La trahison des images

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:17:09 GMT

Last night, Erica and I found we only had two slices of bread left and we both wanted sandwiches for lunch today. After a slightly tense moment, I chivalrously offered to make myself a tuna salad wrap, as we had some manner of tortillas, and all was well. However, when I reached into my back at lunch time did I find a tuna salad wrap? No! It was the PB&J I was planning on making the night before, and on ordinary bread too. I assumed that one of two things had happened, either I was a huge jerk and just didn't pay attention when I took my lunch out of the fridge this morning, or she switched them before I left for work. I ate it while planning how to figure out which of those to scenarios was the actual course of this mornings events, so I could either apologize or thank profusely. Rather than be sneaky, I just sent a text message to ask. My confused wife texted back to say that her sandwich had been in her lunch bag the whole time, was not PB&J but phoney baloney, and was, in fact, delicious.
The question is, where did the PB&J come from? A more thorough search of my bag revealed the tuna salad, uneaten and unmolested, but I honestly have no clue where the other sandwich came from or, more importantly, how long it had been there.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:42:27 GMT

Too busy working on the summer job that i'm not qualified for to get work done on the full time job starting in the fall that i'm barely qualified for. Somewhere in there I've got to manage to find and buy a car that I can hardly afford.
I'm kind of done with being a grown up.
Actually. It's not so bad. The summer job, while way out of my league, is actually a lot of fun and I'm managing to keep up. Anyway. Life goes on.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:53:18 GMT

I haven't updated since March? Wow. I'm a bad person. What's new since then? Quite a bit actually.
Most importantly, my job search is at an end. I went on about 10 interviews, and they kept telling me I was one of the top candidates or that there was one person ahead of me who accepted the job. I found it a little disheartening but kept at it, as I'm going to have monstrous loan payments to make as of August 8. And finally it paid off. I'll be working as the librarian at a small high school on the MA/RI border, as well as supervising the elementary school librarians in the district. So go me.
Which brings us to the fact that I'll be driving almost to Rhode Island 180 days a year. Which necessitates buying a car. My commute is going to be about 100 miles a day, round trip. So I'm going to be putting over 18,000 miles a year on it (that's just from my commute, not to mention errands and weekends), so I don't want a used car. I want something new that I can run into the ground. To the best of my knowledge, the cheapest car (other than smartcars) available right now is the Nissan Versa which, in its simplest incarnation, comes in under 10k - so cheap I could (hypothetically) put the whole thing on my credit card. Because the commute is so long and gas prices could go anywhere, I considered a hybrid, and (for those of you considering one) apparently 2009 Prius' are available with 0% interest right now, it almost looked like I could afford it. But no, it wont work. Oh well. Moving on...
I have a list of cars but for my budget right now, dirt cheap works for me. I'm at least waiting for two things to happen:
1) When 2010 cars come out dealers are going to drop prices on 2009s just to get rid of them.
2) See how this whole Chrysler/Fiat nonsense plays out.

But one way or another, I need a car by september 1st.

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:44:16 GMT

So, watch the trailer for the film adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are" and then indulge my ranting:

Got it? Good. Here we go.
Let me get a compliment out of the way before I move into the bashing. The monsters do look like a wonderful blend of CGI and people goofing off in suits, and they clearly devoted a lot of time and effort to making them match the illustrative power of Maurice Sendak. That being said...
Why are people so excited about this? Doesn't anybody remember when they made The Cat in the Hat into a movie and it had absolutely NOTHING to do with the actual book except for the characters? Remember how stupid and pointless and greedy it seemed?
"Inside everyone is hope. Inside everyone is fear" - Are you kidding me? Did Barrack Obama write your taglines? And the book has nothing to do with hope or fear. It's a book about a kid being really angry and getting over it and discovering his parents still love him despite the fact that he acted like a schmuck.
Quite frankly, I don't give a flying fuck about Spike Jonze (Spike Jones and his City Slickers, however, are one of my all time favorites). Ooh. "Your perception of reality is not based in fact. What is real and what is imagination?" Really? Phillip K. Dick much? I'm been over his schtick for a while, and now I'm really sick of him. I am sure that there is a perfectly good movie to be made about a kid who goes off to live in the woods with a bunch of monsters (not deliverance), but since the actual book Where the Wild Things Are offers such little plot other than mischief, monsters, and something called a wild rumpus, why not make that movie instead of co-opting the title from one of the most loved books of all time. Remember when you found out that Super Mario 2 was not originally a Mario game and suddenly it all made sense how weird everything seemed about it? Same shit, different medium. Make your own damn movie, Spike Jonze. Quit sodomizing my childhood for your own profit.

