Tux

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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....

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.

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.

Uh oh.
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

'Nuff Said.

Uh oh.
Originally uploaded by blackbear88

This Space Unintentionally Left Blank.

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!

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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!

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.

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...

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?

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.

OK, Now That's Funny...

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


Find out your Harry Potter personality at LiquidGeneration!

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.

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.

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.)

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?)

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.

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.

OK, OK!

Gencon post is up on Dark's Carnival. And it is officially my first post written from my---ta daaaahhhh!!!--new super sleek black MacBook! I'm just dripping with coolness....

This is Not the Gencon Post!

Gencon post will be up on Dark's Carnival shortly; I'm trying to resurrect that blog from the dead a bit. Might start posting pictures of minis over there too. If you find it annoying that I have three different blogs, well.... too bad. I like to keep things categorically seperate; I realize I could tag my posts, but it's partly about appearences. I like that the backgrounds/template styles are different for my different types of writing. I'm thinking of turning Wax Lion into my professional blog as well, the one I link back to when I'm commenting on other museum industry blogs (yes, there are such things) and the one where I babble a bit about philosophy of museum display etc. But don't worry, coworker who reads my blog--I've got no intention of making any remarks that might get me in trouble with the Powers that Be, even on my "anonymous blog." I'm not so deluded as to think that anything on the internet is truly anonymous.

Blah blah blah, this is quite a long post for a post that was intended just to tell you that I'm not actually posting about anything.

Perfect Days

You could argue that life in Indy is somewhat wanting lately. We've been slogging through day after day of 90 degree heat and not a drop of rain for nearly 3 weeks; the canal has dropped about a foot, and the mosquitos are many and vicious (even I'm getting bitten, and I usually don't fall prey to the little boogers much; right now I've probably got 10-20 bites in varying stages of itch.) I returned from my business trip to San Diego to a hot, stuffy, humid, and incredibly messy home. The window a/c unit is barely making a dent in the oppresive atmosphere around here, and it's too hot to cook or clean effectively.

So where's the upside? Well, the mornings are nice. I've been going for bike rides at 7 am, since it's too hot by the time 8 rolls around for me to bike to work right now. My house has a new resident--a female turtle named Harriet, who will be released back to the wild as soon as she's healed up from a mild trauma to her shell. It's fair time, and my dad and I spent a pleasant, if sweaty, couple of hours this morning at the fairgrounds. (While I'm grateful for the air conditioning that was added to the Home and Family Arts building in recent years, I must say that the culinary displays were far more entertaining when they fell victim to the heat and humidity after the first 3 days of the fair. Nothing has ever equalled the spectacle of the "Murder in the Cathedral" wedding cake, in which the red sugar windows of the church-shaped cake had melted and run down the inside of the structure and out the doors, pooling around the feet of the bride figurine like a gory testament to the value of pre-marital counselling. Later in the week, the icing under the groom's feet softened and he fell over into the red puddle, as if some jilted former lover of the bride had shown up and redefined the term "shotgun wedding.")

And I've been going out bat-watching in the evenings. The high mosquito population means that the little brown bats around here are very active and visible; I can go out and sit by the canal with a beer at twilight and watch as every few minutes, der fledermice flit past. I can't complain.

"Have Mercy!"

So in browsing the program for the San Diego Comic Con next week, I found a session that purported to examine the work of the worst comic book in existence. "Ha!" thought I. "How bad could it be?"

Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer awfulness that is Fletcher Hanks. Sure, the art is cheesy in a kind of crappy Golden-Age way... but what really marks this comic as beyond dreadful is the scripting. Not just stilted and dull, but actively, indescribably crappy. If you can stand it, I strongly recommend going to all three of the scanned comics on the Links page and reading them in their entirety. I am particularly drawn to/repelled by "Space" Smith, whose name is always spoken in quotes, even by his girlfriend-copilot. In the issue in question, they visit a planet called "Bloodu," where the evil inhabitants want to drink their.....wait for it....their.....BLOOD! Hooray! 10 points to you. Anyway, I had a great time reading this crap. All you Harry Potter fans out there can keep yer Book Seven tomorrow; I'm going to run out and buy a copy of "I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks."

