A Cautionary Tale

2011-11-02T18:31:00.009-04:00

Well, that's.... odd.

Hello all, sorry for my long absence. It's not that I haven't thought about blogging, it's just that I've been writing other things. Like museum labels. And Call of Cthulhu adventures. And strongly worded emails. And... ergh. Yeah.

Truth to tell, I actually did write something resembling a work of actual fiction a few months ago. It was a short story, and I wrote it as a submission to Machine of Death volume 2. Ordinarily I don't even think about writing fiction--truth is strange enough, honestly, and I don't feel I have a gift for that type of storytelling. But an idea hit me, and I figured why not write it down. For those who haven't heard of it, or are too lazy to click the above link, Machine of Death is an anthology in which all the stories have a single premise--there's a machine that can unerringly predict an individual's cause of death from a blood sample. That's it. The idea first came from this comic, by the amazing Ryan North. The first volume hit #1 on Amazon last October, pushing Glenn Beck's newest book off the chart for a day and earning his considerable animosity. It's available as a CC by SA pdf, free of charge, on the MOD website. And it sold so well that the editors decided to put together a volume 2.

So I bought the book, and I enjoyed it, but when volume 2 submissions were solicited I didn't think twice about it... until I had a sudden idea for a story a scant 10 days before the submission deadline. I busted a move, wrote a story in 4 days, and got it in on deadline. As did nearly 2000 other people! This week is the week when authors find out which of the 1958 stories submitted were chosen for publication, and let's just say I'm not getting my hopes up.

But to keep us entertained, a couple weeks ago the MOD website put up a "title cloud" of all the story titles submitted for volume 2. The rule is, the title has to be a cause of death from your story--so this title cloud is a hodgepodge of silly, sad, horrific, hilarious ways to die, and it's available as a pdf download or as a poster to purchase.

Of course I did what ever other author did, and immediately downloaded it to look for my story title in the tiny tiny fine print. I couldn't find it, but I found something else that was frankly more disturbing than the thought of death by Rapture:

Do you see it? Look closer.

Yes. That's my name, among nearly 2000 other causes of death. I actually had a sort of Donnie Darko moment where I wondered if it was just that I was going insane, and if I blinked and looked again my name wouldn't be there anymore, and then a giant vampire rabbit would show up in my bedroom and a plane would fall on me. But nope, it's there for realz. I checked in with the MOD folks, and they reassured me that someone else hadn't written a story where the protagonist dies of Me. Far less sinisterly, it was just some sort of glitch with importing the story titles between tetchy pieces of software. I'm really sort of thrilled--even if my story isn't chosen, I can legitimately say that Machine of Death put my name in print....

2011-06-17T19:16:00.004-04:00

Debbie Reynolds' Costumes

A few months ago, some of you may recall (though many of you may not) my museum hosted a traveling exhibit called "Incredible Costumes from Film and TV." The exhibit itself, from the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, featured a lot of costumes from Star Trek, Star Wars, the Terminator, and so on…. which was fabulous, but since our average visitor is 5 years old and the mere sight of Arnold ominously declaring "AHL BE BECK" is enough to reduce many of them to tears, the exhibit team was charged to enhance the exhibit by adding some costumes with Broader Family Appeal. So our Director of Collections set about making phone calls to various costume brokers/collectors/storage facilities, etc… and one of the people she ended up talking to was a guy named Todd Fisher.

Todd's mother is actress Debbie Reynolds, who is currently (for about another 12 hours—more on that later) the owner of the world's most comprehensive collection of Hollywood costumes from the silent era on forward. Due to her unique position as both participant in and collector of Hollywood history, she's accumulated costumes and associated props that go beyond amazement for us film nerd-o types—not just from her own films, but from every freakin' movie you ever loved. And it's been her intention to house all of this collection in a Hollywood history museum someday. Those of us in the museum world were aware that the possibility of a Debbie Reynolds costume museum was floating around out there for quite a while—I know some of the collection's been on display at a venue in Vegas, and I think there have been other places as well. But the long-term museum plan didn't work out, for whatever reason, and the collection is being sold at auction. All of it.

Debbie Reynolds, seen here in one of her most memorable film roles

Our museum doesn't have the wherewithal to buy a collection like that. No museum does, frankly, in this day and age. But our curator talked to Todd F. about the possibility of borrowing a few items from the collection prior to the auction—and he was nice as could be and talked to us about it at length. As it turned out, the timing was poor; an auction house needs to have the items a good 2 months before an auction to prep the catalog, and our exhibit didn't close til May 12. So it didn't happen, and we ended up getting some fabulous stuff from other sources, some of which I blogged about on the museum's website, if you're interested. The exhibit was a great success, and Arnie didn't make anyone cry (as far as I know,) so I think it was all good.

Anyway, this week I finally saw the catalog for the Debbie Reynolds costume auction, and it's unbelievable. Incredible, one of a kind stuff from the movies I grew up watching over and over—I kept flipping back to the page with the horrible green check suits from the "Fit as a Fiddle" number in "Singin' in the Rain" for some reason. I hope someone buys both and keeps them together. I hope that whoever buys most of this stuff finds a way to keep segments of the collection together and intact, and makes it available to the public and to researchers, as the projected museum would have.

A museum centered around this collection would have been an amazing thing to visit. I would have killed to be its exhibit developer. (Not that I don't love being an exhibit developer where I am now… but come on, seriously. I'd jump at the chance to write labels about Gene Kelly's shoes any day, and twice on Sundays. I'm just that lame.) I'll be watching the auction online tomorrow, and I might even bid on a couple things. Not that I'll be in contention for any of it, but it's about the experience. And I hope with all my heart that some of it—a lot of it—ends up in someone's museum, and doesn't just disappear into some billionaire's closet.

If you want to check it out, go to Profiles in History and download the catalog. It'll blow your mind.

2011-05-21T19:51:00.004-04:00

I have good news, and bad news...

The good news is, I got my bike back.

The bad news is, I got raptured and wrecked it into my car.

2011-04-26T11:51:00.003-04:00

Well, That Was a Hell of a Month.

April's always seemed like such a nice month, in past years. Showers, flowers, spring in the air... But as most of you probably already know, my April 2011 started with the sudden and unexpected death of my grandpa Fred. One could argue that at the age of 96, death isn't technically "unexpected"--and he'd have been the first to make this point, honestly--but it was still a shock, as he was in excellent health for 96, still living on his own, and still getting a lot of joy out of life. This in mind, of course, it's really great that he just dropped dead--"cocked up his toes," as my great-aunt Esther would have put it. (She cocked up her own at the age of 90, about 15 years back.) So many of the possible scenarios for Grandpa Fred's passing were so much worse that while I'd very sad about it, I can't think of a better way for things to have worked out (other than immortality, and frankly I suspect he wouldn't have gone for that even if it had been on offer.) But it was still a shock. And in the wake of that event, I had a serious veterinary issue with one of my cats, which led to problems with one of the other cats (apparently a cat with a cone on her head is the most terrifying thing in existence, as Other Cat hid in the space under the stairs for no less than 3 days straight after getting a brief glimpse of this eldrich horror.) Then I went to Washington DC on business for a few days, which was a nice break from the emotional chaos, but it led to getting a cold, which has now turned into a tidy case of walking pneumonia.

FUCK YOU, APRIL 2011.

But then I remind myself, it's still just April. It's still spring, there are still flowers and baby squirrels and all that jazz. And as my grandpa was quite an appreciator of flowers, I figured I'd post up some pics of what's blooming in my yard in his honor. Bring on May! I'm ready.

2011-03-28T19:51:00.004-04:00

400!!!!

For my 400th blog post, I'd like to make an announcement.

I got a new bike.

Yeah, OK. When last you saw me (at least in this context) I was railing on at the unfeeling skies about having had my much-beloved dark orange Trek 7.3FX stolen from my workplace, from right in front of a security guard. At that time I was hopeful that I might still get the bike back, as 1) we knew who did it, and 2) I had the serial number and a detective and everything. I still don't think that was an unreasonable hope. What I didn't know was that when 2 of the museum's staff identified the guy from his mug shot, a third staff member identified totally the wrong guy. And that, as they say, is that, at least in the eyes of the prosecutor. They're not going to spend time and money prosecuting someone who's not 100% open-and-shut. My detective was kind enough to tell me roughly where the guy lives; so I'm still cruising through that neighborhood on my way to and from work, in hopes of coming across some asshole riding my bike one of these days. But in the meantime I needed a new one. I put it off, hoping that 2011 would bring back orange as a color choice for that bike (or any bike, really) but apparently orange is Out. Unless you favor mountain/dirt bikes, which I don't. So since switching brands wasn't going to give me a color advantage, I figured best to stay with the make and model I'd known and loved for the last 4 years. I therefore give you: The 2011 Trek 7.3 FX, in "Royal Maroon."

I ordered it last weekend, picked it up this weekend, and we went for our first ride together yesterday despite it being freezing cold out. I still miss my old bike. I wish death on the guy who took it, and I'm not going to stop looking for it everytime I go through that neighborhood. But I'm OK in the meantime. I've got another bike to love, and spring is here.

2010-12-04T17:50:00.002-05:00

No Excuses

Whyfor no blog for 6 months? Lots of reasons, none of them particularly interesting or good. :) In the interim, I went to Hampshire, England for pleasure and Edmonton, Alberta for work. I opened two exhibits and closed one. I lost 3 of my 5 dart frogs, and bought 1 new one. My diabetic cat went back on insulin, then into remission, then back onto insulin. And my bicycle was stolen.

You might remember my bicycle; I blogged about buying it back in May of 2007, and before that I blogged about my lust for this particular bicycle (or one like it) for at least a year or two. It was the first big purchase I made when I became full-time employed again--my reward to myself for sticking out the 5 years of living frugally with only part-time work and sponging off my parents keeping me afloat. This bike was special in a sappy sentimental way, and also in a this-bike-fucking-rocks kind of a way. I hadn't had a new bike since 1984, and this 2006 Trek FX 7.3 was worth the wait, I have to say.

So when I got out of work on Saturday November 13, I was naturally pretty upset to discover that it had been stolen from the garage, right in front of the garage greeter who isn't always an actual security guard. My friend Sarah--a goddess if ever there was one--drove me around the neighborhood for nearly an hour looking to see if we could catch someone out and about on it, but to no avail. Returning to the museum, I learned that the thief had been caught on camera, and furthermore had had multiple alteractions with our security staff after trying to chain his own bike (yes, he arrived on a bike) to a guard rail fence. When he was told he needed to chain it in the garage instead, he became abusive, and shouted that he was a ticket scalper who worked downtown and didn't have TIME to waste putting his bike in the garage. (Apparently he did have time to steal my fucking bike. And time to get a ladyfriend of his to walk over to the museum and pick his own bike up while I was standing 10 feet away in tears trying to file a security report. It was only later upon review of the camera footage that we realized this.) When we heard the bit about him being a ticket scalper, Sarah said, "You've got to be kidding me. I know him, he walked in behind me from the garage today and I remembered him from when I used to work downtown. He's always scalping tickets near the Circle." (For the non-Hoosiers out there, ticket scalping is legal in Indiana, and any major event sees dozens of guys on street corners downtown offering to buy or sell tickets.) So, wow, I thought. At least we know where he works, sort of, and we have a good picture of him.

It took me a couple days to dig up my serial number, and the police wouldn't make a report without one, so I filled in time by posting REWARD flyers all over the neighborhood around the museum, and visiting the two nearest pawn shops to give them info on my bike as well. Once I'd filed a report, the police department actually assigned a detective to my case, and he assured me he'd come down to the museum to look at the footage and see what he could do... but I was rapidly giving up hope on getting my bike back. I got a copy of one of the stills from the security video myself, and made up some new flyers with my case #, the bike's serial #, the dude's description and photo, and a picture of a Trek 7.3 FX for reference purposes, planning to give them to the police officers downtown and see if that got me anywhere. Then the museum's concierge let me know she had cheap tickets available for that night's Pacer game, and I thought, hm. Well, I'd like to go to the game, and then I'll be able to hand some flyers to the cops who work around the Fieldhouse, so why not?

While the thought had occurred to me, I was really more or less unprepared for the possibility that I might actually find the guy myself. Yet as I tooled around looking for inexpensive downtown parking, suddenly there he was at the corner of Washington and Pennsylvania. My heart skipped, and not in a good way. While I am the first to admit I'm pretty terrible at remembering faces, I'd been staring at his photo on my desk for the better part of two days, and I knew instantly it was him--I'd thought his eyes were closed in the photo, but he actually is a pretty fat guy and his eyes are sort of permanently squinted, and he looked really identical to the photo, right down to the hat he was wearing. I looped around the block just to get another look, and this time I ended up stopped in traffic not 10 feet from him. We made eye contact. I'm sure he thought I was a potential customer for his handful of Pacer tickets, but I looked away and hit the gas as soon as the light changed, and then frantically took the nearest parking space I could find. Ran the three blocks back to the Fieldhouse and found a cop; I was panting so badly that I couldn't really explain myself, but Thank God for those flyers! I was able to hand one to the cop, point, and say "This guy is scalping tickets... gasp... two blocks up on Penn... help me..." The policeman was nice, told me he couldn't leave his post but that I should go see if the dude was still there, then call Dispatch and tell them I needed a patrol car asap. I did, and he was, and I did.

I then spent about the longest 20 minutes of my life standing in the freezing cold a half block from the dude who stole my bike, who remained blissfully unaware of my scrutiny. (If you're wondering why I didn't confront him, 1. He didnt' have my bike with him, and 2. The dude is the size of a mack truck. And apparently has anger management problems, judging from his performance at the museum. I don't particularly want to have my teeth punched down my throat by an angry scalper-bike-thief dude, so I stayed back.) The cops finally showed up, and once again I was able to just give them the flyer, babble incoherantly a bit, and then point up the street at the dude. "Wow," said the cops. "Usually people aren't this... er... well prepared." They strolled over to question him, while I stayed by the patrol car. Then they came back and said since he didn't have my bike they couldn't arrest him, but they were going to run his ID for warrants. Which they did, and there weren't any, but now we had his name and address attached to my case number. WOOT. When they gave the guy his ID back, he protested loudly that he didn't know anything about my bike, or any bike, he didn't have a bike, and this was *bullshit*, and then he walked off. The cops said, "We'll see if Vice is out here tonight. If they are, we'll have them go pick him up and take his tickets. That'll ruin his night." Suck on that, douchebag.

So that's the story of me finding the guy who stole my bike, but not the bike itself. The bike is still missing. My detective brought a photo array to the museum, and two different security staff were able to ID the guy. I haven't heard from the detective since then, though, so I assume things haven't just been open and shut, they got a warrant and went to his house and found my bike. I'm sure it's probably long gone, sold to his dealer or to someone who specializes in stolen bikes. At least my serial # is in the database that the pawnshops check against.

On that happy note--well, Jake asked for it!--I'll leave y'all. Hopefully I can get back on the blogging horse without too much trouble; lord knows I haven't stopped having stuff to say. :)

2010-06-13T22:16:00.002-04:00

And in Other News, Soccer is Still Boring. Film at 11.*

Sorry for the long absence, those of you who are still paying attention (or were kind enough to put me on their RSS feed.) Work kind of sucked the life out of me on many levels for the months of April and May, and I was unable to think of anything witty or pleasant to say for over 60 days straight. However, here's a funny post about squirrels I wrote quite a while ago, which came to light during my Lost Period.

What else is new? Hmmm. I did in fact get paid to draw about a half-dozen maps for a Call of Cthulhu product in their Ancient Rome setting, which was a lot of fun. Will let you all know when it comes out so you can rush to buy a copy. In the process of this I learned a lot more about Photoshop--or at least, how to turn black and white line drawings into something decent-looking with Photoshop CS4. Not a bad skill to have, even if they never call me for another map. My cat's diabetic again--this is bad, but not unexpected honestly, the remission lasted 2 years and that was pretty damn amazing. And I've lost 10 lbs since January, which about knocks my socks off. While I've never worried a whole lot about my weight, I figured the best 40th birthday present I could think of would be to get off my butt and lose a few, and it seems to be working. Huzzah me. Hopefully I'll have something more entertaining to post soon, our exhibit just opened and I'm starting to feel my strength returning...

*Apparently there's some soccer thing on TV right now, and USA has failed to lose to England--which just goes to prove my point. Any sport they can play for hours and still end with a score of 1-1 (or, ye gods, 0-0) is just not my cup of coffee...

2010-03-20T21:27:00.003-04:00

Maybe Twitter IS Useful...

Two weeks ago I was idly monitoring my Twitter feed in the background as I worked on the current Projecto Disastro at work, and I saw a tweet go by from @ab_Chaosium; these are the guys who publish the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and who used to publish the RuneQuest RPG. Those two things together have taken up a tremendous amount of both my free time and free cash since sometime around 1989, so I feel I owe Chaosium a certain debt of gratitude for all the entertainment of the last two decades. The tweet was something to the effect of "We need a quick map drawn for an upcoming publication, anyone out there want to submit something?"

Now, to say I love maps is no small thing. I collect world atlases and geography books; I have a prized 1923 atlas that I use when I run Call of Cthulhu, and a very cool one from 1941 that depicts Countries Invaded by the Axis and Countries Annexed by the Soviets and so on, with obviously last-minute overlays showing changing borders... I have a full set of Carpenter's Geographical Readers, dating from 1899-1920 or so. I draw elaborate maps for the role-playing games I run, when I have time; my favorite is to put them on foamcore and use map tacks to represent player and bad guy locations. So naturally I emailed Chaosium and offered to submit a map. They responded in the affirmative, so I drew them a very quick-and-dirty map per their instructions and fired it off.

Dustin--who's been with Chaosium for ages and who I know I met at some of my 1990's Gencon forays--is a very cool guy and was quick to let me know that they might need some more maps in the near future, and would I mind sending him a few samples of my work. One thing led to another, and I ended up drawing him 3 samples: a straight-up geographic map of Tasmania, an interior map of a 1950's malt shop done entirely in Illustrator, and this:

Now, setting aside the fact that the title font's hard to read, I thought it turned out rather well for a 100% silly map. I wanted to do something illustrative (that is, something with some dimensionality/pictographic depictions of features vs. a straight overhead view.) Once I got started I just kept on adding little goofy bits to it til I finally figured that I'd better stop before I sank my chances with Chaosium completely. But--perhaps not surprisingly, Dustin was amused (by the satellite dish in particular, it seems) and responded by giving me a few small art assignments for an upcoming product. So, what do you know! Twitter led me to a gig where I'm doing something that is pure pleasure for me (drawing maps) and getting to hopefully eventually see them in print from a company whose products I love. Can't beat that with a stick!

