this is drivel

Monday, March 1, 2010

The only movies that need voice-overs, the background chatter from one of the main characters to explain what's going on, fall generally into one of two camps: they're either film noir detective movies, or they're not very good. Or (I'm all about giving you options) in the case of the Dennis Quaid sort-of detective flick D.O.A., they can be both. Blade Runner, for all its worth in ground-breaking visuals, was originally released in a version heavily larded with narration that seems meant to add atmosphere and make it edgy. Instead, it deflated the wonder of the visuals and made the story sound drab and boring.

A voice-over doesn't automatically doom a movie to craptitude. I like to think an inventive director can overcome just about any obstacle. Sam Mendes had Kevin Spacey narrate American Beauty, for instance, and it not only turned out okay, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have worked without the voice-over. I've tried to imagine the movie without it and I can't.

Unlike, say, The Invention Of Lying, a Ricky Gervais movie we watched the other night. As soon as I heard Gervais introducing the movie by stating the premise — he lives in a world where everyone says exactly what they're thinking, which was pretty obvious, given the title — I thought, "Let's see how this would play out if it didn't have a voice-over." I did a quick rewind in my head after the first few scenes and I think I can say that this movie would not only not suffer if you turned the sound off for the first minute or two, it would be better.

But only a little better. This is one of those movies that has its good moments, but unfortunately that's about all it's got. The scenes play out like comic sketches that would have stood alone on a Saturday night comedy show just fine, but as a movie they didn't quite come together. Too bad.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Robert McCall, the artist who gave us some of the most iconic images of the space age, has died.

You might not recall his name, but if you've ever seen a poster for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, or walked past the mural at the National Air And Space Museum, you've seen his work. And if you did, I'd bet it made you stop and say Wow!

What kid wouldn't want to become an astronaut after seeing the mural he painted for Disneyworld's EPCOT center? That's Robert Crippen and moon-walker John Young getting dressed to take Columbia into orbit for the first time. Yowza.

More space-o-riffic McCall paintings at Robert McCall Studios

If you like to read fiction but you've never read science fiction because of the geek factor, or you've tried but you found it too technical or fantastic, you ought to give Ursula Le Guin's work a try before you give up on the genre entirely. She doesn't write just science fiction; she's well-known for her work of fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea, but in the science fiction genre her story-telling ability is exceeded only by her success in bringing memorable characters to life.

You could dive into one of her full-length novels, but a short story would probably be the best way to start, I think. Pick up a copy of The Compass Rose and thumb through the stories until a title or a phrase catches your eye, or start at the beginning and plow your way through to the end in one sitting, as my oldest son did when he found it on the bookshelf. My favorite, "The Pathways of Desire," traces the origins of the universe back to the desires everyone shares. This is not conventional science fiction.

My favorite novel — not asserting that it's her best, just my favorite — would have to be The Left Hand of Darkness, a story I read again and again not for the science or the fantasy aspects but because the friendship between the two main characters, a love story, really, rises up off the pages and grabs me by the heart. When Ai and Harth meet they are hardly friendly, a coolness that grows into active dislike, but they have a common interest that brings them to trust one another, and from that trust their friendship grows. It's a story I think anyone could relate to.

Although I used to re-read her books regularly, I haven't picked one up in years until I read an interview in The Oregonian via their web site, OregonLive.com in which she candidly admits, with a catch in her voice, she doesn't seem to have any more stories to tell. Her last book, Lavinia was released in late 2008 and Le Guin says her muse has not brought her a story since then. A story like that should set off alarm bells, but no. What she's brought us is quite a treasure, and maybe her muse is only napping after all.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

We was doin' the cha-cha last night!

During our private lesson we reviewed the few basic steps we already learned, foxtrot, waltz and swing, and added a turn to the waltz, and that was about it. Oh, and we learned the merengue. I hope there's a lot more to it than he taught us because the basic step hardly counts as a dance. You just sort of stamp your feet in one spot and turn.

My Darling B likes to stay for the group session that gets going right after our lesson, and they were starting a two-month program to learn the cha-cha. We didn't know they were starting on the cha-cha. Last week, when we joined them, they were working on a waltz step that was a lot of fun and was the kind of dance we were thinking was just about our speed. The cha-cha, if you had asked me a week ago, is not what I would have thought of as a dance that was about our speed.

But Darling B wants to dance, and I'll try anything at least once, so we stayed. I figured that, because it was the first lesson, maybe we'd be able to keep up for at least a little while.

The guy who teaches the group lesson is young and full of infectious enthusiasm, the kind of teacher you can't say no to. Just don't even try. When he says, Do it this way, you do it that way, even if it looks like something you couldn't possibly do. So even though the cha-cha is not a dance I would have ever pictured myself doing, I was giving it the old college try, if only so I could say "told ya so" when it didn't work.

Only it did. Cha-cha is a stupidly simple dance. Well, at first it is. We learned the basic step first, then kept adding on to it: first the basic step, then an introductory step, then a rock step to wind up to a twirl, then the twirl, and pretty soon we were all cha-cha-ing and twirling and it was like a scene out of Saturday Night Fever!

By the time we were done My Darling B was very pink in the cheeks, and I was feeling a bit flushed myself. The cha-cha is quite a workout, but a whole lot more fun than going to the gym.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

For those of you who missed your morning drivel, it's back, thanks to my awesome brother, who also happens to be my blog host and keeps this thing running for peanuts. Less than peanuts, actually. Real peanuts are getting kind of pricey, in case you haven't bought any lately.

I tried to log in so I could write something stupid about my shoes and couldn't. Write. I could log on, for some reason, but I couldn't write, or do any of the other things people do with their blogs, not that I'd want to do all the things other people do with their blogs. There's a list of things as long as the road to ruin of all the things people do with their blogs I wouldn't want to do with my blog. You can be assured that, whenever you come to visit, you will find nothing but the usual drivel.

