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Andrew Lindemann Malone's Internet Playpen |
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Friday, 10/31/03 Happy Hallowe'en! Today's spooky occurrence was Lotus Notes' refusal to consistently allow me to, you know, open my e-mail at work. Or maybe this is Lotus Notes' death throes. Nothing else spooky happened yet, so that's going to have to do. One of the things I love about Slate is that they employ two writers, Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer, who often write articles I've been meaning to write but haven't had time to, and furthermore write the articles better than I could have. A month or so ago, it was Noah mocking and explaining the conservative presumption that Hillary desperately desires to run for president. Just yesterday, it was Shafer pulling out the hickory stick on Tina Brown's new, excreable column in the Washington Post. I had been meaning to write something incredibly vicious about how poorly written and irrelevant her column has been thus far (I actually sent a letter to the Post calling for its removal), but Shafer beat me on quickness and (probable) quality. I'm happy to have other people doing the heavy lifting for me, though, because making a link in Dreamweaver is a lot easier than making an argument in prose. And I can still pull out a hickory stick when I have to. I'm not sure if I've yet called everyone's attention to two sections on the Movie Reviews page, Cream of the Crop and Bottom of the Barrel. They're designed to facilitate the renting of enjoyable movies. Everything on Cream of the Crop should be considered next time you hit your local cinema shack. Everything on Bottom of the Barrel should be avoided like an envelope full of anthrax. Easy and fun to use. Try it this weekend!
Wednesday, 10/29/03 Jason Walther's Blog-A-Thon for the National Stuttering Association, now with that hyphenation, is going on right now, dammit!!! over here. He's batting about .400 in making me laugh out loud, which beats most people who try their hand at that task. The fact that I'm giving him 50 cents for each post but $1 for any posts that result in audible chuckling means that we're both happy. I'm sure Jason will not mind if you belatedly decide to give the NSA some money in recognition of his feat. Better belated than completely nonoccurrent, as I would say if I'd been drinking. Two articles worth mentioning:
Monday, 10/27/03 More on the Kool-Aid Man prank I linked to Saturday (and have relinked to here). A group of students has taken responsibility for the prank but not the stealing; they said they would have simply left the Fear the Turtle sign on the ground had it been there when they began their efforts. Disturbingly, the students (and the Diamondback editorial staff, here) seem to be mainly familiar with the Kool-Aid Man through his apparently recent appearance on Family Guy, which shows that they are unlearned sprout people with no historical perspective. Not that this should be unexpected. Not being an unlearned sprout person, I knew that the Kool-Aid Man was an employee of Kraft Foods, and wrote to Kraft asking if they might legitimize the students' efforts by putting a cool inflatable Kool-Aid Man in the hole in the brick wall until Maryland gets the wall fixed. For a reasonable sum, of course. Maryland could certainly use the money. This was Kraft's response:
Kraft Foods is run by suckers.
Sunday, 10/26/03 My esteemed blog colleague Jason Walther plans to undertake a Blog-A-Thon (he didn't hyphenate it that way, but this isn't the Spamomatic) on Wednesday to raise funds for the National Stuttering Association. His goal: One blog entry every hour for 24 hours. (How can he do it? He's unemployed!) In a competitive marketplace for charitable giving, you have to consider which causes are going the extra mile for your donations. Some places give you gifts of unsolicited address labels with misspellings or notecards that are too damnably cute to actually use. Jason, on the other hand, gives the always-welcome gift of laughter. I think we all know which is the more worthy appeal. Pledge your support via e-mail at his site or in the comment box at the Blog-A-Thon announcement here.
Saturday, 10/25/03 This is one of the funniest practical jokes I've ever heard about — a perfect example of using the existing circumstances to make something magical. If you don't get it, this will provide an explanation, although the explanation (if the reaction of one of my coworkers yesterday was any indication) will not cause you to laugh. It's more of a curiosity matter at that point. Leave the laughing to the rest of us.
Wednesday, 10/22/03 Apart from a killer migraine, I was pretty good today also. Time to stop the mood updates, I guess. It was about a month this year and it wasn't as severe as last year. Those are both victories. New to the site today: The Arnold Schwarzenegger Tribute Page. Sure, you've seen him in "End of Days" and "Collateral Damage," but have you seen him in As I Lay Dying? Journey to the heart of my juvenalia and see how funny it still is. I still like all of it, but then, I was there.