2010-03-13T16:25:00.004-05:00

Less Fun than Bees

I have a friend who is in the final stages of terminal cancer at the moment. She was one of my best friends in the last couple years of high school, but we fell out of touch and despite occasional second-hand news of one another, it stayed that way until I got my current job at the museum, where her older sister also works. Via her sister I heard about my friend's first bout with cancer, her remission, her marriage and kid-having, and then the recurrence of illness nearly two years ago and the ups and downs that have followed. She and I talked about getting together for coffee or something in these last couple years; we played a little phone/email tag, but never quite worked it out. Then a couple weeks ago they finally discontinued her chemo, and that, as they say, is that.

I'm not going to post here about my friend being a cool person (though she is) or how genuinely sad the prospect of her death at age 38 seems to me (very.) What I've been thinking about more has to do with the assumptions we make on a daily basis that affect how we go about dealing with serious shit like death. I think one of the reasons I'd not been hugely proactive about getting in touch with my friend over the years had to do with my assumption that we were Very Different People from who we'd been when we were friends at age 17. And therefore, what would we have to talk about? The people we all were in high school are long gone (or so we imagine--hell, so we hope, right? I was a wildly moody little cuss for 4 straight years, and I seem to recall everyone else being much the same.) Add into that the fact that dying young is pretty fucking horrible, and pretty well beyond my ability to wrap my brain around, and I assumed we really, REALLY would be strained for conversation. So I was worried/depressed about about the coffee.

My assumptions, as it turns out, were complete crap--I'm happy to report this. First off, we haven't actually changed all that much. She's married, with two kids; I'm a long-term bachelor who likes small children in smaller doses. She had a job with tremendous organizational responsibilities; I am lucky if I can remember to tie my shoes in the morning. But at the core, we're both smart, we both laugh at a lot of the same things, and we still (I hope!) like one another's company. I realize a lot of high school friendships generate heavy baggage which it's best not to unpack later in life... but probably one of the few plusses of our not having stayed in touch is that I really don't remember much of the stupid shit. I remember that there WAS stupid shit--and maybe I just have a terrible memory, but honestly the details are long gone, and I don't think it was more than just the usual dumb crap kids do and say when going through the exceedingly painful throes of teenagerdom.

The other assumption, that the fact of her impending death would make normal interaction impossible, was also mercifully crap. I've been lucky enough to get some time to visit with her in the last couple weeks, and while her illness is always present, it's not in charge of the conversation. Today I found out how she met her husband (I'd been wondering!) Last week we had discussion of where to find the best milkshakes in town. I can't think of a better way to spend some time with a friend, dying or not, than sitting around, catching up, and shooting the shit for a while. :)

So the long and the short is, if you're ever in a situation like this, DON'T BE AN ASS. Quit assuming you know how it'll go down before you even make a move. Call your friend, forget whatever that dumb high school shit was, and go bring them a damn milkshake and some conversation. You'll be glad you did.

2010-03-04T23:51:00.005-05:00

I'm Wearing Bees! On My Feet!

I haven't bought new tennis shoes in years; though I gave in to the lure of 2 pairs of Keens over the last two summers, and I finally bought new shoes for work after *cough* nearly a decade--remember I was out of work for 5 of those years, I didn't NEED nice shoes--but I've been a loyal fan of New Balance since college, and frankly every time I went in the shoe store and looked at the racks of New Balance, I thought urrrghhhhhh. So..... very..... bland.... It was as if there had been some kind of horrible bleaching accident at the women's shoe factory, so that every shoe had had any sign of color and life bled from it, leaving only tiny pink or blue accents here and there, near the eyelets and so on. But in looking at the Adidas Star Wars Originals collection online (it was for work! seriously! well, it was AT work) I felt a deep-seated desire for new tennis shoes. Since the Luke Skywalker pilot orange ones were not available, I settled for these.

CHECK. IT. OUT. WHAT?!?!

I am totally in love with these shoes, even though they're a tad too small (they were on clearance, limited sizes available.) They're like bees. Shoe bees. Deadly yet beautiful foot bees.

I also bought a pair of ASICS, which are cool though shinier than I was anticipating. I will wear them happily. But the bees.... the bees will be saved for special occasions...

2010-02-28T21:14:00.002-05:00

Oh, Dear.

I seem to have left my blog unattended for far longer than I'd really meant to. This seems to have corresponded with a period of Holy Crap What the Fuck at work, so I'm blaming it on that... But my new year's resolution is Blog More! So I should be all over that in 2010.

. . . .

New Year's was over a month ago, wasn't it? Aw, hell.

2010-01-10T23:10:00.001-05:00

Happy Binary Day!

Woooo! It's 011010!

Yeah, ok, that was pretty lame...

2009-12-25T11:33:00.002-05:00

Happy Holidays, Dammit

I've noticed a rather surprising amount of crabbiness this year directed at those of us who wish folks a "Happy Holiday" instead of "Merry Christmas." Some random stranger in the grocery the other day was wishing the clerk Merry Xmas--she was wearing a Santa hat, so seems safe to assume she's a celebrater of the holiday--and he had to do a 30 second diatribe on how he wasn't ashamed of saying Merry Xmas, and he wasn't going to be "politically correct," and got very self-righteous about the whole thing, although, as I said, the clerk was wearing a Santa hat at the time and therefore wasn't likely to argue with him. I've heard this in multiple places this year, in varying degrees. Not sure if it's just conservatives who feel "Happy Holidays" is part of the uncomfortable secularization of our (already secular by law) nation now that Bush and his god are out of office, but I find it mind-boggling. Back when I worked at the game store, our bookkeeper--who was a wonderful sweet person and I liked her a lot--sent me an Xmas card, with the statement that she didn't care whether I was a Christian or not, because SHE was, and so she was sending me a card, dammit. (Not that she'd have said dammit. She'd never have said dammit.) That seems to be the prevailing theme in all this bitching and moaning I've heard this year, with a slight edge of being the persecuted minority. As if Christians had ever been a persecuted minority in this country, for heaven's sake.

I'm one of those people who celebrates the Christmas season as a time for family and joy and love, even though I'm not a Christian. I don't object to friends telling me to "Have a Merry Christmas!" because I certainly intend to do so, and I appreciate the thought. But it just seems like common courtesy to wish strangers a Happy Holiday Season--if you don't know what holidays they celebrate, then why not cover them all with a single blanket statement of good wishes for the new year? It's not about you and your holiday, it's about them and theirs. Getting over yourself a little bit--that'd be a truly Christmassy thing to do, now wouldn't it?

Hope you're all having marvelous holidays of whatever type you desire!

2009-12-21T09:45:00.001-05:00

Twilight: New Moon in Ten Paragraphs Or Less

All right, so first off, let me say that New Moon is better than Twilight I, merely due to the fact of it having a quantity of bare-chested native american hunky guys, and Graham Greene, who is an actor of a quality far exceeding that of the script. Let's see if I can sum it up in 10 paragraphs or less.

1. Bella is still stupidly in love with Vampire Ed--apparently it still has not occurred to her that perhaps she is not thinking clearly in this matter. They snuggle together in English class as they watch a Romeo and Juliet movie which Edward has memorized (because apparently being a vampire means Edward is doomed to an eternal hell of repeating the eleventh grade over and over.) Shortly after declaring his undying (heh) love for her, Edward dumps her, for no easily discernable reason--which does tie in nicely with his being an 11th grade boy. He leaves town, vowing that it will be as if he never existed. Would that this were true.

2. Bella's heart and mind are shattered, as she apparently sits in a chair and looks out the window for 3 straight months. Inexplicably, instead of having her forcibly committed, her father just looks worriedly at her from behind his facial hair and makes halfhearted threats to send her to live with her mother. Our window into Bella's distressed state of mind comes via the crude plot device of Bella's emails to Edward's "sister," Alice, who is one of the few enjoyable characters in the film. We see early on that all of Bella's emails to alicecullen@yahoo.com are bouncing back marked Account Deleted; yet we keep hearing her write them, in increasingly pathetic-sounding voice-overs.

3. Bella is just almost starting to act like a normal 16 year old girl again--which is to say self-involved and annoying, but social--when she discovers that doing something stupid or dangerous causes Edward to appear to her in ghost form, saying "er, don't do that." Ghost Edward is an improvement over Real Edward, in that he disappears after blurting out each warning and doesn't sneak into her bedroom to watch her sleeping. Thus Bella decides that occasional visits from Ghost Edward are worth risking grave bodily harm and possible sexual assault, so she goes for a ride with a random bike ganger, just to goad him into showing up. Then she buys a junky motorcycle of her own, and asks her incredibly hot ripped-out Indian friend Jacob to fix it up for her.

4. Bella and Jacob grow closer and bond over the bike repair project, and she emails Alice's non-working address to tell it that she thinks she is falling for Jacob. OH NOES! How will she handle these feelings of not-Edward?? By agreeing to go to a movie with that nice boy at school who she generally treats like crap, and inviting Jacob along, that's how. And so begins Bella's career as the world's biggest cock-tease. Nice boy wants her, she ignores him for Jacob. Jacob wants her, she turns him down at the crucial second. He swears he will be her friend forever.... aaand then the moon turns full and he runs off and doesn't come back. Bella's heart and mind are shattered, and--waaaaait a minute....

5. It is at this point we realize that we are watching the SAME GODDAMNED MOVIE as last year! Bella falls in love. Bella acts like a dumbass. Boy loves her back. Boy suddenly becomes distant and weird. Boy has a secret. Bella whines and moans until she finds out secret--Boy is a Monster who Might Hurt Her if they ever Had Sex or Anything Like That and so therefore Bella Cannot Have Love. But she wants love anyway! And boy loves her and wants to protect her, and *****sounds of violent retching****

6. Werewolves are way cooler than vampires. This is all that is necessary for us to know. Werewolves jump off cliffs for fun. Werewolves work out and are incredibly tan and buff. Werewolves have an endless supply of spare gym shorts to replace the ones that shred off each time they transform. Werewolves catch and eat vampires. They eat the annoying vampire with the dreds from the first movie. They chase the redhead vampire chick off a cliff, but can't follow her despite their mad cliff-jumping skillz, and she swims away to safety in the next film.

7. Bella jumps off a cliff. Because everyone is doing it.

8. Jacob saves her and brings her back to her house; her father is off dealing with the fact that Graham Greene has died, no doubt wisely, as it saves him appearing in "Eclipse." Somehow, miraculously, Alice is waiting in her house, despite not having been invited in and despite the fact that she and her family are theoretically hundreds of miles from Forks. Her weird psychic powers told her Bella was dead! So she came to....er....hang out in Bella's empty house and eventually scare the shit out of her grieving dad? Alice is not a good planner. She and Jacob have some tete-a-tete, and then the phone rings, and Jacob tells the caller that Bella's dad isn't home because he's arranging a funeral. DOHHHHHH!!!! It was EDWARD on the phone!!! Now he thinks Bella is dead, due to this bizarre coincidence/misunderstanding! Now he is going to kill himself because he cannot live in a Bella-less world! Wait wait I get it this is just like Romeo and Juliet, right down to the ridiculous gimmicky ending! OH NOOOOOOOOOOO

9. At THIS point, the plot jumps the rails. There was a plot, albeit a feeble one, involving Bella and Jacob and the mean redheaded vampire and all those indian dudes who we'd like to see a little more of, thanks. Bella opts out of this plot with nary a backward glance, as now she must go to Italy with Alice to save Edward (because when vampires commit suicide, they have to go to Italy to do it.) It was here that I actually said, out loud in the theatre, "What the SHIT just happened?" as Bella's airplane streaked out of Sea-Tac.

10. Edward wants the vampire council to kill him, because he can't do it himself. The vampire council, who look--as a friend of mine said on facebook--like a flaming cross between Monty Python's inquisitors and La Cage aux Folies, tell him no. So apparently the only way to force them to off him is for him to go out and sparkle in public, thus violating Vampire Law by revealing the carefully guarded secret of the vampires' existence. But before he can completely drop trou in the town square, Bella shows up and grabs him around his pale skinny chest and hugs him back into the shadows. Whew, that was close! Now comes the really scary part, where they meet the deadly dangerous and terrifying vampire council and.... wait, hang on. Nothing happens. Hm, that wasn't scary at all. They make Alice promise to turn Bella into a vampire sometime soon, and then turn them all loose. Whew! Close call, guys! Good thing you didn't piss off the council, they might have got out the Soft Cushions and the Comfy Chair....

And so Edward and Bella return to Forks, and she cockteases Jacob a bit more before admitting that she likes Edward best. Jacob points out that if Bella gets vampireated, the werewolves will go completely freestyle on the Cullen clan. Bella says "Whatever!" Jacob leaves, and Edward tells Bella that before he can have sex with h--er, before he can make her a vampire, they will need to---***DUN DUNNNNN***---Get Married! Yes. No biting before marriage for this Romeo. Aww how romantic! Roll end credits!

(yes, I know, it was 11 paragraphs. Stuff it.)

2009-12-15T19:46:00.005-05:00

The Weekly WTF, Episode 1: Holiday Edition

For quite a while now, I've been meaning to start a series of blog posts devoted to the vast number of pictures I have of things that make me go Holy Crap What the Fuck is Up With THAT? There is more weird stuff in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy... In fact, if you were to build a philosophical worldview out of some of this shit, you would end up with a belief system far more damaging even than The Dao of Whiskey.

Now, I wanted to start this off with something light. Something holiday-themed, perhaps, something even OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING NOOOOOOO MY EYES

Festive, isn't it? Nothing says Christmas like drunken Santa stumbling into the midst of Sigfried and Roy's holiday performance at the Mirage, and collapsing to sleep off his bender against the flank of a tiger who has alrady slain and is preparing to eat one of his elves.

No doubt this is an act of revenge, in response to Drunk Santa's having grabbed a tiger cub and crammed it in his bag of presents "just for a laugh." Cruel old bastard.

This is actually an item from our museum's collection, and I have to say that on a 1-10 scale of scary, this is only about a 6 compared to some of the Xmas stuff we own. It boggles my mind how many different ways people can find to make something as innocuous as Santa Claus unintentionally creepy, ugly, or downright disturbing. But for sheer surreal incongruity, this has to be one of the finest holiday creations I've seen. So There you have it! Join us again next week, when I will have yet another photo of some high-quality What the Fuck on display for your edification. Thank you, and good night.

2009-12-13T11:11:00.002-05:00

In Which a Free Book is Won

Apparently, my admission that I read Wondermark in my bathroom was the clincher. The marvelous thing is that not only did I win a free book--thus freeing up my cash to buy more of the Wondermark backlist!--but so did Robin, whom I have been barraging with Wondermark links for over a year now. Huzzah! I think I forgot to mention that David Malki also makes short films which are fairly excellent. If you like that sort of thing, go check out Expendable, which is about the rough life of the supervillain henchman.

In other news, I got to go see Star Wars in Concert last night, which was utterly fabulous. Live orchestra performing selections from all 6 films, with clips showing on the huge hi-def screen behind them and a laser/light show surrounding. The whole thing is given some coherence by live narration from Anthony Daniels--very cool to see and hear him in person. Here is a man who is making the most of a career primarily spent playing one character over and over (though I did love him in this.) The narration itself was a little over-the-top silly; Fathead didn't like it at all, but I figured it was aimed primarily at the kids in the audience, of which there were thousands. And seriously, the music's incredible, our seats were amazing--thank you, Lucasfilm, for comping the museum some dead-center floor seats!--and I had a great time. Best thing I saw was a gang of little teeny kids having a lightsaber battle with cones of cotton candy (pink and blue, of course.) Hilarious. Who could ask for anything more?

2009-12-10T10:05:00.003-05:00

Going Stag

I write you all today from Hartford, CT, a city primary known for insurance, mutual funds, and mutual fund insurance.

The Hartford Stag was a staple image of my childhood, though I'm not entirely sure why--must have been sponsoring something I watched religiously on TV, or something. Technically, that should be the Hartford Hart... I wonder when "Hart" and "Hind" were replaced by "Stag" and "Doe" in the American lexicon. Hmm. Hmmmmm....

Anyway, the point--such as it is--is that I flew into Hartford last night for a business trip, to be greeted by a massive thunderstorm that was following on the heels of 5" of wet snow. Last time I was here, it was fall, and New Englandy-looking in a completely different sense; but honestly, I'm fairly pleased with the current state of the weather. Today it's sunny, there's still snow everywhere yet traffic is humming past my window at a decent clip, so I've no complaints. I'm just sitting around the hotel waiting for my coworker to show up--she's been on the coast for a few days, so was taking the train from NYC to New Haven, picking up a rental car, and driving to pick my other coworker and I up before we head over to LEGO for our brainstorm meetings. Eric's watching Firefly over in his room... not a bad way to spend a morning. Think I'll join him.

2009-11-29T21:13:00.005-05:00

In Which Wondermark is Touted

Yes yes, I know, I promised you a Jell-O ad. But look, this is way more important. Many of you already know of my love for Wondermark; as you can see, it's already linked right down there on the sidebar. I've passed it on to friends. I've fanned it on Facebook. I Tweeted it on Thanksgiving (and even got re-tweeted, thanks very much David Malki!) I have a signed comic on my wall, and a copy of Beards of our Forefathers in my bathroom. (Yes, the bathroom. Shut up. Don't judge me.) But do you know WHY I love Wondermark so, and why you should too? Here are three good reasons:

1. Art. While Malki! can draw—we've seen it happen—the look of Wondermark comes from his massive library of illustrations from 19th and early 20th century books and magazines. It's utterly fucking brilliant. I've no idea how he finds so many pictures of squids.

2. Beards. Malki's obsessed with beards. I can get behind that--as many of you know, I'm quite fond of beards myself. My own ambition to be a bearded lady at the circus was sadly dashed when I showed absolutely no signs of hirsutism from an early age; but I fully support the beardage of others, without bitterness.

3. Shirts. My last order from TopatoCo included what may be my current favorite t-shirt: Steam Powered Heart. Additionally, I had to buy this one for a friend (inspired, of course, by this comic) and this one for another friend. An abundance of riches! I'm giving serious thought to the Bibliophibian Onesie for Jen and Patrick...

All this shameless plugging of course has nothing to do with the fact that blogging about Wondermark enters me in a contest to win a free book. Nothing to see here. Move along. Look, a Jell-O ad from 1923!

(A basketful of happiness? Seriously? Her mom sent her out for groceries, and she comes back with 40 boxes of Jell-O and "happiness"? That's grounds for willful orphaning.)

2009-11-02T20:42:00.009-05:00

No Such Luck

As promised, here is the first of several wonderful ads purchased at this weekend's postcard show. I didn't fully appreciate how awesome this particular one was until I got it home, as you're about to see.