After I figured out the blog was down hard and there was nothing I could do about it from my end, I did the next thing I always do when I can't figure out how to tame my computer: I whined to my brother. He suffers this fool gladly, or at least that's all he lets on he does. I shot him an e-mail S.O.S. before I left for work this morning and, by the time I got home tonight, there was drivel all over the internet once again. How cool's that?

For those of you who didn't miss drivel this morning at all, never mind.

Here's something you don't see every day:

Or ever.

I'd really like to know what's going on in that picture.

From Sam Javanrouh's Daily Dose of Imagery

Tonight's dinner was not cooked on lumber. That means just what it says. I prepared and served a delicately broiled slab of salmon for guy night, and I did it without making a trip to the work shop to dig a rough-sawn cedar plank or a leftover length of select pine from the lumber pile.

I'm not just talking gibberish here. Apparently cooking your salmon on a plank is the greatest thing since JFK boinked Marilyn Monroe. I'm just guessing that the JFK / Marilyn thing was pretty great. It's not like I've seen their lost sex tape or anything like that. How do you suppose that went down, anyway? JFK called up the Secret Service one night when he couldn't sleep and told them, Get me Marilyn Monroe, and don't ask any questions! Just wondering. I suppose I'd look it up if I had the time. Or cared.

I have never heard of cooking salmon, or anything, on a plank before this morning when the announcers on Wisconsin Public Radio, who have been begging for money all week, announced that they had twenty tickets to a cook-out at which Mad Dog and Merrill would be cooking and serving salmon ... salmon on a plank. Joy Cardin's voice was so hoarse after a solid week of telethoning that she was barely audible, but she stuck it out all morning, determined to sell these tickets.

And it was a very big deal. You had to donate at least $1,200.00 to get a pair of tickets, apparently because Mad Dog and Merrill were doing the cooking. I like to think I'm pretty handy with a Weber grill, but am I supposed to know these guys?

I don't doubt that there are a lot of novel ways to prepare salmon, and even some that will let you present a dish that will impress your guests, but why cook on a plank? How does that make sense? Salmon is at its best when it's broiled until it's just about to brown, then served unadorned so you taste nothing but salmon. It's not supposed to taste like cedar, or whatever. You want to eat something that tastes like cedar, then I'll pour you a great big bowl of sawdust and you can spoon it up with some milk & sugar. I'll be sitting at the big people's table savoring the salmon.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Funny 'coz it's true:

"Funny until it makes you cry" would be more accurate, but a lot more depressing.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

It's a first: We stopped by Star Liquor yesterday evening to see what was featured at the Friday afternoon beer tasting and somehow, don't ask me how, we didn't end up taking any home.

Before this, we always ended up picking a six-pack from the brewer who was handing out free samples. They always offered a sip of at least one at the tasting that we liked so much that we had to take home more. This time, through no fault of the guy handing out samples, we didn't. Weird.

It happened this way: We strolled past the coolers, looking at the tasty new brews on display, making our mental wish list. I grabbed a bottle of Central Waters IPA because I'd been jonsing for it all week. B picked out a four-pack of cherry stout that the store owner recommended, and finally I grabbed a sixer of Mighty Arrow, a seasonal beer from New Belgium Brewing (one of the first signs of spring). Having reached the limit of what we could comfortably carry, we paid, said our thanks to everyone and headed home.

Mighty Arrow is soooo tasty. Get yourself some. [Disclaimer: I don't own any stock in New Belgium Brewing. I wish I did, but I don't.]

Sunday, March 7, 2010

If one billion people on this planet drink a cup of coffee every day, and one billion people drink a cup of tea ... it's probably way more than that, but you get the idea ... then where is all that coffee and tea coming from? How's it even possible that people can grow that much coffee and tea on this planet?

Same with corn. Every can of soda pop has high-fructose corn syrup in it. Everyone I know drinks at least two cans of pop a day. Where in the world do they find the room to grow all that corn?

If they're growing it on this world. Maybe it's coming from outside our world, and there's a massive corporate cover-up going on to keep us from realizing that we're dependent on alien worlds for our food supply.

It kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it? It boggles mine. Discuss.

Weekend Wrap-Up:

Saturday

Farmer's Market: A delicious breakfast featuring a pesto Monte Cristo with bread pudding, mushy granola & cranberries, and apple quarters mixed up with some kind of sweet potato stuff. I loved everything except the sweet potato stuff.

Saint Vinnie's: brought home copies of Henry Hitchings' Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary and Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale Of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. A lexical twofer!

Nap Time: It was good!

Dinner: Fired up the Weber to grill a couple of ribeye buffalo steaks. B served with baked potatoes. Bliss!

Movie: The Informant! — funny as hell.

Bedtime: Late. Slept sound and long.

Sunday

Auction: A total bust. Didn't see one thing we thought was worth staying for, so we didn't. Home before noon.

Furniture: Moved it. I've been saying for weeks that I would get around to setting up an office in what used to be Tim's room so B would have a desk with a filing cabinet so she could work on finances. Finally did that. Still have to put up book shelves and get a day bed for visitors, but it's a good start.

Furniture again: Built it. My desktop computer, upon which I bang out these words, formerly sat on the desk that is now upstairs in our gonnabe-office, so before I could move it I had to have an emergency back-up desk on which to set up my computer. Lucky for me I saved the door that used to be in the wall that I knocked out of the basement work shop. Put four legs on it and voila! a desk. Wobbles a bit, but I think I can fix that.

Monday, March 8, 2010

My dream has finally come true: There's a full-size onesie for adults on the market. I am so getting one of these. I only wish I'd found out about it last fall, so I could have worn it all winter. Bonus: It came from right here in Wisconsin. I only wish it came in flannel instead of polar fleece, the material that makes lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips. Ordinarily I'd think that was pretty cool, but by bedtime I just want to go to sleep, not put on a cape and fight crime.

The Hurt Locker won best picture. Can we not talk about the Oscars for a few hours now? No? Dammit!