Monday, 10/20/03 Well, I feel a good deal better now that I analyzed my recent persistent sadness and wrote it up and put it on the Internet for bewildered people referred from other sites to see. It's a good thing I have this daisy-cutting objectivity bomb that I can deploy every so often, or otherwise I'd be in a heap o' trouble. Also it was sunny today, and I got to make oatmeal-butterscotch chip cookies. I have not had too much to do at work lately, so I thought I'd share with you some articles I read while standing ever-ready in case someone needs me to use the verbs "require," "promulgate" and "mitigate" repeatedly to protect animal and/or plant health:
Sunday, 10/19/03 A review of the Jason Moran and the Bandwagon show on Wednesday at the Kennedy Center is now up at Jazz Times' web site. Remember, folks: Jazz Times is currently the world's second-best source for my writing, so if you enjoy this site, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to JT. Actually, you'd better get two subscriptions, just in case! (Just in case what? Just in case I come to your house and steal the first one to spike sales. Yeah.) • My mom has sent me a perfectly reasonable and pleasurable conversation that could well have occurred last night (see post below) if I had felt like allowing it to happen. I knew there had to be one of those. Generally, I try not to talk about my psychological state on this site, because there are few more boring things, in my experience, than reading about someone else's psychological state. But I let the cat peek out of the bag in the post below, so I've decided going to open the drawstrings. If you're dreading the new few paragraphs already, you can read something entertaining here or here. For the past month or so, I've been more nervous than normal, and I've drawn inward as a response. Why I've been more nervous is pretty obvious to me: the weather is changing, from summer to fall, and I tend to get a lot more agitated during April-May and September-October than any other months. While this tendency does not, to my knowledge, appear in the DSM-IV, I've been very diligent about tracking my psychological condition over the last five or six years, and I know it explains at least 80 percent of whatever unusual distress I feel during these months. Drawing inward as a response is probably even less obvious to anyone reading this. The problem is that any free-floating nervousness I have from the weather tends to settle on social interaction. (Try getting really obsessively agitated about the weather sometime, if you don't believe that the nervousness would have to go somewhere else; unless it's something like Isabel, which caused me a couple absolutely devastating panic attacks, it just doesn't work. There are a lot of false-cause problems in mental illness.) I start to believe that no one likes me, I don't fit in anywhere I go, I'm so different from most people that I can't have any meaningful friendships, etc. I know that this is BS, but at the same time I believe it. For some people, this condition might improve if they were to actually interact with people; the interactions would be almost sure to go better than the free-floating fear had led them to believe, and the nasty, false sentiments the free-floating fear had inspired would be discredited. Unfortunately, this does not work for me, at least most of the time; rather, when I am feeling this way, I tend to pick over the conversations and other interactions I have and search for the one bit of evidence that will substantiate the false sentiments. Do I want to do this? No. But the beliefs are so strong that, against my will, I try to justify them. So the best way to proceed may be to avoid certain interactions. With people I know are my friends, I'm fine regardless; I can brush aside any beliefs that I'm annoying them or I'm deadweight in their gatherings or whatnot. (I was not able to do this for a long time.) During these times, I might not think to invite friends to do things, but I accept invitations and enjoy the resulting interactions. And with strangers, I've developed enough of a thick skin that nothing matters too much; in fact, I'm often more outgoing with strangers during these times than I am with acquaintances. But people at work, people I know from a time before and never really felt the need to stay in contact with, and those other people who aren't close friends and aren't people you should just ignore still pose major problems. I'm having trouble navigating those problems, as you can see. This is how I live a lot of my life, trying to figure out how to navigate this stuff. I get less agitated during the critical months every year, and I deal with it better every year. But there's still a ways to go. I hope soon the weather breaks and I can get back to feeling like there's not a lot I can't do again. Finally, I can think a lot more clearly in the morning, like when I'm writing this, than I can in the late night, when I wrote yesterday's entry. And if for some reason the person I wrote about below came to this site and recognized herself: I really am sorry for putting you in the middle of that on the Internet. Sometime else, it would be cool to see you and talk to you a bit. And I'm sure that, contrary to my imagined conversations, you were truly embarrassed and repentant when your phone rang.
Saturday, 10/18/03 Just got back from seeing "Touchez pas au grisbi," a classic French gangster film, at the AFI Silver. There's nothing like a classic French gangster film for supercool protagonists, meditations on life from extremely resigned people, and casual misogyny directed exclusively against pretty women. If you're into that stuff, I recommend it highly. Anyway, midway through the film I realized that someone I know from the paper at Maryland was sitting in front of me. I realized this because her cell phone went off during the movie, and I looked down to get a glimpse of the offender. After the film was over, I ducked out quickly (I was there with my dad, who slowed me up, but we get out) to avoid the inevitable conversation: "Hi!" "Hi." "So what are you doing?" "Writing regulations. How about you?" "I'm still in school [no doubt]. Well, see you." "Yup." As little enthusiasm as I normally have for that kind of random meeting, I have even less lately. Sometimes it seems like my goal during the day is to avoid engaging in insincere chitchat. This may not be an entirely good thing, but unenthusiastically engaging in insincere chitchat is even worse, in my opinion. I did, however, think of alternative, more entertaining conversations: "Hi!" "Hi. So I see you've become a jackass who doesn't turn off her cell phone during the movie." "I never liked you at all, even in a vague milquetoast kind of way. I just put up with you because you handed in stuff without major grammatical errors." Okay, that's not nice, and probably somehow unfair. Another one was: "Hi!" "Hi." "So what are you doing?" "Do either of us really care what the other person is doing? We know each other's e-mail addresses, and we do not avail ourselves of them in even lackluster pursuit of this information." "Yeah, you're right. Let's just part now." Actually, I'm not sure those are even more entertaining. Can you tell I'm wondering if not wanting to talk to anyone is a good idea? It is a major topic of wondering for me lately, especially since I have a lot of time to think about things now that I'm not talking to anyone. But then I try to talk to people and, apart from talking to family and real friends (i.e., people I have enjoyed hanging out with before), it's way less fun than usual. I guess I'll just keep trying occasionally, and maybe sometime I'll actually enjoy it. If you have any opinions on this burning issue, feel free to express them.
