Sounds Kinky

Dream Journal: January 22, 2012

2012-01-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, Moses, interpret this sucker!

I took off on my hang glider from the Marin headlands, across the water, parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge. As I sailed across the water, I saw thrashing in the water below, a shark feeding frenzy. At first I thought they were megalodons, but then I realized that they were black on top and white on the bottom, black scorpion sharks.

After I landed in the Presidio, I finished off my pint glass of beer and set it on the grass. Looking into the water of the bay near the shore, I saw a severed arm moving along the bottom, almost like it was crawling by its fingers. The arm had been in the water a long time; I could tell by what was either algae on it or bits of flesh peeling off.

I went and got the park police, but the arm was gone when we got back. They quizzed me at length about it, especially interested in what type of sleeve was on the arm. (It had a dark band at the wrist, so I thought maybe it was a sailor shirt.) They sent divers into the bay looking for it, but they couldn’t find it. But they did find the severed head of an albino alligator, which they showed me on a turkey platter, sitting on top of a ring of lettuce greens.

Megalodons are giant prehistoric sharks, long extinct. There is no such thing as a “black scorpion shark”.

I guess I slept in a weird position with my arm crooked up, and it fell (ahem) asleep.

Limerick

2012-01-09T23:09:00.000-08:00

There was a drag queen named Melinda
Whose favorite singer was Carlisle (Belinda)
But as a Go Go
She did a no no
And sang something from the Pretendas

Motorcycle Poetry — “November”

2011-11-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

November

The pavement, streaked
Blood red and brown
Shards and moist bits scattered about

Cars drive through
Unseen, uncaring
Grinding to a paste
Smearing across the roadway

Nothing identifiable remain
Only streaks and smears
Waiting for a November rain to wash it away
Waiting for it to happen again

Some leaves have yet to fall

[“Motorcycle poetry”: imagery that comes to me and percolates into poetry while I am riding.]

Movie Review — Cars

2011-11-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

Quick Reaction

Cars was useless.

More Details

For starters, I don’t like NASCAR (or other car racing). And mind you, this isn’t in isolation: I went with a date to a car race one time; I don’t think we went out again after that. 90-minute drive to get there, and another hour to get into the racegrounds and park (and an hour to get out again later). Then lots of cars going by a few at a time, and expensive concessions. What was the point? Not even any crashes.

(There’s a theory that says there are two types of sports. In one, you go to see someone doing something impressive — track & field, for example. In the other, you go to see someone get hurt — football. Car racing: in person, you often can’t see the whole picture of the race, just a couple hundred yards of the track, so frankly, you’re there in hopes of seeing a nasty crash.)

(Baseball doesn’t seem to fit into either category. Maybe it’s not really a sport? And Ice Dancing falls in both categories. <grin>)

Beyond that, with Cars in particular, I found the character designs to be ugly. And while I expect a simplified story in animated films, since they are largely aimed at kids, I typically expect enough non-kid content in a Pixar film to make adults not feel the film was a waste of their time. I didn’t get that in Cars: shallow characterization, predictable plot, and a “message” throughline so worn that it could get a blowout on any curve.

Say Something Nice

Beautiful work on the landscapes. Can I get a short film just of them?

Movie Review — Clerks

2011-11-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

Quick Reaction

Clerks was crap.

More Details

After disliking Mallrats so much, what did I expect, watching an even earlier Kevin Smith film? Glutton for punishment, I guess.

Neither Dante nor Randal present as well-formed characters. Randal’s dialogue, in particular, never comes across as realistic; not just being delivered like a swiftly memorized, passionless monologue but apparently written in the same way.

I still have Chasing Amy and Dogma in my Netflix queue. They are newer films, so Smith’s skills should be better, right? They can't get worse, can they? Can they?

Say Something Nice

I watched this in 5-10 minute chunks over the course of a month. (That it took me a month to finish it says something.) I have no problem doing that with most any movie; I have read comic books for thirty years, and they present a 22-page chunk of story once a month, unfolding over 4, 6, 12 months, so doing a movie that way over days or weeks is not much different. Clerks itself is very “chunked”, even with segment titles throughout, so it works even that much better viewed in pieces than most films will.

High-Octane Gas: Boon or Scam?

2011-10-08T13:29:00.000-07:00

For years, I’ve always wondered about the three grades of gas offered at the gas station. While I know that they recommend the higher grades for certain vehicles — I always use the mid-grade for my Land Rover, and I’m supposed to use the high grade for my scooters — you have to wonder if there is really any difference between the grades.

Can you get better performance (better gas mileage is the most measurable thing) from using higher grades? More importantly, can you get enough better performance to make it worth buying?

According to this Time Magazine article, a test by Car and Driver magazine says “No”.

However, that’s not exactly what they said. Here is the actual article, from 2001. Summarized, what it says is that cars which are intended to run on regular unleaded get very little or no added horsepower and speed from a higher octane, cars which are intended to run on premium fuel experience a drop in horsepower and other performance from a lower octane, and carbon buildup over time means cars designed for lower octane fuels may need to upgrade due to carbon build up and the like. (One thing I note is that they used only low and high grades — 87 and 91 octane — not the midgrade 89 octane which is also an option.

Before I saw this Time article, though, I had decided to do my own test. I had noticed that while gasoline prices have climbed — I remember that I paid $1.99 a gallon for low grade on Labor Day Weekend in 2001, and that was the lowest in months, vs. $4.15 a gallon yesterday for high grade — the price difference between the grades has stayed the same, about 10 cents a gallon. Which means that as a percentage of the price per gallon, premium grade gasoline has effectively become cheaper — it was a 5% markup in 2000, but only about 2% in 2011 — and that means that the viability of any performance (mileage) increase is only half as much to make it worth while.

So let’s look at my Land Rover. I get between 16 and 19 miles per gallon, depending mostly on city vs. highway driving, although factors like weight in the rear end also factor (if I add a 50 pound piece of equipment, my mileage on a highway trip increases by about 1 mpg). For the sake of the argument, let’s call it 18 mpg.

I have roughly a 15 gallon tank. At $4.00 a gallon for 89 octane (it’s a little more than that now, but round numbers work the math easier), that’s a $60 fill up; at $4.10 a gallon for 91 octane, that’s $61.50. Yup, just $1.50 difference, less than the price of a drip coffee at Starbucks, less than half a gallon of gas; put up against a $60 fill up, that’s almost insignificant. More to the point for doing math, it’s a 2.5% change in the price.

So back to the mileage. If I pay 2.5% more for the gas, then I need to get a 2.5% increase in my gas mileage to compensate. (I’m not sure that’s completely right. With the way percentages work, it’s more likely that I actually need something like a 2.4% mileage increase, but the difference there is not going to be enough to alter the test results any more than my use of “round numbers” will. If someone wants to work out the numbers more exactly, feel free.) On an 18 mpg average, that means 18.45 mpg — increase just 1/2 mile per gallon and I will have “won”.

What did my tests show? I shifted to premium octane for several fill ups, including a road trip to Portland (about 180 miles each way). My highway mpg increased to over 20, and my city average was over 18 (city would normally be in the 16–17 range); calculated out, I got an increase of between 1.2 and 1.7 mpg over the course of the tests.

That is, I got 2–3 times as much increase in gas mileage as I needed to make the increase in cost worthwhile. Which means I actually save about $2–3 per fill up by not needing to do them as often.

Let me note a couple things where my tests differ from those of Car and Driver:

I’m driving a 2005 vehicle. Technology changes may have improved the performance differences.
Car and Driver used expert drivers, test tracks, multiple vehicles, and more controlled circumstances, while my test was more informal, real world, and isolated to a single vehicle.
I tested miles per gallon, while they tested horsepower and speed.
I used a change from 89 to 91 rather than from 87 to 91, on a vehicle aimed (I think) at the midrange to start with.
The change in gas prices in the past 11 years has magnified the value of any performance benefits gained, which changes the impact of the results.
My Land Rover gets relatively low miles per gallon. Cars which already get higher mileage need to have a bigger value increase to compensate. (A car which gets 40 mpg has to break, hmm, 41 mpg. Ooooo…)

I’ll also note this:

Time Magazine relied on an 11 year old article, but didn’t identify that and the limits that go with it in their article. Shame on them. (Some education for when you read something referencing other sources: check what the original said rather than trusting a summary of it, since that might reflect their own biases. That’s why I’ve provided links to both stories.)

So what is the net effect of this test? For myself, I have shifted over to premium on my Land Rover (which frankly I don’t drive much anyway; I have put at least twice as many miles on the scooter as on the car for the past 3.5 years). Should you do likewise? No, not just on the results of my tests.

But if you are pained by the cost of a fill up these days and if you are curious enough to track your gas mileage for a month or so, I think you should run the same informal tests for yourself. Get a mileage baseline for both mostly city and mostly highway driving for a few fill ups at the grade you currently use, and then switch to one grade up and track how things change. Worst case, you’ll see no change of note and you’ll be out the cost of a few cups of coffee over the course of a month. But I think there’s a good chance you’ll also see enough of a difference to consider making the switch completely.

Bury the Bone: Clarence Thomas vs. Anita Hill

2011-10-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

According to this news piece, October 2011 is the 20th anniversary of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.

Although I remember the hearings going on, my one real memory of the event comes from a couple weeks or a month later. Walking in the hall at work one day, one of the Human Resources people called me into her cubicle and gave me an apologetic “talking to”. Apparently, a month before, I had been wearing a t-shirt I bought in Tijuana in September, which carried an image of two dogs fucking, labelled “Bury the Bone” (much like this one, down to the color scheme), and someone complained.

In retrospect, that was a (very) inappropriate shirt to wear to work. I happened to be wearing it that day as well, I think, which was what caused the HR person to talk to me. (I was 24 and trying to be brazenly out, I guess. Or I just wasn't thinking, take your pick.) After that, I was much more sensitive to the messaging what I wore would send — not that I refrained from shirts with gay imagery and messaging, just that I gave more thought to it and refrained from wearing some of them to work.

But the complaint that the HR person was responding to — which she had not acted on for at least a couple weeks, meaning she didn’t think it was very significant — was not about the content of the shirt. Rather, it was about the political intent: someone had thought I had work it as commentary on the Thomas/Hill hearings.

Bizarre!

Molotov Cartail

2011-10-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1980s, there were a couple book collections of Sniglets (a “sniglet” being “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should”). Looks like you can still buy the books and such from Amazon.

Several favorite sniglets remain in my personal vocabulary more than 25 years later, including “Alfred Hitchcooking” (repeatedly stabbing a block of frozen vegetables to make it cook faster), “arping” (moving your head in circles trying to read the label of a playing record), “Adam69” (two police cars facing opposite directions, exchanging information), and “Essoasso” (the person who cuts through a gas station in order to bypass a stoplight — guilty!). I still have the original books somewhere, I think.

(Hmm, with the rise of cook-in-the-bag veggies, the demise of vinyl records, the old Adam-12 TV show being long out of circulation, and Esso being absorbed into ExxonMobil, those terms become way more obscure and less valuable as time goes by.)

Here are a couple web pages with lists of sniglets: one with many of the classics and one with new ones.

When I was in Las Vegas in August, though, I had dinner at the Palace Station casino and I parked next to this car. I never thought I would see a “Molotov cartail” in the wild. (That’s a car with a rag used in place of a missing gas cap, of course.)

What Were They Thinking? — More Tongue, Please

2011-09-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This bank of video slots was at the Paris casino in Las Vegas when I visited there in August.

Every set of lips on that display is closed. Someone seems to be unclear on the concept of the “French Kiss”.

TV & Movie Review — Firefly and Serenity

2011-09-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, on a trip to Canada, my boyfriend picked up a copy of the Firefly boxed set at a thrift store, telling me how good it was. We proceeded to watch the first disk’s worth of episodes the next few times I was at his place, but then he had a break-in where his big screen TV and most of his DVDs were stolen. The TV and some DVDs were later recovered, but not this set.

I added the set to my Netflix queue, and eventually finished them a month or so ago, plus the follow-on movie, Serenity. (Particularly of note in the boxed set is that it includes a handful of episodes which did not get aired during the half-season run of the TV show. A must for anyone who enjoyed the show.)

In no way am I about to become a Browncoat (fan of the show) and rave about how it is the best television show ever. (Sorry. That would be Twin Peaks. Or maybe Lost. Or I’ll accept The Dick Van Dyke Show, if someone insists.) And I won’t ever quote lines of dialogue or do Firefly cosplay. (I will drool over Jayne a bit, though.)

Actually, it took several episodes for me to warm up to the show. The first disk’s worth, it was simply okay: solidly a “Western in space”, with an intriguing mix of conflicted characters and unrevealed pasts. Good enough for what it was, but not necessarily anything I would have pursued weekly if I randomly tripped over an episode. By the end of the second disk, though, I was solidly interested in the show, because it was interesting, different, and engaging. By the end of the boxed set, I was invested enough to be bummed by the doomed nature of the show.

The Serenity movie, though, is a must for fans of the show. (Hard to say if it hangs together adequately by itself without the background of the television show. I rather suspect that the Inara and Shepherd subplots would be pretty obscure. But this definitely didn’t come across as just a double-length episode of the show, like some Star Trek films did.) There were two big unanswered questions left over from the show — what are the Reavers, and what the fuck is up with River — and those both get answered in the movie. (Or at least resolved. I still have no idea why they did what they did to River — it felt rather like they came up with a solution and then stitched it backwards into her character to pretend it was the cause — but the subplot gets resolved, which is sufficient.)

The scenes with Serenity passing through the Reavers were very well done, a space battle/ballet which brought to mind the attack on the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, but doubled. And although I mourn (NON-SPECIFIC SPOILER) for the characters who died in the film, I also appreciate that Whedon did kill some of his precious children, making the story that much more heart-felt.

And a nagging non-question from the show — where does this actually take place, how big of a “universe” is it set in — also gets answered. We’re so used to Star Trek and Star Wars, where the ships blithely skip all the way across the galaxy, that it was a bit of a shock to realize that the entire show occurs in a single solar system (albeit one with a couple dozen planets). This information changed the perspective I had on the show a little bit, making things a lot more plausible for the characters to periodically run into people they knew.

(One thing that did annoy me with the extras on Serenity were the repeated comments that the movie was very special in that it was a movie based on cancelled television show, and that never happens. Well, never since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, thirteen years before. And double never since Star Trek: The Motion Picture, thirteen years before that. So yes, it’s rare, but hardly unknown. Or “thirteen years” is the definition of “never” in movie land.)

Now Dark Horse Comics is releasing collections of their Serenity comics. Amazon, I’m coming for you. (But still, no brown coat. I promise.)

Dream Journal: September 27, 2011

2011-09-27T11:57:00.000-07:00

I slept really lousy on the night after returning from Folsom Street Fair. Every time I woke up from this dream, I kept sinking back into it:

For whatever reason — dream logic doesn’t requires these things be explained or even make sense — I sat bare-assed on a chocolate frosted cake. I then proceeded to clean it up by scooping big fingerfuls off my ass and licking the brown frosting off my fingers. (Yeah, so it looked like that.)

At the same time, my father videotaped this. He then posted the video to YouTube, under the name “kbd hong” (so I guess I was Chinese in the dream), with the title “Look what I did on my honeymoon!” (but I wasn’t even married in the dream). The video immediately scored 80,000 views, and soon thereafter broke 300,000 views, and then got featured on Fox News.

My father refused to take it down from YouTube, so I sued them, and I sued him for both defamation of character and for damages (including the money made from page views and ads that came from YouTube). And I had to deal with a media circus, and repeatedly send cease & desist letters and sue people for reposting and remixing the video.

Worst was the mashup of the video with the song “Chocolate Rain”.

I think I’ll blame this on the Reuben sandwich I had for dinner last night.

Let me revise the intro to this: I didn’t sleep lousy. I slept crappy.

Movie Review — Zoolander

2011-09-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

The only thing redeeming about Zoolander was that the previous movie I watched was The Devil Wears Prada, a far more realistic, funny, and enjoyable movie about the fashion industry. Many people over the years have told me how good this was, but I think they need their heads examined.

(Then again, many people like sitcoms, but almost every time I watch one, I can’t fathom most of the appeal. They usually just aren’t funny. Like with the movie A.I., I pull out of the show and listen to the music or the laugh track and see how those things lead the audience to what is intended to be funny, even when it isn’t. It reminds me of the final episode of Ellen, which had no laugh track, and which was made that much funnier/deeper by people who told me they didn’t get it because of that, that they didn’t know what was supposed to be funny. Boy that’s sad.)

Back to Zoolander, though…

Fashion models are goofy, inept, and vapid. Yup, got it.
Fashion designers are goofy, inept, and warped. Check.
Anything else? Nope.

(Okay, I did like the scene at the gas station, replayed with the statue at the end. That was twisted.)

Movie Review — The Devil Wears Prada

2011-09-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

I bought The Devil Wears Prada on DVD when the local Hollywood Video closed. I had seen it when it was in the theaters and damn, I forgot how much fun it was.

One of the things I like about this film is that it isn’t a romantic comedy (it’s a “coming of age” film). She doesn’t meet a guy from the opposite side of the financial/political/upbringing spectrum, find herself attracted to him, decide she hates him instead, grow to love him, and then end up happily ever after with him. (They tease at a subplot with that, with the editor she meets, but it is only a sideline and it doesn’t end up ending pleasantly.)

Then again, maybe it is a romantic comedy, but instead of a hunky guy, the opposite lead is Meryl Streep’s “Miranda Priestly”. Their relationship, although it technically is a mentor/student type of thing, does follow the standard tropes of the romantic comedy genre, without sex and marriage being the end goal (but with “become part of my life and lifestyle” replacing it).

On top of all the glamour and publishing/fashion insight and the love her/hate her relationship the characters end up having with the Priestly character, the final quote from Priestly (“Everyone wants to be like us”) and Sachs’s reaction to it (and the mixed reaction that viewers have — some would agree with Priestly and some would not, adding an extra layer to things) are a fantastic kicker that tie the movie up with a dandy little bow. (A cerulean bow, of course.)

Movie Review — The Wild

2011-08-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

When The Wild came out, I was right there at the head of the pack, saying that their tagline should be “Hey, we can do Madagascar, too!” (That is, "Madagascar 2”, as though it were a sequel to a much more successful computer-animated “New York zoo animals escape to a wild jungle island” movie from about a year before this.) In reality, I realize that it was probably in development well before Madagascar came out, perhaps even with completely separate influences. (See the comics industry releasing X-Men and Doom Patrol or Swamp Thing and Man-Thing at basically the same time. It’s a form of “convergent evolution”.)

I finally saw it (via Netflix), and my quip was both wrong and very right.

First, the character designs for the animals are some of the most realistic we’ve seen when it comes to a fully computer-animated film. In comparison, the animals in Madagascar are roughed-out cartoons.

Second, the thrust of the plot is a bit more organic and adult-friendly, with the kid being upset at his father, running away and getting in over his head, and the father and friends setting out to rescue him.

But then we have the turtle curling match, and the animals steering the ship (sorry, but the penguin cell in Madagascar, while not any more believable, was at least funnier), and the breakdancing, and the dance choreography of the wildebeests. Once you get into these facets, then the cartoony nature of the Madagascar animals becomes more warranted… or if you prefer, then the realistic character designs break hard against the non-realistic actions. And since this occurs repeatedly throughout the film — it could be somewhat excusable only at the front and back as a framing sequence — the viewer is constantly shoved back and forth.

In the end, if you have to choose between realistic (ugly) choreographed wildebeests and cartoony (cute) choreographed lemurs, chose the cute ones.

(It’s also interesting to examine that movie poster, because it’s not very representative of the film. It implies everything occurs in New York City, it paints the characters are more cartoony, it is missing two of the main characters, and it positions the dogs and alligator as much more significant than the three minutes of the film they actually appeared in. Almost as if they were trying to paint the characters as more like those in Madagascar, but to distance the plot from being seen as similar. The Wild only brought in about 15% of what Madagascar did; in fact, it only brought in half as much total as Madagascar did on its opening weekend.)

Jiffy is the Worst Peanut Butter… Right? Right? Um, Maybe.

2011-08-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

At some point, years ago, the message filtered into my brain that “Jif peanut butter is bad for you because it contains more sugar, added to make it more attractive to kids.” Like most such social messaging (see “Coors is anti-gay”, etc.), once this made it into my consciousness, I accepted it as truth without every questioning it.

