messiestobjects

"Every Single Commodity You Produce is a Piece of Your Own Death!" - Hitchhiker

Yes so as once previously threatened, I made it back to Austin Texas and I spent the night at the infamous Austin Motel penis-or-middle-finger-hotel depending upon your viewpoint. It was nice, but it didn't feel infamous. To be honest, I had more fun the last time I was in Austin with my wife, but this time at least I got some pictures.

The South Congress area of Austin is hip-hip-hip. For about 5 blocks. I mean, it's cool, and so are other parts of Austin, but I guess that you really have to be a city mouse to think that it's a cool place to live. I like the woods, and privacy, but I do admit that it is nice to browse some hip shop windows from time to time.

Ha! Take that, all ye fearers of irony, and scardey-cats of culture! It's so laughable to be homophobic, they're ironing books now. I do love me a good bookstore front window.

There is a bridge on South Congress street under which all the local bats hang out, and at dusk they pour out en masse to check out Austin's hotspots. I didn't make it to the bridge on time, but solitary literary bats are far more interesting than the groupthink bats that all mob the same places together anyway.

Or maybe that's just a bird. WHATEVER. Hey look over here, it's Captain Satan!

I know, I know, too many quirky book shop window shots. Nobody wants a book about DIY Porn.... or FUCKIN' DO they?! Anyway, I was excited to run across a famous Austin landmark, The Continental Club. 'Slacker', a favorite Richard Linklater film, shot a scene in here. The one with the anti-artist.

And yeah so one night in Austin, before heading up into the wasteland surrounding Fort Hood for work, isn't enough to do it all. All the cool cred that Austin has didn't seem worth it enough for me to ever even for a second consider that it might be yee-haw to live in Texas. Though, to be fair, I would have to attend SXSW fest to be completely certain.

I had a day off on this trip, during which I drove down to San Antonio to meet up with an old Chiemsee chum, one of my favorites. More on that in the next post.

Bad Movies and Mad Monks

Well so it has been a month since I posted. Julie and I took a work-cation to Austin, Texas for a job. It was fun; Austin is a cool town and we saw something called Master Pancake at the Ritz theatre. It was basically MST3K with Sex & the City. My god that was a horrible movie. For all the women in the world who aspire to Sex & the City levels of "coolness" or whatever that is that's going on there... DIE. But the live razzing made it bearable, plus they served beer and cheesesteaks. I didn't get a single picture the whole trip. Austin's not that kind of cool I guess. If I get to go again I want to find all of the Slacker locations.

Otherwise, I've been busy with school, which is the main reason I haven't posted. So since I've got nothing else, below is a link to a powerpoint I had to do for my math class. I had to choose a mathematician and I chose Grigori Perelman because he's totally hard core. I lost points on it for being "too wordy". I think my math teacher might be an idiot. Click on the link to enjoy.

Download Grigori Perelman Powerpoint

Yet Another Very Large Array Of Photos Of The Very Large Array, This Time At Sunset

And so after leaving the Las Cruces area, I drove the four hours back up to the San Agustin plains, and got there just in time to catch some sunset photos of the VLA. The cold opener above is an HDR I tried out and they aren't supposed to come out looking like that, but I really really like it.

I got some Plains life in just before the sun set. That deer above was headed straight away from me, so I shot him. And these cows, too.

There is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset.

That movie 'Contact' was filmed in part out here, and there is a scene where Jodi Foster is looking out over a canyon, with the radio dishes behind her. Yeah, that's Hollywood stupidity. There is no canyon; I looked. I hate that. Why do they always feel the need to amp up things that in reality need no amping up? If you want the VLA in your movie, film it as it is. It doesn't need a canyon to be awesome.

But HDR doesn't hurt! Actually, taking HDR shots at sunset is a tricky business. Weird colors kept popping in that aren't in any of the original bracketed photos. This next one is not HDR, but it almost looks like it is. I'm learning that not everything needs such embellishment, myself. And also how hard it is not to embellish, sometimes. Maybe I should go easier on Hollywood.

I really like this next one; there's two small line gaps in the dish where the setting sun shines through them, and echoes the reflective train tracks quite nicely. I like the continuity of theme in that; the radio signals from space track down into the dish, and get carried along the train tracks back to the receivers that interpret them.

Ok that's probably not how the signals actually get sent to the receivers, damn you Hollywood! You've corrupted the way I interpret things with your need to visualize everything dramatically! But still. Pretty.

And yes, I really like tonemapping. Sometimes the accidental byproducts are neat, such as green radio dishes. At any rate, remember when I said that there is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset? Well, that's nothing compared to doing it at night.

Unfortunately, the moon was really bright that night, and I had to work hard to get any stars in the photos at all.

Damn moon. At one point I tried taking a ten minute exposure, but that didn't really bring out any more stars either. Still.

You'll notice the dish is pointing at a different angles in different photos. They moved them to point at different parts of the sky every so often. I tried to get a shot that captured the motion in an interesting way, but it kept catching me by surprise. This is the best I could do.

At one point, a couple of guys with a mexican accent drove out to where I was in a dirty pick-up and told me I had to leave because the astronomers don't like it when people hang out by the dishes at night. Hope I didn't mess up any of their work! But still, I couldn't leave without at least attempting a laser light self-portrait.

The Men Who Stare At Goats... And At Me!

Several months back, Julie and I were watching that movie "The Men Who Stare At Goats" and there's a scene during the opening credits where Ewan McGregor's character, Bob Wilton, is preparing to go to Kuwait in an attempt to be an Iraq war journalist. In one frame, about seven and a half minutes in, he is signing his Kuwaiti visa. I said to Julie,"Hey, I have a visa just like that one!" I had spent a few days in Kuwait before running up to Iraq for work, and I even posted a scan of my visa and the story behind it back in August 2007. But just in case you don't feel like following the link to read that exciting entry, for the purposes of this entry I'll post the scan again. Here it is:

Now as you can see, my name  is only written here in Arabic, as well as the Kuwaiti company who acted as my sponsor for the purposes of this Visa. But my old passport number is clearly written there in Arabic numerals, as well as the residency number.

So this guy, 3azeez, commented on that particular post last week, and then we continued the conversation via email. He speaks Arabic, and had been watching the film, and when he saw the Kuwaiti visa pop up he was confused because the name in Arabic did not match the name of the character played by McGregor, Bob Wilton. In fact, the name on the passport was mine. So he did a search online and eventually came to my blog, where he kindly informed me of what must have happened.

That's right! Some prop guy for the movie must have run across my blog when searching online for a Kuwaiti Visa, and rather than bothering to reproduce it, he just copied mine with minor changes! And to prove it, here's a still from the film!

My passport number, except for the 0 covered by Ewan McGregor's thumb! My residency number! All they did was change the dates in Arabic numerals, and change the top part from where it said 'Residency' to 'Work Visa'. And if you have a keen enough eye you can match up the Arabic writing to see that my name is there and everything. Ha ha! My passport is famous! Right up there onscreen next to the producers... one of whom is George Clooney! It loved acting with Ewan, but it feels bad it didn't get an actual scene with Clooney or Jeff Bridges. Right now we're waiting to hear on a deal with the next Peter Jackson film.

3azeez asked me to cut him in on a percentage if we decided to sue, but I don't think we can and anyway I wouldn't. I just think it's awesome. Especially because it's a pretty cool movie. It could have been much, much worse. There are very few films out there lately that I don't consider pure garbage. Besides, in a movie about psychic spies, perhaps I should take it as a sign from the Universe. Maybe I'm supposed to join the New Earth Army. 

Anyway, my Kuwaiti Visa was actually used twice during the opening credits. I guess the film editors thought it was such a good actor that they wanted to see it again. Here it is, a few seconds later from another angle.

My regret is that they did not contact me to ask about it first. Not for any reason other than that I could have saved them from a few Kuwaiti Visa continuity errors. For instance, they shouldn't have had him sign it. That signature on my Visa isn't mine, it's the Kuwaiti issuing authority's. Also, in the upper left corner of the visa you'll see that blue stamp, where it's half white on the top. Well, that's actually a hologram stamp, and when I scanned it it just came out with a glare like that. So that's another indicator that it's a copy. And also, I'm not entirely positive about this one, but I'm pretty sure that unless Bob Wilton was going to be doing journalism in Kuwait, he wouldn't have needed a work visa. He may have needed a residency visa just like I did since when he would be going to Iraq, he wouldn't technically be leaving Kuwait since it was a closed border at the time. See the entry I linked to up top for more info on how that all worked. But I didn't go over as a journalist so like I said I could be wrong about that one.

If you want to join my passport's fan club, or just be alerted on any upcoming roles, please contact it at [email protected] to join the mailing list. Thank you for all your support and love and it would especially like to thank the Seattle Passport issuing agency without whom it never would have existed, and also messiestobjects.typepad.com for daring to give it a chance. God bless.

The Scuba Diving Was Great, But I Didn't Get To Try The Water Boarding

So I lied about not using that joke again. Screw it, I needed a title.

Anyway I don't know if you knew this, but I spent ten days at Gitmo for work recently. :) This here is a painting of an American flag and a Cuban flag in friendship on Guantanamo Bay. I found this over by the Guantanamo Bay Windward Point lighthouse on Gitmo, a historical landmark. Boy times sure have changed.

Here is the lighthouse and what I presume are some of the boats which Cuban refugees made it to Gitmo in back in the day.

And here's the lighthouse barely seen from further down the coastline. There are big gangly cacti all over the place.

One of the guys who drives me back and forth from the airport whenever I leave home for a job was in the Navy in the 50s and was stationed at Gitmo for a little while. He told me they used to hop on a train into Havana when they had leave time. Damn. I would have loved to have hopped the fence and gone to Havana, but you know, we're not allowed to have any commercial business with Cuba any more. And there's this big fence, with landmines. Which makes the butt of this Cuban cigar I found on base quite mystifying.

Gitmo is not what I expected though. It's a small self-contained city, like most American bases I suppose, and could pass for any American suburb if you leave out the iguanas running around everywhere. The housing is very 50's suburb lookin', actually. They have a shopping center, a laundromat, a car rental, a hotel, a McDonald's, a Subway, a public library in which I overheard a conversation between the librarian and a little old lady librarian from the High School library about the dearth of quality books in the schools. They even have a Girl Scouts Camp!

They have a huge Gym Complex including a really nice weight room (embarrassing to go lift weights with a bunch of giant military men but I persevered), a football field and track, baseball diamond, batting cages, skate park, & bowling alley, they had an outdoor movie theater where they show first-run movies every night for free...