Friday, 10/17/03 Well, Grady Little's staggering incompetence kind of forced my hand on updating the LCS notes page. Because last night's game made me think of staggeringly pathetic losses, I updated the piece I wrote a couple weeks ago about the Tigers. Plus because the game went so late, I had to skip exercise this morning so that I would get a reasonable amount of sleep, and now because I didn't get my pulse up earlier I'm in a predictably bad mood, which has been added to my already-bad mood because of the loss to the Evil Empire. Combined, these circumstances made the happy hour I went to with my colleagues earlier today as enjoyable as it sounds like those circumstances would make it. Why didn't you pull Pedro, moron? I'm going to try to work through this tomorrow, perhaps on the recumbent bike.
Thursday, 10/16/03 Not that anyone should really care too much, given the amazingly dramatic League Championship Series baseball has been giving us, but the Washington Post came out with another one of those articles in which an author finds out that relations between young men and young women aren't the same as they were 40 years ago and then concludes that they damn well should be the same. Quotes from individual girls and young women and some approachably titled pop-sociology text are used to buttress the argument without investigating whether there might be another side to it. They run an article like this every six or nine months. I love the Washington Post, and if I could ever get a date I would probably agree that contemporary dating needs to be a little less physically casual and a little more serious about just having regular ol' fun, but the Post's insistence that this bell should be unrung strikes me as futile and simplistic. Is a determined effort to figure out why we got here too much to ask for? Why not find people who actually feel comfy with the new order and interview them? I would even be happy to help them in their search, if, as I say, I could ever get a date. I was going to put my LCS notes here, but they were getting long, so I gave them their own page.
Sunday, 10/12/03 Last night I went to AMC City Place 10 and saw an action movie on the first weekend it came out. Just like old times! And just like old times, I reviewed it! The result, my take on "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," is now up in the Movie Reviews section.
Monday, 10/6/03 In the 15-items-or-fewer line today, the woman in front of me was well below the limit with only two items: a six-pack of vanilla Slim-Fast and a box of frozen eclairs. I checked the eclair package surrepetitiously and saw that one of the eclairs had 48% of one's recommended daily saturated fat intake. Either this woman is a stastician (on average, she has an only slightly worse-than-average diet) or something's really wrong there. I also corrected a spelling error in yesterday's review. Stupid "accommodate." Why do you have two "m"s?
Sunday, 10/5/03 I wrote something! Specifically, a review of the National Symphony Orchestra concert I saw last night, which had a cool new piece and an overhyped new pianist. And not only that, but at the end I reveal my latest unobtainable crush: the concertmaster of the NSO. (Should that be "concertmistress"?) I'd say I need to get out more, but this happened precisely because I went out, so I'm pretty sure that's not the solution. Also check out the new index page, with a parodied rhyme from back when Nasty Nas was a rebel to your area.
Wednesday, 10/1/03 I would like to note here that I am alive; I just haven't felt like blogging anything. Or writing anything. Probably at some point in the future I will (a) feel like blogging something or (b) feel like writing something or (c) die, and when any of those happen you'll read about it here. Even if (c) means I have to use my last ounce of strength to click the mouse to post this HTML file before I finally expire, you'll read about it.
Wednesday, 9/24/03 I'm leaving for Chicago tomorrow and staying for a few days. That means you're reading this post, which you think is a new update, but all it has to say is that I'm not going to be updating for a few days. Is this useful information?
Sunday, 9/21/03 Marketing your products to young people can be a bad idea. Consider the case of Mitsubishi, whose pop electronica-driven advertisements apparently drew young people to the gigantic Japanese industrial conglomerate's automobiles so precipitously that the young people forgot to check their finances first to see if they could afford the cars. The result, according to this article, is a mountain of bad debt accrued almost entirely due to the pursuit and attainment of a cool brand image. That's what you get for valuing trendy music over credit quality. One organization that is in debt and does not have a cool brand image is the Detroit Tigers. Here I meditate for as long as I can on what there is left to root for this season for the worst baseball team in many, many years.
Saturday, 9/20/03 I just found the following instructions on my Rumford Baking Powder can:
It's lucky I saw that, because otherwise I was just going to assume that you should dump a half-cup, from a sopping wet half-cup measure, into the cake I'm baking and then ship the baking powder to Tahiti for storage. Boy, what a dumbass I would have felt like!