And yet, I continued to buy and consume Jif in preference to Skippy or other national brands. Every couple years, I try something else — be it Skippy, or one which needs to be stirred (and thus sloshes half the peanut oil out of the jar onto the floor, leading to inconsistent consistency over the life of the jar), or chocolate hazelnut Nutella — and every time, I come back to Jif.

Recently, buying a new jar, I remember this “truth” and decided to look at the nutrition labels:

For Jif — Serving size: 2 tablespoons. (About what you actually use for a sandwich. You know that isn’t always the case with serving size values.) Calories: 190. (Mmm, that seems high, in this era of 100 calorie sized snacks.) Calories from fat: 130.
For Skippy — Serving size: 2 tablespoons. Calories: 190. Calories from fat: 140. (Interesting.)
For Adams (which needs to be hand-stirred) — Serving size: 2 tablespoons. Calories: 210. (What?!) Calories from fat: 150. (What?!)
For O Organics (Safeway brand) — Serving size: 2 tablespoons. Calories: 200. Calories from fat: unclear, but has higher saturated fat amount than Jif/Skippy, so figure at least the same as Skippy.

Isn’t that interesting: same calorie count for both Jif and Skippy, and both are lower than the presumed “better for you” Adams and O Organics brands. Also, Jif is higher than Skippy in Vitamin E and Riboflavin; there is no listing of those for Adams and O Organics (could be they just don’t list such, could be that they are additives in Jif and Skippy).

Jif actually has lower from-fat calories, which certainly could map into higher from-sugar calories (the difference has to come from somewhere, after all), which means that the data portion of the “sugar message” from years ago may be technically true. But that then raises other questions: is it worse for the sugar calories to be higher, or the fat calories to be higher? If the “better” peanut butters are 5-10% higher in calories, are they actually better?

Of note as well, this website rates brands based on issues such as trans fats, water usage, and community support. It tags both Jif and Skippy very low due to trans fat inclusion, but the brand’s websites indicate no trans fats in their peanut butter products, so the website info is a few years out of date. (Many companies removed trans fats a few years ago.)

In the end, my limited research is inconclusive. There is no clarity that one brand is notably better than another in terms of nutrition — a little higher here, a little lower there — which leads back to the only thing that really counts, taste preference.

I admit that I’m probably going to try the almond butter at some point, and maybe non-chocolated hazelnut butter (if such exists), but in the end, I know what I’ll come back to: “Choosy Jims choose Jif.”

Movie Review — Fight Club

2011-08-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Halfway through Fight Club, when they were just beating the snot out of each other, I thought to myself “Okay, this movie is fucked up. I have no idea why I’m watching this and I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else.”

At the end of Fight Club — which I can’t say anything about, since “The first rule of Fight Club is: ‘You do not talk about Fight Club.’” — I thought to myself “Okay, this movie is fucked up. I have no idea why I’m watching this and I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else.” Just for completely different reasons.

I neither enjoyed it nor didn’t enjoy it. It was twisted, but while twisted is an okay reason to see a film, it isn’t a reason to recommend a film. But at least I get the references now; that’s something.

Movie Review — Doogal

2011-07-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

Doogal is, um, a computer-animated kids movie about a dog and a singing cow and slacker rocker rabbit and a snail who take on a quest from a good wizard spring to stop a bad wizard spring from freezing the world solid, and who do a lousy job of it but eventually win anyway (for not much reason other than because the good guys always have to win).

If that sounds both stupid and not especially enjoyable — probably including for the kids it is aimed at — you’re right. As bad as Barnyard was, this is the computer-animated film that will make you swear off of watching anything in that mode that comes down the Netflix queue. (Then again, I haven't dared to watch Hoodwinked yet.)

Unattractive character designs.
A melange of characters apparently based on the toys left ignored in some kid’s toy chest, given how poorly they mesh as a group/team.
The classic quest concept of recover the magic objects, and in the process lead the bad guy to each of them so he can get them instead, never mind that he would have apparently never found them otherwise.
Loads of pop culture references and anachronisms (a laser grid in an ancient Aztec temple?), the sort which break you out of the thin story over and over again rather than enhancing it.
Subplots which go nowhere (like the snail’s unrequited love for the cow).
Atrocious matching of the voice work to the character mouths. (Apparently all the characters but the cow and good wizard spring were redone for the American release, and they either did a lot of ad lib or the script work was really shoddy in terms of retaining the timing.)

The only reason I would recommend this is to put something in front of a 4-year old that he or she hasn’t already seen twelve times. If the kid has seen something else only ten or eleven times before, put that on again instead of this.

Movie Review — Barnyard

2011-07-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Remember those foam “stress relief” toys from the 1990s, the ones you could squish into a malformed ball and they would slowly restore to the original shape? That is the apparent basis for the design of the cows in the animated film Barnyard. It’s also the only redeeming feature of the film.

The male cows all have udders. According to IMDB, the director says this was an intentional joke. That may be true, but that doesn’t make it funny.
Other than the cows and a couple other barnyard animals, the bulk of the character designs are simply ugly.
While this is positioned as a movie leading into a Nickelodeon television series, it’s obvious that the reverse is true: they took several episodes of the proposed TV series and strung them together The entire film is structured in roughly 20-minute chunks, and several of the pieces have characters who do not appear in other chunks. If you’ve going to give us a movie, give us an actual movie, not a re-edited batch of TV shows.

Saves water… or invests it?

2011-07-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

This little placard (about 4" high) was posted near the urinals at Safeco Field.

I hate messages like this, because they are often used to lie with statistics, using math comparisons to hide the real information, usually to make it seem more impressive than it really is.

In this case, though, the placard is outright wrong!

“This urinal flushes with only 16 oz. of water” — okay, that’s clear enough.

“A standard one-gallon urinal” — points for good hyphenation, but deduction for switching from ounces to gallons. How many ounces in a gallon? (I had to look it up to be sure, got it wrong at first: 128.)

But the word after the comma, this is where the placard text is wrong. If it had said “This urinal flushes with only 16 oz. of water, using 88% less water per use than a standard one-gallon urinal”, it would have been correct (albeit overusing “use”). 87.5% of 128 oz. is 112 oz., so saving 88% leaves 16 oz being used:

x - .88x = 16 (where x=ounces used by a one-gallon urinal = 128)

But they had to try to go green and put the word “saving” in there. That changes the entire meaning. It is no longer about using less than another urinal does; now it is about saving more than another urinal (saves). That unwritten word is the key. It means that we are comparing this urinal and the regular one to some unspecified third option, a presumed baseline. But what is that baseline?

The EPA refers to an “older, inefficient 1.5 gpf flushing urinal”, and the state of Alabama mentions “older flush type urinals used 2.5 gallons”. Or going to sit-down toilets, new pressure-assisted flush toilets use 1.4 gallons, and post-1994 ones used 1.6, while ones before then used 3.4 gallons. Flushometer toilets like those in commercial restrooms also use about 1.6 gallons. (Interesting side note there: urinals use less water than sit-down toilets, but still more than 2/3 as much, a far higher percentage than I expected.)

If we were just comparing one urinal’s volume to the other, our math formula would be what I listed above. But with the mystery toilet involved, it is:

128-16 = .88 y (where y = ounces saved by a regular urinal)

(additional amount saved by special urinal = 88% of amount saved by regular urinal)

Per this formula, for these special urinals to save 88% more than a regular urinal, a regular urinal saves about 128 oz. (one gallon), meaning that the baseline item uses 2 gallons, which doesn’t fit any of the profiles noted.

What Were They Thinking? — Mexico, Peru, What’s the Difference?

2011-07-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Encountered this Mexican restaurant in Richland, WA. It is part of a small chain in Eastern Washington. Here is their website. (Warning: Flash-based, plays loud music, and features dancing animated chilis — very obnoxious.)

I wonder at what point someone said “I don’t care that the Aztecs were in Mexico and the Incas were in Peru, 2500 miles away. I don’t care that Mexican cuisine is different from Peruvian cuisine.”

What Were They Thinking? — Dingleberries

2011-07-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Holy crap (literally!), what were they thinking to name a product “dingleberry”? I doubt I could order it without snickering.

This company sells chocolate-dipped berries at Safeco Field for Seattle Mariners games. As an added curiosity, “shishkberry” is the nickname for a strain of pot.

I’m not even gonna comment on what sort of sex toys the stacked coated berries look like.

Movie Review — Basic Instinct

2011-05-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

I finally saw Basic Instinct (1992) this week, thanks to the wonders of Netflix. This film had been on my “Don’t Watch” list for the last 20 years. Due to the gay protests over it when it was being filmed and released, it was a big no-no to support this horrible anti-gay film about an ice pick-wielding bisexual murderess.

I’m glad I finally saw it, because that was a load of horse crap. Or rather, twenty years down the road, it now looks like a load of horse crap. At the time, maybe making an example of the film was the right thing to do.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area (to San Jose, an hour south of San Francisco) in August 1990, at age 23. I had come out over the previous year in Eugene, Oregon. I think my first trip to San Francisco proper didn’t occur until November or December of that year, for a Silicon Valley gay techies dim sum brunch.

(I still remember walking up the stairs into the cavernous dim sum restaurant, not knowing what anyone who would be there looked like. I scanned the entire place and figured that the table of white people must be those there for the brunch. And then saw many other people in the next half hour come up the stairs and do the exact same thing. This was back in the days where we knew people online pretty much only by their name and e-mail address; there were no social networking or cruise sites where we could see a photo.)

Soon after that, I was regularly coming up to San Francisco at least once per weekend, to country dance at the Rawhide II. After I joined the San Francisco Saddletramps a year later and eventually moved to San Mateo, halfway up the peninsula, my trips to The City would be three or four per week. San Mateo was a great place to sleep, but a lousy place to have a gay life.

One of the first pieces of gay political activism that I remember was the stuff surrounding Basic Instinct, although as one of the first, it’s also something that I only have hazy memories of. The biggest memories I have of the time are the involvement of the activist group Queer Nation, and that the gay country bar Rawhide II was used as one of the sets in the movie, and gay activists did drive-by paint bombing of the front door because of the “sell out” nature of the owner and the business.

Ray Chalker, the owner of the Rawhide II and the Sentinel gay paper, eventually earned himself a worldwide reputation as a jerk — I was once in Florida at a gay country-western dance event and met a couple guys from London who said “You’re from San Francisco? Do you know the owner of the Rawhide? We hear he’s a complete asshole” — but now I wonder what portion of this might stem from the Basic Instinct stuff? That is, while running both a newspaper and a bar already put you at odds with some people in the community, when you get publicly branded as a sort of a traitor to the community and members of the community conduct repeated vandalism against your business, I can see how that changes your view of the community; you start to mistrust motives and you become a degree less pleasant to work with, and that can certainly spiral in intensity over time. Add in the gay community’s institutionalized memory, where we hold grudges and refuse to take actions for years after the reason to do so has evaporated — like the Coors Boycott [see here] [and here], or dare I say it, avoiding seeing the movie Basic Instinct — and it’s easy to see an unfocused perpetual animosity toward Chalker and the Rawhide II festering in the community for years, continually being reinforced by Chalker himself in the way he reacted to things.

(On the flip side, Chalker’s anger and behavior eventually resulted in the creation of the Sundance Association for Country-Western Dancing, a strong non-profit which “owns” and directs the Bay Area gay country community now long after the Rawhide II ceased to be a gay country bar. And Sundance has been an inspiration and model for Seattle’s Rain Country Dance Association, which formed after we lost the Timberline as a dance location up here. Mmm, there’s a lot of stuff thet we can tag as possibly having some roots in this movie!)

Part of the fun with this movie, as with any one taking place in a familiar-to-you city was in identifying where things occur and what has changed since then, such as:

Nick’s apartment is in North Beach. Although I don’t know that neighborhood much from driving, that is also where some of Tales of the City takes place (Russian Hill is right next door; the TV mini-series was released the next year), so I recognized some of the street locations used in both. (Alas, I don’t know that area of the city well enough to tell where they turn down a one-way street, or turn on one street and end up clear across town.)
The construction pit where Roxy’s car crashes? That is what would become Moscone Center. You can tell by some of the other buildings seen on the other side.
As noted before, the country bar is the Rawhide II. The real one’s 7th-near-Harrison location isn’t what is shown in the movie, nor did it have a neon cactus. It never had room inside for a live band where one is in the movie; the room was only 20–25 feet across, narrow and long.
The looming freeways threw me for a loop at first, since I couldn’t place the locations as near the 101 in SOMA. But when Nick is walking on the pier with the city behind him, I remembered that there used to be a freeway along the Embarcadero, damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and torn down in 1991, after the movie was filmed.

Also fun was freeze-framing the scene in the country bar (scene 18), which according to the DVD notes featured as many as 100 of the bar’s regulars:

Right as the scene opens, a guy with a bushy moustache and a white cowboy hat is seen dancing as the camera zooms through the ceiling fan. That is Jeff Hines (d. 1998), longtime instructor at the Rawhide and prominent member of the San Francisco Saddletramps dance troupe.
As Nick pays Gus’s tab, a curly haired woman is at the bar. I think that was Jackie, whom I knew from the 931 Cloggers.
As Gus and Nick leave the bar, they pass by the pool table. Behind the black woman is a blond man in a black shirt, with a pool cue. That is Tim, another of the San Francisco Saddletramps. (Tim and I joined at the same time, in late 1991.)

20 years down the line, and with early 90s AIDS in the mix, a few other people looked familiar, but I couldn’t identify any of them by name.

Bloggenfreude (definition)

2011-05-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

Taking joy in adding to the pain of others via exaggerated and even ridiculous online comments.
A portmanteau of “blog” and “Schadenfreude”

Consider:

Whatever the latest Apple story is, the “Apple haters” dogpile on, tearing things down with increasingly ridiculous claims and theories.
Right-wing pundits jumping on the birther “Obama was born in Kenya” bandwagon, even though probably none of them really believed the concern was legitimate.
People ripping into Rebecca Black’s song “Friday”. The lyrics might be simplistic and the Auto-Tune-ing a little bit obvious, but did it deserve that level of attack? (Kudos to Glee for salvaging the song!)

Sure, when you feel compelled to comment on the latest trend or meme, you have to have your own spin, but if there’s truth in the Thumper Rule (“If you can’t say something nice… don’t say nothing at all.”), then there needs to be a corollary: “If you must say something mean, you don’t have to be meaner than everyone else.”

Prhyme (definition)

2011-05-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

Any word which has no known rhyme (in the same language). A portmanteau of “prime” and “rhyme”.

A “prime number” is a number whose only divisors are 1 and the number itself: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 23, 101, etc.

Thus, a “prhyme” is a word whose only rhyme is the word itself. (Maybe there should be a word-equivalent of the number 1, which rhymes with everything? I guess it would be <whitespace>.)

(Looks like Prhyme is also the name of a metal/ska band and a rap/hip-hop artist.)

Adobe Reader Needs to Build Its Confidence

2011-05-03T11:48:00.000-07:00

Poor Adobe Reader. There, there. It's okay. Stand up straight and just try. You can do it! I know you can!

Gasp! More mutants!

2011-04-25T17:26:00.000-07:00

Isn’t Wolverine supposed to be like 5'2" tall?

So how long is his wingspan? Apparently wide enough from elbow-to-elbow to go from one side of Iron Man to the other side of Spider-Woman while they are flying alongside one another. One twitch of his arm and she’ll lose her armpit webbing. (Click the image to see it full size.)

(Wolverine’s head is obviously bent forward here because Spider-Woman just kneed him in the back of the head. Although that also means she must be only about 4' tall, if knee to armpit is only as long as Wolverine’s head to claw.)

The obvious explanation is that Wolverine has a new mutant power along the lines of Mr. Fantastic.

Gasp! Mutants!

2011-04-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

Here’s a poster for X-Men: First Class.

Don’t tell anyone, but I think the guy second from the left is a mutant! No, not because his head is the wrong size for his body, or because he emits fog from his armpits, but because his left hand is a vampire — it doesn't cast a reflection in the highly polished floor!

Yes, this has been submitted to Photoshop Disasters.

Butch Fun Cars IV

2011-04-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

Scooter: Kymco Downtown 300i, nicknamed “Tula”.
Color: Burnt Orange (or “Galaxy Gold”, like the original color of the Space Needle)
Purchased: April 4, 2011 at Seattle Cycle Center
Location: April 17, 2011 at Snoqualmie Pass

What Were They Thinking? — To Preserve A Severed Extremity Until It Can Be Reattached, Pack It In Ice

2011-04-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This ad for a contest at the Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival was on bus shelters in Vancouver, BC in early April. Take a peek at that leg’s position. Poor guy: it got ripped clean off in the avalanche. He must be in shock and numbed from the cold, since he’s not reacting to the amputation.

Aware of the sensitive nature of the image, they declined to show the severed leg on the contest’s Facebook page.

Yes, this has been submitted to Photoshop Disasters.

Snackies

2011-04-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

Found this at Safeway last night.

I guess that's one way to bypass any trademark issues!

What Were They Thinking? — Pull My Finger

2011-04-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This poster is outside a computer repair businesses on Davie St. in Vancouver, BC. It has been there for years, as long as I can remember (and I’ve been up to Vancouver at least once a year for years and years). Sidestepping the question of what typo the white patch is covering up (and why they haven’t fixed it in a decade), the image itself always seems bizarre to me. What is she pointing at? What does her smile mean?

Is that what a computer looks like?
Windows 95? You’ve gotta be kidding me!
If I stop smiling, I’ll cry because of all the viruses on this thing.
God damn this old junker is heavy.
Kittehs!
What do you know, you can beat Minesweeper after all!
I’m with stupid.
Come on, little guy. Reach higher. Pull my finger!

Movie Review — Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

2011-04-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

Out of all the things I could say about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, one sums them all up:

After watching this movie, I wanted to put the disc back in and watch it again. Immediately.

That’s a pretty rare thing for me. The only other movie that I can think of that gave me that urge was Memento, but that was because I wanted to see all the clues again know that I knew the outcome. Mmm, and Mulholland Drive as well, again one of those films where all the threads change right at the end. Scott Pilgrim isn’t one of those.

I’m still in the process of reading the comic book series that Scott Pilgrim is based on — I need to go pick up a reorder of vol. 5 that came in last week — but up through vol. 3, the movie is one of those ultra-close transfers from comic to film that only Watchmen and Sin City have managed thus far. But with the comic itself a mash-up of slacker, music, and video game content, the movie version takes that a level further, mashing comics, music, and games into a whole which works amazingly.

Another of the great things I can say is that the last few minutes of the movie kept me guessing about what would happen. That so seldom happens for me (unless there’s an intentional mystery in the film) that I was enthralled. Of course, it’s also a plus that I haven’t read the end of the comics series yet, so it couldn’t be spoiled for me that way.

(Hmm, that’s an interesting thought for how to approach movies based on books and comics. If you know too much of the original, you can’t enjoy the movie as a movie — you’re always picking at the inadequacies — but if you know too little, you can sometimes be lost or be aware that you are missing backstory [which is my complaint about all the Harry Potter movies after the first couple, that you could increasingly recognize the places where subplots and entire chapters were chopped out to make the content short enough to film]. For Scott Pilgrim, I knew a lot but not too much, so I could enjoy the first half due to the match ups to the source and I could enjoy the last half due to knowing enough to really be settled into the movie’s world.)

In some ways, the movie works better than the comics. Smart screenwriters know when to avoid some of the diversions that a comic book indulges in, and when to play up things which are subtle in the original source material. They succeed in both of these with Scott Pilgrim, for example amping up Wallace’s gay angle, while completely cutting the Stephen Stills “recording an album” plotline (with its own gay angle).

I heartily recommend this movie for anyone who has at least a passing interest in upcoming indie music, slacker culture, video games, and non-superhero comics.

Now someone explain to me: how does a film about a rock band and loaded with cool and way different special effects (unless you want to just call them updates of the 60’s Batman show) not even get one Oscar nomination in the pertinent categories?

Dream Journal: March 27, 2011

2011-04-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

I had this dream a couple weeks ago:

I was walking in a mid-size town waterfront area — the sort with boat slips and local shops, but also parking lots for a moderate amount of tourist activity — with either my mother or my ex-boyfriend. We stopped by a green van, where an old Asian woman gave us a styrofoam ice chest.

