momma" status just yet). Good thing, because the inner drive has been a wimpy wind of late.
But, head above water and all. Keepin' on keepin' on. The stupidity and grandeur of hope and such. Etc. This is either as sincere or ironic as you'd like, as fits your needs.
---------------
Now playing: John Lennon - Watching the Wheels
Apt metaphor? I'm just sitting here / spinning my wheels, /(they) go round and round...
Thank god for GRE scores, because the past two months otherwise would've been dubiously spent. Every day it's the whir whir scan the jobs, send the resumes, whir whir, wait, no fruit, WHIR WHIR, frustration. An interview goes well, then they offer you a job teaching science instead of math; another math job pops up, only it's across the city AND at night. I do a solid twenty minute phone interview yesterday and it turns out to be one of these buy-in for $100 scams - posting your info all over the world wide has its expenses. And I went to an interview the other day that turned out to be the embodiment of soul-less marketing 101, not that I got offered anything anyways - they were looking for someone with more sales experience. One, thanks for having me drive down there to tell me that, two, SALES? F-ing sales? Beggars / choosers and such, but what the hell am I doing interviewing for sales, pretty much antiNyet on all faces?
And why am I wasting precious blog space on a job search process that is only going to be a temporary stint anyways? Jobs in the bios get one-line toss-offs: Pynchon was a tech-writer, this guy or another wrote his masterworks at night using the company printer in between his desk-job nothings. So who gives a crap what I end up doing (especially here in the short run), so long as it helps pay bills and gets medical insurance for the next inevitable ligamental snap?
Ah, the blackness. Karen (or she-who-has-not-blogged-lately) wrote this recently (or not really that recently, given her above epithet):
2) I then spent a month alternating between "having no job agrees with me. I have sent out resumes for all the jobs I want, so now I think I'll take a glass of wine out the back yard and read my book" and "I'm going to DIE. In a GUTTER." Thew ratio of these thought were about 65/35.Keeping in mind that this post is being composed from the vantage point of one of those rare level-headed, non self-deprecatory moods - I feel that plus. Not that our existential angst should be some kind of pissing contest. Um, woah. Last visual image = deleted. But I would put forth that my ratio sits at about 10/90 in the opposite direction. ANd the latter label isn't die in a gutter, it's "whatever conclusion we arrive at is so hopelessly and pervasively meaningless that it quite simply matters not: success or failure, there will always be the nagging, empty, base blackness beneath it all." These thoughts are one, quite inimical to venturing out on career-boosting ventures, and two, have an under-nagging, a sub-subtext, that they are obviously self-excusing insurance policies of a sort; if we fail badly, at least there was no meaning anyways. In my stupid GRE essay, I wrote about how the statement "the ends justify the means" is implicitly suspect, because people who use it as a justification for their actions have an obvious investment in whatever ends they have achieved. And my little "everything is pointless" fallback is just that implicitly derailed; of course it would be better, more psychologically shielding, if those failures I've had and the successes I'm jealous of are just empty nothings anyways.
I haven't been sleeping well, shocker. I wake up nightly multiple times with a skull shattering "getajobgetajobyouwastelesspointlessnothingetajobgetajobyouleechoffBeck'saccomplishmentspunknothing" mantra blasting between my ears, not exactly healthy for the relaxing night's recoup. I try to combat this by occasionally taking some Tylenol PM (or more accurately, its generic equivalent) to help get me through the night (ladies and gents, it's the all John Lennon solo career song post! More on that in a sec). And the other night I took two as indicated by bottle's typed instructions, and I went in bed, and somewhere in there I forgot whether I had taken them yet or not. I apparently felt awake. And I did the practical thing and just waited to see if I fell asleep, which I did. But there was an odd detachment there, just a sort of cerebral, factual "well, you shouldn't take two more because that would wreck your liver and possibly kill you," it was just those chemical facts, and no adrenaline-firing, fight-or-flight mechanism of "must preserve life." Just a casual notation, not the appropriate repulsion of the pain / death that extra pills tend to cause.
Flash-forward to the next morning, when i'm watching Sportscenter in a drugged haze (thanks Ty PM) and there's this former cocaine addict who has turned his life around by becoming an ironman triathlete. (The subject of Sportscenter and its drama, soap opera for men turn it has taken of late is its own subject - and I will sum up the bizarre estrogen-testosterone-fueled event that SC has become by pointing to its treatment of the Michael Vick case, and its panel questions of "How will this effect Michael as a person, and not as a quarterback?"). And he's recounting his worst days, the height of his cocaine fueled nights, and he says that he never got to some depths where he wanted to off himself or anything, but it was rather this sinking blackness and emptiness of not caring one way or the other. The dread of emptiness. And I'm not saying I had anything approaching that life-of-coke induced bottoming out, but given the last night's "too many pills, no, don't do that (whatever)" experience, I could at least see quite clearly what such a bottoming out level of dread would be like. It's not so much a feeling of sinking but one of perpetual sink, like there ain't nothing beneath nothing, a thought transcending sadness (transcending negatively, I suppose).
Flash-forward again to watching "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," an enlightening and interesting but really fairly flitty doc about the US gov (Tricky Dick, J. Edgar Hoover et al) trying to deport John Lennon on the basis of a trivial drug charge back in England. And there's a scene in there, after John has gone a little off the deep end, where he's debating his effect on the war with some uppity reporter from the New Yorker in an office; she's claiming his "Give Peace a Chance" is fluff, and he's proud that people have taken it up as an anthem. And it's such a collision of foolish idealism and elitist crap that it's fairly sickening, and on both sides - the meaning that Lennon has given to his work, the movement, everything is blindingly constructed, as is her rejection of that meaning - on both sides there are only constructs, and beneath a whole lot of nothing, just impressions and desires and wants piled on top of nothingness. Imagine no possessions? Imagine nothing. For some reason, i got a solid glimpse of it in the middle of the movie, just the crushing feeling that all yesterday's revolutionaries, hippies, and peaceniks are today's investors - and what's bad is not that there activity has flipped from good to bad, but that in both cases it was a bunch of idiotic nothingness, just whims and short-sighted evaluations of what to do with social righteousness in both cases. It is admittedly a seventh level cynical and borderline nihilistic thought, but the need for reorientation that a fundamental faith in the nothingness of it all is a mind-wrenching undertaking, and my basic response thus far has been one of dejection. Whir whir WHIR WHIR, stop.
Which is natch very melodramatic and etc. And the thing whirs up again every day with dependency, whether its faith and love or just this stupid job search. If we want to push the stupidity of this metaphor to its obvious limit, I got impatient with a dysfunctional DVD drive and bought an external one soon after the trouble started - maybe I just need an external guide of sorts now, eh? In the form of, I don't know, say, an academic program? Quick fix, or thing that finds it? Good question - the obvious fear here is that the next undertaking, however better fitting it is with some normal sense of self as a thinker not a doer, is just the next short whir solution to the inevitable crush that is coming, the silence.
I've written before (have I?) about something I loosely think of as "The Cube," this idea that you've got a certain set of outlooks available to you, but they come in the form of a large cube with faces so imposing that they obscure all other sides in any given moment. Right now I'm on an upbeat, relatively objective cube-face (as a rule, I don't post in bad cube face moments - they would pretty much bring you and me down both) and so I've got a sort of blind faith in my good friend Andy's "Everything always works out" outlook and think I can go along with pretending that things mean things in the short run, and that hopefully a job will fall in place in the near future; after all, wise moms say that there's only one phone call between here and there, stupid endless monster clicking and (irresistible, sorry) stupid, endless, excel sheet clicking (that at least pays bills). But like Karen's 65/35, my days have been bouncing between hopeful searching10 and a 90 that feels this whole endeavor is doomed to my stupid pre-fitted outlook - even if things are good, I won't be happy. Not wired that way. And that dread is enough to make me, at least, want to bang my face through glass or scream until vessels burst or at least eat too many chocolate milkshakes. So it's not fun. Given a couple of months off, I've accomplished very little - read a few books, seen a few movies, and I put the GRE chip in place. I'm profoundly under-motivated and (did I make this clear enough) feeling fairly pointless about the whole thing. Perhaps the real tragic thing is that given the time off, I've been too guilty / neurotic about everything to enjoy it - the findajobetc. mantra even managed to creep its way in to St. Lucia beach musings, which is just terrible on all levels. Still, I clearly am very fortunate to have friends / family to put up with my crap in these times, and very lucky to have the Beck and her constant support (in all facets, though FTR I am still being paid by the Nut and she has not achieved unadultered "sugar-momma" status just yet). Good thing, because the inner drive has been a wimpy wind of late.
But, head above water and all. Keepin' on keepin' on. The stupidity and grandeur of hope and such. Etc. This is either as sincere or ironic as you'd like, as fits your needs.
---------------
Now playing: John Lennon - Watching the Wheels
Monday, August 20, 2007
4QIDAP
Around the time my eyes start to actively hurt from gazing into the deep, meaningful eyes of the little Monster mascot from Monster, I figure it's time to take a break and get a little blog on.