Friday, 9/19/03 I just went out a-driving in our new post-Isabel environment. Did you know we have about half the traffic lights working that we once did? For example, the light at East-West Highway and Georgia Avenue is out, which means that if you're trying to cross Georgia on East-West you have to drive across about eight lanes of traffic at an obtuse angle that makes the whole thing seem like about half a mile, with no protection from a traffic signal nor even any illumination from streetlamps, all while fully aware that people who got hammered in the Shaw and Adams-Morgan areas may well be commuting back up to Silver Spring. Fun! I spent about fifteen minutes on the way back going out of my way to ensure I didn't have to do that again. Bethesda Row, that faux-urban cash-sucking environment along Elm Street, was as busy as ever I have seen it, too. So many white people! Coming from Silver Spring, it always looks like someone sprayed a normal crowd with Ethnicity Clorox. Speaking of Silver Spring, I would like to note that, in an apparent effort to avoid hysteria, 1232C has been smoking as much marijuana as ever has been smoked in there for the last two days, which is a prodigious amount. The hurricane brought a flood of the hydro aroma into the hallway, as it always does when a special occasion demands much toking, like July 4th, Arbor Day, or Sunday. Keep sparking it up and holding it down, mysterious happy people in 1232. • Last night around 11 pm all the lights in my neighborhood went off...except those in my building, because our lines are buried. I'm still wondering why I'd ever want to move from here. From 11 pm till about 2 am, all the trees I could see lurched backwards at 45-degree angles, and the wires that were still aloft were stretched taut as bowstrings. Everything that had been ripped off the trees was oscillating ten and twenty and thirty feet off the ground. I went to bed at about 11:30, but woke up from the pounding of my windows at 2 am and saw the same stuff happening as when I had gone to bed. At one point, I had thought I would go out into the highest winds to see what it felt like, but frankly this was well above my threshhold. Today, apart from everyone's power being out, Montgomery County appears to be OK. The local CVS is closed, and the local Giant has enough power to operate the registers but not the dairy case or most of the overhead lights. Shopping in the dark is a bizarre experience. It's a good thing I still have half of a whole gallon of milk that I bought on Monday. Giant and CVS are not unique in their powerlessness, as 1.2 million people in the D.C. area are currently living a life free of television, toaster ovens, and lamps. Two of these people are my parents, one of whom came over this afternoon to borrow my electricity and continued Internet access. If any of you need some electricity, just let me know and I'll give you some of mine. (This would preferably be electricity needed to do something not specifically at your home, unless you have about 150 feet of extension cords just to get down to street level.) Our water is also OK, which is more than I can say for Fairfax County, as that county's residents have to boil everything for the next two or three days or risk getting some horrible disease. Rarely have I felt so lucky as I do today, even in the larger context of being lucky to be a middle-class American. You don't know how fun potable water is until you think about what it would be like not to have it.
Thursday, 9/18/03 6:30 pm: Fox 5 ("We Report the Local Weather, You Decide") just featured an interview with a Pepco spokesperson that concluded with a request for tips for "people who have lost power." THEY CAN'T HEAR YOU, DUMBASS ANCHOR! People who have lost power also lose the privilege of watching Fox 5! Apparently the storm has brought a mental fog along with it. • 5:15 pm. The rain is now visible, in that an abundance of water is pouring down from the sky and the much stronger wind is whipping it into a cloudlike grayness before it can actually hit earth. Despite this, a number of pedestrians can be spotted walking around without even an umbrella to shield them from the aerial hydro assault. (Though, to be fair, an umbrella is pretty useless when the rain's primary movement is horizontal, in the same sense a cannonball's is.) The body language of these pedestrians is varied and amusing in all cases. The wind is high enough that every time it catches the tree below my window (well, a hundred feet below) you can see the dark-green tops of its leaves flip to show the light-green undersides. But it doesn't look like the tree is being pushed so much as it's drawing away from the wind. It looks like an attractive person trying to ignore an unwanted suitor. The wind lets it alone a bit, then suddenly the tree draws away again, annoyed and exhausted. Or maybe I'm just projecting. A Pizza Boli delivery car just absolutely high-tailed it away from my building. Faster than I would drive without a massive visibility-impairing storm present. • Why is everything closed? I have no idea. It's just raining right now, at 1:37 pm. (I don't need fancy blogging software to tell you when I've posted!) If anything, there's less wind. I was relieved when the Feds cancelled today because Metro was being coy about when they were going to be running, but really: I should be at work. The NWS is saying now that the storm has slowed and nothing serious is going to happen until nightfall. It's one thing for me personally to freak out and have to chat with my dad to get a sensible perspective on the situation. As longtime friends of mine are all aware, I have a prodigious freak-out capability at times. But I'm not making any decisions about whether to close things or not. I asked to work at home today because I was worried about Metro closing, not because I thought I was going to die in the course of my commute. After all, the big hit was always supposed to be late tonight. Washington is a ridiculous city when it comes to weather. In this case, it has managed to be even more ridiculous than I found myself capable of being. In a humorless way, this is one of the funnier things that's happened this year. • It's 10:30, and I just got back from a half-hour stroll; I took it because I wanted to have a look around and because it'll be the last time for a while when it won't be massively unpleasant to be outside. The sky is lowering (albeit somewhat blankly, without rolling clouds) and the wind is a constant, gait-altering presence already, even though the Isabel's full force is supposed to be hitting us later tonight. The Metro and all its buses will be off in a half-hour, but for now everything is moving. Lots of cars still on the road, of course, and way more pedestrians than is normal for 10:30 am on a Thursday due to the mass cancellations. I noticed that the Washington Post, which has been punctiliously publishing reminders to keep all your patio furniture and grills and such in your basement for the next couple days, has not secured any of the boxes containing its Homes guide, its Apartments guide, or its Express newspaper parody. This is going to make for a bunch of interesting lawsuits when (for example) the Express box decapitates one of the Einstein Bros. I ducked into the Giant supermarket nearby, and the lines looked like someone had taken the normal Sunday-rush lines and added twenty people to each of them. Normal shopping would have been impossible, since there were carts filling up all the aisles near the registers. The express lane line extended at least fifty feet into the produce section. I had been going to buy carrots and some little paper plates, but I didn't bother. My homemade bottled water is at the ready. As I left the Giant, I saw a man in a Duke T-shirt. "This storm is going to blow as hard as your team sucks," I thought to myself. Then I realized: Duke is a North Carolina school. Do they derive their awesome sucking power from the hurricanes that regularly ravage their home state? Have they developed a blow-suck converting turbine? Something to investigate later. Meandering back to the apartment, I felt the first couple drops of rain — isolated, meager. They wouldn't necessarily promise more if there hadn't been all these photos of the big mass of white-whipped clouds circling the eye and these weather reports from "FORECASTER FRANKLIN" and such. Nevertheless, they encouraged me to abbreviate my journey. We'll see what happens.