Not Dead, but Sleeping

I found a newspost, with a little effort, that states that Enetation is "temporarily offline" and that accounts won't be affected by this. We shall see--perhaps when they resurface they'll have improved their comment spam protection. At any rate, things are ticking along at a surprising rate. People keep asking me how the job is going, and I say, "Great," but that doesn't really convey a picture of what I'm really doing. In the last week, I've interviewed a Holocaust survivor with an amazing story to tell; I've written labels about Indiana Ponds; I've tried to condence the Civil Rights movement into a 25 word paragraph; I've watched seemingly endless media coverage of Ryan White from the late 1980's; I've firmed up plans for the work-sponsored trip to the San Diego Comic convention at the end of the month (we've got an extra day! we can go to the zoo!) and I've been firing hilarious emails back and forth with an AIDS activist who we're hoping to focus on in the big exhibit. Busy, exhausting, fun. yeah.

So I'll give entetation another week or so, and then we'll look into Haloscan.

RIP Enetation?

My comments feature seems to be down, and enetation.com is rejecting my browser. Could it be dead? Are all my old comments lost? Will I be forced to look into Haloscan as an alternative? (No, not using blogger comments. I have them on my other blog, and they're irritating.) So much for my "lifetime subscription," perhaps. If it's not back in another couple days, I'll start investigating the alternative...

Blargh!

It's been a while since I let a month go by without posting anything at all--kind of shocking, really. Anyway, here is what I have been doing instead of blogging:

1. Going to Wiscon, where I ate much food, drank much drink, friended around with friends, and even listened to a few panels and readings. I even went to the hotel pool, which was a new experience--those who know me know that I have a completely unreasonable fear of swimming pools. A mild fear, to be sure, I don't run screaming from them but I also never go out of my way to get in one. ANYWAY, it was a great weekend in Madison despite the sinus headache mentioned in the prior post.
2. Starting my new job. S'wonderful, s'marvelous, s'kicking my ass. I'm having some trouble adjusting to being on a schedule again; I'm not complaining, it's just that after 5 years of irregular work, it's a big transition to be someplace for 8.5 hours per day, in clothes both ironed and color coordinated, and be organized enough to efficiently accomplish all the stuff that has to get done after work. I'm more in the groove now than I was 3 weeks ago... It's just taking a bit of time.
3. Going to my college reunion. 15 years, holy crap on a stick.
4. Going to visit my 93 year old grandpa for Father's Day. He utterly rules. So does my dad.
5. Watching the family of beavers that has built a lodge up the canal about a mile from my house. I can bike out in the evenings and watch them swimming around and eating plants and stuff. I haven't seen them cut down a tree yet, but that would be awesome.
6. Watering my tomatoes--we've been having hella hot dry weather here, like much of the country lately. It rained for the first time in ages this morning, thank god. i still haven't put my A/C unit in, so I'm relieved the heat broke, at least for now.
7. Sleeping. All this work and travel and stuff wears ya out!

So what have you all been doing while I was gone?

Damn Right It's Better Than Yours...

So I made it to Madison (and MLE, where the heck are you??) and so far I've been to a couple nice readings, one panel that jumped the shark faster than you can say "Elvis," and a panel about fighting with people at cons that did not, sadly, involve an actual fight. (it was the sequel to last year's panel on flirting at cons, and while it lacked a lot of the hilarity value it was still pretty entertaining.)

I had a sinus headache when I woke up this morning; it was partially alieviated by going for coffee up the street, and hearing the Milkshake Song over the PA while eating my scone and caffiene. Feminist sci fi in one ear, her milkshake bringin' all the boys to the yard in the other. Too great.

Yayyyyy! Shiny Toy!!!!

In the first of no doubt several major purchases with the fever of "I've wanted this for 5 years and now I have a paycheck!" I finally did it. I bought.....

THE BIKE.