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:49:47 GMT

I wonder what happened next:

http://tinyurl.com/dyb3xa

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:51:31 GMT

Two things:
1) The wife and I have discovered the joy of making marshmallows. We both want to try making them with all manner of funky flavoring, but we can't agree on what. Personally, I want lime. Can you imagine making rice crispy treats with lime marshmallows? Or mint? Or lime and mint for a mojito crispy treat? Fun.

2) We saw watchmen. The general consensus seems to be that the opening credits are absolutely awesome while the rest of the movie fails in various ways. I don't think this is going to get to spoler-y, but if you really don't want to know *anything* about the movie, you might want to stop reading. Of course, if you were that obsessive you should have seen it already. Anyway, what I noticed first and foremost was the absolutely shitty wirework. In other parts of the movie Zach Snyder clearly went out of his way to make things as gory as possible, whether its a person getting limbs removed by a powersaw or recognizable body parts like ribs and jawbones in what remains after Dr Manhattan blows someone up. The gore is rendered in bloody, stomach-turning detail, but when it comes to a guy climbing a ladder he just couldn't be bothered. And as for Dr. Manhattan himself, apparently being disintegrated by tachyons and reforming your body through sheer will not only gives you super powers but also an enormous blue wang, something Mr. Snyder repeatedly points out. Additionally, we've all seen Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, we know how well you can animate a mouth and face to synch with speech. When Dr. Manhattan speaks it looks like one of those cut out mouths on Conan O'Brien.
I'll limit myself to just ranting about the special effects for now.

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:27:56 GMT

Yesterday I got my MA licensure in the mail. I'm official and stuff.

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:52:45 GMT

I was not thrilled when they announced that they were making a live action transformers movie. However, there is something delightful about giant robots that everybody seemed to know it would work, and it did. Following in those footsteps comes the GI Joe movie, and I am not giving it the benefit of the doubt just because the Transformers movie did so well. I, in fact, think it is going to suck. A lot. Why? WHY? In Transformers, even though he didn't have many lines, we had Hugo Weaving playing Megatron. Hugo Weaving is a great actor, and as much as I liked him in LOTR (and long before that in Priscilla Queen of the Desert), he's got a face that is just made for villainy. I think it's the eyebrows. Not that eyebrows matter when you're portraying a giant evil robot. The point is this: Who's playing Cobra Commander? Have you checked the cast list? I have. Joseph Gordon Levitt. The kid from Third Rock. Tommy Solomon is heading up a terrorist organization.

Also, Arnold Vosloo who previously played the title character in "The Mummy" is playing Zartan the swamp-dwelling, cajun, chameleon guy. Not to say anything of his acting ability, but Zartan was one of the most disappointing toys of my childhood. He was supposed to change color to camouflage himself and all he did was get darker in sunlight. I could do that.

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:42:19 GMT

Some of you will love this, others will scratch your heads and say "WTF?"
That being said, I give you: I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:37:23 GMT

As a scrabble (ok, actually lexulous nee scrabulous), I cannot overstate my love of the word Qi. It is perfect. Just two letters long and worth, a q word that requires no u, and worth 11 points in scrabble, 13 in lexulous. And it's just so easy to drop into a game. I (tied with A) is the second most common letter in the game. They're everywhere. And I is in so many two letter words that, chances are, wherever you can put Qi in one direction you can also put Qi perpendicular to it to double up on the high scoring letter. And if you're really lucky, you can drop that on a double or triple letter/word. I just got 77 fucking points for it, albeit in lexulous and not the original Scrabble. And not that definition matters but the fact that it means life force is kind of cool too.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:52:59 GMT