Inside the ice chest were four or five puppies, each the size of a small loaf of bread. They were asleep, and young enough that their eyes were barely able to be open. We were told that they were Bhutanese Yak Hounds, and I was shown a picture of an adult one, which looked like a single-color St. Bernard with an Akita’s tail.

As we walked back to the car, me carrying the ice chest, my mother or my ex-boyfriend (I guess it wasn’t important which one) walked ahead, leaving me behind. The ice chest started to get heavier, and puppies apparently woke up and started moving around. Peeking in the ice chest, I saw that the puppies were larger than before.

As the dream continued, the puppies kept getting larger until they started to climb out of the ice chest and on my shoulders and head. I tried to call out for my mother or ex-boyfriend to wait for me, but either I couldn’t or she/he couldn’t hear me. Soon I had five puppies, each about the size of the original ice chest, clambering all over me as I stumbled along, trying to get to our parked car.

Most likely, I was tangled in the sheets and my head had slipped off and under the pillow as I slept.

There is no such thing as a “Bhutanese Yak Hound”, although the Bhutia Sheepdog, related to the Tibetan Mastiff, might fit the bill.

Coined Phrase: “xxx Tourettes”

2011-03-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

iPod Tourettes

The way someone grooving on their iPod or other music player will spit out random bits of whatever song they are listening to, sharing them with the world. Usually the worst bits and probably out of tune.

Several years ago, when I was commuting by bus — on the glorious MT 7 route up Rainier Ave. — a teenage boy in the back of the bus was suffering from this. Swaying slightly in his seat, he suddenly sang out “Fuck you!”, then a second later “I’m gonna fuck you, girl!” Presumably the song by MITCH.

Bible Tourettes

Randomly inserting Bible verse numbers into your speech, especially by Christianists promoting their agenda on the news. The verse numbers usually do have contextual meaning, but only to people who already know the referenced bits by heart.

In computer programming terms, this is “indirection” — pointing to something that points to what you means. Used to be that they would include the actual verse, but with sound bite news these days, there’s no time for extraneous words, so they just spit out “Ephesians 2:8” in the middle of a sentence and go back to their talking point. This Victoria Jackson video on CNN inspired the phrase; you can read her followup blog posting and see that Bible Tourettes populates her writing, too.

Show Quote Tourettes

Blurting out quotes from show tunes and TV and movies and comedy sketches in the middle of conversation.

Visit gay bars, you’ll hear it. Or visit science fiction conventions and hang around the Trekkers and the Whovians; same difference, different source. As with Bible Tourettes, there is contextual meaning to those who know the quote, although rather than indirection, this is bonding over shared cultural touchpoints.

(With apologies to those who suffer from genuine Tourette Syndrome, and to drag performer Pussy Tourette, who frankly looked better in drag than when backstage preparing to dress. You can catch some of her music on Rhapsody.)

What Were They Thinking? — Shopping? Meh.

2011-03-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Worst. Store Name. Ever.

This is one of those airport stores that you go into during your layover between flights, not because they have anything you want but just to pass the time. (This one is at the end of one of the terminals at SFO, near Gate 74.) Sells “travel goods and accessories for humans and pets,” according to the Shopping at SFO page.

Under that idea, maybe it’s also “Most Accurate. Store Name. Ever.”

Movie Review — Blazing Saddles

2011-03-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

I recently watched the classic Mel Brooks’ Western comedy Blazing Saddles, as part of my quest to refresh on all the Mel Brooks movies. (I also watched The Producers — the original one — soon after.) I’m not sure I had ever seen this one before.

It was interesting seeing (hearing) the word “nigger” being used abundantly during the film. Admittedly, it was done to make a point rather than as casual dialogue. According to the bonus features, this was controversial even at the time, with some actors declining to take a role where they would have to say the word. Today, I don’t think you could get the movie into the theaters; in a drama or a documentary, said by someone clearly depicted as “bad”, yes, but not in a comedy with the word being used by general populace characters.

The most interesting part of this DVD was extras, which include a number of alternate versions or extended scenes done for the television version. Yes, extended versions: some scenes edited for the movie were actually restored for TV. When does that ever happen any more?

No idea if “nigger” made it onto the TV; I expect not, given the other bits which did not. Particularly noted in the behind the scenes stuff was the campfire bean-eating scene, where they had to remove all the fart sounds, leaving the cowboys mysteriously standing up and sitting down repeatedly, in a weird slow motion dance. Also of note was Madeline Kahn’s character, whose last name (“Shtupp”, meaning “stuff” in Yiddish, a double entendre) couldn’t be said on TV, so she gets introduced as “Lili von…”.

(Side angle: while the use of “nigger” throughout the film was shocking and bizarre based on what we are used to today, stuff like the campfire farting scene slides by as trite and common juvenalia. But it isn’t, or at least it wasn’t: apparently this is the first movie fart joke of the sort. This is the prototype. Mel Brooks is to blame for all those fart jokes we endure in inane comedies today. Sigh.)

(Per IMDB trivia on the film, the fart sounds are from the old “soaped up armpit” method.)

In the end, Blazing Saddles is more of a curiosity today than a landmark, but Brooks is apparently working to recraft it for Broadway. Then again, I saw the original version of The Producers a couple weeks after seeing this, and compared to the stage version (I haven’t yet seen the movie version of the stage version), it also feels quite remote. Brooks did a fantastic job reconfiguring that film for the stage, so I have some hopes for Blazing Saddles on Broadway. (Then again, I didn’t think Young Frankenstein did all that great on stage.)

But God knows how he’s going to manage to get “Nobody move or the nigger gets it!” in there.

Dolly Parton, the Coat Check Girl

2011-03-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

This was my coat check ticket a couple weeks ago.

For the three people out there who don’t quite get the reference…

What Were They Thinking? — Seattle’s Worst Advertising

2011-03-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Billboards from Seattle’s Best Coffee have started cropping up around Seattle. A more square version of this one (“Anywhere Great Coffee Is Needed”) has been up above my chiropractor’s office for about a month.

The first time I saw it, I took it for a flat presentation of colored circles, each with a USB drive sticking out of it. I’m not alone in that: I showed a pic of that billboard to Cliff and he said “What’s that? Bubbles?”

(What it is meant to be, of course, is stacked coffee cups, seen from above. Unfortunately, seen directly from above, you lose perspective [ahem] on what you are looking at, and the brain is free to make other connections.)

In the wake of the recent logo rebranding of Seattle’s Best Coffee — where a major complaint was “Why is the ‘coffee’ in the logo red? This looks like the logo for a blood bank” — you would think they would want advertising that is clear.

And maybe advertising that actually includes coffee. Because an ad full of clean, empty coffee cups kind of implies that they are waiting for coffee. Apparently for something other than Seattle’s Best Coffee.

This site doesn’t think they are very good ads, either.

Best Inflatable Ad Ever

2011-03-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

The seafood restaurant Jake’s in downtown Portland (near Powell’s Books) had this huge inflatable King Crab on its roof this past weekend.

Totally fucking cool!

Is This Better When I’m Not Listening?

2011-03-02T14:22:00.000-08:00

To date, there have only been three country songs that I actively despise. (These would be “hit” songs, of course, ones with enough radio airplay to boost them from “I don’t like this but won’t likely hear it again” to “God, I hate this, change the station! Make it stop!”)

Those would be:

Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl”, despised because of the bad poetry in the second verse.
Colin Raye’s “That’s My Story (And I’m Sticking to It)”, his song about getting caught in a lie and just digging a deeper hole.
Reba McEntire’s “She Thinks His Name is John”, about a woman who has a single instance of anonymous sex in her life and dies of AIDS because of it.

But they are now joined by a fourth, currently #1 on the Billboard Country charts, Blake Shelton’s “Who Are You When I’m Not Looking?” (also heard on Joe Nichols’ album from 2007, but not released as a single then — probably for good reason!). Check out these first-verse lyrics:

My oh my, you’re so good-looking
Hold yourself together like a pair of bookends
But I’ve not tasted all your cooking
Who are you when I’m not looking?

Gack. Make it stop. Banal. Insipid. Lyrics that don’t add up to anything. The second line doesn’t even rhyme. (And I’m generally forgiving more forgiving about whether or not something rhymes when it is sung.)

No one has tasted all of my cooking, hon, not even me! I keep making new stuff. That pan-fried tilapia with paprika and bacon fat last night was nummy.

What Were They Thinking? — Rub-a-Dub-Dub

2011-02-28T13:01:00.000-08:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

When I was in New Zealand a year ago, this sign was in the public restroom at the park in Taupo. (Click it to see a larger view.)

While it’s always good to remind people about this stuff:

There was no hot water.
There was no soap.
There were no towels or hand dryers.

Kind of reduces the value of the reminder, huh?

To Every Thing There is a Season! Turn! Turn! Turn!

2011-02-16T13:29:00.000-08:00

“Forget World Peace… Visualize Using Your Turn Signal” — that’s what the bumper sticker I remember from the 90s said. And no place needs it to come back more than Seattle.

Not to say that Seattle drivers don’t user their turn signals. They do. Most of them do every time they make a turn. The problem is, they don’t use them until they make the turn. (Hint: it’s intended to signal what you’re going to do, not what you are doing. It’s supposed to be a help to other drivers, so they can drive more efficiently, and so they can give you space to turn rather than hitting you when you suddenly lurch out into their lane.)

The light turns green, and Seattle drivers just sit there, or maybe they creep halfway into the intersection. Are they asleep? Are they playing with their phone? (Probably.) Are they waiting for ducklings or little old ladies to finish crossing the street? Did they stall out? You’re a car or two back, so you can’t tell. All you really know is that they are sitting there with no signal light flashing, apparently doing nothing.

(Magnifying matters is that I’m usually on my scooter, and in Seattle, it’s probably raining a bit. And I can’t always lane split to get to the front and bypass the hold-up, especially if they are legitimately blocked [because then I feel like an impatient fool].)

Then, just as you’re reaching for your horn (or maybe after), they start to turn and suddenly now there’s their flasher. What, did they hit it with their thumb by accident as they turned the wheel?

You can’t even go borderline racist and blame this on DWA, because lots and lots of cars/people do it in Seattle. I wish I could go back in time and smack their Driver’s Ed teachers upside the head.

I suppose I should note two other things:

We all do this by accident now and then (me, too), but I encounter someone doing it almost every day. That goes beyond random chance.
This is nothing new. I remember trying to follow my father’s car once, probably after my sister’s college graduation in 1990, and having a bitch of time because he didn’t use his turn signals until he was in the middle of a turn.

[Title reference: The song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by The Byrds.]

October, 2003–June, 2004 blog posts

2011-02-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve finished incorporating the October, 2003–June, 2004 posts from my old “Bouncing Off the Walls” blog into this one, a whopping 64 items. There were 202 items in the old blog, and I've now passed the halfway point in the merging process, moving in about 4 old posts per week. (The Q3 2004 batch was the busiest, though, with 30 posts to merge in.)

In the process, I’ve re-edited all the entries, adding and correcting weblinks, clarifying text, and sometimes adding new comments. Here are links to the 9 months covered, so you can read what I was up to back then:

October 2003 (2 items)
November 2003 (3 items)
December 2003 (5 items)
January 2004 (11 items)
February 2004 (8 items)
March 2004 (9 items)
April 2004 (9 items)
May 2004 (6 items)
June 2004 (4 items)

A few of the adult (sex-related) posts are on my other blog, here:

October 2003 (1 item)
December 2003 (2 items)
February 2004 (1 item)
March 2004 (2 items)
June 2004 (1 item)

What was going on in the world (and my blog) back this? War in Iraq. Janet Jackson’s nipple. A bunch of “What Were They Thinking?” items. And a little milestone in Massachusetts: same-sex marriage.

Between the two blogs, I’m now at 401 posts total.

Do Your Religion and Politics Extend to Your Pets?

2011-02-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

Coming into work today, I was following a bus with an ad from the Humane Society (or maybe the SPCA) featuring a cat nursing a scad of kittens, labelled “Spay Me”, with a subtitle saying that family planning isn’t just for humans.

(It was totally LOLCat-able. Photoshop the mama cat’s eyes a little bigger and add a word balloon saying “Please. And soon.”)

It reminded me of a thought that came up a few weeks ago:

Do pro-lifers spay and neuter?

Spaying and neutering pets has long been a standard concept put forward by animal and pet groups. I don’t think I have ever heard anyone take a stance against it, making it one of the (in theory) most non-controversial pieces of social messaging out there.

(I despise using the term “fixed”, though. The pets are not broken. You can argue that it is “fixed” as in “stabilized”, but few people think of that definition first. It’s like using “catholic” when you mean “broad” or “universal”: everyone will have to work past the religious meaning to get at what you really mean, so why make them work that hard? Unless you’re writing poetry, of course; you’re supposed to make people work hard to figure out what the fuck you really mean with poetry. [Kidding.] [No, I’m not.])

But with pro-life/anti-abortion people, though: for the extreme among them, any mention of “family planning” seems to inflame them. And what is spaying/neutering, really, but abortion in advance?

I don’t know. There is undoubtedly a theological difference between a fetus (post-conception) and an egg and sperm which don’t get together, but what about when it is the work of man keeping them from getting together? The political philosophy is generally opposed to condoms and other birth control methods as well, under the belief that man blocking God’s will is wrong. So following that logic, forced sterilization of a human — preventing the possibility of conception — should also be wrong. (Presumably there are levels of wrong: abortion is worse than birth control, which I guess should be about parallel to sterilization, so long as you ignore the invasive/permanentness of it.)

(Hmm: is getting a vasectomy a sin?)

So back to the pets: if you’re opposed to birth control and to forced sterilization in humans, does that religio-political philosophy extend to your pets? Should you be opposed to spay and neuter services because they are a form of birth control? Or are they somehow okay because pets are dumb animals/lower lifeforms/unable to control themselves/creatures with no souls/whatever?

Talking about this with a co-worker, he did say he knew a pro-life couple who doesn’t spay/neuter their pets, so apparently some people follow this through at all levels, but they apparently keep pretty quiet about it. (It’s hard to imagine people out picketing the Humane Society in opposition to spay/neuter services, isn’t it?)

Of course, we can flip this whole thing around from the right end of the spectrum to the left end: cats and dogs are carnivores, or carni-omnivores at best. If you’ve decided to be vegetarian or vegan, do you require that of/force that on your pet as well? (Myself, I can’t imagine a cat being happy with tofu and brown rice with a side of stewed lentils, instead of tuna.)

Movie Review — Mallrats

2011-02-10T12:05:00.000-08:00

Mallrats had been sitting in my Netflix queue for a year or more. No idea why I put it in there, really — recommendations from others about Chasing Amy and Dogma, I guess, since they are both in the queue as well — but whatever.

I’ve started using the Watch Instantly feature some, watching movies 10 minutes or so at a shot when I’m sitting at the computer. There really isn’t a lot of stuff available for watching this way: right now, I have 122 movies in my Queue, with only 23 available for this feature (including oddities like half the Star Trek films available for play but the other half not). The real quirk has been that stuff ceases to be available from time to time; I’ve had more films go away half-watched than I’ve been able to complete. (Which explains why Mallrats ended up at the top of my queue: when it was no longer available to watch online, I popped it to the top of the queue so I could watch the last 15 minutes. Grr.)

(As for watching a film 10 minutes at a shot: I understand why some people feel unable to do this. But me, I’ve been trained to do this via 30 years of comic book reading. I am used to reading 20 pages of a story which will takes 4–10 months to complete (if ever), and waiting a month for the next piece. And doing this with 30 different series at once. And a novel or two. And for several years, a daily soap opera. So watching 10 minutes of a film each day for a couple weeks is really no problem, although I avoid doing it with more than a couple films at a time.)

Back to Mallrats…

What a waste of a movie. Nothing redeeming in the characters, nothing illuminating in the story, and not even anything fun or funny. (And I wanted to hit Brodie in the face several times. A character who screams about things every time he opens his mouth and overreacts to everything may reflect some real people, but it doesn’t make for a good primary character.)

(Okay, Stan Lee’s small bit was reasonably good.)

So why am I covering the film if it’s not even worth Netflixing it?

Because of the recurring joke about the autostereogram in the film being a picture of a sailboat. You can see the trailer here. The stereogram appears almost full screen at 0:57. Freeze frame and view it for yourself.

It ain’t a sailboat. (Not that I’m the only person to ever notice that, of course.) But that sort of a continuity flub really takes the enjoyment wind out of my s…

No, I won’t even write that.

What Were They Thinking? — I’m With the Band

2011-02-07T12:12:00.000-08:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This ad was at a bus shelter in Taupo, New Zealand in February, 2010.

I guess they are trying to play on the second syllable of “broadband” with the stick figure playing guitar on stage, but wouldn’t it make more sense to indicate the value attached to the faster connection?

A broadband connection won’t really improve your playing, after all. Not even in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Only practice can do that.

Hair Hoppers

2011-01-31T20:00:00.000-08:00

This poster for the local “Emperor’s Turnabout” event from the local Imperial Court showed up in the local bars recently. (“Turnabout” is an event where the male-persona Court members do drag and the female-persona members perform in male gear. The name may come from the old Hal Roach film of the same name.) It reminds me of something…

This, maybe?

Well, yes, that’s the obvious connection. But something else…

Oh, yeah. This!

The last big evening-long show that the VisQueens did (about 5 years ago now) used the same concept in this poster I did for the show.

The VisQueens are/were Seattle’s camp scag-drag troupe: leathermen and bears donning lingerie, heels, and hair — no make-up — and doing sometimes really good group performance routines. The group’s original outing was with the “Cell Block Tango” from Chicago in 1998. Our last big group routine (we practiced this for months) was the “Rich Man’s” Frug from Sweet Charity in 2008, replicating a big chunk of the Fosse choreography.

Hey, look! Videos!

Baby, Is It Cold Outside?

2011-01-26T13:35:00.000-08:00

Here’s what the Weather app on my iPhone was showing today at almost 1:00 pm in Seattle. (An hour later, it has corrected the problem.)

Does Homo Milk Come From Lesbian Cows?

2011-01-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

Every time I go to Vancouver, BC and have coffee at the chain Blenz in the gay neighborhood, I get tickled by their milk containers. Wow: a special dispenser just for the gays! So I finally took a pic.

(Yes, I know it’s short for “homogenized”, what American chains would tag as “whole milk”.)

Caught You!: Apostrophe Catostrophy

2011-01-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

“Caught You!” identifies places where people don't quite do the full job with their marketing materials and ads: major typos, Photoshop flubs, etc.

This billboard was in the city of Taupo, New Zealand. Tui is a New Zealand brewery.

What Were They Thinking? — This Sign Placed by the Department of Obviousness

2011-01-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

There is a Safeway in the Mission/Potrero area of San Francisco which has a dedicated nut counter (or had one, when this photo was taken in October 2008).

Unquestionably, one of the stupidest signs ever.

Jesus Probably Rode Dinosaurs!

2011-01-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

Kudos to artist Derek Chatwood for this illustration.

I had it as the lock screen art on my iPhone for about a year, but only just found out the proper origin. (Dang, I had thought it was real.)

I’ll have a Blue Blue Blue Blue… Motorcycle

2010-12-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

This was the view last week in the parking garage I use for work. Four blue scooters and motorcycles in a row, ordered in color from lightest to darkest. Mine is the third one from the front.

(Actually, there was a fifth which is out of frame at the front. An orange scooter kind of blows the image.)

Stuff I Read: “Bear Nuts” by Alison Acton

2010-12-02T17:09:00.000-08:00

Remember the Care Bears? Cute cuddly (sickly sweet) bears with symbols on their tummies which indicated their temperament and role? Cheer Bear, Friend Bear, Grumpy Bear, and so on?

(C’mon, admit it. You remember them. You just wish you didn’t! You also remember Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony.)

Alison Acton’s comic Bear Nuts asks the question: “What other iconic bears were out there which we never saw on the cartoon? The ones with less (market-to-)kid-friendly personalities?”

The “About” page for the comic glosses over this origin, saying just “As one of the largest exhibits at the Discount Zoo, (in both size and number of inhabitants) the bears attract a lot of attention… something none of them are happy about. Between gawking adults, jeering children, and their own rather profound personality clashes, it’s a wonder the bears can get through each day without maiming each other… well, most days.”