Yes, the bike. The bike I've been wanting. The bike I drooled over way back in this series of blog posts. Well, not exactly that bike, but it's been 3 years; the Trek "Adventure 4000" is no longer available. In point of fact, the cool burnt orange color is no longer available--they switch colors each year, and burnt orange metallic is soooo 2006 apparently. So I went in the bike store, and there was this orange bike, and I was all like "ooh, shiny!" And then I discovered that it was a 25" frame. (if you are unwise in the way of bikes, which I was right up to this moment, I will tell you that to ride a 25" frame bike I would need to be about 6'4" tall. Sadly, I'm not.) So I sez, do you have this in a smaller size? And they sez, no, it's Last Year's Bike, that's the only one left. Too bad. Rat Girl sez, how about this one? It's pretty, it's blue! I proceed to pout... but I wanted orange.... sniffle. In that moment, I go straight from being slightly interested in purchasing a bike sometime in the near future to being completely obsessed with obtaining a 17.5" 2006 Trek 7.3 FX in burnt orange. Because that's the way I am. I comb the internet that night, I call up stores all over Indianapolis; I call a store in Oshkosh Wisconsin on the vague promise of a lead. Things look grim. Then I check the store locator on the Trek website, and find that there is a bike store way out on the west side of Indianapolis that I've never heard of before. I give them a call, ask them my question, knowing full well that the answer will be no, and Lo and Behold! They've got one! It's on clearance! Hooray! Off I go to the bike store, and an hour later I roll back home with a new Trek 7.3 FX and a sweet bike rack for the car as well.

Sometimes, being obsessive compulsive can be downright fun.

We Sang Shang-a-Lang, and We Ran with the Gang
Going Do-wop, Ba-doobie Do-ay...

So suddenly tonight, while emailing my oldest friend to tell her about the job, I remembered that I'd also been meaning to tell her about being thwacked with the 2 x 4 of nostalgia a few weeks ago while shooting pool at Chumley's. I'm standing there, waiting my turn, and all of a sudden what should come on the MP3 Jukebox but the Bay City Rollers 1975 blockbuster hit, "Saturday Night." Said old friend and I literally wore out the needle on her record player on that album when we were 8 or 9. I was stunned to even think that it might exist in electronic form (and even more stunned to learn that Rat Girl, a full decade younger than myself, had heard the song before. "Bay City Rollers, right? Yeah." Well, I'll be damned.) So anyway, remembering it tonight and needing a few more items off iTunes to make my next car mix CD, I looked up the BCR in the Music Store. Even better than Saturday Night, the above tune--whose lyrics are utter fluff and nonsense, and I freely admit it's the worst kind of 70's Brady Bunch style crap--is now my favorite song in my iTunes library. Yes. I am in full regression mode. Next thing you know I will be buying the Partridge Family full season collections on DVD. Gah. It's not easy being a child of the 70's.

But It's Saturday.....

Friday Five, ganked from Jane:
What am I....
1. Wearing? New jeans and my bear totem shirt.
2. Pondering? How I can be really intellectually happy, yet feel inexpressibly sad at the same time. (The answer, for those of you playing at home, is HORMONES. In two days I will be wondering what the hell was wrong with me, as usual.)
3. Reading? Perry Mason and the Case of the Baited Hook.
4. Dreaming? Anxiety dreams--see #2 above. But at least it's not The Alligator Dream. Which freaks me out every time it happens, because I love alligators and if I really did see some in the canal in real life I'd be all excited. But in the dream they are always Angry Alligators.
5. Eating? Coffee and toast. Pumpernickel, with butter and basswood honey.

So if you didn't already know, my long jobless drought is finally at an end, and I've been offered an excellent gig at Large Local Museum. I'm pretty damn excited! Adding to #2 above, of course, is the sense that everything in my brain has been rapidly shuffled in the last 2 weeks and now I am playing 52-Pick-Up trying to sort it all out. But I will, no fear. I think my parents are even more excited than I am; they've done a good job of hiding their fear that I might never have a real job again for the last 5 years, but the sigh of relief was so profound that I felt a substantial breeze right through the phone line. My dad is already listing all the things he thinks I need that I should buy once I have a paycheck again. I must admit that one of my first thoughts was, hey, I could buy a new computer! Because my old one is covered in toast crumbs, honey, and coffee stains....

Wow! I Don't Even Know What This Is, But It's Spot On...

Ottava rima? Me? That can't be right!    Too frivolous? But tut, there's no such thing! Let others ponder thoughts of wrong and right,    Or sit and think how much they love the spring; I'd rather spend my time in gleeful spite,    Or maybe laugh, or maybe sit and sing. Besides, it might be fun to be inspiring - But surely it would get so very tiring. What Poetry Form Are You?