This is an ad from the Ladies' Home Journal in 1919--the heyday of entertaining magazine advertising, to my way of thinking. It's advertising a now forgotten brand of soap called "Olivilo" (pron. Olive-eyelow.)

The first mystery to me is why one would market a soap with the word "vile" in the name--I do realize it's trying to evoke the nourishing properties of olive oil, and I can overlook the gimmick that the name's a palindrome, but why put that long I sound in there? It gives me a sense of ick before I've even unwrapped the bar. Also, it's packaged in a black wrapper, which doesn't exactly cry out "SPARKLING CLEAN" to me. Those are basic facets of the product itself, though, so I accept that the pitchmen in Olivilo's marketing department may have been stuck with these problems for some time before devising this particular ad.

The first great thing here is the threat implicit in the image. "Do you believe in Luck?" it asks, in enormously loopy handwriting font, the word "in" squiggling precariously upright. "Do you feel lucky, punk? Do ya? Then try our #%@*& soap!"

Next comes the promise: Fate cannot harm you, if you use this soap. Apparently, Olivilo is the detergent version of a mafia bag man. Among other things, it will protect you from the unlucky influence of the rather bitchy looking black cat who is staring balefully out of the ad with eyes like creepy green footballs. OK, that seems worth a 10¢ cake of soap to me... And hey, at no extra charge you get a sidebar explaining that black cats are unlucky! Except when they aren't.

Thanks, Olivilo, for that fleeting educational moment.

However, the single most spectacular thing in this ad, the thing I didn't even notice until I got it home, was this teeny tiny plug for one of Wrisley's other products--Wrisley's Eau de Toilette. What could be nicer than pleasantly scented floral water, right?

GAHHHHH WHAT THE FUCKING HELL???? THE IMPRISONED SOULS OF FLOWERS??!?!! Holy farking Jesus, who thought THAT would be a pleasant image for potential buyers?? **shudder** It makes me want to buy a bottle just so I can give it a decent burial in my backyard. I can only conclude that Olivilo is truly the soap of the damned.

Join us next time when I deconstruct a Jell-O ad from 1921...

2009-11-01T22:14:00.005-05:00

Yes, Yes, I Know.

It's been forever since I blogged. The whole canal thing had me pretty beat, frankly, and then I decended into the hell that is bathroom renovation, and I kept thinking "I should blog about this!" and then failing to do so, because it wasn't done yet. And then it was done, and I was sick of the whole thing. I'll get back to it, the topic is rich with satire--but look! I'll make it up to you right now with this gem from the Postcard and Ephemera Show I went to today with Haywain McTarry.

As most of you know, I love old advertising ephemera, and I have a fondness for particular types of postcards as well. So I was thumbing through the cards at one of the bigger dealers at the show when Haywain said, "Come here, you have to see this card!" I looked, and saw the following unremarkable picture of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and her corgis:

Then, at Haywain's behest, I turned it over.

Of course I bought it. How could I NOT buy it? I also bought some singularly hilarious soap ads from the 1920's, which will be used to decorate the newly remodeled bathroom which I haven't posted about yet. Sadly, they're too big for my scanner bed... but maybe I can use the one at work. Because you deserve to see them in all their ridiculous glory...

2009-09-02T08:27:00.005-04:00

We Interrupt This Blog...

...to bring you a special bulletin, which will matter not one bit to any of you who don't live in Indianapolis. But most of you know I live on a 170+ year old canal, and that much of the joy in my life consists of walking out my front door each morning and seeing wood ducks, turtles, muskrats, etc. and so on... not to mention feeling as if I'm living in a small rustic town rather than in a city of 800,000 people, thanks to the wall of vegetation on the opposite bank. Last week, the water company which owns the canal (it's a working canal, it supplies 60% of the city's water) unveiled a plan to strip all the vegetation and several feet of dirt from both banks and replace them with a combination of mesh and riprap stone, turning this

into this:

The plan achieves the goal of preventing muskrats from denning in the bank, which does cause subsidence, and keeps geese from sliding down into the water and taking soil with them when they do it. But it will also destroy the look and feel of the canal, will drive off nearly all the bird life outside of mallards (which can live anywhere) and will completely prevent successful nesting for the 5 species of turtles which make their homes here. It's nuts. At the meeting I went to on August 24, only one of the water company representatives seemed at all interested in citizens' concerns; the main people on the project were anxious to tell us what they were planning and what a great solution it would be, but when asked questions such as "How will turtles get out to nest?" and "Will the water company repair property damage done by heavy equipment once the project is completed?" and "How will the company maintain this solution to prevent it from becoming a weed-choked eyesore," they just shrugged and told us they'd look into it. Gee, thanks. Think you might have "looked into" all this shit before settling on a plan and presenting it to the people whose property abuts your canal?

Anyway, if you live in Indianapolis, and you walk the canal's towpath and appreciate the wildlife it supports, please consider writing a letter to IDEM, or to Veolia Water, or to the local paper, and put your two cents in. Since the Star broke an article on this on Monday, the local DNR has apparently been flooded with emails requesting a re-examination of the project, so it's possible we might actually be able to be heard and this project could be delayed until another solution is found. My letter was in the Star on Wednesday.

2009-08-24T18:04:00.005-04:00

Hey, check out THIS rack!

Tomato season is upon us, in the sense that a ton of bricks is "upon" you shortly after it falls. I went out to the garden after a week or two's absence expecting to find a dozen or so tomatoes worth the taking, and instead I found this:

I think this was a good 15-20 lbs of tomatoes. I'm hustling to make sauce with them before the few remaining fruitflies in my kitchen manage to colonize the fruit rack again. I made some excellent sauce the other night--secret ingredients are tomato skins (you peel the tomatoes, yes, but then put the skins in the pot while the whole thing is cooking down,) and parmesean rind, and ground bison. Really. Amazing sauce.

It was, in fact, the Year of the Tomato this year at the Indiana State Fair, and thus one of my favorite fruit/vegetables spent two weeks in the much-deserved spotlight. Every time the fair has a theme like this, there's a certain amount of art in the HFA building devoted to singing the praises of the selected farm product. This year was no exception; however, I have to say that this year I encountered one of the most disturbing artworks I've seen in all my many fairs. Check this out:

It's a gourd painted to look like a tomato--this in itself is fine, gourd painting is an established art form and I've got no problem with that. But check out the scene across the front. It's a classroom for tomatoes! The juvenile tomatoes have come to school to learn about how to become a highly productive member of tomato society--and joy! It's CAREER DAY!! And what youngster doesn't aspire to being successfully...er... chopped up, canned, and eaten? Errk. This closeup I found particularly disturbing:

It's almost like that little tomato and his friend the green chili have entered into some sort of unholy suicide pact. ***shudder*** Even a tomato lover like myself has to draw the line someplace... and I think this is it.

2009-08-09T17:17:00.006-04:00

Say Buddy, That's an Ugly Mug You Got There

Well, the summer's drawing to a close; my birthday always feels a bit like the beginning of the end, though this being Indiana there's plenty of hot weather still in store. As it happens, August also brings with it the end of the 8 week wheel-thrown ceramics class I signed up for with my friend, J the Curator. Yesterday we went in to glaze our last bisque pieces and pick up the stuff that got fired the week before. I have to say I've learned several important things during this class.

1. Wheel throwing is fucking HARD! Jesus, just centering the clay on the freakin' wheel took me 20 minutes some days, and then I'd spend another 30 minutes ruining a piece, adding more and more water until eventually the poor thing just kind of oozed off the wheel and sat there in the catch basin, shapelessly glowering at me while I sluiced off the wheel and started over with a new ball of clay. That was the first 5 weeks of the class, more or less--wedge clay, wrestle with clay, turn clay into unusable mush, rinse, repeat. Then, suddenly, I almost sort of got the hang of it sometime around week 6 and produced a series of nearly serviceable bowls. Which brings me to point #2:

2. Bowls are way easier than cylinders, which is what she started us on and what nearly reduced me to tears. This isn't to say I shouldn't still learn to throw a decent cylinder--and I plan to! Really!--but for this class, bowls were my oeuvre. Though I did enter a plate phase right at the end, I have to say that bowls are The Shiznit. (The mug up top was slab built, and I kind of love it even though it looks like one of the Dark Gods threw up on it.)

3. Glazes are awesome. Our teacher mentioned that for many ceramicists, glazing is the least favorite part because it's so unpredictable--in addition to the random nature of glazes anyway, they also can look completely different depending on what you put over them, how hot the kiln is, and what's sitting next to them when the kiln's fired up. I can see how if I were trying to produce a body of work that all looked more or less the same, it would be a frustrating phase. But since really, most of my pieces were nothing to write home about in a structural sense, I felt like glazing was the Big Adventure part of the whole process! Let's try THIS one on top of THIS one, with a quick dip of the rim in THIS stuff! And as I'm very color-driven to begin with, I have to say that I am utterly taken with the part when you go and find your finished stuff in the kiln room and go "This amazingly blue thing is mine???? WHOAAAAAAH."

So I've got 5 pieces back, and 9 more in the kiln this week for a total of 14. I can't wait to see the finished products. CAN'T. WAIT. OMG.

2009-07-30T23:31:00.002-04:00

Oi, It's Me Birfday!

And a splendid one it was, despite a weather-driven change of plans in mid-stream this eve. I've never enjoyed a 39th birthday more. Though it started with cat-induced bloodletting and some frantic searching for work-appropriate attire, it improved throughout the day and ended with a free slice of key lime pie and some fantastic pizza, as well as a number of unexpected gifts!

I'm thinking of spending my 40th birthday in St. Louis at the City Museum. Who's with me?

2009-07-29T22:31:00.006-04:00

I got a bone bruise, it was AWESOME!

So last week, I went to St. Louis for a museum conference. I presented a paper--my first time doing so in this field, and I only did it once back in my medievalist days, so the experience was fairly exciting. (The bit where it wasn't done until the night before was particularly exciting, as was the bit where I wondered if my laptop was going to work with the projection equipment on hand. Yes, I did a powerpoint. Shut up.)

Anyway, so I got that out of the way Thursday morning, and this left me free to enjoy the rest of the conference without stress. Which I did, it was a great time and I met a lot of lovely people in the Visitor's Studies biz. However, the thing I'd been looking forward to mostest of all in going to St. Louis was a visit to the CITY MUSEUM. I had heard all kinds of amazing and wonderful things about this place. And I was NOT disappointed!

First of all, if you are one of those folk who think that museums are Places With Stuff in Cases with Labels Telling You What the Stuff is and Why You Should Care, then the City Museum will just bother the shit out of you. "That's not a museum!" you'll say. "There's no learning going on there, it's just a playground! And a dangerous one at that!" Ohhhh contrarey, my snobbish friend! Picture, if you will, a giant shoe factory near downtown St. Louis. Now picture a visionary--whose name is "Bob", I think--scavenging pieces of architecture and hunks of junk, works of art and random objects from demolition sites around the city, and beginning to weld them together into a weirdly surrealist microcosm of St. Louis itself. The first floor of City Museum consists of a cave system, with endless passages branching off each other, mostly in pitch darkness--I could only find my way by feel in places, and some passages were too small for me to fit through or too high for me to reach--with stairs and twists and turns and a crystal cave filled with fantastical sculptures of monsters at its center. Finally you find your way out, and you're standing next to a massive fiberglass whale; you can walk into its mouth and out its tail and onto a platform which leads to a hollow log which you can crawl through to reach a treehouse. The second floor is filled with wild and wonderful bits of architectural salvage, cobbled together like a nightmare landscape, with a bizarre art installation about corndogs and a one-ring circus in a room to the side. I watched a performance by 3 trapeze artists and an acrobat there around 10:30 at night, they were fantastic. The third floor is a snack bar/souvenir shop/vintage clothing store. And outside....

Outside is Monstrocity, an amazing construction of salvage and rebar which is completely climbable (for anyone who doesn't have issues with heights.) Note the airplanes. Note the fact that people are climbing along giant coils of industrial cooling equipment to get to airplanes which are suspended 4 stories up. Note that there are no safety nets to catch your glasses, your camera, or your child when you drop them. (Kidding--while it seems almost appallingly unsafe for children, whose fingers and feet could easily get wedged or caught any number of places in this museum--there's no real danger of falling from a height, and frankly I saw a tremendous amount of very positive parent/child interaction here, BECAUSE it seems so unsafe. Parents were actually paying ATTENTION to what their kids were doing, imagine that! This is a rare thing in our museum, which is so disgustingly safe that parents often just turn their kids loose, plant themselves on a bench, and tune out until little Johnny's done breaking stuff and is ready to go.) But this isn't the end of it--there's also the rooftop, where for an extra $5 you can climb into an old schoolbus which hangs out over the street, 12 stories up; you can ride a ferris wheel, slide down a giant slide, cross a pool on stepping stones and get sprayed with jets of water, and have a nice cold beer while watching the sun set over St. Louis.

So why IS it a museum and not just a playground? Because the whole point of the museum is teaching kids (and adults) about exploration. Every corner of City Museum hides something new and unexpected. Every choice you make about where to go, what to do, and how to get where you're going can have unintended consequences. Visitors learn not to be afraid, to explore, to be careful but be adventurous, and they'll be rewarded with an amazing experience. This is, quite frankly, exactly the sort of thing St. Louis itself is all about, with its "Gateway to the West" identity; the strangely conceptual museum at the base of the Arch is all about Lewis and Clark and Boldly Going Forth Into the Unknown. But what were Lewis and Clark doing? The same thing kids are doing at City Museum. Boldly going. Taking risks. Finding out what's down the passage or around the curve, sometimes completely without parental guidance. The City Museum IS the City of St. Louis, both in structure and in spirit.

And yeah, I hurt myself almost immediately. Whacked my anklebone while climbing over a low wall in the cave system. It was blindingly painful... as it was again 4 hours later when I whacked the same bone in the same spot while sliding underneath the whale. My own damn fault. And I had an AMAZING time.

(Flickr photoset is here.)

2009-07-18T21:46:00.003-04:00

Don't let the bedbugs.... yeah, well.

I'm sure you're all wondering why I've not posted any further on my exciting trip to London and my narrow escape from Gatwickia. My excuse is that my enthusiasm for the trip was pretty sharply curtailed about 4 days after I got home, when I started showing a number of itchy bites on my arms, back, and legs. At first I thought they were chiggers, a common summer complaint around here--but I'd not spent any substantial time out in the high grass in the days since returning from England. Then, within a day or so, the number and appearance of the things made it apparent that this was something more than chiggers, or mosquito bites. I did stay in a cheap-shit hotel for 2 of the days in London, and I thought to myself, holy hell... Did I bring bedbugs home with me??? The bites occurred in clusters and occasionally rows of three, which is pretty textbook bedbug behavior. But I'd not gotten any bites WHILE in the crummy hotel, which was at the very start of the trip, so the whole experience was fairly unhinging as I proceeded to steamclean my bedroom and wash load after load of laundry in boiling water. All the while itching and cursing. Bedbugs are notoriously difficult to eradicate once established, so I was a bit terrified. But then I found some stuff on the internet (thank you interwebz!) suggesting that bedbug bites can take up to 10 days to appear, since sensitivity takes time to develop. Could it be that I got all these bites while at Crappy Hotel? Most of them were on my left arm and leg, which was the side closest the wall in the hotel bed. I decided that I would stand down red alert if I went 10 days without a new bite after the initial outbreak.... and we seem to be in the clear as of now. The bites are nearly gone now, and I've not had new ones. BUT JESUS CHRIST SERIOUSLY BEDBUGS WTF????
(This was in the early stages; I marked the bites with a pen to keep track of when new welts showed up. They ended up looking much worse--imagine each of them with a bright pink welt the size of a quarter. I had about 50 bites total, I think. CREEPY AS FUCK.)

2009-06-21T06:32:00.002-04:00

And I Shall Call It....Gatwickia

Once, when I was a senior in college, Jeremy and I borrowed our housemate's car to make a fairly large grocery run. We came back to the car with about three full carts from Grand Union (pronounced "Grand Onion") only to discover that one of us ahem had managed to lock the keys in the car. Eric, the car's owner, was in class, and these were the days before cell phones, and our only recourse was a piteous message on the answering machine back at the house and copious prayer. But as we're both action-oriented risk-taking types, Jeremy and I decided to explore alternate options. We considered taking the groceries back to the house on foot, but this seemed like a lot of work. So instead, we decided to set up a new and culturally rich civilization on the grass median in the middle of Highway 9, just outside the Grand Onion. We had plenty of supplies, after all, though the frozen stuff was already starting to melt we figured the rest would sustain us. Well, most of it. We soon declared our new civilization would be dairy-free, in the interest of public safety. We gave ourselves governmental titles--I think Jeremy was a Grand Vizier, and I was the Secretary of Transportation, or something. We were hard at work developing a belief system based on traffic lights when someone (probably Becky, a long-suffering person if ever there was one) showed up to rescue us with Eric's spare keys. Thus ended our grand social experiment.

I'm in mind of this story right now because I arrived at Gatwick airport this morning at 8:30 am GMT after a week in London and parts south, ready for my 10:45 flight home. Worked my way through the line at the check in desk, and the woman behind the Delta counter said, "Ah, yes. The first thing I need to tell you is that your flight has been delayed. It will leave around 4 o'clock this afternoon." Ah. Yes. Four, as in seven hours from now? As in getting back to the states at 8 pm EDT, which is 1 am on the time I'm currently on? As in trying to decide if I should then rent a car and drive to Indy from Cincy, getting home around 3 am on my present personal clock, or if I should let the airline put me up overnight in Cincy and miss work tomorrow, blowing yet another precious vacation day? That 4 o'clock? That's FABULOUS. So with 7 hours to kill, and ready supplies of food in the North Terminal, I have joined the Greater Civilization of People Who are Stuck In Gatwick Airport. I am busy developing simple hand tools and building crude luggage-framed structures near the public restrooms. At least I know what my belief system is going to be based on...

2009-06-03T19:38:00.002-04:00

Spin Around, Ninjas!

I laughed so hard I cried--this is the best literal video I've seen. They need to do a few Duran Duran videos...

2009-05-30T10:13:00.006-04:00

I'm Not Sure It Gets Better Than This.