My father in law bought us a Garmin. My folks used to have one of their own, and I hated it. It was a holiday gift from one of their employers, something they would have never bought but once they had it they felt compelled to use it. It would randomly take us in circles for no apparent reason, and tell us to make right turns while we were crossing bridges. Worst of all, the cheap ass employer bought thte cheap ass model which didn't announce street names. Just "make left, make right, get out and walk". The word "recalulating" became the bane of our existance, and we heard it over and over again. Eventually someone stole it on a night when my parents forgot to lock the car door; I can only hope it caused them as much annoyance as it caused me.
The one from my father in law was a generous and thoughtful gift, and I thanked him for it, eager to use a new gadget and hoping it would be different from the other (the former one was a Tomtom, I believe).
More recently, we followed fitzjustice and his GPS down an endless dirt road - and I use the word "road" loosely here, it was more of just a section of forest where no trees happened to be growing at the moment - in search of an apple orchard which we never found. Despite all this, we gave it a try.
My wife hated it instantly. It took forever to even figure out where we were. I know they have to sync with satellites, but it took like half an hour before it didn't think we were floating in the Atlantic. It also wanted us to take a different route than we'd previously taken, and while I was willing to give it a chance, she was convinced it was dead wrong. Naturally we argued, and as any married couple can tell you: there is no fight like a car fight. Pretty soon I was sick of the thing too. Eventually, when we were headed somewhere we didn't actually know how to get there in advance, we gave the thing a second try and it worked out.
However, we felt the voice sounded kind of bitchy. For most languages, it offers only one option, but for English it offers male and female voices in three different language. The American English speaking woman was quite short with us and we didn't like her at all. Unfortunately it doesn't offer English with an accent from another language, so eventually we settled on the Australian woman's voice, in the hopes that it might take us to an Outback Steak House. It didn't.

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:06:56 GMT

My house is cold.

Also I really hate when I call someone's cell phone and I get a "ring back". Its bad enough that people get the some stupid song as their cellphone ring, but now I get it when I call them. You may find Sean Michaels' entrance theme amusing, but I sure as fuck don't. And because it's a "ring back" you never even get to hear it! Jackass.

Every time I decide "hey, I'll put the Hawaii 5-O theme as my ringtone. That will give me some retro-cool-hipster-with-a-sense-of-humor credibility" I then imagine what would happen if it went off at a funeral or something, and I just stick with vibrate.

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:52:26 GMT

Stupid snow. Stupid being sick. Stupid shoveling.

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:24:38 GMT

This is the sort of thing fitzjustice and I talk about when we're supposed to be being productive:

Dave: i know you have a strong dislike for Bear whatshisnuts, the Man Vs. Wild dude...but what's your opinion of Les Stroud?
me: never heard of him
Dave: Survivorman
me: wait. is he the survivorman guy?
yeah
Dave: yeah
me: he's all good
Dave: yeah, that was my thought too...
just wanted to run it past quality check, however :)
me: and i give props to bear grylls
he just annoys the crap out of me
and his stupid show is a rip off of survivorman
AND he stays in hotels from time to time while filming
Dave: i haven't seen Man Vs. Wild
but i heard about all the controversy and it sounds lame
wheras Survivorman is hard core
me: i mean
bear IS hard core
he drinks his own pee and bit the head off a snake
but annoying
Dave: whereas Les Stroud is, at his core, a Canadian.
and therefore nearly incapable of being annoying :)
me: well its canadian vs briton
1 has wilderness survival skills because it's necessary
Dave: i've known enough people from Manchester to know just how annoying britons can be
me: the other because it's jolly good fun to get out and associate with the lower classes.
Dave: hee hee
well said. ok, i've got to get back to work.
me: before you go
Dave: thanks for the distraction
yes?
me: what was your decision on the spike vs mal debate?
Dave: in an actual fight?
Spike would win
me: yeah
Dave: but he'd also end up bandaged head to foot
me: mostly because he's a cartoon, but still
Dave: now, if you could allow the kind of cheating that Mal employs on a regular basis...
then it would be a coin flip
me: Nah. I may be biased
but being as impartial as possible
I really don't think mal has a chance
Dave: let me rephrase that
me: the whole point of mal
is that he is, at heart, just a guy
Dave: true
me: he's a good pilot and a good fighter and a good soldier
but in the context of good as compared to any other ordinary guy
Dave: whereas Spike is a cold-blooded and possibly cybernetic and mystic assasin
me: yes
Dave: it's true
Spike would kick Mal's ass
i never had a doubt. i just thought it was fun ponderation :)
me: spike is also not above cheating
Dave: however...for Spike, "engaging in the fight" may be construed as "cheating"
me: Han Solo, on the other hand, would bring a Wookiee to a gunfight
and that would more or less end things
Dave: which is the kind of cheating that i was thinking of with mal...a man who is not above winning fight by landing his spaceship on top of the other guy