I watched 'Green Zone' and 'Hot Tub Time Machine' there. Both very interesting experiences. Hot Tub Time Machine was pretty dumb, but I found myself laughing and enjoying it quite a bit. It's hard to resist the enjoyment of a good fecal matter joke in a stadium full of raucous Navy guys. I'd forgotten what seeing a comedy in a crowded theater could be like. And Green Zone... well that night the theater was fairly quiet, but surprisingly there seemed to be quite a few people there who appreciated the message. I had seen it already of course, but I was very curious to see how people who lived on a base notorious for the controversial and legally shady detention of prisoners would take a film about the recent war built on lies. The more time I spend among the military, the more I get the sense that our government is at war with itself. There are factions and factions within factions. Watching that particular movie in that particular place probably has something to do with that sense, of course. But I'm not talking about partisan bickering or political sides. I tend to feel that the Republicans and the Democrats are actually on the same side, and everything else is just a show. I think it goes on on a deeper level, and that there are sides we don't even know about.

I just can't resist those big lizard shots. I loved watching them just lumber through the outdoor seating area at Starbuck's while people blithely ignored them. (Yes, they have a Starbuck's too.) I'd be all like, "Do you guys see that?! Huh? That's a big damn lizard, just walkin' here!" And they'd be all like, "Whatever." I was hoping that this guy would actually go in the ladies room so I could wait and get a shot of some poor woman running out and screaming. No such luck.

Gitmo also has wind power! There are four of these guys on top of the tallest hill on base, but apparently only one of them is working right now. I went and stood under the one that was working, and let me tell you I wasn't expecting to have an experience like that. There is nothing like having 100 foot tall metal fan blades of death whoooomp whoooomp whoooomping directly over your head.

But you know, there are a lot of places on Gitmo where you are not allowed to take pictures. Like this one.

I was told that I was welcome to take pictures anywhere on base unless I saw one of these signs. Hopefully, taking pictures of the sign won't get me in trouble. But they do a good job of helping the people who live and work there keep the darker side of Gitmo out of sight and out of mind with all these distractions. I couldn't even figure out where the prisons were until after I'd been there for like a week, although to be fair I suppose I wasn't going out of my way too much. But on my second Scuba dive, we went out to a beach where there was a prison up on the hill, and there weren't any signs posted there so... 

Yes, they have scuba diving there too. I got to go on a couple of dives in Guantanamo Bay. Boo-yah.

It was pretty nice diving but we didn't see too much that was very interesting. A moray eel, a stingray. Here's a Gitmo Starfish.

I also got to figure out what ever happened to the Scooby Gang. Guess they stuck their noses into one too many mysteries and got their vehicle confiscated.

Scuba dooba doo!

Anyway, forgive my bad joke. But that's about all I have from that trip. It was pretty cool to get to go and see it firsthand. Not an opportunity most people get and believe me I'm aware of how cool my job is. Hopefully I can get back there one day to get my Advanced Scuba Diver license.

An Inevitable Post, Given That You Know I Had To Have My Say About Green Zone

  So Green Zone. I can't really speak to the larger events which this movie tries to condense into a cohesive plot-line, although I have read the book it was based on and even did a blog post on it a while back. But politics aside for the moment, I think that this movie nails it in the details.

My favorite scene is when Matt Damon, after some intense action out in the chaotic streets of Baghdad, walks out behind the Republican Palace which we were using as the US "Embassy" to meet his CIA contact by the swimming pool. The look on his face and on his men's faces is perfect. Utter confusion, as though they were wondering, "did we pass out and wake up back in the US somewhere?" That disconnect was spot on and is something I not only experienced in the Green Zone but witnessed on not a few members of the armed forces' faces in that very spot. Not that I was really ever "in the shit", but it was a pretty unreal place and having spent some time out in downtown Baghdad, the Green Zone (officially called The International Zone; Green Zone was "local" slang and I myself always preferred to call it the Interzone) was undeniably a real-life study in stark contrast. Employees of the DoD hanging out and sunbathing in speedos and bikinis, drinking beer and carrying on as though they were trying to really be in Key West, while a half mile away on the other side of mortar walls was a city in pain and disaster at every turn. That to me was what the film captures best all around, and specifically so in this scene.

The other thing the film did really well was the set detail. The embassy pool looked exactly right, as did the Saddam International Airport. The flyover shot of the Green Zone was perfect, from the Hands of Victory monument and the Iraqi Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Republican Palace itself.

I even thought I saw my old camps in that shot, though I could have mentally added them in myself. I wonder if they used real footage there or if it was a digital recreation... either way, it looked excellent.

Another detail which I felt was right on was the sort of haphazard occupation of the Palaces in the Interzone. People would just sort of make their sleeping areas wherever there was a corner, their belongings strewn on the sides of hallways, working and living areas side by side, neo-cons in suits and soldiers in uniform, contractors and DoD employees in pocketed cargo pants and shirts all rubbing shoulders. Incidentally, on certain later occasions there were also three very out-of-place Stroudsburg rejects walking those halls wearing their rock-n-roll T-shirts (I think Jeff had a Lou Reed and Scott had a White Stripes. I may have had a ripped Pixies T-shirt at the time) and feeling like we were surrounded by pod people. Especially at lunch time when we'd sit together reading the Stars and Stripes and made fun of the daily propagandist idiocy in a dining hall otherwise full of neo-cons. We really didn't fit in there.

As for the politics of the film; a lot of critics are saying that the film has a heavy liberal bias, is anti-conservative and anti-war. Well, I don't really know when being anti-war became a bad thing, but the film anyway isn't really anti-war. The Matt Damon character is a soldier, and understands why the war was necessary... until it becomes clear that the reasons for the war were lies. He's assigned to a unit that is to search for Saddam's WMDs, which of course we all know by now never existed. It is an anti-conservative film, if by anti-conservative you mean that it's against being lied to by the Neo-cons so that we'd get behind their war like so many patriotic parrot heads. So then also it has a liberal bias, if by liberal you mean a person who dislikes having been tricked into committing murderous devastation upon a city for the sake of the Bush-Cheney agenda. It makes no claims per se on what their real agenda may have been, other than a closing shot of an Iraqi oil refinery. I myself don't really believe that this war was about Iraq's oil, or at least not only about their oil. I think what they wanted was probably a bit more far reaching than that, but until we can put those crooks on a stand, we may never really know.

One of the dumbest criticisms I've seen about the film is that it's not a new message. That we all know by now, even the Republicans, that we were lied to and that there never were any weapons of mass destruction to be found, and that this film doesn't add anything to the story and is really unnecessary. That's stupid. It's a movie, and as such all it needed to accomplish was to put the viewer inside the story it's trying to tell. If you can still make a movie about WWII, you can certainly make a movie about the invasion of Iraq without having to justify yourself beyond that criteria. As for whether or not it accomplishes that agenda, it's hard for me to say. I certainly feel like it's a complete success of a film, but that's because it only had to remind me of what it was like to be there, whereas I can't say that it succeeded for people who have never been to Baghdad or the Green Zone. Maybe it was too confusing and fast. But speaking as someone who lived there for a few years, it's the best movie I've seen yet depicting that time, that place.

The book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, does the job much better, factually and politically speaking. The film is supposedly based on this book, but I'd have to say only very loosely. The book spends a lot more time on the day to day life of the Green Zone's ruling class and their disastrously ignorant decision-making, whereas the movie is trying to condense everything that happened into a nice streamlined plot with a good guy and a bad guy. I feel like this really worked on a visceral level, but unfortunately left it open to the very valid criticism of "making it all up". We all know there was a great WMD lie, but it was probably not one single dickish neo-con general who hatched it up on his own, and I feel like the CIA was largely complicit in allowing the great lie to happen in the first place, even though the first major break in the ranks came from the CIA Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay when he announced that he'd seen no evidence of WMDs after being in theater for less than a year. If there were any good guys in the Green Zone attempting to expose the lie, (and the book does talk about a few of them) they were largely ignored, marginalized, and were not involved in many, if any, heroic action sequences. At least not that we're aware of. In fact, my favorite early whistle blower, Scott Ritter, was a UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq before the war who went on any news show that would have him in the run-up to the war and plead with America to listen to him because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! Unfortunately he dropped off the radar pretty quickly due to inappropriate sexual conduct on the internet, and that's what happens to people who dare to speak out. (Although apparently now there is some damning video of him out there, so perhaps it wasn't merely a politically motivated discrediting move after all. We'll see.)

In any case, If you're looking for a detailed description of the insanity of the Iraq Invasion and subsequent occupation, read the book. If you're looking for a good action flick with shaky-cam and more reality than a Bourne movie via a brief exposure to what it may have been like in the Green Zone in 2003, see the movie. It's very good.

Snapshots From The Forbidden Zone

I'm in California! For work. Not for fun, of course. Work work work. Don't have time for a full post, (too busy um, working) but here are some black and white photos I took today. Guess where I am.

They film movies here all the time. Planet of the Apes, and Star Trek V, for instance. I think that Sigourney Weaver and William Shatner live in a cave out here somewhere, so that the commute to work is easier.

It's a place 20 miles outside of Ridgecrest, California in the Mojave Desert by the Sierra Nevadas called the Trona Pinnacles. It's totally wild out here.

But I have to get going... I'm out here for another week or so, lots to do. Here's a color photo I took of my first up close look at the actual Pinnacles. I have a mess of them of course, but I haven't had time to go through them all yet. I'll post more another time.

Ba-Doink-a BOINC

I don't often do this, but there is a gnarly piece of software that I want to recommend that everybody use. It's called BOINC, and it's awesome. I actually used to use it years ago, but between all my traveling and moving I kind of forgot about it, and I've just rediscovered it. It's basically a screen saver program, but not just a pretty one. It's useful. What you do is you download the BOINC software, and then choose a project. The instructions are all there on the homepage. But what BOINC does is this: When your computer is idle, it comes on just like your normal screen saver would, and it uses your computer processor to perform calculations needed by various scientific projects which you can choose from, showing you a neat little visual of the calculations being performed as the screen saver. What's so powerful about this tool is that thousands of people doing calculations on a project offers more computing power than is possible to the individual scientific programs on their own, so you can help them to do some really incredible things.

I myself run a project called SETI@home, which I've I had a link to on my sidebar forever and still managed to forget about all this time, dur. But as an example of how BOINC works, SETI@home is the radio signal project for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) people. You may have heard of them from that movie Contact, in which Jodi Foster represented them, based on the book by Carl Sagan. So anyway, what they do is point their radio telescopes at different points in the sky for periods of time, and record space noise of all sorts. They record this space noise in huge batches and parcel it up, then send it out to everybody running their project via BOINC. BOINC, with the help of your computer processor while you're not using it, then sifts through this raw data, searching for patterns and signals, and sends the results back to SETI. If your computer is the one that finds indication of Extra-Terrestrial radio signals, you'll be famous. Here's what my screen saver looks like:

Of course I understand that a lot of people might think that this is a loopy project, with about a zero chance of ever finding anything meaningful. To you people, I say up yours. Aliens is cool. But, you know, there are plenty of other projects to choose from should the search for the answer to the most profound question we have (are we alone?) not be your particular cup of awesome.