SO this weekend pretty much ruled - finished up the craptacular piece of tripe that is Weeds second season on Friday, and couldn't get our fix fast enough as Beck looked up the first episode from season 3 on the web. The whole thing was so banal, I just couldn't get enough.
Saturday I did a whole lotta nothing 'til I watched a bit of the Cubs game and then went to the gym with the Beck, where I ran 5 miles on a treadmill. Boo-yay. We rushed home and got ready for the event known as The Vegetable Spectacular at D & C's - we got a shipment of veggies from a local co-op so we could feel moderately better about our mid-desert-living, water-sucking, enviro-destroying ways for a while. Nice! The meal was AWESOME (assisted by the addition of non-co-op purchased CREAM) and a generally sweet time was had by all (Tim and Wren and Naya (sp?) were there, too). Seriously, serious - great times chillin' and watching Growth Hormone taking twelve year olds play baseball and listening to some good tunes provided by Danimal. ANd we even took a foray into discussing desultory life, a discussion in which I was accused of deconstructing Christina. In other news, Christina claimed that nerd is the opposite of black, and then glared pointedly at Dan and me.
Followed up the funday Saturday with an 11 o'clock showing of Superbad at the cinema down by D&C's. It was SWEET, which of course, we already knew, because they told us that would happen in Health class. Niiiiiice. We followed up with a little Duck & Decanter, a sandwich place around the corner from D&C's, where Dan and I once again observed our general awesomeness in not desiring to purchase country store signs with quaint sayings like "I Keep Pressing the Escape Key, But I Never Leave."
Came home only to trek back down an hour later to play 112 degree frisbee with a decidedly out of shape crowd down in Tempe. I played okay and felt pretty decent given the ridiculous conditions. Fall league starts sometime soon; I'm looking forward to that adventure.
Alright, my eyes seem to have returned to their pre-glaze state, so i suppose it's time to get back to it. A couple of leads today, a possible interview tomorrow, we'll see.
SO this weekend pretty much ruled - finished up the craptacular piece of tripe that is Weeds second season on Friday, and couldn't get our fix fast enough as Beck looked up the first episode from season 3 on the web. The whole thing was so banal, I just couldn't get enough.
Saturday I did a whole lotta nothing 'til I watched a bit of the Cubs game and then went to the gym with the Beck, where I ran 5 miles on a treadmill. Boo-yay. We rushed home and got ready for the event known as The Vegetable Spectacular at D & C's - we got a shipment of veggies from a local co-op so we could feel moderately better about our mid-desert-living, water-sucking, enviro-destroying ways for a while. Nice! The meal was AWESOME (assisted by the addition of non-co-op purchased CREAM) and a generally sweet time was had by all (Tim and Wren and Naya (sp?) were there, too). Seriously, serious - great times chillin' and watching Growth Hormone taking twelve year olds play baseball and listening to some good tunes provided by Danimal. ANd we even took a foray into discussing desultory life, a discussion in which I was accused of deconstructing Christina. In other news, Christina claimed that nerd is the opposite of black, and then glared pointedly at Dan and me.
Followed up the funday Saturday with an 11 o'clock showing of Superbad at the cinema down by D&C's. It was SWEET, which of course, we already knew, because they told us that would happen in Health class. Niiiiiice. We followed up with a little Duck & Decanter, a sandwich place around the corner from D&C's, where Dan and I once again observed our general awesomeness in not desiring to purchase country store signs with quaint sayings like "I Keep Pressing the Escape Key, But I Never Leave."
Came home only to trek back down an hour later to play 112 degree frisbee with a decidedly out of shape crowd down in Tempe. I played okay and felt pretty decent given the ridiculous conditions. Fall league starts sometime soon; I'm looking forward to that adventure.
Alright, my eyes seem to have returned to their pre-glaze state, so i suppose it's time to get back to it. A couple of leads today, a possible interview tomorrow, we'll see.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Internyet
Let's take a trip, shall we.
First, shout-out to Zach's cronies at the internet-uber-ubiq Google. I have just stepped into the year 2003 and started using a reader to check out the web. You should, too, only for self entertainment purposes, let's always call it Google Readah from now on. (A reader, for the uninitiated, is a utility by which you can subscribe to site feeds. The site feeds will send you links when sites are updated. This way you can just check your reader instead of going site to site. Nifty, eh?). Anyhoo, my reader has subscriptions to a bunch of blogs, news sites, web dork sites and such. I just finished a stupidly long blog post of my own that got vastly over-serious in a short amount of time, so I decided to launch on a little web venture and see where things may go. Come along.
First, Boing Boing points me to a crazy little art installation in San Jose. Check it:
That's an installation atop an Adobe building in San jose entitled "San Jose Semaphore." Those four discs rotate and, along with a recordd radio message simulcast on the web, encode a message. The message is, of course, crazy-encrypted - a challenge was put out to the engineering minded San Jose community to figure out what the installment was shouting forth. After nearly a year, two guys figured it out. And this is a slew of heady reading, but the process they used was pretty fascinating - read this to hear how the artist encoded it, and then read this to learn how the two dudes decoded it. (Note - I predict that none of you will actually read them in detail, as it is pretty involved. I can't decide whether it is really that cryptic - ha - or it's just written by engineers. To save you some trouble, the semaphore encodes The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Pretty Sweet).
That little trip took me over to the Adobe website, where I found this list of recent award winners for animation / graphic design. Lots of cool stuff there, even if it's pretty much a plug for Adobe products.
After that, my Readah took me to this comic strip called the Laugh Out Loud Cats. It's very weird and has this crazy invented backstory about how the artist's grandfather was a Depression-era cartoonists and he is now republishing his granddad's efforts. You'll quickly figure out that this isn't really true; the strips contain all sorts of modern references and, in general, a very odd manner of grammar / spelling. Laugh-Out Loud = LOL, and this is really a reference ot LOLcats. Seems there is a wacky internet phenomenon going on out there where people throw up pictures like this:
There is really no good original way to explain this phenomenon; the best thing is probably just to head over to I Can Has Cheeseburger and look at a ton of wacky captioned cat pictures to get a feel for what is going on. It's all a sly parody on something called leetspeak aka "l33tsp33k", a form of IMing or in-game messaging that computer gurus use to convey information faster or really, in a coolguy vernacular. So the oldstyle cartoon is a '20s style cartoon rendering of those same cat images, only with ink-drawings in place of the usual cute kitten photos. I am having trouble deciding whether all of this is awesome, a sign of the vibrant acceleration of cultural evolution, of further proof that with all this freedom we essentially accomplish nothing. Except funny cat pics. ANyways, I really liked this one on the game Go, thoguh I originally didn't get it:
Apparently, a standard form of these LOLCat captions is "I'm in ur X, Ying ur Z." This is thought to have its origins in the Red Alert online game, where you could blow up your opponents bases with troops that your opponent, had he not sent his scout to check, would not be able to see (so the exchange would go "Where the hell are you?""I'm in your base, melting your guns"). Which is not in and of itself cool. But it leads to the concept of snowclones, or stock phrase-forms derived from popular origins. Think "if I had a ____ for every ____, I'd be a _____." Structural joke and language forms have some pretty weird beginnings, and it's hard to speak originally when everything under the sun has been... I mean, there is nothing I can say that I... crap.
So, I've managed to bore even myself with this web-trip - so I'll leave you with this, a website called Aurgasm where you can check out rando indie peeps from some dude in Boston you'll likely never meet. Enjoy.
First, shout-out to Zach's cronies at the internet-uber-ubiq Google. I have just stepped into the year 2003 and started using a reader to check out the web. You should, too, only for self entertainment purposes, let's always call it Google Readah from now on. (A reader, for the uninitiated, is a utility by which you can subscribe to site feeds. The site feeds will send you links when sites are updated. This way you can just check your reader instead of going site to site. Nifty, eh?). Anyhoo, my reader has subscriptions to a bunch of blogs, news sites, web dork sites and such. I just finished a stupidly long blog post of my own that got vastly over-serious in a short amount of time, so I decided to launch on a little web venture and see where things may go. Come along.
First, Boing Boing points me to a crazy little art installation in San Jose. Check it:
That's an installation atop an Adobe building in San jose entitled "San Jose Semaphore." Those four discs rotate and, along with a recordd radio message simulcast on the web, encode a message. The message is, of course, crazy-encrypted - a challenge was put out to the engineering minded San Jose community to figure out what the installment was shouting forth. After nearly a year, two guys figured it out. And this is a slew of heady reading, but the process they used was pretty fascinating - read this to hear how the artist encoded it, and then read this to learn how the two dudes decoded it. (Note - I predict that none of you will actually read them in detail, as it is pretty involved. I can't decide whether it is really that cryptic - ha - or it's just written by engineers. To save you some trouble, the semaphore encodes The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Pretty Sweet).
That little trip took me over to the Adobe website, where I found this list of recent award winners for animation / graphic design. Lots of cool stuff there, even if it's pretty much a plug for Adobe products.