With characters like Gay (with a lavender rhino, a barely known gay symbol), Evil (with an inverted pentagram), Prozac (with a pill), Tanked, Death, Nerd, and Vanity all sharing the same exhibit at the zoo, Acton has the makings of a fun, emotional, explosive story. Currently posting a couple times a week, Bear Nuts is a perfect blend of cute and twisted.

Two collected volumes, plus prints, sketches, original art, and merchandise are available from the website and from Acton’s partner companies. (I want a Gay Bear t-shirt! One of those “sports” design shirts with a white chest and light yellow sleeves and collar, and a pic of Gay on the tummy as though I were “Gay Bear” Bear would be way cool. Bet Evil would sell even better.)

Book Review — Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

2010-12-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

I finally finished Anthony Bourdain’s latest collection of essays (I bought it this summer and read it in chunks, a perfectly suitable thing to do with a book of essays), Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, but I cannot recommend it… to anyone who has not read his other books.

I don’t know how/where I first encountered Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Saw it recommend by someone I respect on some website, probably. But I bought it and thoroughly enjoyed the stories of his early career, his up and downs, and his personality conflicts. In Kitchen Confidential, Borurdain painted a vivid picture of a career path which I was interested in but had no interest in getting into.

When his biography of Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical came out, I snapped it up and devoured it quickly. A lot of people who know Bourdain’s work don’t even seem to know it exists, which is a shame. It’s a great look into households and cooking practices from a century ago which should make people today absolutely twitch, wondering how we survived. (On the flip side, a lot of people claim that the modern rise in allergies is a result of “too much” cleanliness and such in our food preparation, that we are bringing it on ourselves by not being exposed to things which would help build immunities. “A little dirt never hurt anyone.”)

His third book (might be his second; Wikipedia lists it before Typhoid Mary), A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, was fascinating, combining a travelogue with an examination of exotic meals and delicacies. (“Delicacy”: a word that means weird-ass food that not even the locals eat/enjoy very much.) His focus on stuff like Vietnamese phở and a Portuguese farm using the entire slaughtered pig were fascinating and really encouraged me to try stuff previously outside my comfort zone, such as tendon and the like in my phở . (But I’ll still say no to cobra heart, thanks.)

(As an aside, I do the bulk of my pleasure reading in one of three places/times: with a meal, including dining out by myself; in bed just before going to sleep; and on a plane. Do not — I repeat, do not — read Bourdain’s essays about food in Kitchen Confidential or especially in A Cook’s Tour while you are eating a meal. I don’t care what you are eating, the stuff he is describing will either sound so fantastic that what you are eating will become depressingly plain, or else it will sound so gross that you’ll lose your appetite.)

Which finally brings us to Medium Raw, and why I can’t recommend it as a first taste of Bourdain.

The essays in this book are mostly focused on three things:

Specific chefs Bourdain knows, many of whom are big names in the world of high class cookery, especially in New York
Specific restaurants Bourdain enjoys (or fails to enjoy), many of which are big names in the world of high class cookery, especially in New York
Follow ups from or tangents off his pieces in earlier books

In other words, if you don’t know (aren’t able to recognize) the chefs and restaurants that Bourdain name drops — or at the least, if you aren’t apt to travel to New York or Europe and patronize high-end dining establishments — and if you haven’t read his earlier works (and probably haven’t read them recently, to boot), this isn’t a book for you. Do not choose this as your entry to Bourdain; you might as well start reading Harry Potter midway through book #7 and hope to follow things.

Myself, I don’t know these names or these restaurants, and I’m not going to travel to where they are or frequent them if I should, and it’s been probably 8 years since I read Kitchen Confidential. Having read others of his book, I knew what I was getting with Bourdain: as mentioned before, I’m getting a view into a career and a lifestyle which I am interested in but which I have no interest in getting into. There are probably relatively few career/lifestyles where, as Bourdain describes it, people from all walks of life, given the right choices and breaks, could genuinely ascend to a high level of skill, fame, and renown; that concept makes this book, if not fascinating, at least intriguing, and forgives the relative impenetrability of this piece.

Do pick up one of Bourdain’s books. Just not this one, not as your first taste of him.

(Perusing his Wikipedia entry, I see there are two other essay collections I've missed: The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones [2006] and No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach [2007]. Must get.)

What Were They Thinking? — Shoes? Or “Eeewwwws”?

2010-11-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This ad for Gravity Defyer shoes showed up in the latest National Geographic.

Everyone I showed it to asked a version of “Why is there a sperm on the shoe?” (And in the company logo?)

Also worth asking is “Why are they pouring energy drink on the shoe? Are they implying that it is waterproof, or that the shoe adds ‘energy’ to your feet?” (Would that the ad text had anything that tied into that imagery.)

Not worth asking is “Who would drink an energy drink with a sperm logo on it?” Also not worth asking: “How does Monster feel about you using their can but with your logo on it?” (The ingredients text around the top gives away the brand, if you compare images.)

(A different version of the ad — without the energy drink — showed in another magazine the same month. AAA’s Journey, I think. Still just as “ewww” inducing.)

Are All Downtown Bicyclists Assholes?

2010-11-24T16:06:00.000-08:00

You’re a bicyclist in downtown Seattle, riding amidst automobile traffic, and the light you are coming up to changes. Do you:

Slow down with the rest of the traffic and maintain your position
Lane split past the slowing/stopping cars to come to the “bicycle box” right by the crosswalk, giving you a jump forward when the light changes
Pedal like crazy and lane split, then zoom out into the intersection after the light changes to red and make a big sweeping left turn just as traffic going in your new direction starts to roll

You’re a bicyclist in downtown Seattle, riding amidst automobile traffic behind a pickup truck, and traffic is stopped at a light. When the light changes, the pickup truck starts to roll forward and make a right turn, but then stops partway through the turn due to a pedestrian in the crosswalk. Do you:

Stop and wait for the truck to be able to continue his turn
Edge around his back bumper, maybe even a little into the next lane, so you can squeak past
Edge around his back bumper, maybe even a little into the next lane, so you can squeak past, and then bang your fist on his rear fender and yell at him for blocking traffic

If you said “a”, you are a tame bicyclist. (I’m sure you would call yourself “defensive” or something else that makes you sound better.) You’re not in a hurry to get somewhere, and you figure you’re better off (safer) by staying right where you are.

If you said “b”, you are an aggressive bicyclist. You are willing to push the envelope of what is technically allowed in order to get where you are going in a timely manner, and you know that you can get away with it. But you still totally respect that there are other vehicles on the road with you, and that they are way bigger than you.

If you said “c”, you may have been one of the two bicyclists I saw within the space of a minute at the intersection of Pine and 5th last Friday. You’re totally an asshole and an idiot. Someday, you’re going to get hit or counter-attacked by a pissed off driver and you’ll likely have deserved it.

Updated on January 18, 2011

This behavior is apparently called APD (Aggressive Pursuit of Destination), per this listing in Schott’ Vocab Blog.

What Were They Thinking? — Sales Resistance is Futile

2010-11-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Here is one of the ad blocks from the Apple Store, pushing for Black Friday sales.

Is it just me, or does that thing made of lots of smaller pieces of tech all mashed together look less like a present and more like a Borg cube?

“Resistance is futile. You will be a-sale-imated.”

Does This Shirt Make Me Look Non-Fat?

2010-11-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, at our Friday dance night, I had no less than three people ask me if I had lost or was losing weight. In one case, it was “Looks like the diet is working.” Another theorized that all the dancing I had done (must have done) at Sundance Stompede the previous weekend must have had an effect.

These comments kind of threw me, because while I have been gradually losing weight for almost three years now — close to 30 pounds to date, but only maybe 5 pounds of that in the past year — I haven’t tried to lose the weight, I just have. No particular heavy diet involved. But there are some things I can target here.

Relationship Weight Gain

Three years ago this month is when Rusty and I broke up. At the time, I weighed about 220 (maybe even 225), weight which had crept up over the previous 7 years living in Seattle. Some (but only some) of it was attributable directly to being in a relationship — you’ve probably seen it many times, where people connect up, settle down, and expand to fill the couch space available. When the need to be svelte to attract a partner goes away and the diet either doesn’t change or even increases in bad ways due to more stay-at-home activities, weight goes up. (I’ve seen guys add on as much as 50 pounds in a year or two this way.)

In no way am I blaming Rusty on this front; he gained some at the same time I did. But after we separated, I was no longer buying and cooking for two (three when his daughter had lived with us), and I also stopped eating out as much. By the end of the next summer, I was down to around 205 pounds.

While I was dating Cliff, it was a different situation. We didn’t live together, my activity level had already gone up (see below), and with his thinner build, he was more aware of (more paranoid about?) the potential for getting a gut. So during that relationship, my weight actually continued to go down a bit at a time. 18 months along (spring of this year), I was a bit above 195 lbs.

Activity Level Increase

I made two notable lifestyle changes over the past three years which may have had an effect.

First, I bought a scooter in April 2008 and turned it into my primary form of transportation. (Over 13,000 miles in 2.5 years now, more than double what I’ve put on the car.) This has added some upper body strength, perhaps, from manipulating the scooter on and off its stand. It has definitely improved my core muscle strength and improved my posture, by not having a seat to slump against for support. And being in the fresh air (and wind) more has perhaps helped my breathing and I think it has improved my resistance to colds and my recurring bronchitis problem, and that all could have some small effect on the weight.

Second, a couple years ago, we shifted Rain Country’s twice-monthly Wednesday dance nights to be all line dance. Line dances — especially when you dance almost every one — provide really good exercize and increased heart rate and such. A year ago, when the dance team went on hiatus from Wednesday practices, we expanded the line dance nights by an additional hour, giving me that much more activity. (I lost some exercize from the dance team hiatus, but it is made up for by more line dancing.) Further, I have been pursuing line dance competition — even travelled to Copenhagen to compete in the OutGames — which has probably helped even more by giving me increased focus on posture, core muscles, and so forth.

I’ve also significantly increased my sexual activity level as well, especially some practices which focus on muscle tone and muscle relaxation. A couple hours of getting sweaty and getting your endorphins up is good exercize, and when you get that 2 or 3, sometimes more times a week… it’s got to be a boost for weight loss. (Yeah, I’m bragging a bit. But it’s true: I’m getting more sex these days than I ever did in my 20s or 30s. To co-opt a phrase, “It gets better.”)

Diet and Portion Control

As I said earlier, I haven’t actively sought to lose weight, at least not in the “go on a diet” sense. (Nor in the “do physical activity that doesn’t appeal to you” sense. It’s much easier to up your activity level if it’s something you like to do, something that you don’t start doing because you “have” to. Gym workouts failed for me in the past; if I have to make time for it and force myself to do it, I’m going to find ways to avoid it. And I always did.)

I did make three small changes in my eating habits, though:

I eat out less often for dinner and rarely for weekend brunch. Many restaurant meals are larger than you would make for yourself, but you finish them because, by God, you’re paying for them, and thus you eat more than you would at home. (And often not better for you in terms of fat, calories, carbs, etc.) I do still eat out for lunch most days at work — mostly because I have a hard time getting myself to make and take a decent lunch, but also by eating a later lunch (12:45 or later), the food carries over toward dinner and thus also reduces late afternoon food intake desires.
I put some Splenda in my coffee when it’s available. I don’t go all the way to “no sugar” (there’s a mild bitter/chemical aftertaste to Splenda that I’ve gotten used to but still don’t like), but with the coffee service at our previous building (and when I go to a coffee shop), I do half sugar and half Splenda, effectively cutting the sugar intake in half. That’s a small thing, but multiplied by 2 or 3 cups a day, 4 or 5 days a week, it does become a significant amount of calories dropped out of the diet.
I exercize mild portion control. Have you ever noticed that the first couple bites of ice cream are fantastic, the next few are pretty good, and then you stop really tasting the peach or salted caramel or whatever, but you finish the amount you dished up anyway? Same thing with chips: the first couple handfuls are yummy, the rest you just eat because they are there without the same level of enjoyment. So now instead of a bowl of ice cream, I have a teacup full; half the quantity, same amount of pleasure. Instead of pulling from the bag of chips until I’m full, I have a moderate bowl, or I have a small bowl of salsa and I eat until it’s gone. I keep a box of sugar cubes at my desk and I sweeten my coffee that way, rather than the guesstimate method of pouring sugar into the cup. (Now if they just made Splenda cubes!)

Except for the sugar/Splenda switch, I haven’t swapped out ostensibly high calorie items for “lite” ones, however. I use real half & half in my coffee. I eat bacon and eggs. I use real maple syrup. I use butter. I cook with butter and with bacon grease. (Date a southern boy and you’ll learn this!) While losing some weight is a good thing, there is a trade-off: how much suffering are you willing to endure? How much joy (and flavor!) are you willing to suck out of your life? And what comes along with switching out real food for chemically engineered replacements?

If you need to lose large amounts of weight in a short period of time, those trade-offs may be worth it. But for me, I am happier with a slow loss of weight combined with a minimal loss of joy.

Current State and Goals

Right now, my weight is down in the low 190s, depending on time of day, recent meals, and so forth. What is especially cool about that is that this is lower than I have been since before I moved to Seattle, ten years ago this weekend. That thrills me: it’s rare to be in better shape than you were a decade ago.

I’m able to now fit into medium t-shirts again. (Well, some of them. Some are not just smaller, they are shorter, and I can’t wear them tucked in.) I’m buying 34-inch waist jeans again; I have one pair still at 36, which I’ll wear until they wear out. (Thinking back, pants were one of the reasons I did make the small changes that I did. I noticed that my jeans, which I had always worn tight, were no longer conforming to my body. Instead, they were feeling like loose bags belted to my waist; they covered rather than clung, and I didn’t like it.)

I’m able to wear my original pair of leather chaps again, although they are still damn tight such that I can only wear them without pants on underneath. (They are tighter in the thighs than in the waist, actually.) Give that I bought them 19 years ago, when I had a 28-inch waist and had barely started country dancing (which is what expanded my thigh measurements), being able to get into them at all is cool!

It’s good to have goals, even if they are small. I would like to get back down to 32-inch 501s, and down to about 185 pounds, which would be about where I was in 1995. I think I can manage that in the next year or two.

Why It Threw Me

When I “grew up gay” (that period of about the first 5 years after you come out), I lived in the Bay Area. It was the early 1990s. AIDS (and fear of same) was abundant. AZT was the only AIDS drug around. If someone in gay circles lost a noticeable amount of weight and they hadn’t been chatting about diets and major exercize changes — or gastric bypass surgery — then you knew what was up.

Of course, no one then would ever approach someone and ask if they had tested positive or even if they were just generically “sick”. The best you could do was verbally observe the symptom and then let them respond about their health status if they wanted to.

I had little idea that that stage of my life still had such heavy coloring for me, but I realize that I was shocked by having several people observe that I looked thinner because of the inferred subtext that they were fishing to really ask if I was all right or if I was sick. (I don’t think they were asking that, I just subsconsciously interpretted it that way.)

Why I Actually Got the Comments

As it turns out, the main culprit in why I got several comments that night has less to do with whether I’ve lost weight recently and more with what I was wearing. A couple summers ago, after winning a line dance competition in Tampa, I bought a nice Western shirt as my personal “prize” — cream colored fabric with a massive amount of copper brown embroidery across the chest/shoulders/back. It is an XL shirt, but that was the only size they had and I really love it.

That was 20 to 25 pounds ago.

Now that I’m down to the low end of Large again, that shirt practically hangs on me and makes me look skinnier than I am. (I remember a girl in high school who did that, wearing big baggy shirts to make herself look thinner.)

I guess I should be happy that people do notice these things. But I’ve absolutely got to get that shirt tailored to better fit me now.

…And RealPlayer Loses a User

2010-11-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

I got a notification about an update to RealPlayer today, so I accepted it and waited for the install to occur.

And 10 minutes later, I uninstalled the application and started this blog post.

In order to install, it insisted I quit my browser. That’s so 2005, that I have to quit one app to install another.
After installing, it asked for my password. No idea why it didn’t have my previous one saved, but this happens. Maybe a wipe of saved browser passwords at some point wiped this, too. (Most likely, when they mirrored my content over from the previous laptop, info like that wasn't preserved, and I just haven't used RealPlayer since then.)
This is a work system, so my password has to change every few months. After trying a couple that I could remember, I gave up and used the “Forgot your password?” link. The page that came up asked for my email address… twice. Twice on the same page. These double-ask fields are done during sign-up scenarios to ensure that people have entered the right email address (no typos) or have typed their password (in blind text) correctly. That use case doesn’t apply here.
After getting the email to reset the password and clicking on the stupidly long URL, the resulting web page asked for the last four digits of my credit card. I don’t recall having a credit card attached to that account — why would I have, since I’m not going to buy anything through them? — and why would you need me to click a link, enter an email address twice, check my email, click on another link, and then provide even more info? Seems like overkill, when other applications can do the reset in fewer steps.
But okay, which credit card? I’ve used several over the nearly five years this account has been around, and I have since closed most of those accounts. I tried the one I think I recall from my checking account; that’s the one I have on file at various retailers and such. But no, that’s not the one they were looking for, and there was no means for entering other info, etc. (Actually, that was the one from a checking account I recently had to close due to a fraud claim, but I’ve been using it for a few years. Although as I think of it, I got that one after the RealPlayer account was created, so it would have likely been wrong regardless.)

(Note the big sin they have committed here: credit card usage changes over time. The card I prefer to use now may not be the same one I used last year, and that account may be closed and the info not accessible to me any more. Values which change over time should never be used as a security measure because they are neither memorizable nor retrievable.)

So I need to sign in to complete the install, but I can’t remember my password, and they won’t reset my password without me entering digits from a credit card for an account I no longer have? Plonk!

Control Panels > Add & Remove Programs > Uninstall

[Note: I used to work for RealNetworks. Does that make me more forgiving of them or more critical? I’m not sure.]

JJ CC MM SS UU PP

2010-11-18T11:37:00.000-08:00

The streets in downtown Seattle (north of Yesler) are Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, and Pine. Note the duplication there:

JJ CC MM SS UU PP

When I moved to Seattle ten years ago, I was given a handy mnemonic for remembering the order:

Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest

This mnemonic even shows up in Wikipedia, and my mention of it got on the New York Times website’s Schott’s Vocab blog.

It doesn’t help for “Which ‘S’ street is next?”, but it’s great for figuring out roughly how many blocks you have to go. But I was thinking this week that maybe this mnemonic would be offensive to non-Christians and maybe even to Christians who consider it to be taking the Lord’s name in vain. So here are some alternate options:

We voted several years ago to make marijuana usage the police department’s lowest enforcement priority:

Just ’Cause Many Seattlites Use Pot

Why you should either go commando or wear a Utilikilt:

Jeans Can Make Some Underwear Pucker

Or maybe a recipe for consuming our most notable beverage:

Joe: Coffee, Milk, Stir, Uncover, Pour

(Geez, the things I come up with riding to work on my scooter on a soggy day.)

Lemon Meringue Pie

2010-11-17T12:22:00.000-08:00

Haven’t made one in a couple years. Crust didn’t roll out very well, so no pretty fluting on the edges, but who cares so long as it tastes yummy!

And it does.

Stuff I Read: “Bleeding Cool”

2010-11-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

For years, UK-based Rich Johnston’s “Lying in the Gutters&rdquos; column was the place to go to for advance news and rumors about the comic book industry. He had an incredible hit rate for getting stuff right — which probably implies that lots of people were willing to feed stuff to him, that they trusted him.

About a year ago, “Lying in the Gutters” was transformed from a weekly column into the comics and comics-related film news (and rumor) site Bleeding Cool.

While other comics fan sites run lots of previews of soon-to-be-on-sale comics, interviews with creators, press release lightly rewritten as news stories, and fan musings on various subjects, Bleeding Cool remains the go-to place for all the latest stuff. As an example, the current front page has bits on:

Sponge Bob comics
A new Transformer named "Spastic"
Ads for The Walking Dead
A Roy Lichtenstein painting auction
J. Michael Straczinski
A new Winnie the Pooh movie
Torchwood and Dr. Who
The Little Fockers movie
Casting for the new Spider-Man movie
Ghost Rider 2
…and a lot more

Lots of rumors. Lots of barely-there, bleeding-edge news. Lots of trailers and such that don’t show up on other comics sites.