There is a nice one called Rosetta@home, which needs your help to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. There is also one called climateprediction.net, which is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century because climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

But there is a whole list of such non-profit projects you can choose from over on the BOINC project page, so you can choose one that you feel is important, regardless of the ultimate importance of the Alien question.

Barock The Votebama!

Nothin'. I got nothin'. I just wanted to put my little play on words out there. You know, for happy election day. Which, by the way, is today if you're voting for Obama, and next Tuesday if you're voting for McCain. Yeah, it's a new rule. Like early voting and superdelegates. It's a new rule that's going to be used by the losing side to accuse the winning side of vote fraud. If Obama wins, you watch; FOX News will be making innuendos, (In your endos) if not outright accusations of electoral fraud related to early voting or perhaps, ironically, some sort of shady business at the polls in Ohio & Florida. That would be awesome. And if McCain wins, FOX News will be all like what? That was fair.

On the other hand, if McCain wins, that's exactly what me and Oliver Stone will be saying. Or perhaps not... I did go see W. last week, and it's disappointingly short of conspiracy theories. He didn't even try to cover the shady business in Ohio or Florida back in 2000, Ted Kennedy's accusations of fraud in 2004, or that day with those flying tin can thingies and the buildings that fell down and went boom. Maybe he's saving those subjects once the not-as-crazy-as-they-once-seemed conspiracy theorists get a chance to self-publish their investigative material.

But what was great about W. was the Rorschach Test that is Dubya. On the surface of the movie, Dubya came across as a pretty normal guy who constantly has more food in his mouth than a person normally should. Interesting depiction, by the way. Even while he was making the worst Presidential decisions imaginable, he seems pretty well meaning, even affable, if misguided perhaps. But hardly the demon he seems like from a distance. But if you look closer, after the credits roll and you've thought about it a bit, it's a more damning portrait than you might at first glance think.

I'm not going to say much about it though, because like I said, it's a Rorschach Test and the important thing is what you take away from it, if you ever see it, not what I think. I'm sure you can guess what my opinion of the man is. The one thing I do want to say though, is that even though it's a cliché, the road to hell is, in fact, paved with good intentions; Even Hitler believed he was doing what was right, all the while using his feelings and his guts as his guides, ignoring the evidence that was all around him that what he believed so strongly was only what he wanted to believe.

Of course, the movie is still merely an interpretation of the events. My gut tells me we shouldn't be so kind to ickle Georgie in the history books. I strongly believe, in the absence of any real evidence available to me, that he purposefully misled the nation and probably has nonconsensual sex with goats while feeding on aborted baby fetuses. But that's just an opinion, you know, don't take my word for it.

I guess the real point of this post is how different types of people interpret things, and how this election seems to have polarized people into two major groups of different interpretive capabilities. Is this an election which has polarized the Good from the Evil? The intelligent from the deeply stupid? The authoritative from the nonauthoritative? The butter side up from the butter side down? None of the above or all of the above? Humanity confuses me, and while I strongly believe that Obama is the right choice and that the McCain camp is only preying on one type of humanity's inability to deal with their inner conflict of Mind Vs. Fear, that's just my interpretation. I've been wrong before. Besides, it's also entirely possible that by even participating in this election, I have also succumbed to the fear by way of the terror that Palin inspires in me. I mean come on, do I really believe that she's Satan's goat-whore bride? That's just silly.

The brave thing to do might really be to sit it out, since what my actual leftist beliefs tell me is happening is that Obama and McCain are the left and right hands of the Military-industrial complex which murdered JFK, RFK, & MLK. After beating us with the stick in their right hand for eight years, they might let us rest up with a nice carrot from their left hand for a bit.

I know, I know, it's all a bit radical. But I'm feeling quite philosophical this morning, this election day. All my life I've been told that voting is the most sacred duty of every American, and to be fair I've never really believed that so my opinions are already coming out of left field. But I am voting today, for Obama, and it's not because I think Obama is going to save us, and it's mostly not because I think McCain and Palin are going to be another 4 to 8 years of happy-go-lucky skipping to Gomorrah, but because I'm simply tired of being beaten with a stick. Time for some Beta Carotene in my diet.

A Perfect New York Day, Gabba Gabba Hey.

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years”
- Thomas Wolfe

I live about one hour to the west of NYC, and I haven't been there in like fifteen years. I've still never even been up to see the Statue of Liberty except one time when I was too young to remember; apparently my Pop Pop, who used to work in the City, took me there once. It's one of those traveling oddities. Germans that I knew from Bavaria had never been to Italy, which is only a few hours away by train, yet had been to the Statue of Liberty. I've been to Venice, Baghdad, and Moscow even, but it's been fifteen years since I spent any time in the greatest city in the world. I'd seen online that one of my favorite bands was playing the final show on their tour there on Saturday night, so Miss Luongo and I drove over there yesterday to have a perfect New York day.

Miss Luongo doesn't particularly enjoy concerts, so in order to bribe her into attending one with me, I had to promise that we'd see a Broadway show which is one of her favorite things to do in the City. We hit TKTS which sells discounted day-of-show tickets, and scored a sweet deal on Equus. I'd never seen it before, but it's one of Miss Luongo's favorite plays and she credits it with being an important force in her decision to become a writer. And, to top it all off, the cast consisted of Daniel Radcliff (Harry Potter), Richard Griffiths (Uncle Vernon Dursley), and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager)! I really enjoyed it. It's a very 70's sort of sexual psychodrama, but it holds up and I think having British leads really helped make it work. If you've ever seen it or heard about it, you know that the role of the boy calls for some nudity, so yes, we got to see Harry Potter's penis. But other than that tense moment it was quite enjoyable and it's nice to see a child actor grow up into a good actor and not yet another screwed up tabloid case. I was able to sneak a blurry picture of the set before the show got started, which I was reprimanded for. Sometimes getting in trouble for pictures is worth it, but on this one I'll have to say, eh. Those silver things are the horse heads which were donned by actors portraying some scary-ass horses during the show.

After the play we hit Little Italy for the street festival of San Genaro and got some awsome Italian food and Pinkberry, which is some sort of Asian frozen yogurt and awesome. Then we hit the Angelika, an independent movie theater and saw some wacky Woody Allen movie about love and it's myriad disappointments. And threesomes. Vicki Christina Barcelona. Go see it. Or not. Afterwards it was time to hit the concert at the Zipper Factory on 37th and 9th.

It was Dean & Britta again, and Spectrum opened for them. Spectrum is a band formed by Sonic Boom, singer from another legendary band that I love, Spacemen 3. My friend Scott turned me on to them a ways back and he used to say that they don't play their instruments better than anyone. This was definitely the case last night... Sonic Boom does this sort of trance-rock thing and he opened with a Spacemen 3 bit called 'Transparent Radiation' which made me very happy. Then he did a bunch of loud sonic-y things which weren't really songs and got progressively weirder until the final number which prompted Miss Luongo to uncork her ears long enough to tell me angrily that she thought he was basically saying "screw you" to the audience because nobody was even playing instruments by this point, he was just utilizing foot pedals and amps to produce massive amounts of feedback. Again, Spacemen 3 used to do this better than anybody, and Sonic Boom was in top form. I guess you have to know what you're getting into here otherwise it pretty much is just noise, but I really enjoyed it.

Dean & Britta were of course awesome. I don't need to go into how awesome they are all over again... I saw them in DC not too long ago and you can go read that one again if you want to know how awesome they still are. I did grab a copy of Dean Wareham's book after the show and had him autograph it. My friend Steph had originally wanted to join us to go see the show, but she had already read Dean's book and said that it sort of disappointed her to see what one of her favorite musicians was really like. She still might have gone, but she'd have had to take off work and her heart wasn't in it. I can't wait to read it. It sounds like it's going to be honest.

I got a nice shot of Britta grinning at me. We had the best seats! It was a terraced u-shaped theater going up, and the seats were all old discarded minivan seats. A very nice and comfortable way to enjoy New York shoegazer Rock.

And here they are, singing 'You Turn My Head Around' again. I love taking pictures of them during that song.

Here's four shots of their shoes that I cobbled together.

So yes, it was a perfect New York day. A broadway show, an Italian streetfest, a Woody Allen film, and quintessential New York shoegazer icons. Some things are just worth saving up for. We didn't make it to the Statue of Liberty, but that's really ok. I'll make it there one day and then I'll be like, "Huh. I wonder what the people who declared that this gift of friendship to us from the French should symbolize Liberty and Freedom would think of how far we've come from those heady days of hope."

And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that's a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature, because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires using a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker

The Stars At Night, Are Occasionally Big And Bright...

"Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think."
-Ambrose Bierce

Ahhhhh... The smell of Texas hick in the morning. I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for work this week. There is nothing cool about this trip. No pictures, no wry observations. Except for the smelly Texan hick I got stuck in the elevator with this morning, and there ain't nothin' wry about that. The smell is quite similar to Pennsylvanian hick, actually. You'd think, you know, different States, different hicks, different smells. But hick pretty much smells the same all over I guess. The one exciting thing I did was take a drive down to Waco, Texas. There really wasn't much there though. I got a coffee. Turned around came back.

So I spent the little free time I've had this week at the movie theater just a few blocks up from where I'm staying. I saw The Dark Knight. Twice. I think it's the best superhero movie yet. In fact, it might be a work of film art. Heath Ledger of course was amazing, but even more amazingly, he didn't entirely steal the show. (Though his performance should make Jack Nicholson feel ashamed of his inadequacy as an actor) Everything in the movie was absolutely perfect. The worst that can be said about it is that some of the action was so busy and parts of the plot so byzantine, that if you weren't paying attention, you may have to watch it a second time. But what I really love about it is that it is an ensemble piece... Batman didn't get any more screen time than anyone else, and the most pivotal role in the movie didn't really even belong to him, and it was still exciting as hell. (I'd say the most pivotal role was Aaron Eckhart's, whom I was glad to see in such a good role. Been a fan of his since In The Company Of Men.) Christopher Nolan gave all of his characters an important piece of the story, and allowed all of them a chance to play themselves out. It's the first superhero movie I've seen that can correctly have the adjective "epic" be applied to it.

Anyway, sorry. I know that nobody comes here to read pop film reviews. I'm just indulging myself in a gush. And, you know, I've got nothing else to talk about, yet my habits dictate that after being away on a work trip, I must post about it. So, movies I saw in Arlington, Texas is my theme. Hancock. Stupid. REALLY stupid. It started off fairly intriguing. But it was like the screenwriter or director or whoever had had a neat idea for a superhero movie, got partway through the script, but then realized that he didn't have an actual creative bone in his body nor had he ever actually read a comic book, and pulled something stupid out of his butt and plopped it in the theater. X-Files. Yeah. Not actually a bad movie... if Mulder and Scully were supposed to be characters in a mature adult romantic detective novel. It was more Moonlighting, the later years, than X-Files. And really, after waiting like 10 years after the end of the series to make a movie, you'd think that X-Files fans would deserve some answers, or at least more plot development on the Alien theme. But, nope. Chris Carter doesn't think so. Wanker.

