WalakaNet 2.0

Annual reminder

2012-01-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

In what has become a bit of a tradition, here is a restatement of the "resolutions" that I make every year. They are more like reminders of the habits of mind that I try to live by:

Listen more and talk less.
Ask more questions and make fewer statements.
Approach every circumstance with compassion and a little kindness.

Love and rockets, world.

(ur)(rum)ination

2011-10-20T22:41:00.001-07:00

I recalled today a time when I was just a small boy and I was on a rare excursion with my father, a stolid and not at all frivolous man, not so atypical of his age and generation. An amusement park? A ball game? They are both equally unlikely, and I can't remember exactly where we had gone or why, but at one point I accompanied my father into a dank and dirty public men's room, leaving my mother and maybe my two-years-older sister outside or at the ladies'.

As we entered, my father said "Don't touch anything." It hadn't been all that long since the introduction of the polio vaccine, and public hygiene nearly fifty years ago wasn't what it is today, so maybe his admonition had merit, but however reasonable (or not) my father's fears of infection, it was an order.

As I stood at the urinal adjacent to the one my father was using, streaming away, I heard in my head my mother's voice and the words she said every time I came out of the bathroom: "Did you flush?" Apparently, this was another common anxiety of the time: that bodily wastes of any sort left to lie in a toilet would create a miasma of contagion, and all toilets must be flushed immediately upon use.

And so I was torn. I had received clear and unequivocal instructions from the stern and foreboding figure of my father, yet they clearly contradicted what was almost daily direction from the central character of my little life, my mother. What to do, what to do?

Inchoate reasoning gasped and spasmed as the frail machinery of my brain clanked laboriously in a vain attempt to reconcile the two directives. In the end, my nascent concern for the common weal won out, and as my stream became a trickle I tentatively reached out to depress the toggle on the urinal with the briefest touch of two fingertips.

Whack! A gentle cuff from my father brought me out of my reflection. "What did I tell you?"

"But... but..."

"Ach! I told you not to touch anything and you did."

"But... but..."

"Ach! Come on." And he turned and strode out of the fetid little room and back into the daylight, me following behind closely.

As I have thought back on that incident over the years, I realize that it might have been the first time I understood that life was going to be even more complicated than I had imagined, and that the right choice was not always going to be obvious, nor good intentions rewarded.

More geeky than girly?

2011-10-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

I spent the shank of the day today at GeekGirlCom, which was held this weekend in the Seattle Center. The convention is run by a nonprofit whose goal is "promoting awareness of and celebrating the contribution and involvement of women in all aspects of the sciences, science fiction, comics, gaming and related Geek culture through conventions and events that emphasize both the historic and ongoing contribution and influence of women in this culture." So, while not a women-only con, it was certainly a woman-friendly con.

And a funny thing happens when you shift the perspective on traditionally or historically male-dominated events (such as geek culture cons) like this: the con winds up being everyone-friendly. The place really felt inclusive: male or female, single or coupled, with or with out kids, straight or gay, plainclothes or costumed - it seemed the world was there. I never got the feeling of there being an in-crowd and an out-group. Really, everyone was welcome; there was no sense of having to be a female person to be part of the event.

There was one thing excluded in all this inclusion: objectification of women. That's not to say there was no smexiness there: between steampunk, burlesque, and superheroes, there's ample opportunity for presentation of, shall we say, a sex-positive affect on the part of many attendees. But I never got the feeling that the women were on display: there were no "booth babes" hawking video games or whatnot, as if often the case at this sort of thing. Just a healthy sexuality on the part of some participants.

The programming was clearly designed with an emphasis on the the contributions and experiences of the XX side of the population. The presentations and panel sessions were all focused on women: women in geek jobs, women in geek arts, the stories of women from the past, the adventures of women in the present, and discussions of how to navigate these nerd worlds that still too often allow or promote bias and unfairness. If I had a daughter, I'd certainly be taking her to this every year.

Of course, I can only tell from the printed program schedule: I just went to game.

The D&D game I run and the Pathfinder game I play in have both been on somewhat of a hiatus for a few weeks, so I wanted to find a place to play a session and maybe recruit players to my own ranks. I am finding that the intersection of the sets of People Who Game and People I'd Want To Hang With Anyway is a pretty thin silver on the Venn diagram; I figured this might be a productive place to meet some folks who shared both my interests and my sensibilities. Unfortunately, the guy running Pathfinder didn't make an appearance today and the guy running D&D was doing a 4th edition encounter*, so there went that idea. I did manage to have some fun, anyway - I played a session of Talisman (sort of a board game version of D&D) and ran through a demo of Warmachine, a miniatures-based tabletop wargame.

As enjoyable as those encounters were, I did not succeed in my goal of finding players to supplement our core group, but I went home happy anyway. The good mood and community atmosphere of GeekGirlCon was infectious. And given that both days of this inaugural event sold out, I can look forward to attending next year as well.

Here are some shot of the con (highlighting its awesome Industrial Yellow official color scheme) with a totally appropriate soundtrack courtesy of Team Unicorn.

*The D&D world seems to be divided into those who welcome 4E and those who will not move past 3.5, except into the warm embrace of Pathfinder. You can probably tell where I stand.

Resetting the trip odometer

2011-10-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I have been the subject of celebratory birthday action for a few days now, even though this isn't one of those typical milestone birthdays or anything else special. As trite as it is, the displays of affection and esteem associated with these little rituals can be quite moving, and I sincerely thank everyone who participated.

The attention drawn to this occasion has put me in a thoughtful mood and has got me considering.

That the clock keeps ticking is a cliche, but true nonetheless, and as I move relentlessly into the future (still without a jetpack, dammit), there are things that I want to make sure stay in frame, or get drawn into the shot, and maybe still some things that I want to remove from the picture altogether.

Some things under consideration:

Ukulele.
Curling.
NaNoWriMo.
Neckties.
Coffee.
Running.
Biking.
Comics.
D&D.
Blogging.
Facebook.

It's been a busy year since I moved from the teacherhood to a deanship. I think it might be time to forefront the mindfulness again.

This is just a tiny step.

As if I still blogged

2011-06-21T21:05:00.000-07:00

I am just back from a turn around the lake on the longest day of the year, and have decided to record two short items I would have made hay from if I still blogged.

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

I came back from a walk around the lake the other day and saw my neighbor Lonnie coming back from his run with his boy, Daniel. I was crossing 65th on the west side of Ravenna, and he was crossing on the east. As I waited for the light to change so I could head east, following him back to our block, I thought, "Hey, I could run and catch up to him and say hi." That thought was immediately followed by another: "Lonnie is a marathon runner at the peak of his condition, with a race less than two weeks away. There's no way you're ever going to catch up to him if he has even a half-block head start, even if he is pushing a stroller." So I watched him disappear down the street.

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

I read an item on one of my news aggregator blogs, or rather I saw it, but couldn't even read it all the way through, so i am missing some details. It seems a homeless man was found ill in his car; along with him was a dog. The dog was well-groomed and well-cared for, even though the man was in dire straits. The man was taken to hospital and the dog to a shelter; a paramedic on the case who happened to volunteer at the shelter took it upon herself to reunite the man and his companion in the hospital. There was a picture of the man hugging the dog, who was looking at him with total unconditional love. Knowing he was near death, the man held the dog one last time and told him "Behave. You behave, now."

I am crying now as I type this; I can't even think about this story without choking up, and I don't even really know why. The heart is a strange and wonderful thing: mine, yours, and his.

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

But I don't blog anymore. Happy summer.

The ball drops

2011-01-01T09:51:00.000-08:00

I think I missed out on this blog tradition a year ago, for the 2009-2010 new year transition, so I want to make sure I get it out here this time.

Every year, I make the same new year's resolutions. Every year, I hope, I get better at keeping them, but there's always room for growth, so here they are again:

I will try to listen more and talk less.
I will try to ask more questions and make fewer statements.
I will try to approach every circumstance with compassion and a little kindness.

Happy New Year, everyone. Peace out.

The World's First Superheroes

2010-11-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

Sometime ago, I ran across this title in a stack of 39-cent comics at the Goodwill:

Even though the shininess of the foil-embossing doesn't show well in the scan, you can almost feel the waves of pure nineties-ness radiating from this cover, drowning the poor, staid Scholastic logo under crashing waves of total awesomeness. The book does not disappoint.

Published in 1996, Hercules: The Strong Man is the first issue in a series of tales under the title Myth-Men: Guardians of the Legend, which presented stories of heroes and heroines of Greco-Roman myth. This inaugural edition gives a one-paragraph introduction to Hercules, takes four pages to summarize three of the twelve labors, and then spends the rest of the book telling of the theft of the three golden apples of the Hesperides. (SPOILER ALERT) The tale ends with the moral that Hercules was smart as well as strong.

All of this is told in lavish full-painted pages in a format somewhere between illustrated story (an awful lot of narrative weight is carried by text) and comics (there are word balloons that convey essential information).

While the form is pretty typical for "educational" comics, is the sensibility that is most striking: the ancient world of myth is depicted in that mishmash faux-medieval/quasi-classical/fantasy mode that was popularized by Xena: Warrior Princess, Dungeons and Dragons, and most versions of Lord of the Rings. Myth-Men is part Classics Illustrated comic and part Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, wrapped up in pretty paper that's only slightly homoerotic.

I'll leave it another time to deconstruct the whole story; what's more interesting to me right now is that there was a whole series of these. Although I haven't been able to track down any more issues, the back of the book promises even more mythic badassery and shiny, shiny outfits:

Now let's zoom in a little bit for a quiz - or perhaps more properly a survey, since I'm not 100% sure of the answers myself.

Can you recognize these heroic men and women after their makeovers? We know the big blond guy is Hercules, and numbers 2 and 3 look pretty much of the period, if not terribly distinctive. But who's number 1, the dark-skinned woman warrior on the left? Is silver-carapaced number 4 wielding a Klingon bat'leth? And is that Scarlett from GI Joe at position 5?

Tell me what you think. No Google-cheating - just think back to your Bullfinch's Mythology, put on The Macarena, and take your best shot. Just list 1 through 5 and the names.

(Here's a hint: Issue #2 was subtitled The Soldier King.)

Who the heck? (things only I wonder about)*

2010-10-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

So, while I was in Value Village today as part of an errands run, I encounter this guy hanging in a plastic bag on the cheap toys wall:

He was eye-catching in the first place because I didn't immediately recognize him: the brown suit, green bird-motif cape, and visored helmet rang no bells. At first, I thought he might have been an owl-guy of some kind, and Otis has been developing an owl-theme for me lately, so I picked it up. A closer look revealed more details:

Look at that phiz. Seems determined, but a little confused at the same time. The design of the helmet looks less like and owl, and more like a... parrot? Parrot-man? There ain't no Parrot-man I know of.

And the belt: besides his, shall we say, greater that typical belt size for a superhero, his buckle is a big "G." G is for... owl? parrot? Is this a Spanish superhero or something?

But get a load of the detail on the boots - the split-toe really makes the costume.

As I was taking photos and moving through these details, I started getting some resonance that I had indeed seen this fellow before, and that he was a Japanese character, from one of those groups of heroes like the Power Rangers. A little bit of internet research later, the mystery is solved: he is Ryu, the ship's pilot for Science Ninja Team Gatchaman! This series was known more popularly in the U.S. as G-Force or Battle of the Planets.

It's nice to know I haven't completely lost my touch for pop culture, even stuff I'm not directly interested in.

Oh, and despite indications to the contrary, that is indeed an owl suit: Ryu's name in some English translations is Hooty.

So, what did you do while you ate lunch today?

*Actually, that title is a lie: the server here in the Green Bean Coffee Shop took a close look at the figure and texted her husband to ask him who it was.

Baby steps

2010-06-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

Life in the 21st century seems to revolve around not jetpacks and undersea cities but rather social networking technologies. I was at the movies last night and during the previews it was suggested that not only should I follow the theater's Twitter and check out their Facebook, but also that I should log the event on Gowalla and do something else with another network I'd never even heard of and can't remember now. All this near-instantaneous revelation and communication has seemed to lead to the demise of (or at least a sea-change to) blogging as we knew it (a topic I mused about here). If nothing else, the social networking phenomenon nearly killed this site, as evidenced by my having written only four posts in the ten months since that rumination.

So imagine my surprise when Jim Wilson, the force behind the brilliant Let's Not Talk about Movies and one of the Stalwarts, ticked me off on his list of noteworthy bloggers, despite that overlong hiatus. His notice was like good whiskey: warming, but bracing as well. He talked of inspiration, and I guess his praise was close enough to that. This morning, I shuttered the ol' Facebook site and came back here to turn on the lights, open the windows, and pull the sheets off the furniture.

I'm not going to promise anything specific, but I imagine that this summer will allow me to exercise my writing muscles a little bit more than I have recently. I think we'll let the freak flag fly high, and talk about superheroes, roleplaying games, movies, and how science fiction hasn't been any good since Stanley Weinbaum died.

But first, I need to pass on the meme that Jim gifted me with. That'll be the next post.

Auld Lang Syne

2010-05-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Rob Lenihan's birthday: an occasion inconsequential to many across the globe, a cause for great joy and festivities to many closer at hand, and another reminder to me of the passage of time. You see, while some people - actually, it seems more like plenty of people - are in Rob's current coterie of friends and associates, I, on the opposite coast, cannot celebrate his birthday with the crowd, and must console myself with my status as, I think, his longest-sustained friend.

I have known Rob since he was Robert, when we both found ourselves in Brother Joseph Anthony's sixth grade class at Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. Drawn together over the ensuing years by our shared interests in science fiction, comic books, old movies, his brother's Playboys, Levi jackets and Dingo boots, pulp magazines, girls from the Bronx, and kung fu movies, Rob and I found a friendship that was the stuff of song and story, or at least a movie of the week. Even after we enrolled in different high schools in different boroughs, we were as tight as ever, traversing Senator Street just about every day, from his house just past Fifth Avenue to my family's apartment at the other end, near Owl's Head Park.

You know that profile picture he has on Facebook, the one where he still has a head of black curly hair? That yellow Midas scarf he's wearing came from my sister's shop. That hand he is holding is my other sister's. That Christmas tree was in my house.

Even when I left the City for the wilds of Westchester and college, Rob and I were tight, keeping in touch and meeting to hang out. I remember being poured onto a Hudson Line train by him and our friend Liam Dolan after a night of drinking in Manhattan, to somehow make my own damned, drunken way back to Dobbs Ferry, thank you. What a pal.

When I left the East Coast for the Pacific Northwest in 1978, our relationship started to get a little sketchy. Rob was there when I returned to Brooklyn in 1984 for my father's funeral, but was not on the scene in 2001 when I came back for my mother's. In the intervening years we had lost touch; I understand now that it had something to do with an exile to the Poconos, but at the time it appeared to me that he had just dropped off the face of the earth. Not that I blamed him; more often, I blamed myself for not holding on.

Finally, though the miracle of the Internets, we were able to re-establish contact recently, and I couldn't be happier. Following Rob's adventures on Facebook, reading his blog posts, and having him present in my daily life, if only virtually, has meant more to me than perhaps he knows. That he appears to have aged well and matured his talent for writing - and living - is icing on the cake.

I can't give Rob a birthday cake, but I'd like to give him something else. Here, from the dusty archives that have managed to survive across five decades, is an example of Lenihan juvenalia, with undisputed authorial provenance. This was a joint writing assignment Rob and I did in sixth grade (note the "A" grade on the cover) and was the first collaboration of many.

The cover:

And because we all know a cover alone isn't enough, a title page:

And finally, just an excerpt from the deathless prose within:

(This is in my handwriting which was marginally more legible than Rob's. Okay, significantly more legible.)

I have held onto this for so long because it is the tangible manifestation of one of the most important things in my life: my friendship with Rob Lenihan. I can't be there to celebrate with him, but that doesn't mean I don't celebrate him.

Happy Birthday, Robert!

Apples and trees

2009-09-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

One of the background noises of my childhood was the sound my father made when he was practicing bowling in the living room.

Pop came to bowling late in life, not until he was in his forties, and I always suspected that he could have gone professional if he had started earlier. For a long while, he carried a 220 average in a league at Leemark Lanes in Brooklyn, and he once bowled a nearly-perfect 295 game: eleven strikes in a row and five pins on a last ball that he told me "felt so heavy" in that final frame.

Bowling was his passion; he would play twice-weekly when he was working and daily on vacation and after he retired. In between visits to the alley, he would practice in the living room. I could sit and watch him, so focused on his task, and he wouldn't even notice me. He would sit in his rocking chair, reading a dog-eared copy of one of his bowling manuals or one of his clippings of the bowling column from the sports section of the Daily News - "Don't Twist at Target," "Fine Bowlers Study Lanes," or "Bend Knee to Brake." After a while, he would close the book, set it down on the carpet, and pick up his ball.

With a look of concentration on his face, he would step to the center of the room and practice his footwork, making a classic four-step approach in his slippers - swish, swish, swish - and moving through his backswing and downswing, not releasing the ball, of course, but letting it drop into his left hand - slap! - his muscled butcher's arms easily handling the weight as he worked to refine his technique.

After one approach or several, he would set the ball down again, return to his chair, pick the book, and open it once more. My father was not a formally educated man, progressing no further than grade school, but he believed in books and their power, and his bowling manuals were as important to his game as the rasp he used to smooth the finger holes in his ball. I am sure that there were sections of his manuals that he had read dozens of times, reading and experimenting and refining and improving his game. Bowling and reading about bowling; he did a lot of both.

I've bowled a bit in my day, but have never made it the avocation that my father did; and as a fellow who ended up a college English instructor, books and education have been a big part of my life for a long time. In some ways, I am nothing like my father; but sometimes...

We have begun some role-playing games again with a small group of friends, and I have been game-mastering some of the sessions. This requires me to set up a scenario that will provide the players with both an opportunity to create a shared narrative and some sort of challenge for them to overcome, all within the constraints of the game mechanics and rules. So, I sit and write, sketching out the non-player characters and trying to build a believable and engaging world.

And when something doesn't seem to be working out, or I have an idea I think would improve a puzzle, I find myself putting down my stuff, walking over to pick up my game manual, and sitting down to read it again. I am sure that there are sections of the manual that I have read a dozen times. Then I go back to my work, refining and improving it.

My father would not have had any resonance with something like RPGs; he was much more practical and did not have much truck with the world of fantasy. But I think he would have recognized the value of the manual and the relationship between my reading the book and accomplishing my task. And I'd like to flatter myself by thinking that I might look a little bit like him as I sit in my chair, a dog-eared volume in my lap and a look of concentration on my face, trying to get better at doing something I care about.

Better Bowling by Joe Wilman sits in my bookshelf, tape-mended spine, yellowed clippings, and all. The trophy that Leemark Lanes issued for Pop's 295 game went into his casket.

The best part of waking up

2009-09-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

As I sit in here in the quiet watching the skies lighten, as I have done scores of times in the past, it is time for a confession of sorts. My beverage of choice for times such as this, and for just about any morning, has lately been instant coffee.

I know, I know; in the context of the Pacific Northwest coffee culture, this is heresy. We're supposed to obsess over which side of the hill our beans were grown on, and order our espresso drinks with a stream of qualifiers as long as an Elizabethan sonnet, and know the difference between grande and vente as well as ristretto and lungo, and so on. I can play in that sandbox when I have to, but usually I choose not to. I don't know if it was growing up with burnt percolator coffee ever-present on the stovetop, or coming of age in a New York that only distinguished between "regular" and "black" in coffee ordering, or just having too many graveyard cups of 7-Eleven and Circle-K coffee as a cop, or maybe just having unrefined taste overall, but I've never been able to get too excited over coffee.

Many people out here just don't get instant coffee. Perhaps the kindest thing a friend has said about this penchant of mine was "Well, I guess if you consider it a completely different beverage, you could get used to the taste." So, in an attempt to make instant coffee more relatable to the prevailing attitude, here's a short course in becoming an instant instant coffee snob.

Starbucks: The big green machine has been pushing its little tubular packets of instant coffee furiously of late. I tried a fee sample we picked up and liked it better than the regular brew that the chain serves - it had less of that burnt flavor that many people complain about. And one of the weirdest things I have seen was a commuter cup that had slots to hold several of the little tubes - I guess that no matter where you are, you just cadge some hot water and Bob's your uncle. I could drink this stuff regularly, except I try not to redistribute any of my resources to Starbucks.

Folger's: This is a nice, steady, mainstream instant coffee. It's a little on the thin side when it comes to flavor; it never really gets bitter, but isn't ever that robust. The smaller size still comes in a glass jar, so that's cool.

Trader Joe's: A rare miss for our favorite funky foodstore. Their instant coffee is nondescript in flavor and has an oily film on top, no matter the proportions of milk and water. Give this a pass, even though it is in a cool glass jar.

Kona coffee: Otis has brought me back two types of instant 100% Kona coffee from Hawaii: Ukulele Melody from Hawaiian Brew and Gourmet Blend by Mulvadi. Both of them come in nice little hexagonal glass jars, and each has the nice, round, earthy flavor of Kona. The Ukulele can tend to some bitterness more so than the Mulvadi, and neither mixes as well with cream as the local brands.