Voters in Iceland decided their national bank isn't too big to fail. This was not a symbolic referendum. 97% of eligible voters went to the polls to answer it. Makes the Tea Party look like a thin crowd of protesters half-heartedly chanting worn-out slogans. Oh, wait ...

But the prize for the voters who most wants to make their voices heard goes to these guys. "I was ready to come to the voting center even if there were missiles, not only mortars." I'd still be under my bed if there were mortars, buddy.

Think way back to middle school to that day in science class when the teacher introduced plate tectonics by showing you how Africa and South America fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, and have been racing away from the starting line of the mid-Atlantic rift at the blinding speed of something like a centimeter a year (I went through middle school during the Jimmy Carter Loves Metrics years).

Well, here's science class in action: The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Chile last month was so powerful it sent a tsunami clear across the Pacific to Japan, shortened the length of a day (even if it only amounted to a few microseconds), and moved the city of Concepcion 10 feet to the left. Or right, if you live in the southern hemisphere.

If I had a bunch of these I'd burn up a whole tank of gas just cruising back and forth along the Beltline all weekend.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

I woke at about four o'clock this morning and was at a complete loss to explain the reason for it. I hadn't had a dream about a bear chasing and eating me, I didn't have a cramp in my calf strong enough to bend steel, I hadn't tried to swallow my tongue while snoring. With an hour to go until the alarm clock started having a bleeping fit, I had no idea what had brought me wide-awake ... until I heard the sound of a cat moistly cleaning itself. It sounded as if it were inches from my ear.

I sat up in bed. It was inches from my ear! At some time during the night, one of our cats had wormed its way between us and all the way up to a point between our shoulder blades.

Both the cats like to sleep on our bed during the winter months, then go find cooler places to sleep during the warmer seasons. We don't mind except in a few cases, like when they try to sleep on top of us. That earns either one of them a quick ejection, to the end of the bed or onto the floor. Nobody and nothing gets to sleep on top of me.

And both the cats have tried to mosey on up to the pillow more than once. B thinks that's kind of cute, but I'm a little funny about having a cat on my pillow. It's not that I'm worried about them sucking my soul out through my nose. It's that I don't want cat hair on my pillow, and keeping cats off it seems to be the easiest and most sure way to guarantee that. Plus, whenever they're walking on my pillow I'm reminded that, no matter how much time they spend licking their own toes clean, they use the same dainty toes to walk on kitty litter, and that's something I don't want to put my head on. Ever.

And I don't want to wake up at four o'clock in the morning to the sound of a cat licking itself. It's a great time-saver they're self-cleaning, and I say this as a guy with enough experience washing dogs that I will pay someone else to do it if I ever have one again. That doesn't mean I like being in the same room with a cat that's cleaning itself. It's such a noisy process. And I don't want to think about what they're licking.

So the cat that woke me up this morning — I think it was Bonkers — was rudely grappled and shoved more than halfway down the length of the bed to a less warm spot just behind my knees. And then I rolled myself up in the quilts and tried to go back to sleep, unsuccessfully. Why do we keep cats again?

I'm not sure what this is about, except that it is so Japan.

Link to WTF, Japan, Seriously? for more.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

It's awkward day, right in the middle of everything. We've left Monday in the dust, but Friday's still too far away to get excited about it.

I could have stayed in bed this morning and not felt a moment's guilt about playing hookey. I still feel a little tired all over after last night's cha-cha lesson. Cross-body turns and all those twirls take a lot out of a guy.

We're SO CLOSE TO SPRING!

About a week ago, when winter finally showed the first signs of letting up on us just a bit, My Darling B went out to her garden to paw through the snow cover, searching for sprouting garlic but, so sad, couldn't find any.

This week, it's been even warmer, and today temps crept into the 50s for the first time. As soon as we got home, B slipped into her mud-caked gardening shoes and was out in the back yard again, looking for sprouts.

Still no luck. Damn. But just look at how much of the ground you can see! Two months ago the snow was hip-deep. Two weeks ago it was was knee-deep. And now ...

A few of the people I work with were complaining about the rain and the gray, dirty snow. I couldn't stand it. What, are you kidding me? I shot back. It's raining! Let me put it another way: It's not snowing! And the snow on the ground is melting because of the rain! I just don't get people sometimes.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

"Got time for a question that doesn't have anything to do with anything?" Tim asked me the other day.

I just love questions that don't have anything to do with anything, so I said, "Shoot!"

"If you want to increase the amount of heat in a circuit, do you increase the voltage or the current."

Well, damn. I used to know that kind of thing, but I don't tinker so much with trying to make electrical circuits hotter so I don't go doing things like increasing the voltage or the current.

"I'm not sure," I told him. "It's just a guess, but I think you have to increase the amperage." I liked that answer because "increase the amperage" made me sound as if I knew what I was talking about.

He seemed satisfied with that, and I figured he would probably go look it up himself later anyway, so I let it go.

Then, about a half-hour later while I was thinking about other things that didn't have anything to do with anything, a light bulb lit over my head. As soon as I could, I got to a phone and dialed Tim's number.

"It's volts," I said.

"Really? Volts? How'd you remember that?"

"Apollo 13 blew up because the space ship was designed as a twenty-four volt system, but was upgraded to a 36-volt system. The heater in the oxygen tank was built for the old system and got too hot during a test run."

"It's cool that you remember that," he said, and he really meant it. "I guess knowing all that space geek stuff might actually be good for something, eh?"

Friday, March 12, 2010

I've wasted an indefensibly huge amount of time surfing through these photos of PR photos from the original Star Trek television series, but then I've wasted an indefensibly huge amount of time watching every episode of the series at least half a dozen times, too. But don't judge me. Space geekery is a disease. I'm just a victim. From Bird Of The Galaxy's Flickr photostream.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The public bathroom at the Willy Street Co-Op:

I guess some guys need something to keep their hands busy while they're standing there. I can't draw, but I know a few snappy quotations I could dash off ... not that I really want to pick up that chalk, even when there's soap and plenty of hot water nearby.