Not just cool. Bleeding Cool.

Rocky Horror G(l)eek

2010-11-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

I’m such a Rocky Horror geek. I both loved and disliked the recent Glee episode. (More on that later.)

During the 80s and early 90s, I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show roughly 50 times. (Only twice in the last decade, though, and probably only a half dozen times after mid-1990, when I moved to California. I guess I decided drinking and getting laid was a better use of my post-midnight time.) I’ve been in several theater casts and even in an actual stage production. Here are some memories…

Seattle / In College (1987–1988)

My second time seeing it was at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle, on what turned out to be their 10th anniversary showing, during my junior year of college (1987, I guess). Lots of people in costume, and the “opening act” was the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Rhapsody Rabbit”. While we were waiting in line to get in, some Jesus Freaks were across the street with signs and a megaphone, telling us we were going to Hell for seeing the movie. (Really. For seeing a movie.)
Our crew made a few more trips from Tacoma to the Neptune over the next year or so. One time, one of the kids we approached to come with us said “You don’t want to see that movie! That’s where they rip up the chairs in the theater and throw them at each other!” (Makes Sue Sylvester’s interpretation of throwing toast seem benign, huh?) Another time, my father came with us (drove us up); a youth pastor, he knew of the movie but had never seen it and afterward, he said he was glad he had seen it (in that “I didn’t really enjoy it, but now at least I know what it is” sense).
The Neptune cast used to “sacrifice” (Rocky Horror) virgins before the show. One time, we took a college friend up name Carol. Carol Carroll, actually. They had fun with that. (“Ask her her name! Ask her her last name!” “No, what’s your last name? No, your last name!”)
My first theater cast part was at the Neptune, where they put me in a wedding dress and I played Betty Monroe. My Ralph was wearing a Nixon mask.

Eugene and Portland / In Grad School (1988–1990)

During grad school in Eugene, the local art theater started doing Rocky Horror, and after several of us showed up in costume, they asked us to create a theater cast. We did that every Friday and Saturday for about a year.
At one point, they even played it as a Saturday afternoon matinee. (Lasted about 3 weeks, I think.) There’s something truly wrong about exiting a showing of Rocky Horror into bright sunlight.
Actors Cabaret of Eugene put on a live version of The Rocky Horror Show (note that the stage show name differs from the movie), and I was cast as one of the Tranyslvanian chorus. (I had nothing prepared for my audition piece, so I sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.) To this day, I struggle to sing the melody (rather than the harmony) for “The Time Warp”, and I still recall bits of the show choreography. The show only ran for three performances, but it was lots of fun.
A few times, several of us drove to Portland for their showing (must have been after the Eugene theater stopped showing it), and once we drove to somewhere near Seattle and provided a cast for a theater there. Ah, the long drives in my old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. The Portland theater had a live band at the time which would play before the show; a cover of “Tainted Love” was their best/most memorable piece.
At some point, a few of us from the Eugene cast were interviewed for a master’s thesis someone was doing on Rocky Horror and similar mass participation movie viewings (of which there were very few at the time). I think I’ve got a copy of the thesis somewhere (God knows where).
Over the years, I’ve played several roles in theater casts: Betty Monroe, Columbia, Dr. Frank N. Furter, Riff Raff, Magenta, Dr. Scott, Brad Majors, and Rocky. I still have most of my costume bits (except the wheelchair), including the gold lame booties for Rocky and the laboriously hand-sequinned blue tap shoes for Columbia. (Mmm, need pics!)

California and Seattle / The Last 20 Years (1990–2010)

After moving to California, I went to showings in Palo Alto a few times. In about November 1990 (I think), they had a costume contest. At the time, I had let my hair grow long, aiming for a ponytail but my hair has so much body that it was more of a puffball. For Halloween that year, I had done a French Maid drag costume (you can see where this is going), and I re-used that as Magenta. With my own hair teased out big, and with a beard. I won the costume contest and got a copy of the Rocky Horror Picture Show Book.
One of the women in the square dance club was a big Barbie collector, and for Halloween that year, she dressed up as Janet from the Floor Show sequence, and brought a Barbie dressed to match.
Since moving to Seattle in 2000, I’ve only seen Rocky Horror twice: I took my then-boyfriend Aaron to see it at a theater in West Seattle, and later then-boyfriend Rusty to the Cuff Complex for their annual showing. In both cases, the guys were a bit scared of me for how well I knew the film and how much I threw myself into the songs, dances, and antics.

Which brings us back to the Glee episode.

While I was pleased that they did a Rocky Horror episode (and I’m glad that they didn’t echo back to the piece of Fame involving the movie), I still found this to be one of the weaker episodes thus far.

The Good

I was tickled from the very start by the realization that Quinn in the show would play Magenta, the role played in the movie by… Patricia Quinn. (In-joke or coincidence?) Fox has stated that the lips in the intro are Santana’s (which means they are still Magenta’s lips, since Santana did some of the Magenta stuff, especially during "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me"), but the voice sounds like Quinn to me; if they were mirroring the movie, then it should be one person’s lips and another’s voice, so it could be Quinn mashed-up with Santana (although technically, it should be Kurt’s voice over Santana’s lips). (The comments thread in that article say that a producer tweet and that the soundtrack album indicates that it was indeed Santana’s voice as well as her lips.)
The actress playing Mercedes was superb as Dr. Frank N. Furter (as she always is, of course!).
The lyric changes in the songs to make them teen-appropriate (or really “TV appropriate”, I guess) caused me to snicker at times. (Although I give them props for changing “transsexual” to “sensational”; that one worked fairly well.) Ultimately, the word switches didn’t really bother me, since they were addressed in the story as part of rewrites to make the show acceptable for a high school musical.
“Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?” has now been added to my country DJ set (East Coast Swing, 162 bpm). I also have “Physical” from Season One in there, as a West Coast Swing.
I completely missed that the TV network guys were Barry Bostwick and Meatloaf.

The Bad

Since when are Mr. Schuester and the Glee Club responsible for the school musical? That came out of left field and wasn’t fleshed out very much.
The episode didn’t serve to really move any of the subplots forward. At best, it nodded to Sam and Quinn’s relationship and Sue’s TV career.
The episode didn’t have as strong a “structure of a musical” structure. “Will uses the show to get close to Emma” as the emotional crux didn’t really carry the right weight. “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me“ as an Eleven O’Clock Number?
The whole thing about casting Carl as Eddie and Will as Rocky seemed totally left field (it’s a high school musical!) and gave a really major “Eeewww” factor to things.)
There has apparently been some outcry reaction to Kurt’s use of “tranny” in the episode. I noticed it at the time but was more intrigued by the issue the character raised — it’s hard enough being out and gay without everyone thinking you want to be a drag queen or get a sex change as well — than I was at the potential perjorative. But I’m not trans, either.

The Future

Seeing a leather-clad motorcycle riding dentist made me wonder about whether there’s a Little Shop of Horrors episode in the works for next year. (Similarly, Kurt’s references to the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music — an event which stems directly from the Rocky Horror phenomenon, as does the “Rocky Horror Lion King” from furry circles — needs a payoff at some point. These kids are 16 going on 17, after all.)

Stuff I Read: A Distant Soil, by Colleen Doran

2010-11-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

A Distant Soil is a long-running sci-fi/fantasy comic book by Colleen Doran.

Started when she was a teenager back in the 1980s and restarted from the beginning a couple times since then, A Distant Soil features a pair of teenage kids — Jason and Liana — who have been drugged up and locked in an asylum/test lab/government facility for several years due to their psychic powers. During one flare-up, Liana’s powers contact an alien race called the Ovanon, causing a race between various political factions of their upper class (the Hierarchy) to catch and control (or maybe kill) the kids.

One of those factions is connected to an underground rebellion which seeks to overthrow the power structure of the Hierarchy and depose the ruling Avatar. Their representative gathers Liana — who turns out to be the child of an Ovanon exile — and a crew of other humans (and some non-humans, including another Ovanon exile and the time-displaced Arthurian knight Galahad!), intending to use them to bolster the rebellion. What neither the rebellion nor the humans realize is that the rebellion’s representative is… but that would be telling.

What makes A Distant Soil so compelling beyond the story and the layered characterizations (and those would be enough!), though, is Doran’s art. Steeped in both the best richness of classic Japanese manga (take note: I don’t mean the “speed lines and huge weepy eyes” stuff people tend to associate with the term “manga”) and flowy fashion-heavy illustration along the lines of Erté and Aubrey Beardsley, Doran’s art in this comic is fine lined, expressive, detailed, deep, and heck, the word for it is “beautiful”.

A number of comic books featuring grand themes, vast world building, and novelistic scope premiered in the 1980s and 1990s — A Distant Soil, Elfquest, Bone, Strangers in Paradise, and others. While forced by the nature of the comics industry to release their stories in roughly 20-page increments — and those are sometimes released months apart due to what underfunded small press/self-publishing companies can manage — these stories have tended to read best in large chunks, in the trade paperback collected forms, where you can sit down to 150 to 300 pages at once and read it not unlike a text novel. In that form, the themes and foreshadowing and repeated elements come through as they were intended. As you can imagine, that intent gets muddy and lost when you read only 20 pages, only twice a year.

Today in the world of the web, Doran is presenting the comic again, usually a page every couple days. This is almost as good a way of consuming the comic as in book form, where even if you are all caught up and reading the pages just one at a time as they are released, the recent pieces of the story are still fresh in your mind. (But I still heartily recommend them in book form, too: more permanent and the best possible reading experience.)

I think Doran is just about caught up to the last printed issue (I’m still a few months behind in reading, a few pages at a shot, a couple times a week), and there are supposed to only be a few issues to go before the story is done. Not that the rich universe she has built couldn’t provide her with a hundred new stories to tell. I hope she tackles some of them!

What Were They Thinking? — One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State

2010-11-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This showed up on the front page of the Sunday edition of Wisconsin State Journal, just a couple days before election day.

Curious color selections, since it’s usually blue associated with Democrats (donkeys) and red with Republicans (elephants). I can’t find the original image at iStockPhoto, but I expect that the newspaper added the animal images and didn’t think through the implications.

Updated on November 4, 2010

This article at Language Log has interesting details on red state/blue state, and links to this more in-depth one.

Basically, the television networks alternated which party had red or blue between 1976 and 1996, which lead to the Republicans being assigned blue five times out of six. The current color-to-party linking (and the “red state/blue state” terms) only dates to 2000.

You’d swear it was older than that, wouldn’t you?

See No Gay, Hear No Gay, Kick Out No Gay

2010-11-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, I was listening to talk radio and heard the most bizarre statement from one caller:

Gays should be able to serve in the military. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is a bad policy because it hurts people and gets rid of people with skills the military needs. But we shouldn’t repeal it, because the policy is working.

That’s a paraphrase of what she said, but the gist is intact.

This was conservative talk radio, I think, and/or it was at the very end of the show, so the caller’s viewpoint was not challenged. But you have to wonder what this woman’s definition of “working” is, how she can mesh those contradictory ideas.

(Sure, the rocks in the bottom of my dishwasher break all the glasses and chip the plates, but I’m not going to remove them, because by God, the stuff comes out clean!)

Overheard at 5th & Pike

2010-10-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday morning, as I was getting to work, a guy got off the bus as I walked by and loudly proclaimed:

“I love having sex with older women!”

Mind you, the Sweet Adelines International competition was happening late last week at the Seattle Convention Center, just a couple blocks away. There were more women than usual around that day, shopping an sightseeing, many in their 50s and 60s.

I doubt it got him any, but hey. More power to you, guy.

What Were They Thinking? — The Challenge is Figuring Out the Challenge

2010-10-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This banner showed up at the Cuff Complex recently, advertising the German beer Bitburger now being stocked by the bar. I’ve tried it, and it’s okay, but I'll stick with (darker) local favorites like Mac & Jack’s and Manny’s and Red Hook.

The banner advertises the “Bitburger Challenge”. Which is… what? Based on the banner, it would appear to be drinking Bitburger. Maybe the challenge is drinking it on ice, or drinking three bottles of it? Gee, makes it sound foul. (Is it like Jägermeister, a liquor apparently so nasty tasting that they used to advertise it with guys making horrible faces from drinking it?)

A web search doesn’t reveal anything about the “challenge”, either. The challenge of being a top three brand in Germany. A Facebook page with two posts on it and no descriptive content. A no-name web forum which has a link to a video of a guy being urged to drink a huge stein of beer.

A more refined search finally showed this page, which refers to people trying to drink an entire mini-keg (looks like it holds about a gallon). Is that it?

Maybe the challenge is to figure out the challenge?

What Were They Thinking? — The Sound of Silence

2010-10-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This billboard looms over Denny Way at the foot of Capitol Hill — presumably just about the most liberal part of the city — asking people to honk if they disagree with the (so-called) liberal media. If you must learn more about their cause, go to tellthetruth2010.org.

It’s amazingly quiet there at 6:00 pm, with a multi-block line of cars waiting to get on the freeway. Quiet enough that you wonder if they wasted their dollars.

(Hmm, maybe the billboard’s presence has an unintended side-effect, convincing irate drivers to not user their horns, lest others think they are reacting to the billboard.)

Limerick: Isadora Duncan

2010-10-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Sweet Isadora Duncan
Talented, cute little punkin’
A wheel caught her scarf
Tore her head quite in half
They knew ’cause they heard the ker-plunkin’

This morning, I was riding the scooter to work and realized that the high temps coming up are all in the 50s — we’re past the last days this year we can even pretend it is warm, although neither is it outright cold, just verging into that ugly cool damp zone — so it’s time to dig out a scarf. Another few weeks and I’ll be layering a sweater under the jacket every day, and putting the extra lining into my blue motorcycle jacket. Sigh.

Info on Isadora Duncan.

What Were They Thinking? — Get Your Sunglasses Before the Summer Rush

2010-10-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

A whole series of these ads for Sunglass Hut have just invaded the Seattle bus/transit tunnel that runs under downtown (including under Macy’s).

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see late October, when it starts getting dark in the late afternoon and just before the rainy season sits down for a five-month squat, as being the ideal time to push sunglasses in Seattle.

Updated on October 21, 2010

Stupid, Stupid Ads! — Me Are College Sutdent!

2010-10-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

“Stupid, Stupid Ads!” dissects ads that try to do something underhanded or just plain stupid.

I honestly can’t tell what these ads for City University are trying to get across? Remedial spelling classes seem a bit below what you expect from adult education programs at a “university”.

The flip side of that, however, is that they are pushing graphic design skills with the idea that using all uppercase text turns words into rectangular blocks, making them harder to differentiate based on shape (and thus uppercase text is harder to proofread). But that doesn’t seem like an easy message to get across in ads, nor does it seem to actually be the point of these ads.

So maybe they are doing an ironic push for Marketing classes: attend City University and you’ll be able to make ads that do a better job of getting your message across than these do.

Stuff I Read: “The Daily Dish” (Andrew Sullivan’s blog)

2010-10-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

For a while now, I’ve wanted to highlight some of the blogs and websites and webcomics that I read, both to examine for myself what I get out of them and maybe turn a few other people on to them.

This week is the 10th Anniversary of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, “The Daily Dish”. You can read his biography here, but in summary, Sullivan is a well know gay conservative writer, notable in his writing for several books looking at homosexuality from a positive-but-conservative viewpoint, especially Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con. On the blogging front, he started out quite pro-Bush and has drifted more moderate over the years as revelation after revelation about the directions of the the Republican party have come out. (Or perhaps he didn’t drift, everything else did in the opposite direction.) And don’t get him started about Sarah Palin.

Years ago, my father taught me that the best way to beat something was to understand it, and the best way to understand it was to pay attention to it. As an example, he was on the board of Planned Parenthood and he was a member of the Christian Coalition (I imagine they were really pleased that he was a minister); as such, he got access to huge doses of everything the theocratic right was up to, practically by the shovelful.

I’ve put that policy into effect in my own life over the years, listening to Dr. Laura and Michael Savage and Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin on the radio — often shaking my head at stuff I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing. It’s been especially interesting to listen to conservative talk radio in Seattle over the years as they’ve moved through these people one at a time, eventually kicking each to the curb and moving on to the next voice. And where convenient, I at least open my ears to other sources of information and opinion, just to see what’s up on the other side of the fence, to see what the “easy” channels of information are not telling me.

(Really, it sometimes surprises me how much people — especially ostensibly liberal queers and techies — like to live in their own little bubbles. They say they want to be up on politics and current events, but no, really they don’t. Just like people addicted to Fox News, they want to get their news only from narrow, supportive avenues, ones which will feed them more of what they want to hear and nothing to challenge their world views. If you try to balance their viewpoints, they will often fight to death to keep from learning stuff which will imbalance them.)

I initially started reading Sullivan’s blog (back in about 2002, I think) for much the same reason — to see what these “gay conservatives” were up to. Initially, as a good fag living in a very blue city (Seattle), I was repelled by much of the pro-Bush content and such, but I muscled through. (And “muscled through” is right: The Daily Dish has many screenfuls of content on its front page, and sometimes will fill more than one front page in a day [although less so today than in years past], so it takes a dedicated block of time to consume it. Sullivan [and his assitants/substitutes] isn’t quick reading.)

Over time, well, the abyss gazes back: even as Sullivan’s tune shifted some, so did mine toward him and his blog. Being confronted by opinions on the other side of the fence — opinions which are generally well written and well rounded, as opposed to the shrill name calling from talk radio — expanded my views. Not necessarily changed my views; expanded them. (It’s interesting to go back and revisit my blog posts from 6 and 7 years ago. Can I see some influence from Sullivan in there? Maybe.) I agree with some things I read, and disagree with others, but most of all, I can’t help but respect Sullivan.

And that’s probably really all he asks for.

Food Review: KFC’s Double Down

2010-10-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

You remember the Double Down: the carb-free super-protein all-meat sandwich from KFC, bacon and cheese between two slabs of chicken, no bun. (Okay, you’d need the grilled version rather than the breaded one to get close to carb-free.) Lots of news coverage and controversy when it came out, including use of the phrase “suicide cuisine”.

But have you actually eaten one? I have. Visited a KFC in Centralia on a trip to Portland in July. Sought it out specifically instead of other less-than-fine dining options.

The first bite was far more peppery than I expected, from the spices in the breading.

The next couple bites were very tasty, but I found the sandwich a bit unwieldy to eat while driving the car. The slabs of chicken don’t compress like a bun does, so getting my mouth around it was a challenge. (Insert NSFW comment here about me getting my mouth around big pieces of meat.)

By the time I was 2/3 done with the sandwich, though, I was over it. Too much meat, or at least too much intensity of the meat. I’ve found this before with other bigger-size fast food; when I got to the last couple bites of that Wendy’s Double, I was no longer thrilled with the sandwich and I more “finished” it than “ate” it. (This probably means that I’m safe from overdoing it on fast food.)

End Result: the Double Down is a very tasty sandwich, but it is big and intense. You would probably be better off splitting it between two people; both would enjoy it and both would enjoy it more.

Avoid: Ace Rent-a-Car

2010-09-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

As lightly described in this post, I recently rented from Ace Rent A Car in Los Angeles over Labor Day weekend. It wasn’t what I would call a great experience.

When I looked for rental cars on Kayak, Ace came up as cheapest, by a factor of almost 1/2. Their cheapest rental was a smart car at about $12 a day, with tax and fees, about $50 for the Friday–Monday rental. I typically rent from Alamo, but since I needed the car just for in-city driving — you can’t get anywhere in Los Angeles without a vehicle, and cabs can be way too costly as I found on my last trip, two years ago — so I gave them a try.

Ace is located off-airport, at the nearby Sheraton. These days, you have to catch a shuttle from most any airport to the car lots, so that was no big deal.

At the rental desk, they had terminals for up to three agents working. One customer was being served, and one return was being processed. A third agent came up and helped the one person in line in front of me. When the return was done, that agent left for the back room. (On break? I don’t know.) The first rental was having issues of some sort. When the second rental was done, that agent also left. Once they finally helped me, it had been 45 minutes from when I arrived at the rental desk (an hour from when I caught the shuttle) until they got me the car, with only one person in line in front of me. Fortunately I had no particular place I needed to be until that evening, so the delay was mostly annoyance, but it would have been bigger had this been a trip where I had a meeting to get to or where I was flying into Los Angeles and driving to Palm Springs.