Nescafé Clásico: The ne plus ultra of instant coffee. You can tell it's classy because not only are there two diacritical marks in the name, the jar has a really cool shape and the label is written primarily in Spanish, with some English subtitles. It actually has a rich, full flavor, and no bitterness at all, and creates a creamy drink when combined with half-and-half. I guess jillions of people worldwide drink this, even in those fancy European countries that we think we are copying with all this coffee-drink business we have going on. And it's what I'm drinking right now.

So, pick your poison. For some, it's a grande two-pump vanilla non-fat extra-hot latte. For me, it's a cuppa. Just relax and enjoy.

Whither the blogosphere?

2009-08-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

The other day, someone sardonically quipped that "blogging is so 2006." Y'know, I think they might have been right.

What with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, it seems that the practice of starting and maintaining a personal blog has fallen from favor, at least among our circle¹. I had the feeling that this was the case, so I decided to check it out by looking at the blogs from the original League of the Underemployed gang -- we friends who all jumped into blogging in early 2005 -- and compare blogs² from July and August of 2006 to July and August (to date*) of 2009:

Viva! An Experiment: 17-8, 21-3*
Stave It Off, 1,2,3: 14-3, 9-1*
Ned Said: 11-1, 17-0*
Independence Days: No data - shuttered
Life with Jon: No data - shuttered
HKC (vs. WalakaNet): 30-6, 30-1*

Wow. I had expected a decline, but not that much. What's the deal? Have we run out of things to say? Umpossible! Were we bored with the medium? Maybe, widgets or no. Were there other outlets for expression? Definitely.

It's hard to deny that Facebook bleeds posts away from a blog. Here's an example: I rode the brand new Link Light Rail and the not-so-new-anymore South Lake Union Streetcar line, both for the first time, yesterday. Back in the day, I would have spent the time composing a nice little essay about the adventure for the blog. What did I do yesterday? I posted this status update to Facebook from my phone: "I just got off the light rail and am now on the streetcar - ain't it cool?" Not quite Proustian, that. As an added incongruity, the person I shared the adventure with, Dingo, would never see the post - because she's not on Facebook!

I don't think I am alone in this sort of practice; Facebook does allow for quick and easy updating, and it's hard to beat that convenience. It's also great for sharing photos and links, and it has the added bonus of speaking to a somewhat screened community. Setting privacy issues aside, at least you know you're speaking to people who want to hear what you have to say -- they have chosen to "friend" you and include your posts in their news feed. These characteristics make Facebook an attractive channel for the same expressions that in 2006 would have found their way onto a blog.

In some ways, this bleed-off can work to make a blog healthier; leaner, perhaps, but healthier nonetheless. I know that I think more about a wider audience when I write for this blog - posterity, if you will - and use it as a space for practicing control and writing more structured pieces. I cannot speak to the motives of my blogging colleagues, but their work seems to be a bit more considered as well. There are fewer posts overall, but what's gone are the short blurbs and the offhand remarks; what remains is the developed writing.

Well, if Facebook handles all our socializing and our blogs remain focused on essaying, is there a down side? I think there is. What has gone missing is the place for [links/observation + short commentary] - a form that comprised a considerable portion of 2006 blogging.

Facebook allows links, of course, and you can even comment on them as you post them. But considering that the typical length of discourse on Facebook is about 20 words, and that your full text comment is put behind a cut at about 40, it doesn't encourage or leave a lot of room for an even minimally developed response. But with the current refinement of the blog contents, anything less than a fully-formed text seems depauperate in that context. So where do these mid-range utterances - too long for Facebook and too short for the blog - live?

Twitter is certainly out - the 140-character limit is a step backwards from Facebook limits. It may find its place in the communicative spectrum, but this isn't its role.

We could start another blog just for these medium-sized posts, where they wouldn't look out of place, but then our friends would just have yet another place to have to bookmark.

We could follow the maxim that the middle of the road is the most dangerous place to be and commit to either brevity or magniloquence, eschewing the mid-range post altogether.

Or we could just throw caution to the winds, as I am about to do, and throw a link-farm post onto our blogs every now and again. The interweblogosphere is changing, that's for sure, but the questions till remains: how will you know what I had for lunch unless I blog it?³

One of my technological favorites has always been the pneumatic delivery tube. Seen today only rarely, usually at bank drive-up windows, these cool and steampunky systems were still very common when I was a boy, transporting receipts from cash registers to the main office in big department stores and moving documents around large office buildings. Well, there are two different engineering proposals, documented by the folks over at Wired, which, while not strictly speaking pneumatic, bring back a little of the romance of the almost-forgotten systems.

The first project is The Cargo Tunnel, a dedicated network of four-foot-wide tunnels that would house a tiny little subway for the delivery of packages to homes and businesses, complete with tiny forklifts at the terminals to handle packages up to 18" x 18". The coolest/scariest part of the proposal is that self-guided TBMs (tunnel-boring machines) would create the network without surface life being any the wiser, like an attack from the cyborg moles. What could go wrong?

The second project is actually called the Urban Mole, and it applies the same principle to an existing network of tubes -- the sewer system. That's right, drop your parcel into a little carrier, seal it up tightly, and let it make it way through the thick and turgid waters of the sewers until it pops out at its destination. The article provides no details on the disinfectant bath that would have to be in place at the receiving terminals, but I am sure they have thought of that.

Y'know, maybe pneumatic tubes weren't such a bad idea after all.

I ran across a little online application called Personas our of MIT that attempts to represent your online presence graphically. You tell it your name and it searches for occurrences, using some kind of algorithm to rate and rank the surrounding words to determine the context of each instance. Then it squishes all the information together into a color bar. Here's mine (click to embiggen):

This looks pretty accurate; at least, there are no big surprises. But my name is extremely rare, if not in fact unique. (I go egosurfing fairly frequently and I have never encountered another me.) For anyone with a more common name, the results can be quite distorted. The Personas group says that this is a feature, not a bug, and that the process "demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world." So, there you go: reflection is the goal, not accuracy. Try your name and reflect away.

1. Special interest blogs, such as Let's Not Talk About Movies and Quiet Girl Gallery, as well as commercial blogs, still seem to be thriving.

2 Lowcoolant came and went as a Blogspot blog during this time, but TormentedbyDemons had been and continues to be active on his MySpace page. Since MySpace is a social networking site, this seems to align with my point, albeit obliquely.

3. I de-cobbed some leftover corn, mixed it with some leftover mashed potatoes, frozen peas, three cut-up veggie link sausages, and some slices of Red Torpedo onion that Dingo gave me to create a sort-of shepherdess pie. Mmm-mmm.

Water wheel turns 'round

2009-08-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

One of the endearing characters in the recent heartwarming film Up is Russell, the enthusiastic "Wilderness Explorer" who inadvertently stows away on the flying house. Russell is the quintessential over-achieving, over-equipped Boy Scout (non-trademark-infringing type), just like my friend Davey Callaghan, who made First Class Scout and had twenty merit badges while I was still a Tenderfoot (and who one summer collected enough coupons from gathering empty milk cartons to go to a Mets game for free not once, but twice). But despite all his gear, Russell is missing something important. He's got the mess kit, and the flashlight with the 90-degree angle in it, and even a bugle, but there's no canteen.

When I was a kid in the sixties and early seventies, canteens were the most essential piece of wilderness gear (ignoring for the moment that closest I ever got to wilderness was camping on the edges of the vast Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills). Some lucky kid might have an old army surplus canteen, the kind that Sgt. Rock had in the comics or that Vic Morrow had on Combat! on TV. Others, like Davey, would have a specially-purchased Boy Scout model. The rest if us had whatever we got from uncles or older brothers, camping store remainders or bargain basement specials. But wherever the canteen came from, this silver jug, so cool to the touch on a hot day and infusing the water with a metallic tang, was the first and most important piece of survival gear, and we all knew that no soldier or explorer would be caught without one (we had seen Sahara with Humphrey Bogart).

Of course, this concern with constant hydration confined itself to Boy Scout hikes and our imaginations; I didn't know any kid who carried a canteen on a regular basis, when just hanging out or playing stickball. No, the "civilian" canteen didn't start appearing until the early eighties, contemporaneous with the aerobics craze. Suddenly, all sorts of people, mostly women, were wearing Lycra and legwarmers and flinging themselves about to get their heart rates up. That kind of activity wears a person out, so it became more common to see people carrying plastic water cups around. These started to get more elaborate, with sealed lids, and sippy straws and handles and places to put ice in separate from the drinking water. These "sports bottles" are pretty rare now, mostly because they were too ugly to keep and made of plastic too crappy to last, but at one time they were so popular that the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip blamed them for the infantilization of society because of all the nipple-sucking they required. (I hardly ever see the classic ones anymore, but encountered something like one at Goodwill not too long ago.)

Of course, it wasn't long before the whole drinking-container process got more complicated. On the one hand, the instant-gratification and convenience movements of the nineties begat bottled water in individual disposable bottles, available first in vending machines and eventually in just about every retail establishment on the planet. Gone was the mess and fuss of actually filling your sports bottle with water; just buy a new one each time! (I have often thought that if you could go back in time to Atlanta in 1950 and tell the Coca-Cola board that someday they would be selling their stuff without even having to put sugar, color, or carbonation in it, they would all just die from pure avarice.) This trend butted up against the political-statement-making and environmentally-conscious threads always present in our culture, and a significant and growing portion of the population dropped the disposal bottles for the nearly-ubiquitous Nalgene bottle of the oughts.

Of course, Nalgene bottles were added to the list of Things That Can Kill Us and all of a sudden sipping from one was tantamount to courting horrible death. Like Superman changing the course of a mighty river, public opinion modified the trend and metal containers became la mode. Silver or colorful, with or without carabiner, as long as it was stainless steel, it was cool. There's one a foot from my elbow as I type. It can feel so cool to the touch on a hot day and infuses the water with a bit of a metallic tang.

So, you can probably guess where this is going: a lament that I didn't keep my old canteen, since that's what we've essentially come back to. In fact, that's how I had planned to end this piece, until I saw this ad and realized that we no longer have to hold onto our memories, since the consumer-industrial complex will be happy to sell them back to us anytime.

That's all, folks. Stay hydrated!

arcane: known to only a few; esoteric [L.>arcanus- hidden] (see holocryptic & recondite)

2009-07-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

Alan King was always one of my favorites. Even as a wee lad, I loved his stand-up routines and his appearances on Johnny Carson's couch, even though I had no reason to relate to his put-upon-by-modern-life suburban persona; I even read his books, Anybody Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It and Help! I'm a Prisoner in a Chinese Bakery.

I can recall as clearly as yesterday watching King do one of his routines more than forty years ago, maybe on Ed Sullivan, taking the piss out of the crop of television shows that season. Westerns were still in vogue then, and one of his bits went: "Look at Bonanza. It's Father Knows Best out west. The Big Valley? Mother Knows Best out west. Dundee and the Culhane? Nobody knows best out west!" The line got a big laugh, but I didn't get it.

I had never seen an episode of Dundee and the Culhane, and I still haven't. I can recall seeing subway poster ads for the show; I think they showed a top hat and a cane lying on a table with a cowboy hat and gun, or somesuch still life, with text promising something new in westerns. I was intrigued. I think the hat and cane put me in mind of Bat Masterson, another show that I liked, and I was always a sucker for people referred to with the definite article, so I was all over "The Culhane." I was primed for the show, but I never saw it.

Although these scattered remembrances - a line from a comedian and a poster - have floated in my consciousness since Lyndon Johnson was president, it was only recently that I thought I could use the power of the internets to tie this loose end off once and for all. I imagined I would be able to find a Dundee and the Culhane fan club, a tribute website, and even, if I were lucky, a full episode on YouTube or Hulu or somewhere.

Boy, was I wrong.

Oh, there are some sources out there, to be sure. IMDb catalogs the show, and Wikipedia gives it all of 169 words. It is mentioned ever so briefly on some television mega-sites and baby-boomer nostalgia pages. But there is no love for DatC on the internets: no fan site, no shrines, no clips, and very few stills. This one below repeats the most.

For the record, the show was a lawyer-western hybrid that aired for thirteen episodes in the fall of 1967. Dundee was a British attorney who came to practice in the American old west (how does that work?), establishing an office in Sausalito of all places. The Culhane was his Irish-American --- apprentice? partner? -- I'm not really sure. Apparently, the pair traveled across the west, providing thrills of the Perry Mason meets Have Gun, Will Travel variety. Dundee was played by John Mills, pre-Oscar and long prior to his knighthood; The Culhane was played by Sean Garrison, who seems to have been a working television actor up until 1981 or so. All of the episode titles ended with "Brief" - "The Cat in the Bag Brief," "The Death of a Warrior Brief," and so on. I think I really would like to see an episode or two.

But what is much more interesting to me about this whole affair is that even with the internets, there is still some ephemeral knowledge that is out of easy reach. One of the first websites I ever contributed to years ago was a Tales of the Gold Monkey fan page. I was amazed then that this obscure show, which lasted one season in the early eighties, had so much information available; in the ensuing years, I gradually became accustomed to finding on the web any information I wanted I almost no time, and was amazed at just how much energy was poured into some pretty specific niche interests. But despite to this commodification of popular culture and the incredible networking power of the world wide web, there are still some things that remain known only to a few; the details of the adventures of these two gunslinging lawyers seem to be in the category. If I really want to find out about Dundee and the Culhane, I'm going to have to work a little harder than making a few Google searches. Somehow, that actually feels good.

And maybe I'll even do it. Then I'll know why that Alan King line was so funny.

In all fairness

2009-07-24T11:15:00.001-07:00

I remember a conversation with my philosophy teacher, mentor, and pal Joel Goldstein back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and I was trying out college for the first time. We were discussing fairness, and how in some circumstances it might be determined by the result and in others by the process. For example, if you and I were to split a cookie, a determination of fairness would probably depend on whether we each felt we got an equal share (the result) and the process - I cut and you pick, get a trusted third party to do it, measure/weigh it - wouldn't really be important. However, in an other situation, such as a poker game or Monopoly, fairness would be determined not by an equal distribution of the resources in the end, but only by whether the correct process was followed - the rules were adhered to and no one cheated. Result vs. process.

A recent lunch with my favorite Mad Engineer Dr. Burn, I was reminded of a discussion* we had a few weeks ago about Babylonian fractions, a system whose process seems to have been affected by a particular cultural positioning regarding the fairness of different results.

Let's show this through a word problem. You have seven loaves of bread and eight people. If you were to divide up the bread evenly among the people, how much would each person get?

In most classes discussing fractions, the answer might go something like this: Well, there are 7 loaves of bread that I have to divide among 8 people, so 7 is the numerator and 8 is the denominator, and each person gets 7/8 of a loaf of bread. And that's as good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.

Think about how you would actually make this happen. Presuming all the loaves are the same, you could cut a one-eighth piece from the end of each one and pile them all together. Seven people would get a less-than-full loaf, and one person would get a pile of slices.

But is this really dividing the bread evenly? Is an almost-whole loaf of bread the same as a pile of slices? (Slices that would all be heels, too!) Isn't it really the case that seven people got 7/8 of a loaf a bread and one person got stuck with seven 1/8s? We can try all sorts of variations on this method - take a slice from the middle of some loaves and the ends of others and so on - but it all comes out to same sort of result unless we work at it from a completely different perspective.

The Babylonians had this other perspective. Rather than focusing on trying to make the denominator in fractions equal one, which we really like to do (6/1 is the same as 6, right?) the Babylonians liked keeping the numerator at one.

The bread problem would be solved like this in Babylonia: First we cut each of the seven loaves in half. Now we have fourteen 1/2s. Each person gets one 1/2, leaving six. We cut those 1/2s in half, making twelve 1/4s. Each person gets one 1/4, leaving four. We cut those 1/4s in half, making eight 1/8s. Each person then gets one 1/8, and all the bread is gone. Each person gets a 1/2 and a 1/4 and a 1/8 of a loaf of bread.

(And in case you think this is just one of those math tricks, it does come out the same: 1/2 = 4/8 and 1/4 = 2/8, so 4/8 + 2/8 + 1/8 = 7/8, just like the other way.)

The difference between the Babylonian method (which I am sure I have oversimplified) and just "doing fractions" is that the approach incorporates a sense of the reality of fairness in dividing things up in its very structure. I don't think I'd feel good about getting seven bread heels for my share of the baked goods, even if you showed me how it was mathematically even. In the real world, 7/8 does not necessarily equal seven 1/8s. But 1/2 and 1/4 and 1/8 should be the same as 1/2 and 1/4 and 1/8. In this case, the result and the process work with each other, and fairness comes from their intersection, not from one or the other.

So, perhaps a purely binary view of how fairness is determined is less useful than initially thought. And that might be the most important takeaway from consideration - not a new way of doing math, but a new way of thinking about things and an understanding that as unlikely as it sounds, many coins have more than two sides. These two conversations took place over thirty years apart. My learning may be slow, but it appears to be constant.

*In calling it a discussion, I flatter myself. Actually, Dr. Burn just told me what for.

Problems solving

2009-07-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I was a supervisor in the circulation department of the main Seattle library. We had two cash registers for overdue fines and other fees, so we had a combination safe in which we kept our change bank and pending deposits. When we closed at night, we would put the two cash drawers in a locked desk drawer, and one of the first supervisor duties in the morning was to retrieve them, complete the reconciliation and deposit, and make the safe right.

One morning, we discovered that the safe had been emptied overnight of about $400 in cash, without having been broken into. The cash drawers locked in the desk were untouched.

We had a meeting of the supervisors to figure thing out; everyone was puzzled as to what happened. In my (very) recent ex-detective voice, I told them: It's very simple. We supervisors use the combination daily; we have it memorized. You (and I pointed at our manager) never use it, but you need to know it just in case. So you have it written down somewhere. Probably on a post-it note. Probably in the back of the center drawer of your desk or under the phone. Some custodian came across it, realized there's only one safe around here, took a shot, and made a quick four hundred bucks. My manager was silent for a moment, and then said, "Well, it wasn't in my drawer. It was on the bottom of it."

After checking with the higher-ups, it was decided that, besides changing the combination of the safe (duh!), we would stop keeping the cash drawers overnight in the desk.

I pointed out that the security of the desk hadn't been compromised and that there was no need to change that practice. I was told that we just wanted to ramp up our overall security by keeping all the cash in a more secure place. I pointed out that were were moving cash from a place that had never had cash stolen from it to a place that had had cash stolen from it and asked how that was increasing security. I was told to stop pointing things out.

The episode has remained close to my heart as I have studied and thought about and taught critical thinking, but it may have been supplanted by a new episode that has recently unfolded on our campus.

There is a busy crosswalk on our campus from our main building to our main parking lot. Ever since I came to at Cascadia, it had been controlled by a stop sign in both directions. Traffic was required to stop at all times, regardless of whether a crossing pedestrian was present.

Recently, construction work began in the crosswalk area, and when it was completed, the stop signs had been removed and a new feature installed at the crosswalk: sensors now react to the presence of a walker by activating in-ground yellow flashing lights along the crosswalk itself, and a recorded voice admonishes pedestrians to "use caution when crossing."

Besides the disembodied voice being a little creepy, the whole rigmarole seems confusing. Apparently, someone may have been struck at or in the crosswalk, and this modification was in response to that incident, but I have yet been able to find hard info on that.

I have been trying to figure out how taking away a stop sign makes the crosswalk safer. I mean, if someone was indeed struck, it was (obviously) by a car that was moving; is taking away the mandatory stop likely to increase or decrease the number of cars moving through the crosswalk without stopping? Are the flashing yellow lights more or less likely than a stop sign to cause a driver to yield right-of-way to a pedestrian? Isn't the voice warning, on some systemic level, moving the responsibility for crosswalk safety from the drivers onto the pedestrians? This whole thing doesn't seem thought through.

I have also heard, but been unable to confirm, that the campus was not allowed to have both the flashing/warning system and the stop sign at the same crosswalk. There may be an RCW that prohibits this on public roads, but the campus is governed by Washington Administrative Code, and neither WAC 132Z-116, for Cascadia, or WAC 478-117, for UW-Bothell, seems to preclude the installation of any combination of traffic signaling devices. Even if the code made such a restriction, it would leave us with the question: if you have to choose between just a stop sign or just a lighted crosswalk, which one intuitively seems safer?

Maybe there is a counter-intuitive aspect to the situation; that can sometimes be the case. I wonder, though, if this wasn't another instance of people solving the problem that wasn't there rather than the one that was.

A day

2009-07-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

I read on facebook a note from my childhood pal that he was remembering the death of a parent seven years earlier that day. My thoughts turned to my own father's funeral, perhaps because I think that was the last time I saw my friend, and I realized that I couldn't remember when my father died.

That's not exactly true; I knew it was 1984, because when I got the news I had just been on the police department a year or so and was living in that big apartment in Magnolia. But I couldn't narrow it down much more than that.

I could remember that Pop had been diagnosed in late 1982. I can remember my brother-in-law Gene filling me in on the situation, that Pop had lymphoma.

"So, it looks like this type of cancer has two kinds, the kind that kills you slow, and the kind that kills you quick. And your father don't have the first kind."

That must have been around Christmastime 1982. When I next saw Pop it was when I made a mad cross-country dash back to Brooklyn in June 1983 for his and Ma's 50th wedding anniversary while I was in the middle of the police academy. My then-wife Lisa and I caught a plane on Friday night knowing I had to be back in roll call at 7:00 am Monday morning. My sisters had planned a huge reunion party around the anniversary.