For those, like me, who had no idea what Ottava Rima is, you may check the Wiki entry here. Apparently it's a Roman form of poetry, originally for long heroic poems, but eventually adapted for humorous parodies of epic works, a la Boccaccio! That totally rocks.

Anchors A-Whey

Lately my work schedule has been fairly complex. (Not as complex as getting an old blogger template listed on Technorati, mind you.) I'm teaching in the mornings Mondays and Wednesdays, and Thursday afternoons; volunteering at the zoo still on alternate Thursday mornings; working at Crocodile on Tuesdays and Fridays; and now contract working pretty much all the rest of the time at the museum, which is in a high state of panic about an upcoming exhibit. So I was kind of shocked to find that I had Thursday afternoon completely free after finishing up with the baboons. I got a call from Rat Girl around 11, saying she wasn't going in to work until 2 because they were doing repairs at the dairy; all she had to do was drive a truck full of whey to Monrovia in the afternoon. I figured, cool, we'll go for lunch downtown and hang out. Then over lunch it occurred to me that I was already wearing smelly, zoo-stained clothing, and that I had absolutely no other commitments for the afternoon. "Want company?" sez I. "Well....sure!" sez she. So I got to ride along in the truck while RG demonstrated her skillz at driving a cranky behemoth of a stickshift on the highway for the drive out to Monrovia. Why whey, you say? The dairy she works for makes cheese (though they don't have a cheesecam, sadly) and a byproduct of cheesemaking is whey--lots of whey. We had 2 enormous tanks of it in the back of the truck, and we were taking it to a pig farmer who uses it to feed his pigs. It's high in protein.... and also utterly repellant, it smells vile and includes chunks of semi-solid curd stuff that looks like vomit. The pigs love it. So we got out there and backed up the truck, and basically just attached a hose to each tank and used it to fill up about 8 oil drums of muck, while the pigs were all "ooo! ooo! can't wait!" We still had about half of one tank of whey left when the drums were full, so the farmer had us just dump it out in the middle of a field, making a sort of small swamp of grossness--thank god it got cold, or the smell would have been unimaginable by the following day, I expect. Naturally I got whey on my shoes, and RG almost "accidentally" sprayed me in the back with the barf hose, and it was stinky and gross and involved heavy lifting. And I loved every minute--it was a TOTALLY AWESOME way to spend an afternoon!

Well, THAT Was Insanely Complicated.

I finally got Technorati sorted out. They certainly don't make it easy--it had to do with the fact that Blogger automatically indexes and feeds all blogspot posts to Technorati. But because I use an old template (and I'd like to thank Eliza Wee, designer of this marvelous template, before something tragic happens) it didn't have the proper code imbedded in the page for full indexing of posts. So I went around and around with adding bits of random code supplied by both Blogger and Technorati; I managed to screw up my link color briefly, had about a week when my Technorati profile was visible, which I did NOT want, and finally now seem to have it worked out. Bleh. I think I'll try indexing my other blog later today--since it's a newer template, maybe I won't have this problem.

Is That So Wrong?

So I got into a bidding war on Ebay today. See, when I was a kid, I had these posters that I got from Burger Chef--one of those "Collect All Four" kinds of things, and of course they were Star Wars, so I HAD to have them. Over the course of time and adolescence, the posters got demoted and finally I think got moldy in my parents' wet basement and were pitched. Now, in true midlife crisis fashion, I happened across them on ebay and decided I must have them--a Set of Four! Mint! Never rolled or folded! And only $15 for the set plus shipping. So I threw out a bid over the weekend. Then this morning I got the dreaded "you have been outbid" notice in my email... so I upped my bid to $20. Still only $5 a poster, that's pretty awesome! Then another outbid notice in the afternoon, so...er....$22? $25? $30?....Dude wants these posters worse than me! By god, then, he'll PAY FOR THEM. I nudged his bid up over $40 before finally deciding (with about 2 minutes left) that I didn't want them that bad. It's only me regaining my carefree childhood, nothing really important or anything. But then, as I was letting go of the thought, I remembered that my boss at the game co had mentioned he'd got these same posters from a guy who had a store on ebay--as opposed to an auction. So as the sand drains away on the final seconds of the auction, I go searching on Ebay stores. Look, there they are--for $20 a set. Clicked "Buy Now" so fast I may have broken my mouse, and now they are MINE. For $20 less than I was willing to bid. And.... I admit to a moment of pure, unkind pleasure when I looked back at the auction and found that the final selling price was over $50, a third bidder came in and sniped it during the final seconds. And all I could think was "Ha! Suckers!"