Sure, Wiscon was a lot of fun--best one in years, quite frankly. (Upyernoz skipped coming this year. Coincidence? I think not.) ((Actually, I did miss him a lot, the parties were dull without him and I missed him repeatedly texting me HELP THIS PANEL IS BORING GAHHHHHH. But on the upside, I didn't get norovirus this year.)) Panels were good, though I'm not sure if this was because panels were better generally or because I chose more wisely than I usually do... I adopted Jake and Jeremy's rule of panel selection, which is to read the description of the panel in the program book, and then imagine EVERY POSSIBLE WAY the panel could go horribly horribly wrong and off topic. If you would find this derailment more amusing that annoying, then go to the panel! If not, skip it. This works pretty well generally. Good panels at WisCon are really really good, but bad ones are either hilarious or horrible depending on your perspective. I skipped going to the one called "Are we done believing in god yet?" partly because it was opposite something else I wanted to go to, and partly because I knew it would just irritate me. ("No, I'm not. Are you done being an intolerant jerkface yet? OK, status quo for both of us, then! High five!") But I went to a fabulous one on bisexuality in fiction, where some genuinely interesting things got said and many laughs were had; and I went to a fun one on Internet Drama, which I attended solely for the purpose of trying to understand what for me is an extremely alien mindset: caring what other people on the internet do or say. I did get some insight into this, and I can sort of grok it a bit better (though I still don't personally care what some dipshit typing away in his basement bomb shelter thinks about gay marriage, or race politics, or the price of a cup of coffee. Just...can't....care....) But more importantly I got to hear Karen's One Asshole Theory of Systems, which was HILARIOUS.

So yes, the panels were good. And yes, Madison is ALWAYS lovely this time of year--even a downpour during the farmer's market only dampened my hoodie, not my spirits. But the high spot of the con was NOT the panels, or the farmer's market, or the meeting up with a fellow mod from McKinley's forum, or even this:

Which is, for the mercifully uninitiated, a Bacon and Cheese Beer-tini. Don't get me wrong, I'm a lover of all things beer and cheese, and I've been giving serious thought to joining the Bacon-of-the-Month club. But this--an unholy confluence of microwaved pre-cooked bacon, Cheez-Whiz, and Pabst--was like a work of concept art. I love the idea of it, and yet I don't ever want it in my living room. No, the beertini was not the apex, ladies and gentlemen. The Apex of Joy for this year's Wiscon was our unexpectedly wonderful stop at Beef-a-Roo, a hilariously-named fast food joint at Beloit Exit 1. We stopped because I needed a drink (not a Drink, mind you--though the prospect of facing the Illinois toll roads does kind of call for mild sedation) and I figured that a place called "Beef-a-Roo" had to be at least a little bit hilarious, especially since my driving partner is a vegetarian. But it exceeded my wildest expectations. From its gorgeous retro-sign to its Route 66 mural to its menu of shakes, fries, malts and--yes--beef, Beef-a-Roo won me over instantly. I gather that other Beef-a-Roos (Beef-a-Rim?) have different decorative themes, but this one, frozen in fake 1962 glory, has captured my heart forever. It's now a permanent stop on the Wiscon tour. Oh, Beef-a-Roo... you make me smile.

2009-05-07T22:59:00.002-04:00

Dear God, What Have I Done?

After nearly 7 years of blogging, I finally broke down and updated my template. My main problem was not just my basic Fear Of Change, but the fact that while blogger used to have about 30 different templates, with easily changable background colors etc., they now have about 12 to pick from, and they all kind of suck. This was the least awful of them, and while I do like the general layout, I hate that brown-with-florettes background and want to change it. Only I can't seem to find the bit of code that sets that image--I found everything else, for god's sake. But not that. SIIIIGH. Why can't they just provide us with a library of backgrounds, borders, etc., and let us tinker around with the look of the template without having to start from html scratch?

Anyway, apologies to anyone who fell off my blogroll--I thought it would import over, but it didn't, and now I'm trying to remember what was there off the top of my head with limited success. Likewise my webcomics--though a bunch of them were defunct now anyway, as well I pruned the list. And fun linky stuff... I'm actually too tired to try to forensically reconstruct that at this point. Maybe tomorrow.

This whole emotional crisis of shifting templates is a nice parallel for the emotional crisis of buying a new car, which has been plaguing me now for months. I love my old Saturn. But I admit that it has not seemed in the best of health in the last year or so, and so (under relentless parental pressure) I have conceded the necessity of buying a new one. But which one? I have been torn between buying a hybrid, and buying something cheaper yet less gas-efficient. I finally went and drove a Prius yesterday (the civic doesn't float my boat, and all the rest of the hybrids aren't great) and I was hoping I would either fall in love with it, or hate it, thus making my decision easier. Sadly that didn't happen... It drives well, handles nicely, certainly gets great milage, and fits my ever-greener lifestyle. But... the salesman was an ass, it's got all sorts of computery bells and whistles I don't NEED which irritates me, and it's damn expensive. So I've been agonizing over the whole thing, and I think I've finally decided on the cheaper car. (Ford Focus Sedan, Manual 5 speed.) A nice simple car, much like my Saturn. Only with non-leaky gaskets and an ignition switch that doesn't cut out periodically....

2009-03-21T10:05:00.002-04:00

yes i know i need a haircut goddam it

This whole business of actually being expected to look good for work has been a struggle for me. I am chronically clueless about things like Whether My Clothes Need Ironing, or Whether Those Pants Have A Lingering Coffee Stain, or What Makes Some Shoes Cuter Than Others. I can hedge around some of these failings; dry cleaning is a godsend. But my hair is another matter. I have had the same haircut, more or less, since 1984. I like to think of it as Timeless Style.... but really, it's just that I can't wrap my brain around doing anything that requires effort involving my hair. It's very straight and very very fine, and so getting it to do anything other than look a bit like Shaggy Meets Rick Springfield would take both time and hair products, neither of which I have much of. I could cut it off a lot shorter than I usually wear it, but it being so fine and soft I think that what looks all tough and butch and european on some women would read as sad baby duck on me. So I content myself with getting it trimmed and shaped periodically, and put gel in it when I think about it to keep it out of my eyes.

But the lingering problem is that I still don't THINK about it. I'm always shocked when I look in the mirror on some random morning when I really do need to look Good, and find that my hair is about 2" over my collar in back and my eyebrows in front, and looks like utter ass. Yes, hmm, let me see.... last time I got a haircut was before those stupid TV shots for the LEGO Castles exhibit, which was... mmm... Late January. Great. And now, 2 months later, why am I frantically running out to get an emergency haircut today? Because of a TV shot for the new exhibit that opens Monday. If it weren't for exhibit openings, June would roll around and I'd look like Cousin Itt. For god's sake.

2009-03-20T19:38:00.002-04:00

In Which I am Utterly Spent

Against all odds, the exhibit that I was assigned not fully 2 months ago is open, or will be in a day or so. It was supposed to open Monday, but the local paper apparently promo-ed it as opening Sunday, and of course people will want to get into it tomorrow. Today we practically had to beat them off with a stick, as you could see into the installation area from the bottom curve of the ramp to the Lower Level. It did my heart good to hear that many kids screaming with anticipation... which was good, because it counteracted the palpitations I experienced during the two final case installations. We borrowed cases from another--VERY GENEROUS--museum to put 2 of the costumes loaned us by Lucasfilm into, as we don't really have large cases just hanging around. Those cases had some... structural integrity issues... during the installation process, which then led to problems with the graphics applications. One thing progressed to another, and by about 3:30 pm I was cussing (quietly) a blue streak while pulling velcro up, moving a large piece of vinyl 3mm to the left, sticking the velcro down, checking the position, unhooking the velcro, moving it 2mm right and 4 mm down, sticking the velcro, looking at it from the front again... Man, it was frustrating. Kudos to all my coworkers who valiantly put up with this and all sorts of other crap in the last couple of days. All told, things went about as smoothly as one could have imagined considering the hugely accelerated timeline. And I'm really happy with it. It was important to me to have a good product at the end of this--not just something satisfactory, or something that echoed the last venue that had these objects, but something new and interesting and cohesive and fun... and I think we did it. Come see it and find out for yourselves, if you can! Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Exhibition will be at our museum til next January 31. Oh, and there's a spaceship in the Welcome Center. Just so's you know.

2009-03-06T23:34:00.003-05:00

Things I'm Not Telling You

So my life has been more or less dominated by work since 2009 reared its ugly head. For January it was LEGO CASTLES LEGO CASTLES LEGO CASTLES all the time. It opened January 31, which was amazing and awesome as chronicled earlier here--my first baby, as it were. I was on this exhibit from its inception to finish, and a large part of it is more or less pulled from my own brain, and seeing something like that come to fruition is an utterly new experience. It opened very, VERY well, and has been incredibly popular--which means that about 2 days after it opened, the children had found our weak spots and begun to exploit them. They broke everything that could possibly be broken, and even some impossible things--who knew children could break a welded steel plate? I ask you! Kids are scary. So the start of February was fixing, and adjusting, and tightening and re-welding and replacing and grabbing our heads and going "holy fuck srsly" a whole lot. But in the midst of all of this, another project dropped on us, as it were, from outer space, and landed squarely in my lap.

But I'm not going to tell you about it. Not yet, at any rate. The upshot is, major project, outside player requested that we do a small but flashy exhibit with them, of course we said yes, and the timeline is friggin' insane. A project that would ordinarily take 6 months at least is coming together in the space of 6 weeks. I am utterly confident that we'll do it and it'll be awesome once it's open--but I have a feeling I am about to get a lot more experience laying graphics in trying circumstances.

I'm also not going to tell you about refinancing my house, because that is one goddam sack of joy that I am trying not to think about at the moment. And I'm not going to tell you that for some asinine reason I've got the Eagles' Victim of Love stuck in my head--which let me tell you is NOT a work of lyrical genius; "I might be wrong, but I'm not?" Seriously, jesus--and I'd hate for you to get it stuck in your head too simply because I brought it up here. That's the kind of friend I am. So I won't mention it.

But I will tell you that the frogs are doing great, thanks for asking! I think they're getting bigger, though it's hard to tell. They must be getting bigger, they are eating the frog equivalent of 30 White Castle sliders every damn day and keep peering hungrily at me looking for more. I'm finding I feel a little sorry for the fruitflies, who as tiny insects go are reasonably charming and well-behaved... but then the frogs come along and zap them up, and the sheer coolness of poisonous-frog-speed-hunting in my living room overwhelms the pity I have for the flies. Maybe I'm just getting callous in my old age...

2009-02-20T10:13:00.002-05:00

DOH!!!

Today I bothered to go out to the mailbox for the first time in several days, and lo and behold found myself laden with bills--not surprising, really, no matter how many times I pay them, they keep coming. I have a pretty spotty history of paying my bills on time. This is partly due to being pathologically absent-minded, and partly due to my general state of disorganization, which depending on who you talk to is either a charming personality quirk or a major weakness of character. To pay a bill, you first have to FIND it, and when bills come into my house they end up in all sorts of odd places only to emerge 3 days after the due date... and of course I don't think to look for them due to the absentmindedness issue. Out of sight, out of my tiny mind. The other day I found a phone bill under a cookie sheet in the kitchen...

Anyhow, the convenience of online billpay has come to my rescue more than once; but I try not to do it regularly, as I feel it indulges my laziness, and besides I don't trust things to post properly. I'm not sure why I feel mailing them a check is more reliable--call me crazy, but paper just seems inherently more trustworthy than the intertubez. But last month I discovered my Visa bill--rather like Indiana Jones finding the Ark of the Covenant--underneath a pile of sand and snakes in my living room, on the VERY DAY IT WAS DUE. Huzzah--I rushed online to pay it and avoid a late fee. Thank you, online banking!

And.... then I got my new bill today, and I took a quick look at it so I'd recognize it again a month from now when it appeared amid the ruins of ancient Troy in the dining room. Lo and behold, I now had a balance of $awholebunchamoneyplusfees, because the prior payment had never posted. Fucking online payments, I KNEW I couldn't trust them! So I leaped online to see what the deal was.

Sigh. I actually have 2 accounts with MBNA, one for my visa card and one for the loan for my new carpet in the den, which was paid off 2 years ago. Naturally, despite 24+ months of inactivity, that loan appears first when I sign on to my online MBNA account, and apparently somehow my frantic "PAY BILL! PAY BILL NOW!!" hindbrain led me to post a payment in the correct amount, to the completely wrong account. 20 minutes of phone menus and hold music later, I got the dough transferred over to the correct account. And obviously I was right all along--online bill payment CANNOT be trusted. At least not in the hands of a skilled fuckerupper like myself...

2009-02-18T07:51:00.003-05:00

Good Lord But I Am Lazy

I'd planned a post about a week ago called "Hamentashen on My Doorstep"--because I came home from errands the weekend before and found a bag of hamentashen from Andy, and a note saying "Happy Purim!" propped up against my back door, and it was so thoroughly unexpected and lovely that it made my whole day. So it was going to be a post about unexpected and lovely things... and then, expectedly, I failed to post. SIGH.

Anyway, recovery from LEGO opening is taking longer than I'd anticipated, and I think I'm going to need a day off just to try to get back in control of things. Including blogging, this is getting ridiculous. But look, I have something for you! It's not safe for work, unless you have headphones on!

2009-02-01T20:16:00.005-05:00

My First Post of 2009

That may be the first time since I started the blog that I missed an entire month. Yeesh. Let's see, what have you missed? In January I developed a cure for cancer, started a rescue home for stranded whales, and got my life organized. Heh.

No, actually I spent all month becoming gradually more and more obsessed with THIS. More specificially, getting it open successfully and on time. Totally worth it, but now I'm so exhausted that all I can do is sit here and stare in mindless horror at Bruce Springsteen's hideous patch of chin fur during Superbowl Halftime. Seriously, what the fuck IS that thing on his face? I was never a Springsteen fan, but this little sample of Over-the-Hill Glory Days left me kind of speechless from Awful.

So the spectaculariffic snowfall last week led to a much needed moment of Pure Funny in the garage at work:

Unfortunately, I had a cold all week, and though I fought mightily I was utterly miserable by Friday night. I gave serious thought to skipping the group dinner at Bourbon Street with the LEGO team and our exhibit team and just going to bed. But I took some drugs, drank some coffee, and showed up at the appointed time... And I'm so glad I did! Because just LOOK at what the LEGO guys made for each of us to commemorate our work on this exhibit and look forward to the next one....

How awesome is that? It totally made my evening worthwhile--a cold is nothing in the face of my very own LEGO dragon.

2008-12-31T11:52:00.002-05:00

Post Title Goes Here

Well, first off, for anyone who's interested, here is a link to the NPR story about my workplace on All Things Considered. I was surprised to find a) that I'm actually IN it, and b) that I didn't sound like a complete idiot. I apparently talk awfully fast, though. Hmm. It doesn't sound fast when I say stuff in my brain... Anyway, it's an entertaining piece over and above my 30 seconds of fame, props to Neda Ulaby for doing a great story highlighting the fun stuff we work so hard on.

My usual sense of impending doom at New Year's hasn't hit yet, I have hopes that this year will be the one where the dawn on Jan 1 does not bring a wave of soul-searching moodiness in its wake. I've certainly managed to do a lot of housecleaning (both literal and metaphorical) in my week off; perhaps stumbling downstairs to a tidy kitchen is all I ever really needed to take the edge off the New Year's funk. I'll experiment with that. In the meantime, my next door neighbors have, for some reason, acquired a dog which appears to be part beagle, part bassethound, and all misery. He has been emitting rays of concentrated sadness with every BARROOOOOO he utters, and there have been a lot of them in the last 24 hours. I walked over to visit him on my way to the butcher yesterday afternoon, and he wagged and flopped over and generally behaved like a very sweet and normal dog; then as soon as I moved on, BARROOOOOOOOO.... Maybe he's just visiting. Please lord, let him be just visiting...

2008-12-21T14:45:00.002-05:00

A Full Year's Worth of Posts!

When I logged on blogger, it informed me that Cautionary Tale has 364 posts in its archive; so with this post, I now have produced a full year's worth of blogging goodness! Of course, it's taken me since 2002 to accomplish this, because I am a lazy bastard who only posts once a week at best... Honestly, I don't know how daily bloggers do it.

Anyway, I'm currently suffused with accomplishment because I managed to extract my window-mounted air conditioning unit from my window singlehandedly today, with only minor injury and property damage. Ordinarily this is a two-person job, involving one person standing outside on a ladder holding onto the thing, while the other person raises the window sash; then both heave it up over the sill and into the house. It's highly unpleasant, as the unit is generally filthy and has random sharp bits that cut into your hands when you're not expecting it. My friends have come to dread this process, to the point that if I invite Fathead over for dinner at any point during November, she says, "You want me to help you move your air conditioner, don't you? God DAMN it." So this year I kind of forgot about it... until today, when it got down to 7°F outside and frigid air was seeping in around the edges of the unit. I decided it was time to stop being such a wuss, and see if I could bring it in by myself--I had the impression that the bulk of the weight was resting on the windowsill, so it MIGHT not fall out the window the moment I raised the sash. (And if it did fall out the window, this would be an excellent excuse for buying a new window unit come next summer--this one really is a piece of crap, it came with the house, it weighs 4000 lbs, and its little fins are all mashed up. It's brought to you by Amana, which always makes me think of my childhood spent watching The Price Is Right--I don't even know what an "Amana Radar Range" actually is, but I think it came in Avocado, Mustard, and Burnt Orange.)

So as it turns out, I was wrong about the weight. I unscrewed the screws, raised the sash--and despite my claim of a cavalier attitude toward dropping my AC unit 8' to its death, I lunged forward yelling "NOOOOOO" and grabbed onto its edges just as it was heading out and downwards. And there I sat, contemplating my next move, as a cold wind rushed past me into the house and attracted the attention of the cats, who came over to investigate. This motivated me to solve the problem sooner rather than later, and after several false starts I managed to lift one corner of the thing up and onto the interior sill. Brief struggles with the couch (which was emphatically In My Way, but had nowhere to go) and then I got the thing inside, turned around, and set down in the corner of the living room. The sill is scraped up, and I punched a small but painful hole in my left middle finger on god-knows-what-sharp-bit, but I didn't throw my back out and I did get the storm window closed. This will all be worth it when I get my next gas bill.... I hope.

2008-12-16T20:32:00.002-05:00

There are 8 million stories in the LEGO city...
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

Tragedy in LEGO Town

My LEGO advent calendar is in full swing, and this year has been a little more surreal than last year's offerings. Today I got a LEGO Crime Scene Investigator--he's got a police uniform, a baseball cap, a camera and a slightly frowny face. What else could he be? So naturally I had to set up a crime for him to investigate... the pizza chef from December 9 has apparently met a gruesome end. Who did it? Was it the diver with the spear gun? The girl with the ice cream truck? The fireman? The turkey-leg seller? Only careful CSI work will solve this unspeakable crime.