After that, my Readah took me to this comic strip called the Laugh Out Loud Cats. It's very weird and has this crazy invented backstory about how the artist's grandfather was a Depression-era cartoonists and he is now republishing his granddad's efforts. You'll quickly figure out that this isn't really true; the strips contain all sorts of modern references and, in general, a very odd manner of grammar / spelling. Laugh-Out Loud = LOL, and this is really a reference ot LOLcats. Seems there is a wacky internet phenomenon going on out there where people throw up pictures like this:
There is really no good original way to explain this phenomenon; the best thing is probably just to head over to I Can Has Cheeseburger and look at a ton of wacky captioned cat pictures to get a feel for what is going on. It's all a sly parody on something called leetspeak aka "l33tsp33k", a form of IMing or in-game messaging that computer gurus use to convey information faster or really, in a coolguy vernacular. So the oldstyle cartoon is a '20s style cartoon rendering of those same cat images, only with ink-drawings in place of the usual cute kitten photos. I am having trouble deciding whether all of this is awesome, a sign of the vibrant acceleration of cultural evolution, of further proof that with all this freedom we essentially accomplish nothing. Except funny cat pics. ANyways, I really liked this one on the game Go, thoguh I originally didn't get it:
Apparently, a standard form of these LOLCat captions is "I'm in ur X, Ying ur Z." This is thought to have its origins in the Red Alert online game, where you could blow up your opponents bases with troops that your opponent, had he not sent his scout to check, would not be able to see (so the exchange would go "Where the hell are you?""I'm in your base, melting your guns"). Which is not in and of itself cool. But it leads to the concept of snowclones, or stock phrase-forms derived from popular origins. Think "if I had a ____ for every ____, I'd be a _____." Structural joke and language forms have some pretty weird beginnings, and it's hard to speak originally when everything under the sun has been... I mean, there is nothing I can say that I... crap.
So, I've managed to bore even myself with this web-trip - so I'll leave you with this, a website called Aurgasm where you can check out rando indie peeps from some dude in Boston you'll likely never meet. Enjoy.
Friday, August 17, 2007
The 8th mile (and extended considerations)
So this is in rough allusion to the confluence of the artistic work of Eminem and David Cross and also manages to incorporate a biographical account of my morning. I know you're impressed. It is this kind of high-minded mouth-garble that keeps your clicking F5 on the Ballad (which by this point is undoubtedly your home page). Anyhoo, Eminem and Cross: MIND-EFFINGLY ENOUGH, the first site that came up when I googled David Cross's first comedy album (Shut Up You F*@#ing Baby), one of the first hits I got was an article that referenced... EMINEM AND DAVID CROSS. So perhaps I am unoriginal. Though I doubt it.
Anyhoo, tangential connections don't rear their heads from nothing, so here's the narrative background: I decided to go running this morning and, against my better thoughts, to attempt my usual out and back approach to running along the Greenbelt. I figured a max of 6 miles for my run would be decent and I would decide where to turn around whenever I got there. That was stupid; I should be banned from designing my running routes. Because I have one convenient stopping point at about 2.75 miles (total = 5.5) and another at 3.3 (6.6). And nothing in between. So I passed the 2.75 mile point and felt great, thinking I would go up to 6... but at about the 3 mile point my hamstring twinged and blah blah blah, I decided I wasn't really
up for a full 6 after all. But I didn't want to stop at 3 so - I kept going. Progressively furthering myself along a path that would require me to loop back. Argh. Dumb, but I had nothing but the oft-cited button punching job search at the apartment waiting for me, and I had pretty much sent off every résumé possible in the past couple of days, so - what the hell. I ran all the way past another golf course that took me out to about 4.7 miles.
HA! You were banking on the inevitable 8 mile total, weren't you?!?! Sucka. I took a short-cut back and ended up totaling 8.7 miles. FTR. Anyhoo, with sweat-soaked shirt (and if you know me, that is not an exaggeration), I walked four miles home, which makes for a lot of music over the ol' Shuffle. And somewhere in the soft instrumental start blended into the chugging power chords of "Lose Yourself," everyone's favorite song including something of a run-on sentence. (do not miss your chance or blow this opportunity comes once in a lifetime). In fact, check some lyrics if you lack familiarity. Or read this quick summary: dude in an abject state of poverty is attempting rap as his egress and feels that not only is this his only way out, but he will be unfixably ruined if he fails. He further feels that his own skill, prowess and hard work will inevitably push him through so long as he achieves some Zen state with regard to the moment. And he caps this off with the aphorism that "you can do anything if you set your mind to it" as an epilogue. Don't forget this is all set to the chuggachug and accented with some pretty hefty downbeats, so you do get a little bit of an adrenaline-based confidence boost going, even if you're pulling off a wet-rat look while walking down hayden.
And this is where David Cross steps in: he has a bit on "The Delusion parade" where he talks about the fact that there's
The connection being, of course, that the hard-willed determination spat forth by Eminem (admittedly convincing coming from one of the actual "made-its") serves as an incredible basis for naive, self-delusional thinking cited by Cross. And as much fun as it is to celebrate the few and far betweens as well as the comedy fodder that becomes the mass majority, David Cross's ultimate comment is that it leaves places like LA with a service industry full of disgruntled, cynical, embittered folks who by sheer force of reality simply did not "make it." They are the off-shoot, the unfortunate consequence of a concept (anyone can work their way to stardom with enough hard work) that entails its unfortunate correlation, that in order for the special to be special there must be a background for them to stand out against. And all those unemployed actors and writers and their shattered dreams become something of an inevitable consequence, a necessity for the machine to thrive. And the beat goes on. La ta da ta di.
I pondered this same idea recently while walking along First Night in Phoenix about a month ago, when I felt that I was seeing the fall-out fodder first hand. For me, it conjures the idea of the American dream, go west young man success meme, and how the entire industry depends upon its continued pursuit by legions of the naive. The take-a-step-back effect is that the million people who trek off to Hollywood form a bell-curve, and in theory only the very tippy top - say, the top 13 - of the curve are going to fulfill the hard-work = success myth. (That is actually probably giving the system too much credit - in reality, those 13 are probably grabbed from roughly around the top of the curve, with a whole lot of luck, timing and arbitrary circumstance accounting for the success - this makes the result even further removed from the work that gets put in). And those 13 do make it, get put on the proverbial pedestal and go on to write their auto-bios rife with the "I just knew I could make it, you can, too" framework that propagates the myth. This is classic post-facto reasoning that, by tapping into an already thoroughly ingrained success-story archetype, convinces another mass of people that if they just try hard enough, they can make it, too. The post-facto comes from the selective filter of only listening to the successful and misappropriating their success to their plan; if any kind of big-picture, statistical take on the whole thing was attempted, you'd find that you're attributing success to the plan after the success has already been achieved, and that plan in actuality has about a 0.00013% success rate.
All of this is some pretty pessimistic lip (finger) flapping, natch, because everybody and their dog knows that Hollywood careers are a decidedly non-pragmatic venture; this is what causes moms to try to get their sons to take math courses instead of just majoring in drama. I am more interested in the massive effect of the myth-propagation and the purpose it ultimately serves than the clichéd self-delusion achieved my wannabes. It may be more of a thought on what kind of structural purpose optimism and hope play in our continued existence - so maybe this does not pertain particularly to the "hard work -> success -> chase your dreams" paradigm as much as it pertains to the general human habit of eschewing rational consideration in favor of vague notions of happy endings.
In this particular example (the entertainment machine), I mean this: humans, at least American humans in a modern, relatively carefree and copious-leisure-time filled life, need entertainment. Without too much high-handed elitism dripping from my open mouth, I think it's fair to say that we do not need GREAT entertainment, but we need something resembling mediocre plus entertainment, and because of a bevy of different tastes (or probably more exactly, our evolutionary need for variety) we need it in a large number of forms. This entertainment, in a lot of instances, does not need to be meaningful and in fact would often be better suited to intentionally lack meaning and serve only as a dopamine-releasing, pleasure-pushing diversion exercise. That is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the inherent value of the craft of film-making or acting or what have you, but in a general sense it should ring at least partially true - we need the entertainment as aesthetic highlights to our daily lives and something to keep us going.
That is not exactly a gigantic selling point for the entertainment industry - "come fulfill this basic purpose that keeps us all from offing ourselves at the next cataclysmic existential moment" - so the entertainment machinery better have some better mechanism for recruiting than that (or really, it would not have ever come to exist in the first place). Fair enough, there are those who may just act for its own sake or create art for their own love of the process, just as there are doctors who would practice medicine at no charge and lawyers who would litigate just for fun - but I am not talking about the marginally insane who are so tuned into their dopamine receptors as to have absolute direction in life, I am talking about the majority who are susceptible to the carrot-dangling acts any particular profession might entail. SO the entertainment industry has this particular mechanism, the dream chase, which on face value is a brilliant narrative to supply life-giving hope to people far and wide, but when examined deeper must be admitted to at least have the properties of a pragmatic inevitability of a massive-effect process. The follow-your-dream narrative gets the ball rolling and brings in the hundreds of recruits, all of them putting their best efforts forward. And then the entertainment industry functions as a callous sift, separating wheat from chaff. The top tier (however it is determined - again, I conjecture that it probably has a solid correlation with effort and talent but certainly not any kind of 1:1 relationship; there has to be a slew of mitigating factors that lend themselves to being labeled luck, good timing or "boinking the director") settles into its place, as do the other tiers and other actors settle into other spots, whether it be in stand-in roles or caterers for the industry. Voila, functioning machine. ANd plenty of mediocre-plus entertainment created in the process.