Wednesday, 9/17/03 Isabel's now expected to be a tropical storm rather than a hurricane when it becomes an inside-the-Beltway player, but that was enough to get Metro to shut down at 11 am tomorrow, which means that the Feds are also closed. Hurricane day! Let's go play in the rain! We can get slammed into the sides of buildings by gusts of wind and clocked by snapped-off tree branches! Or maybe we can watch the majesty of the storm from indoors. Or maybe some DVDs. To prepare, I have filled up every vessel I own with tap water, thereby avoiding the suckerdom of competing for bottled down at the 7-Eleven (or "Sept-Onze" as I refer to it when I am feeling un-American). I am not too concerned about my power going out, as I believe my building's lines are buried, and, lacking a patio, I have no patio furniture that might go careening hither and yon in high winds. But we'll see what happens. I could use my day off tomorrow to write, of course, which some of you may have noticed I am doing precious little of lately, at least publicly. I'm thinking a lot, and sometimes I'm even writing stuff in my head, but I don't feel the impetus to turn it into reproducible text. We all need vacations occasionally, even from fun stuff. But I'm going to a preview screening of "The Human Stain" on Monday, so I'll be out front with an Actually Useful Movie Review for you then.
Monday, 9/15/03 I don't update this for almost a week and look what happens — Isabel's coming to town to kick ass. Look, woman, I blog when I feel like it, and no Class III-category winds are going to move me from my lazy course. The National Weather Service is producing the go-to materials on this one: straight-up weather reports without tales from Home Depot about how there's no more plywood or quotes from emergency authorities that are meant to be reassuring except that emergency authorities never get quoted unless something bad happens, so how reassuring can their quotes ever be? Props to NWS. All day today at work was spent either doing work or freaking out over the oncoming hurricane. I called my dad to get some perspective (strangely, I've been known to exaggerate a few dangers in my time) and he reminded me that all the other hurricanes that have made their way up to Washington have manifested themselves in high winds and a seaload of rain but have not survived in true hurricane form. We now have a bet on where if we get 75 mph or above winds from Isabel, Dad has to produce for me an apple pie, and if we don't I'm the one peeling, slicing and baking. "Mmm! I can taste that apple pie now!" he says. Last laugh's on him! We're going to get hammered, and I'll have no property except most of a pie and my incontrovertible rightness. Geico agrees with me, as I learned when I called about getting some renter's insurance (I've been meaning to for weeks, I swear). "We're not underwriting any new policies in Maryland anymore," he said. "It just came down about twenty minutes ago." Wimps. Here's some graffiti that you can see going from College Park to P.G. Plaza on Metro's Green Line:
Now we see why graffitists generally just write their names. It's gotta be the fumes.
Tuesday, 9/9/03 Okay, I took down the "For a Quarter of a Century" thing. Too much already. I had a very fun birthday. Thanks to all of you who sent or called along your best wishes.
Monday, 9/8/03 It's my birthday today! I'm a quarter of a century old! By the time I turn 26, everyone I know is going to think I've been saying I'm a quarter of a century old for about seventeen million years. But what can I do? Look how classy it looks on top of the blog there! It sounds like I'm a charitable foundation or a baseball stadium or even (gasp!) a utility provider that managed not to get acquired by someone else during the recent consolidation period. As always, if you're reading this or anything else on the site, you've given me one of my most cherished gifts already: the gift of an attentive reader. When I stop to think about my site stats (instead of robotically noting whether the day previous raised my average page views or dragged it down), I'm consistently astonished that there are so many people coming to take a look around, even if a large proportion of them seem to be arriving here looking for "barkers beauties" or "carmen electra ass". (Or, lately, "kayne west", who gets like two sentences in that review that have caused search engines to think the article is an exegis of his production techniques or something.) One thing that remains true no matter what I'm trying to write is that it's a lot easier to get myself to do it if I know someone's going to read it. Thanks for consistently giving me the extra push. The Spam-O-Matic newcomers among you don't know that this is essentially what I always write on my birthday; the veterans among you know how true it always is.
Sunday, 9/7/03 Sometimes I look in the help wanted section to make sure I'm not missing an ad for someone who wants to write about classical, hip-hop, college football, and economics during the same workday. It was on such a mission that I found in today's Washington Post the following ad, which I have reproduced here in all its glory:
I assume they'd like to fill the position as soon as possible.