Is that so very wrong?

TechnoRama!

I'm experimenting with Technorati. Anyone have any opinions on its usefulness?

***update: already I'm confused. I've tried searching for exact phrases from recent posts (such as "experimenting with Technorati") to see if this blog picks up on their search engines, and so far nada. I must say they're not really helpful with the info on exactly how the engine works, so I'm a little challenged in troubleshooting. Moved the bit of code up into my page header, we'll see what that does.

I Do All My Own Stunts....

I saw a t-shirt that said this not long ago, and I think I need to own one. My stunt for the morning was getting my mental clock wonked by an hour, and arriving wayyyy too early to work; so here I blog.

Last night's IFS selection was Double Dare, a film about two women in the movie stunt industry. It features Jeannie Epper, a member of the biggest stunt-family in Hollywood whose best-known work was doubling for Lynda Carter on "Wonder Woman," and Zoe Bell, who doubled Lucy Lawless on Xena, and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, among other things. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a stuntman (gender divisions for me were indistinct then as now) and spent a lot of time practicing falling off of things and pretend-punching my friends. Sadly, a complete lack of physical talent or coordination stood in the way of this dream, and it didn't come to pass. (Some might say the fall into the penguin tank counts as a professional-level stunt, but it wasn't on purpose, and I didn't make it look good.) But I have an eye for good stuntwork and fight choreography, which probably had its birth in years of watching Epper on Wonder Woman. As I think I've said before, my fondness for Xena/Hercules is rooted partly in the writing of the early seasons and the general campy silliness of the show, but also largely a result of the complex and intricate fight choreography. This fascinates me still; so it was a real treat to finally see this film and "meet" the woman behind all the harness and wire work. Would have liked a bit more from the stunt coordinators about what goes into stunt design and prep, but really the movie was less about the mechanics of the whole thing and more about the difficulties of being a woman in what's essentially still a very male-dominated industry. It was almost painful watching Epper make phone call after phone call--"Hey, it's Jeannie. So.... You have any work for me? Anything at all? No? Well, keep me in mind..." Then again, watching the spontaneous joy-fest when Bell gets the Kill Bill job was pretty damn exhilerating--YAHOO! WAHOO! She deserves to be successful, she's fantastically talented. I look forward to seeing her work in films and TV for years to come; while I may not ever have mastered falling off of things for money, I have a great admiration for them that do it every day.

Stegosnowrus Approach

Stegosnowrus Approach
Originally uploaded by blackbear88.

Attack of the Stego-Snowrus!

When the weather turned warm a week or two ago, I had a day when I should have been doing something much more productive, but figured that a foot of soft sculptable snow was something I don't have access to every winter.... So instead, I made this in my yard. The snow-sleet-snow combination during the storm resulted in a wet snow layer on top of about 2" of an icy crust, with more dry powdery snow underneath. That crust fractured nicely into pieces suitable for Stegosaurus plates, as well as his fingers and toes.

Two more pics of him over at Flickr, and I'm sorry to say it rained the day after I made him, so his life was brief but wonderful.

Stealth Mode

Stealth Mode
Originally uploaded by blackbear88.

Just in Case You Were Wondering.

Yes, I am in that part of the midwest that was hit with a substantial snowstorm on Tuesday the 13th.

***Breaking News!!***

Nooooooooooooo......

I Take It Back.

I would cheerfully trade several of the "It was a bright sunny day at the museum" papers in exchange for the one I just read that was fine except for two significant problems. One, it was completely unrelated to the assignment. And two, it was copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia.

What the hell, people? There was not even a crude attempt to disguise the theft--I just scrolled down the Wiki entry, and look! There's the text of the paper, verbatim! Why, lord? Why do they risk their entire academic career for one dumb 2-3 page paper assignment? And why do they think I won't go check the Wiki page myself? Do they think I'm sitting around here going, "Eh? What's this newfangled 'internet' I keep hearin' tell about? I hear it's a bunch o' tubes, or somethin'."