The thing that often gets left out of this is "machine." Entertainment does not care about individuals or even groups; it cares about its own functions and that they are served. The remainder is details. Since the modern mechanization of entertainment, there have always been stars and underlings, successes and failures. The particular people sitting on celebrity pedestals is, in grand scheme terms, completely unimportant. If there were no Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, there would be other hot male leads to quickly step into their shoes. I have often contemplated the idea that "Tom Cruise" has very little to do with Tom Cruise, and based on our treatment of him / attendance of his movies (wack Scientology claims not-withstanding), substituting a completely different human for him and maintaining the trappings of the celebrity persona would have a questionable effect, if any at all.
I recognize that this big picture (ha!) view of the machinery is fairly heartless, pessimistic and cold; please recognize that I throw it forth with a lot of tongue and cheek; I don't actually think you can completely discount individually unique contributions to the world (if I did, I would be hard-pressed to explain spending my time writing any ideas, since they would just be inevitable conclusions, no different if arrived at by someone other than me). But I would put forth that it is very easy to over-emphasize the contributions of the individual without recognizing that they do so within a machine, and because of the inevitability of the machine and some of its high-powered myths that continue to propel its function - something that I would say speaks of the very "cog in the machine" role that we fulfill - we should put a mental check on those individual contributions and question which values tend to more serve the machine than the untold millions who fail and suffer at their pursuit.
It is very possible to put forth an extraordinary amount of hard work and not succeed. The myth has a nasty inverse, that if you did not succeed you did not try hard enough. The failures are inevitable and in fact give success its meaning - if everything were blue, what would we call the sky? I know from personal experience that diligent work and that entire ethic are at best odds improvers, but entail guarantees of nothing. I waste a lot of time lamenting lost and fruitless effort, and I may be biased in wanting to investigate the "work hard" value and its possible function to the system instead of the individual. We are, by some framings, all pellets in a shotgun blast or a carpet bomb exercise: some of us will hit, and some us won't. This is not the whole story but always part of it.
Postscript: I am pointing to a notion that we "need entertainment" because we need something to relieve daily drudgery and the (debatable) notion that we are just biological machines pushing forward toward no real end other than the pushing forward. In other words, one price of our sentience and ability to contemplate our existence is the nagging question of why. Squirrels, for example, can trudge along collecting and hiding nuts with no question as to the purpose (and even if they did have a question, it would have an obvious answer - to survive, you dolt squirrel). People, especially those of us far removed from the survival process, ask these questions and, removing aesthetic plusses achieved on a daily basis via the aforementioned dopamine surges, are sometimes hard-pressed to find answers. This whole thing is expandable to age-old questions and that of finding meaning, but I am trying to frame this in light of an evolutionary question: Are our traditional answers to existential dilemmas a sort of evolutionary behavior? In other words, a completely rationally developed and ubersophisticated, world-aware mind might draw heinous conclusions about the point of existence and be driven to inevitable suicide. Is our attribution of meaning to life an evolutionary adaptation , something necessary given our conscious awareness that helps us achieve so much but enlightens us as to our fragile happenstance being?
----------------
Now playing: David Cross - Phone Call from a Cranky Terrorist
Anyhoo, tangential connections don't rear their heads from nothing, so here's the narrative background: I decided to go running this morning and, against my better thoughts, to attempt my usual out and back approach to running along the Greenbelt. I figured a max of 6 miles for my run would be decent and I would decide where to turn around whenever I got there. That was stupid; I should be banned from designing my running routes. Because I have one convenient stopping point at about 2.75 miles (total = 5.5) and another at 3.3 (6.6). And nothing in between. So I passed the 2.75 mile point and felt great, thinking I would go up to 6... but at about the 3 mile point my hamstring twinged and blah blah blah, I decided I wasn't really
up for a full 6 after all. But I didn't want to stop at 3 so - I kept going. Progressively furthering myself along a path that would require me to loop back. Argh. Dumb, but I had nothing but the oft-cited button punching job search at the apartment waiting for me, and I had pretty much sent off every résumé possible in the past couple of days, so - what the hell. I ran all the way past another golf course that took me out to about 4.7 miles.
HA! You were banking on the inevitable 8 mile total, weren't you?!?! Sucka. I took a short-cut back and ended up totaling 8.7 miles. FTR. Anyhoo, with sweat-soaked shirt (and if you know me, that is not an exaggeration), I walked four miles home, which makes for a lot of music over the ol' Shuffle. And somewhere in the soft instrumental start blended into the chugging power chords of "Lose Yourself," everyone's favorite song including something of a run-on sentence. (do not miss your chance or blow this opportunity comes once in a lifetime). In fact, check some lyrics if you lack familiarity. Or read this quick summary: dude in an abject state of poverty is attempting rap as his egress and feels that not only is this his only way out, but he will be unfixably ruined if he fails. He further feels that his own skill, prowess and hard work will inevitably push him through so long as he achieves some Zen state with regard to the moment. And he caps this off with the aphorism that "you can do anything if you set your mind to it" as an epilogue. Don't forget this is all set to the chuggachug and accented with some pretty hefty downbeats, so you do get a little bit of an adrenaline-based confidence boost going, even if you're pulling off a wet-rat look while walking down hayden.
And this is where David Cross steps in: he has a bit on "The Delusion parade" where he talks about the fact that there's
"...a million people in Hollywood who know they're gonna make it - because they're so good, they're so talented ... they're gonna be the next that guy or that girl, but you know how many are gonna make it? Maybe, 13 will make it. Maybe 14 if you count the girl who goes on Blind Date and poses in Playboy, if that's your idea of making it then let's call it 14... but they know man, they know, they come from all over the world, they come from Winnipeg, Portland, Maine, Pensacola, Florida, they come from Norman, Oklahoma, they all know they're gonna make it - I've got so much talent, because I was so good in my high school production of Brigadoon and Annie..."He then goes on to describe the travesty that these people become as they eventually get parts in movies *playing delusional people in Hollywood*. And then he let's their tragic-tale take a turn into things that I can't retype here, lest we violate all kinds of family-value-oriented norms thoroughly established in the Nyetverse.
The connection being, of course, that the hard-willed determination spat forth by Eminem (admittedly convincing coming from one of the actual "made-its") serves as an incredible basis for naive, self-delusional thinking cited by Cross. And as much fun as it is to celebrate the few and far betweens as well as the comedy fodder that becomes the mass majority, David Cross's ultimate comment is that it leaves places like LA with a service industry full of disgruntled, cynical, embittered folks who by sheer force of reality simply did not "make it." They are the off-shoot, the unfortunate consequence of a concept (anyone can work their way to stardom with enough hard work) that entails its unfortunate correlation, that in order for the special to be special there must be a background for them to stand out against. And all those unemployed actors and writers and their shattered dreams become something of an inevitable consequence, a necessity for the machine to thrive. And the beat goes on. La ta da ta di.
I pondered this same idea recently while walking along First Night in Phoenix about a month ago, when I felt that I was seeing the fall-out fodder first hand. For me, it conjures the idea of the American dream, go west young man success meme, and how the entire industry depends upon its continued pursuit by legions of the naive. The take-a-step-back effect is that the million people who trek off to Hollywood form a bell-curve, and in theory only the very tippy top - say, the top 13 - of the curve are going to fulfill the hard-work = success myth. (That is actually probably giving the system too much credit - in reality, those 13 are probably grabbed from roughly around the top of the curve, with a whole lot of luck, timing and arbitrary circumstance accounting for the success - this makes the result even further removed from the work that gets put in). And those 13 do make it, get put on the proverbial pedestal and go on to write their auto-bios rife with the "I just knew I could make it, you can, too" framework that propagates the myth. This is classic post-facto reasoning that, by tapping into an already thoroughly ingrained success-story archetype, convinces another mass of people that if they just try hard enough, they can make it, too. The post-facto comes from the selective filter of only listening to the successful and misappropriating their success to their plan; if any kind of big-picture, statistical take on the whole thing was attempted, you'd find that you're attributing success to the plan after the success has already been achieved, and that plan in actuality has about a 0.00013% success rate.
All of this is some pretty pessimistic lip (finger) flapping, natch, because everybody and their dog knows that Hollywood careers are a decidedly non-pragmatic venture; this is what causes moms to try to get their sons to take math courses instead of just majoring in drama. I am more interested in the massive effect of the myth-propagation and the purpose it ultimately serves than the clichéd self-delusion achieved my wannabes. It may be more of a thought on what kind of structural purpose optimism and hope play in our continued existence - so maybe this does not pertain particularly to the "hard work -> success -> chase your dreams" paradigm as much as it pertains to the general human habit of eschewing rational consideration in favor of vague notions of happy endings.