I can remember that during that weekend, there were more of our family's old friends and relatives in my sister's backyard than I have ever seen together before or since. Pop arrived to the surprise party showing the effects of radiation treatment: he was thin, frail, and weak. But his spirits brightened immeasurably as he caught up with his old cronies, these tough old birds from the bowling alleys and racetracks of New York. We made sure he had pictures taken with all of his children.

I guess we figured the end was close, but Pop fooled us. I can remember when he and Ma came out for my graduation from the academy in August 1983. He was his old self - better even, strong and vibrant, having a ball walking all over Seattle with my mother, both of them proud of my accomplishment. They stayed in my Belltown condo and we had a splendid visit.

It was great, but it didn't last too terribly long after they went home; sometime after Lisa and I moved into that apartment in Magnolia in early 1984, my sister called to say that Pop had gotten sick again. I asked her if she wanted me to fly out; she said to wait and see. The "kind that kills you quick" didn't wait for me a second time; Pop died less than two weeks later and my next trip out would be for the funeral.

I can remember finding out that Pop had died. I was at home alone in the afternoon when the phone call came from my sister; after hanging up, I began to make arrangements to go back. A short time later, Lisa came home with our friend Jim; I can't remember where they had been or why Jim's wife Sandy wasn't there. I told them about Pop and they wanted to comfort me; I waved it off and we played Risk.

I can remember the wake; not all of it, but some details. I can remember that George, my sister Monya's widower, seemed have the hardest time of all of us. I remember that he fell on the sidewalk, cutting his head on a metal fixture, and we had to take him to the emergency room. I made him a chicken sandwich when we got back home.

I can remember the funeral; not all of it, but some details. I can remember my brother comforting my mother by handing her handkerchief after handkerchief that he pulled from his pocket as she was crying. I can remember him tucking one of his business cards in Pop's jacket pocket before they closed the casket, a gesture so apt and so loving and so surprising in its tenderness.

I can remember heading to the cemetery on Staten Island. The hearse got a flat, right there on 66th Street under the Gowanus Expressway, and we all waited, a stationary procession.

I can remember Staten Island: green and far away.

I can remember saying goodbye to my father as they lowered the casket into the ground, knowing that there was no unfinished business between us, that he had cared for me as a boy and respected me as a man. He loved me, and although he was a man of few words, he had even said so, once, sort of. During one regular weekly long-distance call from the west coast, after small talk about the weather and before handing the phone over to Ma, he said "Your mother loves you, you know." I said I knew that. "And I do, too," he said. I said I knew that, too.

I can remember all that. But for the life of me, looking down at the computer screen twenty-five years later, I couldn't remember that date.

I got up and walked down to my office, and pawed through some folders in the second drawer of the file cabinet. I knew exactly what I was looking for; a sheaf of yellow five-column accounting paper with handwriting in black ink. I found it in a less than a minute and leafed through the pages of a timeline I had written up back in the day, cataloging major events and transitions: jobs, apartments, and so on. It was right there, two inches down from the top of the 1984 page, in the furthest right column, in tiny lettering. Just Pop's name and the notation 5/19/84. No other explanation.

Twenty-five years, one month, and 26 days.

Now I can remember that date, but I guess it doesn't change much.

Running Jogging on empty

2009-07-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, I have been going around Green Lake just about every morning this summer. It's a nice four-mile loop: a half-mile to the lake path, a three-mile circuit, and a half-mile back. I usually go right after I get up; I'm generally heading out sometime between 6:16 and 6:45. It's been great, physically and spiritually. But it has brought up a semantic issue of how to name what I am doing.

On alternate days, it is easy: I walk. Walking is something that most of do, and we can easily recognize it. Specialized variations of it are usually very distinctive and have specific names : racewalking and silly-walks, for example.

But on alternate days I go around the lake at a faster clip, raising the question: am I jogging or running? The question came up at a recent breakfast with Johnbai, and we explored various distinctions; I later did a bit of Internet research. I eventually wound up with little in the way of a satisfactory answer.

The first consideration was that is had something to do with the stride. Running, we reckoned, had a longer stride, an open stride, and jogging meant using a small stride, with perhaps more knee than hip action; we thought that jogging might be harder on the knees than running. As usual, we didn't even know what we were talking about.

Stride came up first partly because my buddy D.D. had clued me into some research into running form from an anthropological standpoint. To grossly oversimplify, it seems we've been training ourselves to do it all wrong for the past thirty years. The human foot, with the arch acting like a natural leaf spring, is designed to land almost flat-footed, to absorb the shock of impact and then spring back up, transferring the energy to the next step-off. The long-stride, heel-and-roll form (encouraged and abetted by over-designed running shoes) is actually less efficient and is likely increasing the incidence of running injuries, despite all the cushioning and padding. So, "real" running probably involves a stride that looks more like what we have been calling "jogging" - the foot hitting the ground directly beneath the hip, instead of in front of it.

(There is a secondary hypothesis that ancient humans, natural endurance runners and one of the few animals who could run in the heat of the day, would use this skill to run down game, not by catching it, but by exhausting it.)

So, with stride apparently out of the mix to distinguish jogging and running, we turned to speed. A few websites and discussion forums used this as a measure: some arbitrary number - a ten-minute pace, a nine-minute pace, an eight-minute pace, whatever - was selected. Slower than that speed was jogging, faster than that was running.

(As a baseline, the typical walk, exclusive of window-shopping or flower-smelling, ranges from about a 15 to 20-minute pace - 3 or 4 mph. NatDog ran her first marathon at about a nine-and-a-half minute pace - a little better than 6 mph. World class runners can do a marathon and maintain a five-minute pace - 12 mph.)

This result-based method doesn't seem to take into account the observed differences between individual ability levels - we have all seen people whom we would characterize as running all out even if their speeds were under one of these arbitrary levels.

Another theme arose in the research that did address individual differences, that of effort: running was what you did when you were working hard and getting out of your comfort zone, while jogging was moving comfortably and working, but not too hard. This approach seemed way too idiosyncratic to ever become useful in a general application and didn't get much traction in the discussions.

From a completely different angle came the cultural construct method. In this scheme, running is what people do when they are training competitively for timed events; jogging is what people do for general health reasons. In some of the more developed models of this type, this kind of social construction seemed to make the most sense; underlying most of the definitions, however, was some sentiment like "Running is what I do because I am a Serious Athlete; jogging is what the rest of you amateurish rabble do." The unspoken judgmental nature of this model makes its use less appealing than it might otherwise be.

You can see where all this rumination took me: nowhere. I still didn't know what to label my morning locomotion. I was thinking about it, and, in fact, thinking about this blog post, as I made my way around the lake this morning (walking today), when I suddenly realized that I was spending so much time looking for a label for what I was doing that I wasn't paying attention to feeling what it was I was doing. And I thought back to a mediation I wrote last summer, in which I talked about how good it felt to do and not to think about running.

So, we're done with this. Jogging, running, walking, sprinting, racing, tearing, trotting, galloping - whatever we want to call it, I'm just going to keep going around the lake.

Apology for taste

2009-07-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

So, this past weekend, I came to be at a cabin in the woods in pursuit of a peaceful weekend away from Independence Day festivities and explosions. High in Chinook Pass, I tarried with some pals beside the American River, relaxing in the rusticity.

Of course, bringing a book is part and parcel of such a retreat, and I had in my hands a copy of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which had coincidentally been left in my work mailbox just days before by a colleague who thought I would enjoy the story of two seventies-era youths who bond over comic books. Since the seventies were my own coming-of-age decade and since comics are my penchant, it seemed like a sure bet, so much so that I did not even bring a Plan B / backup book.

Alas, it was not to be. I don't know about Lethem's qualities as a storyteller; I never made it that far. I do know that his prosody leans toward the elaborate - in fact, it is positively filigreed. The language was so lyrical and literary that I felt as if I were reading sonnets written on Belgian lace; there were so many grace notes I had a hard time finding the substance.

Take this description of two young girls roller-skating, from the opening of the book:

The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut.

Sky-pink hair? I've seen the sky get pinkish at sunset or sunrise; does that make their hair an off-blue? And gauzy? I'm not sure I know what gauzy hair is. I sure didn't know what the girls looked like. And if, in fact, the girls were murmured rhymes, why not edit that sentence down and just say that first? Finally, I have often told my students that italics and boldface for emphasis are marks of weak prose; maybe I was wrong, but I don't think the edited version of that sentence would need them.

I soldiered on through more similarly flowery prose and in a few pages was struck by this passage wrapping up a description of the historically dubious naming of a newly-gentrified neighborhood by its sponsor:

So, Boerum Hill, though there wasn't any hill. Isabel Vendle wrote it and so it was made and so they would come to live in the new place which was inked into reality by her hand, her crabbed hand which scuttled from past to future, Simon Boerum and Gowanus unruly parents giving birth to Boerum Hill, a respectable child.

Again we get the in-text edit-by-comma, "hand" gaining a "crabbed" modifier only with repetition, not at the outset. We also get a serial "and," the metaphorical "inked into reality," and a concluding participial clause trying to shoulder the action, all in one rambling sentence.

I'm not saying any of these language choices are bad, incorrect, or even inappropriate; I just felt when reading it that it was all style and little substance, that Lethem cared more about writing prettily than telling a story, and that I didn't know how much I could get through.

As it turned out, not much. About page twelve or so I gave up on it and wandered into the cabin to see if there was a nice paperback on the small bookshelf in the corner by the fireplace. I pulled out a somewhat worn copy of Agatha Christie's Dead Man's Mirror, one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries. It began

The flat was a modern one. The furnishings of the room were modern, too. The armchairs were squarely built, the upright chairs were angular. A modern writing-table was set squarely in front of the widow and at it sat a small elderly man. His head was practically the only round thing in the room. It was egg-shaped.

Ah. This room I could see, and this man I could visualize. The weekend's reading agenda was reshaped but salvaged.

Now, I have wondered about this response I had. An easy explanation is my falling on the spare side of the ol' Fitzgerald-Hemingway divide: possessing a bent for the plain and unadorned as opposed to the mannered and ornate. A specific preference between those two authors may be so in my case, but how does that explain my absolute enthusiasm for Dickens, whose paragraphs seem like dense thickets of forest next to the bare tundra of Papa's sentences?

Perhaps I merely fall in the Animist quadrant of Scott McCloud's Four Tribes theory of creators, concerned mostly with story, while Lethem is a Classicist, focused on beauty.

Or maybe the answer is as prosaic as my commute companion suggested today: I wanted a "beach book," and not a literary novel, in that particular place and time.

But maybe the truth is that I'm just not very "literary" at all. And maybe I can live with that.

Links, hold the sausage

2009-06-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here in the Wayward coffeehouse while Otis is out at her book club. About 85% of the twenty or so people here are with a group whose table stand reads Steam Punk, 6:30 to 10:30. There have been a couple of brassy artifacts passed around, but the group actually looks like any generic activities club - no goggles, beaver hats, or spats to be seen. It's a little disappointing actually. I haven't made contact yet, but I am eavesdropping pretty good.

Although none of it is steam-punky, I wanted to share some stuff that has been cluttering up my bookmarks folder. The first is this lovely little movie that was apparently made as a student final project. It is a visual treat as well as a nice little slice of whimsy:

Machu Picchu Post from Machu Picchu Post Team on Vimeo.

The next selection is also artistic, but in a completely different idiom. Apparently, there is a new mash-up genre gaining popularity: re-making (usually clip-heavy) credit sequences for one pop culture icon for another pop culture icon. Here, take a look at Han Solo, p.i. to see what I mean:

Now, I wasn't kidding when I called this artistic. As stunned as you are by the sheer awesomeness of the juxtaposition, take a look at this side-by-side comparison with the original sequence and see how well the creator, TheCBVee, matched not just the visual feel of the credits, but the thematic and emotional elements as well.

Well played, sir.

As I mentioned in the last post, I spent last week impersonating an art student. Coincidentally, I tripped over this art school blog post while I was there. I have to say that I saw some of those students in the class, but I don't think I was much like this guy:

And finally, something from the wingnut file. While researching something real, I ran across this political commentator's rant against the pernicious influence on our culture of tobacco, alcohol, drugs... and dogs. Yes, the pet industry in its unholy alliance with child-scorning misfit "pet parenting" dog owners is a threat to our society that rivals crack cocaine. Mmmmmmm-kay. Need I say she is member of the GOP?

Finally - just as I finished typing that last sentence - a woman came in wearing a pith helmet with goggles up on the crown, a funky adventuress vest, and long, wide trousers. Yay, hardcore steampunk lady! Time for me to start writing that new GURPS campaign!

Traffic refuge/Comics class

2009-06-26T17:09:00.001-07:00

So, I left the Pacific Northwest College of Art some time ago, but I haven't made it out of Clark County yet. Traffic is just misery, so I have taken refuge at a Krispy Kreme donut shop to wait out the storm a bit.*

(By the way, although I am not all that fond of donuts, KK is a pretty good place to hangout, at least here in The Couv. It is open until 10:00 pm, has a nice strong wi-fi signal, and sells coffee for a dime (some weird "depression-era prices" marketing scheme.)

For those who weren't completely in the loop, I have been attending a week-long class at PNCA called Graphic Novel Intensive. It is both a theory and a studio class; we have been doing readings and having lectures/group discussions, but we have also been producing our own work. In fact, the class work will be collected in an anthology that will be published through one of those Internet just-in-time printing places.

The real draw for me was that the visiting instructor for the course was Ellen Forney, whom I have gone on about before, and she did not disappoint in her high wattage lessons and demonstrations. Dan Duford, the PNCA staff instructor, brought an energetic and playful nature to the heavy lifting of class readings and exercises.

I've been messing about with comics analysis and criticism for some time, and it's starting to show; much of the theoretical material was old news for me, and based on the feedback to my exercises, my grasp of the language of comics is pretty well-developed by now. But as usual, my skill set seems to fill up with writing and, even more so, editing techniques; my actual graphic production still leaves a lot to be desired. But that was part of why I invested so much time (and took on double-duty with my teaching responsibilities) to be a part of the class: I wanted to explore the studio experience and dive into the creative process of comics.

So I played around with my drawing and even experimented a little bit with brushes. Usually, I know what I want to do, but I feel so limited in my talent that I abandon my ideas for something simpler to execute. I know this is chickening out; the wonderful cartoonist Donna Barr supposedly once said if you want to be a comics artist, first make 10,000 drawings. I have seen this in action, even: one of may favorite webcartoonists, Jeph Jacques, started out with stuff looking like this, and now does this. I guess I just have to decide if I really want to do this all myself, or if my destiny is to write and edit.

In any case, I did want to share my final product. I brought this from concept to thumbnails to final pencils to inks and then a bunch of Photoshopping (especially the lettering) in the last 24 hours. I'll post more in a substantive post with other scans, but for now, here's the house ad for a series based on a concept you might remember.

*I'm not going to post this right away because Otis thinks I am coming home tomorrow morning and I am going to surprise her.

Poesy

2009-06-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

It was a bit of a game night around the townhouse last night. Johnbai came over with Ticket to Ride and Otis, he, and I spent a nice hour or so building railroads across Europe. Fruitloops came over to observe the tail end, and then we moved into the living room for some competitive poetry.

Y'see, in the relentless search to market every variation of those Magnetic Poetry tiles, which started as a simple novelty and then grew into an amalgamation of all kinds of speciality collections and related products, the public was once treated to the Magnetic Poetry Game. It came with two sets of conditions cards, an extensive set of tiles, a little refrigerator door to put the poetry on, and a set of ill-thought-out rules (score a point for each word in your poem?). In her gentle and non-competitive way*, Otis tossed away the rules and turned the whole deal into a series of writing exercises. Here they are.**

Otis led off, but her warm-up poem is lost to the fog of history. Johnbai went next; the cards said his poem had to be about flowers and had to begin with a word starting with "T":

Tender cat lick boy,
full of dream-time and chocolate,
wish for a
ticklish moon where
blue flowers storm through the sky.
Their ache is thunder and peace.

We all liked it, but didn't think it was about flowers. (So if we had been playing by the rules, Johnbai would have lost!)

Fruitloops went next. She had to do something about holidays and begin with a word starting with "C."

Clean together, soon
Crowded cheek kisses
Celebrate dark chocolate.
Remember life and family,
Blue butter angel.
It's a game,
Leave it
Calm.

I wonder if her own repetition of that initial C was deliberate or unconscious.

I went next; I had to say something about rain, and the first line of the poem had to be an exclamation.

It's too dry!

Clouds,
spread and sex the sky.
Sound of thunder, sing.

Water,
fly,
lick green hill,
clean that mountain,
kiss this ground.

I think I was influenced by our recent dry spell. The board came back to Otis. Her task was a curious concatenation: Begin a poem about "home town" with the word "journey."

The journey is a film
in my skin -- tender, cold
like a dark drive to the dog bed of home.

I leave this prisoner ground
tongue-faced and alone

With, that were done.

* O showed up during the poetry game, but chose not to participate the non-competition.
** Any editing during transcription is my fault; blame me if it ruins the poem.

Launching into an explanation

2009-06-18T16:50:00.000-07:00

The other day, during a conversation with some pals including Johnbai, the subject of catapults came up, as it often does with D&D types and other geeks. The discussion created a bit of a disagreement in fact: I said that catapult properly referred to a device for throwing javelins and that a ballista threw rocks; Johnbai insisted that it was the other way around. (We did both agree that a trebuchet was the large, counter-weighted slinging device.) Since we are both brilliant men, this disconnect bothered me, so I have tracked down its cause: what I am using is more like Roman terminology, while Johnbai is using medieval nomenclature.

Roman artillery came in three major forms: the ballista, the onager, and the catapult, from heaviest to lightest. The onager looks the most like what most people think of when they hear the word catapult.

(click any picture to embiggen)

Notice that the throwing arm gets tension by its position in a twisted skein of cord/ cable / ligaments/ they-apparently-aren't-sure-precisely-what. These engines usually threw rocks at the walls of cities.

The ballista, which Johnbai envisions as a "giant crossbow," was actually the heaviest device in the Roman arsenal, and it usually threw rocks as well, but could reach much farther or hit much harder.

I guess this one was shooting directly at troops, since it has no elevation to speak of. It also uses the twisted-skein method for tension.

The catapult was the smallest siege engine, with perhaps a little more accuracy:

You can see why Johnbai would think of this as a ballista; it does bear a superficial resemblance to a big crossbow, but notice that the arms don't receive tension from being bent: they are also situated in twisted skeins. Anyway, this is the first thing that comes into my mind when I hear the word catapult; somehow this "proper" Roman use of the term has ingrained itself in my consciousness, and that was the source of our terminological discord.

Five hundred years after Rome fell, siege engines were still in use, but some of the names had changed. Catapult had become a more general term for all sort of throwing devices; the mid-range weapon of choice for this type was the mangonel, its equine nickname echoing the Roman weapon named after a wild ass:

Ballista in the medieval period no longer referred to a heavy siege engine for throwing rocks, but to the overgrown crossbow so popular in D&D campaigns:

Notice the change here: this machine gets it tension from bending a bow in the same manner as a standard crossbow, not from the twisted-skein method. This is what really distinguishes it from the Roman catapult.

Of course, when Johnbai was DM for the D&D campaign that ended with the Great Grelsch Insurrection, he was never specific as to whether the siege weapons employed by the Thieves' Guild Navy to attack the fortress were powered by the twisted-skein or bent-bow method, so we'll never know if they were Roman catapults or medieval ballistas.

Credit where credit is due: the information and illustrations for this piece came from this book, which, according to some paperwork inside, has been in my possession for over 37 years. Oy vey.

What if #1

2009-06-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

Back in junior year of high school - that would make this 1973 or '74 - we sons of Regis were given the push to start applying to colleges. Lots of letters went out to the Ivy League and to "good, small liberal art colleges" (as our guidance counselor called schools of a certain kind and caliber). I dutifully followed suit, but threw a wild card into the mix: I sent a letter of inquiry (since I could not find an application form) to the University of Iceland at Reykjavik.

I can't now recall what prompted this action. I had always had some fondness for the island nation, with its storied Viking past, its legendary linguistic protectionism, its phone-book-by-first-name, and its oldest currently-seated parliamentary body (the Althing, founded 930 CE). Perhaps we had just been reading the Elder Eddas or something; at any rate, I thought it was a good idea to consider leaving Brooklyn for a course of higher education in an isolated and insular nation-state located on a volcanic island in the North Atlantic.

So, off went the letter, and, a few weeks later, back came the reply. Even in the formal academic English, the message was unmistakable: thanks, but no thanks, and don't call us, we'll call you. There was some explanation of the difference between European and American higher education (they wouldn't consider me for admission until I had completed two years of college) but one other point came through loud and clear: the language of instruction was Icelandic. The first year of admission, I would take Icelandic History and Icelandic; after that, I was on my own. The school clearly had no structured international student program, and displayed little interest in starting one with me.

Despite this warm welcome, I decided not to pursue my admissions process. Or perhaps after a few years, I just forgot. I did complete an associate's degree in 1978, but moved to Portland, Oregon to begin building my ultimately checkered work history instead of sending my transcript to Reykjavik. As it does, life happened, and here I am.*

But I did make it to Iceland, and even to the university. In summer of 2001, I took an extended vacation in Europe, and had the travel agent get me a weekend junket to Reykjavik while I was staying in England; I think I flew in on a Thursday night and stayed until Sunday. While I was enjoying the cosmopolitan delights of the city, I made sure to pay a visit to the university. It seemed very much like any other university, not an especially magical place, and I noticed when I was in the bookstore buying a T-shirt that about 75% of the textbooks were in English. I guess times changed at Háskóli Íslands.