Michael Collins is the astronaut who drove the bullet-shaped command and service module in circles around the moon while Aldrin and Armstrong took the lander down. The photo above is from the 2008 documentary In The Shadow Of The Moon. I couldn't resist using it here, instead of the usual Nasa portrait because, to my lights, it's a much better photo than almost any other I've seen of Collins. He's got a great smile, which goes well with the very frank, plain-spoken way he has of of telling stories. I just love it that he's a grandpa with stories to tell about flying in space.

One of my favorites: During the Gemini program, Collins was tapped to sit on a board that would review the applications of the newest recruits to the astronaut program. He was surprised there were no African-American applicants, but relieved there were no women applying for the job. I gritted my teeth and read on, expecting the usual garbage about how the job was too dangerous, or that women weren't qualified, but it turns out that Michael Collins didn't want to fly in space with women because he wouldn't feel comfortable taking a dump:

I think our selection board breathed a sigh of relief that there were no women, because women made problems, no doubt about it. It was bad enough to have to unzip your pressure suit, stick a plastic bag on your bottom, and defecate — with ugly old John Young sitting six inches away. How about if it was a woman? No, it was better to stick with men.

Although Collins was deeply involved in the Gemini program with space suit development, and was selected for the Apollo program early on, he made just two flights into space, first on Gemini 10, then called it quits after Apollo 11. "I just didn't feel I could go back to the bottom of [the] ladder and work my way up again," he explained.

I was simply not willing to spend [three years] in simulators and nights in motel rooms instead of with my family. If I were leaving Deke [Slayton, head of the manned moon program] shorthanded, or if he could have promised to get me airborne in six months (which, of course, he could not and would not), it might have been a different story. As it was, Deke had enough astronauts to fly thirty missions to the moon.

His frankness sometimes comes off as irritation, or maybe ordinary grumpiness would be a better way to describe his attitude toward the endless hours of meetings, report-writing and training to fly a mission. And he is equally frank about describing the pressure he, Armstrong and Aldrin felt when it came to carrying off their mission without a hitch.

I don't know why, but I'm always surprised by memoirs of people involved with the Apollo program. The PR machine built these people up to be gung-ho warriors filled with can-do spirit, yet when I read their stories they're very ordinary, self-effacing and fragile, filled with optimism but pragmatism right up to the point where it almost begins to sound like self-doubt. Their memoirs reveal people who had grave doubts that it would ever come off, in spite of all their hard work. I was delighted with this book, though, from which Collins's voice spoke loudly and clearly, and held plenty of interesting details about the space program I hadn't read before.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Milk doesn't come from grass! Cows aren't fed milk! What the hell's going on here?

We're having a cookbook sale today, but you can't come in.

Although most of the ice is gone from Lake Monona, there's still a bit on Squaw Bay, a little cove on the east side of the lake.

Tracks and grooves in the ice suggest that somebody's been dragging his kayak to the open water to do a little paddling.

You can't see it in this photo, but there were still some nutjobs out ice fishing on the lake.

Change the tablecloth? No problem.

Monday, March 15, 2010

My Darling B had the foresight several months ago to ask for today off from work, apparently knowing way back then that spring weather would have come by now, the snow would all be gone and she could begin to plant her garden. Lucky girl gets to spend the day starting seedlings (poking seeds into little cups filled with dirt) while listening to Sinatra, Martin and Fitzgerald on Pandora.

I, on the other hand, did not foresee how insanely jealous I would be when I realized she would be home today enjoying the warm temps, clear skies and fresh air of this fine spring day and so I did not ask for this day off, and instead would spend the day where I spend every other week day, in the basement of an office building downtown, plinking away at a keyboard while my caffeine high slowly fades.

Cheers.

One of the wines we brought home from the monthly sale at Star Liquor. Paired up really deliciously with the potato-trout pancakes My Darling B served for supper. "Orange peel and melon aromas lead to flavors of honeysuckle," claims the label. I got the fruity smell, but I don't eat a lot of honeysuckle so I can't vouch for that. This would be especially drinkable on a hot afternoon as an aperitif right before dinner.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The ides of each month are special here in the Madison area, particularly on Willy Street at the north end of the isthmus. On that glorious day, the fifteenth of each month, Star Liquor offers a fifteen percent discount on every bottle of wine in the store. Well, almost every bottle.

I was helping My Darling B search the shelves for our favorite labels when Dave, one of the employees, came by to offer her help. (That's not a typo. I know her as Dave because one day she was wearing a t-shirt with "Dave" printed in block letters across the front. Introducing myself with the line, "Hi, Dave, I'm Dave!" was irresistible, but I couldn't help it, even though she gave me a look like she thought I was putting her on.)

"Need help? Looking for anything in particular?" she asked us. "Did you want to see anything in the wine cellar?"

In the wine cellar? Wait, what?

Before the chance could pass us by I nodded and answered "Yes, please!" and we were off, threading our way through the knots of people searching for their favorite wines. Dave led us down the stairs to a chilled room in the basement where our eyes beheld one of the marvels of Star Liquor: Wines that we might possibly be able to afford once, like on our fiftieth wedding anniversary, say. I walked very slowly from rack to rack, being careful not to accidentally brush up against anything. One wrong move in there could max out my line of credit.

And it wasn't just wine. Did you know you can cellar beer if it's got the right amount of alcohol in it? I didn't, until we tasted a bottle of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale that had been lagering in the basement since 1999. That's something I'm going to try my darned self.