feel free to add your own contributions to either debate.

When I was a kid my friends and I would debate Batman vs. Superman or Optimus Prime vs Knight Rider (yes, I now know the car was named kit, but at the time we always just referred to the car as Knight Rider) or Mr T vs. He-Man or other stuff and now, nearly 30, very little has changed. (if you're curious, the overall opinion was that Mr. T and Batman were both undefeatable, though we never got around to discussing which of those two would win).

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:02:28 GMT

No matter how bad a mood I'm in or how much I don't want to wait for the bus to go into work, some jackass driving through the harvard square busway always cracks me up. Especially when he's in a pickup truck and has a look of pure anger on his face that says "I'm so pissed at my own stupidity"

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:18:35 GMT

My wife thinks its weird that I have Google alerts set up for everyone in my family. Ok maybe it's a little wierd but I'm just making sure some jackass with a blog doesn't post something stupid. Not that I can actually prevent it, but at least I'll know.

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:02:34 GMT

I always lament that my journal has gone steadily downhill (pretty much since I went to China), and, for the most part, I blame graduate school and facebook. But last night I finished my last class at Simmons. Now, assuming all the paperwork goes through, I'll have my degree and certification to teach. But last night, also, a friend of mine died. He moved in across the street from my family when I was about four years old and his son and I were good friends throughout our childhoods. The man was a giant, both literally and figuratively. He was at least 6'3 and well over 200 lbs, defying the stupid stereotypes people have of Ethiopians. He was also a respected academic on the sociology of modern Africa and a vocal proponent of Eritrean independence. He didn't have his own wikipedia page, but his works are referenced in several. My earliest memories of him are of him picking me up and throwing me in the air. And then my brother and his son and back to me again with tireless ease, and he was still able to do it long after we got to big for my father to do the same, though to be fair my dad also had major back surgery. No neighborhood barbecue was complete without him bringing over his specially marinated beef for the grill, or a plate of hamburgers so heavily spiced that the meat turned green.
When we were in middle school, his son and I were in the same class and we had a genealogy assignment. Most of us could trace things back at least three or four generations. He could trace a direct line of decendancy to a famous early king of Ethiopia. So, arguably, Sunday I'm going to a kings funeral. That doesn't happen too often.
He is also the first person close to me who's died. My grandparents and my aunt were both old or crazy or both, and my father either hated them or was embarassed by them, but he generally kept us away from them except for the few times a year we'd go visit them in the nursing home. On my mothers side, her father died before I was born and as nice as her stepfather was to me, they lived on the opposite side of the country and we didn't see each other often. My mother didn't like him too much either, and so we were never close.
20 or 25 years ago he had a nearly fatal bout of meningitis, and though he survived and bounced back, he had some liver issues and this mountain of a man who drank scotch by the class could never touch the stuff again. Everything was fine until he came down with a still unidentified lung disorder. I guess his body could handle one system running a little behind but when both were stressed everything started to collapse. Over the summer he spent a month in the hospital and when he came out he had an oxygen tube that stayed with him the rest of his life. They had to sell their gas grill and convert over electricity and he gave his son, home from a doctoral program in California, special lessons on how to properly marinate and grill that special beef.
Briefly, he was near the top of the list for a lung transplant but something - I doubt I'll ever know what - went wrong. I would assume that its got something to do with the transplant anti-rejection drugs and his failing liver, but who knows. For whatever reason, he was taken off the list, and he gave up on his idea of finding another hospital to do the surgery, and he came home to die.
That was a week or two ago. I made a point to stop by their house the next day, he could barely speak but we talked a little and I talked with his family a while - they were all gathered around him because by that point he couldn't leave the room. This was just before thanksgiving, and shortly after he slipped into a coma. I didn't know it, I guess you never do, but that was the last time I'd speak to him.
The coma hit me, almost literally. I couldn't think, I felt dizzy, I had to sit down. I never thought something would make me need to sit down but there it was. I told my wife what happened and we just sat there in silence. I visited him twice after that. The first time, though unconscious, he would groan and move around, one time nearly even saying something coherent. The next time he was very still, but even then he made the occasional noise or movement. And last night his lungs finally shut down and all the tubes and tanks and pumps in the world couldn't give him the oxygen he needed.
I try to see it that my friend isn't rigged up to machines and catheters anymore. I try to at least find peace that my friend isn't in pain anymore, but he's still gone. And I wont lie and say that it doesn't hit close to home that he's my parents age. We pessimists like to say that we're all dying, but thats in a vague, nebulous sense of "eventually". He was real and immediate. But ultimately, he died in his sleep surrounded by his family. What more could any of us want?