Occasionally, I wonder what would have become of me had I pursued this educational plan, but the variables are so vast that I cannot even begin to reckon how different my life might have been. Perhaps it is enough for me to remember that, as a youth, I was the type of person who thought that initiating such an endeavor was perfectly reasonable and to never lose that sense of what is possible.

*For what it's worth, I did get accepted to a good, small liberal arts college, Reed, but chose instead to go to a crappy, small, private community college, Mercy.

When I so informed him, the guidance counselor looked at me and held one hand high over his head. "This," he said, "is Mount Olympus, and here is Reed." He put his other hand down around his shins. "And here is Mercy."

The Greek myths never grabbed me as much as the Norse, so I wasn't swayed. After getting my associate's, I finished my bachelor's twenty-four years later at the oldest distance education institution in the country and then took a master's from a regional, comprehensive public university. So it goes.

Report from Client Exile

2009-06-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

Otis has a busy morning working, so I have hied myself to one of my favorite spots: The Green Bean.

I love to plug this place - it's a cool little non-profit coffeehouse that supports a bunch of worthwhile local causes. Nice work, even if their parent organization loves the jebus. There's a particularly happy energy in here this morning, with some study group (talking about electricity and cells?) that just left, a bunch of people working on laptops, some kids - just lots of activity and plenty of sunshine streaming through the big windows.

Of course, the big deal right now is that yesterday was the last day of the regular school year, which ended with the Cascadia graduation ceremony at 7:00 last night in beautiful Lynnwood. So, counting today, there are 107 days until the first day of fall quarter. Wow! That's a lot! In point of fact, it is not quite so golden as it might otherwise be. In an attempt to get a handle on my summer, I (of course) made a spreadsheet. Here's the chart (click to embiggen):

Lots of things, small and large, floating around these 15 weeks. For example, I need to post my grades by Tuesday, and I'm luckier than many of my colleagues in that my grading is actually finished; I also have a six-hour planning retreat on Monday. I've picked up two classes for the eight-week summer session, and I will probably have a half-dozen half-day working meetings of the Program Review committee in July and August, plus some report-writing time. The required pre-fall days start two weeks before the quarter, and I'll likely have to go to some meetings to plan those, too.

I'm not complaining at all, mind you; I have a long list of personal projects to work on, and I fully expect to have plenty of time to dig into all of them, as well as enjoying the lake every day and some occasional weekend trips. We may even see the return of Summer Humpday dinners in some form! Let's face it, 107 is a big number no matter how you slice it up.

So here's to a full, full summer!

Coffee shop blogging, old style

2009-06-10T17:19:00.001-07:00

Now this is the way to do café society when it's all summery like this: outdoors on a busy city street, letting life stream by and around. I'm down the street from the townhouse at Peaks, giving them yet another chance. The wi-fi seems strong today but my iced coffee is more tepid than cool, so it's still a mixed result at best.

My days of regularly photoblogging my coffee stops aren't so long ago, but a few times recently I have found myself slipping into reveries of times long past. The most acute was occasioned by my seeing a movie trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123. This caused me to seek out the some clips from the original on YouTube, and that's what led me in search of lost time.

You see, the original book and movie of Pelham 123 came out at exactly the right period in my life to be deeply influential and important: that is, when I was sixteen or so, immersed in old-school pulp adventures, stumbling-to-maturity comic books, Humphrey Bogart movies, and Raymond Chandler novels. Crime as metaphor, heroes vs. villains, the antihero, battered morality, and flawed ethics were themes I and my like-minded pals grabbed, swallowed, inhaled, and sweat. It was a period of time when traditional narratives were becoming problematized for us, when it seemed the world, like television, was no longer merely black and white.

Compounding Pelham 123's appeal as an example of our chosen genre was its setting: New York City, in the subways. This was my world; my high school years saw me on the BMT and the IRT (transfer at 14th Street/Union Square) for over two hours each weekday, and as much or more on the weekends, looking for diversion. The City was in bad shape in the seventies, a mean drunk in the middle of bender, dirty, dangerous, and broke. Simultaneously thrilled and appalled by our home, we responded to stories that wallowed in its degeneracy. This story, and its contemporary, Report to the Commissioner, captured that fatalistic edge while still providing us with enough "good guy" energy to keep us from spinning off into nihilism.

All this was happening in during a time when I was discovering, sometimes in very indirect ways, who I was, and what I valued, and what was important. And once again encountering The Taking of Pelham 123, while it was only one small piece of that mosaic, puts me in mind of that whole growth experience.

Nostalgia has been commodified along with so much else in our culture; we package and sell the memories of our youth and even those bygone days that we never experienced. But it would do us well to remember that the word nostalgia contains the root form of "pain" as well as that of "home"; it is not an emotion to take lightly, and it brings with it much more than fondness and warmth. For as I remember the young man who was captivated by a certain crime drama, I realize that never again will I be as open to the world, as impressed with new-to-me ideas, and as constantly surprised every day to find out that the world might not be exactly as I thought it was the day before. With age comes a certain amount of weariness and dullness; I can cultivate my wonder and practice my curiosity, but the eyes of a sixteen-year-old have a special quality as magic as X-ray Specs, and as young-at-heart as I remain, I will never see the world through those eyes again.

I am now about the same age as Walter Matthau was when he made the movie.

Echoes of unuttered words

2009-06-05T22:33:00.000-07:00

That sounds like such a fun ride I don’t care where I sit.

In a jocular exchange about the next day's carpooling, a pal sent me an email containing nothing but that line. A weird sensation suddenly struck me; sort of a faux-deja vu. It was as if I knew I had never seen or heard the sentence before, but I felt as if I ought to have done.

I could faintly hear Bette Davis's voice and realized that there were some echoes of this classic line from All About Eve:

But that wasn't quite it. The line wasn't that diabolical; it was more mischievous. Then I heard Olympia Dukakis as Clairee in Steel Magnolias:

This was more like it. Like this exchange, the new line hints a little at schadenfreude, and the anticipation of some small misfortune occurring to someone else, or perhaps the expectation of a minor villain being served comeuppance.

If nothing else, it signifies enthusiasm for an impending event that might not be entirely innocent, but isn't mean, either.

So I took the line and heard it in the voice (and the North Texas accent) of my great and good friend Gweekers; it suited her perfectly and sensation was complete.

That sounds like such a fun ride I don’t care where I sit.

A great one-liner waiting for its context. Thanks, RF.

June is busting out all over! *

2009-06-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess the calendar gave up on spring and decided to jump right into summer. It was 81 yesterday and 82 today, and they predict more of the same for the next few days. I'm not complaining at all; it's like I'm getting the same weather as Otis in Maui, except without the island breezes. Or the beach. Or the ocean. Well, a lot of stuff is missing, actually. But the weather is pretty darn close to the same! Hello, June!

I really should be in bed instead of posting this, but May was the month that saw the shuttering of the site, and I guess I wanted to make sure I was here on June 1 to declare it re-opened. NatDog sussed it out: she said the other day, "I knew you were working on something else, because you sure haven't been blogging." Well, I have been, and I still am, working on other stuff, but I'm back blogging, too.

So much is going on that makes me want to write stuff. Good things: blessings and satisfactions and achievements and options. Not-so-good things: challenges and struggles and disappointments and choices. Threads in the rich tapestry of life, as the Jesuits who taught me in high school were wont to say, threads which I would love to start sharing again.

I had dinner with my pal A-Wo tonight, and we were reflecting on that tapestry, particularly on how some things in life today are so different - my G1 Android® GooglePhone® is a marvel, without a doubt - while some things - like the decrepit restaurant booth we were sitting in - would have been instantly recognizable even fifty years earlier. The discussion put me in mind of a line from Messner-Loebs and Fujitake's overlooked classic from 1987, The Dragons of Summer. The bureaucrat-hero, commenting on life in a future filled with all kinds of technological advances, says

Oddly enough, the ordinary things of life - eyeglasses, neckties, danishes, poverty - seem to stay the same through time, while complex things like transportation change constantly. They call it Thompson's Law.

Well, I can't find any record of that law, but we have arrived at the future and it seems to be in effect. I don't even notice that the classroom I teach in is wired to the hilt and puts the most extensive network of knowledge in history right at my fingertips, yet I am still wearing sandals and T-shirts that I could have worn to high school. I don't know what to do with this understanding yet, but somehow I can't shake the feeling that I could find wisdom in it if I looked long enough.

* Oh, and for all of you who were disappointed I was didn't take the easy way with that title, here's a picture of Otis from Hawaii. Makalapua!

Pax Walaka

2009-05-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is quoted as saying "You cannot step twice into the same river." While this is an oversimplification of this metaphysics of flux, I feel the emotional weight of the sentiment tonight.

Otis has an extended evening appointment, so, as usual, I determined to make myself scarce for the duration. I came up here to Greenwood and stopped to browse at Gary's Games for a while before settling in at the Wayward Coffeehouse for some laptopping.

Now, I am sure I have made this same expedition sometime in the past, about a year ago; if a brave soul wants to search HKC, she could probably find such a trip documented. But this time it was different. Back then, I was involved in an ongoing D&D campaign and was immersing myself in the conventions and mechanics of the game; every figurine, book, or accessory was a discovery and a potential treasure. Now, with our RPG days seemingly behind us, it seemed a hollow exercise; there is no one to share the discoveries with, no chance to implement any of the knowledge or use any of the tools, and no wrangling over the merits of ideas or details. Back then, I would have come over here and pounded out a blog entry, maybe about the game, maybe about work, maybe about what I had for lunch; in any case, it would have been another small tile in the greater mosaic that was my blogging then. Now, my blogging is spotty and the current site is pretty much shuttered, except for infrequent visits like this one, and the posts don't build to any critical mass. The movements are the same, but the sense is completely different.

It's not like my awareness of this constant state of change is a revelation; it is not that realization that I offer tonight, since it is by now a commonplace. This particular manifestation of that truth, however banal, inspired another thought: that in our lives, from time to time, we have our own personal versions of the Golden Age.

The Golden Age: Greece had one, and so did Rome; Islam had one, and likewise Christianity. Movies have one, as do television and comics and just about any other field of human endeavor. And we each have one or more of our own - those periods of time when, at least in retrospect, things seem to have been idyllic and organic and picture-perfect.

And as much as I know that it wasn't true (it was actually a pretty rough time around our household), the circumstances around that first D&D Campaign seem that way to me now. Seen in the rosy glow of hindsight, they were halcyon days, everything seemed to be working the way it needed to, at least where that regular, every-Friday get-together was concerned; god was in her heaven and all was right with the world.

There have been other Golden Ages in my past: six months at the Greenlake Library, when the entire crew meshed like the gearing on a Swiss watch; perhaps at year at Clark College Security, when the demand for service and the resources available were in balance and everyone played their role with gusto. All of those times came to an end; in fact, it may be the case that a Golden Age can only be identified in retrospect, and that we never know how good we have had it until it is over.

And that may actually be a cheery thought. While other Golden Ages have ended, we can't know that we're not in another one right now. My current game-playing and blogging may seem to pale in comparison to some half-remembered and mostly-imagined past experience, but who knows where the river I have stepped in will take me next? I am doing all sorts of new things. As long as I keep moving, and exploring, and experiencing, I could easily strike gold again.

Shutter the windows

2009-04-25T06:31:00.001-07:00

Well, since it's clear there's little activity going on here lately, we're going to close the shutters, throw some drop cloths over the furniture, turn off the utilities, stop the mail delivery.

School just seems to get busier and busier. I used to teach five classes a quarter when I was an adjunct, and while I remember having to grade all the time, I don't remember feeling like I was doing a plate spinning act all the time.

Maybe that was because as an adjunct I was focused only on the classroom, and even though I had a lot of work, it was all of a kind. Now, well into the second year of my tenure track, I find myself drawn into committee activities more and more, working on planning, budgets, course development, and similar long-term projects. The work has changed, making me feel little bit less focused and directed.

On top of that, I have several other projects going on that take up some time but don't wind up with publishable items for this blog. Not that I haven't had plenty of ideas for posts: my bookmarks folder is filled with interesting links to share, my desk holds a stack of comics I want to talk about, and I have a to-do pile of essays on the classroom experience. It just seems that the season for blogging has turned for a while.

Just as spring in the Pacific Northwest is having a hard time getting any purchase this year, I've been losing some traction here. Both situations will eventually resolve themselves, but for now, this post gives me absolution.

Zillions of 'em!

2009-04-07T19:27:00.000-07:00

Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is the yin to his Stranger in a Strange Land's yang, the story of Johnnie Rico's redemption and self-actualization through military service and flogging. I liked the novel well enough when I was young, and in the seventies actually bought the Avalon Hill strategy game pictured on right. I never played the game much; those old-school cardboard-counter games required real dedication, what with all the pieces and their finicky setting-up and complex play calculations and whatnot. I didn't quite have what it took, and didn't have any friends that were nearly geeky enough to play with anyway.

I carry one lasting legacy from the novel; it is a quotation, and one that was immortalized on the game package. Towards the end of the story, Rico has advanced in rank and is commanding a platoon of high-tech infantry seeking to engage the insect-like aliens with whom Earth is at war. Exploring a network of tunnels, he sends a scout ahead to reconnoiter for the enemy. Shortly afterwards, the excited soldier comes running back, shouting his report on the enemy status:

Ever since I read this, it (or a slight variation) has become my stock reply whenever someone asks me "What's in there?" or "What can you see?", especially if the situation involves actual bugs, but often even when it does not. More and more often, people have no idea what I am talking about, but for me, this is a much catchier phrase than "I'll be back" or a dozen others you can think of.

Anyhoo, when I saw this box at Half-Price Books, it brought a lot of memories flooding back. But I still didn't buy the game. It has too many pieces. In fact... nah, that's too easy.

Here's the complete back cover. It's worth looking at close-up just for the pitch supposedly written by Heinlein himself.

Hey! I saw this game in the store and took pictures of it with my cool new phone and even emailed them to myself so I could put them in this blog post even though I am still out and about! How cool is that?

Age of aquarius

2009-04-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

It was a lovely day here in the Emerald City. It was warm (looks like we hit 69 degrees) and the skies were blue and sunny all day - quite a treat. I took advantage of the beautiful weather to do some grading out in the airyway, and that spurred a thought not unrelated to some musings from a few weeks ago about student writing.

I have to say that whether or not the form is relevant in the information age, there is something aesthetically satisfying about reading student papers that are actually on paper. Most of the composition assignments I grade are submitted electronically, as Word documents in a digital dropbox. I read them on my office computer or laptop, make my responses in-text with the Comment feature and as a separate e-note, and send the back to the student accounts the same way they came. The system sure cuts down on paper and maintains a complete developmental portfolio of a student's work, and I think it makes me provide fuller and longer comments (and certainly more legible ones), but on the whole, I feel like there's something missing.

Dennis Baron has said "Writing is first and foremost a technology, a way of shaping materials to an end." This truth was apparent in early cuneiform writing on clay and inscription in stone, and it is no less obvious in ink on sheepskin, graphite on paper, or inkjet fluid on eighty-pound bond. A typed - or more accurately, a word-processed and printed - paper is an artifact as well as an act of communication. It is shaped materials, and although the clarity and weight of its end may vary from writer to writer, as a package it fulfills its charge elegantly. A paper reveals its message without the need for any other intervening technology - unless you count my eyeglasses - and is relatively permanent and easy to store.

What are the shaped materials of a .doc file? Where does it actually exist? Where is the final draft? How do we call it writing, then? These are perhaps non-critical questions, since we cannot deny that the nature of textual communication is changing and that these considerations may have already been mooted. Yet the practical consideration of that need for an intermediary technology maintains some significance to the distinction: I could read old-style papers anywhere. And in the affective domain, the difference is profound: it is a pleasure to hold a sheaf of stapled sheets in my hand and move my pen slowly down the margin. I can't do that with a Microsoft product.

In the end, I need to prepare my students to do the kind of writing they will be doing with the kind of tools they will be using for the kind of audiences they will be reaching. But on a sunny spring afternoon, there's nothing like reading a stack of papers, on paper, regardless.

99 and 44/100 % Walaka-free!

2009-03-30T21:02:00.001-07:00

This is mostly a link-farm today; I'm thinking about a number of things, but not ready to write about any of them yet.

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Stolen from Journalista who got it from Kung Fu Monkey.

Somebody I know would just love a tall glass of flaming water. Check out the story and be sure to watch the video.

Justine Lai has a very challenging art project; I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. Link goes to the artist's statement; the "works" page is very NSFW.

Well, whaddaya you know - there's finally a search engine that seems to have improved upon the mighty Google: Clusty clusters your search results three different ways to make sorting through the hits easier. It's cool to find something new that isn't part of the GooglePlex; how long do you think it will be before they assimilate it?

West side story

2009-03-26T16:42:00.001-07:00

Sometimes the road takes you to unexpected places. This afternoon, I transported NatDog and TomCat down to SeaTac; they were flying out to San Diego for a little bit of spring break sunshine. Otis had an afternoon appointment scheduled and I had tentative plans to hook up with Ned, but she didn't answer the phone when I called. So, I came back north via the west side - up 509 to 99 - wanting to keep in easy striking distance of West Seattle in case she called back. Well, she didn't, so I found myself working my way back via the waterfront and Ballard and like that, and so I am now here killing time at Makeda Coffee on Phinney Ridge, since by the time I got home Otis would have been getting into the zone for her session anyway.

This has been a wandering and indolent break anyway. I have done the minimum amount of prep work necessary for the next quarter, and allowed myself suitable time for naps and other affairs of state. It's been nice just to be off the clock, even though we didn't go to San Diego (or Hawaii or Japan or Colorado) like my colleagues. I haven't been able to sleep in, though; I wanted to start switching to swing shift, but the cats still say the day starts at 6:30 am.

There has been a new distraction this break: Otis and I decided to beat the clock and get a new TV before the projector lamp burned out. So, we trundled around for an afternoon last week and picked up one of those new-fangled flat screen jobs and a table to put it on. We've been running off one of the laptops for now, but I have plans to pick up a used Mac Mini and use that as our media player. In addition to the DVDs and Hulu and iTunes and all that, we have actually been watching some of the new DTV channels, mostly for the novelty. RTH, the Retro Televison Network, shows stuff like Simon & Simon and Kate & Allie; it's amazing how dated that stuff is.

Here's some stuff that's not dated:

This one is for O:

Credit.

This one is for Soapy, in the spirit of creativity that he has recently exhibited:

Credit.

And this one is just cool:

Credit.

A fit of Peaks

2009-03-22T19:03:00.000-07:00

Nu, after a yummy dinner of Ho Chi Minh (fried rice with soy sausage), Otis and I decided to head down the block to Peaks, the new dessert place so recently praised by Lon and Jules. The idea was to get a cuppa and a little custard to go with, and to do some laptopping.

Well, the coffee was good (it's Lighthouse, a local micro-roaster). Otis's chocolate custard was good (although I would have foregone the Snickers topping). But my vanilla custard was meh at best and weird at worst; I only ate a few bites, the part that had chocolate syrup on it (which was for the better, anyway). And worst of all, the wireless internet wasn't working, and whatever the staff did after we told them didn't help.

So, even though I took a picture there, no snaps of Peaks until they straighten up and fly right!

The Post I Had Actually Planned to Write

Spring break, as in something is breaking off or breaking away and something else is gushing in to fill the crack.

This epigram was appended, apropos of nothing in particular, to an email I received from a colleague a few days ago. Well, spring has started, at least officially; the equinox was Friday. And the break is also here, I guess, since I went into campus today and finished off all my grading of papers and posting of grades for winter quarter. So now I'm just waiting for the gushing in to begin.

It's past time to wash up and start fresh. The change to daylight time and the lengthening of the daytime light have removed most excuses for winter indolence; if the weather would just cooperate a little bit more, we might even have some actual incentives to activity. And Urd knows I could stand to move around a lot more than I have been lately. I don't know if there will be a B2K this season, but I plan on making a regular bike commute, at least, although I hope to do more than that.

I also need to get in gear metaphorically as well as literally. I've got notes and outlines and lists and all sorts of stuff laying about wanting attention; maybe my new schedule (and a new attitude) will let me make a little more consistent progress on those fronts. Dammit, you'd think they were nasty chores instead of things devoutly to be wished, so little have I had to do with them lately.

The biggest gusher I am hoping for involves my professional stuff rather than the personal. I wonder if, in the next five days, I can completely revise my English 101 syllabus to counter the lack of relevancy I have begun to sense ever since seeing this little video last week:

I know my stock in trade comprises critical thinking and effective communication, and I maintain my faith in the value of those qualities, but somehow I can't help but think that the packages that I currently use to contain these commodities seem at best quaint and at worst immaterial to my students' lives. And part of me wonders if that isn't in fact the case.

Well, there's no time like the present, and no better week than Spring Break, for new beginnings. As I say to my students, let's have at it.

Google me this, boy wonder...

2009-03-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

So, expecting my first income tax refund in about four years and wanting to do my part to stimulate the economy (but mostly wanting to keep up with the iPhone-flaunting Gweekers and Dr. Burn*), I went down to the T-Mobile emporium the other week and got myself one of those Android G1 OpenSource GooglePhones.