A big "Thanks!" to Dave for the special treat. We didn't bring anything home from the cellar this month, but maybe (by the time we retire?) we'll have saved enough from our lunch money to get a bottle of something special for our anniversary.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

We're still doing the cha-cha in the group class we go to on Tuesdays, but at our private lesson afterwards the instructor had us doing the rumba and waltz. I'm pretty sure anybody who can count to three can waltz, and the rumba isn't much more difficult, although you need a sense of rhythm to do that (I'm slightly challenged there), but after the group class all our legs could do was cha-cha. I lost track of how many times we had to start over to get the rumba right.

My biggest problem is not learning the steps, it's learning how to lead. Learning the steps is complicated but doable; I've always been pretty good and learning to do almost anything by rote. Give me too many things to do at the same time, though, and my circuits quickly get overloaded. When we rhumba, for instance, I have to remember not only the steps but the rhythm. Sending a constant stream of cues to My Darling B would require a third circuit. I seem to have only two. Either that, or I haven't figured out how to switch the third one over to rumba from whatever it's doing now.

With a warm spring sun still dazzling the skies over her shoulder, My Darling B turns over a forkfull of garden soil and crumbles it in her hand to see if it's ready for planting. It looks promising. This photo was taken in the middle of last year's potato patch.

The garlic has sprouted!

And the strawberries have wintered over nicely. B says these are "Alpine strawberries," the most hearty plants she could find. They'll survive the cold snap forecast for this weekend, she says, even if she leaves them uncovered. I certainly hope so.

Friday, March 19, 2010

I had to come up with something quick and easy to serve for guy night because I had to have plenty of time to perform a minor plumbing unblockage on the pipe that the kitchen sink drains into. When it's blocked all the goop backs up and pools in the basement sink. It's pretty gross.

So we stopped at the co-op on the way home to buy some sliced ham and some cheese and I pan-fried some ham & cheese sandwiches. Voila! Dinner! We even splurged and I served them with Tater Tots because we called Tim on the way home to invite him over for ham and cheese and plumbing fun, but he didn't answer his phone and apparently doesn't check his messages, so we had the Tater Tots all to ourselves.

We also picked up copies of the Isthmus, a weekly advertising tabloid that just printed the schedule for the Wisconsin Film Festival that My Darling B and I started going to last year and will now go to each year until we're too decrepit to move under our own power because it's that much fun. We even asked for several days off from work so we could see more films this year. After our delicious, nutritious dinner we sat reading the film schedule for almost an hour, ticking off the films that interested us. We haven't compared notes yet so I don't even know whether or not B got through the whole schedule yet. I didn't.

Then it was on to plumbing fun! I've carried out this particular operation before so I knew just what to do, and exactly how much I didn't like to do it. First thing was to take apart the p-trap under the kitchen sink and the basement sink. Pretty straightforward, smells a bit, gets the hands very dirty. Next step: Bring in a garden hose, hook it up to the spigot in the laundry. That part really sucks because I have to either move the wash machine out of the way, which I'm not going to do unless I have all afternoon or a trained gorilla to move it, or I can work in the four-inch space between the machine and the wall. Takes forever to work a wrench in that four-inch space and I usually bark my knuckles bloody.

I hooked up another hose downstairs for the basement sink. To the end of each hose I attached a black rubber bulb. The bulb goes in the drain pipe and fills with water when the hose is turned on so that the bulb blocks the pipe and forms a plug from which, theoretically, no water can escape. A small hole in the end of the bulb shoots a jet of water down the drain. Turn both hoses on, let the water run for a while and, theoretically again, the water will push the blockage down the pipe and into the sewer. Worked last time I tried it. And worked again this time.

It's a pretty simple, cheap fix, really. We already have garden hose, and the little black rubber bulbs cost about a buck fifty each at the hardware store. Saved us a couple hundred dollars getting a plumber out here, who would probably have done what I did.

The part I really hate is the clean-up. The hoses always dribble all over the floor no matter how care I am while I unhook them. I have to drag the long hose outside to drain it, and it weighs something like a thousand pounds when it's full of water. The rubber bulbs get covered with nasty sewer pipe gunk that has to be washed off because it smells like Satan's farts. I'd be tempted to just throw them away and get new ones if I didn't use them so often. And finally, I have to put the p-traps back together. My fingernails are gray for a week after all this.

But the drains work and we can wash clothes again, yay.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Well, who's going to come clean this up, then? Because it's not gonna be me! I'm done shoveling snow.

We here in Wisconsin have a saying about winter: It's not over until April. March may get warm enough to go out in shirtsleeves and shorts, but there's at least one cold snap and snowfall coming down the pike to slap us all in the face, and if you can't abide by that, you'd better move to Texas.

We have another saying about winter that's especially reserved for mornings like this one, typically uttered the moment we look out the window on the scene of freshly-fallen snow: Dammit! And then we pack up and head for Texas.

[Update: I just realized this is technically the first day of Spring. Touché, Mother Nature!]

We had such a good time on our outing to the Wisconsin Film Fest last year that My Darling B and I took time off from work this year so we could see even more films ... if we could get the tickets, which tend to sell out rather quickly, some of them within hours after going on sale.

This year, B was determined not to miss out on any of the films she really wanted to see. We picked up a couple copies of the Isthmus, read through all the movie reviews and picked the ones that sounded most interesting. Then this morning we went over our choices with each other, arm wrestled over the ones that conflicted with one another, and made out a schedule of the films we could see.

After that it was just a matter of getting the tickets. Luckily we could order on line. If you go by the comments on the Twitter feed on the film fest's web site, a lot of people seem to think this is a really crappy deal. I guess they'd rather drive downtown and stand in line for hours before finding out at the box office that the show they wanted to see is sold out. Yes, ordering through the web site was a little frustrating, probably because thousands of people were trying to buy their tickets the same time we were. At one point B was sure her order had timed out and we would have to start all over, but as it turned out all was not lost and in just thirty or forty minutes we had tickets to all fourteen of the films we wanted to see. How's that bad?