2008-12-13T09:38:00.002-05:00

Unexpected

I was minding my own business on holiday slide duty--which duty consists of yelling "YAYYYYYY!!!!" each time a pair of children arrives at the bottom of the ginormous slide, then quickly but politely booting them out of the way so they don't get kicked by the next pair down--when I got the word that I was needed back up in the exhibits department. A reporter from NPR was doing a segment on technology in museums and wanted to get audio of kids testing an activity prototype. As I was the only one with a hi-tech activity nearing completion, I got tapped. Thrilling for me, of course, since I'm a fan and supporter of all things NPR. (Though I fell off listening as much during the late Bush administration; if I left my alarm clock on Morning Edition during the last couple years I was often then too depressed to get out of bed. But I'm back on track now, and I love going through the online archives for cool stuff that I've missed on TAL and All Things. Anyway.) Turned out I need not have left off "YAAAAYYYYY" duty, as it didn't need to be recorded then and there--and as it happened, the lead time getting the program installed on a laptop and hooked to the giant touchscreen monitor we use for testing was pretty substantial. It was ready about 5 minutes before we needed it. Yeesh.

So said NPR reporter got some entertaining audio of me propelling kids through playing a crude prototype of the catapult game. I could not have asked for better test groups; I got some ragingly excited 9 year olds, both girls and boys. They loved it, and one even figured out what the activity was FOR (that's the brass ring we strive for, of course.) Not bad considering that it's pretty emphatically Not Done Yet. She also captured a good deal of me babbling about technology in museums and why it's cool in a children's museum context particularly. I have no idea what I said, but I sure hope it sounded smart...

2008-11-30T08:33:00.002-05:00

First Snow

As it should be, the first snow of the year is after Thanksgiving, I woke up this morning to a dusting of fluff outside. It had shifted to rain by the time I took the coffee grounds out to the compost heap, but now it seems to be snow again--giant wet flakes, and lots of them. Right on.

I seem to have forgotten about Thanksgiving haiku again this year. Or rather, I thought of it, but was too caught up in fending off an oncoming cold and making pies to do anything about it. (Making pies and having a cold is a bad combo, true. But apparently the cold was only a proto-cold, and I've squashed it with daily overdoses of Emergen-C (black cherry flavor for Heart Health.) As there's a ton of B vitamins in the stuff, it's also doing a fair amount to hold back the tide of annual holiday depression, which I appreciate.) Anyway, if anyone has a haiku to share, feel free!

Gaming seems to be taking up a good deal more of my brain space than usual lately--which is honestly fine by me, I miss it when it DOESN'T take up brain space, especially now that I'm not In The Industry anymore. The thing about having your hobby also be your career for many years is that you start to take it a bit for granted, it eats up all aspects of your life without your really noticing--or minding, even if you did notice. But now I Make Time for it, and think about it in a more structured way I suppose... and I wonder if I'm coming up with a better product now, as it were. I suppose you'd have to ask my players. At any rate, I've got a lovely Sunday afternoon stretching before me with icky weather (it's back to rain now as I write this) and nothing to do but housework and answering the Call of Cthulhu... I'll take it.

2008-11-23T22:07:00.002-05:00

Time Traveling Frogs

Apparently, if you start a post on Sunday, but then finish and post it on Tuesday with the word "Tuesday" in the headline, Blogger will timewarp it back to having a Sunday date stamp, regardless. They're frogs from the fuuuuuuture!!!!

At any rate, today Sunday is Sunday, and this being the only day likely to be both dry and above 40 degrees out before winter really sets in, I spent it frantically doing all the yardwork tasks I'd failed to do earlier. Mowed my leaves. (Thank you, mulching mower! I say it every year...) Cleaned my gutters. Cleared the leaves off the driveway. Drained and put away the hoses. Cleaned out my community garden plot. Put away the chiminea--I'm not sure I've ever remembered to do that before the first snow. I was a machine of efficency.

I also managed to strain a quad muscle climbing back down off the roof of the garage, hurt my back in some unspecified way, and smashed my face straight into the edge of an open door while walking through my darkened house last night. Even machines have their poorly oiled days...

2008-11-16T17:21:00.005-05:00

Tuesday FrogBlogging

Meet the newest members of my ever-growing menagerie. After two years of research and thinking it over, I've finally set up a dart frog terrarium with not one, but two Dendrobates Leucomelas in residence. Before you ask, NO. They are not poisonous when in captivity. In the wild they eat ants, which have formic acid in their venom; the formic acid is metabolized by the frogs into the neurotoxin secretion that dart frogs are famous for. No ants = no poison. I hope.

2008-11-16T17:12:00.002-05:00

Hell Yes, I Cried.

Ok, just to get it on the record even though I have utterly failed to blog since the election--yes. Yes, I cried during the victory speech. I was OK til he got to talking about Lincoln and then I lost it--my companion on the couch had already had the waterworks on for a while at that point, so I was in good company. And thanks Elee and Erik for hosting me on such a glorious night, by the way! 8 years of feeling unrepresented by my government are finally over; Obama's not perfect, but his themes of change and hope really do resonate with me. I've needed some of both for quite a while now.

And Indiana sure does look beautiful in blue. :)

2008-11-01T09:47:00.002-04:00

Wooooo! Way to Fire Up the Base!!!

Breaking news--we've just received word that John McCain, who hasn't seen fit to visit our fair state since July, who didn't even bother spending a single advertising dollar here (ads were eventually put up by the Indiana GOP) and who apparently assumed that our voter base is made up of mindless automatons, will be holding a campaign rally here in Indianapolis on Monday! Monday, the day before the election! And he'll be staging it at....wait, this can't be right.... at the AIRPORT?

Yes, it's true. As if McCain's general lack of respect for his Hoosier supporters could not have been more thorough, he is now sending them the message that just as he couldn't be bothered earlier in the campaign to spend some money or time in our state, he now can't be bothered to actually leave the airport terminal to stage his rally. "Hi Indiana, vote for me, if you haven't already voted for that terrorist--oh, whoa, is that the time? Sorry, I've got to head out, we left the engine running on the Straight Talk Jet!" Unreal. What's more, our airport is undergoing major renovations at the moment. While they're nearly done and I'm sure McCain won't be speaking amid piles of acoustical tile and bags of cement, it's significant that the approach to our airport from the highway has changed dramatically in the last 2 months, along with the parking situation. There may be serious wayfinding issues even for diehard McCain fans who genuinely want to hear the man speak--and a low turnout would be an unfortunate headline for our paper on Tuesday morning, wouldn't it? Local polls show Obama by .7%--McCain can't afford a screwup here. And yet, he's trying so hard to have one.

2008-10-26T22:10:00.004-04:00

Mutter Mutter Mütter...

The sad thing about the Mütter Museum is that they do not allow photography. So while I desperately wanted to bring you photos of heads in jars, lifelike wax models of various skin diseases, and the six-foot colon, I am unable to supply them except via this link. Instead I can only tell you that their motto ("Disturbingly Informative") is about as good as a motto gets. I'd been before, of course, but Coworker had not; so I got quite a kick out of her reactions to various and sundry awfulnesses as we worked our way around the displays. In the museum world there is always an open, neverending debate on the ethical issues surrounding the display of human remains in Natural History museums. But medical museums can neatly sidestep this issue--they're doing it for SCIENCE, and science trumps ethics. Of course, many of the specimens at the Mutter were donated by their...er...owners, but many more were donated by 19th century doctors who just...kept....items... after autopsies and the like. They're now enshrined in the College of Physicians (home of the Mutter, and the country's oldest medical professional organization) for the education and edification of both medical professionals and the public at large. I'm all for this, as I find it all pretty damn fascinating.

This fascination with the unseemly spilled over into a book purchase at the conference--not of something directly related to work, but a book called The Ghost Map, which is about how a map of the last great outbreak of cholera in London (in 1854) paved the way both for epidemiologists to understand how diseases are spread in an urban environment, and for the development of infrastrutures that make modern cities possible. Before the advent of water treatment and planned sewers, it was simply not possible for a city as large as London to continue growing beyond a certain point. Cool stuff, if you're a big picture sort of person--and still a hell of a story even if you're not.

And in other news, one of my cats smacked me in the face today and cut my lip open. I'm not sure if there's some kind of hotline I can call for this. Domestic abuse is a terrible thing; but abuse BY domestic animals is a tragedy not often discussed in public. Mostly because it makes their owners look like asses.

2008-10-19T08:25:00.002-04:00

We Interrupt This Broadcast...

I was going to do another Philly blog entry today complete with drama, excitement, and a review of the Mutter Museum (one of my all-time favorite museums ever) but instead I am forced to pre-empt myself to say--Sarah Palin on SNL? SERIOUSLY? Holy crap, could she have been LESS funny??? I admit to having very, verrry little sympathy for this woman on nearly all fronts. And I have been loving Tina Fey (not literally, though I certainly would jump at the opportunity.) But could they have MAYBE written something a little bit better than what we got? The intro bit was not horrible but not hilarious; her turn on SNL News was just sad. Her sitting there, looking uncomfortable and completely out of her element, not even trying to participate in the joke at her expense--why did she even want to come on the show, if she wasn't inclined to show us a willingness to poke a little fun at herself? John McCain has hosted a couple times, and I hear he's been hilarious--say what you like about the man, he's got a sharp sense of humor. But this was just further proof that Palin is truly unfunny both politically AND personally. I didn't think it was possible for me to be more disappointed in McCain's choice of running mate, but apparently I was wrong. Siiiiiigh.

2008-10-18T07:35:00.003-04:00

Looking for Socks in Philadelphia

I realize that it's traditional to pack a full wardrobe, including socks, when one goes traveling for work. But I, like the McCain/Palin team, have always been a "maverick." Also like McCain/Palin, I am "more of the same damn thing" in that I never remember to think about whether I have clean socks or not until it's far too late to do another load of laundry before heading to the airport. And so it was that I found myself wandering the streets of Philadelphia looking for socks yesterday morning.

Being from a fairly spread-out midwestern city, it always seems incongruous to me to find Big Box stores nested in on downtown streets among the skyscrapers and pizza joints. Those kinds of businesses are by definition freestanding stores amid acres of the fast food jungle on the perimeter of town. So it was just a tad startling to walk 2 blocks from our hotel and go--as my roommate succinctly put it--"Shut UP! Is that a K-MART??" 15 minutes later my mission was fulfilled. (2 black, 1 beige, and one lovely pair of argyles.) Now I am more like Obama, having committed to a change of socks I can believe in.

2008-10-09T23:58:00.004-04:00

Obamarama

Yesterday, Barack Obama came to town for a rally at the State Fairgrounds. This event was historic for a number of reasons. First, of course, is because he's the first black man to run for president, and the fact that he's here at all is amazing considering that as recently as 45 years ago people got murdered for trying to get black folks registered to vote. Secondly, it's amazing that a Democratic candidate for president is treating Indiana like it matters. Indiana has always had a strong democratic base--we've had democratic governors, senators, reps and city mayors on a regular basis in my lifetime. Yet in presidential elections we're always treated as a throwaway state--no one spends money here. The republicans assume we're in the bag, and the democrats have bigger fish to fry than our piddly 11 electoral votes. But not this year... This year, Obama's campaign put us on the hit list, along with the Carolinas and Missouri, as a state he could flip; and damned if he might not just do it. Polls here show him ahead by a couple % points, and allowing for margin of error it looks like he's at least in a dead heat with McCain--who by the way has not spent a DIME on advertising in this state until just this last week.

So this was the first chance in my life I've had to go to hear a presidential candidate speak in person--and it's someone who I support and feel good about voting for. Therefore, when the suggestion was made that a few of us hook off work and go, well... didn't have to ask me twice! The rally was at 12:15, doors at 10, so five of us piled into a car at 10 and headed over there, not completely sure we'd get seats.

The line. The line was unbefuckinglievable. A huge column of people, all moving briskly along thanks to some smooth organization on the part of volunteers, which snaked at least a half mile through the fairgrounds when we got there at 10:20 or so. We trotted along, trying to find the back of the line, behind an elderly woman who kept shouting out "OBAMA FOR MAMA! YEAH! I'M MAMA FOR OBAMA!" Finally, at a large gap in the line somewhere near the Home and Family Arts building, we jumped in, turned around and started walking back toward the front. (We lost the Obama Mama at this point.) We had white tickets for seats in the grandstand, which was fine--grandstand holds about 15,000 people so we figured we were probably OK. Then, when we were still a good ways from the gates, a volunteer walking down the line asked me, "Are you in a group?" I said, yeah, we're all together. She said, "Well, how many are you? Five? OK--" and she handed me 5 bright yellow tickets. "Do you guys want to be on the stage behind Obama? Just take these tickets, go right up to that tent there and they'll let you in."

!!!

Twenty mintues later, we were seated in the bleachers on the stage behind the podium, looking at a sea of Obama supporters. The official tally was apparently 21,000 people--I didnt' think the grandstand held that many, and one of the wings wasn't totally full. But still--15,000 or 21,000, either way that's the biggest event I've ever been at, possibly barring an Eric Clapton concert in the early 1990's. It was incredible, even before the speeches started. Since we were toward the back of the bleachers, we got a good view of the snipers setting up position, the arrival of the motorcade, and Obama's eventual entrance--got a nice little film of him walking right past not 10 feet from me before coming on stage, shaking some hands and starting his speech. Which was a great speech--it was both sobering and inspiring. At last, an intellectual running for president! Who'd have thought it. God, I hope he wins. I want him to win Indiana; but even if he doesn't, lord, let him win the shootin' match.

2008-10-03T17:41:00.002-04:00

Crap.

About a month ago I added new fish to my tank. I'd had 2 old tetras (one shabby, one brilliant-looking) and so added about 8 other tetras to keep them company.

Two weeks ago, I lost the shabby looking tetra--not surprising, he'd been shabby for a while.

One week ago, I noticed 2 more fish were dead. I looked closely and realized that they and all my remaining fish looked like this, in varying degrees. Apparently one of the new fish brought a gift with it--ichthyophthirius, a fairly virulent parasite. Within days, all but two of my fish were dead. I bought a treatment that supposedly will take care of it, but the treatment also kills snails; since I have 2 snails who I like, and about 40 that I hate, I figured this might be a mixed blessing, and evac-ed the chocolate snails to a hospital tank before putting in the treatment. Too late for one of the remaining fish... but the other one seems relatively healthy now, 48 hours after the treatment. So I now have ONE fish. And a tank that may or may not still be infested with free-swimming parasites. And 40 snails who appear to be completely resistant to Mardel Coppersafe. God DAMN it.

2008-09-27T14:35:00.002-04:00

GAAAA THERE IS A HUGE SPIDER IN MY MAILBOX

At the moment, he and I have reached a kind of detente; our agreement involves my gently poking him with a stick, and him angrily waving his pedipalps while ceding the high ground to me long enough for me to grab the mail. However, I'm a little worried. He's awfully big... there's nothing to say he won't start opening my mail and signing for packages while he's in there.

2008-09-20T18:07:00.005-04:00

The Good, the Bad, and the Un-be-freakin-lievable

Robin McKinley's got a new novel out; I've read it, it's lovely, and if you like fantasy/fairy tales/YA fiction and AREN'T reading Robin's books, then what the hell's wrong with ya? Give 'em a try! I've been a fan of her stuff since college--LaraB, didn't we have a copy of The Blue Sword kicking around Ottoman Central at one time? I know it wasn't the pizza book, at least--and she is notable, among other things, for having heroic female characters that Don't Suck. She's got a couple adult novels as well--my favorite is her retelling of the Robin Hood story, and she's also got a good vampire novel. Anyway, Robin's a friend and a talented author to boot, and so I figured a little shameless plugging was not out of place here.

Since into each life some rain must fall, I should also tell you that I finally got around to watching the MST3K version of one of the most godawful B-movies it has ever been my wretched experience to watch: Teenagers from Outer Space (1959.) Sweet mother of god, what a horrible film. Even Joel and the gang could not make watching this movie a pleasurable experience for me--unlike The Creeping Terror, which is still in the top eschelon of worst films ever formally released. I could laugh at Creeping Terror. But this.... oh god. What do you get when you combine actors so wooden you could carve your name in them, an alien teen named "Derek" whose space uniform is obviously a jumpsuit with electrical tape piping, a "disintegrator ray" which is obviously a toy gun purchased for 25 cents from the Woolworth's up the street from the studio, and a monster which only appears in the final 5 minutes of the film and is, I shit you not, created by waving a live lobster in front of a spotlight and filming its shadow menacing the townspeople? You get CRAP, that's what you get. Further proof that the creationists were right and God really IS dead in our secular society.

But for sheer "AUGH MY BRAIN" value this week, I present you with the short to end all shorts: Mr. B Natural. Here's part 1, and here's Part 2. It's like watching the Death of Music Itself. If listening to "Mister" B-Natural chirp on and on doesn't make you want to bludgeon yourself repeatedly with a sousaphone, then you're just not a music lover.

2008-09-17T00:01:00.001-04:00

And the Lord said, Let There Be Photos.

And there were photos. And some of them were even good.
Click here to see the Creation Museum Photoset!

2008-09-14T21:48:00.006-04:00

Remember Remember the 8th of September

Last Monday marked the realization of a long-held dream for me. I went to the Newport Aquarium, which was every bit as fabulous as I’d been led to believe. I petted the sharks; I watched the raysharks sail overhead in their immersive reef tank environment (and holy shit is that cool); I saw otters, frogs, alligators, turtles, jellyfish, and other things that make me marvel at the amazing beauty and diversity of our natural world. And then… Then we went to the Creation Museum.

I consider myself a religious person. I consider myself a pretty open-minded person generally. But I just cannot wrap my head around biblical literalism. So walking into the Creation Museum, I was prepared for a WTF experience of (dare I say) Biblical Proportions. And I was not disappointed!

The Creation Museum, if you've not encountered it before, is a museum-cum-entertainment facility run by and directed at the followers of a ministry called Answers in Genesis, whose basic premise is that the book of Genesis (not to mention the rest of the bible) must be taken literally, word for word--and therefore, the earth must only be about 6000 years old. With that premise, they then go on to explain fossils, dinosaur/dragon conflation, diversity of species, and oh yes, the Fall of Man and the evils of the ACLU. To be fair, let me start by saying that the museum itself is a beautiful facility, some gorgeous design concepts, and that everyone who works there was the soul of niceness--no proselytizing or pushyness, they really did just kind of leave you to it. As a museum professional, I have to say I was a little disappointed at the complete lack of interactivity--there were two interactives, both in the Noah's ark room, and both frankly kind of lame. It was more like a walkthrough theme park ride than a museum in the sense that I usually use the word. But all that aside... HOLY CRAP THAT'S SOME F'D UP SHIT. From the dueling paleontologists (kindly white guy with a godly perspective vs. foolish Asian pagan scientist) to the hellishly creepy child manniquins leading you toward the light, to the brachiosaurs entering the Ark, to the label explaining why incest used to be OK, this museum is a testament to the cracked out fringe of Christian society. I'm not saying I didn't have fun there, mind you.
Any museum that lets me ride a ceratopsian is OK in my book. There will be a full photoset on Flickr shortly, with more amazing Creation Museum goodness.