It's pretty cool, what with its little magic touch screen and all. Since it's a GooglePhone, it has a right-on-top Google Search Bar as well as the iPhone-like slidey tray o' applications (many of which are free, because open source, ya dig?). It's also got what I like: an actual QWERTY thumb-board, instead of just an on-screen virtual keyboard. (Yeah, I know it's not as kewl as the iPhone, but forgive me my sausage fingers.)

The phone functions are easily accessed, with a keypad and favorites and recently-called numbers, all the usual features. It gets really good reception and has great sound, too.

But the coolest of all things that I have on it now is comics! I downloaded Atomic Robo, an indy comic that has been reconfigured for reading on the phone screen. I thought it would be totally lame, but this particular artwork is clean, simple, and straightforward, making the piece a pretty good match for the small display. Of course, I'm reading one panel at a time, which takes out a lot of the pacing and mood delivered by page layout, but for a little waiting-for-the-bus diversion, it's pretty sweet. (Maybe that it's about a wisecracking robot adventurer, built by Tesla, who fights a Nazi mystic in the Himalayas helped, too.)

Ha! Who's old-timey now? Now gett offa my lawn.

*Dr. Burn told me a funny iPhone joke:

You know what's really cool about an iPhone?
What?
Everything!

I watches the Watchmen

2009-03-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

Johnbai wouldn't leave me be: he loved it and really wanted to talk about it. So even though I was in no hurry and could easily have waited for the second-run showing at the Crest discount house, a few of us met up at the Neptune so I could watch Watchmen and Johnbai could take in his third showing. After more than twenty years of wishing and two years of waiting, the comics community had finally gotten its masterpiece brought to the screen, and I was going to see it.

Three hours later, we strolled out into the damp, cool Seattle air, my life unchanged.

It would have been nice if it had been a singular experience, either gut-wrenchingly awful or exceptionally good, but it was neither. In the same way that I liked Dark Knight even though it was only nominally a Batman movie, I didn't much care for Watchmen even though it was faithful to the book and in some ways an effective adaptation.

Movies ain't comics; their language is different, more so than many fans (and practitioners) think. In many ways, the film lost my interest when it followed the novel too slavishly; the essential structures and forms didn't carry over. And when the film deviated from the comic, it was to move into the territory of tired tropes: slow-motion hair-tosses and quick-cut fight scenes. Regardless of its source material, I just didn't think it was that engaging a movie. And as with any "literary" novel being turned into a movie, I think a lot of the internal development got lost, as did the meta-reflection on the superhero genre (and certainly on the comics form).

Watchmen in the end was just something like Quantum of Solace with costumes. Which makes me wonder if there is a Daniel Craig action figure...

Cartoon Diva

2009-03-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

Otis was working late last night, so I took the opportunity to head over to 826 Seattle* for a writing workshop presented by Ellen Forney. You may remember Forney from my report on last year's Comixtravaganza - she's a local rockstar cartoonist, does a lot of work for The Stranger, worked with Sherman Alexie, has a new book out, and is currently writing a graphic novel. As I have said before, she is da bomb.

It was great night. Forney gave a wonderful workshop, particularly because she approached making comics from the perspective of writing. She mentioned a few times how delighted she was to be seen as a writer, or at least as a writer-artist, instead of just as an artist. The art-pigeonhole cartoonists find themselves slotted into doesn't do justice to the storytelling ability and understanding of narrative form anyone accomplished at the craft must have. This is of especial interest to me, since my comics reading stretches back to a time when the writer was king of the book and comics were more textual and less faux-cinematic than they currently are; the writing has always been the aspect of making comics that appealed to me (viz., the prior post).

Forney was personable, informative, funny, and cool, and the crowd of a dozen or more lapped it up as she walked us through her process on a few different works. After a comprehensive survey of nuts-and-bots approaches, we ended with the now-almost-traditional Making of the Mini-Comic. Here's an except from mine:

(Yes, I went meta.)

Whether you want to make comics or not, any chance to hang with Forney is worth it. Maybe she'll tell you the story about her Cougar.

*By the way, 826 Seattle, located inside the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. (a convenient front), is a fantastic non-profit writing center that lets adults attend cool writing workshops only to support all the great FREE work they do with kids week in and week out. It's worth checking out and supporting.

Genius in a minor chord

2009-03-09T21:32:00.000-07:00

Young cousins Sammy and Joe have a scheme to cash in on the boom in superheroes following Superman's success in the late thirties. They have contracted to produce an entire sixty-four page comic starring only masked men. Commandeering a neighborhood house and recruiting all their artist friends, the group intends to conceive all the characters and write and draw the entire book over the course of one weekend. Sammy is one of the weaker artists, but...

If I had any wishful figments offered to me, I could do worse than to play the role that Sammy plays here, all the livelong day.

Excerpt from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon,© 2000, published by Picador USA.

99

2009-03-08T16:12:00.001-07:00

An ominous warning in nondescript red letters appeared in the lower left-hand corner of the screen as we began to watch what turned out to be an unwatchable science-fiction movie: 99 hours is all it said. Cryptic? Not really. Expected bad news is more like it.

A few years ago, I got a really good deal on an Epson EMP-5500 multimedia projector through eBay, and since then it has been first the primary and then the only "television" in the house. We have a neat little system rigged up in an Ikea shelf unit: an old VCR to act as a television receiver, a DVD player for movies, the sound from everything running through the stereo system, with the projector on top of the stack, casting an 80-inch diagonal image on the wall over the fireplace. It served us well for movies, big-event nights like the Oscars or Election Day. We could even hook a laptop up to the projector for Internet stuff and homegrown graphics.

One of the best features about it, besides the enormous picture, was its relative inconspicuousness: most people didn't notice the projector at all when it was not in use, and there was certainly no big, blank screen dominating the living room all the time.

Well, it looks like the glory days of our jerry-rigged home-theater are coming to an end. We knew that the VCR would soon be a useless as a receiver; we got a four-month reprieve when the government delayed the implementation of digital broadcasting, but June will be here sooner than we know. The stereo is showing signs of decrepitude. The DVD player crapped out last year, and the thirty-buck replacement lasted only a few months, so we have been using my laptop as our DVD player. And now, that 99 hours notice means the lamp in the projector should fail, given average usage, sometime around June as well. Since the lamp runs somewhere around $400, more than I paid for the projector, keeping the old technology running doesn't seem completely attractive.

Which means we have to Make a Decision: A new bulb and another makeshift system? A new projector with a built-in DVD player? A flat screen TV? How about a Mac Mini for playing Hulu and Netflix Watch Instantly movies, and for making Otis's iTunes playlist available? Or one of those stations that lets you dock the iPod? Chucking the whole mess out the window?

I really don't want to deal with it; I know that the end result will (a) cost me more money than I want to spend, and (b) require me to get another Thing in the house - like furniture. For someone who is constantly trying to lighten his load, I seem to be acquiring more than I let go.

On the other hand, we do like us our movies in this house, and the Big Wall Spectration nights have been wonderful social events.

Well, at least I have ninety-nine hours to figure it out.

Week-off weekend

2009-03-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

Here's an old-school blogging treat:

East and west views from the laptop corral at the remodeled Third Place Books/Ravenna, after the replacement of the Honey Bear Bakery with Vios. It does feel a little confining after the wide-open set-up this place used to have, but it's actually a little more functional.

So, I took about a week off after my blogathon, and it has been a busy week, mostly with school stuff, but that's really not why I have been away. I've been looking at the blog and thinking about Voice, Audience, and Purpose; I've been working on the early stages of some other projects; and mostly I have been trying to pull back the stick of my personal Flying Flapjack to gain some altitude. Winter seems to be hanging on here in Seattle - we have snow showers in the forecast all weekend and into Monday - and I am so ready for spring. I want to get moving again, I want to get back on my bike, I want do spring cleaning, I want to have a massive garage sale and unload a bunch of Things, I want it to be sunny and light out more of the day, I want to wear sandals - the whole shebang.

I know it'll come soon enough - Monday begins Week 10 of the quarter, so we're certainly in the home stretch now. This last bit just seems to be taking too long, like the last ten miles of a hundred-mile drive home when you're tired. So maybe a little radio-silence from the Flapjack is okay for the time being.

Blogging about bogging is still a sin...

2009-03-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

... but I'm going to do it anyway.

Without any fanfare, this blog moved into Version 2.0 at the end of January and I started posting more frequently. In fact, I made sure that I posted every day in February. I wanted to see what would happen if I threw myself back into the daily grind that I walked away from last summer, the grind I said I thought might be sapping my creative juices, and which I later thought might be a source of creative mojo. I thought that conscious daily blogging for a month straight (even the shortest one) would let me know the score.

Here's the score, or at least the tally (click to embiggen):

I actually wrote a bunch of things worthy to be called essays - eleven of them, or 39% of the posts. Most of them were around 500 words, although two were twice that long and a few shorter - quite similar to what I assign my students. They all look to be pretty good composition exercises; while they weren't really long form, they did give me an opportunity to play with structure and voice. Not a bad batting average.

The next largest section was diary-blogging at 25%. This is an odd category because entries could actually represent craft, although they are frequently closer to free-writing. A quarter of the posts in this category seems a little high.

I posted four link farms, 14% of the total. This mainstay of blogging seems cheap 'n' easy, but it's harder than it looks to build a coherent post around links. Three posts, 11%, focused on movie reviews, two short ones and one longer one. Any more, and I'll be creeping into LNTAM territory. The same percentage represents pure junk - posts without any structure to them, probably posted late at nght to keep the streak going. That's definitely too high. Bringing up the rear were two creative projects, a video parody and a song parody, for 7%, and one light analysis of a photo.

So, what response to this mix of messages? The posts generated 41 comments over the course of the month (one-and-a-half per post), and here's what the visits looked like:

So, it looks like there's a small coterie of folks who are interested enough in this stuff to keep coming if I produce it. So maybe I will. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life.

As for today: here are a couple of links!

Just for Johnbai (click for source):

Click Poppy's picture for the science of kindness:

Not the one with Betty Hutton

2009-02-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

Otis and I went to see Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky at the Crest last night. I had heard a rumor that Leigh made the film in response to the charge that he couldn't do anything that wasn't pessimistic. That story is likely apocryphal, and the film isn't that far a stretch from Leigh's often dark work (Vera Drake, All or Nothing, Career Girls) anyway.

As usual, Leigh gives us vividly drawn, real and rounded characters, moving through a detailed and authentic landscape as they deal with life's big and small challenges. What's different this time around is that the protagonist is neither beaten down nor worn out; the irrepressible Poppy is still tackling problems head-on, with a positive outlook and an optimistic perspective.

Poppy is a zen clown: always colorful and bright, even in a flamenco class, she has found her Way and sticks with it in the face of all adversity. And that way includes a lot of joy and laughter, as well as a willingness to accept people as they are while still expecting the best from them. While her unrelentingly sunny affect irritates some, that may be because it shines a light on their own dissatisfactions; a small matter, since Poppy will love them anyway.

In lesser hands, such a woman might come across as merely a naif, or at best, The Fool, but Sally Hawkins gives us a Poppy whose sanguine nature comes from wisdom, not inexperience. In her quiet moments, her eyes show the accumulated history of her experiences with things both good and bad, and we realize that her position is both a considered choice and a courageous one. Even when violence or meanness would be the easy way out, she sticks to her convictions. Poppy moved onto the upper tier of my heroes almost immediately.

I have to make a special note of Alexis Zegerman as Zoe,
Poppy's flatmate and devoted friend,
who projects a grounding, practical energy
that lets us see the power behind all Poppy's seeming airiness.

Mostly for Soapy

2009-02-27T23:29:00.000-08:00

YouTube garbled the opening titles a little bit but I think you'll still get the drift. I was talking about videos people post of themselves watching other people's videos.

Here's the link.

6.6294 of one, half-dozen of the other

2009-02-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

Nu, I used a cash machine today for the first time in a long while. I usually get cash back at the supermarket, but there's a new no-surcharge machine on campus (yay, credit unions!) and I was supposed to pay for some Girl Scout cookies a co-worker was selling, so I stopped by on my way to the library to get some folding green.

The transaction went fine and I asked for a receipt, which reminded me of an industrial design choice that I have always thought brilliant, even though it seems to have never caught on.

I remain convinced that the perfect size for an ATM receipt is 2.61 inches (6.6294cm) wide by 6.14 inches (15.5956cm) tall or long.

Why? Because that's the size of U.S. currency. I always figured that since the ATM has the sole purpose of distributing money - that's its only product - and the customer is going to have some place to put that money (usually a wallet) that is designed specifically to hold that size paper currency, why not give them a receipt for the product that is sure to fit in the same container as the product? One bank I used to use - it must have been some incarnation of the old Rainier Bank - had a receipt that was almost the exact same size as dollar bills, and it was mighty convenient just to tuck the receipt in the wallet with the cash. You could even use it to separate new cash from old, or special money from walking-around cash.

But although my experience is admittedly spotty, most ATMs seem to give out big, square receipts that don't match up with money in any dimension. The receipt I got today measures out at about three inches by four inches: both too wide and too short to match up with a bill. I couldn't just merge it in with the bills to fit in my wallet; I had to fold it a completely different way.

This all might seem just a little anal retentive, but I think it makes good sense. After all, usability is one of the key elements of industrial design (as it is for technical writing) and this size does seem to feed right into the receipt's usability.

Of course, as I was looking for a suitable illustration for this post, I came across a burgeoning movement to forgo ATM receipts because they waste resources and are a major cause of litter and take up landfill space and all that. So maybe the whole point is moot.

Think they'll cancel classes in the morning?

2009-02-25T20:27:00.000-08:00

And don't think we won't be missing a few students tomorrow.

I'm not that interested in owning Things, but if I were, this is a Thing I would want to own:

That there is the Zeppelin, a $600,000 showpiece car that is hoped by Daimler to revive it's flagging high-end Maybach division. The car represents conspicuous consumption beyond belief - check out the details in these press materials - but that's not why I would want one. My desire stems only from the fact that Maybach was originally a company called Luftfahrzeug-Motoreinbau GmbH (Airship Engine Company), and was a subsidiary of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH, which manufactured rigid airships - zeppelins. How cool would it be to have a car that was even a distant relative of The Hindenburg? Pretty cool, I think.

From the student seat

2009-02-24T19:48:00.000-08:00

I read this blog post today about reading comics in different formats, and although I had been scoping this program out again a few days ago, it once again got me thinking semi-seriously about going after one of these (well, maybe a real one). After all, in an economic downturn, community college attendance traditionally trends upward, so isn't it just a matter of degree?

In the more immediate future, I was thinking more realistically of doing this course. It's a bit more local, although the commute is still problematical, and it might actually have the same effect on my earning potential.

That's a bit more like it, no?

Just like the Hollies

2009-02-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

I've noticed today that Seattlites don't queue for the bus very well. People mill about at the stop nicely enough, and acknowledge other passengers when each arrives, but when the bus shows up down the street, instead of forming a nice, neat line in the order of arrival, everyone seems to wander about in some sort of Brownian motion until the bus actually stops, when they all cluster in a knot at the door, even though they should know they will have to step back and let passengers off before the driver will let them on.

What's up with this? Where is the famed Seattle Politeness, and the collectivism that this nigh-unto-socialist blue state is supposed to represent? If you drive down a narrow street in Queen Anne or Cap Hill, people are screeching their tires to pull their Priuses aside in order to allow you the right of way between rows of parked cars, even when you are still a half a block away; in Whole Foods or QFC, anyone with only an item or two is cheerfully waved ahead of the carts stuffed full of organic vegetables, free-range meat, and fair-trade coffee. Why doesn't this same sense of self-sacrifice carry over into mass transit? I would have expected that Pacific Northwesterners would slow things down by backing off and nodding, smiling, and gesturing to each other to go first; no, you go; no, I insist, but that's not the way it is.

It isn't that the bus riders are being aggressive in that outta-my-way, I'm-here-first manner that, say, New Yorkers can be; it's more like they have no idea how the process is supposed to work, and the jockeying around the door is more Three Stooges than Roller Derby. If it is unfamiliarity that is the underlying cause, where do we lay the blame? Merely on the overwhelming influence of Car Culture in West as a whole? On the choice Seattle made back in the seventies to go after federal highway money and let mass transit languish, resulting in a populace less familiar with buses than most people in cities of similar size? On a shh-don't-mention-it classism about mass transit that keeps most Seattlites from ever becoming regular riders, so just about everyone is a newbie all the time? Whatever the root, it really shows.

I guess it's not the worst hurdle in the commuting world. I still like getting to work by bus: it's quick, I don't get stressed, and I can even sleep on the way (try that in your Prius). I just let all the other little passenger-molecules bump their way onto the coach first, and then climb on with a veteran's patient smile, find a seat, and snooze away.

A cautionary tale

2009-02-22T20:34:00.001-08:00

So, this totally cool old-timey sepia photograph has been all over the internets lately. It is a panoramic picture of San Francisco in 1906, shortly after the earthquake and fire. The photo was taken by the George R. Lawrence photography company, who flew a "captive airship" - basically a huge array of kites - carrying a giant camera to get the shot. Click to embiggen - the file is huge.

Y'know, as I look at this again, there seems to be some kind of spot on a cloud off the left of the picture. Let's zoom in on that.

Hey - it looks like there's another airship up there! There were about 25 LZ airships flying out of Friedrichschafen, Germany before the First World War, but I never heard of any being in San Francisco. Let's get closer.

Wow - that doesn't look like any zeppelin I've heard of. Let's zoom all the way in!

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle - it looks like Jules Verne was paying a visit to the City by the Bay, even though he'd been dead for a year.

Of course, the airship is a fake, although the photo is quite legitimate. (You can see the real Lawrence photograph here - and it's not even sepia.) After I noticed the little imaginary airship, I looked at a bunch of websites that had this photo reposted or linked. All of them presented it as the bona fide photograph, a page from the historical record, and none of them noticed - or at least mentioned - the fanciful flying boat off to the south. I think I traced the original modification back to Abney Park, the site for a steampunk band; from there it made it onto the Antique Forums™ and thence onto the wider world web.

So, you might want to double-check any information you find on the web, I guess. Sometimes even when it's right, it's wrong.

Bonus goodies: Ron Klein Photography recreated the photograph from the exact same spot one hundred years later. Check them out for all kinds of cool stuff.

Walaka A/V Club

2009-02-21T22:23:00.000-08:00

First, some broccoli. I mean, it's green and it's good for you:

The second part isn't as long.

Now, a callback. A few days ago, I posted a song that I heard all during my childhood. So, how come this one is new to me?

We'll continue with something borrowed. The Apple posted this on Facebook, but here it is for the rest of y'all to enjoy:

And for our finale, a finale. What do you get if you take eighties musics, layer it over with faux-fifties style, and use that to define the milieu of an urban remake of The Searchers filtered through Marvel Comics? You get Streets of Fire, Walter Hill's classic "rock and roll fable." Here's the closing number:

(And before you hit IMDB, yeah, that's Diane Lane.)

Sandalous!

2009-02-20T22:40:00.000-08:00

You gotta love the Pacific Northwest. I got back from North Bend mid-afternoon today, and Otis I and went out to run some errands. It was so warm and sunny that I wore my sandals. Sandals! And three days ago I was wearing long johns! The Weather Underground website says that it actually only got to 52 degrees, but it sure felt warmer. I was totally comfy.

That image, by the way, is of a caliga, the sandal worn by Roman soldiers during both the Republic and Empire. I have two pairs of sandals, one pair that looks a lot like caligae and one pair that looks like a modern version of caligae. They both really go well with my kilts; when I wear them, I fancy that I have a kind of legionnaire vibe going on. After all, they wore skirts, too, right?

And peaking of Roman military fashion, I have to weigh in on the whole sandals-with-socks issue. It's pretty clear from the historical record that Roman soldiers in Britain wore socks under their sandals. A letter from home found at a Roman site near Hadrian's wall read in part "I have sent you two pairs of socks from Sattua, two pairs of sandals, and two sets of underwear," and archaeologists in northern England found a Roman razor handle formed in the shape of leg, clearly showing a woolly sock under the sandal. If it was good enough for the imperial troops, it's good enough for me.

But today, it was all about the bare toes.

Relative quiet

2009-02-19T21:30:00.000-08:00

Just taking a break from the social hour here in beautiful North Bend to check in on the blogosphere. I spent about eight hours today in a workshop talking about integrative approaches to curriculum design and underprepared students and program development and all that. Our group made a lot of progress on some initiatives we hope to push forward on campus, and we got a chance to network with folks from other schools and steal their ideas, too.

Now the informal discussion continues. Some people are in their jammies and there are snacks all around and we're sitting on the floor, but the conversation seems to come back to work issues and problem-solving no matter how many times we veer off into America's Top Chef or how'd-you-meet-your-wife territory.

I have made one internal observation in the middle all this information processing and creative thinking: I find that I am no longer going to quick and easy cynicism as a position quite as frequently as I might have once done. I think I've realized that while standing off to the side and throwing bricks might be fun, rolling up my sleeves and helping get some stuff done is more satisfying in the long run. Hunh.

To convincingly write

2009-02-18T20:05:00.000-08:00

So, if you just look at the superficial layer, you will say that it is grammatically incorrect to split an infinitive. I mean, it's in all the books, right? So it must be wrong. A noted example of this error: "to boldly go" from the opening to Star Trek.