In this particular example (the entertainment machine), I mean this: humans, at least American humans in a modern, relatively carefree and copious-leisure-time filled life, need entertainment. Without too much high-handed elitism dripping from my open mouth, I think it's fair to say that we do not need GREAT entertainment, but we need something resembling mediocre plus entertainment, and because of a bevy of different tastes (or probably more exactly, our evolutionary need for variety) we need it in a large number of forms. This entertainment, in a lot of instances, does not need to be meaningful and in fact would often be better suited to intentionally lack meaning and serve only as a dopamine-releasing, pleasure-pushing diversion exercise. That is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the inherent value of the craft of film-making or acting or what have you, but in a general sense it should ring at least partially true - we need the entertainment as aesthetic highlights to our daily lives and something to keep us going.
That is not exactly a gigantic selling point for the entertainment industry - "come fulfill this basic purpose that keeps us all from offing ourselves at the next cataclysmic existential moment" - so the entertainment machinery better have some better mechanism for recruiting than that (or really, it would not have ever come to exist in the first place). Fair enough, there are those who may just act for its own sake or create art for their own love of the process, just as there are doctors who would practice medicine at no charge and lawyers who would litigate just for fun - but I am not talking about the marginally insane who are so tuned into their dopamine receptors as to have absolute direction in life, I am talking about the majority who are susceptible to the carrot-dangling acts any particular profession might entail. SO the entertainment industry has this particular mechanism, the dream chase, which on face value is a brilliant narrative to supply life-giving hope to people far and wide, but when examined deeper must be admitted to at least have the properties of a pragmatic inevitability of a massive-effect process. The follow-your-dream narrative gets the ball rolling and brings in the hundreds of recruits, all of them putting their best efforts forward. And then the entertainment industry functions as a callous sift, separating wheat from chaff. The top tier (however it is determined - again, I conjecture that it probably has a solid correlation with effort and talent but certainly not any kind of 1:1 relationship; there has to be a slew of mitigating factors that lend themselves to being labeled luck, good timing or "boinking the director") settles into its place, as do the other tiers and other actors settle into other spots, whether it be in stand-in roles or caterers for the industry. Voila, functioning machine. ANd plenty of mediocre-plus entertainment created in the process.
The thing that often gets left out of this is "machine." Entertainment does not care about individuals or even groups; it cares about its own functions and that they are served. The remainder is details. Since the modern mechanization of entertainment, there have always been stars and underlings, successes and failures. The particular people sitting on celebrity pedestals is, in grand scheme terms, completely unimportant. If there were no Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, there would be other hot male leads to quickly step into their shoes. I have often contemplated the idea that "Tom Cruise" has very little to do with Tom Cruise, and based on our treatment of him / attendance of his movies (wack Scientology claims not-withstanding), substituting a completely different human for him and maintaining the trappings of the celebrity persona would have a questionable effect, if any at all.
I recognize that this big picture (ha!) view of the machinery is fairly heartless, pessimistic and cold; please recognize that I throw it forth with a lot of tongue and cheek; I don't actually think you can completely discount individually unique contributions to the world (if I did, I would be hard-pressed to explain spending my time writing any ideas, since they would just be inevitable conclusions, no different if arrived at by someone other than me). But I would put forth that it is very easy to over-emphasize the contributions of the individual without recognizing that they do so within a machine, and because of the inevitability of the machine and some of its high-powered myths that continue to propel its function - something that I would say speaks of the very "cog in the machine" role that we fulfill - we should put a mental check on those individual contributions and question which values tend to more serve the machine than the untold millions who fail and suffer at their pursuit.
It is very possible to put forth an extraordinary amount of hard work and not succeed. The myth has a nasty inverse, that if you did not succeed you did not try hard enough. The failures are inevitable and in fact give success its meaning - if everything were blue, what would we call the sky? I know from personal experience that diligent work and that entire ethic are at best odds improvers, but entail guarantees of nothing. I waste a lot of time lamenting lost and fruitless effort, and I may be biased in wanting to investigate the "work hard" value and its possible function to the system instead of the individual. We are, by some framings, all pellets in a shotgun blast or a carpet bomb exercise: some of us will hit, and some us won't. This is not the whole story but always part of it.
Postscript: I am pointing to a notion that we "need entertainment" because we need something to relieve daily drudgery and the (debatable) notion that we are just biological machines pushing forward toward no real end other than the pushing forward. In other words, one price of our sentience and ability to contemplate our existence is the nagging question of why. Squirrels, for example, can trudge along collecting and hiding nuts with no question as to the purpose (and even if they did have a question, it would have an obvious answer - to survive, you dolt squirrel). People, especially those of us far removed from the survival process, ask these questions and, removing aesthetic plusses achieved on a daily basis via the aforementioned dopamine surges, are sometimes hard-pressed to find answers. This whole thing is expandable to age-old questions and that of finding meaning, but I am trying to frame this in light of an evolutionary question: Are our traditional answers to existential dilemmas a sort of evolutionary behavior? In other words, a completely rationally developed and ubersophisticated, world-aware mind might draw heinous conclusions about the point of existence and be driven to inevitable suicide. Is our attribution of meaning to life an evolutionary adaptation , something necessary given our conscious awareness that helps us achieve so much but enlightens us as to our fragile happenstance being?
----------------
Now playing: David Cross - Phone Call from a Cranky Terrorist
My Living Will:
Join us next week when we cover the niche psychosis: "When Your Soda Talks to You and Says Practical Things."
"He's as Dead as I am Old"
Ahem... that's a quote from the inadequately reverential Beck. Missed this by a day, but 30 years ago Elvis Presley died. While our lives did not overlap, I think it's fairly obvious that my style is highly derivate of his. A-uh-huh. Yeah. Hey-yay. Uh. And yet, I was alive last year, and I did not manage to make 42 million dollars. My bad.
Beck also managed to conjure up some interesting (and thoroughly unrelated, unless you like to think of that 50,000 Elvis Fans Album Cover or Andy Warhol prints or something, in which case it's thoroughly related) while we were watching the second half of the Weeds season 2, when she tossed out during the intro song: "I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing." For those out of the know (and/or those who aren't Aaron and don't spend 90% of their disposable income devouring the pop culture landscape ion DVD form), here's the intro to Weeds:
The song is called "Little Boxes," and this is the version by its writer, Malvina Reynolds (tidbit: a different version performed by the Womenfolk in 1963 clocked in at 1:03 and is the shortest song to break into the Billboard Top 100 (albeit at 83)). Here are the lyrics for your edification:
"LITTLE BOXES"
Little boxes on the hill side, little boxes made of ticky tacky.
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow
one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just
the same.
And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there's doctors and there's lawyers, and there's business
executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just
the same.
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp and then to the university
Where they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same.
And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
In boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow
one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just
the same.
Not exactly a hearty endorsement of the suburban post-war baby-booming lifestyle. And so I bring up that it's interesting that Beck questions whether it's a "good thing or a bad thing" is because it is a very knee-jerk, faux hipster cynical thing to decry the suburban nightmare as an "obvious terrible thing" and eschew further discussion - your basic open-mindedness-only full-circle conservatism that Beck here dodges gracefully. The show itself almost assumes this intrinsic vilification on face and makes no attempts to hide it. Not that it should - behind the implicit comedy in its "mom deals drugs" plotline is a landscape dotted with biting satire of upper-middle-class bourgeois values, and it pulls these off with a relative mastery. But it's always good, though not necessarily time-efficient, to question the underlying values on a base level, even if the values here being questioned are the ones that ostensibly question values themselves all the time. Is conformity necessarily the soul-crushing evil alleged here? Is that pragmatic trade of safety and financial responsibility for the authentically lived life a bad one, or does it come with its trappings of positive community that outweigh the fringe-y, on your own terms existence?
Important considerations for the near thirty and their borderline mindless pursuit of cars, houses, careers and such.
Wowsers
Okay, so the Little League World Series and its annual August TV-fest is absurd for a number of reasons. But I just saw the CF for Massachusetts, a 5'2" kid nicknamed "The Rabbit," jump and reach over the fence to pull back a homerun with two outs and a runner on 3rd in the last inning to preserve a 3-2 win. Walk-off glory for the batter turned to jog-off glory for the CF on a dime. Tres exciting.
Anyhoo, that may not have been post-worthy, but I'm sure you'll see it on Sportscenter tonight. Word.
And for the record, yes, I do have better things to do than watch the LLWS. I was taking a break. Phbbbbt. Now back to the Cubs game.
Anyhoo, that may not have been post-worthy, but I'm sure you'll see it on Sportscenter tonight. Word.