(In comparison, at Alamo I would have walked to a kiosk — which probably wouldn’t have had anyone in line at it, since most people don’t seem to know to use them — and since I’m a Quicksilver member, I would have spent about 3 minutes at the kiosk, walked out to the parking lot, grabbed my car, and been gone in total time of less than 10 minutes, max.)

I had to fill out more than one form, including manually transcribing my insurance number twice. They required a $250 deposit to do the rental, so I had to put it on my debit card rather than the credit card I wanted to use. (This was indicated in the details on their web site, so I was fine with it.)

(In comparison, just a couple initials — checkboxes on the kiosk UI — at Alamo, and I could have paid with the debit card in advance, with no deposit. In positive comparison, though, I refuse to rent from Thrifty because of their forms: the last time I rented from them [about a decade ago, so it may have changed], their agents had to verbally read you the entire text rather than letting you read it, making the rental process about 5 times as long as it needs to be.)

Because it was a holiday weekend, I didn’t get the car I had reserved, but I ended up with a larger one at the same price. (That’s fairly standard. I once ended up with a huge Lincoln or some such huge beast at compact price point because they oversold all their lower classes of car.) The car was not well cleaned inside, including what looked like shoe marks on the passenger seat. I got the impression that, as a second or third tier company, Ace probably gets last year’s models from the first tier companies and then doesn’t put much into maintenance and cleaning. Or else people who rent from them don’t take care of the rentals very well. (Or I could have just got an undertended one due to the weekend’s pressure to turn things through quickly, an exception.)

The car worked fine for the weekend.

When I returned it on Monday, I fortunately didn’t have to wait 45 minutes to be served. But during the check-in, the agent sat behind his terminal and clicked this, paused, clicked that, paused, click the other, paused. After what felt like 15 minutes of whatever he was doing (was probably only 5), he told me that his computer had frozen, but my deposit would be refunded.

(The mainline rental companies check you in when you drive up. They check the gas and mileage and look for any damage, give you a receipt, and you’re done. I have no idea what all he was entering, why he was so slow, or how long he was trying to do something with the frozen computer, nor why he didn’t ask anyone for help. Implication: this isn’t a quick process for them and the freezes happen often enough to not be remarkable.)

After returning home, I monitored my checking account to see when the deposit would free up. Usually the rental and deposit will be issued separately, with the deposit being an account hold which will free in a maximum of 72 hours because it wasn’t actually charged. Since I brought the car back fine, the rental charge would go through and the hold would be allowed to expire. Not with Ace: on Wednesday morning, the entire $300 had been deducted from my account! I called them up and they said this was standard practice and the deposit would be refunded. On Friday, it still had not, and a call said 3 to 7 business days (and thus maybe not until the next Wednesday); at this point, I had my suspicions that I might have to fight them over things. Fortunately, end of day Tuesday (6 business days out), the $300 was refunded to my account.

Notice what didn’t happen: because the two charges were lumped together, by refunding it, they didn’t actually charge me for the rental at all. So I lost access to $250 for a week, but ended up technically ahead of the game. (But with a bad taste for the company in the process.)

So, in summary:

Very slow check-out service
Dirty car
Slow and uncommunicative check-in service
Deposit not done as an account hold and only refunded over a week later
Ultimately, they couldn’t even process the rental fee correctly and lost their money

Conclusion: a company that doesn’t deserve the business. I would have spent $100 on renting from Alamo rather than (expecting to spend) $50 at Ace, but I would have had a much better experience. If I had been under any sort of deadline or distance pressure for the weekend, the $50 difference would have been totally worth it. Lesson learned.

Updated on October 14, 2010

Turns out that the rental fee did eventually show up, charged to the original credit card I had made the reservation with. The computer freeze had blocked me from getting a close-out receipt, so I couldn’t know that at the time.

Following my rental, they sent me an online customer service survey request, and I took the opportunity to rate them pretty poorly. (I refrained from outright cussing the out.) A couple days ago, I got a letter thanking me for taking the survey and expressing that they were sorry that I didn’t have a good rental experience. They also included one of those ubiquitous grocery tote bags. Wonder if I can turn it inside out so their logo doesn’t show?

Movie Review — Shanghai Surprise

2010-09-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

I recently bought the DVD of the 1986 Madonna/Sean Penn film Shanghai Surprise for $4 from a bin at a local drug store. (I also bought Shut Up & Sing, Kinsey, the 2007 musical version of Hairspray, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, and maybe a couple others. They were cheap, how bad could they be, right?)

I had to ask. Oh, this one was painful to watch. It involves a missionary hiring a ne’er-do-well to help her find a million dollars worth of missing opium to be used as medicine, dealing with corrupt police, gangsters, and high class prostitutes along the way.

(It was made worse by the George Harrison soundtrack. Not much good music in the film. I had thougth this was the movie that Madonna’s “Live to Tell” song came from — that was really why I bought it — but that was the other 1986 Sean Penn film, At Close Range. Damn, what was Madonna thinking here? At least get a hit song on the soundtrack, woman!)

The settings — filmed in Hong Kong and Macau — aren’t bad, but the story is full of holes and oddities like why they needed to hire someone in the first place and how Madonna’s missionary character had all the money she was throwing around (and why she wasn’t just buying opium with it instead).

Beyond that, there are two major problems with the film itself:

It can’t decide if it wants to be serious and maybe even noir, or if it wants to be a wacky caper film. There are a number of characters which work in one or the other, but not both. Every time it seems to be going serious, a WTF? scene or campy character shows up (I never did figure out what Kronk’s role was, other than to kick the plot down the alley when it stalled), but all the scenes which seem aimed at wacky hijinks pull up short and end up as weird/goofy rather than actually funny. (Most likely, the producers wanted something in the vein of Romancing the Stone, but the story didn’t have the chops for that.)
The dialogue delivery is atrocious. Of course, you can’t do a lot when the words themselves are poorly put together, but the flat, badly inflected stuff coming out of Madonna’s mouth (no, not her music!) is just embarrassing. But you can’t just blame Madonna, since Sean Penn’s lines come off just as bad. You’ve got to blame the director, I guess.

What salvages this DVD, though, are the extras, which were put together some 15 or 20 years after the fact. In addition to a “Madonna in 1986” piece with a couple media mavens discussing her career up to and after that point, there is one with the writer and one of the actors discussing the film and the problems it had (including the crew nearly rebelling due to [pri]Madonna), and another with several comedians talking about their favorite and least favorite parts of the film. If you felt embarrassed for the actors or felt guilty about mentally savaging parts of the film, you’ll find these people agreeing with you just about point for point.

Any fan of campy, terrible movies will tell you that viewing the movie as a shared experience can help salvage (rather than “savage”) it — you have others to discuss, commiserate, and moan with — and sometimes can even elevate a piece of shlock into a form of art. (Hello, Rocky Horror Picture Show!) This one will never make “art”, but it maybe can be enjoyable pain when shared with others.

Flying Hither and Yon

2010-09-21T14:47:00.000-07:00

Bit the bullet last night and today and booked my upcoming travel for the next few trips:

San Francisco for Sundance Stompede
October 15-18
Virgin America
Late morning flight going, with a somewhat tight deadline to get to my workshop in time
Mid-morning return on Monday and then direct to the office from the airport
Madison for the IAGLCWDC Hoedown
October 28-31
Delta
Redeye flight going, to get there in time for morning workshops and afternoon meetings
Early evening flight back
Washington DC for Mid-Atlantic Leather (my 12th time there!)
January 14-17
American (via frequent flyer miles)
Very early morning flight going, but it’s also business class; I can nap at the hotel when I get there
Noon flight back

Total cost for the three tickets is $510, so not too bad.

I’ll probably have an additional trip to book in a month, to go to Palm Springs for New Year’s. Next flying trip after that probably won’t be until Memorial Day, to wherever the next IAGLCWDC summer hoedown ends up being.

I find it interesting that my frequent flyer programs have shifted over the years. My first frequent flyer trip was via TWA back in 1991. I wanted to fly to Seattle for Norwescon, but flights were horrifically expensive at the time, but a travel agent friend found a deal to do three round trips to Los Angeles on TWA at like $75 each (I literally did “fly down, catch the return an hour later”, three times), which would get me a free flight from San Jose to Seattle. (Seems very weird in retrospect. The flight to Seattle must have been priced at $350 or more; compare to the $150 or less you could often get a decade later.)

During the 1990s, American got almost all my business (with some in-California stuff going to Southwest, back when it was actually affordable; for this San Francisco trip, Southwest was almost double other options!) In the late 1990s, Alaska took over as my preference for West Coast flights; in San Jose, they had a dedicated set of 2 or 3 gates less than 100 yards from their ticket counter — most convenient travel setup ever! (Even after 9/11, you could still arrive at the airport less than an hour before your flight with no worries.)

For the past decade, since I moved to Seattle, I’ve been slowly eating through my American miles. I don’t know that I’ve flown them but maybe once in the last five years. Due to inactivity, my last miles (about 41,000) were going to expire in December, so I used 37,500 for the trip to DC, including the to-DC leg being business class (so I’ll get breakfast for the first leg and booze for the second; I couldn’t have had a flight with fewer miles in non-business, although a redeye option would have been available, so no complaint).

In the past few years, Alaska use has also slowed some. Actually, I’ve still flown a decent amount on Alaska, but mostly using either miles or their special deal where a smaller amount of miles cuts the price in half, making it much more decent to fly coast-to-coast on them. So my mileage block on Alaska is down in the 40K range these days, as well.

(Mmm, I remember having credit cards that gave me miles on American, and maybe one that gave them on Alaska as well. Those really helped build up the balances. Really built up the credit card balances, too, of course, which is why I don’t have those cards any more!)

I flew United a couple years ago and have about 1000 miles from them, which will apparently expire in the next few months. May it be soon, so I can never hear from them again. Every time I’ve flown with them in the last 15 years (about three times), I’ve had a bad taste in my mouth.

More recently, my miles have been accumulating on Delta and now on Virgin America, where I have nearly a free flight’s worth on each; these trips may push me over that edge.

I wonder where my miles will live in another 10 years?

Updated on September 21, 2010

Crap. Couldn’t even remember my own schedule! Madison redeye is one of those true “last flight out” things, leaving at 12:50 am, which is close to when I usually go to sleep anyway, so if I remember a pillow and ear plugs, I’ll be able to sleep some.

I opted for the DC redeye after all, with an 11:30 departure and a 3 am (Pacific time, ugh!) layover in Dallas, but it gets me in early enough to both shop the leather mart and catch up on sleep for the partying and cruising that night. And that’s what I’m there for, after all!

April–September, 2003 blog posts

2010-09-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve finished incorporating the April–September, 2003 posts from my old “Bouncing Off the Walls” blog into this one, 29 items total. In the process, I’ve re-edited all the entries, added and corrected weblinks, and such.

Here are links to the 6 months covered, so you can read what I was up to back then:

April 2003 (6 items)
May 2003 (7 items)
June 2003 (5 items)
July 2003 (no items)
August 2003 (1 item)
September 2003 (8 items)

A few of the sex-related posts are on my other blog, here:

June 2003 (1 item)
July 2003 (1 item)

Between the two blogs, I’m now just under 300 posts total.

Satispassion

2010-09-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

Cribbed from Schott’s Vocab blog at the New York Times website:

“Satispassion” is a word meaning “atonement by an adequate degree of suffering”.

I find this a great word, because it matches up with a concept for which I haven’t had a word before.

Think about the times when you (or someone else) does something bad or stupid. You profusely apologize to the person you hurt or insulted or whatever, but their forgiveness is not enough for you (or maybe there was no actual injured party to forgive you). You have to mentally beat yourself up and generally cause yourself to suffer until you feel that you have atoned for the bad deed. Or perhaps the other person technically forgives you but reminds you frequently and pointedly of what you did, causing you to relive the issue until he/she feel you have suffered enough for their tastes.

“Satispassion” — we experience it quite a lot, I think.

To Heck with Science!: Ow, My Eye!

2010-09-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

“To Heck with Science” spotlights pop culture references to science that are stupidly wrong.

From Secret Six #25, page 2. Last panel, dialogue from supervillain Lady Vic:

I was aiming for the pupil and hit the cornea.

From Wikipedia:

The cornea is the transparent front part of the eye that covers the iris, pupil, and anterior chamber.

And a schematic of the human eye.

You can’t hit the pupil without hitting the cornea. This is why supervillains always lose: no appreciation for science!

Trip Report: Portland for Alder Street Hoedown #2

2010-09-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

Before the Trip

August 7–8 marked my second long road trip of the summer on the scooter, this time down to Portland. I had intended to ride to Portland for Pride in mid-June, but that got stopped by needing scooter repairs (and given the heavy rain on the way down, no big loss). I was then planning to ride in mid-July for the Alder Street Hoedown, but repairs were still underway, so I again had to drive. Third time’s the charm, I guess.

Plotting my route, I knew I wanted to avoid the steep hill north of Olympia where I–5 climbs the Nisqually ridge. After some online research, it appeared that Highway 507 would be my best bet, through Roy, Yelm, Rainier, and Tenino. Looking further and comparing Google Maps time estimates, it appeared that staying off I–5 altogether until near Centralia was doable, adding only like 15 minutes to the trip. Indeed, I could take Rainier Avenue through south Seattle and Renton until it turned into Highway 167, get off onto 161 and then 512 at Puyallup, and then off that at Parkland to head to Spanaway and pick up 507 there.

(I don’t think Google Maps does a good job of estimating times through the urban district of Parkland/Spanaway or the backroads of Highway 507, where you slow down every 6 miles for the next town. The route took longer than I expected.)

This weekend was also Seafair in Seattle, with the Blue Angels roaring overhead and the hydroplane races on Lake Washington. One of the major viewing locations is about a mile from my house, which means that traffic is horrific on this weekend, and thus I’m pleased to be able to leave town for Seafair. I’ve only been in Seattle this weekend maybe 3 or 4 times in the past decade.

The Ride Down

This weekend, rain was threatening, with low overcast clouds. (I’m told that the Blue Angels had to alter their routine to compensate for the clouds.) I felt a little schadenfreude toward the crowds who were going to get rained up. But of course, that tends to come back at you: I had to ride in the rain from home down to Southcenter Mall (about 10 miles), although then it mostly cleared up.

I rode down to Yelm, where I stopped for gas and decides to shed the rain pants. I then continued out to pick up I–5 at Grand Mound, and then headed south to Centralia. I stopped at the Centerville Western Wear store there and picked up a new western shirt — forest green with “WRANGLER” in gold thread on the pocket and the sleeve. (I almost bought one in plum with silver threading on the pocket and back instead, but decided I look better in the green.)

After a pretty medicore French dip sandwich at Arby’s, I got back on the road. From there, I had to deal with rain again until Kelso (most of an hour), where I stopped for gas again.

You Can’t Go Home Again

From 4th to 7th grades (over 30 years ago), my family lived in the Hazel Dell area of Vancouver, Washington. (“Vancouver A.D.” I like to call it, vs. “Vancouver B.C.”. Heh.) Since I had the time, I detoured through north Vancouver, past Columbia High School and down to 95th Street, and tried to find the second place we lived. The big tree I recall in the back yard wasn’t there anymore, but the juniper-laden planting on the corner was, so I think I found it. I then rode down to 85th Street, to the first house we lived in, and I think I found it. I think it’s even the same color as when we lived there. I took pictures of both houses, plus Dwight David Eisenhower Elementary and Jason Lee Junior High, both of which I attended. The latter looked basically identical, but the elementary school had been completely rebuilt, I think.

Time blurs all sorts of memories, but one of the biggest as you grow up is the sense of scale. Things were vastly closer together than my memory has them. The house on 85th Street was only a block from the Junior High (which I didn’t attend until we had moved 10 blocks away). And it was only maybe a mile to whatever shopping area had existed back then and to the freeway. Today I would walk that without thinking, but then it was vastly far away. Makes me think that as I kid, I never tended to go more than 4 or 5 blocks from home, and often probably not even off my own block. Weird feeling.

Alder Street Hoedown

This trip, I stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott near the Oregon Convention Center. This was convenient to the PPAA for the dancing (more so that the Econo Lodge was in July), and the room was good. I again used Hotwire, getting the room for just $75.

While DJ Crystal has been on vacation for the summer, Rain Country Dance Association in Seattle has been working with Reuben and Pamlin in Portland to put on dance nights to fill the gap — same space, schedule, lesson plan, etc. — dubbed the Alder Street Hoedown. We want to ensure that Portland has a growing community, and two months with no dancing wouldn’t help. Rain Country is providing DJs, some teaching, and some monetary support to ensure the events at least break even.

Terry DJed for the Alder Street Hoedown, and taught the line dances — Picnic Polka and Cowboy Cha Cha (partner flow dance). When I got there at 9:00, they had just started the second one (which really should have been done at 9:00, but they apparently started late), but I didn’t hear griping.

The Alder Street Hoedown nights look to be a success, at least in terms of maintaining the Portland dance community during Crystal’s vacation and not losing money. In fact, Reuben says they have had as many people as usually seen in the spring, which would be an uptick in attendance over what would normally be expected in the summer (given good weather pulling people away, and summer vacations), so that’s very good. As a side angle, there has long been some dissatisfaction with Crystal as a DJ from some Portland dancers — if nothing else than because she’s the only one the dancers experience — and by giving them a little variety, perhaps some leverage can be built up to shift Crystal toward music selections which people will like more.

There will be one more Alder Street Hoedown this summer, on August 21 (past by the time I’m writing this), with Keith as the DJ. Hope it also goes well.

Getting Laid

I loosely planned to go to the Eagle Portland after the dance. As part of Oregon Leather Pride Week, they were hosting a uniform party, so I had brought a sailor shirt with me. This meant that I also didn’t have to pack my leathers for the trip, which I was content leaving out of the scooter trunk.

(I am not really into uniform fetish — I’ve never been in the military and I’m not attracted to the look, the attire, or the attitude for roleplay. The only military backgrounds I know in my family are late 1950s National Guard from my father, early 1940s Army from my mother’s father [who abandoned the family], and an early 19th century Prussian cavalry officer on my father’s side of the family. I’m anal-retentive enough to know that I would need for any real uniform I wore to be as complete and accurate as I could make it, and I’m not about to try to put together that cavalry outfit! So this shirt is one of the few concessions to that fetish that I have, enough to be “in gear” at such an event without worrying much about accuracy and completeness.)

But cruising on Grindr at dinner time, I connected with someone who apparently connected the red on the leather harness in my pic to other activities. (He’s not the first to do so. I’m actually surprised by this, since so many guys seem to clueless at times, but I’m happy when it happens.) I had to go to the dance, and he had other early evening plans, but we arranged to get together later at his place.

Suffice to say, I did get laid. Real good like! Small hands, great attitude, and a Volcano Vaporizer — I was totally floating for the evening. Now if we can just arrange a repeat visit, or have him come to visit me.

The Trip Back

After brunch on Sunday at the Village Inn, I rode down to Columbia Scooters to check out what they carry — which turned out to be Kymco (same as my scooter). I talked to the owner for a while, who was (like many people) surprised that I could ride mine to Portland and Vancouver like I do. He asked whether I hear engine strain noises, since I’m definitely pushing it beyond expected usage patterns, but no, haven’t heard any whines or the like. I bought a lock-down cable, since I don’t have one of those. I also drooled over the Kymco Quannon 150 sport bikes (the second branch-out of Kymco into motorcycles, following the Venox from a few years ago). He said they haven’t sold well, so he’s going to be dropping the price in August. (Hmmm. No, damn, can’t afford one now!)

When I go to Portland, I usually like to go out to the nude beach at Rooster Rock State Park, about 20 miles east of Portland. Facing a long scooter trip home, though, I didn’t want to go all that way out, and I had been there two weeks before and found much of the trek to the beach area a horrible muddy bog. Portland does have a second nude beach, at Sauvie Island about 20 miles west of Portland. I researched where it is and initially hoped to go there on the way down on Saturday, but the weather stopped that. On Sunday, the weather report was for sunny but cool weather, making it not worth going then, either.