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:34:11 GMT

If I wrote Star Wars...

Darth Vader: The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant when compared to the power of the Force.
Grand Moff Tarkin: Can the force destroy a planet?
Vader: No.
Tarkin: I see.
Vader: I could choke you with my mind.
Tarkin: Can you destroy a planet?
Vader: I could levitate a ship out of a swamp.
Tarkin: Can you destroy a planet?
Vader: I could cut you in half with my lightsaber.
Tarkin: Can you even destroy the moon of Endor?
Vader: This is not the argument you were looking for.
Tarkin: This is not the argument I was looking for.
Vader: I can go about my business.
Tarkin: You can go about your business.

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:23:01 GMT

Now, I haven't actually read the Twilight series, but I'll go on record as saying that the previews I've seen for the movie are utter crap. They don't just make the movie look bad, they themselves are poor examples of the artform that is the movie preview. That is all.

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:18:12 GMT

A local beekeeper told me his theory that the cause of "Colony Collapse Disorder" was that large beekeeping companies would rent out their hives to farmers all around the world. A hive would be delivered and left in a specific field to go out and pollinate everything. Obviously this is something that bees would do naturally, however when it is done for money and as part of an industry, can the resulting crops be considered animal products? I'd be curious to hear a strict vegan interpretation of this.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:21:24 GMT

Take that, Niccolo Machiavelli.

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:10:42 GMT

Stolen from a few people...

If you read this, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. It could be how we met, something you regret, something you love or just something that stuck with you. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:30:55 GMT

stumbleupon + del.icio.us = joy

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:16:08 GMT

from nikkisioux who got it from someone else:

"I find it hard to believe that some people, mostly liberal and at least of modest intellect are actually voting third party because their ideals are not perfectly embodied by Obama. Look at where this kind of idealism got us. You must realize that people, including yourself, will tangibly suffer for your decision.

I consider myself to be idealistic and extremely independent, but there is a time when you must put that extremism aside and unite for the greater good: the kind that will ensure your basic freedoms, let alone your personal ideology. Most people who indulge in this kind of behavior were raised privileged, educated in the ivory tower and shielded by income afforded by their economic birthright. For those whom this is not the case, I applaud your tenacity, but not your intention. We are at a precipice and steadily leaning over the edge. Please consider the impact of your vote before throwing it away."

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:47:36 GMT

In continuation of this post I decided to attempt to make my own la jiao. I had a fairly good idea what was in it and found a few recipes on the internet, but ultimately was on my own. What I made was a pretty tasty chili paste (this stuff, if you're curious). It's good. Its not what I wanted, but it's good. At the suggestion of a recipe on line I soaked the peppers first so soften them up. What I think I need to do is smash them nearly into a powder first, almost like chili sand, and then reconstitute that in a little oil. Next time. But until then I've got all this chili paste to go through, and hot damn is it spicy.