My Darling B posted a roster of the films we got tickets for on her blog.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

I've been trying to find out why Richard Garriott paid sixty-eight thousand dollars for the Lunokhod 2 robot. The Sotheby's auction house put the rover on the block in 1993 and Garriott, who made millions developing a video game and calls himself "Lord British," paid $68,500 for it, sight unseen, a little like buying an Edsel that's been lying abandoned by the side of Interstate 70 just outside of Dotsero, Colorado, for the last 37 years. It might be worth some money if you didn't have to drive to Dotsero from the UK to get it.

My best guess as to why he bought a broken lunar lander that no one has laid eyes on since it was launched in 1973? I think it's mostly because he's a space nerd who wanted to be an astronaut but, when he found out his bad eyesight would keep him out of Nasa's astronaut corps, he developed a couple of wildly popular video games, made a jillion dollars, and bought himself a trip to the International Space Station. He paid somewhere between $12.5 million and $30 million, depending who you ask, for that two-week trip, so sixty-eight grand for a broken robot that's stranded a quarter million miles from here is a bargain, sort of.

Now for that trip to Dotsero: The location of Lunakhod 2 has been known for a long time, but on Monday the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took a photo of it and the long road it traveled (white arrows) from the spot where it landed (black arrow). Do you suppose Garriott's got any plans to go get it? Landing men on the moon cost Nasa $24bn in 1969, so Garriott will have to sell a few more video games to pony up enough money.

Monday, March 22, 2010

There's a cat in this photo.

Where could she be?

Time for a few stray thoughts. I haven't done this in a while, and I can't come up with anything but complete randomness right now, so the timing seems auspicious:

Granola. I eats it. I didn't used to because I thought it was ucky, and I thought it was ucky because it was pretty bad granola. Dry enough to suck every molecule of moisture out of every cell in my mouth and gritty enough to use as traction if my car got stuck on the ice. I don't know who made that stuff or why, but as granola it was crap. Or maybe that's just the way granola was made back then, and now they know better. We started bringing it home from the co-op when Tim asked for it, and as he asked for it more and more I started eating it, too. Crunchy and sweet, it's pretty tasty stuff and comes in more flavors than the multicolored plastic stuff they sell to kids as breakfast cereal. There was a spell after Tim moved out where we didn't bring much home for a while, and then a while back we started stocking up every week because both My Darling B and I were eating it for breakfast in the morning, and neither one of us are breakfast-eating people. Or weren't. I guess we are now.

We practiced our dance steps last night and we were freaking AWESOME! By our standards. And the bar's still set pretty low, but only because we've been at it for just five weeks, folks. It's not for lack of trying. We've got all the steps down, for instance, but that's about it. Grace, poise, timing, that's all stuff far in the future. BUT WE'VE GOT THE STEPS DOWN, OKAY? That's gotta count for something.

I thought we'd be able to get an uninterrupted night's sleep now the weather's warmed up and the cats have wandered off to find other places to bed down for the night, but the recent cold snap brought them right back to cuddle up alongside us like a couple of heat magnets. Last night they had me pinned to the mattress like Lilliputians pinning Gulliver to the ground. They were purring like great big furry purring things. They were just like another metaphor that I can't recall right now.

We had one of those weekends where we didn't go out much and it seemed as though we didn't really do all that much. I mean, we weren't inert blobs of protoplasm; we washed some clothes, took out the trash, cleaned the kitchen and unblocked the bathroom drain, things like that. Stuff got done. Also, I finished a book I started last weekend (no prize for guessing what it was about) and My Darling B got herself up into the biggest snit ever talking to me about the book she finished.

And some of us had plans that were dashed by the cold snap that brought us that one last dump of winter (at least I'm hoping it's the last dump). B wanted to break out her roto-tiller and turn over some soil in her garden so she could plant lettuce, and I think she may have been just a teensy bit bummed out that she couldn't. With temps in the fifties all week, she was living in anticipation for too long not to be utterly gobsmacked by the change in weather. I'm pretty sure my head would have exploded, but I'm a little more excitable than she is.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Does the phrase "autopsy robot" fill you with dystopian dread? Because it sure as hell does that to me.

From the web site IO9.

I went swimming last night in a great big, shallow pool, the kind you sometimes find in campgrounds filled with kids. In fact, it was filled with kids, hundreds of them, and I kept bumping into them as I swam under the surface of the water from one side of the pool to the other. It was filled with adults, too, but they were all sitting in folding lawn chairs and it was relatively easy to avoid their non-moving legs.

I swam around for what seemed like forever until somebody announced that we would all have to get out of the pool because it was getting dangerously dirty. I looked down at the water I was standing in and, instead of the crystal-clear bluish water I'd been looking through all afternoon, I saw what appeared to be grayish, lumpy porridge. Everyone else saw it, too, because they all got out of the pool without the usual "Awwwww" and headed for the showers to get good and cleaned off.

Whoever ran the pool apparently wanted to make up for kicking us out because they sprung for treats at the ice cream stand, handing each one of us a little wad of cash as we stepped out the door. I went straight over to the stand, got in line, picked out an Eskimo Pie and found a place to sit while I ate it up.

I looked around as I was eating and said hi to all the people I recognized. The place was full of people I knew. In fact, literally every person in the place was somebody I'd met at some point in my life. It occurred to me I might be dead, although I didn't feel dead, didn't remember dying and nobody appeared to be particularly spectral or offered me any helpful advice on how to get along in the afterlife. We were all just eating our ice cream and saying, Hi, how you doing?

Then I left the ice cream shop and went home. For once it really was home, not some strange-looking building I understood to be home. Everything was familiar and in exactly the place it should have been except (there had to be an "except") that Darling B was lying in the middle of the living room floor, bundled up in one of those mummy sleeping bags that only your face sticks out of.

She was very, very small, no bigger than a kitten, and when I knelt beside her she asked me to pull on the cord that closed up the face hole. So I did. As the hole got smaller, oats welled up around her face, covering it almost completely, which scared the crap out of me. I quickly undid the cord and worked the opening of the sleeping bag until it was large enough to brush the oats away from her face.