But, if you dig a little deeper, you will say that the prescriptive grammar rules we learned in school were mostly arbitrary decisions made by 18th century grammarians who troweled the models of Latin grammar over English usage. In Latin, the infinitive is one word and is impossible to split; these bluenosed grundies applied that rule to the two-word English infinitive just because they privileged the classic over the vernacular. The rule against splitting infinitives is poppycock! A noted example of this position: "to boldly go" has much more euphony than "to go boldly."

But, if you think about it a little longer, it gets a little more complicated. Those grammarians may indeed have been humorless prigs, but there may be something to the unity of the infinitive after all. To native ears, "to beyond the the farthest reaches of the galaxy go" has no euphony; it sounds particularly awkward, as a matter of fact. Perhaps we can't split infinitives willy-nilly after all.

But, if you let it stew around in your head for a while, you might come up with a theory: splitting infinitives is okay if you're not really splitting them. "To boldly go" can be seen as "to boldly-go": the verbal component is compact and cohesive enough to be conceptualized as boldly-going, a single verb, one integral action - at least by the hard-wiring in the language section of our brains. So, it passes, while "to beyond the farthest &c. go" does not. "To willingly destroy" property sounds right; "to with an axe chop" wood does not. We might see the first-mentioned written; we would never expect the second. We arrive soon at the point where we say there is no "rule" against splitting infinitives, but our language processor just won't let us do it anyway.

But, if you are hard-nosed rhetorician, you will still hold to the opinion that if you mean "boldly-go" and can't find a real word for it, you are a lousy writer, and that splitting infinitives may not be wrong, but it's a practice of the weak, the meek, and the simple.

As the song asks, did you ever have to finally decide?

With all due credit to Mrs. Grundy,
Steven Pinker,
Todd Lundberg,
Gene Roddenberry,
and John Sebastian.

Produced under the Who's on First license:
Bud: That's the first thing you've said right!
Lou: I don't even now what I'm talkin' about!

The sounds of silence

2009-02-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

"Listen. Do hear that?"
"I don't hear anything."
"Exactly!"

Yojimbo could probably recite a list of films that that conversation appears in, but it was my own internal dialogue tonight. (And I know most people have internal monologues, but just go with this, okay?)

What was I listening for? The sound of papers, papers scuttling all about me, surrounding me, demanding to be graded.

What did I hear? Nothing.

I am all caught up! All student work that is in my hands, whether digital or physical, has been reviewed and assessed and will be handed back tomorrow. Students are submitting and reviewing drafts tomorrow, but not ones which I need to assess. So, I can head into my end-of-week training retreat and my week-end time off with nary a sword of Damocles (or anyone else) hanging over my head. Oh, there will be some minor reading of progress reports and such to do by Monday, but nothing that can seriously be called grading with a capital Grrrr. I don't know how I did it - squeezing work in over the Valentine weekend, lucking out on interruptions on campus today, whatever - but for a few precious days, I am free and clear. I hardly know what to do with myself.

Let's celebrate with some fun pictures!

Here's one for Dingo:

Ain't he cute? He's even got a crocheted Right Hand of Doom - and a cigar! (Link.)

And I just love this one:

This is Thor and Loki in drag, as part of a plot to get Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, back from a giant who had hidden it. I like how Loki seems to be totally enjoying the gender-bending while Thor can barely contain himself. The ruse involves passing Thor off as Freya, willing to be the giant's bride, and, of course, hijinks ensue, at least until Thor gets his hands on Mjolnir again and smashes the place up in a gynophobic rage. Party pooper. (Link.)

What I asked for, and what I got

2009-02-16T22:09:00.000-08:00

Nu, tonight Otis and I went out with A-Wo and K-Kay to catch Ruby Bishop's first set at Martin's off Madison Piano Bistro up on Cap Hill. We had already eaten some nice pizza-calzoney stuff at Piecora's, but through a mix-up in the reservations, we were seated at a dinner table at Martin's. Feeling guilty about taking up the space, we ordered too-rich desserts and adult beverages all around. A & K had wine, Otis had a custom-made fruity concoction we called a Boarding Pass, and I ordered a cup of coffee with a shot of Canadian Club, figuring to make my own little fortified coffee drink. The glass on the left is what I wanted; the glass on the right is about what I got:

I swear that what they brought me was a rocks glass, although it did have the little white shot line about an eighth of an inch from the bottom. Of course, the top of the whiskey was nowhere near that line; as I have duplicated it here, it was about four or five shots. Seriously.

My drinking days are so far behind me that if I ever could have downed this much hard liquor at one go I can't remember it. I couldn't pour it into my coffee; it would have made the cup overflow. I sipped at it all through the set, and it still held a measurable amount when we left. Otis says that I got the huge drink because the waiter thought I was cute, but I told her that those days were far behind me as well. So, if you're in a drinking mood, you might try ordering a whiskey neat at Martin's; you may get more than your money's worth.

Where I'm tattooed

2009-02-15T20:14:00.000-08:00

That mash-up of right-to-work advocacy and musical-comedy comes to us courtesy of Shipyard Sally, a 1939 film starring Gracie Fields as the plucky heroine.

Fields was an interesting figure: she began her career in with British music hall reviews in the twenties, was awarded several distinguished honors, including a CBE, for her charitable work, beat cervical cancer in the thirties, supported the British war effort in the forties even though her marriage to an Italian forced her to leave the U.K., and continued to work into the nineteen-seventies, even playing Miss Marple on U.S. television. She became a Dame shortly before her death at 81.

So, why am I promoting a thirty-years-dead obscure British entertainer? Well, when I was a wee lad, whenever my mother would present her little boy to women of a certain age, whether they actually pinched my cheeks or not, they almost universally greeted me with the same singsong chant, playing on my name. Perhaps the most valued of all the informational flotsam and jetsam that the intarweb has tossed onto my shores is the origin of that incantation, and it is intimately connected to Gracie Fields. Click the picture of Little Walaka and Vera, listen a while, and all will be made clear.

Spontaneous Ikeosity

2009-02-14T21:50:00.000-08:00

So, there we were, having a nice intimate dinner under the fluorescent light at a formica table at Ballet Vietnamese on Cap Hill, when Otis announced that the best way to spend St. Valentine's Night would be to go to Ikea. Romantic fool that I am, I said "What the heck!" and we fired up Renty Red and aimed her at Renton, taking the scenic route through the ID, Beacon Hill, and SoDo before jumping on the 5. In no time at all, we were wandering through the labyrinthine aisles of the local outpost of this privately-held, international home products retailer (which is now the world's largest furniture manufacturer, according to Reuters). In less time than it took to get there, were up three lamps and a half-price dresser, and lighter by several ajax.

The acquisitions are the final finishing touches on Otis's redecoration of the master bedroom. She talks about the project as part of her 29-Day Giving Challenge. The dresser will replace the hopeless chest as a project storage unit, and the lamps will provide adequate reading light. We got the lights up already, but the dresser will wait until tomorrow. It looks pretty good. Here's an impromptu photo show:

I did other stuff today, too, like go out to breakfast, and have lunch with Johnbai, and hit a comics sale, but I didn't get any pictures of any of that stuff, so I guess I can't blog it.

The Very picture of paraskavedekatriaphilia

2009-02-13T23:49:00.000-08:00

Otis and I just finished watching a couple episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I've gone on a little bit about how much fun this animated series is; here's a little animation that shows some martial arts action - an airbender (the kid) versus an earthbender (the old guy):

Fun stuff, but the action is only secondary to the story arc that connects all the episodes and the best use of continuity outside comics. Check it out.

Here are some more images that have been floating around on the ol' desktop:

A great shot of a zeppelin over the pyramids:

Captain Easy in a kilt? Sarong? A skirt of some sort, anyway.

Here's another kilt picture, but I have no idea what is going on:

The Sci-Fi Channel has some new ads that feature old tropes from a different perspective:

This is for my own personal mad scientist, Dr. Burn:

And finally, a photo from RL: Otis's Yip-ification of our bedroom:

That's all for tonight!

Part-time job, full-time teacher; full-time job, part-time teacher

2009-02-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

As I sit here just having finished some grading at nine in the evening, I have to ask myself something: why the heck am I grading at nine in the evening?

I am a full-time, tenure-track, professional College Teacher™ now, with my own office and everything. Shouldn't I be getting this stuff done on campus? Especially on days like today, when I was there for over eight hours without any classes?

Back in the day when I was a Freeway Flyer®, I frequently taught 19 to 27 credits each quarter, with four or five preps, usually at three different schools. I always had a bag of books and papers slung over my shoulder, and I felt like I spent half my life in my car, and I often left the house packing two brown-bags - one for lunch and one for dinner. In all that hubbub, I don't remember feeling really overwhelmed. Sure, I was busy, but most of my work was one and done: come in, teach a class, get out. Drive to the next campus, teach, go home. Then grade, grade, grade - and I spent some long weekend mornings at the Phinney Ridge Starbucks and the Wallingford Tully's, to be sure. But it all seemed doable: I ate it up and moved on.

Now, I only teach 15 credits a quarter, usually with only two preps, and at only one campus. It should be a piece of cake, yet I feel that I am always running to keep up. Part of it is the actual work of acquiring tenure - attending meetings and writing annual portfolios - but that is only a small fraction of what fills my time. Mostly, it is all the stuff that I do that I later write about in those portfolios: Serving on committees. Attending professional development activities. Facilitating professional development activities. Serving on committees about professional development activities. And so on.

Today, I had all this time without classes to get caught up. But what did I do? I first responded to some email, either from students or about committee stuff, and created some of my own. A new hire colleague came into the office to chat about some current concerns of his. Getting coffee, I ran into the president of the college and had an impromptu discussion around the budget process (I am on the budget committee). In response to an email, I climbed to the third floor for a debrief with a member of my tenure committee who had observed my class the day before. Then I had a scheduled meeting with some English types about the workshop we are putting on in a few weeks. I ate microwaved spaghetti leftovers at my desk before I climbed back to third floor to get some materials for a new lesson plan, and then wrangled the copier for a while. Back in my office, I had to make time for a former student who needed to vent about some current challenges he is having. I did manage to get an hour or so of grading in before I had to have a conversation with another colleague about a possible interdisciplinary learning community. By then, it was almost time for the union meeting that took up the last hour-and-a-half on campus.

And this kind of thing is getting to be pretty typical.

I'm not complaining, mind you; I have got a great job and I wouldn't trade it. It has been a surprise just how much of the time I feel like I am running behind, and how much of my work comprises responsibilities outside the classroom. Our official workload documents say 15%, but it is to laugh. Today was easily the equivalent of my 15% for this week, and it's not like I didn't do this stuff yesterday and won't do it tomorrow, too. How do we do it, then?

I've figured it out. We grade at nine in the evening.

Here's an example of Rhythmic Gymnastics with Apparatus, my favorite Olympic event. This video is even cooler if you pretend it's a bowling ball that she has there:

Elevenses anytime

2009-02-11T21:44:00.000-08:00

Notes from all over

It was a nice teaching day today. My tech writing class played with Legos®: teams wrote instructions for other teams to duplicate little structures without seeing the original. It was fun, it was chaotic, and I'm pretty sure some learning happened along the way. Great active learning, just the way we like up there at Bothell Polytech.

I'm having a little quandary about the Oscar ceremony. For several years in a row, we had a splendid affair at the Phinney Ridge place on Oscar night - red carpet, dress-up, prizes, pajama parties, all that. But, since coming to the RD, we really haven't done the Oscars at all. There's something about the diagonal of the Big Wall that makes me want to limit the size of the crowd for Spectration-based events; whereas the Phinney Place could stand a score or more, this place seems to hit its max with under a dozen. We've been thinking about reviving the tradition anyway, though, but then I find out that Starbuck has her own long-running show going and we could just hitch onto that. What to do, what to do...

As I wrote the above and transitioned to this item, I realize my Oscar dilemma will be moot soon: Washington may have delayed the switchover to digital TV until June, but it will surely come, and we have made the decision to give up our television (i.e., our crappy old VCR that receives the TV signal and pushes it through our LCD projector) when it happens. We're going to continue with a DVD player/LCD projector combo for movies, and just need to find a new audio rig that takes the iPod (and isn't falling to pieces like the old stereo). Actually, we watch a lot of stuff over the Internet already; we were even projecting Eureka via Hulu on the Big Wall last night. Of course, Otis's new throb is Vern Yip; she upstairs watching him on her computer right now.

Tomorrow is a no class, buncha grading + a couple meetings day; I'm expecting it to be grrrrrreat!

Thanks for the snacks, O!

Ten-der is the night

2009-02-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

So, today I parked at my desk all day and read and annotated a short, inexpertly written novel.

Well, not literally, but near enough. I graded two sections' worth of English 101 compositions, the revision of the first major paper for this quarter. So, somewhere around 50 papers, somewhere around four pages each, commenting on each one (in-line and summative), and there you go. A paperback, at least.

I say "inexpertly written" because, by the very nature of the class, the writers in English 101 are inexperienced and the writing a bit unpolished. If writers at this stage by and large already knew how to write a competent essay, we wouldn't need a class like this one, but by and large they don't (there are some wonderful exceptions), so we do.

And there's the rub: it's harder to read "bad" writing than it is to read "good" writing. Unless you are an English teacher or an editor, you probably don't think about this for much longer than the time it takes to wince through a particularly inept email or especially unclear instructions. But we think about it all the time.

Reading competently written prose is like driving on a paved, well-lit, and well-marked roadway. Even if you don't know exactly where you are going, even if you've never been down the road before, you can still make pretty good time most of the time. You click along at the speed limit, confident enough in the solid construction of the road, the reflective paint, the color-coded signs, and the clear lines of sight to actually take in the scenery and enjoy the trip. And even when the road winds through rough terrain or it's raining out or you just see something really weird out the window and you have to slow down, you still feel assured that the road will treat you right, that you can rely on the markings and the stripes and the signs to get you through.

On the other hand, reading developing writing is like going off-road, with only a faded map and the description of some landmarks to keep you oriented. You think you are following the blazes correctly, but all of a sudden you find your self in tangleberries; was the map wrong? Did you miss a turn? Or is this supposed to be here? You're not quite sure if it's you or the trail that has gone wrong, so you back up, and have at it again; nope, more tangleberries. Nothing to do but push on. And perish forbid you should come into any really rough terrain! Sometimes the trail disappears completely, and some have just stopped abruptly at a cliff face or even in the middle of the forest, leaving the traveler stranded.

It would be one thing if this imaginary novel I was reading today were just a distraction, one that could be tossed away if traversing the thing became a task too onerous. But these papers are real and aren't diversions; they are important, and I never forget that, I can't forget that. For these students to develop into competent and capable writers, they have to have a safe space to work out the moves, to make their attempts, to grapple with expressing ideas that they may never have tried in any form to express before. I need to create that space, one that is both safe and challenging, where they feel comfortable taking a risk, willing to try and perhaps fail, and where they will get the kind of assessment and response that will help them try again and perhaps succeed.

So I continue to make my way through these corner-stapled traces, trying my best to keep my bearings and make progress so that I can mark the hazards with orange chalk for future reference and take snapshots of the occasional grandeur to cherish and share. And maybe, just maybe, I'll help some of the students learn to build a road that leads us to who knows where.

Not the ninth art (but that one's cooking)

2009-02-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not have heard, our latest regular Friday night RPG - Johnbai's second D&D campaign, to be specific - has come to a premature end as a result of the vicissitudes of RL. To memorialize this passage, click here to activate a cheesy midi file (which should play in a new window) and read along:

Anybody here seen my old friend Sebastian?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He punched a lotta people but it seems the big they die young
You know I just looked around and he's gone

Anybody here seen my old friend Narley?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He seen a lotta weird stuff but it seems the small just get lost
I just looked around and he's gone

Anybody here seen my old friend Ragnar?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He helped a lotta people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone

Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Weren't all of them lawful good in alignment?
I mean all three.
Some day soon, it's gonna be okay

Anybody here seen my old friend Ovo?
Can you tell me where she's gone?
I thought I saw her walkin' up over the hill
With Sebastian, Narley, and Ragnar

Thanks for the good times, folks. I had fun.

Okay, well, that was pretty inappropriate...

And here's something even tawdrier: the 50 Hottest Sci-Fi Girls. Normally, I'd never link to this sort of thing even though Johnbai was all over it, and there's just something weird about a sensibility that can place TV/movie characters portrayed by real women on the same "hotness" scale with comic book/manga/anime/video game characters, but the only actual person to place twice on this list (for two different characters) is a favorite of this blog, so here it is. Slog through or not, but it does hold some surprises.

So, while we're on the topic of geekcore, I don't know if this is where Soapy has been getting the stuff he has been emailing lately or if I am turning him onto the mother load here, but this website is a treasure-trove of old comic book ads.

Now that I have completely destroyed any ethos I have managed to build up in the past, I'll just say that it sure was peaceful walking home with the hail/snow starting to fall just as I got off the bus. I saw some lighting and heard almost immediate thunder as we pulled up to 65th street, the pellets began coming down as I cut across Salman's Chevron, and the sidewalks just got whiter and whiter as I made my way up the hill. It wasn't quite the archetypal winter wonderland, but the quiet and the stillness were enough to take the edge off a busy day anyway.

Community, organized

2009-02-08T18:55:00.001-08:00

Ah, what a world, what a world. After my hail-fellow-well-met post yesterday, ScottyTuxedo left a comment that was complimentary (if a tad vampiric), which is kind of funny, because today I want to single out someone else for their communardistic acts. But first, a story:

A few months ago, I noticed a bit of a ruckus in the alleyway that our kitchen window overlooks. I looked out just in time to see a fellow dragging a retail display case for record albums from the back of a pickup filled with other such storefront paraphernalia and shoving it near the recycling and garbage bins along the low east wall of the alley. As quick as a thought, I had sussed out the sitch: this fellow, likely the recent new tenant of a retail space, was clearing out the old fixtures by driving around and dropping them in various alleys, effectively making them someone else's problem and avoiding dumping fees. Unfortunately, it took me a bit longer than a thought to get down the stairs and outside, and the mooching malefactor was gone before I could confront him.

So, I at least organized the pressboard cabinet into the row of bins, using it to store the glass recycling boxes. I knew that the case would become an attractive nuisance and that someday I would have deal decisively with it, but I would need a cordless power screwdriver or a sledgehammer, either of which I would have to borrow. So, until I was willing to tackle the project, I just acted in my usual role of Alleyway Marshal and kept it as tidy as I could, a task that grew more difficult once our friendly neighborhood schizophrenic saw the rack's potential as a trash-sorting station. And that's how the situation has stood over the winter.

Until now.

God bless America, the rack is gone, baby, gone. Our great neighbor Jules took it upon herself, as a personal gift to me, to take her Black & Decker out there, dismantle the whole shebang, and toss it in the dumpster. She even documented it all on her 29-Day Giving Challenge page. Brava, Jules! You have my thanks!

And that, my friends, is community organizing.

Nu, just to leave us in a good mood on a Sunday evening, here is a lyrical little video trip around a sushi restaurant, on the conveyor:

Simply beautiful, and a peaceful way to end the weekend.

Friends and neighbors

2009-02-07T19:53:00.000-08:00

Frank Sinatra just sang "What a day this has been!" on the radio, literally as I put my fingers on the keyboard to type, and that's as appropriate a start to this post as any could be. This day was indeed a good one, mostly because we are lucky enough to have good friends and good neighbors, sometimes at the same time!

First of all, I passed on heading up to campus and opted to stay at home today; this being the case, there was no reason not head down the block to O's and join in on the deluxe breakfast that she was preparing. Johnbai and Dingo, down from Cap Hill, and Kimosabe, O's roomie, joined in, and we were all treated to biscuits and tangerine juice and eggs bennie with just-made, homemade, whisk-made hollandaise sauce. Man, brekkies don't get no better'n that.

Otis was working most of midday, so she came by at the end of the meal for a quick visit. I floated back and forth along the alley visiting until all parties had left on various missions.

Still feeling social, we rousted Lon and Jules from their late-afternoon reverie across the property and enticed them come out for burgers and brew down at the Blue Star. With Jules still shaking the nap cobwebs out of her head, they came strolling down the walk just minutes later, ready to join us at Otis's usual doorbuster, earlybird dinner hour. We had a delightful evening chatting about everything from external hard drives to inspirational teachers, and stuffed ourselves with enough french fires to last me until March.

You can probably tell that I didn't get a lot of work done today, and there will certainly be a piper demanding to be paid tomorrow, but right now, it feels worth it. I'm lucky to have such warm and witty friends, and to have several of them right within arm's reach. How cool is that?

Besides, I'll get a lot of grading done tomorrow morning while Otis is at church with her mom.

Cold comfort

2009-02-06T21:40:00.000-08:00

60 Words or Less: Frozen River, set in a landscape that is physically and emotionally brutal, is a bleak but ultimately compassionate story about poverty, parenthood, race, class, and doing the right thing. Melissa Leo and Misty Upham are two actresses you can’t look away from, because their faces show so much emotion in every shot. Director Courtney Hunt deserves kudos - and an Oscar.

Otis and I just came back from seeing this movie at the Crest. It's funny how we all go through stages; for a while, we'll go to the movies every week, and then it'll taper off and we'll turn around to find it's been two months since we've been to a theater. (Vide Johnbai's top ten list.) I guess it works that way with other stuff, too: eating certain meals, playing certain games, maybe even wearing certain clothes. Is this how we keep the balance between the comfort and security of the familiar and spice of variety?