And for the record, yes, I do have better things to do than watch the LLWS. I was taking a break. Phbbbbt. Now back to the Cubs game.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
That Which Transpired Today
I woke up very early (5:40 AM) to drive 20 miles to play 4 on 4 (sigh) Ultimate. Am I dedicated or stupid?
I dodged 101 North 8 AM traffic by playing disc golf at Vista Del Camino. I tossed my disc in the water three times, and every time it was close enough to the shore to retrieve by lying prone and sinking an arm in elbow deep. I am down to two discs because I keep losing them and don't want to spend the money to replace them. I am years away from being able to afford "real golf."
I scoured the web for some kind of reasonable for the job. This involved a lot of clicks and several go-es at editing my resume and cover letters. Money and health insurance are calling me collect. Sooooooo bourgeois.
I read up on the ASU Philo Dept., contacted their office and exchanged some e-mails with their Grad Studies Coordinator. It sounds like Fall '08 would be the earliest realistic starting date. Huzzah.
I read a book on Baseball Betting given as a wedding present by my Tufts-bud Andy. Highly interesting, but utterly ridiculous as a lifestyle and I think it would cause my cerebral vessels to explode by week three. Good stuff.
I clicked on the web some more, took the dogs for walks, and will now go feed them.
FTR, Liz had the weird dude ask her if she wanted to enter a contest.
I dodged 101 North 8 AM traffic by playing disc golf at Vista Del Camino. I tossed my disc in the water three times, and every time it was close enough to the shore to retrieve by lying prone and sinking an arm in elbow deep. I am down to two discs because I keep losing them and don't want to spend the money to replace them. I am years away from being able to afford "real golf."
I scoured the web for some kind of reasonable for the job. This involved a lot of clicks and several go-es at editing my resume and cover letters. Money and health insurance are calling me collect. Sooooooo bourgeois.
I read up on the ASU Philo Dept., contacted their office and exchanged some e-mails with their Grad Studies Coordinator. It sounds like Fall '08 would be the earliest realistic starting date. Huzzah.
I read a book on Baseball Betting given as a wedding present by my Tufts-bud Andy. Highly interesting, but utterly ridiculous as a lifestyle and I think it would cause my cerebral vessels to explode by week three. Good stuff.
I clicked on the web some more, took the dogs for walks, and will now go feed them.
FTR, Liz had the weird dude ask her if she wanted to enter a contest.
The Impropriety of the Suburbanite-Driven Suburban
Okay, lady in the Fry's parking lot, yesterday, Tuesday, August 14, you, the one driving the large suburban child-crushing tank of a car, you the one who found it so necessary to fail to yield as I walked on top of a yellow-paint striated subsection of parking lot indicating in everyday commonplace symbology that pedestrians were likely to be ambling there (let alone the fact that one actually WAS ambling there), you who cell-phone spoke with such aplomb behind an expression obscured by sunglasses and window-tint that I am sure indicated some level of mouth-breathing inanity, you who paid neither attention nor respect to the sanctity of the non-gas-guzzling me, you who did not so much choose to continue as much as fail to chose to stop, you who would have rolled over and pulverized the meta-tarsals of a less cynical/skeptical/wary walker, you who in your inertia and lack of Turing-esque evidence of any mental activity occurring behind your white-knuckled wheel-gripping hands raised all kinds of questions as to the moral turpitude of negligence v. intentional action, who in short almost hit me yesterday:
ARGLERAZZLEFRATZ. Of course civilized discourse begs that I halt, dodge, stop in stride and let you pass in the interest of preserving my feet, maybe waving an unregistered one-finger gesture in your rear-view as you nonchalantly progressed toward to the next destination of your to-do list, but really doing nothing other than dismaying yet again at the callous indifference of the suburban modern machine. In short, i should have just done what momma done taught and been polite. But not yesterday; the air of authenticity struck me. This was plainly stupid on your part, or at the very least inconsiderate. And so rather than halt/dodge/stopping, I step/press/continued, and walked right into the side of your shiny automobile with all the force that would have resulted naturally had I been as willfully ignorant as you. And then I hit your car, open palmed, loud enough so that you couldn't not have heard, you had to stop, check whether you ran over a child / small animal / grocer. Stopped and looked and saw only me, gave a glare and rolled on down the road and then. Nothing gained, nothing ventured, but the day from that point on sparkled with a little more authenticity, a little less southern decorum and a little more Newtonian-based hey here's what happened and here's the equation to describe it. Vigor-filled, I trudged on into the store, bought my broccoli and Honey Nut Cheerios and walked with a cavalier air of this-is-real, this-is-direct, this is faux-nothing all real. Until an old lady ran into me with her shopping cart while perusing the sugar content of Low-Sugar Frosted Flakes and apologized and I said smiling "Don't worry about it, could've happened to anyone." Maybe she had diabetes.
Camp Liz & Dog
So I just got off the phone with her Zilness, who proudly reports that after three years of vague aspirations, she has finally made The Bozeman Police Blotter. Because that archive of Lizian accomplishment will surely be lost to the annals of time before too long, I will go ahead and post a representative smattering here. Your job is to guess which one was / was caused by Liz (answer in the following post):
The Bozeman Police Department reports for Monday included the following:
€ A man and woman set up a tent in Centennial Park. They were told to leave.
€ A woman on South Third Avenue told police a man knocked on her front door and asked her whether she wanted to be in a contest. He said he needed females. She told him no.
€ A person was warned for leaving an obscene message at City Hall.
The Gallatin County Sheriff's Office reports for Monday included the following:
€ Someone rummaged through a few unlocked vehicles on Bozeman Trail Road. Nothing was stolen.
€ A Realtor on West Magnolia Drive told deputies a person dumped grass clippings and other garbage on the lawn of a house she has listed.
€ A man told deputies his canoe, two fishing poles, two reels, one oar and a bag of fishing equipment were stolen in Manhattan.
€ A deputy on Black Hawk Lane stopped to talk with a man and woman who waved when the deputy drove past. They were simply waving. They said it was nice to see a sheriff's deputy in the neighborhood.
So have you figured it out? Doubtful. Congrats Liz, for leaving your stamp on your tiny Montanan town. Liz additionally reports that things are going well in Jackson, Wyoming (she's white-water-rafting today), and that she is planning to return to Geneseo soon and call the lakehouse home for awhile. She astutely points out that due to the dearth of attendance, this summer's t-shirt will inevitably read "Camp Liz & Dog" instead of the customary CBS logo. Which is, incidentally, not an eye, as appropriate as that would have been.
The Bozeman Police Department reports for Monday included the following:
€ A man and woman set up a tent in Centennial Park. They were told to leave.
€ A woman on South Third Avenue told police a man knocked on her front door and asked her whether she wanted to be in a contest. He said he needed females. She told him no.
€ A person was warned for leaving an obscene message at City Hall.
The Gallatin County Sheriff's Office reports for Monday included the following:
€ Someone rummaged through a few unlocked vehicles on Bozeman Trail Road. Nothing was stolen.
€ A Realtor on West Magnolia Drive told deputies a person dumped grass clippings and other garbage on the lawn of a house she has listed.
€ A man told deputies his canoe, two fishing poles, two reels, one oar and a bag of fishing equipment were stolen in Manhattan.
€ A deputy on Black Hawk Lane stopped to talk with a man and woman who waved when the deputy drove past. They were simply waving. They said it was nice to see a sheriff's deputy in the neighborhood.
So have you figured it out? Doubtful. Congrats Liz, for leaving your stamp on your tiny Montanan town. Liz additionally reports that things are going well in Jackson, Wyoming (she's white-water-rafting today), and that she is planning to return to Geneseo soon and call the lakehouse home for awhile. She astutely points out that due to the dearth of attendance, this summer's t-shirt will inevitably read "Camp Liz & Dog" instead of the customary CBS logo. Which is, incidentally, not an eye, as appropriate as that would have been.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Who are the People in your Nyetborhood?
So, in between learning vocab words and visiting museums, I occasionally play fantasy sports video games on the computer. Yes, this is a 100% dork post, so feel free to skip if your name starts with Ka and ends in ren. There will be no babies, edible or otherwise, following the nerdy sports pics.