To be fair, this has only happened once in the 500 or so papers I've graded in the last year. Occasionally we get students who don't know how or when to cite sources, and of course we have lots who think Wikipedia is a good source for a research paper (bzzzt--wrong) but this is the first time I've actually had a 100% rip off the internet. So my faith in humanity is not completely destroyed. Just a little dinged.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night....

Why do some of my students think it's ok to start off a formal analytical paper with paragraphs like "It was a bright sunny day when I started out for our field trip. The wind was blowing, birds were chirping, and suddenly, on the horizon, I saw the museum! It was like a big brown building with no windows. Cautiously I entered, and was confronted by the coat-check girl, a pretty blonde about 25 years old..." This goes on for nearly a full page of a 2-3 page paper, before they actually get to talking about the art! Who teaches them to write a formal paper like it was a creative writing assignment?? Gah.

Several years ago, I had a Superbowl party, and my pipes froze the night before. This made for some cautious use of beverages during the party. This year, my party went without a hitch... and then my kitchen tap froze while I was at work yesterday. Sigh. Such is the peril of living where I do, and at least my shower and upstairs tap still work. I've had the oven on in the kitchen all morning, hoping it might thaw the pipe that runs behind it, but to no avail. So I've been running up and down the stairs to get water for coffee and cooking.... but I draw the line at washing my dishes in the bathroom sink. It better get up above 10 degrees tomorrow, or I could get mighty irritated....

There, but for the Grace of Booze....

Last night at Film Society, I finally saw American Movie; if you've not seen it, it's a movie that holds much of the same fascination and horror of a train wreck. Not just a regular train wreck, either, but one of those ones you see in movies where the trestle is out and the train just peels off down into the ravine car by car by car.... It's truly amazing.

It's a documentary, and I can sympathize with the basic motivation of its subject--it's about an ordinary guy who wants to be an independent filmmaker. I've dreamed about making films since I was 8 or 9, wrote scripts in middle and high school with every intention of committing them to celluloid... and never quite managed to do it. (Though my dreams of being an on-camera star were finally realized in 2006, thanks to MD Hearts!) So I know a little of how Mark, the guy in American Movie, feels.... But oh. My. God. The guy is obsessed with making a horror film--but also with writing craptastic scripts, worming money out of his mentally infirm but rich uncle, and drinking huge quantities of peppermint Schnapps and Labatt Blue. He's just the kind of guy who would have come into the game store and talked to us for hours about his movie/game design/RPG character, whatever, while we took turns hiding in the back room. A telling moment is an interview clip with one of his brothers, who says, "Yeah.... I never really thought Mark would be a filmmaker. I kind of thought he'd turn out to be, you know, a stalker, or a serial killer or something. Seriously." It's like the reverse of when they interview the serial killer's family and they say "Oh, no, he was always such a nice boy, and so polite!" Here, Mark's own family thinks he has stalker potential. His best friend is a recovering addict who is really kind of sweet, always very agreeable, not very bright--and he's like a poster child for what happens when you drop acid/drink/get high to excess, because it's apparent that certain areas of his brain are no longer functioning. He was my favorite person in the movie, actually... But the main thing about Mark is that he will not give up on his dream. Even though his dream seems like a really bad idea--even though his movie looks kind of awful--even though he has no money, and a complete lack of good sense--he knows what he wants, and he goes for it. And strangely enough, he gets it. He makes his awful movie (called "Coven," with a long "o" sound) and has his premiere, and then this documentary about him was a huge hit at Sundance in 1999, and he's sold over 5000 copies of his film and has moved on to make more movies and realize his dream. You gotta admire that.

My pal with the camera is talking about starting to shoot his first film in May, and I am on board 100%. But if I have to drink that much Peppermint Schnapps and Labatt in order to be a filmmaking success, I think I'd rather be a loser...

One Froggy Evening

Oh man....YouTube has EVERYTHING.....

Oh Please Oh Please!!

It's supposed to (maybe) snow tonight. And maybe stay below freezing tomorrow. Come on, snow....this winter has SUCKED so far. I like the occasional unseasonably warm day as much as the next guy, but my bulbs are coming up, dammit! This is not the January I've come to expect from Indiana. Having 50 degree days in midwinter is just lame. If it doesn't get cold, how I am I supposed to appreciate it when Real Spring comes?

SNOW. SNOW. SNOW. SNOW. SNOW.