(BTW, has anyone noticed that this blog template doesn't display italics? For example, that "vide" up there is in italics, but it doesn't look like it, does it? I wonder if it is just the typeface.)

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It was nice to have a little restful fun tonight, after driving to and from Olympia twice in twenty-four hours and sitting through an all-day all-state faculty meeting today. The nose is back to the grindstone tomorrow, as I sit down for another 9 to 12 hour day of grading, in hopes of having the day (or at least most it) off on Sunday. I'm even passing up a brunch a la O - can you imagine?

I-5 and the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable

2009-02-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

Isn't there a way to point out things in need of correction without complaining? Can't we seek to improve something without tearing down what's already there? Or even if we seriously don't like something, can we speak against it without being insulting? Can we be firm without being mean?

Of course we can; it's just a goal easier said than done, and honored more in the breach than the observance.

It's been on my mind a lot lately, in this year of positive energy. You see, last year, what with all the stress and sturm und drang of the first year on the tenure track, and with a really wacky fall start, and with some problematic issues on campus, a bunch of us teachers fell into a negativity trap. You know the drill: complaining all the time, always expecting the worst, sabotaging ourselves to make sure it happens, and then reveling in our gloom.

Perhaps the most acute example was our relationship to Running Start students: we basically hated them, at least as a class. Then, somewhere towards the end of the year, someone pointed out that we couldn't just keep cursing "those damn runners!" - it didn't make the situation any better, and they weren't going away. We needed to change how we interacted - with the situation and with the students themselves - and actually start working toward positive change. The school put together a training summit. And, mirabile visu, it worked. (Starbuck and I even did a follow-up workshop on it this quarter.)

So, when September came rolling around this year, NatDog and I made a carpool promise to each other: rolling down Lake City Way, we sang Accentuate the Positive and vowed to have a better attitude this year about all aspects of our jobs, which, we reminded each other, we really loved. And, mirabile dictu, it worked. We take the bumps in the road without breaking stride, we own our own stuff without worrying about it, and we address problems with a realistic optimism. And we have much better days.

And so, not just at work, but in all aspects of my life, I'm trying bring gloom down to the minimum, as it were. A decision may be ill-considered; that doesn't make it the worst freakin' idea of all all time. I may disagree with a conclusion; that doesn't mean it's the stupidest thing I have ever heard. A policy or process may be awkward or unworkable; that doesn't mean that the boss is a evil sumbitch or that the system is completely rotten or that there is a conspiracy to cheat and confound me. I'm a tough guy; I should be able to meet life's little obstacles without flying off the handle, picking a fight, or making a federal case of it.

I'm not a polyanna; I don't for a second imagine that life will always be peaches and cream or skittles and beer. But I do know that, if I so choose, I can meet the struggles with equanimity and resolve rather than agitation and stress. And I'd like to make that choice more and more.

Fourth base

2009-02-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

Fifty Words or Less: The House of Yes is a creepy, funny, stagey film revolving around Jackie-O (Parker Posey as young woman with a Jacqueline Bouvier obsession) and the sometimes incestuous passions running through her upper-crust family. Notable for a not-bad performance by Tori Spelling as the brother’s fiancée, it’s pretty twisted, but enjoyable.

We just watched it on DVD. And yes, I know it should be "fifty words for fewer," but it's an idiom by now, so cut me some slack.

We watched the movie because I was a little too fried to do anything else. It's been a heckuva week - I still haven't recovered from the unfortunate concatenation of my tenure portfolio being due at about the same time my students handed in their first major assignment for assessment. I'm still playing catch-up with grading, and it doesn't help that every time I turn around, we need another committee or work group or disappearing task force to solve some problem or other. yesterday I spent over eight hours on campus, hand no classes to teach, didn't get any grading done, and still was busy all day.

I'm not going to campus tomorrow; I'll see if I can squeeze some work in around the chores in the morning, but then I'm off to Olympia for a meeting: Thursday afternoon and all day Friday. That won't help with the catching up, but I still have all weekend, and a week from Monday is a holiday, so maybe I'll be square again by the end of the month.

At least it's a short one.

Just call me Walaka Jones

2009-02-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

Generations have been in the forefront of my mind for a little while. A few weeks ago, my colleague Starbuck and I facilitated a workshop for faculty entitled "NetGen Reloaded," concerning the values, attitudes, and behavior patterns our Generation Y / Net Generation students bring into the classroom. A few days ago, I was out at our college-town alehouse with some colleagues (including Starbuck), and the conversation turned to how some of us teachers from an older generation differed in out formative experiences from our younger co-workers, many if not most of whom are Generation X. Heck, even my own Otis is a Gen-Xer, and we have had to bridge a few gaps between us.

Yet even with generational issues staring me in the face, I have always felt a bit confused about my own generation. I am clearly too old to be from Generation X, but I have never felt connected to Baby Boomers, that great, influential generation that came before. I was not a child of the sixties in the traditional sense; I was too young for the summer of love. But I'm not a slacker, either.

Well, you can just call me a charter member of Generation Jones.

I had heard about this construct before, but had somehow forgotten it. The coinage of pop culture historian Jonathan Pontell, Generation Jones refers to those of us born between 1954 and 1965. Most studies would parse these folks as just young Boomers, but Pontell saw a distinction. As one writer put it: "They grew up watching The Brady Bunch, not Leave It to Beaver. Their attitudes were shaped more by Watergate than JFK. They remember gas lines, not Mustangs."

That's me. Not a Boomer. A Jonesie. Less idealistic than Boomers, less cynical than Xers, formed by the wonders of moon landings, the malaise of hyper-inflation, and the disaster of the Iran hostage crisis, Jonesers can remember a world before computers and Walkmans and even color TV, but missed out on Camelot and Davy Crockett and Joe DiMaggio (except when he was selling coffee makers). I have always thought it emblematic of my generation that Do The Hustle hit number one the charts in New York on the night of my senior prom. Generation Jones.

And you know who's one of us? That one. The White House has gone from sixteen years of Boomer occupancy to Joneser in the Oval Office. Change, indeed.

I fight authority, authority always wins

2009-02-02T19:35:00.001-08:00

A few years ago, I was in a group of English faculty somewhere, at a conference or a department meeting, when the subject rolled around to What We Do in 101. We as teachers clearly all want to help our students develop into writers, but the exact outcomes of that enterprise are a little fuzzier. One of the more radical instructors said he wanted to create writers who would challenge the conventions of academic writing and break the norms. A sardonic reply came from across the table: "With all due respect, you are a tenured faculty member with a Ph.D., and it's a lot easier for you to talk about pulling down the pillars of the academy than it is for some kid who wants a job or to transfer to a university."

I felt the same tension in my own 101 class today, both sections. My students have been grappling with responding to texts, making claims, and writing in academic genres, and the panoply of decisions that come along with those activities, about voice, tone, register, format, authorial presence, audience, and so on, as the make their ways through various iterations of reflections, annotations, expositions, and analyses. Today, we were discussion the latest reading, an article by Nancy Sommers on authority.

"Authority," when used in discussing writing, isn't about legal jurisdiction or supraordination; it is not even just about writer's having confidence or being an expert; it's about claiming in your writing the right to present yourself as an expert, as someone worth listening to. We say before repeating something we believe, "I have it on good authority." Writing with authority means setting yourself up as one to be listened to.

Sommers, the author of the article at hand, is a bright light in composition studies, perhaps the high maven of revision. In 1993, she wrote an award-winning article that discussed her changing concept of authority. To a great degree, it rejects traditional academic conventions, the reliance on sources in writing and the appeal to experts to make a case, and reclaims personal experience and a more intimate voice as tools of authority, even in academic writing. The article is written in the form of personal essay with extensive autobiographical detail, even though it was published in an academic journal.

To which I can only reply: easy for you, you're Nancy Sommers. No matter what you do, you'll always have authority. So the tension is thrown into relief. Sommers's article, was, in fact, effective and insightful, and makes a lot of sense. But I am sure that were I to write an article in a similar style with a similar take on academic standards, it would never get published in an academic journal. I'm not Nancy Sommers; I still have to claim authority.

But it's not my stillborn articles that I'm really concerned about; it is how this tension affects my students and what and how I teach them. On the one hand, I want them to write with authority: I want them to claim the right to speak with confidence and conviction about the topics in front of them. On the other hand, I don't want them to understand the world only through their own experience and write only from and for their own perspective and frame. I want their responses to and their conclusions about and their evaluations of the ideas in front of us; I don't want their feelings or "opinions" or impressions. But students resist the authority I want them to take; they know, usually accurately, that they don't have as much expertise in Shakespeare or American History or Psychology as the audience for their papers has; whatever are they going to say? And they certainly do have authority on their own experience, and can competently talk about how they interacted with a text as an individual and how it made them feel, all the things I don't want to hear. No wonder they are confused.

Compounding their problem is the simple fact is that the academy - the university, even community college - has certain expectations of student writing, and as appealing as it might be for me to encourage them to rage against the machine, I think I would be remiss if I weren't at least in part preparing them for that game. The choices about what we write together are not all mine.

Students do need to learn to work with sources, but they need to engage and converse with them, not just cherry-pick and drop them in. Students do need to formulate positions and make claims, and not just say what they feel about something. Students do need to understand the power of structure in rhetoric, and not just throw all their ideas on the table in a jumble. And yes, students do need to know conventional moves, just not cliches and trite expressions.

But it's safer to build a five-paragraph essay and drop in a source supporting a disconnected point in each of the three body paragraphs than it is to try to converse with an author; it is much easier to report your experience reading an article than it is to analyze it; it is less complicated to write under pressure and just "let it flow" than it is to revise an essay for symmetry and parallelism; and it is less threatening to consider how an issue "has been considered since the dawn of time" than it is to really reflect on how it affects you as a person. So I understand the students' reluctance to claim an identity as a writer and to seize authority where it would really matter, and their desire to retreat to either the weighty but distant or the personal but trivial.

So I continue to try to walk with them through this minefield of English 101 to a safe spot where they can create authentic writing within sometimes arbitrary genres; where they can write from their hearts in an academic voice; where they can eschew the frippery of scholarly writing but meet the standards of academic discourse. And I try to do this with as much compassion and as few tears as possible.

The firstest of the shortest

2009-02-01T21:04:00.000-08:00

Man, I spent about nine hours grading today. I thought that was a lot, but then I realized that a lot of people prolly spent the same amount of time in front of the TV watching the Superbowl. I think I had more fun doing the grading, but I guess I did miss the commercials.

As a consequence, I didn't do much interesting today, but on one of my breaks from working, Otis and I went down to Fondi Pizza with a whole mess o' folks to celebrate the birthday of Annis P! Since I have already posted her baton-twirling publicity still on Facebook, I guess I can't top that now, so here's a nice picture of her in one of her favorite places, Maui:

And, what the heck, here's that great baton photo one more time:

Happy Birthday, Annis!

In media res

2009-01-31T20:09:00.000-08:00

Nu, it's a Saturday night, and Amanda Wilde is on the air, and the tea is hot, so it must be time for blogging.

I keep getting tagged on Facebook™ for my 15 (or 16 or 23 or 25) Things about Me meme. Hey, I was the only who responded to Apple's tag, like, two weeks ago. We were meming before meming was cool! So, dig out the note, or just read this blog instead.

I'm heading into the tail of a whirlwind time at work. The submission of my second annual tenure portfolio coincided with a particularly busy stretch of grading, so I have been humping it for about a week and a half now. No rest for the wicked, either; another assignment just came in on Friday, and I should get it back by Monday if I want to keep my Cool Teacher® status, so there's still plenty to do.

I did take time out yesterday for the weekly D&D game. We have been trucking along nicely since we started back in late November. DM Johnbai created a great world for us to play in: he took the typical D&D high fantasy structure, moved it to a desert environment (consistent with the geography from the campaign last year), layered on some semi-steampunk, lost civilization technology, and then crafted a complicated realpolitik for the adventure to play out against. All this and bigger fireballs for Soapy, too! Otis is thrilled because her druid can now talk to and change into various animals, Dingo's rogue has been kicking some serious butt, and my new monk character has been a ball to roleplay. The only downside to the whole thing is that John took all the good ideas, including some that are rather too close for comfort to things I had been contemplating for our next Fudge game. Now I have to cast about for something new and good!

Hey, while I was out with a slug of tenure-trackers the other night, I ordered a pilsner, as is my typical contrarian wont in an alehouse. I think it was a Rademacher, but I wish I could remember for sure, so I could make sure never to order it again, because it was terrible! I sent it back, and through a concatenation of circumstances wound up with a bottle of Fox Barrel Black Currant Cider. I was dubious, but, man, was it good. I think I may have a new favorite drink. Of course, I am sure it's so unusual that I will rarely be able to find it when I go out, but maybe that will just make it all the more special. If you ever run across some, give it a try.

And now, let me clean out the link bin:

Well, it's not a jet-pack, but I'll take one of these any day! (It wouldn't take much to steampunk it out, or to turn it into a Whirly-Bat, either.)

Of course, one of these might be even more practical, if only slightly less cool.

Here are some cool pictures of food, in 300 and 200 calorie piles. Besides just being fascinating their blandness, they would provide a great diet plan: just eat seven (or ten) selections a day!

Here's a more artistic picture: a 100 meter by 78 cm photo of people on a bridge called We're All Gonna Die.

And finally, is this stupid or awesome? I haven't decided. (Here's the .com.)

[apparatus] American pop

2009-01-17T18:55:00.001-08:00

Y'know, back in the day, like, six or eight months ago, I used to blog every day. I would often hie myself to a local coffee shop, crack open the laptop, and let the world know what I had for lunch. I reported on much more than that, of course, but that was the code for the diary-blogging that sustained so many posts, covering which movies I had seen, who had come over for a visit, what games we had played, and similar escapades.

I guess some people actually enjoyed reading all those quotidian details; at least, some have told me since I retired HKC that they miss them. In some ways, Facebook takes the place of diary blogging, but the Status Updates, one- or two-sentence "what I am doing now" notices, always written in the third person, are short and cryptic and lack even the minimal perspective that even a late night blog post has. I guess I could turn my Facebook page into a full-blown blog, writing Notes on my Wall instead of posts on my blog, and uploading photos and videos, but it doesn't seem that the system wants that. I don't get the sense that anyone ever visits anyone else's page, but instead everyone just read their feeds (and let's not get into all the poking and sending of virtual gifts and such). In the end, Facebook (or any other social networking site) is doing something different than what a blog does.

But it's not really the lack of a proper outlet for lunch-posts that I am concerned with; the world is not poorer for the loss of updates on the minutiae of my life. It is rather that that river of information that I created with those simple posts provided a medium for other writing - and other thinking - to happen in, and I miss that. My new format was intended to encourage me to try more developed pieces - longer texts with more complicated treatments of their topics. That is all well and good, but I have discovered that what is missing from the process now is what we call writing to learn. Sketching out those low-key responses to daily events helped to generate more developed thought; the act of writing modifies the the act of thinking, and lunch-posts sometimes beget true essays.

In an amazingly self-referential way, this one did. I had intended to just jump in with a few pop culture references and links to have some fun, but as I was drafting and revising the introduction, I realized I had more to say about the blogging itself than I thought I did. Hence this ever-lengthening rumination.

I guess what I need to do is make myself some space to some writing. Hmmm.... y'know, I might have said that before. I should listen to me.

Now back to our regularly scheduled post, already in progress:

Otis is all excited about the inauguration, so here's her own hope-ful poster:

Get your own at Obamicon.me

Isn't this how every old Flash Gordon serial started?

For everyone who had a crush on Winnie Cooper: she's a math geek now!

And I can't tell if this is a fake or not, but either people were doing parkour before there was a word for it, or it is a totally cool little fraud:

And we love us our steampunk here, and I think this qualifies:

[apparatus] Like a moth to the Flam (& a Francophone challenge)

2009-01-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

For my birthday a couple of years ago, Otis hit me with a superhero-themed surprise party. To help set the appropriate mood, she downloaded a bunch of superhero-themed music. Among the usual suspects (John Williams' Superman theme, the Wonder Woman TV show theme, Jim Infantino's Ballad of Barry Allen, Crash Test Dummies' Superman's Song, &c.) was a peppy little number we couldn't identify.

The song was in French, and other than a repeated "Capitaine" we couldn't suss out the words at all, but it had laser noise in the background and was clearly heroic-anthemy. We were playing the CD again last night, and this song came on, catching the attention and piquing the curiosity of pals Dingo and the linguistical Wheylona. A little intarweb research later, we had an answer: it was the theme music for the French edition of a 1970s Japanese animated version of the adventures of a 1940s American pulp science hero, Captain Future. But you gotta check out the music yourself:

Cool, innit? One of the sources said it hit the pop charts in France, contributing to the relative success of the show there. There was apparently an American condensed "movie" version, but the TV series itself was popular across the globe.

Italy:

Germany:

The Arab world:

I don't think any of those other themes have the hook that the French version does, though.

I haven't had a Francophone pal be able to keep up with the lyrics on any given listen to offer a decent translation, so here's a transcription I found on the web. Post in the comments your best and most poetical translation to win some sort of prize, or at least the esteem of your peeps.

Chantal Goya on 6Lyrics.com

Capitaine Flam! A new hero for a new era!

Footnote department: Wheylona did guess that the French version became "Captain Flame" because the best sense of "future" in French is captured by "avenir" and that sort of conflicts with the big ol' F on the Captain's belt buckle.

[sheepman] TWTYTW

2008-12-31T10:44:00.000-08:00

In the great tradition of ~~bloviators~~ bloggers everywhere, it's time for the Year in Review post, and I guess I am no exception to the rule. But I promise there will be no "Best [whatever] of 2008" lists and no "clip show" recycling posts from the prior twelve months.

In fact, it's hard for me to get very worked up about New Year's Eve retrospectives at all. I've long thought that outweighing the holiday's merit as truly international and secular - the Gregorian calendar is, after all, an artifact of state and commerce - is January First's totally irrelevance in most arenas most of us attend to. The astronomical calendar and the seasons do not notice it, most fiscal years ignore it, the US electoral system marks it not, the TV season is not based on it, and so on. It's pretty darn arbitrary, when you come to think of it.

The triviality of January 1 is especially true for me. Working in the higher ed system for the past eleven years, I have grown used to using October 1 as my rough marker for renewal. In addition, my personal budget runs from October 1 through September 30, and my birthday is in the beginning of October, so I underwent my own stock-taking, closing of the books, and turning of the calendar three months ago.

This time around, there's an additional reason for not marking the new year with a look backward. In many ways, 2008 could be counted as an annus horribilis around these parts, certainly from Otis's perspective. Not there there weren't any fine and happy moments at all, but there was so much struggle and pain for so much of the year that revisiting it holds little appeal.

So let's look forward instead, with just this briefest of backward glances:

From HKC, 2005-2006:

When we were having our new year's resolution discussion at breakfast yesterday, I didn't mention the one and only resolution that I make every year.

Many people have talked about it in many ways, and each year - each day, really - I hope that I can make fewer statements and ask more questions.

From HKC, 2006-2007:

So I take this moment to reflect and to give thanks for the world I was lucky enough to be born into and for the people I have been fortunate enough to meet along the way. I generally have the same two resolutions every year; this year I add one more:

I will try to talk less and listen more.
I will try to ask more questions and make fewer statements.
I will look at the situations in which I find myself and ask how a little kindness might help.

From HKC, 2007-2008:

This is my third New Year's Day Blog post, and my themes (I hesitate to call them resolutions) for the year remain the same, with some growth (a description that I hope applies to me as well):

Try to make fewer statements and ask more questions.
In each situation, consider what a little kindness might do.

So, I don't know what I can add, so I will merely reduce:

Listen more, talk less.
Ask, rather than state.
Try some kindness.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

[blockhead] Running with scissors

2008-12-19T07:34:00.000-08:00

The first look at the first draft of the new, draconian state budget is here, and at first glance it looks like relatively good news for the community colleges, but overall, the situation is pretty damn dire.

Looking at the governor's own highlights, it looks like there will be no COLAs for CC staff for the next few years, that tuition will be increased by five percent, and that the operating budget will have to be cut by seven percent. Considering how our Cascadia Budget Council has been trying to imagine 20% cuts, this seems like a relatively simple exercise in comparison. Not that seven percent won't mean painful dislocations; I still fully expect people I know and like to have less work - or no work - as a result, and the five percent tuition increase will almost certainly mean the difference between access and barrier for some of our students. It's hard times all around.

But I can't feel too good about all this when I look at the proportionally greater cuts to heath and human services. For just one example: 13,000 low-income patients will no longer receive chemical dependency treatment. Those are actual individual people with actual problems who will now not get help where once they did and who will then stress some other part of our society, whether that is their family, the police, or you, when you're walking down the street. The proposed cuts to direct services necessary to balance the budget include many such scenarios of people's quality of life changing substantially.

The governor spared community colleges from some of the burden of cuts apparently because she feels that any economic recovery needs the worker retraining provided through the CC system. That makes sense; we can't live in crisis mode forever and we need to continue to plan for the future. But thinking about the future doesn't make it any easier to make even bigger cuts that effect direct services today.

So, while I feel a little bit relieved by the news, I am far from a good mood.