MILD SPOILER ALERTS THIS PARAGRAPH:
But the most disturbing thing about all three of these movies was the children. None of these movies were appropriate for very young children. There were 4 year olds, infants even, that parents had brought to the theater. Severed arms, Hancock shoves a guy's head up another man's butt, horrifically scarred man holds a young boy hostage... all kinds of potentially scarring moments on a young person's psyche. Plus, young kids are noisy and it's just rude to the other moviegoers. I mean, what are parents thinking? This kind of stuff can scare the crap out of kids in their dreams for years. I speak from experience... I inadvertently saw a Monty Python sketch one time on TV when I was very young which gave me the screaming willies for years. Monty Python. Imagine what seeing a psychopathic clown put someone's eye out with a pencil would've done. There was a preview for a horror movie... there were some pretty horrific images loud and proud on the screen. Blood, disfigurement, bizarre imagery... you know the kind of thing pop horror fans are into these days. There was a very young boy nearby, staring in horrified awe, and his father was laughing his ass off. Laughing at mutilation. What the F*** is wrong with people?

Ok ok... sometimes scaring the crap out of children is funny, but still. Not always.

Getting It Backwards

For some inexplicable reason the other day, the words "You got served" came out of my mouth. It's really about the most horrifying thing I can imagine, linguistically speaking. I don't remember what happened that elicited that appalling phrase from my head, but even at the time that I said it I had no idea where on Earth my brain got the idea that it was an acceptable response to anything. And then I realized I had recently seen a TV show where, and not to be overly descriptive but there's a point to this, some portly black woman had used that phrase. It had stuck in my mind because she had at first been an extremely annoying character, and she'd been "talking smack" about someone who'd "been served", which made me want to plug my ears. But during the course of the show, she became a much more interesting character and I found myself liking her, despite myself. She was smart, witty, and other than the occasional unpalatable urban street slang thrown in the mix, extremely engaging.

So I then realized that I'd probably used said horrific phrase because I'd found this TV show character funny, and that offhand phrase of hers which I'd found repugnant must have retroactively stuck in my addled brain, and that's when I realized that even though I have been watching zero to even less TV, I was still watching too much if my speech patterns were being interfered with in such a manner. It's amazing how little it takes to affect human behavior, isn't it?

But then something even more shocking happened. I'd had a picture of this character in my head, and her saying about someone or other getting served, but I couldn't remember what the hell TV show I'd been watching that she was on, or what the show was about, or maybe it was a movie she was in? It was one of those niggling little things that drives you crazy because you can't stop thinking about it until you figure out the answer, and I was extremely irritated that I was wasting even this fraction of brainpower on something Hell-evision related. When I eventually figured it out, I had a lot of soul-searching to do: Turns out she wasn't a character on a TV show. She was an actual real person who had been hired from my company's Human Resources department to come to our work retreat and give all the employees a two-hour lecture on Harassment, sexual and otherwise, in the workplace and why one should avoid it.

I'd garbled a two-day old memory from a real live person into a TV show. I'm mistaking real life for TV. It's the opposite of the usual problem people have (mistaking TV for reality), but still, it's worrying. I feel a bit panicky about it, if the truth may be told.

By the way, the reason her character... dang it! I mean, she, the actual human being, was so engaging and funny as a Sexual Harassment lecturer was because she was one of those people who pretty much broke every sexual harassment law in the book during class in order to show us what we shouldn't be doing. Very effective technique.

In other exciting events, Wall-E is a great movie. Don't let those Right-Wing Republican nutjobs tell you otherwise. (If you haven't seen it, that link provides not only hilarious fat complaining Republicans, but some major plot spoilers.) I think my favorite line from that article is: "Stolyarov cites the fact that fast-food restaurants are serving “health foods,” “landfills are remarkably effective at storing garbage,” and that traditional farming is, like, hard and stuff, as flaws in the film’s logic."

Commercials Make You Think Drivel Is The New Funny

I haven't had my own personal access to Television in maybe two decades. I despise TV, and have had nothing but disdain for it since... well I don't know exactly when, but at some point I decided that it was the devil. I'm not against a good show, mind you. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest TV show of all time. Actually, Firefly is quite good too. And Angel. And those are great shows because Joss Whedon created them, who is a genius. So I'm not a total TV snob. I believe that film can be art, even on TV. But art on TV tends to get canceled quickly, unless you're lucky. But my philosophy has been, for the past few years, that anything that is actually good, I'll hear about it and can watch it on DVD someday. That's how I discovered Buffy; I never would have chosen to watch that show, thinking that it sounded like the dumbest idea for a show on Earth. Especially because the movie was so bad. But I knew some people who really liked it, so I borrowed a friend's DVDs and gave it a shot. I was able to watch all 7 seasons of it without a single commercial break... which is the point I've laboriously been coming to.

Commercials are the devil. I hate hate Hate HATE them. In fact, I've been known to scream at them in disgust. I don't feel that TV programming is what is responsible for dumbing down America, although there are certainly plenty of shows out there that I wouldn't wipe my bottom with. Hell, if I was a personal Nurse for a quadriplegic Stalin I wouldn't wipe his bottom with them. Well ok, to be fair, I'd never be a personal Nurse for any quadriplegic, Stalin or otherwise. Gross. I'm just not that selfless a person. But still, you take my meaning. Next to commercials, aimless channel surfing is the next in line for most mind-numbing thing ever. Anyway. I feel that commercials, and most popular TV shows, are a way of making people think that raving lunatic morons are funny, or even normal. Like those Wendy's commercials where the black guy wearing a Wendy's wig is trying to convince people that they have a constitutional right to a better burger. I know, I know, it's supposed to be funny. Ha ha we're just kidding buy our burgers. But something about it makes me want to commit suicide inside.

So having said all of this, I finally caved and got cable. I did this because, earlier this year I was happily enjoying my HDDVD player when BAM! Blu-Ray won the High Definition battle, making my HD collection obsolete. No more new movies in that beautiful, pristine format I had so recently become accustomed to. Believe me, you have not seen Unforgiven, The Shining, or 2001: A Space Odyssey until you've seen them in HD. I could have made the switch to Blu-Ray, except that the cheapest player is still around $400, the discs cost like $30 to $40 a pop, and a few other reasons that you probably don't care about, but I do. HDDVD players were around $200, and the discs were usually around $20. Sigh. But so I got cable, because they offer some channels in HD, and I was really wanting to watch some stuff in HD again.

I haven't had it on much since I got it, since I don't actually spend all that much time watching TV anyway. I tend to watch a movie with dinner, and that's about it. But I've enjoyed a few things... I got to watch The Lost Boys in HD, and the other night I tried out the HD pay-per-view channel and saw The Golden Compass. Very nice! But last night, something happened which made me decide that cable in my house is a short lived phenomenon. Spiderman was on TNT HD, and I was all excited because I'd been curious what that looked like in HD. When TNT plays movies, they have commercial breaks. A commercial for a Stouffer's TV dinner came on. I was already irritated by the spate of obnoxious pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator commercials I'd been forced to sit through between segments of Spiderman, and the worst part is that they tend to play the same 10 commercials on every break, just in case you'd forgotten about their stupid product that nobody needs from ten minutes ago. Oh, I also have to say that the worst commercials to sit through (Well, they're all horrible. It's so hard to chose the worst, actually, that anytime I complain about any commercial it's going to be the worst.) are the chain restaurant ones where they show you large pictures of gross greasy things that come in food-like shapes and are supposed to be appetizing, but are in fact unbelievably nauseating, and are the worst reason to have HD channels.

(Keep in mind that these pictures, as disgusting looking as they are, are not even what the food you order will actually look like in reality. The actual food always looks limp in comparison to the ads. Gross and grosser. Blechh.)

So this Stouffer's TV dinner commercial came on. And it combined just about everything I could possibly hate in a commercial. It starts off with a shot inside of a moving car; Mom and Dad are in the front and three noisy brats in the back, eating some sort of take out and all looking generally miserable. Then the voice over comes on and says, "When did this become our idea of a sit-down dinner?" Several big gross photos of greasy Stouffer's TV dinners later, and a satisfied family sitting down at home to eat them, and I was screaming, frothing at the mouth, unleashing a stream of obscenities at the TV as though I had just been told I had to wipe Stalin's immobile ass. I mean, seriously, Stouffer's TV Dinners have the audacity to lament the disappearance of a sit down family dinner, and try to convince you that they offer a product which solves said dilemma!!? This is what is going to end us, I swear. The problem is is that people just pretend like it's no big deal to have to witness such towering banality, that it's just a commercial and of course it's dumb but it doesn't really affect me. But it's not true. People, you have no idea how much it affects you. Seriously, try not watching TV at all for a time; try turning off your cable for say 6 months. Then go back and watch some... you'll be appalled at the drivel you're made to swallow.

You might think that you can control it. You know, flip to another show while commercials are on, or mute it or whatever. But I'm telling you, having cable in the house is no different than keeping heroin in the cabinet for medicinal uses when William Burroughs is your best friend and drops by all the time. I don't have any TV addict friends who drop by to get a TV fix, and TV is an addiction I gave up long enough ago that it tastes like ashes to me now, so I'll keep it around for the moment, until I can find a better HD solution, but please. If you ever realize that I've relapsed into couch potatoism, please come over and punch me in the head really hard. I'm begging you, intervene. I think I'll be fine, you know. I gave up smoking and fast food. I'm sure I can keep away from idly turning on the TV for no good reason. I have plenty of methadone, I mean DVDs to get me through the more difficult moments. I'm just saying, you know, TV commercials are worse for you than smoking, fast food, or heroin, so I'm a little more nervous about it.

Seattle; City Of Science Fiction And Improper Diction

"When I die, I'm donating my body to science fiction."
-Steven Wright

"The future isn't what it used to be."
-Arthur C. Clarke

It's my 200th post! So in honor of this rather meaningless milestone, I traveled all the way out to Washington state just to get this photo of the Space Needle. Well ok, I was forced to be in Seattle for work, but I made the best of a bad situation and toured around the city a bit, and spent some time with Jordan and Alison, friends of mine who live in the area whom I'd known from Germany. Jordan is famous for his dance moves at the Bavarian Biker Fest (and has the neck-scars to prove it!) and Alison is famous for her drunken instigation of little Danish hot dog fights. Also I got to see Emily, another friend from Germany, who was in the area on rather suspicious business one afternoon and who is famous for breaking T-bars over fellow snowboarder's heads in fits of amazing pique. Ah good times, good times.

Anyway, Seattle is a very cool city, although I must say that I'm very disappointed to not have seen one single flannel the entire time I was there! Very sad. It's almost as if, collectively, it is a city ashamed of it's grungy flash in the pan. The absolute COOLEST part of the city, without a doubt, and I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say because it's the coolest thing in the universe (that we know of) and it's in Seattle so of course you know where I'm going; is the Science Fiction Museum.