The cord had about a million knots in it, making it very hard to undo, so it took what felt like a million years to get the bag open and when I finally did I was so exhausted that I barely had the strength to hold her hand as I sat by the side of her bed to watch her so she didn't get buried in oats again.

And that's when I woke up.

I haven't been keeping a round-the-clock watch so I can't claim this is the first Robin to return to our yard this spring, but it's the first one I've seen so far. Welcome back! Go eat some worms.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Buzz Aldrin, who hoofed his way along the surface of the moon forty years ago, is trying out his moves on Dancing With The Stars.

I thought I might have heard about this the other day on the radio but figured it was just my tin ear picking up a name that sounded like "Buzz Aldrin," because don't they all, and then the space geek lobe of my brain tricking me into hearing what I wanted to hear, so I didn't give it any more thought.

Then, this morning as I was checking out the funny pages over coffee, I noticed that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was running photos of the latest round of Dancing With The Stars and my geek lobe kicked in again, so I clicked on the link and what do you know? There's the rocket man himself. Can't tell what kind of performance he turned in, but it looks like he's having one hell of a good time.

Over at NPR's pop culture blog Monkey See, blogger Linda Holmes says Aldrin danced like an old man (might be because he's eighty years old) but I couldn't judge for myself because I can't use the flash player on their site (curse you, Flash Player!) so I found this really crappy video on YouTube — why does anybody even bother posting video this bad? I can't tell if he's doing a really good cha-cha or a really bad one. Still looks like he's having a great time, though.

Our cha-cha lesson introduced the step and POP! Which means nothing to you, except this: Everything we learned up to this point, all the practice we put in getting our moves down, amounted to pretty much nothing when our instructor asked us to stick a step and POP! in there. The whole dance sequence came grinding to a halt as we pinballed off each other for the better part of twenty minutes trying to learn that goddamn move. But when we finally got it down, oh man did it look sweet!

Luckily we have an instructor who's very patient and kept at it with us until we had all the steps down, even though he had to watch us walk through it v e r y s l o w l y at least two dozen times counting "One, two, three cha-cha" out loud as we went. It's got to be excruciating for him to watch us step through these moves at one-tenth the speed he uses to demonstrate them, which is already snail-slow to him, but he diligently keeps at it, hoping, I suppose, that one day at least some of his students will show up on Dancing With The Stars.

The step and POP! is right in the middle of the cha-cha routine we learned, when we start the walk-through. It's like a snappy little pause where we used to be on the move, which is what was throwing us off big time. The guy doesn't have to do much at that point, thank dog, just step aside and let the lady step past and spin, but the hesitation just before that where the step and POP! goes left my teensy tiny mind in the dust while my feet wanted to keep boogying. The disconnect did not help.

Oh, and the instructor added a spin, too, but I don't have to do much for that, either. All I have to remember is to turn my wrist toward me like I"m reading a watch and hold my hand in the air so she can twirl. Cha-cha is a dance where the lady does all the heavy work and the guy's supposed to just stand there and make her look good. I can almost manage to do that.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Now that the nation is committed to Socialism, thanks to the newly-passed health care bill, I thought I'd post just one or two thoughts about the "conversation" going on about health care reform before our totalitarian overlords enslave us all with their mind control rays. It's a virtual conversation because I can't actually scream in your face or spit on you, the way most of the "conversation" has been carried on. Send me your address in e-mail and I'll make up for it one day, if you like.

Can I just say first of all that it's pretty creepy the way members of congress can read my disappointment, my concern, even my very thoughts? "The American People think this," and "The American people want that." It's amazing. How do they do it? They're a little indiscreet with broadcasting these thoughts on the radio and television every day, though. I kinda figured that was just something between us.

Considering how well they know my own thoughts, it's more than a tiny bit alarming they don't seem to realize they're part of the government. "The government should have no part in health care reform," I heard a member of congress say yesterday, speaking as if "the government" were some ravenous, fanged beast he was gallantly fighting saving us from. Then he went on to outline his plan to reform health care.

Friday, March 26, 2010

To answer the sign-holder in the back: Well of course you don't have to pay your taxes if that's how you want to protest a policy, that's what democracy's about. It gets you thrown in jail, too, but that's sort of the point of bucking authority.

Not paying your taxes won't keep congress from enacting programs like health care reform, though. You're imagining that they're going to tax you to pay for it, when in fact they will make up money out of thin air to pay for it.

Deficit spending: It's the American way.

[Photo: NPR]

Saturday, March 27, 2010

I spent the afternoon trimming branches off some of the bushes in the yard that got hammered pretty badly by the monster snowfall we had back in December. After having a look at the damage to the great big cedar in the front yard I figured it had to come down completely; the problem there was, it was really a tree, not a bush. I don't have the tools to cut down a tree.

I suppose it probably started life as a shrub, and maybe it remained a shrub for many years, but at some point it grew wildly out of control and it's been a tree by default of its enormous size ever since we moved in. It was about twenty feet tall and had a trunk that was probably a foot thick at its base. I've got a pruning saw and a bow saw. I might as well try to cut it down with a toenail clippers.

But I made a start of it by lopping off the broken branches I could reach, then stepping up onto a low branch and lopping off a few more, and so on until I had climbed about ten feet up into the branches and had managed to hack away just about all of the topmost branches.

This was about the time Harley showed up. Harley almost always comes over when I'm doing yard work to see what I'm up to and offer to help if he can. This often turns out well because Harley seems to collect chain saws the way I collect typewriters. As it turned out, he just bought a new one last weekend and seemed to be itching to try it out. "Did you want to cut the whole thing down?" he asked eagerly. Why yes, Harley, I believe I did.

So he went back to his place to break out his new toy. In the meantime, I trimmed off as many of the lower branches as I could to make it easier for him to get at the base of the monster. When he came back, it took him barely ten minutes to do what I would have needed a couple weeks of heart-pounding work to finish with my little bow saw. Harley is the coolest neighbor I believe I've ever had.