2008-09-03T20:39:00.003-04:00

Summer Colds are TEH ALSOME.

Whose dumbass idea was it to have cold viruses available year round, anyway? I've got a streaming head cold, have gone through a box and a half of kleenex since I got up this morning, and it's effing September for god's sake! I'm supposed to feel like this in FEBRUARY! Not when it's fall, and especially not when I've got 2 days training at work; as this is cross-departmental training, I have potentially infected people from HR, Security and Safety, Programs and Interpretation, School Services, and Purchasing, all at one fell sneeze. It's wretched.

Even more wretched is the unfulfilled promise of rain here. It seems odd to be wishing so hard for rain while Gustav is all in the news--but we've hardly had a drop since the end of July and it's getting a little grim here. So this evening we had wind, we had thunder, presumably somewhere in the general vicinity got a shower. But here, nada. Sigh. I love the sound of rain on the roof, particularly when I'm sick... it'd be a nice thing to go to bed early with rain outside. I'll cross my fingers, and go check the radar.

2008-08-22T07:03:00.002-04:00

Stay On Target

Duties as usher:
1. Pick up tuxedo.
2. Show up on time.
3. Apply tuxedo to self right side up, in correct order. No accidents involving suspenders and cufflinks.
4. Guide people to correct seating.
5. Guide the mother of the groom to her seat.
4 1/2. Remember what the groom's mother looks like.
6. Cue the DJ for processional.
7. Roll out floor runner thingy in front of flower girl, without getting tangled up with other usher who might actually also be a Level 12 Klutz (specialist class.)
8. Sit down and get out of the way.

Don'tscrewup don'tscrewup don'tscrewup don'tscrewup.....

2008-08-20T22:57:00.002-04:00

GRAHHHRGGHHHH

Gencon kicked my ass, as usual. Which is to say, I had a good time, I lost a lot of sleep, I was painfully upbeat and cheerful with thousands of strangers while working at the booth, and I am hardly fit for human company even now, 3 days after the fact. I thought I was more or less OK yesterday; then my body betrayed me, and today was more or less a lost cause. I hope this doesn't last, I've got a wedding to be coherant for on Friday. At least I remembered to pick up the tuxedo on time....

2008-08-13T17:39:00.002-04:00

Rumbly Stumbly

I'd written a post all about fiction, and why I seldom read it, and how I think I got broken in this way, and the fact that I'm not the ONLY one like this at least... And then I re-read it, and it was boring. So I've stifled the post. It may emerge later, reformed, like a lovely butterfly from the cocoon of draft status... Or it may never advance beyond the larval stage. But at any rate, it being Gencon week, I'm going to be good for utterly nothing for the next 5 days. I have about 30 minutes to clean the kitchen and feed the cats, and then I'm off to meet Alex and get this train a rollin'. For those of you going--I'll be at the Croc Booth for most of the weekend during dealer room hours. Come find me. Entertain me. Admire my mad sales skillz. Try the veal.

2008-08-07T22:33:00.003-04:00

Fantasy Fun

Oh, for god's sake--not THAT kind of fantasy. But if you like fantasy genre, friend Robin has just put the first chapter of her new novel up on her blog. Go have a looksee, it comes out in about a month. And while we're at it, Former-Roommate Sarah, aka Princess Anastasia, has her first e-book out, and you can read about it on the Drollerie Press website, purchase it from their store, or find it on Amazon for your Kindle, if you have such a thing.

While I've been "off fiction" for about a decade now, give or take, I'm trying to get back in. The bookpile disaster inspired me a bit. Gibson's got a new novel out in PB now, I got a new (to me) John Varley novel a month or two ago, though I've not gotten through it yet, and apparently Jonathan Carroll's got something in September as well, which is exciting. And I'm just finishing Matt Ruff's Set This House In Order, which is pretty damn impressive. (the book, not me finishing it. well, I guess that's damn impressive too, considering my recent track record...)

2008-07-31T23:11:00.002-04:00

Birthday Bowling Bash

Made it through another one! None of the pictures of us bowling came out all that well, other than a hilarious one of Professor E. which I can't post because I think she might murder me. So you'll have to settle for this.

The shirt, which was a gift from Rat Girl and Designing Woman, says "Hello, my name is NINJA." Just in case you couldn't tell...

2008-07-28T20:58:00.002-04:00

A Short Quiz

Q: Why did it rain last night?

A. Because I left my car window down.
B. Because I left the lawnmower out.
C. Because I just watered the garden.
D. All of the above.

Write your answer on a white 3 x 5 index card in black or blue-black ink, and deposit it in the nearest storm drain for your chance to win a fabulous no-prize. Thanks for playing.

2008-07-25T12:14:00.005-04:00

No, I Don't--So Stop Fucking Asking

The song "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" has been stuck in my brain on infinite loop for 3 days now. It becomes particularly noticeable when I am trying to figure out, for the 18th time, why Google Maps has given me completely different directions to the San Jose Ramada Limited than it did the last time I asked it. I've been doing a lot of driving in the Super PT-mobile--from Sausalito to SJ, from SJ to San Fran and back, from SJ to Monterey and Back, from SJ to Berkeley and back. Each time I have asked Google for clarification, the directions on how to get from the 101 to the Ramada differ. As a result, I have gotten turned around and lost EVERY DAMN TIME I come back to the hotel. Screw google. I'm on my own with the Avis map from here on out.

The reason I've been hoofing it all over the Bay is partly the fault of work, and partly the fault of She Who Bakes. I haven't seen her in over 3 years, so we've had a lot to catch up on. On Wednesday, she had me meet her at a very chic diner-turned-chef's-paradise called Canteen. They have assigned seating times--everyone gets seated at 7:30, orders from a choice of 4 starters, 4 entrees, and 4 desserts, and then they serve everyone simultaneously. Very elegant--and it's in a converted diner with a rusty old clock on the wall, chrome-edged counter, and vinyl booths. Things were off to a chaotic start, as due to the aforementioned fact that Palo Alto was on fire my allowing 1.5 hours to get into the city from SJ went from generous to holy crap I'm not going to make it. I got to the door of the place at EXACTLY 7:30, panting and red-faced. But soon calmed down, and we had a fantastic dinner. (Tomato/basil soup, pork schnitzel with paprika sauce, celery, and a poached egg, and glazed peaches with fresh ginger.) Last night I drove out to She Who Bakes' place in Berkeley, where we had a great pizza and she presented me with cookies from her own hands. I'm putting miles on the car, but it's all in the service of great food.

PSA Addendum: Karen was kind enough to link us to the Is California On Fire? website, which will answer that question for you on an up-to-the-minute basis. Apparently that service is provided by the same folks who bring you the answer to the burning question, Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

2008-07-24T11:15:00.004-04:00

Cruisin' the Bay

Having a great time in CA; how could it not be great with a neon blue PT Cruiser at my command? Thank you, Avis!

However, I have noticed a distinct downside to California, namely that it is apparently ALWAYS ON FIRE. Driving from San Jose into SF last night I was trapped in a traffic snarl resulting from not one, but TWO brush fires rolling clouds of smoke across the 101. For someone from the midwest, where roadside fires are primarily caused by exploding cars, this is unprecedented. I'm off to Monterey today, and no doubt it will be on fire too. Fortunately they have crack squads of sea lion first responders to take care of these things...

2008-07-16T19:03:00.002-04:00

I'm Still Preoccupied...With 1985...

So last night I had a co-worker over to watch Ladyhawke, which is still hands-down my favorite sword and sorcery movie ever. There is nothing I do not like about this movie. And that includes the now-very-80's-sounding synthesizer-driven soundtrack. I love it. I love that kind of music in a fantasy movie--it's a fantasy, dammit! If I wanted to hear a fake medieval soundtrack, I'd go watch Excalibur again. (No, the Carmina Burana isn't real medieval music. Not that I don't like the Carmina, mind you--but real medieval music isn't nearly that stirring. I might have to watch Excalibur again anyway... I love that bit where you can totally see the film crew guy running across the background while Lancelot and Guenevere are doing it. Wait, what was I talking about again? Oh, yeah.)

So yes, I love heavily electrified music in my fantasy movies. The guitar solos totally make that movie. I don't think it sounds dated or goofy at all. And I'm firmly convinced my own life would be vastly improved with the addition of a looped soundtrack from the Alan Parsons Project. (Or Blue Oyster Cult. One or the other.)

2008-07-12T16:14:00.007-04:00

The Great Bookpile Disaster of '08

Many of you who've visited my happy home know that I have a pretty massive bookshelf in the living room. (OK, whoever just said, "Where? I couldn't see it for all the piles of crap lying around!" can just shut the hell up.) It's floor to ceiling, and crammed full with books on the topics of history, more history, art, religion, science, travel... and history. It's where non-fiction books go. Some of you might also know that I have a bookshelf next to the fish tank in the office. It's where I keep huge-ass hardback books--my Complete Shakespeare is here, and my Lewis Carroll anthology--as well as graphic novels and antiquarian books. What 99.9% of you have never encountered is the Fiction Pile in the Back Closet.

While I don't read a whole lot of fiction these days, I do own a hell of a lot of it that's accumulated over the years. This store of mostly mass-market sized paperbacks can be divided into two categories: Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Everything Else. When I lived in Chicago, I had a little wood bookshelf that I'd built myself which was where the SF/F lived, and Other Fiction was at my parents' in storage. The little bookshelf got full, so I got another very little bookshelf to handle the overage, and that was fine. Then I moved, and moved again, and eventually my parents, unreasonable beasts that they are, asked if I might consider taking some of my books back into my own custody. So I had two little bookshelves of SF/F, and a cardboard box of Other. The cardboard box sat on the floor of the passthrough between my bedroom and bathroom for several years, until I tried to move it and it broke, sending a cascade of fiction onto the floor. A normal person would have seen this as a sign from god to build another damn bookshelf and get on with it. I saw it as a sign that god didn't want me to use the pass-through anymore, stacked the books loosely around on the floor, quietly shut both doors and began venturing to the bathroom the long way around.

Meanwhile, somewhere in here, the SF/F collection was growing--through no fault of my own, people keep giving me books!--and then one of the cats jumped up on the small bookshelf and then launched themselves to a windowsill, knocking the shelf over and sending books flying in all directions. Hm, I thought, this is a good opportunity to reorganize that shelf and fit in some of the additional books I've had sitting around... I'll just put them in the passthrough with the other fiction until I have time to do that.

I don't think I really need to spell this out for you here. This little closet-space was knee-deep in slightly musty, randomly-sorted paperbacks for over a year, and I was cheerfully and successfully ignoring the whole mess. THEN. Then, as is my wont, I suddenly decided I needed to find a particular book. (Peter S. Beagle's The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche. But that's beside the point.) I opened the closet door, avalanches of books slid everywhere, and I was keenly reminded that I am a horrible, unforgivably lazy slob as I kicked my way through the seething mass of paper, dust, cat hair, and guilt. (I didn't even find that damn Beagle book. But that's beside the point.)

I took a vow that I would not rest until I had at least restored the sci-fi to its original home in the two small bookshelves, neatly alphabetized and dusted. I culled through the heap, removing books I'd never really wanted to read in the first place, duplicate copies of things I'd acquired who knows how, and finally had it winnowed down to the point where I could fit it perfectly on the two little shelves, just like the days of yore, and began to impose order.

AdamsAlexanderAnthonyBeagleBradburyBrinBurroughsBullCardCarroll(Jonathan not Lewis) ChestertonClarkeCrispinDickEddingsGibson (and more Gibson, and more Gibson) HandHeinleinHowardHughartKressLeGuinLewisLovecraft (where on earth did I get all these Lovecraft paperbacks with the ugly-ass covers?) McCaffreyMcCrumbMcKinleyMillerMoonMoorcockMorrowPratchettPullmanRobinsonRowling (British "adult"covers only, I happily chucked my ugly American copy of "Sorceror's Stone" into the bag to go to halfprice) StephensonTepperTolkienVarleyWangerinWellsWilliamsWillis and....and... DAMN YOU TO HELL ROGER ZELAZNY, I ONLY OWN ONE OF YOUR FREAKIN' BOOKS AND THE SHELF IS #@%$£¢ FULL!!!!

I swear, if Lord of Light hadn't been a gift from an ex-boyfriend I'd have chucked it right out the window then and there. I'm crabby when I'm optimizing.

2008-07-03T21:26:00.002-04:00

Up, Down, and All Around

So yes, I'm back from my vacation over the pond and have had several days to recover. My stress levels peaked about 24 hours before departure (which is pretty typical for me, really) and by the time I left I was in full-on "oh well fuck it, if I forgot something then the hell with it" mode. So naturally, I forgot my toothbrush. The one thing you really, REALLY want to have on the plane after 12 hours in transit. Pleh.

As to where I went, Charles, it's almost a question of where didn't I went? I got into London early morning on Sunday and fumbled my way from Gatwick to Charleton; I was visiting my friend L., who needed to be at work in North Wales Monday-Tuesday. So Sunday we went to Leeds and then returned to watch Dr. Who with her husband, J. Then up to Wales for 2 days, during which she worked like a stevedore and I pottered around looking at castles (Beaumaris and Caernarfon) and the scenery around Snowdon. Then Wednesday it was down to the south of England--L. is originally from Sussex, so we meandered down there to visit her mom, went to Arundel Castle Thursday, back up to London Friday for some sightseeing and beer drinkin'. Then away back home again. L. was an utter trooper the entire week and figured out the morass of travelling by rail in Britain. It used to be so easy! When I was there 10 years ago, on my stopover en route to Kenya, I bopped around on cheap day returns out of London without external assistance for nearly a week; it was so easy an American could do it. But now the system's privatized, the different rail systems don't all play well with one another, and "cheap" is no longer an operative word. A particularly egregious moment--to get from Worthing to London/Charleton via London Bridge, I got a ticket for £19.50. Over at the next window, L. requested a ticket from Worthing to London Bridge, since she had a commuter travel card that would allow her to go London Bridge to Charleton. Her ticket was £22. Luckily she overheard my transaction before the sale was completed: "Wait, I'm going 4 stops fewer than she is, and her ticket is £2.50 less???" The cashier squinted at his screen for a few minutes, tapped at some keys, and then said, sheepishly, "Yes." "Right, one ticket for Charleton, please."

Overall it was a fantastic time. The weather was great, I took hundreds of photos of castles and ruins and L.'s garden; although a day did not go by where I did not spend at least an hour on a train of some description, even that was a blast and I couldn't have asked for better.

2008-06-28T17:46:00.005-04:00

You Know You're Back in America When...

...you have a moment like this. The flight to Cleveland was long, and included persistent kicking from the 8 year old in the seat behind, and an annoying conversation from two rather bitchy women sitting next to me. I was airsick, angry, and tired when we finally pulled up to the gate; and then we sat there for 10 minutes waiting for them to connect up the gangway and let us out. By the time I'd stood through the ABSOLUTE SLOWEST of the 5 passport control lines, and the entire crew of the aircraft had cut in line ahead of me, and the passport guy'd asked me some totally dumb questions, and then I had to get my bag and go through intensive X-Ray security AGAIN including taking off my damn shoes and belt and showing all my 3.5 oz liquid containers (which I still feel is a direct violation of my protection against unreasonable search and seizure) and I was struggling to put my shoes back on while leaning against a wall and hanging desperately onto my 400 lb shoulder bag, I was close to white-hot fury. Then I rounded a corner to the escalator, and what was playing full blast on the overhead speakers in the Cleveland airport? The Pina Colada song. One of the dumbest, most hilariously cheesy songs in the American pop music canon. I almost fell over laughing. Home, home, home.

More trip blogging shortly--unlike The Noz I didn't manage to find internet cafes on every corner so wasn't able to do the remote blogging thing...

Tux

2008-06-18T23:09:00.001-04:00

Tux
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

First Thing's First.

I regret to say that due to the dappled sunlight effect, I don't think the Rick's hair question has been answered by this photo one way or the other. But you can form your own opinions.

Second--a brief return to the question of films. Specifically, Indiana Jones and the Big Disappointment. Look, I'm not saying it wasn't fun to watch, and I'm certainly not saying people shouldn't go see it on the big screen. But here's the thing--last weekend, I went to see Iron Man. I was not a fan of the Iron Man comic book as a kid--I never read the Avengers, and I'm purely an X-Men girl. I'm not a fan of Robert Downey Jr. either. But MAN--what a FUCKIN' AWESOME movie!! I liked it start to finish, overlooked its goofier plot elements and slightly strange timeline, and you know why? Because the script was awesome. There's a big difference between story and script, and that I think is the problem with Indiana Jones IV. Here's an example:

STORY: Ok, so they're looking down in the pit, and it's full of snakes, and Indy's scared of snakes.

SCRIPT:

Indy (rolling over and staring blankly off into space): Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

Sallah (peering down into the hole): Ooh. Asps. Very dangerous! (pause.) You go first.

You see what I'm getting at here? The story of each Indiana Jones film has been standard pulp fare, more or less. The story of Temple of Doom is pretty outlandish, and that's what hurts it even more than the loss of Karen Allen and the addition of Short Round. But Crystal Skull has a perfectly OK story, and one godawful script. As Miss Alex pointed out--"Knowledge was their treasure...their treasure was knowledge." Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Lines like that run throughout the damn film. Then you add on top of that the poor use of CGI (the ants weren't scary. The monkeys...were. and don't even talk to me about that damn snake.) AND the fact that they made Cate Blanchett completely unattractive, which is a feat I would never have thought possible. AND the near complete lack of chemistry/banter between Indy and Marian... I'm not going to nitpick all the little stuff, but the big things that were bad were just. Bad. In comparison, Iron Man took a character I had no pre-viewing love for, built him up to be completely likeable yet a total asshole, and then spun a kick-ass story that left me waiting on the edge of my seat for the upcoming Avengers film. All because the script was good. The story wasn't that much better or more believable than Indy IV; it's all about the script.

I also saw an Israeli film called "Cafe Tales" this week--hilarious, borderline surreal film about 5 totally insane guys and a coffeeshop. Totally recommend it.

2008-06-04T21:47:00.004-04:00

Well, That's....Hmmmm.

So I was an usher at a friend's wedding last weekend. What with the norovirus and the power outage and all, I didn't have time for a haircut beforehand. Not wanting to reinforce my general reputation as a slob, I broke out the styling gel and hairdryer, and did my damnedest to make myself look more or less intentionally tidy. It was an uphill battle, and the results were not completely clear to me even after I got the tux on and ran a brush through it one final time. So I asked Andy how my hair looked, and he said, "You look kind of like Rick Springfield."