I was soooooo happy when I realized this place existed, and that I was in Seattle to experience it. This museum kicked so much butt. You weren't allowed to take photos inside, which really really frustrated me. Here I was, in the coolest museum I'd ever been in... and I was impotent. The no photo rule didn't stop me from trying to be all surreptitious of course, but the few shots I managed to sneak wound up coming out rather blurry and not worth keeping, because I was too busy looking around for the mean kling-on security guard. I did keep one or two photos, blurry and badly composed as they are. But I'll get to those in a minute. They had a ton of first edition science fiction classics in there that I would steal in a second. (Uh, if I did that sort of thing, which I don't.) By authors I had been sure that only I knew about. James Blish. Fritz Leiber. Theodore Sturgeon. Stanislaw Lem. Pierre Boulle, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick. And... they were in places of honor. It was like heaven. They even had Iain M. Banks and Vernor Vinge, two of my more modern favorites, along with of course all the big easy ones. Asimov. Clarke. Niven. Anderson. A first edition of Childhood's End, (by Clarke) the first sci-fi novel to blow my mind and which made me ravenous for more. No Rudy Rucker though that I saw... a major oversight.

They had displays of movie items too, of course. Props from famous sci-fi movies and franchises; the dress that Sean Young wore in Blade Runner, a Storm Trooper armor suit, the original model of the Death Star used in Star Wars, (Where the no photo rule would have literally had me pulling out my hair, if I had any. As it was, I was in agony. The security ape would not leave! I think he was on to me.) the little talking bear from A.I., the Terminator robot, Robby the Robot. (Robby the freaking Robot!) Captain Kirk's command chair. Anybody recognize this?

Yes, that's right! It's the Pit Bull. Griff Tannen's anti-gravity skateboard from Back To The Future II. Totally. Sweet.

My favorite thing about the Sci-Fi Museum though is that, you know how in normal like, arty-farty museums, you'll see collections of snooty arty-farty junk, with little plaques next to them that say snooty stuff like "Kindly donated from the prestigious collection of Snooty McVandersnot"? Well, it's only at the Sci-Fi Museum that you'll find Star Wars action figures donated from the collection of Gus Lopez!

Yeah, it says "From the collection of Gus Lopez"... kind of hard to read, I know. But I had Had HAD to get this picture, and I was very nervous that that security clown was going to come around the corner before I got the chance. Plus the light was all dark and science fictiony. Oh well.

After the titillating thrill of the Science Fiction museum, the rest of Seattle rather paled. I re-visited Pike Place (I'd been there about 12 years ago on my way back from Alaska) and had a coffee at the original Starbuck's. I don't like Starbuck's coffee... too acidy. I like my coffee stronger and with the coffee machines having been cleaned out every once in a while. BUT, it's the very first Starbuck's coffee shop ever, it's a great success story, it was right there, and I am a traveling glory-hound, after all.

Oh sure, I did other stuff. I went up the Space Needle, rode a ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle, saw the world famous Giant Shoe Museum. Hell I even worked a little. But none of it is really as exciting as, well you know. That awesome genius science fiction museum, of course.

Jordan was kind enough to let me crash at his parent's house (they were on vacation) with him and Alison for a few nights, which saved me a few bucks on a hotel room. Very cool. Good to see them. When old Chiemseers get together, many tales of German hilarity along with German beer will inevitably flow. I flew out of Seattle on the 12th straight down to Fort Lauderdale Florida, where I am at the moment. Again for work. It's rather a hum-drum area... I've been here before, back in January. I just think it's neat I went from one corner of the continental US to the other. What a great job.

Oh, just in case not everybody has noticed, something else happened this past week which made me extreeeeemely happy: The military officer who arrested me in Iraq for being snotty to him found and commented on my blog! Specifically on the original post where I told that story. Nothing has made me that kind of happy for a really long time. You can read the post, his comment, and my response in the original spot, here. I really hope he comes back... unless he's going to arrest me for being snotty to him again of course. I won't be needing any more of that.

Shoes of Mystery? Sheesh.

In Florida. Again. Ho Hum.

I've been in Fort Lauderdale for the past week for work... work work work. Actually, I didn't really do anything all that cool. And also actually, strictly speaking, I was in Coral Springs, about a 15 minute drive from Fort Lauderdale. Coral Springs is in Trivial Pursuit as the answer to the question: What is the only American city which forbids McDonald's to put up their Golden Arches sign? They have very strict zoning laws there. There is next to no advertising, no billboards, and even shop signs are generally hidden by the lines of palm trees crossing right in front of them which apparently is a zoning requirement for every commercial building here. I'm ambivalent about this: On the one hand I really like it because I hate billboards and obnoxious advertising... anyone who has been to the Poconos knows how ugly that sort of commercial behavior can make a place. But on the other hand, everything winds up looking exactly the same; buildings all look the same, streets all look the same... and I am not a fan of characterless uniformity.

I did take a quick afternoon jaunt to the Everglades for another airboat ride... It was kind of junky looking though because apparently there's a drought going on, so there wasn't much water. St. John's river up by Orlando was actually a lot prettier. But at least now I can say that I've been to the Everglades, and anyway alligators there are quite used to tourists, so we were able to get much closer to them than I had on that other trip.

 I made it down to Fort Lauderdale beach one afternoon, but it was too cold to swim, like only 76° or so. Brr. So I just sat and read a book for a while. It's a nice beach. A bit overrun, and right next to a busy highway, but it's clean and well kept.

Other than that, I got not much. I saw Cloverfield and Sweeny Todd at the local Regal Cinema when I got too bored to live with myself in the hotel. Cloverfield, GOOD. Loved it. But if you were too cool to enjoy The Blair Witch Project, you're probably too cool to like Cloverfield. Actually I have a theory about that: I think that in a weird way, enjoying those two films requires a certain kind of imagination in order to get involved in that shaky cam "This is really happening, no for real I swear" style; You have to allow the film to kind of suck you in, suspend your disbelief even more than usual, and fill in the blanks yourself in order to get that “There” feeling; They don’t give you all of the visuals and answers that a typical film does, so you kind of have to fill in that missing information yourself. And also, you have to sit in the back of the theater to avoid nausea from the shaky cam. Or maybe that's just too much work, I don't know.

Sweeny Todd was odd, it had everything I hate in a movie; it was a musical, and it was gory. BUT it was gory in that macabre Tim Burton way, only more so than usual for him and it's a fun if highly disturbing story. I probably never need to see it again, but I'm not sorry I did.

Anyway, I feel like I've been in Florida far too often for this job. I hope I get another cool new location to go to, soon.

My Scientist Could Kick Your Scientist's Ass

"Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame."
-Lydia M. Child

So I've been reading this biography on Nikola Tesla. Wowzers. This guy was insane, and there is quite a bit of misinformation out there about him and his inventions. For instance, Thomas Edison was a royal tool. Edison is credited with inventing electricity, but actually, Tesla invented alternating current, which is the form of electricity we use today. Edison was a proponent of DC, and had a whole bunch of money invested in patents for it. Tesla came along and dreamed up AC, and a battle ensued as to which form of current would be adopted. Much like the Betamax / VHS war, or the other, more recent Blew-Ray / HD DVD battle. Grrr. Argh.

Anyway, Edison resorted to some extremely dirty tactics. He kidnapped dogs and cats off of the streets, even people's pets, and electrocuted them to death with AC current in a barrage of propaganda stunts intended to scare people off of using it, saying that Alternating Current was far too dangerous to be used safely. He even apparently filmed the electrocution of an elephant with AC. Tesla won out though, because AC is superior and people realized it eventually. Unlike with HD DVD. Grrr. Argh.

"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."
-Thomas A. Edison

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
-Nikola Tesla

Mark Twain was a close friend of Tesla's. Mark used to hang out in Tesla's lab, and one time Tesla was experimenting with electrical therapy, and Mark insisted on trying it out. So he got up on a special rubber platform and thoroughly enjoyed a sensation of electrical vibrations. When Tesla told him that it was time to stop, Mark refused, whooping, waving his arms, and saying that this was awesome, and he could take it! Tesla smiled and said that for Mark's own well-being, he really ought to let it go and get down; a person is only meant to take so much vibrating. Mark laughed and still refused, despite Tesla's repeated warnings. Suddenly, Mark got a look of consternation on his face and clenched a bit. He abruptly hobbled to the edge of the platform and begged Tesla for the direction to the bathroom, as Tesla and his assistant laughed uproariously, knowing full well the laxative effect of the electrical therapy.

"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough."
-Mark Twain

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
-Nikola Tesla

Tesla demonstrated publicly many amazing feats of electricity, some of which engineers are still baffled by today as to how he did them.

There are some extremely sobering, and frankly rather quite scary things which he claimed to have invented and tested, but which we know nothing of today. He claimed to have invented a device which could fit in his pocket, and could knock down a building simply by attaching it to a metal girder. It worked by resonating vibrations, and there is proof that his theory was sound. He'd been experimenting with it in his lab in New York City, and it caused great rumblings and broken glass 15 blocks away. He claims that later, he put such a device in his pocket, sauntered down to a building that was under construction, attached it, and waited until the entire structure began to vibrate alarmingly. It made an unbelievable sound, construction workers began running, and he surreptitiously stopped the device, put it back in his pocket, and strolled off unnoticed.

By the way, after he died, the US government confiscated all of his papers and personal notes, and they have still yet to see the light of public scrutiny. Nobody knows what was in them. For those of you who are conspiracy-minded, chew on that.

Tesla claimed that with that same device he could collapse the Brooklyn Bridge in minutes, and with appropriate timing and a large enough such device, he could split the Earth like an apple.

For further conspiracy theorizing, here's a paragraph from his Wikipedia entry:

Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer.

Hmmm... Sound like any UFOs you've heard of?

He also demonstrated claims that he could transmit electricity wirelessly, and believed in the possibility of "Free Energy"; Do you have any idea what wireless power and free energy would mean to the world? Of course you do. But it has never been developed. He tried building a tower at Wardenclyffe designed to transmit power in just such a manner, but he ran out of funds, everybody thought he was a nutter, and the tower was destroyed for scrap.

He is actually the unsung inventor of Radio. Marconi was originally credited with inventing it, but all he did was steal an idea of Tesla's from a lecture, and patented it before Tesla had a chance to. In a nutshell. Tesla was eventually awarded the patent and credit for inventing Radio, but the Marconi misconception persists to this day. Tesla was cheated out of credit for many many things in this manner... he did patent quite a few inventions, but he is one of those historical geniuses that had more ideas in a day than I've had in ten lifetimes. He was so far ahead of his time that many of the things he accomplished have yet to be rediscovered, and he is uncredited for many of the ones that have been because at the time people thought his ideas were loony, and other people followed in the footsteps of Marconi with Tesla's "crazy" notions.