Wednesday, 9/3/03 Screw lame-ass jokey personality tests, kids— let's do this for real. Here are a coupla personality tests developed not by marketing experts but by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, whose findings about gender and autism are featured on the cover of Newsweek this week. His basic thesis is that men are much better at systematizing than women are, and women are much more empathic than men are; this would explain why men are so much more likely to be autistic than women. However, he sez, both kinds of intelligence are useful and crucial, and many autistic persons need only be interacted with in ways they can appreciate to be exceptionally productive members of society. The tests measure your systematizing quotient (SQ) and your emphathy quotient (EQ). I took 'em. Results:
So maybe I'm a high-functioning autistic person and just didn't know it previous to taking these Internet diagnostics. The other oddity, for me anyway, came from a new portion of what is otherwise basically the same test in non-electronically interactive form in Newsweek. (The Newsweek Web article linked to above has a similar but less comprehensive quiz in a much more annoying format. It has me in the "above average" range for the conflated "autism quotient," but three points from "very high.") One of the questions in the magazine involved six pairs of eyes that were to be read for the emotion they showed; there were four choices for each pair. Women did better than men, which presumably means this is an EQ field. I got five out of six right. That was a stunner to me, even though I went with my gut instinct on all six. I'm all speculation as to what most of this means. I know I'm not especially good in social situations or in anything spontaneous, but both of those seem to be dragging down my EQ, whereas I can generally function OK in the narrower definition of "empathy." I know I'm a big systematizer so that doesn't surprise me much. I encourage you to take the test and let me know if you find anything interesting, although apparently I will not be able to care too much about what you tell me. (Joke! I think.)
Tuesday, 9/2/03 While I was on vacation, a representative of showmetickets.com e-mailed me to ask about advertising rates for this site you're reading now. He wanted to run little text ads, nothing extraordinarily obtrusive, and wanted a price quote. The first thing I thought was, "Wow, that's flattering." The second thing I thought was, "If I accepted ads, I couldn't really jack around as much as I do now, huh?" I mean, I'd have a professional obligation to be entertaining, even when I didn't really feel like it. I'd have to think twice about my occasional maudlin posts. There would be an incentive to post pieces with descriptions of famous hot women's buttockses so that the site would get more traffic. Does classical music really appeal to sports-ticket buyers? Etc. Of course, the man had either looked at the site and was holding his nose as he made the offer, or he had just been trolling for high-stat sites that had something to do with things that require tickets and didn't really care about anything else. Regardless, I like having this site as my playpen rather than my cash-printing machine, at least unless I can print some serious cash with it, and because I average 389 page requests a day that ain't a-going to happen right now. So I e-mailed him back saying that I appreciated his interest, but I just didn't want to right now and promising to let him know if I ever changed my mind. The e-mail I sent back got a Mail Delivery Warning. Maybe that's just an artifact of all our recent virus scares. Or maybe it's part of your recommended daily dose of irony.
Monday, 9/1/03 A bunch of people are coming to the site looking for info about the AFI Silver, so I updated and expanded my review of that hallowed hall in The Rest of Our Culture. This is the first instance of me using the information gleaned from my new site stats. I'm not going to put in any Carmen Electra photos to satisfy the desires of most of the people who find this site through search engine queries, though.
Sunday, 8/31/03 I'm hoooome! None of my property was missing when I arrived last night, so I guess no one called the bluff I made in the post below. Burglars are such suckers! During my summer vacation, I ran a lot, played football in the yard with people both much younger and much older than I, helped cook big tasty meals, read, listened to Beethoven, and generally didn't take responsibility for anything. Now I'm home and I have to pay some bills and go buy a bunch of groceries and clean my bathroom and crap like that. On the other hand, I have cable, and in my own apartment I can wander around naked whenever I want. • I have some information for those Spam-O-Matickers who have been considering going to see the newly extended version of Sergio Leone's Western classic "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" at the AFI Silver: It is the most awesome thing ever. The movie itself, long accorded a privileged place in the manly movie pantheon, does not need a review. In this incarnation, however, the print is pristine, the sound is gloriously high-definition (Ennio Morricone's score has never rung out this boldly and arrestingly), and the extra scenes, while not necessarily adding anything to the plot or characterization as such, give the film even more cool cowboy talk and stuff like that. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is screening at the AFI through Thursday. There are two kinds of cowboy-movie fans in the world: those who know when a treasure is buried nearby and relentlessly seek it out, and those who are suckers. I trust you all are not the latter kind of cowboy-movie fans.