[sheepman] Early morning snow notes

2008-12-18T06:35:00.000-08:00

I've been up for about an hour, after being awakened by some thunder that accompanied the snowstorm that has finally arrived in central Seattle, after three days of waiting and one proactive snowless snow day. It's been a long time since I've made a lazy pre-dawn post, but I've got a fresh cup of Folger's on the table and NPR in the background, so here we go.

So, I'm sort of in the middle of winter break here, and this was going to be a time for imposing little order - or at least the illusion of order - on aspects of my life. My professional life runs on its own rhythm - the tenure process engine is clanking along, still going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa with a full head of steam in the boiler, and the quarters turn in their inexorable path. There's a dire budget crisis looming, with some severe cuts up ahead, but I think I'll come out of it okay personally. It's not the professional life that needs attending, it's my personal productivity.

I've had a bit of a setback physically. After a summer of getting to know the three-mile path around Green Lake, and a vigorous fall of regular running, I pulled up sorta lame few weeks ago. I have been giving my right leg a bit of a rest, trying to allow a mysteriously weakened knee to recover, but this aging anatomy doesn't seem to be quite as resilient as it did some time ago, and people are still noticing a little wobble in my gait. I'm going to give it the ol' community college try again today, but I may have to overcome my reluctance to go to a doctor and actually get this checked out. The early-morning RCAF calisthenics have not been affected, thank goodness, so that regimen is moving into its second year.

Of more concern than my exercise program are my intellectual endeavors, such as they are. Nu, for an English teacher, I sure don't read much! During the quarter, I am so piled with student papers that I find it hard to squeeze in personal reading, and if I do get time to read, I feel like I should be reading the professional literature instead of pleasure stuff. Of course, I usually wind up reading neither. And my writing is languishing as well - this blog hasn't seen any essay for quite a while, my academic "articles" don't seem to advance past bibliographies and outlines, and my fiction has yet to resurrect itself. It's not a compete wasteland - I have been reading articles and pursuing some smaller writing projects - but I have produced nothing substantive to set upon the mantle.

This break was supposed to be a time to get control of those processes, to make some particular headway and perhaps establish some habits that I could take forward. It hasn't seemed to work that way. Right out of the gate, a week ago, I got wrapped up in Otis's art show project. It was wildly successful - check it out - but also consumed a lot of break time right away for preparation, execution, and recovery. The remaining time between then and now has been filled a bit with decompression from the quarter and a bit with plain old indolence. Maybe there's time in the twenty-four days left to the break to slide some accomplishments in with the lesson-planning and portfolio-writing that have to be done.

Gee, this got more ruminative than I thought it would. The cat just came back in, complaining about the cold. The snow seems to have stopped. Let's make something of the day.

[apparatus] I broke my blog

2008-12-13T19:21:00.000-08:00

Nu, I was going to mess about with my template, so I saved the old template and everything, just like you're supposed to, and when I realized that changing my template was probably a stupid idea I went to put it all back, and most of it came back, but the blogrolls were empty, so now I have to do them all again. Pfui. If I lost your link or a link you liked, please let me know.

But just so this is more than a completely self-referential, whiny post, here is a death-metal puppy for y'all (but mostly for Soapy).

[jet city] Blog bast #1

2008-12-01T21:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you just have to take your ride down to the flats and blow the carbon out of the pipes. I have been absent from the blog for a long time, and the longer it goes, the weightier I feel the next post has to be, so instead of waiting until I (or forcing myself to) come up with a brilliant essay, I'm just gonna blast the intarweb with a lot of little stuff.

A lot has happened around town since the last post, not the least of which has been Otis (and by extension, me) taking on dog-sitting Bailey while Lon and Jules are vacationing in Mexico. Lots of fun adventures in poop-scooping, resulting in Otis's informed observation: cats are a lot easier than dogs. Another few days and the master and mistress will be back, letting us off the leash.

The new D&D campaign got started in earnest. Johnbai is DMing again, with his usual incredibly high level of detail. Otis and Soapy are reprising their old roles, Dingo has joined us (breathing life into a former NPC), and I have revised my character somewhat. Neds couldn't commit to the whole campaign, so she came along as a completely new character specifically designed to join the party, betray them, and go out in a blaze of glory. And so she did.

Farewell, Moloch, you untrustworthy tiefling SOB.

The Thanksgiving Holiday went just fine. The day began with a Pumcake Brunch with just me and the ladies around the table: Dingo, Stella, Trots, O, and JagGirl. Yum-o! Afterward, I joined Otis and Clan Putnam up in LFP for an East Indian thanksgiving meal: channa masala, dal, tandoori, raita, and Robb's Whipped Monkey King Coconut Yams. And let's not forget the tevenberry pie!

There's one more week or so of fall quarter, and then the long winter break begins. I'm sure more adventures lie in store.

[blockhead rhetoric] Blog blast #2

2008-12-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

It's as easy for teachers to complain about job-related stuff as it is for anyone else, I guess. It's a bad habit to get into, so I try to avoid it, and in that spirit, I would like to share something that happened today that made me feel good.

In my lit class, we have a workshop day before papers are due, giving the students a chance for some peer review before they hand the paper in (and not incidentally keeping them from writing the entire paper the night before it's due). On each of these days, before we get into pairs or groups, I have each of the students reduce the claim of their paper, its main point, to one sentence - a thesis statement, if you will - and write that on an index card. Using the document camera we look at all the samples, and talk about how complex (or not) they are, how interesting (or not) they are, what strategies would be useful in exploring them, and so on.

We had out third and last workshop today, and halfway through the stack of cards, it struck me: none of them were complete clunkers. Oh, sure, some were more sophisticated and some less obvious than others, but overall, all of the ideas were analytical, specific, and potentially robust candidates for the focus of a lit paper. We had come a long way from out first workshop, which offered some claims along the lines of "this poem is about love".

It was satisfying to see that the class, as a whole, had moved from one place to another. While some students clearly have more aptitude for verbal-linguistic learning, and some individuals are just more interested in things literary, everyone's grasp of the form and conventions of literary analysis seems to have been ratcheted up a notch or two. Whether they will ever be really good at it or whether they will ever really enjoy it, they all know how to do it: what the objective is and how to get there. And in the final analysis, that's all I want.

So, yeah, we'll put this one in the win column.

[men in skirts] Blog blast #3

2008-12-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

When winter comes to Seattle, it's time to break out my Workman's model Utilikilt. This durable garment, made of caramel duck cloth (usually known as Carhartt material) is heavy enough to keep out the coolness and dampness of the northwest rainy season. There's just one problem.

Two of the six snaps that hold the kilt closed have ripped from the fabric. The remaining four snaps are enough to keep modesty (and comfort) intact, but it gives the kilt a slightly shabby looks, with frayed holes where the bright silver buttons ought to be.

I'm thinking I might want to get this repaired, but I'm not sure how to go about it. The same thing happened to the first version of this kilt that I bought, within a week or so of wearing it, and I made a temporary and not-very-effective repair with some duct tape (on the inside), but Utilikilts replaced the kilt promptly, so I really didn't have to worry about it. Now, the kilt is out of warranty (as it were), and I'm certainly not in the mood to spring for another new one, so... what to do? Perhaps over the break I can track down a canvas fixer.

[apparatus] Blog bast #4

2008-12-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

Since we borrowed the DVD set of Farscape - what, about three weeks ago now? - we have watched about a season and a half of it. Otis is positively addicted - not only does she want to watch it every frelling night, but when we discovered a missing disk, she downloaded the episodes on iTunes and we projected from the laptop!

Okay, I'll admit it, I like it a lot, too. And the ability to watch a series - any series - basically all at one go is really changing how people interact with Story. I'm telling you, there's a doctoral dissertation in there. maybe I should write it.

But that can't be the only junk culture of note that has surfaced recently, can it? Not bloody likely:

Just for Johnbai: hippo fight!

Okay, this video starts out as one of those sweet inter-species friendship stories, the kind that Otis really likes, and then hangs a hard left into Weirdville. Downtown Weirdville, at the corner of Disturbing Avenue and Crazy Street.

Occasionally I have posted games that I thought were cool or fun. This one is just damn frustrating!

I have to find a way to work these old manuals into the tech writing class I'll be teaching next quarter.

Okay, that concludes BlogBlast 2008. Maybe now that the tubes are clear, this particular section of the Internet will start flowing again with some quality content. Hope springs eternal...

[4-color ma] The physics of cats and (wonder) dogs

2008-11-14T17:40:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads genre comics - superhero in particular, but including adventure and war and western - gets used to improbable physics, those apparently impossible leaps and lifts and feats and flights. But sometimes the impossible is only unlikely.

Some time ago, Mike Sterling ran a post on Progressive Ruin entitled Adventures in Improbable Physics with Rex the Wonder Dog, in which he looked dubiously at this sequence:

Well, being a community college teacher and all, I figured it might be useful to let some students have a go at seeing if this scenario could indeed happen, at least without violating any laws of physics. So I sent the link to Dr. Burn, who is not a supervillian (although the way I render her name makes her look like one) but our resident math/physics guru. The time was right for her to introduce the problem in her class last week, and she sent me this rumination on the scenario, written while she was in her ~~lair~~ lab, proctoring a test:

I'm thinking about Rex the Wonder Dog. This problem is a bit complicated because of the torsional aspect of the tree branch. On one level, it is acting like a spring, which is a simple analysis. However, the spring force happens because of torque on the branch. As you know from changing a tire and using a lug wrench, torque depends on the amount of force as well as how far from the rotation point that you apply that force. The big cat has more force on the branch because it is heavier than the Wonder Dog. However, Rex is further out from the branch. So, one way to look at this is depending on the different masses, they have the same torque. But then, that wouldn't be good, because Rex would still be holding the branch and stuck in the quicksand.

But wait! The big cat "leaped" on the branch. Therefore the cat has more torque on the branch than just its own weight and a certain distance. What we can use is a conservation of energy analysis and sidestep questions about the springiness of the branch. We can say that the energy state of a closed system is always the same amount. When the big cat is at the highest point of its leap, it has maximum potential energy due being up in the air. The dog has zero potential energy because it is at ground level. The branch has zero potential energy because it hasn't been sprung yet.

At the end of the comic, the potential energy of the big cat is zero, because it is at ground level. The potential energy of the stick is zero because it isn't bent anymore by the weight of either animal (we'll ignore that it is probably still oscillating). The potential energy of the dog is at its maximum because of its height above the ground.

When we do an energy analysis, we also have to think about kinetic energy, but at the moments I am talking about, nobody is moving (at the top of a leap, you are momentarily at rest). So, kinetic energy is zero at these two points.

OK, now the numbers. Potential energy due to a spring has an equation associated with it, but we don't care because of the points we are choosing. Potential energy due to height from the ground is equal to mass*height*g where g is associated with what planet one is on (sometimes hard to determine). So, [mass of cat] *[max height it reached in its leap] is equal to [mass of dog] * [max height it reached on the ledge]. Or, height of ledge = cat to dog ratio times how high the cat leaped.

This is the scenario Dr. B was going to walk her students through. I set up an Excel spreadsheet to run some numbers and found that if we estimate the cat at 200 lbs (top end for a black panther) and Rex at 77 lbs (mid-range for a German Shepherd), and guess the cat's jump was 10 feet, the Wonder Dog could have been thrown 26 feet up to the ledge, bob's your uncle, and it's all not so improbable after all!

But wait! What about the quicksand? I emailed Dr. B to remind her of this niggling detail. She replied:

I used the comic in my class yesterday. It was a great teaching device.

I was trying to ignore the quicksand, but my students wouldn't let me. It is hard to predict the average dragging force due to the quicksand (at least for me). By the way, we can't talk about the sucking force of the quicksand, since there is no such thing as a sucking force. There is only a pressure differential. So, there could be a low pressure situation at Rex's bottom paws. Or, the frictional force could just be the scraping force as Rex gets pulled out by the branch. That is quite a range in terms of possible amount the quicksand will hinder Rex the Wonder Dog.

Frictional force is often just measured and then you know. So, we need to get a panther, the dog, the branch, and the quicksand. We can estimate how far up Rex should go. The amount under that he actually goes tells us the amount of friction. [Weight of Cat] * [height cat jumps] minus [Weight Dog]*[height dog goes]" is equal to [Friction] * [distance in the quicksand] (where distance is equal to the length of Rex's body).

Well, that didn't give me as clear an answer as I wanted. I checked some internet sources on quicksand and found this from an entry on HowStuffWorks: "Quicksand is basically just ordinary sand that has been so saturated with water that the friction between sand particles is reduced." The reason things get stuck in quicksand is that it can't support any weight because it is saturated, not because there is any sucking - a pressure differential doesn't play into it. So, the actual friction of quicksand should not be terribly high and certainly less than being stuck in a pile of regular sand.

So, if we just make the cat a little heavier, and his leap just a little higher, and the ledge just a foot or two lower, we should be able to offset any dragging force from the quicksand, and it is all still plausible.

I pity the fool who doubts the Wonder Dog.

[apparatus] In the meme time

2008-11-11T21:09:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia says a meme (pronounced /miːm/) consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus.

I say a meme is a groovy little blogosphere interaction you engage in, like this one, the alphabet meme, that I got from blogging buddy RAB at Estoreal, who got it from Blog Cabins via Movie Chunks. Here are the rules:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

Like RAB, I'm not specifically tagging anyone, but feel free to jump in with your own list. Here's mine:

Antonia's Line
Bubba Ho-Tep
Crimes and Misdemeanors
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Elling
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
The General
House of Games
I Heart Huckabees
Joe versus the Volcano
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Little Voice
Millions
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Once
Pieces of April
Quigley Down Under
Run Lola Run
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
The Third Man
Until the End of the World
A Very Long Engagement
The Wedding Banquet
X The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
You Can Count on Me
Zatoichi

As a bonus, here's Otis's list:

Amelie
Bourne Identity Series
Chocolat
The Darjeeling Limited
Escape from Alcatraz
Fargo
The Great Escape
Hero
In America
Joe versus the Volcano
King of California
Lars and the Real Girl
The Man who Knew Too Much
North by Northwest
Once
The Piano
The Quiet American
Rear Window
The Secret of Roan Inish
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Unbreakable
Vertigo
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The X-Men Series
You Can Count on Me
Zatoichi

Jump in on your bog - just post the rules and the link. Here's the LNTAM index if you need some memory-jogging.

[sheepman] A question of balance

2008-11-10T14:24:00.000-08:00

The election is over and all the whoop-dee-do is settling down. I must admit that I am more pleased than displeased by the results, but I also have to say that I am not as euphoric as some public demonstrations have indicated many people are. I am trying to figure out just what I feel.

Pal Wheylona posted this image as part of her own post-election analysis from a European perspective. I have to admit that it speaks to me, capturing as it does the historic nature of this election, the end of a regime which I sincerely feel has not had the best interests of most Americans at heart, and the sense of a populist progressivism that I hope will be evident in the new administration. In my estimation, the single most important advantage to an Obama administration is that is should be easier to pull to the left; I will gauge its success by just how far we are able to do that, because I think that more people will be helped more genuinely by that course than by another.

At the same time, we have to remember that the popular vote in the presidential race was split roughly 52% to 48%, a clear victory but not an overwhelming majority. And no matter how much we joke about it or frequently we kid about it, neither half of the population of this country is going to move away, or secede from the union and become Jesusland or The United States of Canada, or change their minds overnight. We have some serious problems ahead, and it's going to take all of us to fix them. How are we going to do that, especially when some of the differences that divide us appear to be so elemental?

That renaissance man of the intarweb, Ze Frank, seems to have taken one small step forward with his From 52 to 48 with Love project. In his own quirky, bloggy way, Ze wants to start off this new era with reconciliation and community, and has asked people to contribute their own expressions of those feelings. Some of the photos contained in the album are just touching and heartbreaking in their sincerity; the responses to it have, of course, been mixed. But I think it's a great place to start.

I have friends in the 48, people whose intelligence I respect and whose integrity is unquestionable. I think they were wrong in where they threw their support and I think they are wrong in some their fundamental assumptions about who we are and how we work as a country. But I want them to be part of my community and part of my country, and I need to pull them closer instead of pushing them away. This might help with that, a little bit.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too."
--Barack Obama

[apparatus] Whew!

2008-11-06T20:46:00.001-08:00

Well, it has been a heck of a week - I really haven't had much time since Halloween for a developed thought unrelated to my classes. But this is a long weekend for me - not holidaywise, just non-instructional-daywise - so maybe I'll get a chance to focus some neurons on issues other than essay organization and poetry analysis. In the meantime, there's this mess.

That blue lady up there is Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan, a character from Farscape, Otis's latest watch-the-series-on-DVD venture. It seems to be a bit like a mix of Bablyon Five and Star Trek: Voyager with more of an edge, or maybe Andromeda on crank. We've watched a few episodes, and it's holding up so far, although the fairly generic spaceship milieu and the Henson puppetworks wear thin easily. Watching this mostly-obscure little series makes me wonder if anyone else remembers White Dwarf, an ill-considered series from 1995 with a semi-steampunk vibe, described by one critic as "a sort of Northern Exposure meets The Princess Bride on the planet Dune."

Speaking of steampunk, here's a bike to reckon with - The Brass Lion:

This wonderful ride is a product of Steuben's Wheelmen, and I'd love to be tooling down the Burke on it.

More steampunkish transportation news: the rigid airship is back! You wouldn't know it by the headline, which sacrificed accuracy for a little pun, but the zeppelin has returned to American skies. I'm not sure I want to pay five yards for a one-hour ride, but I'm happy to know its in the skies. That's cool.

Here's something else that manages to be totally cool and completely boring at the same time, something that I would not have thought possible before:

Um, yeah. Here's a website that I am sure explains how fantastic this really is, but it's even too boring to read. Not cool at all.

Something that everyone else thought was cool was the cloned dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Sometimes I wonder if I was the only kid who was more excited by Pleistocene mammals than by dinosaurs: sabre-toothed cats and giant sloths, that's where it was at for me! In any case, according to this article, it looks like the mammoths might beat the thunder lizards in the reincarnation race.

And finally, here's a note from the real world, not the sci-fi past or future. Newsweek ran an article with inside information from the political campaigns that is now leaking out; it included this quotation from Barack Obama talking about the debates:

“I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

Bravo! I love this quotation not only because the voice in it is so authentic and direct about the campaign process, but because Obama is echoing a sentiment about environmentalism that I have held and argued for some time now. Yeah, he's got this.

[jet city] Liveblogging election night (sort of)

2008-11-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

Well, the munchies are all out and the bevvies are in the fridge, the news Spectration is on the big wall and Sousa is on the CD player - I guess we're ready for the Election Night Open House that we have planned. I think there may be a lot more folks here than we anticipated, but that's cool. I will check in from time-to-time with updates about how the evening is going, both in the political world and our little social world here.

5:43: We're projecting NBC on the wall (we only get broadcast television) and playing the soundtrack from Brassed Off on the CD player. Otis is upstairs taking care of some business and I am watching our freaky cats and the talking heads (better than talking cats and freaky heads, I guess). Polls in the east have only been closed a short time, and already the projection for Obama is something like 103 electoral votes, with McCain getting 58. They may call this election before anyone even gets here at 6:00.

6:24 Johnbai, Dingo, and Sachet are here eating sandwiches and salads as ABC announced that Obama had Ohio in their projection. That gives him 195 according to them, and Stephanapolous has called it over. Hunh. They've switched to local coverage - we don't expect to really know any results for a few days.

6:49 Hi Lai and Welcome Matt just showed up with cupcakes!

Obama is at 200.

7:24 Outside the studios of ABC, people are holding banners that say "Cassoulet Forever." What is up with that? Is he running for something or do they just like French bean dishes?

7:43 Full swing:

Andres(2), Plus-one, and Yojimbo have joined the party. We have lots of champagne but have agreed that none gets opened until Obama hits 270. He has 207 now, so still some time to go. Our polls aren't even closed yet.

8:02 Wow. As soon as the polls closed on the West Coast, ABC gave the election to Obama. So did NPR. It looks like it's over. It's a little confusing, since they haven't called all the states, and no one is showing numbers yet, just cheering crowds. We'll wait for McCain to concede, I think.

8:45 McCain conceded. The champagne was pretty good. During the speech, we were wondering where the hell that guy had been all campaign - his concession was gracious and inspiring. Now we're waiting for Obama's speech. Even Soapy, our resident libertarian.

9:22 The gang just watched Obama's speech. Good stuff. Makes me want to get rid of reds and blues and just be all purple.

10:53 Everybody is gone; the gang grew to include Toke, Reni, JagGirl, Merry, and Mark I as well as the previously aforementioned folks. We watched the gubernatorial campaign come to a much swifter resolution than anyone expected - Gregoire had a substantial lead and claimed victory, attempting to short-circuit any replay of the long-drawn process from four years ago. Most of the local propositions broke the way I wanted to see them go, and my buddy Jim Jacks down in The 'Couv sailed to a stunning victory. All in all a pretty good night, leaving us with a lot of hope for the future, and the anticipation of some fence-mending and community-building, if any of that is at all possible in the polarized nation we have become.

Personally, it was a night of connection and re-connection, as close friends and acquaintances once-removed alike came together to share this historic event. There's nothing like good company and a momentous occasion to turn an evening into an event - and the coincident visit from an out-of-country pal was the cherry on the sundae. Here's looking forward to more opportunities for celebration and communion.

And snacks!

(EOM. G'night!)