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
-Nikola Tesla

After reading this biography, I've had to rethink my opinion of The Prestige. I mean, I still think that it's a sloppy movie, and the denouement is still visible ten miles away, but part of what I thought was ridiculous about that movie was the portrayal of Tesla by David Bowie. I thought that the particular invention that he came up with in that film was utterly laughable, but now, I'm less sure. I mean, duplication of matter through the simple application of electricity is still extremely far fetched, but less so to me now that I've read about some of the things that he actually did experiment with.

 “Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.”
-Nikola Tesla

And Now For Something Completely Different... From All The Other Stuff That Is Also Also Different.

I saw this movie years ago, and just re-visited it. It's still awesome. It made me happy, and I'm afraid I won't make my post quota for November, so here's some YouTube clips from it.

Boy, This Work Sure Is Hard.

So I was in Greenblatt's Deli the other day on Sunset Boulevard and this group of ladies sitting behind me were discussing a script that someone wanted them to make a movie out of. It was apparently about some boxer from South Africa during Apartheid, and during this conversation, I heard the phrase that made my trip to Hollywood complete: "I think there is definitely a market for a South African 'Rocky'." Ahhh... so Robert Altman. But it got even better as the discussion continued; they apparently forgot how marketable the idea was because she started to say that the guy would have to be flexible with his script as the "whole Apartheid thing has been done to death" and perhaps they could change it to a Muslim boxer, or a Muslim love interest because "that whole Muslim... thing... hasn't really been explored as much yet."

You can't make this stuff up, folks! Well... ok, they can, but I can't. I was so happy. That's really the best thing that happened to me on this trip. Although, if I was a sports fan, that wouldn't be true because I sat next to Kurt Warner on the plane ride from Newark to Pheonix. Although, since I had never heard of him until the guy sitting on the other side of me told me with barely concealed glee as we were getting off the plane who he was, I didn't get much out of it. I had had my headphones on and my face in a book for the whole trip, so I was confused as we began getting our luggage out of the overhead when some lady kept thanking him and how sorry she was to bother him but her son wouldn't forgive her if she didn't get his autograph (He was quite gracious about it), and in full earshot of Kurt, I turned to the guy next to me and said, "So who's this dude then?" After he told me, and ran down a list of Kurt Warner's football exploits, I was all like "Huh, that's wack, yo. But I don't watch football, so you're like, speaking gibberish right now."

I noticed while traveling from Newark to Phoenix to Santa Ana that every 4th person on the planes, in the airports, at my hotel here even, had a copy of the new Harry Potter book in their hands. Seriously. The front desk girl here is having a terrible time getting through it because although she speaks great English, it's not her native tongue but she's dying to find out what happens. Every time I walk by the desk she admonishes me not to tell her anything. It's all pretty funny. This is definitely going to be something that defines the 2000's when people reminisce 20 years from now. "So, where were you when the last Harry Potter book came out?" I just finished reading it myself, and I have to say that it's not what I expected, and it was pretty awesome. Definitely the most exciting one yet.

So otherwise, I've been to see the La Brea Tar pits, the big Hollywood sign, and I took a nice drive on Mulholland drive and a quick run through of Beverly Hills. Here's a picture of Hollywood High School. What's Lawrence Fishburne doing there with Elvis and Bruce Lee? Why is Dorothy so chubby? Who are all those other people? Is this the message we want to send to LA's young people?

I gave the Avenue of Stars and Rodeo Drive a big pass on the way to the Santa Monica Pier, which I could have passed over, also. Honestly, I can't figure out why rich and famous people like to live here. It's desert hot most days, the smog makes my eyes puffy, and the traffic is unbelievably insane. All that crazy talk about LA freeways is true. It takes about 2 hours to go 30 or 40 miles. Although, the Pacific Coastal Highway was nice. If I get time I need to go hit one of the beaches I passed. But, for my money, if I'm ever rich and famous, I'd live on Martha's Vineyard.

So here's a Sunset Boulevard billboard. I'd really like to know what the hell is going on in this Perrier ad. Um... no I wouldn't. Never mind. But I call this work of art 'Privilege', for obvious reasons. It all kind of ties together, I think.

Oh, did I mention that I'm here for work? I forget that part sometimes. Hee hee.

The Austrian Ski Patrol Is Always There When You Need 'Em.

I was reminded recently of a story about running from the cops. Well, sort of cops. I was living in Germany in the winter of '98/'99, and it was the best snowboarding season, ever. Bavaria was getting record amounts of snow. It seemed like every day, there was a foot of fresh powder on the ground. It would snow like crazy all night, and in the morning, clear skies. It did that every day for weeks. Like I said, best snowboarding season ever.

I was working as Night Hausmeister at the Von Steuben Hotel in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps. Heh. As an interesting aside, General Von Steuben was a Prussian military officer who was either exiled or escaped from Germany after being found out to be a pedophile. He went to America and offered his services to the American military in the American Revolutionary War. I don't know if his vices were continued in our great, forgiving nation, (See Deliver Us From Evil... my God. I mean it. See it. Everyone needs to.) but he did become a war hero. Anyway, after World War II, when the US Army wanted to have a place for soldiers to go on R&R in Bavaria, they took the old Nazi Youth Headquarters in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and re-named it the Von Steuben Hotel. The Prussian pedophile was allowed to return home to Germany honorably, thanks to US! That always gave me the giggles. Uh... I mean, MANLY giggles, that is. Anyway, that's where I worked as Night Hausmeister, which is a fancy German word (House Master) for Night watchman/housekeeper. It's a nice word, I like it.

Anyway, my friend Dirk (Whose picture that is at the top) was the Night Auditor. Our hours were from 11pm until 7am. After I finished my work, I'd crash on the couch in the main lobby in front of the fireplace from like 2am until 5 or 6. We'd eat breakfast, run back to our rooms and get geared up, hop into his VW van (which he called his toybox because he was an avid outdoor sportsman and had four seasons worth of sporting goods he kept in there, including a unicycle and some juggling pins... don't ask, he was insane) and head to any one of about ten different Alps in the area for a full day of snowboarding on a foot of fresh powder. Get back home by around 5pm, sleep for a few hours, get up, go to work, repeat every day all winter. Again, best snowboarding season anybody's ever had in all of time!!! It was really great. Dirk was a really excellent boarder too, and my own boarding skills improved dramatically that winter, just trying to keep up with him.

But it was all possible because of the Happy Ski Pass... the season pass which Dirk and I each had that allowed us access to all the Bavarian Alps AND Austrian Alps in the area. Our favorite mountain was in an Austrian town named Lermoos, about 45 minutes down the road from Garmisch. They had some really awesome runs, and the best off-piste (off trail) boarding anywhere in the area... which turned out to be the problem. When the snow is really good, there is a particularly fun off-piste run that goes right down under one of the main chair-lifts, and due to the copious amounts of snow on this particular day, there were signs saying to stay out of that particular area due to avalanche danger. Of course, we either didn't see or chose to ignore the warning signs. It was a fantastic run. It was so fun and we were so cool for hitting it first that the Austrian Ski Patrol was waiting for us at the bottom.

They asked for our Happy Ski Passes. Dirk (who spoke fluent German)  started flipping out and said "No! No way! Mike, don't give 'em your pass!" And I was all like "No! No way! Dirk, don't give 'em your pass! What do we do?!" Have I told you yet that Dirk was a Genius? Well, he says "Dude! There's a Church at the bottom of this slope! (The slopes commonly would run all the way right down into town in the Alps) Get away! start boarding! They can't arrest you in a church, it's sanctuary!" So we run. I followed him down the slope, the Austrian Ski Patrol following us in a rather bewildered state... I don't think they'd been faced with this particular problem before. This picture is not of the Church at Lermoos that is being implicated in this story, but it's pretty, no? This particular church resides on the slopes of the Zugspitze, the tallest Alp in Germany.

Well, a not-so-much-longer-story short, we made it down because I don't think that the Austrian Ski Patrol was really trying too hard, because I think they weren't sure what to do if they actually caught us, ski-chases not likely being a part of their regular routine. We boarded right through the front doors of the small rococo Tyrolian church, which was mostly empty at the time, and unhitched our boards in the foyer. We ran to the back of the church, got out of our ski clothes, ran out the back door through the church cemetary and hopped the back wall surrounding it. We made our way separately back to the toybox, hiding from the ski patrol who apparently hadn't thought we'd try to escape from the rear and laughed our asses off all the way home. We avoided Lermoos for a few weeks after that, but of course we couldn't stay away forever. That run under the ski lift was too sweet.

Sanctuary. Sheesh. Thank God we were so dumb, or we might have actually had our Happy Ski Passes confiscated. Good times.

There was another time, a few years later, when I was snowboarding at another location in Austria, (The Steinplatte, I think) when the Austrian Ski Patrol saved my life. I was going off-piste again, when all of a sudden I found myself staring down a 300 foot sheer cliff. I screeched to a halt, and sat at the very edge, looking down at my death. I couldn't move to try and unhook my board, because if it slipped while trying to unhook my foot, I'd be going off-cliff. I couldn't turn around because I was too close to the edge. So I sat. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Austrian 911... I tried to explain where I was, but it was difficult because my German has never been stellar, and besides, I was in the woods off some ski trail. So I sat there, staring down at my 300 foot death with my ass in the snow, eventually going numb from cold, for about 2 hours until the Austrian Ski Patrol found me... So you know, they're nice to have around when you need them. Even though they helped me out, I don't feel bad for not letting them take my Happy Pass all those years ago. Besides, if you think about it, I really owe my life to cellphone technology. The Austrian Ski Patrol only gets partial credit. The greater portion, of course, but still.

This is me on the Zugspitze. I have no pictures of the Austrian Ski Patrol, I'm sad to say.

I Ain't Askin' Fer Yer Advice, See? I'm Just Whinging My Bored Little Guts Out.

I'm hoping that, years and years from now when I look back on this period of my life, I don't say to myself, "Yup. That's where it all went bad." I'm saying this because it's weird; I'm in a rut, I know that I'm in a rut, I can easily afford to get myself out of the rut any time I want to, and yet, I continue not to. Don't get me wrong, there are good things going on for me right now: I have good friends, my last blog post inspired over a hundred comments for the first time, I'm learning how to make pop-corn having neither a microwave nor an air-popper, discovering the joys of coffee percolators, sampling many of the fine restaurants in the Stroudsburg area to find out who serves the best buffalo wings, (so far it's that place in the Delaware Water Gap that is where the old Brownies used to be) and I'm, ahem, backing up a whole bunch of DVDs onto blank DVD discs with my new Dual Layer DVD burner. So, obviously I have a full life.

It's just that without any forward momentum, a Man isn't really a Man, you know? And I'm not talking about romance or marriage or house mortgaging or anything like that, either, which is what most people consider forward momentum. And I'm only sort of talking about a job.