Friday, 8/22/03 Tomorrow I'm going on vacation for six days. That's right — no updates 'til next Friday at least. I may write while I'm away, but you can rest assured that I will not be posting anything from my remote location. That is, unless I'm just saying I'm going on vacation to entrap potential burglars, who I can then prosecute to the fullest extent the law allows. So look out for that one, lawbreakers. Yeah, you heard me. I am excruciatingly ready for a vacation, whether I'm actually leaving or not. The last two days have been Server Follies at work, what with the various viruses whizzing around the Internet and inserting their metaphorical DNA into our metaphorical brains. Well, maybe not metaphorical; there's nothing that makes me feel stupider than when the server's down and I can't remember anything about what I can't work on anymore. I've been swinging left lately after a long period of tacking rightwards (The Nation: "Malone is Back!"), and one of the things I have begun to favor during this swing is a mandatory two-week vacation. I mean, I get that, but lots of fine folks in these United States don't, and some of those who do are shamed into not taking it or just flat-out ordered not to use it. I'm not lefty enough to call that "wrong," but it seems a markedly unwise way of doing business, since a burnt-out employee who works 52 weeks a year is probably not as productive as a more relaxed one working 50. Employers, fixated on theoretical gains that could only be realized if their workers were machines, seem blind to this truth. I hope to come back from my vacation fully recharged and better able to address the risks of the importation and interstate movement of commodities associated with plant and animal pests. I think everyone else should have the opportunity to go on vacation and come back relaxed to their jobs, no matter how much more interesting their jobs are to describe. Unless, like me, they may be staying home to entrap burglars, in which case they should be ever-vigilant.
Tuesday, 8/19/03 I had a grinding day today — nothing incredibly bad happened, but it just seemed to keep going way longer than it was supposed to. Then I missed an appointment for some reason. I staggered home and lay down and was wondering why time wouldn't pass more quickly when I remembered: I had BLT fixin's. Key word there now is "had." They're all well down my gullet now: fresh tomatoes and basil from my parents' garden and Hormel Black Label bacon, on toast made from my Toastmaster breadmaker's bread. And I'm pretty cheery now. I'm glad sometimes happiness is so simple.
Sunday, 8/17/03 Hey, kids! Wanna see some incredibly juvenile comedy? "American Wedding," as my review states, has exactly what you need, without those annoying massive flaws that get in the way of enjoying movies like, well, "American Pie 2." Read all about it! Today I saved $23.10 on groceries that would otherwise have cost $58.43 at Giant. Yeah, that's right: twenty-three dollars and ten cents. Sixteen bucks of that were from sales that I enabled using my BonusCard, but a whopping $7.10 came from coupons. I know people who won't cash in $7.10 of coupons in their entire lives. I whupped Giant's ass today, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow I will waste the $23.10 on something silly, but hey, I have it to waste!
Friday, 8/15/03 Apparently, the person who called on Wednesday was either (a) a telemarketer or (b) a young woman who is so offended by my peremptoriness that she's never going to call me again no matter how public a forum I apologize in. Either way, c'est la vie. I've been trying to think of something interesting to write about the Washington Post's two latest experiments in reaching people who are the same age as I am but who obviously have far, far different interests than I do: the Sunday Source section and the Express. The first of these is about twelve pages of fluff every week, heavy on Fashion 101 and "How the hell do you do that?" and pictures. Lots and lots and lots of pictures. The second of these is a disposable free daily being passed out on workdays at Metro stations. It relies almost entirely on heavily shortened wire copy for its stories (average source: AP; average story length: three sentences) and thus is as close to a content-free newspaper as we're ever going to see. So I had thought I would just do a hit on the Source and the Express; I have some impressive slamming machinery when I choose to deploy it. I even asked the following snotty question in a Sunday Source chat to gather material:
But apparently, both of these things actually have their partisans among my fellow youth. Therefore, I'd have to be trashing a whole bunch of people my age at the same time, which is a different can of garbage entirely. Plus, the fact that many people actually enjoy these makes me more depressed than angry, as I ponder once again why I can't just be like everyone else and not think too hard and then maybe I'd have an easier time with a lot of stuff. You know, stuff? Yeah. So you can read this excellent Jack Shafer article for an intelligent take on Express, 'cause I apparently cannot produce one without entering into ambivalent self-loathing. (New Spam motto: "If it works, it goes in the sections; if not, desribe why and put it in the blog. Don't waste content.")
Wednesday, 8/13/03 Just now I picked up the phone while sitting on my couch, hit the "Talk" button, and said "Good evening" to whoever was on the other end. The other end was silent, and I thought it might be the telemarketer who had called earlier while I was making dinner; as I am sure you are aware, telemarketers' phones tend to pick up a little while after you do. I continued greeting the dead air: "Hello? Good evening. Hello? Good evening? Hello!" Finally, I decided this wasn't worth it, and said "Goodbye" just as a young female voice said "Hello, Andrew?" That's not normally a script, and what's more, the words didn't sound like a telemarketer's bored intro; they sounded like the words of someone who actually wanted to talk to me. I said "Hello?" once more, as I remembered that pay phones often have a similar effect on whether or not people can talk to you right after you pick up, but the call had already started to disappear, and soon the dial tone rang out again. Missed connections sometimes dominate my life, or at least my thoughts. I have been wondering, off and on for the past couple days, why I didn't get one girl's number at a party I went to two months ago — and in fact, why I did not realize that I was flirting with her, and being well received, and could have easily gotten her number had I not suddenly become overwhelmed with fatigue and left, sans conscious thought. One of my more painful memories from Maryland is when another young female voice called my name from afar at least eight times as I was eating my lunch in Nymburu Ampitheatre, but I never could figure out where the voice was coming from, and I never thought to do anything to indicate that I heard and would have been immensely happy to figure out who wanted so much to say hi. I'm an introvert, but I'm not someone whose best interest is served by just going around accidentally ignoring interesting people who are interested in me, either. I don't think anyone could say that was anything but a waste. So, if the caller just now was a real person and really wanted to talk to me, and that person is now reading this website, I'd just like to say: I'm very, very sorry, and please drop me an e-line or call me back to give me an opportunity to apologize in a more private and florid manner. And if you were actually a telemarketer, well, damn you for making me worry about all this.