Once the beast was felled he cut the trunk into chunks about a foot long and advised me to stack them by the curb. "They usually disappear overnight when you do that," he said.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

We stopped at the co-op yesterday morning for groceries and at the thrift store to see if there were any books I had to take home (there were; I finally scored a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff).

On my way to the front door of the thrift store I glanced through the window to see if there were any old typewriters on the front counter. It's a nervous tic I picked up ever since I went home from the thrift store with a cast-iron LC Smith typewriter. I didn't see any this time, so I was even more surprised when I caught sight of a small portable out of the corner of my eye.

It was an Olivetti Studio 44. My first typewriter was an electric Olivetti Praxis so I already have a soft spot in my heart for Olivettis. This little manual had been well taken care of and was in great shape, except that a tiny metal tab that was meant to hold up the return lever had broken off sometime in the past, so that the return had left a mark where it dragged across the top of the body, and dangled feebly over the side as the carriage advanced.

No big deal to me. I took it home anyway. Fixed the problem of the return lever by sticking a couple of washers in the gap between the lever and the mechanism it screwed onto. Works just great!

My Darling B dug up this freakish carrot that had overwintered in her garden. Either it was a freak to begin with, or it didn't like the frost much.

I pulled this out of the lilac bush along with a big handful of dead wood.

Squirrel, I think.

December 10, 2009: A crazy powerful snowstorm hammers the Madison metro area:

The snow was heavy and wet. It clumped up on trees like badly-applied Christmas flocking and tore branches off all over town. The lilac in our back yard was quickly overwhelmed, but it wasn't until a few weeks later that it became apparently how badly it was mangled by the heavy snowfall. Several of the thick, old-growth trunks were snapped clean off at about head-height, and just about all of the rest of the boughs were bent all the way to the ground.

Flash-forward to today: Home owners all over Monona have been hacking broken, dead branches off the trees and bushes in their yards and piling them up along the curb. I cut down the big cedar in the front yard yesterday, with a lot of help from a neighbor with a chain saw, and today I hacked away at the big lilac in the back yard until it was a leaner version of its previous self.

I really had no idea how much dead wood I had cut off the body of the tree until I was finished and stopped to take a good look at the pile of branches that had built up in the middle of the back yard:

Holy crap! That's enough wood to make two more lilac bushes! I guess I probably let it get a little too overgrown.

Monday, March 29, 2010

I got my bike down out of the garage attic yesterday afternoon and took her for a spin for the first time this season, just to limber up the legs a bit, and I don't think I've ever felt regret more keenly than I did that day. Really, I didn't know how out of shape I could get from laying around all winter. Every muscle in my body seems to have the tone of a limp dish rag.

And if riding my bike was a Herculean effort, trimming dead branches off the trees and bushes took more sheer willpower than the creation of the universe. On Saturday I didn't feel too bad, but by Sunday I was moving very gingerly and all my joint were going snap-crackle-pop.

I feel like I need at least six days to rest but, perversely, I only get five until next Saturday when our plan is to tear down the retaining wall around My Darling B's herb garden and build it back up so it doesn't fall over. That means lots of digging and bending and picking up twenty-pound paving stones. Oi.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Your smile for the day:

More at Photos of Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Somebody grabbed my lawn mower yesterday afternoon, threw it in his truck, and drove away with it!

Watching from inside the living room, My Darling B and I cheered and waved as they loaded it up.

I bought a new lawn mower last weekend and did what everyone else does when they want to get rid of an old lawn mower, or an old sofa, or a book case or pile of wood: I put it on the curb and, in a day or two, somebody took it home with them. In fact, I cleaned house of all the things I just mentioned that way. It's like magic.

We weren't so sure the lawn mower was going to go, though. It sat out front all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and I was pretty sure it would be gone when we came home from work on Monday night, but there it was. And there it was again on Tuesday night. I was starting to feel a tiny bit insulted by then. Anybody could see that it was a perfectly usable lawn mower. What, mine's not good enough?

Then last night, as I was waiting for B to finish brushing her teeth so we could go to our dance lesson, I heard a cheer rise up from the bathroom, followed by, "Take it! Take it away!" Running to the front window I saw two guys loading the mower into their truck.

"Wave at them!" B said, coming into the front room, waving like a maniac. "Wave so they'll know it's okay! Hi, guys! Have fun with that!" They paused for a moment to look in wonder at the crazy lady jumping around waving her arms inside the house, then finished packing up the lawn mower before driving away.

It's an electric wood chipper and it can turn all our yard waste into garden mulch. Well, maybe most of it. Okay, some. Because if I wanted to shove all our yard waste into it I would have to use every spare minute from now until the snow flies again, and I don't know how willing I am to devote even half that kind of time to garbage disposal.

Still, though, it's a really cool toy, and we've always got plenty of twigs, branches and leaves to mulch at pretty much any time of the year. It's always been a bit of a problem because although the city sends a truck around periodically to pick the stuff up, it never seems to come around when I really need it, and always seems to be there when I'm feeling especially lazy and wouldn't pick up a pruning saw if you pointed an assault rifle at me. Literally.

We revved it up right after dinner this evening because we just brought it home from the store and, y'know, we couldn't just let it sit there in the box, could we? Bolting the legs on was stupid easy. My Darling B wanted me to read the directions — as if! So she read the book while I bolted the legs on, and we were happily feeding junk wood into it about ten minutes later.

And we just happen to have plenty of twigs and branches on hand after I cut down the cedar out front and pruned the shit out of the lilac in the back yard. I jammed it almost right away by shoving the thickest branch I could find into the feeder. You don't know until you try, right? After taking it apart and clearing the blades, I found I could grind even the thickest branch down to chips if I fed it in very slowly, and we soon filled a big yard bucket with lots of mulch. Fun!

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