Okay, so you want answers? Starting at the top left and proceeding L-r, up-down like most written/read languages (Hebrew, always having to stand out!), it's
Jon "Scrooge"
Zach
Nick "So Smelly"
Elliot "Dad"
Andy
Mike "MAZ"
Ariel "Xanatos"
Neil "Pink Hat"
Nyet Jones
Josh
Ian
Matt "Skymall"
Mike "Verbal"
Mike "NTPB"
Dan "God"
Dad "Dr. J"
Aaron "My Brother"
Alright, and such. Don't MAKE me give you their stats. Do Make me give you a three pic sequence of Dan "God" in action:
And here those are: 17 different characters from Tufts, Rice and the rest of the Nyetverse, all stylishly playing in NBA Live 2003 (yes, I am aware that I am well behind the times and again, a big dork). Try to name them, and I'll put the answers below:
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 |  |
Okay, so you want answers? Starting at the top left and proceeding L-r, up-down like most written/read languages (Hebrew, always having to stand out!), it's
Jon "Scrooge"
Zach
Nick "So Smelly"
Elliot "Dad"
Andy
Mike "MAZ"
Ariel "Xanatos"
Neil "Pink Hat"
Nyet Jones
Josh
Ian
Matt "Skymall"
Mike "Verbal"
Mike "NTPB"
Dan "God"
Dad "Dr. J"
Aaron "My Brother"
Alright, and such. Don't MAKE me give you their stats. Do Make me give you a three pic sequence of Dan "God" in action:
Sunday with D & C
Digging into the pre-gre memory, I took Sunday off from studying so Beck and I could hang with D & C. We had originally intended to go on Saturday, but we found out that the "special event" that day was a Phoenix Art Kids event, and Kids at Museums: Beck :: Hamsters : Sparkle. So rather than exposing some poor street urchin to beck's voracious, don't-disrupt-my museum-experience appetite, we went on Sunday instead, agreeing to meet at D & C's at 11 for brunch. We went to a restaurant downtown and after spending a solid 30 minutes baking in the sun, sat down for a yummy brunch. I mean, it was not Centre Street Cafe or South Street Diner, but it was definitely tasty.
We eventually got to the museum at about 1 or so and took a brief tour of the Mexican Print-making exhibit with a knowledgeable docent and a group of elderly people who did not ask too many inane questions (except maybe for the guy who kept asking the dates of the prints - which would cause the docent to turn around and read the date off the placard. COME ON, eliminate the middle man, go straight to the placard, dude! Silly stranger). That was cool; we checked out a little bit of the modern art section and I hit up the Philip Curtis exhibit again to snap some photos that I forgot to take last time:
Pretty cool surrealist / circus/train nostalgic stuff. Definitely has appropriated his own style, which is always cool - weird that he has his own wing in a giant museum and seems like a relative unknown outside of Phoenix.
We also checked out a graphic art exhibit called "Uninked" that featured a few well-published artists; I especially like the stuff by the mono-named Seth and Regé Jr. Good times; always nice to see graphic arts get the full-blown museum placard treatment and force yourself to question what the hell high art is. Actually, I just put a placard next to our bathroom that says "Bathroom." Where my money at.
We headed back to the DC abode to be entertained by the lizard-decapitating stylings of Elliot the Dog. We watched Tiger cap his 13th major win in Tulsa Oklahoma - I actually saw his full round from Friday where he shot a major record-tying 63; the rumors are truths; the dude is ridiculous. And even more ridiculous in widescreen HD, thanks Dan and C. Oh, man, hold on a sec...
I completely neglected to mention the highest of awesomest developments that has occurred in the past 48 hours. Dan and Christina were cleaning out their pantry and discovered under the mound of pantry-targeted acquisitions that they had a spare table - which they gave to us! So for the first time since I arrived in Arizona, I am blogging in an upright, human-style position. No longer are the Nyet entires being made from a prone stance or in a Schroeder-at-the-piano-esque hunch; I am sitting upright at my desk like so many soul-less accountants before me. Wahoo. Note also, that big blue ball - inspired by the Bally sales lady, I am using an ab ball as my chair. It's exciting, works my core all day long, and if I get excited I can bounced up and down like an idiot. You know you're jealous. AND, it what I'm relatively positive is a meta-moment first, that picture includes a shot of this computer screen which is actually the editing screen for this very post. So the Ballad now prominently features its own creation from within the Ballad; hell, this post contains its own creation. Somewhere, Tom Pynchon is smirking from behind a head-covering brown paper bag.
(And a real Nyet aficianado will note a Mark Grace Bobble-head doll poking its Bobble into the frame. Nice. Hey, Bauble-headed. I never noticed that before. Fascinating).
(So a quick quip - is there any other kind? - from the DC Sunday. Christina wants to paint an entire wall in their study with whiteboard paint, so the space would be usable. Dan and I protested that this would get ugly after a while with smeared dry-erase; plus Dan thought it would make the place look like an office, which is lame. Christina countered that it is an office. Ratiocination at its finest. Dan grumbled wearily. Christina then extended the idea, wanting to put bulletin board material up as one of the another wall, again under the rationale of usable space. I asked if she would put in carpeting of boredom; Dan asked if they would install the soul-sucking machine in the ceiling. We are funny in our cynicism).
At some point we remembered that Dan had never seen The Goonies, so we headed back to our condo for some swimming, beers, pizza, Boone's and Goonies. Ah, Boone's - somewhere, Carrie Stallings is smirking from behind a surgical mask. Not drinking Boone's, hopefully, for both legal and fetal reasons. Anyhoo, caught the tail end of the Philly Atlanta game (Howard homered - again), and then exposed Dan to the childhood wonders of Gooniedom (in case you have not heard, Dan had some rather stringent cinematic restrictions in place throughout his childhood which led him to miss pretty much the bulk of any healthy Gen Xer's collective pre-adolescent cultural experience. So he's trying to catch up now - Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, going trick-or-treating. It's been a trip). Dan gave the following review:
"What's with all the screaming?"
Experienced through the eyes/ears of twenty-something child-like-optimism-long-since-defeated experience, Dan is quite right; apparently child acting in the 80s equated vocal volume with quality and depth of acting ability. So all of these years when the Beck was (in a very Lucy-esque way, actually) ridiculing my legendary Snoopy performances, it turns out I was just acting in the vernacular. I was every bit the genius that Mikey / Rudy / the Hobbit/ the CIA director Sean Astin was. Hoo-ah. That said, Dan is pretty much right - the movie is very loud and shrieking. perhaps he has missed his window of childhood. His parents won, and his mind is forever sacrosanct.
So that was the fun Sunday before my test Monday, whose face was rocked rather harshly byt eh Nyetverse. That is hopefully the last time I pat my own back with regard to that, but come on, I need to get a little bit excited about... wait for it... wait for it... ANNIHILATING THE GRE.
Actually, some sad news from the Monday morning of my standardized glory - Sparkle fell off the bed, or rather jumped and landed in a crumple. SO Beck was pretty sure she had torn her ACL or broken her back or pelvis. I was sickly worried about her, and when I got home she was shivering and whimpering and altogether looking like an invalid whose world was coming to an end. Of course, a couple of anti-inflammatories and a few hours later, she was walking around the house just fine, and this fine Tuesday morning she is motoring about and acting like nothing happened. She did this a few years ago and we determined that she is probably just the world's least stoic dog - in reality, she probably subluxed her patella or something that is bad and horribly painful, but fairly acute and not surgery-requiring. Thank goodness. The gameplan, if you're interested, is to keep an eye on her and take her in for X-rays if necessary, though given that she just vaulted across the apartment to bark at NOTHING, I'm guessing she'll pull through. Nonetheless, throw a kind thought the way of the world's most pathetic pup:
Dios mio. And so - I'd better go get some real, non-blogging work done. In the meantime, check out this nifty little new feature from our friends at Foxy Tunes (a Mozilla Plug-in) that allows you to inform the masses exactly what recorded music you are listening to at this very second. You are taking notes, right?
----------------
Now playing: The Who - I Can't Explain
via FoxyTunes
We eventually got to the museum at about 1 or so and took a brief tour of the Mexican Print-making exhibit with a knowledgeable docent and a group of elderly people who did not ask too many inane questions (except maybe for the guy who kept asking the dates of the prints - which would cause the docent to turn around and read the date off the placard. COME ON, eliminate the middle man, go straight to the placard, dude! Silly stranger). That was cool; we checked out a little bit of the modern art section and I hit up the Philip Curtis exhibit again to snap some photos that I forgot to take last time:
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
Pretty cool surrealist / circus/train nostalgic stuff. Definitely has appropriated his own style, which is always cool - weird that he has his own wing in a giant museum and seems like a relative unknown outside of Phoenix.
We also checked out a graphic art exhibit called "Uninked" that featured a few well-published artists; I especially like the stuff by the mono-named Seth and Regé Jr. Good times; always nice to see graphic arts get the full-blown museum placard treatment and force yourself to question what the hell high art is. Actually, I just put a placard next to our bathroom that says "Bathroom." Where my money at.
We headed back to the DC abode to be entertained by the lizard-decapitating stylings of Elliot the Dog. We watched Tiger cap his 13th major win in Tulsa Oklahoma - I actually saw his full round from Friday where he shot a major record-tying 63; the rumors are truths; the dude is ridiculous. And even more ridiculous in widescreen HD, thanks Dan and C. Oh, man, hold on a sec...
I completely neglected to mention the highest of awesomest developments that has occurred in the past 48 hours. Dan and Christina were cleaning out their pantry and discovered under the mound of pantry-targeted acquisitions that they had a spare table - which they gave to us! So for the first time since I arrived in Arizona, I am blogging in an upright, human-style position. No longer are the Nyet entires being made from a prone stance or in a Schroeder-at-the-piano-esque hunch; I am sitting upright at my desk like so many soul-less accountants before me. Wahoo. Note also, that big blue ball - inspired by the Bally sales lady, I am using an ab ball as my chair. It's exciting, works my core all day long, and if I get excited I can bounced up and down like an idiot. You know you're jealous. AND, it what I'm relatively positive is a meta-moment first, that picture includes a shot of this computer screen which is actually the editing screen for this very post. So the Ballad now prominently features its own creation from within the Ballad; hell, this post contains its own creation. Somewhere, Tom Pynchon is smirking from behind a head-covering brown paper bag.