Hoosier Pride

I just had to post about how proud I am that the single dissenting vote on the massive lobbying ethics reform measure was cast by Dan Burton, my former congressman. Apparently he is the only member of Congress who was brave enough to admit that he doesn't WANT to give up free travel and lavish gifts from lobbying interests! Way to go, Dan--honesty is always the best policy.

And really, I did look around on the net and on his official website to see if there was any official explanation of his opposition to this much-needed reform. Nothing. Nada. The local newspaper was unable to reach him for comment; however, they do note that while Indiana lawmakers severely curtailed their lobby-funded travel in recent years, Dann-o took the single most expensive trip of any of our delegates in 2006, a $15,500 jaunt to Taiwan. (The next most expensive was taken by former rep. Mark Souder, Mr. "Homosexuals want to destroy YOUR marriage," who got to go to Madrid with his son for 14 grand.) Coincidence? I think not, my friends.

But...But I Liked Lorne Greene....

As you might be aware if you too are a Blogger-o-Phile, Blogger has been in beta-test for a brand new version for several months now. The Beta is finally over, and now every time I log on I'm exhorted to "Switch to new Blogger! Switch now! NOW, dammit! Or we'll come to your house and rip all the labels off your canned goods!" Naturally, I'm suspicious.

What I decided to do instead was to start a brand new blog over on Blogger2, using my google ID. (Yes, that makes 4 blogs I have now. Each is a discrete entity serving an entirely different purpose. Really. Shut up and stop laughing.) While Cautionary Tale strives to be funny, the new blog is a bit more serious and a dumping ground for personal introspection--so I won't be offended if none of you want to read it. But anyway, it's giving me an opportunity to check out New Blogger's format without risking the old blog falling into chaos. It's got some nice features--it's certainly easier to tinker around with the look of your template than Old Blogger ever was. But the best thing about it, so far, is that when I log on I get all sorts of messages telling me how cool New Blogger is, including the following analogy:

"Let us put it this way: Old Blogger = Battlestar Galactica with Lorne Greene. New Blogger = Battlestar Galactica with Edward James Olmos!"

So...you're saying....Old Blogger had Daggit? Damn! I always wanted one of those!

Ringin' It In, Yo!

Happy Grue Year, everyone and sundry! I'm cleaning my house today, and making room for the stationary bike I have promised myself I'll buy with any leftover holiday cash I might have. It's time I got off my ass. I'm also making corned beef and mashed potatoes for dinner. So what rituals do you perform on New Year's Day?

And Now, A Musical Interlude....

A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from my pal Andy, inviting me to a concert that had, in fact, already begun when he called me. "It's Paul and Storm! You should come!" he said. Now, Paul and Storm are one half of a now-defunct acapella band who I deeply love, and my feelings about them were a little mixed--they're not DaVinci's Notebook, after all, and while they've got a lot of good comedy material going, as a two-man band they're a little more limited musically than DVN. But still, I felt an urge to be supportive, and I went to the show, enjoyed it a lot, and bought their new album, Opening Band. On that album (among several other gems and one extensive running joke) is a song called "The Ballad of Eddie Praeger." It's a song about the death of a urinal cake; imagine Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," only with a urinal cake instead of a boat. (And if you'd like to hear it, go here and scroll down.) I found this song utterly hilarious--mainly because I am convinced that "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is one of the primary selections in Hell's Jukebox. I hate that song. It just goes on, and on, and fucking on. So this brought to mind the question of what other songs are on the jukebox in Hell. "Sherri Baby," by the Four Seasons, I'm pretty sure. Possibly "Dust in the Wind." There must be more.

At any rate, since it's Christmas Eve, I got to thinking about the Christmas selection on Hell's Jukebox. Everyone has Christmas songs that they utterly hate, and those of us who've worked years in mall retail have more than most people just because we heard them on infinite loop during stressful moments of our lives. My special nemesis is "The Little Drummer Boy." There is NO version of this song that is anything other than plain awful to me. It strives to be a religious carol, and fails utterly. (My favorite carol is We Three Kings, so it's not that I prefer the secular ones. It's just that I hate the Drummer Boy.) So that's on Hell's Christmas PA System. I can think of a few others, but rather than descend even further into holiday cynicism, let me tell you instead that Grinchy ol' me made a Holiday Mix CD of GOOD stuff, with the help of iTunes and the spirit of the season:
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Barenaked Ladies
Christmas Wrapping - The Waitresses
Jingle Bells (banjo instrumental) - Earl Scruggs
I Saw Three Ships - Sting
Father Christmas - The Kinks
Backdoor Santa - BB King and John Popper
Carol of the Bells - Mannheim Steamroller
Winter Wonderland - The Eurythmics
We Three Kings - The Roches, who mess up the fourth verse but I forgive them
Baby Please Come Home - Joey Ramone
The Dreidel Song - DaVinci's Notebook
Wizards in Winter - Trans-Siberian Orchestra
So, are any of my faves on YOUR personal Christmas Hell list? What's in your mix instead?