I'm talking about where do I want to go next? And it could be a travel destination, or a place to live, or hell, just a little old-fashioned direction... either way. I just don't know. Part of me wants to get a "temporary" job in Stroudsburg... but, I put quotes around "temporary" for a reason. Because then you need a place to live, which usually means a lease of some type, and then you need a bed and a couch and that home theatre system I've been looking forward to. And then "temporary" becomes "well that's a really loose definition of "temporary", isn't it then?" It's not even that I'm really against staying in Stroudsburg, you know? But the career opportunities are bleak bleak bleak, here.

I think I'm paralyzed. I mean, it's not permanent. The thing I'm best at is picking myself up and going somewhere. I just am waiting for the right moment to hit me, and it feels like a rut. And honestly, I thank BOB for that feeling. Knowing that you're in a rut is half the battle, right? ...RIGHT?! Lots of people don't notice that they're in a rut until they're already too depressed and stationary to do anything about it. I know, I've been there. Anyway, I'm still waiting on lots of other little things and details and nonsense and such to fall in to place, and though they all seem like small little stickies, together they add up to a large wad of super glue on my ass.

One day, I promise you gentle readers, I will get back to travel blogging. I swear.

I did make a second trip to Washington D.C last weekend... not for business this time though. Christy wanted to get out of town for a bit, so I caught a ride with her and Will. An eFriend of hers that goes by the handle KC met us there... very nice girl. We all had a few drinks on some fashionable street or other and things were moving along nicely until, in a fit of inexplicable exuberant derision, certain epithets were ill-advisedly shouted out of certain passing car windows at silly preppyuck D.C. club-goers waiting in long lines for their chance to make asses of themselves on the dance floor, and really it was only funny if you were wasted at the time, so I will bore you not with the details. Suffice it to say, I'm really happy that I didn't get beat up.

Other than that, my time has been spent trying to figure out how those little chinamen stuffed all those big bright fireworks into little containers, discussing the costs of flying to LA, imagining how depressed I would get if I had nothing to write about, and compensating for having nothing to write about by writing about nothing. It's a mad mad world.

Now, for all you mad mad commenters, (and I include myself in that category) other than the usual slicing, dicing, & ribbing banter that will no doubt ensue, I'd like to suggest a thread to hold you all together: A certain fellow blogger asked for a  list of movies that were bound to produce good belly laughs. In keeping with all of your high though misguided opinions of silly 'ol me, I want to get a list of movies that made you think. For those of you who don't know what I mean, what I want are movies that confused you and kept you up late making your poor head hurt in unfamiliar ways. Like this one did to me.

Carry on.

Time Wounds All Heals, And I May Be It This Time, So This Round To You But The Game Is Far From Over

I watched The US vs. John Lennon last night. Good flick. I admit I don't know that much about him, never having dove headfirst into Beatlemania, but it seems he had a bit of a Messiah Complex. Which, hey, good job, I say. If more people had Messiah Complexes, and weren't, you know, sociopathic, but went around getting millions of people to chant things like "All we are saying, is give peace a chance", I might have more hope for humanity. Anyway, the movie focused on the part of John's life where he evolves from a moptop into a political activist, and the US government's attempts, under Nixon and Hoover, to intimidate and have him deported.

As an aside, one thing that struck me in this movie were the bits of Government propaganda used to support the Vietnam War in those days, and how similar... no, how identical they were to our present day Nixonish regime's propaganda. Lord, we need another Messiah!

One thing that troubled me about the whole incident was something G. Gordon Liddy said in the film. John Lennon was a British citizen, living in New York under a visitor's visa. It galled G. that a foreigner, who loved living in the US and enjoying the freedoms that our National forefathers provided would dare to criticize the US war policy. "If you don't like it, go back to Britain", was the sentiment. And, as anti-US policy as I am, it sounds like a good point. As a US citizen, it would be supremely galling of me to go hang out in London and criticize the Blair administration for it's part in the Iraq war, wouldn't you agree?

Where it breaks down is here. The favorite Republican slogan, said off-camera, of "Shut up, or get out" is so twisted and unAmerican that anyone who says it and believes it, and even worse uses it as a policy making idea, ought to be the ones that get bitchslapped. I feel that, something that is often not thought about in those circles is that America was not a nation founded on religion, or borders, or policy. It was founded on ideas of equality and human rights, regardless of where you come from or who you worship or what kind of hat you hang on your coatrack in the evenings, and as such should be able to stand up to the critical eye of truth, or survive the attacks of lies, whichever Nation the mouthpiece hails from. Obviously, America failed that test in Vietnam, and we are woefully failing it again in Iraq. When the powers that be try to silence people, regardless of their citizenship, it means that they're scared. George Bush isn't scared, which means that Peace & Love and all that hippie malarky has no champion this time around.

Okay, getting off my high horse now, whom I've named Lennon.

Well, I've been "tagged" by Miss Luongo, and when such an august persona as she tells you to write something, you do not decline. I have been told that I must blog about my answers to the questions in the following category: Things I Know By Heart. Before I continue, I feel I must offer the disclaimer that although this rather feels like one of those emails you get with a list of half-questions such as: Favorite Color? Most Embarassing Moment? Second Favorite Movie? etc... and you answer them and reply to everyone on the mailing list, additionally sending it to five new friends, who in turn have to answer, it is not. One of those emails, I mean. First off, it's not an email. It's a "tag you're it!" blog game. Secondly, I was tagged under the geas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer metaphors, and seeing as I'm such a starstruck fanboy when it comes to Buffy, I must oblige. It's like when religious people invoke their deity. God told me to do it, amen! Well, Buffy has commanded me, via her latest acolyte Miss Luongo, and the power of the Slayer compels me.

Man, sometimes when I write things, I realize how lost a cause I really am. Anyway, moving on.

Things I Know By Heart:
Two Novels/Poems/Plays: What am I, Abraham Lincoln? When I was in the sixth grade I was in a play called Snow White and the Six Dwarves. There were only six because Smiley went to Hollywood to do toothpaste commercials. It was a stupid play. But I knew my lines by heart, does that count? I hate poetry. It seems to me that poetry is a cheap economical affected way of saying things in a misleading manner. Say what you mean, dammit! I understand that it's all supposed to be pretty, and in the old days a good way to make chicks weak in the knees. But, give me a good novel any day. I don't know any novels by heart though, that's ridiculous. So...

Love guppy

			You mean all the world to me.
			Without you I can't be free.
			You make me pant considerably.
			You're my love guppy.

			You have the finest rosebud's taste.
			Without you my life is waste,
			I'll stick to you like Elmer's paste.
			You're my love guppy.

			I'd break through a citadel.
			I'd fight with a raging bull, 
			Though winning would seem improbable.
			You're my love guppy.

			My love's as strong as the mid-ocean ridge.
			You shine like the rainbow bridge
			or like that light inside my fridge.
			You're my love guppy.

			For you I'd consume haggis,
			or lose the joys of Bacchus,
			or live in sin with Mike Dukakis.
			You're my love guppy.

			No time's too long for me to wait.
			For you, I'd fight against Fate,
			though maybe you could lose some weight,
			You're my love guppy.

			Without you, I'd be not whole,
			I would have to sell my soul,
			or gulp a quart of Tide-E-Bowl.
			You're my love guppy.

			My passion is always mounting.
			I'm like a geyser founting.
			Well, maybe not, but who's counting?
			You're my love guppy.

			The love that is the more intense
			always has the most silence,
			like quiet bursts of flatulence.
			You're my love guppy.

			I know that my love is true.
			I know that you'll love me too,
			or I'll hold my breath 'till I turn blue
			You're my love guppy.

			I'd not forget you if I tried.
			You make me all warm inside.
			My love's as pure as Naugahyde.
			You're my love guppy.

			Then I hear the words let slip
			From betwixt impatient lips,
			"I want to have a relationship.
			You're my love guppy."

So I don't actually have it memorized, but that's poetry!

Two Films/Television Shows You Can Quote From:  Well that's easy. The Kids in the Hall. The funniest show ever made, and I quote from it on a daily basis. If not out loud, then at least in my head, because if there isn't someone else around who knows the show as well as I do, it's not funny. For instance: "Well I think the great leader is some sort of twisted ass freak!" Or, "I'm crushing your head!" Or, "I'm not being sarcastic." And, not to be too obvious or anything, but you had to see it coming. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cordelia: "So, does looking at guns really want to make you have sex?" Xander: "I'm 17. Looking at linoleum makes me want to have sex."

Two Songs To Which You Know Every Word: Actually, I have a real problem with this. I don't know any words to any songs... at least, you know, not if the song is not playing at the moment so I can kind of stumble along with it, and that's only if I am extremely familiar with the music already. It's a serious mental block. I'm sure it has something to do with my disdain of poetry. When there's music on, I don't actually really ever pay attention to the words, which shocks my friends to no end. But, like I tell them, it's the music I care about, not the wooing of women by post-pubescent songwriters. Even when I really like the lyrics to something, I never commit them to memory. But having said all that, Scott, being so distressed over my handicap, saw his solemn duty as my best friend to teach me a song, and after days of practicing, (I'm not joking. Days.) I got this one down:

Show me the way to go home. I'm tired and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went straight to my head! -From JAWS.

Two Dishes You Can Make Without A Recipe: My Mom's special cheesecake, and tacos. If I buy the kind that come in that little yellow box.

Two Cities You Can Navigate Without A Map: I'm going to take this opportunity to be snotty about how well-travelled I am. Munich, Germany. Because I lived within an hour of it for six years and it's actually one of my top 2 favorite cities in the world. I spent alot of time there. The Hauptbahnhof (main train station) is one of my favorite parts of the city and makes a great starting point.
And while it may seem boastful considering what a maze the place is, but Venice. Because it's also one of my top 2 favorite cities and I've been there about 7 times, and because I know all of the major points and I don't mind wandering around it's back alleys lost for a few hours until stumbling upon a place I know. Actually, that's one of the most pleasurable activities in Venice. The other is riding the vaporetti (boat buses) around all day. San Marco piazza is sublime, too.

By the way, if anybody needs a personal tour guide, you know, I am totally for hire. For those two cities, or any other place I've been. Or not been. I'm really good at travelling.

And An Extra Question–What’s A Date You Always Remember, and What’s A Date You Always Forget?: This is the silliest question and reminds me more of those emails I was talking about than the other questions. But, the power of the Slayer compels me regardless, so, I always remember Christmas, because even if for some reason I didn't want to, the retail community makes sure that I don't. And I don't know of any dates I've forgotten, otherwise they wouldn't count as answers to this question, would they then? That was a very British answer in honor of John Lennon. Peace out.

Here's a picture of me in Prague which I thought of posting here because of the inherent personality-typing implicit in the tag questions. It's supposed to be mildly snarky. Probably it's narcissitic. Damn you, Myers-Briggs!