However, in the process, I had investigated an alternate route to Sauvie Island, to avoid going to Portland and then doubling back 20 miles north. There is a bridge across the Columbia at Longview, and then state Highway 30 goes down the Oregon side of the river, through Rainier, Columbia City, St. Helens, Scappoose, Linnton. So rather than take I–5 back through Vancouver, I took the road less travelled up the river the Longview. (Interesting: I would go through Rainier in both Oregon and Washington, and through Columbia City in both states [it’s the neighborhood just south of my house in Seattle].)

The weather might not have been quite warm enough for nude sunbathing, but it was wonderful for riding a state highway. I strapped my riding coat to the seat behind me (with that new cable) and just wore the new Western shirt atop my t-shirt. Delightful ride. Once I got through Longview and to Kelso, before getting on I–5, I put the coat back on.

Got gas in Kelso. At Centralia, hit the usual grind-to-a-halt that haunts I–5 north from there to Olympia every Sunday afternoon. (Literally, almost every weekend! And for no discernable reason like an accident or a narrowing of the highway.) So I got off at the bypass to Bucoda, which connected me up again with 507 at Tenino. And then retraced my route from Saturday (with a couple more stops for gas and snacks along the way), but was able to ride through Renton and south Seattle now that Seafair was done.

Taking Aim at Target

2010-08-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

I don’t really have anything to say about the Target donation debacle.

For those who came in late: after the Supreme Court loosened restrictions on corporate giving to political candidates, Target gave $150,000 to a Minnesota candidate ostensibly because of his pro-business policies, but without paying heed to his anti-union and anti-gay stances. Target has issued an apology, which gay groups don’t accept as authentic, but has refused to either rescind the donation or make a matching one to gay groups, which tends to reinforce why people don’t accept the apology as more than boilerplate.

Actually, I do have one thing to say about the deal: Best Buy donated $100,000 as well, and no one is paying any attention to them in this. Shouldn’t 40% of the attention be going there, since 40% of the money came from them?

Nonetheless, I found it ironic that Target ads ended up on the Seattle Times webpage for the story dealing with the donation and its backlash.

What Were They Thinking? — I Before E, Except After Uruguay

2010-08-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This screenshot comes from the BlackBerry developer site, where to download the simulator files to use for testing apps being developed for BlackBerry devices, you have to enter your contact info, including the country you are in.

Apparently the list once used “USA” instead of “United States”, but someone changed the name without updating the sort order.

As they say, “Broken gets fixed, but shoddy is forever.”

Surprise Shopping: Gay Priests

2010-08-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

“Surprise Shopping” highlights online shopping and catalog results which don’t match what you expect.

This was the item that first inspired this series of posts, which made the rounds back in January 2010. Now, why someone went looking for communion wafers and noticed this in the first place, I don’t know. (Could even have been a hoax, a jiggering of Amazon results to make the funny connection — just buy both a couple times and you could probably force it.)

Of course, now we’re seven months later and the “Also Bought” statistics have changed so this no longer shows up. (They do currently include an iPhone battery and a power strip, though. Not as funny, though. You never know what people will buy at the same time. My last Amazon purchase was latex gloves and a book on PHP coding. How would that look?)

Surprise Shopping: Poppers on Amazon

2010-08-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

“Surprise Shopping” highlights online shopping and catalog results which don’t match what you expect.

They say you can buy anything on Amazon. Sure enough, you can even buy poppers!

(For the puzzled, “poppers” are a mild inhalant drug used primarily by gay men during sex. They produce a muscle relaxation effect and usually a high or even mild hallucigenic effect; different brands have different intensities and durations of these effects, usually lasting only a few minutes. Originally amyl nitrate based and intended for treating heart issues like angina, they were sold in tiny glass vials wrapped in a cloth sock; you “popped” the glass to release the drug. Poppers are technically illegal and their manufacture is unregulated; if you use them, you probably don’t want to think too hard about it.)

Beyond the fact that you can actually buy these from Amazon, though, is what else shows in the list when you search for them. Check out the screen capture from the Amazon app on the iPhone.

Trip Report: VanQueerDanceDay and Vancouver Pride (July 30–August 1)

2010-08-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

Before the Weekend

Several years ago, a couple guys from Vancouver, BC who were visiting Seattle asked me and a friend, “Where do guys from Seattle go when they want to get laid?” We looked at each other and replied, “Vancouver.” Not that Vancouver is any more a hotbed of sexy men than Seattle, just that “fresh meat syndrome” is true — a new face in town draws attention.

Vancouver is a 3+ hour drive north, and you have to have a passport or enhanced driver’s license to cross the border. I get up there a few times a year, especially for Rubbout in April, but I’ve also been up for their Pride celebration a couple times in the past, once to march with their Leather contingent and once just to go. I’ve also been there several times for New Year’s, just to not be at home at the usual local bar.

This year as well, Not So Strictly Ballroom was hosting VanQueerDanceDay, a day of same-sex ballroom, Latin, and country workshops, competitions, and dancing. They invited me to come up to teach Country Two-Step. Initially, Rusty was going to come up as well, and we were going to compete, but he ended up not able to go. Klint was going up, though, so the two of us decided to compete — mostly just for fun, but also to support the event and get some experience under our belts. (Our only real rule was to not embarrass ourselves.) We got together a couple days before and practiced the various dances on my concrete parking area and called it ready (or ready enough).

Lining up a hotel was very difficult. A week out, there was nothing reasonable available, and not even anything lightly unreasonable. That is: nothing in the downtown core under close to $300 per night! (You can usually get something around $100 at other times.) I checked various sites and individual hotels, but nothing. No availability at all. But I also knew this was a lie: stuff was locked up with reservations which would cancel and other blocks which would free up if they didn’t fill. Sure enough, by Wednesday, stuff was starting to show at about $200 a night (lightly unreasonable). I had hopes that stuff would continue to drop, but by Friday morning, I was forced to go with the Best Western Chateau Granville (2 blocks from the dance studio, which was great) at what ended up being $225 per night including tax and parking. With Klint sharing with me, doable if not nice.

The Trip Up

I rode my Kymco People S scooter up. I’ve been looking forward to doing a long road trip on it again for some time. (I had to pass up two trips on it to Portland this summer because it needed some significant maintenance — air filter, belt and rollers, rear tire, etc., not unexpected at 12,000 miles — that had it in the shop on and off for a few weeks.) I did the ride to Vancouver for Pride on it two years ago, and last year rode to Bellingham for Pride, about 2/3 as far, so this wasn’t a new trip. (And of course while I was dating Cliff, I took several trips on it to Stanwood, halfway to Bellingham.)

Two years ago, when I had only been riding 3 months and wanted to avoid the highway as much as possible, I had taken Lake City Way around the top of Lake Washington, then Highway 9 through Lake Stevens to Arlington, then Pioneer Highway through Stanwood (right past Cliff’s house, before I knew him) to Burlington, and Chuckanut Drive to Bellingham, with my only significant highway time being once I got into Canada. That ride took 5 hours.

(Many people are stunned that I could or even would ride the scooter all the way. The biggest thing is that they don’t realize that mine will go highway speeds, cruising along between 55 and 65 comfortably, barring hills or wind. I just stay in the rightmost lane most of the time, since I’m going slower than most traffic but still at legal speeds.)

This trip, I did the highway all the way to Burlington (about 70 miles, stopped for gas in Marysville), then Chuckanut Drive through Bow-Edison and along the coast (I don’t want to do the Chuckanut Mountains pass, since I would slow down to sub-highway speeds there), and then up to the Lynden/Langley crossing (where I only had to wait for 1 or 2 cars).

(Somewhere on Chuckanut Drive, I took off my clip-on sunglasses and in the process, popped out one of the lenses and voomp, it was gone. Toss those. I also had a can of energy beverage in my pocket which wasn’t there when I got gas in Marysville; I hope it dropped out when I stopped before getting to the highway back in Seattle, rather than flying out at speed and maybe hitting another vehicle! I also have a volume booster device that goes between my iPhone and my helmet speakers, to make the sound more audible, but it wasn’t working and was in fact working in reverse, bringing the volume down! So I couldn’t use it on this trip.)

Once across the border, I made a mistake: rather than go to Highway 1, I decided to take 1A, the Fraser Highway, which eventually turns into Kingsway between Burnaby and Vancouver. This is like taking Highway 99 through Seattle — fine on the viaduct, but then you end up on Aurora for miles of lights and 30 mph zones. (Or like driving El Camino Real the whole length of the San Francisco peninsula.) So what would have been about a 4-hour trip ended up a bit close to 5.5 hours. I found that after about the 4.5 hour mark, my lower back started bothering me, probably due to the lack of support; at every light, I was standing up while stopped, dancing my feet around, stiff and sore.

But I eventually made it fine. In the end, I’m not really sorry I took that route. I had the time available and saw parts of the Vancouver metro area I never have before (although Cliff and I had hit some of the Burnaby thrift stores on a previous trip, so I recognized some parts), but I usually just want to get where I’m going (and repeated stop lights aren’t a lot of fun). So while I’m likely to do Pioneer Highway and Farm Road near Stanwood again some day, Fraser Highway and Kingsway aren’t apt to get another visit to just ride them.

Friday Night

Friday night was the Vancouver Men in Leather Social at the “Leather Loft” at Numbers. (That’s the name of the upstairs space on this leather night only.) Usually, this would be on the 2nd Friday, but they did an extra one for Pride (or rather, moved the August one up a couple weeks). Good big crowd, but I’ve only been there for the Rubbout ones in April, which is another special event, so I don’t know how it compares to a regular on.

The center of Davie Street was blocked off for a street party — beer and people and stage acts, I guess — which had traffic snarled all over the West End and had Davie way crowded. After the Social, I went over to the PumpJack Pub, but there was easily 100 people in line at 10:45, so I gave up rather than wait for what could be an hour or more.

Went back to the hotel, and then to M2M to get laid. I was apparently stiff or tense from the ride up though, so I didn’t have quite as much fun as I would have liked.

VanQueerDanceDay

Not So Strictly Ballroom, one of the GLBTQ dance groups in Vancouver (Vancouver Timberline Dance Society is the country-western one) hosted the VanQueerDanceDay on the day before Pride. This was a morning of dance workshops, an afternoon of dance competitions, and an evening of awards and dance entertainment and open dancing.

Next year, this same weekend, Vancouver will host the North America OutGames (which happens on the two-year interval between the World OutGames), and DanceSport (which includes ballroom, Latin, and country) will be one of the 20 competitions being done. So VanQueerDanceDay partly serves as a lead-in to the 2011 competition.

The morning workshops were Argentine Tango (which I skipped; needed the extra 30 minutes of sleep!), Country Two-Step (which I taught, with Klint’s help), and Salsa (which as a group lesson, merged into Casino Rueda, which is a “called” form of Cuban salsa — like square dancing, more or less). I had probably 15 or 20 couples in the lesson. Started with absolute beginner, then into beginner, and then into something more intermediate, to hopefully provide value for everyone attending. We seemed to have some of each set.

During the lunch break, we got hot dogs from a vendor between the dance studio and the hotel, and Klint and I decided on what shirts to use (we had brought several), and I tried to nap. Maybe got 20 minutes, tops. (The fancy hot dog I got was wrapped in bacon; we referred to it as “uncut”.)

For the competitions, there was little actual competition. Only about 6-8 couples total — Kirstin and Carol were also up from Seattle — mostly in either separate divisions (Newcomer [first time] vs. Intermediate) or in different dances. So we competed to the same song/at the same time as Kirstin and Carol, but in a different division. We did have another couple to compete against in West Coast Swing, and there was a trio of dances for ballroom which had two couples competing, but all others were one-offs. Klint and I competed in Night Club, Jive (double-rhythm East Coast Swing), West Coast Swing, Country Two-Step, and Shadow.

After the competitions, we rode my scooter up Davie to go to Little Sisters bookstore, Priape (the leather and underwear store), and I got a beer at the PumpJack. I cam back to the hotel for another try at a nap, and Klint hung out with some of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who were up from Seattle. For dinner on the way back to the studio, I had a piece of pizza. (Ooh, excitement.)

After dinner, in and around some open dancing, were three line dance competitions: D.H.S.S., MMMBop, and Chill Factor. (All three non-country, I notice.) The four of us from Seattle did the first one, then Klint and I and Todd from Vancouver for the second, and Marek joined the three of us for the last.

The awards were Mardi Gras beads with gold/silver/bronze stars attached to them. Cheap and blingy, but just fine for this sort of a low-key competition. Klint and I won all five of our couples dances, including the West Coast Swing. I took gold in D.H.S.S. and silver in the other two line dances.

Our primary goal for the competition were to get a little experience at competing under our belts — I’ve done line dance comps for many years, but no couples comps in over a decade and even then just a couple Jack & Jill/Pat & Chris competitions (where you get paired with another dancer pretty much at random). Secondary was to not look bad — that’s why we didn’t do Waltz; we knew that even if it was country, it would be too slow for what we are used to. We also want to be able to take the experience back to Seattle and encourage people to compete at the OutGames next year, and then when we host the IAGLCWDC competition in 2013 in Seattle.

(Okay, we might have looked bad during the Jive competition, when a table-top move resulted in me head-butting Klint in the stomach and knocking off my glasses. I left the glasses off for competitions after that.)

Overall, I was very impressed by the event. It was fairly simply put together and Michel moved things along well (except for the brief power failure when we tripped a breaker in the middle of one of the line dances). We’re talking about doing a similar one-day event in Seattle after next year’s hoedown, to push competition at the OutGames. We should be able to do that pretty easy, I think.

Saturday Night

Dinner had been just that single piece of pizza on the way to the dance, so I supplemented with poutine at Megabite Pizza on the way back to the hotel. The poutine from the Frites place on Davie near Gravnille is better.

The PumpJack has last Saturday leather nights (well, sort of — “we hope you’ll wear leather, but you don’t have to” nights), with line privileges for guys in leather (because there is always a Saturday line, so you get to jump to the front). Line privileges last until 10:00 usually, 10:30 this weekend, so I tried to get there in time. Alas, Davie Street was still blocked to traffic (no street party, though), so I had to park several blocks away and didn’t quite make it. But I was still close to the front of the line and waited only 5-10 minutes.

Curiously, almost as soon as I got my beer, they closed the back patio (at 11:00, I guess). Not sure why, maybe for noise reasons or maybe it’s harder to police when it’s dark. Good crowd inside, though, and it turned out my ex Cliff (and his new boyfriend, Rob) were up for the weekend. I’m sociable with them, but I’m definitely finding that the breakup still hurts when I see them together, so I sort of avoided them (that is, didn't spend much time hanging near them).

After three beers, I headed out, back to the hotel and then to M2M again. Had a better time tonight, ride-up tension and dance competition stress were gone.

Pride Sunday

As noted above, I’ve attended Vancouver Pride twice before. About 6 years ago, Rusty and I marched with the leather contingent. I confess that I don’t really remember much about that year; it must have been okay but not particularly notable. Two years ago, I just watched the parade from somewhere on Denman, a little past the halfway point. Watching the parade, of course, gives you a view of only a tiny slice of the attendance; in comparison, of course, being in the parade gives you only a tiny view of the parade, no more than a handful of groups.

This year, there were apparently two leather contignents. Knights of Mantra (previously known as Knights of Malta; link is for the Seattle chapter, since the Vancouver chapter’s site is dead) was the color guard, carrying the flags immediately after the Dykes on Bikes. They sent an oddly worded invite to Seattle Men in Leather, inviting us to march with them (and for our President to possibly carry the US flag); oddly worded in that it seemed to have a slap at Vancouver Men in Leather as part of the invite. The other contingent was a flatbed truck from the pansexual club Metro Vancouver Kink, with Vancouver Men in Leather and others marching along with them (including the current Washington State Mr. Leather and the crew from Rubbout, probably 10-12 leatherguys in total).

The parade started at 12:00 noon, although we didn’t step off until probably 1:00 pm; we we’re somewhere in the middle third of the groups. Not So Strictly Ballroom also had a contingent, and Klint marched with them; they were in the latter third of the parade.

In the past, many parades have required vehicle wheel monitors for each vehicle in a contingent, something that has always seemed a little odd, given distances from the vehicles to the parade watchers. No longer odd after this parade. The first couple blocks on Robson was through a crowd of primarily Asian attendees. Thousands and thousands of them, with no respect for staying away from the vehicles. The gay attendees usually cluster on the sidewalk, sometimes crowded there or standing several deep, but these attendees came clear off the sidewalk, past the parking lane, and crammed into the first driving lane on each side of the street, leaving only a single lane for the truck and marchers to come through. Wheel monitors were very necessary here, to corral the people back so they literally didn’t get run over!

After we were through that gantlet, things largely settled down to a usual placement of people, thankfully. But I was very impressed by the number of attendees. The route (Robson/Denman/Beach) felt twice as long as the Seattle parade route (but was really only 10% longer — I mapped on Google; I can’t say how far we traveled to the technical start of the route, though vs. the Seattle parade’s leather contingent’s path). The number of people on either side, while it did fall off noticeably toward the end, appeared to be 3 to 5 people deep on both sides for most of the route, and was still a solid wall of people all the way to the end. The official numbers said about 600,000 for Vancouver and 400,000 for Seattle, I think, but Vancouver felt much denser, at least three times the size of Seattle’s parade attendance.

After the parade, I wandered the festival booths and got some food (roasted corn! Carribean meat pies! mini donuts!). Because I had got a blister on my heel the previous day, I had managed to buy a pair of cheap rubber sandals on Friday afternoon, which I wore the entire route. I had my boots with me, and carried them over my shoulder with the laces tied together, but finally got a red shopping bag from Air Canada which made toting them a lot easier.

Eventually headed back up to the Davie Village, where I waited in line at the PumpJack for about half an hour and had a beer. Said some goodbyes and trekked back to the scooter. The parade route is U-shaped, so while I had walked a couple miles during the route and then back to Davie, my scooter parked at the front of the parade route was only about 6 blocks away.

On the way back to the scooter, I realized that Vancouver meters run on Sundays as well as other days. When I parked, I was between two other cars, not in a clear meter space. When I got back, both cars were gone, leaving my scooter by itself in the parking spaces, but for whatever reason, I had escaped any parking tickets. Whew!

The Trip Back

Riding back was more straightforward. I picked up my stuff at the hotel and left at about 5:45 pm. (So that Klint and I could ride to the parade start, and store the helmets in the scooter, I had checked a bag of my stuff at the hotel, and stashed an additional bag in Klint’s car — the stuff I knew I wouldn't need for a few days until I got it back from him.) I left an hour later than I wanted, so the heat of the day was already starting to fade.

I took Highway 1 out to Langley, where the Greater Vancouver Zoo is. (I always wonder how much business they get, 45 minutes outside the downtown core, in the midst of wineries and farms.) Saw a little coyote in the grass near the road on the way from the highway to the border; you never notice things like that in a car.

After crossing the border, I pulled off to get an extra layer on under my coat, since it was still cooling down. I also had a touch of sunburn which was probably also making my temperature fluctuate.

Stopped in Bellingham for coffee and a snack, taking 20 minutes to sit and relax a bit. Got gas, then went through Bellingham city streets to the north end of Chuckanut Drive; the highway to Fairhaven would have been a quicker route, but I wasn’t sure of where to go to get there.

I intended to stop for gas in Burlinton/Mt. Vernon, but missed the exit, so I ended up going all the way to Smokey Point, where I also had a hamburger at Five Guys; again, a 20-minute sit-down break. After dinner, even though it had gotten a little warmer as I got away from the Sound, I added a leather vest under my coat, since the sun was down now.

Stopped again for gas at Northgate. Stupid pump design would only give me one gallon (my tank holds 1.5+ gallons). I’m concerned that my gas mileage — it dropped a lot in April/May/June and prompted the maintenance session at the scooter place — had popped back up but now seems to have dropped back down to right at 60 mpg. I’ll have to monitor this, but there may be more work needing to be done. Or it may just be an aging scooter thing.

Stopped in at the Cuff for a beer before heading fully home. Got to the Cuff at about 10:15, so 4.5 hours since I left Vancouver. If I hadn’t had the length of the two stops and the city streets jaunt in Bellingham, it would have been right around 4 hours, or about 45 minutes longer than the trip would have been in the car. That’s reasonable for the scooter, I think.

After

Monday at work, I had a massive leg cramp that lasted a good 15 minutes and almost had me crying. I’ve also had sore feet and calves for several days. I think the latter are from all the walking on Sunday, in the rubber sandals (with no arch support), but the former may be from the long riding. I’ll have to watch for that. (A couple weeks later, no further instances of the cramp.)