It only occurred to me later that I should have asked if he meant Young Rick, or Current Rick. I sure hope it was the former. As my mom said the other day, Current Rick is lookin' a little like he was rode hard and put away wet. Gone are the days when my best friend and I stood on tiptoe in the horse barn at the State Fairgrounds to get a glimpse of Rick and his perfectly feathered coiffure arriving for a concert. Ah well--at least the tuxedo fit.

2008-06-02T23:22:00.002-04:00

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Broken Hip

OK, I was going to come home and write an extended review of the new Indiana Jones movie, but it's late. So I'll give you the short version now:

Karen Allen reprising Marian Ravenwood = +50 cool points.

The dialogue and general level of ridiculousness = minus several million bajillion cool points.

Seriously, I'm pretty tolerant and I did have fun watching it--but holy shit, did the scriptwriter for the first couple movies die in the intervening decades? You could have fit all the clever repartee in this one in a teacup and still had room for milk and two sugars. Sigh.

2008-06-01T23:51:00.001-04:00

Not Dead

I'm not dead, but my comments appear to be so. I'll try to sort that out later, I think it's got something to do with my old comments system (enetation) still being invisibly linked here via code... but not sure how that's bollocksing up the new comments system (Haloscan.) Oh well. Y'all didn't want to say anything anyway, right?

2008-05-26T09:59:00.002-04:00

Dooooommmmm.....

I would have blogged more about the con, but the main exciting event here was an outbreak of norovirus or something like it. I started feeling like crap when I'd been here about 24 hours; by 36 hours I was deep in the throes of stomach flu, and spent a good deal of yesterday being both miserable and pissed off. I woke up yesterday feeling kind of ick, and then when I went down to the front desk there were signs everywhere warning of an outbreak, and I was all "God DAMN it!" I'm not looking forward to the drive home, to say the least--while I'm better this morning, I wouldn't say I'm out of the woods yet. Gah.

2008-05-24T12:57:00.002-04:00

It's a Mad Mad Madison...

Well, I'm up in Madison for the weekend, as I am every year at this time. I'm rooming with my good friend Mr. Noz. Sadly he has not left his blog logged in and unattended like he did last time, so I have not been able to sabotage his template or alter his link roll. He DID manage to leave his key in the room once already, and I could have let him howl miserably in the hallway, begging for the use of the bathroom, for a lot longer than I did a bit ago. But I let him in. Because that's the kind of friend I am.

At least he didn't spray seltzer water on me when he woke me up this morning at 6 am. That happened last time we roomed together, too....

2008-05-17T14:50:00.005-04:00

The Cold Grey Light of Dawn

So I went to my 20 year high school reunion two weekends ago. I have no problem with reunions, for the most part--thanks to my ridiculously poor memory, I don't really carry a lot of grudges for anything that happened during high school. There's no one likely to show up at our reunions who would make me go all cold with dread. Mind you, I had plenty of intense and damaging experiences in high school, just like everyone else; but time takes the edge off, plus most of them involved people I didn't end up graduating with anyway.

When I was in middle school, I had a couple of best friends. By high school, I had a completely different set of friends, because the first set had discovered the joys of substance abuse. Now, I'm the first to admit to being a bit of a straight-edger about drugs... but it's a chicken-and-egg thing, did I stop being friends with these people because I was so put off by their drug use, or was I so put off by seeing the effects of drug use on my friends that it cemented my opinion that it wasn't a place I wanted to go in my life? Drugs (and we're talking here about the gamut from pot to shrooms to acid to heroin) universally seemed to bring out the worst in my friends--if they were already depressed, lazy, uncommunicative, bad-tempered, forgetful or spacey, it just made them more so. They may have felt better on the inside, mind you, but for me on the outside looking in, it was annoying at best and completely maddening at worst. I had to fight down constant strong urges to punch them in the collective face. So, not surprisingly, those friendships died off. New ones took their place--and Mara, just so you know, thank you thank you thank you for being my pal for the past 25 years. :)

Now, the interesting thing about all of this is that I bopped along quite happily without those people for some time. When I went to college, NONE of my friends were into the drug scene in any substantial way. We didn't even drink that often. I'd occasionally run up against one of my old homies in one context or another, but it was obvious we were still not remotely on the same path. And I don't think I worried about it too much, other than still being annoyed that they'd changed so radically from the people I remembered.

Sometime in the late 1990's, one of those people--my best friend from Kindergarten through 6th grade or so--started contacting me again. She'd been through a lot of shit, come out the other side, and while I never got too many details about those intervening years, she wanted me to know she was sorry she'd been a jerk back then. And so we made up, and we visit now and then, and things are--while not the same as they might have been--are really very nice. About 6 months ago, the miracle of MySpace led to a reconnection with my first boyfriend/close friend from grades 7-9. He emailed me out of the blue to say he was sorry he'd been a jerk back in high school, and would I like to be friends again? Again I said, sure! He's married now, expecting a kid, and I'm looking forward to meeting up with him when I'm out in California sometime in the coming year.

The other most important person in my Lost Friend triumverate was a guy named Paul. When he dropped out of school, he almost completely dropped out of my life. He got into the indie music scene, and spent the subsequent decades doing the two things he loved--heroin, and playing the drums. Not necessarily in that order. In 2003, I heard from him via Friendster--he wanted to say he was sorry he'd been a jerk (you sense a theme here? apparently your 30's are all about the nostalgia and regret.) He told me he had seen me at the State Fair that year, but he'd been tripping at the time and hadn't wanted to try to talk to me. He seemed embarassed--and in the few subsequent email exchanges we had, he talked about trying to kick the drug habit, but it was apparent that things weren't going well in that area. So we didn't email much; we still didn't have a lot in common or a good frame of reference for each other's lives. We didn't really reconnect... but I always sort of assumed we would when he was ready and able.

So when Paul died of a heroin overdose last week, it was affecting on a lot of levels. On one hand, I mourned the loss of a guy who obviously meant so much to so many people in the here and now--there were about 200 people at his memorial service, mostly his pals from the music scene and from his years of wandering aimlessly around Broad Ripple, getting high, and having those endless conversations with friends and strangers that you have when you're young, or high, or both. I mourned the loss of a very talented musician; though his music in recent years wasn't to my tastes, I know that he devoted his life to creating sound in new and amazing ways, and I don't even pretend to understand what he achieved in his 25 years of making music. But mostly, I mourned the loss of my friend, who remains frozen for me at the age of 14...never aging, never going on to achieve the things he might have done if he'd made different choices way back then. I had forgotten how much I liked that guy, and it's like I lost him all over again--only now it's permanent.

Dammit.

2008-05-11T21:29:00.002-04:00

Greetings from the 9th Circle

I spent the weekend at a medieval studies conference in Kalamazoo. This is always a good time, even when I'm only there for 1 full day. But this week has been a long series of bad news from multiple directions, which I'm not really prepared to blog about just yet, and while I'm glad I went, I'm still kind of in a fog. When I'm depressed or under stress, I tend to slip into a purely functional mode; I get things done on a purely mechanical level, can still hold conversations and make jokes, but I can't really think or concentrate beyond a certain depth, and that's kind of where I am at the moment. A 4 hour drive each way to and from Michigan is, unfortunately, way too much time for contemplation when I'm in a Mood. As my friend Ellen said, "Thank god your car radio works, at least!" True dat! I can't imagine where my head would be if I hadn't had a few worthwhile CD's in the car--the stretch between Battle Creek and Ft. Wayne is one long, lonely string of country/western stations...

Uh oh.

2008-05-11T21:27:00.001-04:00

Uh oh.
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

'Nuff Said.

2008-04-30T08:02:00.003-04:00

Uh oh.
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

This Space Unintentionally Left Blank.

2008-04-26T09:49:00.002-04:00

Case 19, Beyond the Page
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

Look! Some Comic Books!

Exhibit opens May 3, and I am apparently too busy/addled to post. But I do have time to make a Flickr photoset. Will be adding to it all this week... Hope you like it!

2008-04-11T21:51:00.002-04:00

At Long Last

Spring arrived, for a total of one day; tomorrow, we are back to 40 degree temperatures and a chance of snow for the weekend. But the promise of spring is in the air, and along with spring comes the Indianapolis International Film Festival. Last year I missed most of it, but I'm thinking this year I may try to catch a few films; year before last I bought a 10 ticket bundle and saw several really good things. But I was also a volunteer that year, and it wasn't a good experience--the IIFF is not a well-oiled machine, or at least it wasn't back then, and IFS (the Indiana Film Society, of which I'm a board member) actually got the short end of the stick from our linking up with IIFF that year. So in 2007 I still had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth regarding the IIFF. I'm still not offering to volunteer for them, but I'm perfectly happy to go see some cool films in a few weeks. The run of the festival includes the weekend of our new exhibit opening, and coincidentally my 20 Year High School Reunion falls on that very same day. Hell, I may need a little escapism that week...

2008-03-22T14:22:00.002-04:00

Sells-Floto Circus Poster, 1938
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

Limited Engagement - One Night Only!

So you all know how much I love circus posters, and circus wagons, and the circus museum in Baraboo, right? (Mind you, I don't actually like circuses themselves, at least not the modern version of them--but that's a paradox for another day.) Anyway, check out this beaut of an original half-sheet poster I bought at the antique advertising show last weekend! Dates from 1938, I'm fairly sure--after Sells-Floto was bought out by Ringling Bros but before the Ringlings had completely absorbed them and discarded the Sells name. The "Portage" is Portage, Wisconsin. The rip in the corner is the only reason I was able to afford it at all... and it still wasn't cheap. But no buyer's remorse here, I love it.

2008-03-20T22:21:00.005-04:00

My Checkered Past

We have a new employee at work. She and I are getting along quite well, she responds effectively to my sarcastic and abusive tendencies with same. But the other day I said something about my teaching job, and she said (essentially) "WTF?!?! How many jobs have you HAD? You talk about working in retail, working for a game company, going to grad school, blah blah blah--how many career changes can one person have?" How many, indeed. I realized I had no idea how many different jobs I'd had, so I thought I'd count it out.

Game store clerk/manager/ubermanager - 1987-1996, 1998-2002.
Campus Patrol - 1989.
Costume seamstress - 1989-1992.
Comic Book envelope stuffer - 1988-89. (thanks for the reminder, noz)
Apprentice Personal Property Appraiser - 1993.
Freelance set construction and run crew work, various local theaters - 1992-1996.
Grad school - 1996-1998, 2003-2006.
Pet store clerk - 1998.
Teaching assistant, World History 105/6 - 1996-97.
Research Assistant - 1997-98.
University office assistant - 2003-2005.
Seasonal gardener at the zoo - 2004, 2005.
Animal care volunteer at the zoo - 2003-2007.
Game company sales director - 2004-2007.
Teaching assistant, Art History 101/102 - 2005-2007.
Adjunct professor, art appreciation - 2006-2007.
Web page content developer - 2006-2007.
Contract worker, various local museums - 2004-2007.
Miniature painting artist - 2004-present (though I really started informally back in 1988 or so.)
Museum exhibit developer - 2007-present.

My god, is that really everything? Seems short, somehow.... How many varied jobs have you had?

2008-03-09T11:52:00.004-04:00

Back to Normal

Well, my finger is, anyway. I seem to have not done any permanent damage, as usual... But otherwise, not a lot to report. I'd like to do one of my long ranting posts on why I hate DST today, just to celebrate the joy of having to suffer several weeks of painful internal clock adjustment; but out of consideration for my readers, such as they are, I'm instead doing another webcomic post. This week's bundle of joy is "How to be Happy," by Shannon Wheeler. I met Shannon at Comic Con this summer, and he's a fabulous guy, very friendly and enthusiastic--about his own comics, but also the topic of comics and comic books in general. He made me wish our upcoming exhibit weren't limited to comic books, I'd have loved to get him involved. Maybe the next time around.

As usual, you can click to view it big. Shannon's mainly known for his cult-status comic character, Too Much Coffee Man; but "How to be Happy" mostly centers on a guy, his cat, and the occasional giant space squid. I love his art. I love the very simple, very expressive black linework. The cat in panel 2 is awesome, with only a few lines and dots we have a very earnest expression as the cat peers down at his owner--"You awake? Hello?" The cat flying out the door in panel 6, with his little stick legs crossed as he flails (just as my cats do in this exact situation)--and then the completely unexpected punchline. Perfect. One of my complaints with some webcomics is the failure to understand timing between panels--building up to a good solid punchline isn't easy, after all. Standup comedians have trouble with this concept all the time, it's not surprising some cartoonists do too. But "How to be Happy" consistantly delivers, whether he's doing a serial plot or a one-off. Even when he's doing a "god, I have writer's block" comic, the art never fails to charm me. So this is another one I strongly recommend checking out, if you're up for another webcomic in your life.

2008-02-17T13:13:00.004-05:00

Last Aid

I was going to write another post on webcomics, but then I shut my finger in a door and severely limited by typing speed (already pretty piss-poor.) So instead I offer you this gem of a video, which I found via SirValence.

2008-02-07T20:27:00.000-05:00

Why I Love Webcomics.

OK, this is going to be a completely wasted post for anyone who is not particularly into comics, comic books, or the idea of sequential visual storytelling. But I'm thinking about it a lot lately--"it" being, what makes a good comic good, at least for me? I've been working on a project involving comics at work for the last 6 months As part of that project I've had a couple of really entertaining and fruitful chats with Scott McCloud, whose books Understanding Comics and Making Comics have comprised a huge portion of the background research for the project. One of the things that keeps coming up in these conversations is the place of the webcomic in the world of "Comics" with a capital C. I love traditional superhero comics and the graphic novels they've spawned in the last 20 years; but as Scott has pointed out, some of the most inovative, crazy, and wonderful stuff out there in the first part of this new century has sprung not from pen and ink, but from stylus and Wacom. (Yes, I know many webcomic artists do still use pen and then scan it in. Shut up.)

In the last couple weeks, I've become aware of a blog called "PvP Makes Me Sad," which is a panel by panel critical deconstruction of one of the most popular webcomics out there. I started reading it regularly, not because I am a meanspirited brute who hates Scott Kurtz, but because--like the blog's author--I used to be a big fan of PvP, and now I hardly ever read it anymore. It's not just the material--which is admittedly often same-joke-different-day--but the fact that it's basically a 3-4 panel standard comic with predictable punch lines and somewhat repetative art. (I think of this as KoDT syndrome--Knights of the Dinner Table was damn funny for about the first year I read it. And then it was the same characters, doing the same things, in essentially the same drawings--I think they were often actual photocopies of earlier panels--and I started to think, WTF? Where's the fun in that? And I stopped reading regularly. So it's been with PvP, though admittedly Kurtz is a far far better artist than Jolly Washburn.) I've been enjoying "PvP Makes Me Sad," partly because its author has managed to put a finger on why PvP doesn't work for me anymore. The timing is often off. There are places where just a tiny adjustment of phrasing or attention to a detail of line would turn an OK comic into a pretty funny one, and it's not happening. This kind of analysis is always interesting to me, again in light of McCloud's books--a well-crafted comic requires those kind of fine-tuning adjustments to go from good to great. Some webcomics are brilliant because of this... and instead of spending a blog post trashing on a webcomic I find disappointing, I'm going to spend a couple looking at webcomics I think are amazing, and trying to sort out why.

The first one I'm looking at is a comic that only updates about once a week these days, if that. I bring this up because I don't have it on RSS; I just pop on the site and check it every few days. And even when it's not a new comic, I will always scroll down and re-read the present post, because Beaver and Steve always makes me laugh. Even when I've read the same panels 5 times before, I'll read it again and snicker, because James Turner is a freakin' genius. Beaver and Steve tends to be a bit surreal in its plotting, which is one of the things I like about it--all you really need to know is that Beaver is sensible and practical, and Steve is a creative thinker. In the present storyline, he has started a sweatshop factory to make Steve Brand tennis shoes in the arctic, using the local workforce (seals) as cheap labor. Here's this week's offering (click to view big):

First of all, I like how the panels are laid out, with the tall one in the center; the artist gets to really create a swirl of chaos around Miss Jones, with seals flying every which way, mixed in and around with Turner's trademark onomotopoeia sound effects. It's a great panel. The seals look so shocked. And the spilled coffee creates a sense for us of what happened outside Steve's door between panels 1 & 2--Miss Jones GOT the requested coffee. She was on her way to his office, when suddenly nature got the better of her and GRAAAARRRRR ark ark ark!! Monty Pythonesque in its hilariousness. And then her expression in Panel 4: embarrassed, apologetic--"I don't know how this happened, I'm soooo sorry Mr. Steve," and the little detail of the nervous gesture of her tapping fingertips/claws. And best of all, the seal in panel 5 has, not stars, but little tiny fishes swirling over his head. Almost unnoticeable, it's like an easter egg within the drawing. And so Steve learns that it's so hard to find good help these days... Anyway, Beaver and Steve is one of my very favorite webcomics for just this reason--it's always visually rich, yet subtle in its humor. If you're inclined to go through the archives, you'll see this is just the tip of the iceberg--Turner pushes all kinds of limits in his plotting, sequencing, and drawing style, in ways that I've never seen in print comics.

Next time: I blather on about some other comic I like. Maybe.

2008-01-31T20:07:00.001-05:00

Have Stone, Will Curl

In my endless quest to participate in the most bizarre and esoteric sports on the planet, I have added yet another notch on my metaphorical bow:
CURLING.
Yes. A sport involving brooms, giant heavy rocks, and ice. If you were not sucked in by the 2006 Olympic Curling championships on TV, then here is a YouTube video showing the Canadian Men winning with what can only be described as a perfect shot. The narration in Russian just makes it all the more entertaining. (At least, I think it's Russian.) Anyway, after almost 2 years, Indianapolis finally has its own curling club and I am THERE.

I suck at it, of course. Here are the things I've learned:
1. Many things can affect where the rock ends up stopping, including how hard you throw it, how much English you put on it, how hard your sweepers are sweeping, and how the ice is running.
2. I am completely incapable of perceiving ANY of these factors when I am actually the one throwing the rock. I'm too busy wondering if I'm about to fall over as I launch myself forward out of the hack. But I'm hoping to get the hang of it.