(And a real Nyet aficianado will note a Mark Grace Bobble-head doll poking its Bobble into the frame. Nice. Hey, Bauble-headed. I never noticed that before. Fascinating).
(So a quick quip - is there any other kind? - from the DC Sunday. Christina wants to paint an entire wall in their study with whiteboard paint, so the space would be usable. Dan and I protested that this would get ugly after a while with smeared dry-erase; plus Dan thought it would make the place look like an office, which is lame. Christina countered that it is an office. Ratiocination at its finest. Dan grumbled wearily. Christina then extended the idea, wanting to put bulletin board material up as one of the another wall, again under the rationale of usable space. I asked if she would put in carpeting of boredom; Dan asked if they would install the soul-sucking machine in the ceiling. We are funny in our cynicism).
At some point we remembered that Dan had never seen The Goonies, so we headed back to our condo for some swimming, beers, pizza, Boone's and Goonies. Ah, Boone's - somewhere, Carrie Stallings is smirking from behind a surgical mask. Not drinking Boone's, hopefully, for both legal and fetal reasons. Anyhoo, caught the tail end of the Philly Atlanta game (Howard homered - again), and then exposed Dan to the childhood wonders of Gooniedom (in case you have not heard, Dan had some rather stringent cinematic restrictions in place throughout his childhood which led him to miss pretty much the bulk of any healthy Gen Xer's collective pre-adolescent cultural experience. So he's trying to catch up now - Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, going trick-or-treating. It's been a trip). Dan gave the following review:
"What's with all the screaming?"
Experienced through the eyes/ears of twenty-something child-like-optimism-long-since-defeated experience, Dan is quite right; apparently child acting in the 80s equated vocal volume with quality and depth of acting ability. So all of these years when the Beck was (in a very Lucy-esque way, actually) ridiculing my legendary Snoopy performances, it turns out I was just acting in the vernacular. I was every bit the genius that Mikey / Rudy / the Hobbit/ the CIA director Sean Astin was. Hoo-ah. That said, Dan is pretty much right - the movie is very loud and shrieking. perhaps he has missed his window of childhood. His parents won, and his mind is forever sacrosanct.
So that was the fun Sunday before my test Monday, whose face was rocked rather harshly byt eh Nyetverse. That is hopefully the last time I pat my own back with regard to that, but come on, I need to get a little bit excited about... wait for it... wait for it... ANNIHILATING THE GRE.
Actually, some sad news from the Monday morning of my standardized glory - Sparkle fell off the bed, or rather jumped and landed in a crumple. SO Beck was pretty sure she had torn her ACL or broken her back or pelvis. I was sickly worried about her, and when I got home she was shivering and whimpering and altogether looking like an invalid whose world was coming to an end. Of course, a couple of anti-inflammatories and a few hours later, she was walking around the house just fine, and this fine Tuesday morning she is motoring about and acting like nothing happened. She did this a few years ago and we determined that she is probably just the world's least stoic dog - in reality, she probably subluxed her patella or something that is bad and horribly painful, but fairly acute and not surgery-requiring. Thank goodness. The gameplan, if you're interested, is to keep an eye on her and take her in for X-rays if necessary, though given that she just vaulted across the apartment to bark at NOTHING, I'm guessing she'll pull through. Nonetheless, throw a kind thought the way of the world's most pathetic pup:
Dios mio. And so - I'd better go get some real, non-blogging work done. In the meantime, check out this nifty little new feature from our friends at Foxy Tunes (a Mozilla Plug-in) that allows you to inform the masses exactly what recorded music you are listening to at this very second. You are taking notes, right?
----------------
Now playing: The Who - I Can't Explain
via FoxyTunes
Monday, August 13, 2007
Two Weeks Gone (You Missed My Loquacity)
1. The Harry Potter Book 7 actually made use of a couple of the twenty-five cent words, including a personal favorite, "perfidy"(= treachery, disloyalty, benedict-arnold-pastime). Then again, the book also made use of terms like "snog," "Adava Kedavra," "effing" and "BITCH!," so I don't know how much reading Potter alongside my GRE Book actually helped.
2. Other books I've read in the past three weeks (Emperor's Children, The Keep, as well as online reviews of those two books) threw a lot of the vocab words around like nobody's business, betraying a thesaurus-addiction like needle-tracks:heroin. Fatuous, mollify, perfidy (again), surreptitious, obviate, Sitwellian, bonhomie, and my personal favorite "avuncular" ("like an uncle" - like a forklift lifting a crate of forks, so damn literal!) reared their heads way more often than the pretext of a urbane, Manhattan sophisticate narrative really necessitated. But the real point is that it's surprising how many ridiculous words you know that you aren't aware of and/or are adept at construing their meaning from context without blinking an eye and not even noticing that you just ran over a BIG WORD - but when you're studying vocab all the time, the words fly out and make you question why the hell the author keeps saying "visage" and "countenance" instead of "face."
3. You also quickly figure out that there's an obsessive theme to the the words that you need to learn for GRE-type purposes. They are obsessed with concepts of frugality (abstemious, parsimonious, provident, skinflint, miserly, niggardly, etc.) and wastefulness (prodigal, profligate, spendthrift, immoderate, wanton), longwindedness (loquacious, garrulous, discursive, verbose, voluble) and conciseness (laconic, reticent, taciturn, pithy, sententious). There are tons of other dichotomies that drove me nuts because I felt like I was learning four hundred ways to say the same two things (and yes, i know there are subtleties, but occasionally I would find circles in the GRE book - for example, to admonish is to reprove, to reprove is to reprimand, to reprimand is to rebuke and to rebuke is to admonish. I am not kidding; that is the exact circle that was in the Barron's book. Awesome. They also claimed immovable was "not movable" and movable was "not immovable." Somewhere in there is some serious Zen). The above and beyond winner, of course, is that I now know no fewer than eight ways off the top of my head to insinuate that someone is "stubborn" - intransigent, recalcitrant, refractory, obstinate, obdurate, inexorable, dogged, mulish, etc. Ridiculous.
4. This kind of single-mindedness invariably leads to nocturnal psychosis, at least on my part. I definitely woke up at 3 AM one night with an entirely anti-beneficial obsessive need to remember what the difference between petulant and impetuous was. (Petulant = peevy, touchy, impetuous = violent, e.g. Mike Tyson is a petulant dude whose style is, by all accounts, impetuous, his defense impregnable, he's going to eat your children, etc.). I had similar night-time idiocy back when beck and I were taking chemistry over the summer at Tufts; in fact, that much chemistry packed into the day made me do things like look at "No Parking" signs and start thinking about Nitrous Oxide. That was a bad scene.
5. I also got to employ my idiotic mnemonic device arsenal, which largely involves imagining narratives to help me remember words (lassitude = little lass falling asleep, assiduous = a donkey working diligently). But sometimes it helps to remember really stupid, over the top thing, like a kick-ass veteran ninja pug dog, who will help you remember that pugnacious means "ready to fight" and that a pugilant is a boxer. These are things I will remember probably no longer than the next fifteen seconds, but they got the job done.
6. Indeed, they got the job done. Big-time self-aggrandizement: I got a 790 on my Verbal Reasoning and an 800 on the Quantitative Analysis (Math). Sweet. So whatever I decide to do in the GRAD (and not professional) school department will not have any doors closed by my GRE scores. Sweet relief. I was pretty uptight and nervous, self-doubting and diffident about the whole thing, so I'm glad it turned out well. And now, of course, I need to figure something out that will put it to good use.
SO on the plus side, you will start getting posts again. I will try to recap (short for recapitulate) the Phoenix events of late shortly, not that there has been anything groundbreaking recently. I do owe a ton of reviews, which I may or may not get around to. We'll see. But I'll leave you here with the following exchange that Beck had with a little (four year old?) boy at her clinic recently. A man and his son came in with their dog who was acutely not walking. Beck was trying to do a neuro exam on the pup, who was not taking it well and yelping a lot. The expression of pain apparently triggered something in the four year old's brain, because he chimed in:
"When I got my front privates stuck in my zipper, they put some cream on it that made it go numb."
Beck's colleague could not take it - way too funny - so she made up an excuse and left the room. Beck, consummate professional, did not acknowledge the outburst (nor did the dad), and Beck continued to examine the dog. But the boy was not satisfied, and suspected that Beck had not heard him:
"WHEN I GOT MY FRONT PRIVATES STUCK IN MY ZIPPER, THEY PUT SOME CREAM ON IT THAT MADE IT GO NUMB!"
Beck, quick on her feet: "Well, I bet you never did that again!"
Boy: "NO WAY!"
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