This coming weekend, Rain Country is again supporting the Alder Street Hoedown in Portland. I wanted to ride down for Portland Pride and for the mid-July ASH dance, but the scooter was in the shop. I’m right now not going to the August 21 dance, so this ride will be it. Weather looks possibly rainy in Seattle but sunny in Portland for the weekend, so we’ll see.

This will be my first long ride to Portland. Portland is about 170 miles, a bit longer than Vancouver at 150, but with no border crossing, it should be about the same trip length on the scooter, 4 hours. I have to study my route and find the right roads to take to bypass the plateau for Olympia, and plot out my gas stops, but it shouldn’t be too hard. Looking forward to it!— Stay tuned for a trip report.

Counting Sheep

2010-07-27T13:42:00.000-07:00

Around five years ago, as I approached 40, I started having an increased problem with falling asleep. Not quite insomnia, I think, but I would sometimes lie there on the edge of sleep for quite a while (often 20–30 minutes, occasionally an hour or more, and a few times, genuine “I’m not going to sleep, am I?” insomnia).

I assume that this was primarily biological, part of the aging process, but I was having some issues with my relationship at the time — which ended in late 2007 — which sometimes kept my mind whirling. I’ve also recently seen some news stories that the glow from electronics can have a sleep effect, and around that time, I was trying to find a clock radio to replace one that had died; I went through three before I found one that didn’t keep me away from the glow, so that may have had an effect as well. Hmm, I was also in the middle of an unhappy period at work then. Man, it all piles up, doesn’t it?

Anyway…

Trying to find something that would help (other than drinking myself to sleep), I resorted to counting sheep, something which I had also pooh-poohed before. But when you’re desperate, you’ll try anything. So I imagined up a setting with a pasture and a fence for the sheep to jump over, but something very cartoony and almost a stage setting with cutouts of trees and clouds, a lot like one of those late 50s/early 60s Bugs Bunny cartoons. (Wish I could find a pic.)

Out trotted the first sheep — white and puffy, very cartoony, little blinky eyes. He trotted over to the fence, jumped it, and trotted off stage.

The next sheep trotted on, jumped, trotted off.

The next one trotted on, jumped, didn’t quite clear the fence, scrambled over, and trotted off.

This continued on for several more sheep, each having progressively more difficulty getting over the fence. Some tripping over it, some squeezing between the bars, etc. Still not sleeping, I rolled over, from my right shoulder to my left.

Suddenly the stage flipped 90 degrees in my head! The next sheep plummeted from the right side, smashed into the fence, and bounced over and fell off to the left side of the stage! And another and another followed it!

Fuck. I think I got up and had some cocoa with peppermint schnapps in it at that point.

These days, no cartoon sheep die to put me to sleep. Instead, I start at 100 and count my breaths backward to 1. Usually somewhere in the 80s, I’m off. Sometimes I come back to awareness that I’ve stopped counting and I pick up again where I think I left off. If I make it to 1, I roll over and start back at 100; if I make it to 1 a second time, I give up, get up, and do something else to shut my brain down.

Dream Journal: July 8, 2010

2010-07-15T13:13:00.000-07:00

Short but dramatic:

I was standing near a swimming pool, wearing just a pair of cutoff shorts, and I had my iPhone in the pocket. Suddenly someone started to piss on me, and on the pocket where the phone was. Shortly, I was separating the layer of the phone and laying it out on a counter to dry, using a handheld hair dryer to hurry things along.

Note that I got a new iPhone on release day, just a couple weeks before, and I was heading to Palm Springs the next day, for a weekend to be spent around swimming pools and such. Also, I have previous had phones doused in liquid (although not that from the dream), and did try the hair dryer trick to rescue one.

What Were They Thinking? — Mirror Mirror on the Mirror Mirror on the Mirror Mirror on the Phone

2010-07-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Check out this screenshot from the music player on a not-yet-released phone. (That’s a perk of my job, getting to test our software interactions with unreleased devices. So no, I’m not going to tell you who the phone is by, but Verizon is their carrier.)

Apparently, it isn’t enough to just show the album art. No, you have to make it way cooler than that:

You put a border around it
Then you create a reflection of the art and border
Then you put a border around the art/border/reflection combo
Then you reflect that
And then you put a trendy fake reflection glare across the whole thing (which mostly serves to just obscure the art)

They could have saved processing resources and given the user bigger art if they just did art and maybe its reflection. And no one would have ever wished for more.

Apologies to country artists Caitlin & Will who get caught up in this example. (Then again, the duo broke up in late 2009 after releasing one single and having their album pulled. Sigh.) But here, go listen to some music from them.

TV Review — V

2010-07-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

I was crazy for the original V mini-series, and V: The Final Battle (the sequel mini-series), and V: The Series (the 1984 TV series). (Never bought the comics, though.) Diana was a bitch goddess, Crystal Carrington for the truly man-eater set. And the fact that I still remember the half-alien girl’s word for peace — “pretanama” (spelling per Wikiquote) — says the show stuck with me in deep ways.

I want to like the new V show. Really I do. Oh God, but I can’t quite manage it.

The reinvention is adequate, carrying forward many of the tropes of the original show — lizard aliens disguised as humans coming to Earth allegedly in peace but really with an ulterior motive, human teenager falls for a Visitor, 5th Column rebels with Visitor allies on the inside, TV newscaster blows off ethics to get the inside track on Visitor news, and so on. And they’ve ditched the Nazi subtext, replacing it with domestic terrorism. (On the other hand, they also dropped the squick-inducing eating of mice, which was way cool in the early 1980s.)

I have a natural soft spot in my heart for Agent Erica Evans, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, such that I always think of her as Juliet (from Lost), and the actress carries some of the underscores of that character into this role. (I keep helfway wishing agents Mark Benford or Dale Cooper would show up, though!) And there’s a weird attraction to Scott Wolf as newscaster Chad Decker, since he is visually reminiscent of Michael J. Fox, who played a newscaster covering an alien invasion in Mars Attacks!

Some of the acting is top drawer, especially most any scene with Mitchell. (I really liked the eye movements she made in a scene at the FBI office when they are watching a press conference on TV and she knows it’s all a lie.) And Morena Baccarin as Anna is just so slimy, she just about reaches Diana heights (Anna, Di-ana, mmm). I am also intrigued by Christopher Shyer as Marcus.

(Although speaking of eye movements: can we skip the edge-of-romance meaningful looks between Father Jack and Erica. Priests shouldn’t be on the make. Eeewww.)

I get unnerved by the cinematography on the Visitor ship, which uses green/blue screen backdrops constantly, but almost all of them slightly skewed or with wrong perspective. Is it shoddy work or is it intentional to emphasize the alienness? I can’t be sure. (But if I question it, that means that the effect has broken me out of the story and thus the question is answered: even if it is intentional, the result is shoddy work.)

But the real problem I have is that just about every episode has me all but screaming at the screen: “That makes no sense! How can you be that stupid! Why doesn’t anybody say something?”

Father Jack confides in Chad Decker, who trots to Anna and then comes back and tells Father Jack that he did so. But Father Jack keeps talking with him, further jeopardizing their 5th Column cell with every syllable.
They blow up a shuttle and find human remains in it. But no one asks why there are absolutely no Visitor remains as well. (Viewers know Visitors can be immolated, turned to ash, but the FBI and the media don’t know that.)
They blow up a shuttle, leaving debris scattered over a big field. High-tech debris. And the Visitors let the human police and FBI do the clean up, giving them access to Visitor tech. (Viewers know the shuttle was a set-up by Anna, and thus might have been stripped of anything useful, but the FBI and the media don’t know that.)
Hobbes is framed for the attack on Lisa and has his picture shown on the news. But he still goes out to meet a contact in a public park: no hat, no sunglasses, no shaved beard, no hair cut, no bleached hair. Why did the FBI have to search for this idiot for years? (I suppose you could argue that Erica’s partner, who was a Visitor, was blocking efforts to catch him all that time to allow him to be used as a patsy later on, but come on.)
And then there he is again in public in a church. And not just that, but with Father Jack giving an anti-Visitor sermon that makes people angry enough to get up and walk out, right past the guy whose face was plastered all over the TV a couple days before because he tried to kill the daughter of the alien woman they are almost revering as a god.
And Hobbes also sits right next to Erica: the terrorist the FBI has been hunting for for years, sitting next to the FBI agent heading up the task force to catch him? WTF?
Lisa’s face is slashed and her legs are broken. Her legs get healed at the medical center at the start of the next episode (so the shock value of her mother having her legs broken is completely wasted). But if they could heal her legs, why doesn’t anyone interrupt the press conference and ask why her face hadn’t been healed? (Yes, Anna intentionally left it unhealed for the press conference shock value, but the press conference was held outside the medical center, and no one thought to ask about the facial injuries? Does Anna really think she is fooling any humans about her having ulterior motives?)
All the ships arrived at once at the beginning, but when Anna decides to leave, she has only one ship pull out rather than all of them. Shouldn’t this be a rather obvious ploy to anyone in government circles? To be sure, the blogosphere would be pouncing on it.
Joshua calls while they are interrogating the human prisoner. So do they leave the room to answer the call? No, they pull out the special tech gadget and talk right in front of the guy.
After putting an axe in the chest of the Visitor soldier who nearly killed them all, Hobbes — the experienced terrorist/soldier — leaves the guy struggling to get up. What, you thought he would just die in a few minutes? Shoot him in the head and be sure!
Anna’s people know there are 5th Column rebels in their own ships, so why aren’t they constantly scanning for unauthorized communication activities, which Joshua does just walking down the hall? We saw the intense monitoring of humans being down via the jacket cameras early on, so is it even conceivable that similar monitoring throughout the V ships doesn’t also occur?
Speaking of unauthorized communication, Erica is constantly on her cell phone at the FBI office. Surely all communications in those offices are super-sensitive and need to go through secure channels. And God forbid that she turn away from the office windows through which someone could read her lips.
Further on this topic, what is with allowing humans to walk around the V ship unescorted, going wherever they want? (And Erica with a gun, to boot!) Worst example of this being Joshua directing Chad to a “restricted” corridor. Restricted to whom, given that a random human was able to walk right in with no escort, passcard, or security challenge?
What the fuck is Anna’s plan? In the original mini-series, we started to have an idea after an hour, but by the end of 13 episodes — the entire first season — we have no idea if she’s sucking the planet’s resources dry, eating the people, running from worse invaders, or what.

These things drive me up the wall, and not in the sense of “What does it mean? I’ll have to keep watching!” from Lost.

I see the show has been renewed for a second 13-episode season. Jesus Christ, please fix these fucked up plot holes! (Yeah, I’m praying to Jesus to do it since I don’t think the writers will.)

What Were They Thinking? — Cardboard Cutout Donuts

2010-07-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

A handful of storefronts for this old school donut and coffee shop chain survive in the Seattle area, along with a few signs which no longer go with active businesses. (There is one such sign near where I live — the business is now a laundromat, I think — and I pass by it a few times a week.)

I have no idea if their donuts and coffee are any good. I only know that neither the logo — are those donuts or CDs? — nor the business name inspires me to stop in and find out.

Gotta be in the running for Worst Logo Ever, especially since it’s for a full chain, not just a one-off thing.

(Swiped the photo from someone's Flickr stream, because summer tree growth prevent me from getting as clear a pic of the sign near where I live.)

January–March, 2003 blog posts

2010-07-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve finished incorporating the January–March, 2003 posts from my old “Bouncing Off the Walls” blog into this one. (Actually, they were all from March 2003, when I started that blog, but I have it archived in 3-month chunks, so future incorporations will cover a quarter at a time.) In the process, I’ve re-edited all the entries, corrected weblinks, and such. I was pleased to find that very little in the way of revisions were needed, and I’m still happy with the politics-oriented stuff I wrote at the time.

For those interested in what I was writing about at the time (mostly What Were They Thinking? items and a number of posts about the then-new Iraq War), you can read them here:

http://soundskinky2.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_archive.html

A few of the sex-related posts are on my other blog, here:

http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_archive.html

(Oh yeah, and the addition of those posts has put me past post #200 on this blog.)

Gay Pride Parades are Intended for Adults

2010-07-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

There is an increasing conflict regarding gay pride parades and the sometimes over-the-top, edgy behaviors sometimes exhibited at them. This conflict has increased in recent years with the rise of the gay family, including young children — some people want the behaviors restricted due to the presence of children (and some want them restricted because of the presence of straights and the media), which of course pushes some people to go more extreme.

The push/pull of this is felt very strongly by the Leather Community. Already branded as sexual outlaws and oddities by both the straight worlds and the mainstream gay world — a branding embraced by many in the community, and played up accordingly — leatherfolk are heavily in the spotlight regarding this issue. How do we (legally) present our edgy play and sexuality in a way that doesn’t sideline or minimize it? In other words, how do we express our pride?

How pleasant, then, to read this article about the Stanley Cup being exhibited during Chicago Gay Pride, and especially this not-quite-a-quote regarding the pro hockey player (and his wife) who is bringing the Cup to the Parade:

When the [Blackhawks professional hockey] club passed along the request to players, Sopel and wife Kelly volunteered. The couple doesn’t plan to bring along their kids, saying the festive, sometimes-bawdy atmosphere might be a little too chaotic.

Amen. Here’s a couple who apparently gets it: the Gay Pride Parade is a party for adults. There’s nothing wrong with a bawdy atmosphere, but it isn’t appropriate for kids.

So let’s stop the discussions about dumbing and damping down the parade and start the discussions about where it’s appropriate to bring your kids, and how we can have age-appropriate other events for them.

Overheard at Portland Pride

2010-06-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

Crossing the Burnside Bridge, from a guy in a a t-shirt that read "HOMO" with a red circle/slash on it:

“It’s such a devastating lifestyle. It makes people cry. It brings shame.”

(That’s what you’re claiming these days that is wrong with being gay? It makes you cry? And you’re saying this on Pride day? What planet do you live on?)

Book Review — Peter & Max (Fables)

2010-06-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Here is the final review of the movies and books I dealt with on my trip to New Zealand this February.

First, some background on the comic book Fables:

Imagine a world where all the stories and characters we think of as “fairy tales” — Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Aladdin — existed, each in their own universe/dimension/whatever. In this universe of fairy tale worlds, there are linkages between the worlds, and as is inevitable, someone from one world built an army and attacked another world, and another one after that, and another one, creating a vast empire. In the wake of this empire building, many characters we know from stories (dubbed “Fables”) fled from their homeworlds to our mudane, largely magic-free world (and many others died along the way). Here, those characters and their stories live on, nearly immortal, and a few hundred years later, there are a couple enclaves of Fables and a scattering of individuals around the world. Leadership of the Fables has fallen to the likes of Snow White, Prince Charming, Old King Cole, Bigby Wolf (formerly known as the Big Bad Wolf, now reformed), and Beauty and the Beast.

Fables is a comic book series written by Bill Willingham, running now for almost 100 issues, about 8 years, with a host of collected volumes, spin-off series, and a TV show in the works, plus now the prose novel, Peter & Max.

Now for the novel itself.

One of the conceits of Fables — and any fiction that pulls together threads from many other sources — is that any characters which could be connected or related, are. And thus since fairy tales contain two “piper” characters — Peter Piper, who picked a peck of pickled peppers, and the Pier Piper of Hamelin — those characters must either be the same or related. In this case, brothers. (The conceit also draws together noted Peters: Peter Piper is also Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater and might be the one from “Peter and the Wolf”.)

Peter & Max follows two storylines. The first is long ago in the Homelands, with the boyhood of brothers Peter and Max Piper, the conquering of that world, the bestowal of magic flutes and their associated curses, and Max’s turn away from being a good boy. (You’ll recall the story of the Pied Piper: he cleared the town of rats, but when the city wouldn’t pay, he led the children away as well, never to be seen again.) Along the way, we encounter other characters familiar to Fables readers and fairy tale/nursery rhyme fans: the Big Bad Wolf, the Black Forest Witch (of gingerbread house infamy), and Little Bo Peep. The second storyline involves the return of Max to the modern world, and Peter’s journey to meet him and hopefully stop him from killing all the other Fables and generally wreaking havoc on the world.

Half of the fun in a book like this is seeing the author pull together the threads of familiar stories, especially ones that were less obvious, and adding new stuff into the mix to create something both familiar and new at the same time. Willingham has been doing this with Fables for years (and projects like Pantheon and Coventry/Ironwood before that), so there’s no question he knows how to do this task successfully. The real question, then, is how accessible is this to people who have no connection to the Fables comics, and that I can’t answer since I’m way to close to the comics (having read them all as singles and again as collections). But I can answer two reverse-side questions: this novel is largely independent from the comics storylines, so there’s little in the way of “I know this must refer to something, but what?” moments (so this isn’t a “crossover” where you have to buy all the pieces to figure out the story), and for readers of the comics, there are some new insights into the secondary characters here who are primaries in the comics (so comics readers benefit from reading the novel).

Definitely recommended for fans of the comics. For fans of this sort of story, moderately recommended: others like Neil Gaiman have done it better, but this is just fine and serves as a gateway into some truly excellent comics, a much broader world than seen in just the book.

I would be happy to get another Fables novel like this every couple years.

Pets

2010-06-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

“There can be no greater reward in life than to come back as a gay man’s pet.”

(author: Peggy Drew — my mother)

Dream Journal: June 15, 2010

2010-06-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

This morning’s dream:

I dreamed that I was riding on my scooter, just about to get onto I-5 southbound at the MLK ramp, going somewhere south (although not as far as Portland, 170 miles), when something went wrong. Snapped, broke, slipped, I don’t know. But my motor revs went way down and I suddenly couldn’t sustain speeds over about 20 mph. I limped home and had to give up on wherever I was going.

This was one of those “too close to home” dreams, since I rode past that exit on I-5 yesterday, going down to a site visit at an airport hotel (as a potential site for an upcoming event). Also, last Friday, I took my scooter in for a checkup and was told that I need a new air filter, a new belt, new rollers, and a new back tire. And thus I shouldn’t ride it long distances, which means I won’t be taking it on the trip to Portland this coming Saturday. So I guess that stuff is weighing on my mind.

What Were They Thinking? — Mirror, Mirror, On the Bumper

2010-06-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

On the way to work a couple weeks ago, I was following this Cadillac Escalade SUV.

Side-stepping the obvious question — “Who the heck puts a $3 bumper sticker on a $50,000 car?” — I looked closer. (Oops, my error. Checked out actual prices on this class of vehicle: $62,000–$75,000. Yow!)

So now the question becomes “Who the heck puts a reverse image bumper sticker on the back bumper of a car?”

(Hint: Reverse image items are intended to be read in a mirror. No one is going to see your back bumper in their mirror. These are intended either for your front bumper — which is also a stupid place for them, since if someone is trying to read your bumper sticker while looking in that mirror, they are going to get in an accident [plus the front bumper isn’'t usually visible in a rear-view mirror anyway] — or the thing is supposed to go inside your back window or on your bedroom wall opposite your dresser, where you will see the devotional reminder in your own mirror and… well, I don’t know what you do then. Feel good? Read the Bible? Watch Glee?)

Eggs Benedict

2010-06-08T19:03:00.000-07:00

Doesn’t that look yummy?

It sure was.

And it turned out to be awfully easy. I’ve tried a few egg-poaching gadgets over the years, but none have worked very well. (Anyone ever try one of those microwave egg poachers? What an explosive disaster that was!) But I picked up a pair of poachpods a couple weeks ago and presto, they just work. I can now make my own Eggs Benedict whenever I want. (Okay, I’m using Hollandaise from a mix at this point. I’ll tackle that for real someday soon.)

Which means now I get to experiment. I’ve already done them with pepper bacon rather than Canadian bacon, but how about replacing the English muffins with artichoke bottoms like California Kitchen in San Mateo used to do, or pepper grits like Cape Fear Café in Duncan Mills did? (Alas, the first of those is long gone, and Bennies are no longer on the menu of the second.) How about spicing the inside of the poachpod, maybe with some chili sauce? Mmm.

Oh yeah, the potatoes were easy, too. Peel, season, fry in bacon grease, cover and let cook down while doing the Bennies, add catsup. Nom nom nom.