So if you're in Indy and you want to try curling, here is a basic primer:
The point of the game is to score points. You do this by sliding a granite boulder with a handle on top along a sheet of ice toward a target at the other end. After each team has slid 8 rocks down the sheet, you look to see who's got a rock closest to the center of the target, and that team scores. It's called curling, because the rock usually doesn't slide straight, but curls in one direction or another depending on which way it's rotating as it slides and how melty the surface of the ice is beneath it. Your teammates may attempt to affect the speed and curl of your throw by scrubbing the ice in front of the moving rock with brooms--this melts up the ice just a tiny bit and makes the rock speed up and curl less. When to sweep and how hard to sweep is one of the subtleties that will only come from experience; likewise which way to spin the rock and how hard to throw it. All my throws seem to cruise straight through the target and out the back, or else fall short and are taken out of play. But I've only done it twice. There's always room for improvement...

2008-01-20T21:05:00.001-05:00

I MADE YOU A QUIZ...BUT I EATED IT.

My score on The Which Lolcat Are You? Test:

**************************************

Lion Warning Cat
(51% Affectionate, 63% Excitable, 46% Hungry)

You are the good Samaritan of the lolcat world. Protecting others from danger by shouting observations and guidance in cases of imminent threat, you believe in the well-being of everyone.

**************************************

Take it!
http://www.okcupid.com/tests/6348388576689378978/Which-Lolcat-Are-You-

The problem with LOLcats is that I'm completely at a loss to explain why I find them so hilariously funny. I think it's a cumulative effect from having spent a sick day paging through the archives of I Can Has Cheezburger. Or maybe I'm just easily amused these days...

2008-01-10T20:51:00.000-05:00

Who Put the Goat In There?

I can already tell that Netflix is going to change my life for the better. I am one of those people who hardly ever sees movies in the theater; I like documentaries, foreign and independent films, and I've got a long list of things I've seen reviewed which I'd like to watch.... but since Rhinebeck is really too far a drive now, and the Indianapolis arts theater is expensive, and I'm spacy and forget to check what they've got on... I miss stuff. One of the things I missed, way back in the day, was Earth, the second film in Deepa Mehta's Elements trilogy. I saw Fire when it first came out, when Upyernoz and I were still doing our near-weekly trips to the Music Box to catch whatever cool foreign flicks were on offer. I thought it was fantastic, hands down, and made up my mind to catch the other two films which were (we thought) to follow shortly. Earth did come out in 1998, the year I left Chicago, and no opportunity to see it arose, and it didn't show up at my local rental place, and I forgot about it. The third movie met with difficulties--the first two were not popular in the areas of India where Mehta was doing her filming, and as I understand it, a lot of her equipment was destroyed, workers threatened, etc. So the production ground to a halt, and the film was eventually finished in Sri Lanka and released in 2005. I caught Water at its Indianapolis premiere in 2006, and my review of it is here. But the whole point of this is--I did HAVE a point--that shortly after signing up for Netflix I realized I could finally see Earth and complete the trifecta. GOOOOOO ME!

Earth was very, very good. It's a story of what happened in Lahore in 1947, as the British were pulling up the stakes and saying "see you later, and oh by the way, this is now Pakistan and that's India, have a nice day!" The resultant rapid and gruesome explosion of Lahore's formerly closely knit community of Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems and Parsees forms the backbone of the film. I thought it was better than Water, personally; and like all of the trilogy, it was wrenchingly painful, beautiful, and funny all at the same time. It was not as visually lush as the other two films, I didn't feel overwhelmed by the visuals. Both Earth and Water are told through the eyes of children who don't really grasp the significance of what is going on around them, and I think this is why the latter two lack the intimate feel of Fire. But at any rate, I highly recommend all three films.

So I also like Indian cinema--and by Indian cinema here I don't mean Deepa Mehta. I am an unashamed fan of Bollywood musicals, and they are the sort of thing where you either think they are fantastic and amazingly hilarious, or you think they are bizarre and annoying. There is very little middle ground. So if you are in the second category, I strongly recommend that you NOT watch This You Tube Video. I found this link via Jane, literally minutes after finishing watching Earth, and I laughed so hard I cried. One thing to note, if you've never encountered this genre of films before, is that while Bollywood musicals are generally subtitled, and the dialogue is usually in Hindi, the musical numbers are almost NEVER subtitled, and the lyrics are frequently in another language like Urdu. So you--the average American viewer--will NEVER know what the FUCK they are singing about, and frankly this video pretty accurately simulates what my brain is filling in when I am watching one of these films. I love it.

2008-01-07T18:55:00.001-05:00

30% in Common with Huckabee? Dear God.

Here's how my own political convictions line up with the available candidates, more or less.

81% Chris Dodd
79% John Edwards
78% Barack Obama
78% Bill Richardson
73% Hillary Clinton
71% Joe Biden
69% Mike Gravel
62% Dennis Kucinich
45% Tom Tancredo
39% Rudy Giuliani
37% Mitt Romney
33% John McCain
30% Mike Huckabee
29% Fred Thompson
26% Ron Paul

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

This is interesting--it's more or less exactly what I anticipated (Edwards over Obama over Clinton) but the % of agreement with the weirder GOP candidates surprises me a little. There were a few questions I felt could have used another answer option--like the illegal immigration one. I firmly believe that illegal immigrants should be deported, because they've broken the law by arriving illegally in the first place. Many immigrants bust their asses to arrive here legally; what's their incentive to do so if arriving illegally gets you benefits or a path to citizenship? However, I also think that our current immigration laws obviously aren't working all that well, and we need to find a way to grant worker status to more people so that they can work here legally (which will help the economy in their home countries, if they're sending money back to family) and put some serious energy into helping improve the infrastruture in central and south american countries so that there will be less incentive FOR people to come illegally to the US. But that wasn't an option on the quiz.

I wonder if it's notable that both my top democrat and top republican have already dropped out of the race...

2008-01-01T12:33:00.000-05:00

Thanks For Playing!

The fascinating thing about blogging, for me, is not just the fact that I'm casting my life upon the waters of the internet for anyone to read, but that I can go back at the click of a mouse and find out what I was thinking on this date in history, from 2003 onwards. I know other people have been keeping personal journals all their lives; but despite various attempts at diarying at points in my life, I've never been able to do it with any consistancy. Why? I think because I don't like writing for myself. I like writing for other people to read. I like choosing my words carefully in order to make you laugh when you click my bookmark and see a new post. It doesn't matter that there are only about 10 people who read this thing regularly--even if it was only 2, or 1, or just someone randomly Googling the words "Cautionary Tale" every week or so, it still provides more motivation for me than just writing something for myself. Must be the Leo in me.

Anyway, so the ability to go back and check on my state of mind on New Year's pasts is quite a feature. I generally tend to be depressed on New Year's, but I note that I only posted about being depressed twice in the last 5, which is impressive. Maybe because depression isn't all that funny, and I strive to stay funny so that all 10 of you will stick around for another year! But this year, I'm not depressed at all. For the first New Year's since I started the blog, I'm gainfully employed, full time, in a job that I really love and am passionate about. I'm in a good place with family and friends, and we have again the hopeful prospect of political change in the wind for 2008. (Mind you, if we get a Democrat in the White House the "good place" with my family may change--my mom holds me personally responsible for betraying the Republican party at times like this.) I'm in reasonably good health mentally and physically, as are my pets and family. This may be one of the best New Year's in the last decade for me, simply because I don't have anything to dwell on while listening to Pink Floyd's "Time" in a darkened room. Go, 2008!

So how did I start this new year on a high note? By getting completely cleaned out at penny poker. Jesus, my luck was just awful, and I had a great time. We pulled out This Book, and I got to call some great variants like "Liz Taylor" and "Rescue 9-1-1." As you might expect from a book authored by Phil Foglio and James Ernest, these variants are wild and brilliant and hilarious, resulting in huge pots. If you like poker and don't take it too seriously, you should add this book to your library. Just to give you a taste, here's the two games I called last night:
Liz Taylor. 7-Card Stud. Queen of Hearts is wild, and starts in the middle of the table. First person to get a jack or king face up gets "Liz." She stays in his hand until a new man comes along--ie, someone else is dealt a face up jack or king. So until the last faceup card is dealt, you don't know for sure who's going to end up with the wild card. Prevents early folding, builds the pot, and carries a nice suspensful jolt.
Rescue 9-1-1. 5-Card Draw. Natural 9-A-A beats all hands. Everyone's discards after the first betting round go into a pile in the center called "The Media Crew." The injured cards (one-eyed jacks and the suicide king) are wild. Play is as normal, but before the winner collects, all the cards in the media crew are revealed. If a 5-card hand can be made from that pool of cards which beats the winning hand, then the Media Crew has arrived at the emergency first! All cards are reshuffled, another hand is dealt to all live players, and the pot stays. Play continues until a player has a winning hand that isn't trumped by the media. Last night we had two full houses beat by the Media Crew before someone finally won with a 7-high straight. It was awesome, the pot was enormous and there was a huge tension each time we flipped the media hand and started sliding cards around to see what we could make of it. Totally worth the $3 I lost last night.

So...Happy New Year, y'all!

2007-12-15T14:09:00.000-05:00

Wait, We're Having a What, Now?

Last night en route to an evening of Warhammer, I stopped at the big grocery chain to pick up coffee because my corner grocery doesn't carry the kind I like. I found the place packed, huge lines at the checkout, and vast swaths of the cereal aisle empty, as if swarms of Froot-Loop eating locusts had passed through. WTF, I thought--it's almost like people are stocking up before a blizzard. Then I thought, hmmm. I haven't checked weather.com in the last 48 hours or so.....

Oh.

So I woke up this morning to an inch of cottony fluff all over everything ("morning" is a relative term here, since Warhammer went until 1:30 am and I didn't get to bed until 2:30 or so) and supposedly we're well on our way to 7+ inches of snow, with a layer of freezing rain/ice in there someplace. I managed to heave my sorry rear out the door an hour ago to buy cookie-baking supplies and something for dinner; the Safeway was a little less scarily cleaned-out than last night's trip to Marsh, and I didn't have to wait in line too long, so no complaints. If I get snowed in, I should be able to survive on gingerbread and almond shortbread for a couple days. I've got multivitamins. It's all good.

2007-12-01T19:22:00.000-05:00

I'm Not Sure Whether to be Proud, or Embarassed.

The best part, for me, is when the Snitch goes streaking off toward my old dorm, Jewett House. Good thing it got remodeled, or there'd be a danger of the snitch getting stuck in the antiquated elevator...

2007-11-22T15:44:00.001-05:00

Jesus, Make It Stop!

So far my Thanksgiving Day has been marred by something (cats) setting off my allergies early in the am; it's now 3 o'clock, and my nose is still running pretty much nonstop. This despite the application of 24-hour super-Claratin, which I can tell you right now is worse than useless--it doesn't make you drowsy, but it also doesn't stop the nasal drip, hence you're fully awake to enjoy it. Bite me, Claratin.

Since the drugs aren't working, I've resorted to prayer, as you can see in the post title. Last night I finally got around to watching Jesus Camp, and if it taught me anything it taught me that the world's problems would be solved just by invoking Jesus in the most trivial matters possible. If you've not seen it, and you have any interest in American politics or religion, you really should. It's a documentary about evangelical Christians; specifically, evangelical kids and how they are being trained as an army to "take back America for Jesus!" If you think the army metaphor is a bit over the top, see the film and think again. These kids walk, talk, sleep, breathe, and even bowl the Religious Right agenda (a memorable scene involves a bunch of these kids at a bowling alley, whispering fervent prayers to Christ before flinging a gutterball, more often than not.) Yea, the lord is with us, even when bowling. The movie is fairly serious, and presents a frightening (to many of us) view of Christianity which should disturb my genuinely Christian friends even more than it does non-Christians like myself. It does have a few lighthearted moments, including a brief and ironic appearance from exceedingly smarmy mega-church leader Ted Haggard, who shortly after the film was made was caught up in a scandal involving methamphetimene and a male prostitute. One can only hope that this shook the blind faith of some of those kids in the film.

Today I've made 3 pies, blown my nose 119 times, and cleaned out my refrigerator. What've you done?

2007-11-16T23:27:00.000-05:00

Ooooh, Spikey!

I'd be excited about my slight uptick in hits this week, except that I've figured out that apparently the TV show "Heroes," which I've only seen one ep of but I hear it's nice, has recently aired an episode titled "Cautionary Tale." So all of a sudden, I am getting hits from the UK, the Ukraine, Germany, Mozambique--all googling for "heroes cautionary tale." As well as random places in the US. Although I'm obviously not what they're looking for, I am gratified to see that I am the #1 hit for this google search (presumably since all three of those words appear in my header.) Only one or two of them have hazarded an actual look at my blog--but if you are, in fact, here hoping I am talking about the Heroes show on a regular basis, I'm very sorry to disappoint you. You'll have to wait til I've watched a few more disks of the set my coworker loaned me last week.

My adventure for the weekend is that I was coerced into dog-sitting for one of my neighbors; I'm in the town directory as a dog sitter, but the last time I dogsat it was an utter disaster and I didn't want to repeat it. But these folks seemed desperate, so I said OK. Things were a little surreal when I biked over there after dark on Wednesday and found myself passing sign after sign that said "No Outlet" "Dead End" "Roadway Ends" and "Turn Back Now, Before It's Too Late." There are lots of signs like this in my little town (well, the first three) but I seriously had no idea there were any houses back on this little gravel path along the river; I was about to turn around when I finally found the house #, at the second-to-last house at the farthest southern tip of town. Surrealism continued when I met the dog, who is the world's most gi-normous Rottweiler. "Oh, he's a sweetheart! Don't worry, you can just let him out without a leash and he'll come right back in!" Jesus, I thought, I am DOOMED. This dog is going to go blitzing off into the sunset, and there is no way I will be able to force a 150 lb herding dog to do anything it doesn't want to do. So this morning, when I had to go let him out for the first time, I'm thinking "Crap, crap crap... I so don't want to do this."

Naturally, it turns out that this is the most timid Rottweiler in the history of the breed. I had to lure him outside with a dog biscuit because it was chilly out. He ran back inside as soon as I opened the door. Additionally, he is painfully sad that his family has left him, and it is all he can do to look up at me with his sad, pitiful eyes, and silently ask, "Why? Why did they go away? Was it something I did? Tell them I'm sorry." No doubt that will only get worse before they return Sunday night, he already seems convinced that life, as he knows it, is over forever. Poor, poor gi-normous dog.

2007-11-09T22:31:00.001-05:00

OK, Now That's Funny...

Because I found myself pretty annoying in the books...

Find out your Harry Potter personality at LiquidGeneration!

2007-11-03T11:09:00.000-04:00

Because You Can Never Have Too Much Star Wars...

Yes, it's me as Dork Skywalker. Another Halloween triumph--though sadly this photo doesn't show my vintage 1978 Kenner/General Mills blaster in improvised holster on my right hip. You'll have to just imagine the coolness.

2007-10-15T22:50:00.000-04:00

And Now for the Talent Portion of the Program...

Thanks, Heather. That was one of the worst things I have ever seen or heard on the internets.

And my other laugh for this week was a link from Defective Yeti to this Open Letter to a Can of Baby Corn. You're making everyone uncomfortable, Baby Corn. It's time for you to go.

2007-09-26T22:01:00.000-04:00

I've Got My Geek On....and I Can't Get It Off.

My parents are out of town for a week, and I have this ritual where every time I'm taxed with feeding their fish and picking up the mail, I try to get one more load of my junk out of their garage/house/etc. A year or two ago I liberated both my guitars and my old Crate amp from my former bedroom. Here they still sit, of course, more or less unused (Karen! When's our next jam fest?!) But at least I'm trying to be mature and not use their home as a vast storage dump for my stuff. So this week, since I've been thinking a lot about Star Wars due to projects at work, I decided to check out the large plastic bins marked "Star Wars Toys" out in their garage.

Oh. My. God. Not just toys, mind you. Not just toys, but things I didn't even know I had. Things like this.....

Who wants a ring-neck T-shirt with Jawas on it? ME!! I DO!!!!!!!!

(Several of my co-workers pointed out that the funniest thing about this cover is that C-3P0 and the stormtrooper have their shirts tucked in.)

2007-09-19T22:22:00.000-04:00

Pirate Day? Whydah Not?

And the first person to get THAT obscure reference wins a gold doubloon....

I've been talking like a pirate all day; as it's not technically "Type Like a Pirate" day, I'm taking a break. My coworkers and I hit a local club for their "Party Like a Pirate" night, and that was entertaining though somewhat sparsely attended. I suspect it's partly that it's a weeknight (even pirates have to get up in the morning; someone has to drive the ship) and partly that we were a wimpy pirate crew and all left before 9 when the real dedicated party crowd probably showed up. Arrrr.... we be gettin' old, mayteys. But two things of note: one is that HeatherW posted an utterly fabulous link in my brand new comments to the previous post. Go click it. And two is that Defective Yeti has posted a comprehensive list of all the 36 countries our president has asserted have their "boots on the ground" in Iraq. And here I thought the president was fudging a bit! Not so--and thank god the Cimmerians are on our side. (Come to think of it, is there more than one Cimmerian? Or was Conan the only one?)

2007-09-17T11:02:00.001-04:00

Holy Haloscan, Batman!

OK, I finally did it. Killed my link to enetation (though theoretically all my old comments still exist on their server) and implemented Haloscan. So feel free to comment away!

I'm home sick from work today, which is kind of a new experience for me; I don't think I missed work more than once or twice the entire time I was in retail--with the exception of the Chicken Pox Incident, which was less being sick and more a near-death experience that lasted over a week. But I woke up this morning, blew my nose about 16 times, and thought to myself, you know... if I were my coworkers, I wouldn't want to be around me today. I am gross with a capital G. So I called in, and went back to bed.

2007-09-07T09:05:00.000-04:00

A Few Things of Note

First of all, yes I know that my comments no longer work. :) I have two options, since enetation is apparently more or less a lost cause. One, I can switch to New Blogger's comments and completely lose this template which I've become attached to over the years. Two, I can sign on with Haloscan, which I've been toying with for a while. But I'm going to need to sit down and take a few minutes to set up the account and monkey the code into my blog. Which I've not really felt like doing just yet. So there will be a short delay; and in the meantime, if you have something you simply must get off your chest, you can put it in the comments of Dark's Carnival or The Wax Lion.

Secondly, I'm in New York! Wooo hoo! Sent here to infiltrate the competition.... that is, to check out local museums and see what kinds of cool stuff they're doing. So far I've been to the AMNH, which was fairly awesome--even their bad displays are really good-looking. The ones that are bad are more bad in a sort of 1930's way of looking at native cultures kind of thing. :) And the ones that are good are awesome. Today it's the Bronx Zoo and the Cloisters. Jane had the decency to pick a co-op in the far north reaches of Manhattan when she moved here a couple months back; so the Cloisters is only 2 subway stops and a pleasant walk through the park away from where she is generously hosting me. Sweeeet.