An Attempt To Remain Valid In This Confusing Young People's World

Good morning, everyone. I'm feeling quite perky on this fine winter day... Because there's snow on the ground here in Allentown! First time I've seen that in quite a while. Don't get me wrong; Thailand and Cambodia and all that tropical junk was nice and all, but thank god that whole holiday madness is over. Sure is good to be back in PA, yessiree. Now I can... um... figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Hmm... anybody want to start a betting pool on how long it'll be before I high-tail it the hell out of here for another exotic travel destination? I did receive an email a week or two ago from an old friend I knew while working in Germany whom I hadn't heard from in years, and he's living in Buenos Aires! I haven't done South America yet...

Ah well, best not think about it for now. I have myriad other issues I have to deal with for the moment, before I start getting all itchy footed again. Actually, this time it was much easier coming back. It was kind of, that first time I came back in December after being gone for years and years was like jumping into an iceberg infested Alaskan bay in February. Very chilly and prone to cause the shakes and various other health problems. So I hopped out right quick, and then came back for a second dip only this time my body was ready for the shock.

I slept without my eyeshields for the first time last night, because I was too exhausted from the 22 hour plane travel to bother getting up to tape them on. My eyes seem fine this morning, so I think I'm done with those. Hip hip, hooray.

Maybe some of you have noticed an interesting new technique I'm using in this post. The ADD kids these days call them linebreaks. They are apparently becoming the in way to write, because something about short attention spans, lazy eyes, and something something something has dictated that if you don't use them, people don't understand what you're saying. Reading line after line after line, with no spaces in between them, is becoming one of those old-fashioned quirks that will separate the stylish young up-and-comers from the old brain-dead farts that can't roll with the changes. So, in order to avoid becoming obsolete, you'll be seeing alot of these, linebreaks, in my posts from now on. For those of you who can hold a thought in your head from paragraph to paragraph without going all Memento, I apologize, but the world belongs to the young, as they say, and if you want to remain relevant, you've got to adapt.

Speaking of Memento, I saw Christopher Nolan's new film The Prestige on the airplane from Tokyo to Chicago yesterday. If you haven't seen it, I don't want to ruin anything for you, but I kind of thought it blew. I mean it was well done, the actors were all great, but I figured out the twist halfway through the movie, and thought to myself, "No, it can't be that simple. There's something else." But nope, it was that simple. The worst part was, at the end when they reveal the depth and convolution of the twist, they do it all dramatic like the end of Sixth Sense, only I was laughing my ass off because it had been so easy to figure out that it made the final moments extremely comical, which I imagine was not the director's intent at all. It's a shame, I really like Christopher Nolan, too.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Now I have to come up with actual topics for my posts again, which is another reason I love travel. Travel makes coming up with subject material extremely easy; this whole coming up with relevant, interesting, or humorous posts while living in an uninspiring locale such as Pennsylvania requires real talent, such as some of my other blogging friends have, and now I have to fear everyone finding out what a fraud I am if I draw a blank. Damn Sword of Damocles.

In Which I Get A Taste Of My Own Medicine, Which Sounds Kind Of Gross, But That's The Expression, Isn't It Then?

I've been watching the news for the last couple of days from Baghdad, and I caught myself doing exactly what I've been telling friends and family not to do for the last three years... which is to worry about my friends there. (Well, I never said for you guys not to worry about my friends. Actually I told you all not to worry about me, but you see, now I'm worried about them, so it's the same thing. Or rather, my position has now changed, so that rather than having people worry about me, I have to worry about people there. I hope I didn't just lose, or worse, bore you; I'm actually having trouble piecing the last couple of sentences together myself; I think I may have overexplained an unimportant point, just a tad... I need a drink.) See, the thing is, is that when you're there, in Baghdad, relatively safe inside the Emerald City, and stuff blows up or you read about stuff blowing up in various other parts of the city, you kind of shrug your shoulders and go tsk tsk, but you go on with your day, you know? I mean it's not like you don't worry or you don't care, but it's just another aspect of the environment where you go about your daily business. Noony noony noony noo-ny.
But the current crisis in Baghdad, which began on the 24th, and seems to be calm for the moment as of yesterday, really has me on the edge of my seat. Full-out Civil War seems fairly inevitable at this point, and that just means a whole world of badness for anybody still there, Iraqi wise. I'm sure that those inside the Interzone will still be fine, for the most part, and most of the Iraqis I know have emigrated to Kurdistan anyway, where the madness hasn't reached yet and hopefully never will. I'm trying to remember how the news always makes it seem worse than it feels when you're in the middle of it, but the more time that goes by where I'm having cappuccinos, walking around posh shopping areas, touring pretty mosques and museums, and eating McDonalds, the more distanced I've begun to feel, naturally enough, and the harder it is to put my head back into what's going on over there.
But my point is, now I know how things looked like to those few of you who were worried about me (and/or others in Iraq) from the outside for the last three years... didn't mean to minimize your nagging voices to a Peanuts adult character quite as much as I did... sorry about all that! Heh heh. All's well that ends well, aye? No hard feelings? Right-e-o, moving along then.
So Turkey has been real fun, but I've been here way too long... I have gotten to know Istanbul rather too intimately. I don't have much to add, excitement wise, from my last week here. I've mostly just been hitting the pavement and shoving my nose into every available nook and cranny, and even retreading the more choice spots. I really like the mix of East and West here... lots of haijabs, lots of carpets, lots of eyes of Fatima, and lots of other Middle Eastern stuff-n-junk, and also fast food. This has totally been a great place to ease back in to the West. I even went to see the new James Bond movie... it was in English with Turkish subtitles, so that was nice. It's a good one; definitely a bold move in the Bond franchise. I like that he gets his butt kicked all over the place, before sort of coming out on top. It's not really what Bond is supposed to be about, but that just made it more interesting. Anyway, Istanbul, not Bond. Sorry. It's a wicked neat city, but sadly it's not as exotic to me as it might have been had I not already toured several Middle Eastern countries before arriving here, though as I said, I did enjoy the mix. But I feel that I've finally seen everything I need to, and it's time to move on, so tomorrow morning I'll be flying to Budapest for a few days, and then making my way by train to Munich. I will, as usual, tell you more than you probably want to know about how it all goes.

Overly-Friendly Travel Agents Are The Trojan Horses Of My Wallet

It seemed like such a good idea at the time, it really did. When I was in Istanbul, and getting tired of it, I stopped by a travel office one day to try and get some tickets to the Cappadocia region. Somehow, the agent talked me into this whole tour package thing... I'm trying to remember exactly why it sounded like a good idea. Normally, I have better sense, because I hate tours, being a part of a tour group, the buses, all of it. But Turkey is such a large country, and there's a lot to see, and this seemed to be an easy way to get to do a lot of it without having to think about the logistics too much, or worry about fitting it all in.
Well, I guess this was just a lesson that I needed to re-learn. Never again. Don't get me wrong, Cappadocia was amazing. It's where Hanna-Barbera got the idea for the Flintstones, I'm sure. I got to see lots of cave dwellings, ancient and modern, as present day Cappadocians still utilize the swiss-rock land to the fullest. I even slept in a cave hotel; pretty cool. But the thing I hate about tours is how much they lead you around by the hand; they neglect to tell you about simple things such as bus changes because they figure you're too stupid to remember, and just change everything in mid-direction and expect you to relax and not be concerned. Also, for every cool place they take you, they also take you to some local craft shop or souvenir kiosk where you are touted to death.
On the other hand, I got to see some things I may not have found on my own, so it's a fifty fifty proposition. We toured this underground city... wicked cool. I guess the Hitites used to hide out down there, and then the Christians. There are like seven levels of interconnected caves spreading out for hundreds of kilometers underground. We also got to see some Rock Churches... not rock-n-roll, just rock. I guess the Christians that settled in Cappadocia built several hundred cave churches around, and we got to see some of the more impressive ones.
Now I'm in some town on some seaside area somewhere... I left Cappadocia last night on a 14 hour overnight bus ride, on which I got to see some 60's Turkish slapstick comedy. It was hilarious... I have no idea what it was about or what anybody was saying, but I laughed my ass off. All I can recall at the moment is some duelling banjo-thing contest between rival harems, and there was a picnic where the fat harem ladies, in full regalia, were forced to perform sack-races and egg-in-a-spoon-in-the-teeth races for the men, and then the men got all greased up and wrestled some mentally handicapped dude. And at the end of the movie, they all started slapstick hitting each other and simultaneously all lost their balance and rolled down a sand dune together into a freeze-frame. I tell you, they aren't kidding when they say that travel is broadening.
Anyway, in the next couple of days I'll be touring Ephesus and Pergamon (Pergamum?) and some other cool junk. I had wanted to go to Troy, but the tour guy talked me out of it because I guess there's not much to see, as anything museum-worthy was carted off to foreign museums, and the big wooden horse that is there is not, apparently, the original Trojan Horse. It is a newer one built to trap tourists, which I now find to be a very funny line which the travel agent used to get me not to go there, as %50 of this tour is nothing but a tourist trap. He also managed to talk me out of going to Olympos... man, I am such a sucker!
I just Wikipediaed Pergamon, and it's both. It can be Pergamum, also. Anyway, here's a shot of one of many good spots in Cappadocia:

Self-Fulfilling Grizzly Motorcycle Prophecy

Heh heh... I was just re-reading some of my earlier blog entries, and something funny occured to me. If someone had told me before a year ago that "You'll pilot a Russian jet plane before you ever drive a motorcycle!" I would have taken it to mean that I'd never in my life actually ride a motorcycle. But as it turns out, it would've been prophecy! I actually have flown a Russian Jet, and have not yet driven a motorcycle in my life! That's awesome! So I also have to kind of call bull***t on myself here because in my description of flight day, I compared piloting the L-39 acrobatic jet to driving a motorcycle in the sky, and as I've never been on a motorcycle, I apparently had no true basis for comparison, (unless you count the scooters I drove while living in Bavaria, which I probably shouldn't) but it sounded good. But I will definately correct that at some point in the future, as the prophecy clearly states that I WILL fly a Russian jet before ever riding a motorcycle! hee hee. Self-fulfillment rules!
  Has anyone seen 'Grizzly Man'? I watched it the other night, and man I laughed my butt off at that guy! I mean, he's just some loser that decided to go live in a super dangerous Grizzly Bear environment, even though he'd had no formal training with something like Park Service or Bearology or whatever! What did he think was going to happen! Ha! .... but then I realized that I've pretty much done the same thing... and I'm not sure if that makes him worthy of more respect from me, or me worthy of equal derision... let's just drop the subject there, okay?
So anyway, we finished the construction, mostly on time, but I'm still not sure where we stand with the client... on the one hand I think it's likely that they'll tell us to take a hike anyway, as we are usually having a crisis of some sort and are not fully able to meet their requirements, but on the other hand they'd be foolish to let us go because they've been bullying us into performing work that is outside what we are actually contracted to do, and we have to let them because we are in no position to stand up for ourselves. Additionally, they haven't paid GBG in 6 months, so it's work for free! Another contractor won't give them a deal like that! So anyway, my honest guess is that we'll only be here a few more months until they can hire a replacement contractor, but I've heard nothing official yet.
Thailand, here I come!