To Fret, or Not To Fret.

I can't decide if I'm stressed or not. On the up side, I finished all my holiday shopping in plenty of time, I didn't run out of money before the end of the year (a distinct possibility, what with the new roof and all) and got my grading done and grades posted by the end of the day last Saturday. And all my art app students passed, except for the dude who stopped coming to class back in October but inexplicably didn't bother dropping the course. Which incidentally boggles my mind--IUPUI, unlike my own college, allows you to drop a course without penalty practically up to the last day of class. Why in the name of god wouldn't you do that rather than take an F on your record?? Amazing. Anyway, so they all passed and most did quite well, and some of them liked the class enough that they sat around after the exam to talk about art and eat the homemade fudge one student brought as an end-of-semester treat.

On the downside, I'm working a contract that has to be completed by December 31, so not much free time; the house is a horrible mess post-semester, with piles of paper and dishes everywhere that I can't seem to make myself deal firmly with; and I seem to have had a bout of the norovirus that is working its way around Indy, which peaked over the weekend but has left me feeling tired and unhealthy in its wake. Also it's raining a lot, which means fear of flooding in my neighborhood. So far this winter hasn't been bad in that respect, it helps that it's been warm, and that there hasn't been a ton of snow to suddenly melt off in a warm snap and swell the river. But after the last two winters, it's pretty much always at the back of my mind.

So am I stressed? Hmmm..... I wonder.....

Oh well.

Life Lessons

Last year's lesson from art history TAing was, "Don't smoke pot before the midterm." A lesson we can all learn from! This year's ancillary lesson: "Don't drop acid before you write your final paper." Remember this, folks. The grade you save might be your own.

While I may occasionally bemoan the writing skills of the average student at the art school where I'm an adjunct, may I just take this opportunity to say how much I love teaching at this school? It's the end of the semester, student projects are due, and I walked into the main hall this morning to find three of my past students nailing together what appeared to be an enourmous teepee, made of gauze and a metal armature of some kind, with lights inside it, standing in a pool of water. The entire back hall was full of the most amazing damn woodwork/furniture projects I've ever seen, shelves and benches and tables that leave The Jetsons behind in their space-age, retro coolness, all waiting to be photographed for the students' portfolios. I passed a girl was sitting chatting on her cell phone, who had next to her an angel sculpted entirely of matchsticks (the long ones) and straw. I went to get a drink during the exam I was proctoring, and found one of the two drinking fountains had been enveloped in soft, velvety fabric--it was like Christo came and did a surgical strike on the plumbing at Herron. Went out to the parking lot, and there's three people in a cherry picker hanging round sculptures on the large sycamore tree outsdie the door; they looked like blobs of colored melty wax, or possibly a giant homage to Wham-o's late, lamented Superelastic Bubble Plastic. What can I say? Pure joy.

Oy Gevalt.

So I'm thinking about purchasing a menorah of my very own. Indianapolis not being a mecca of judaica (so to speak) I did a quick internet search. Now I am flooded with possiblities. I am particularly drawn to this Ceramic Turtle Menorah, mainly because the idea of a ceramic turtle in itself is so random; sticking 9 candles in his back just makes it all the more surreal. And I don't even see where the candles are supposed to go on this one.... Really, I was looking for something a little more traditional, simple, and.... ok, well, cheap. Not super-cheap, but cheaper than Mr. Flaming Turtle up there. I'll probably go with the basic brass model--simple, but every bit as effective for setting my house accidentally afire. I'll make the quick rounds of possibilities here in Indy before I pony up for shipping. But if anyone has any recommendations for "best menorah ever," I'll take 'em!