Tuesday, 8/12/03 The Spam-O-Matic would like to officially throw its support to Gary Coleman in the California gubernatorial race. The Spam-O-Matic has chosen Gary from among a cast of hundreds because, if Californians are going to have a joke election, they might as well have the best punchline possible. Fortunately, the Spam-O-Matic is not alone in its enthusiasm. Here is propaganda and analysis from the people who may have started it all over at East Bay Express, including a PDF of a recall poster, insightful analysis of his chances, and even a clearly stated platform that the candidate has obviously thought about for a couple minutes. Please note that thinking about something for two minutes does not necessarily mean the product of that thought is intelligent. Nevertheless, this alone puts him ahead of the Gubernator, who was quoted recently as saying, "I will fight for the environment. Nothing to worry about." This sounds more to me like "Relax, environmental regulations, you've just been erased," but who can tell? Click here for a wide selection of Gary-for-governor paraphernalia, including T-shirts, mousepads, and a thong that I am sure all the female Spam-O-Matickers will click furiously to purchase. It ain't really a movement if someone hasn't started a CafePress store for it. I'm hoping to write more soon on a bunch of topics, but right now I'm going to eat dinner so I can get my behind down to the AFI Silver and see "The Sea is Watching." Kurosawa retrospectives rule! • I dis Akira Kurosawa in my review of "The Sea is Watching"! No, I'm not insane, and no, it's not quite what you're thinking. You should go see all the Akira Kurosawa films you can at the AFI Silver. For the full story, read the review.
Thursday, 8/7/03 In a move that'll keep humorists eating regularly for months, Arnold Schwarzenegger tossed his Conan wig in the ring to unseat Gray Davis yesterday. This article should give you an idea of my initial personal reaction to the possible ascension of the Gubernator. As a writer, I think it is the funniest thing ever, even better than Dr. Cecil Jacobson (scroll down to the second item. Or, if you want to read the actual Fourth Circuit decision, click here). Well, maybe tied, but everyone knows about this one. Here is my contribution to re-using famous Ah-nuld lines in legislative/executive contexts: (To one of a pile of vetoable bills) You know how I said I'd kill you last? I lied. (To veterans clamoring for more benefits) I eat Green Berets for breakfast. (To a legislator protesting the construction of a turbine generator in his home district) Let off some steam, Bennett! No doubt we'll be getting plenty more of this. (My esteemed blog-colleague Jason Walther already blessed us with his.) What a time to be a smartass. The best thing, though, is that Gary Coleman is also running, which should make my Gary Coleman T-shirt all that much more a hit with whatever ladies are in the vicinity when I wear it. If someone ever calls you up and asks you to participate in television-related marketing research, you gotta say yes! Yesterday I got to watch an episode of awesomely horrible program called "Dads," but today when a woman called to ask me questions she sounded a lot more interested in Listerine. (She did ask me, among other things, who my least favorite character was, and then laughed when I said "All the kids!") The best part was where the woman invited me to imagine that Listerine was my neighbor and then read off a list of qualities like "friendly," "strong," "leader," "cool or hip," "responsible," and such. I had never thought of Listerine as a person before, but I soon formed a picture of a guy in too-short shorts mowing his lawn early on Saturday morning, a quiet, intense guy who nevertheless would wave when he saw you and call the cops if someone was trying to break into your house. This guy is not a whole lot like my real-life neighbors, who are a Korean soprano student and a Hispanic woman who is very tolerant of my loud music, but it was an interesting exercise nonetheless. I wonder what other products would be like as people? I bet Yuengling would be a fun guy.
Monday, 8/4/03 All of my movie reviews are now up, thus completing my mission, which was…I forget. But this completes it. Plus we have a new movie review up: "America 2020," a film made by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which happens to sign my paychecks. Guess how good it is! Next up for the movies: Assembling Cream of the Crop and Bottom of the Barrel, two sections whose eventual existence is promised on the Movie Reviews home page; making the links at the bottom of the reviews complete and consistent; and eventually updating the 100 Greatest Movies Never Made by removing the outdated and/or unfunnny ones, which will result in me creating about 40% new content. Then I will rest and look upon my cinematic-criticism creation and pronounce it beer-worthy.
Sunday, 8/3/03 I think I was still fighting a comedy hangover last night, as my dominant memory of the penultimate match of the CSz Tournament was how bad my burrito was. The food at the DC Improv is aggressively mediocre: not bad enough to make everyone simply give up on arriving early and eating dinner, but not good enough to make such a plan a welcoming prospect. I sat with three very nice strangers and saw some excellent comedy, but it made less of an impression than it had earlier. The fact that the tourney title show at 10 pm was sold out did not help matters. (When I asked whether there were any tickets available, the woman in the window gave me an absolutely pained professional smile as she told me the show was sold out, like the professional smile was aggravating some horrendous spinal injury. I'm convinced the world would be a more livable place without these extra-mile gestures of courtesy. Just telling me the show was sold out in a pleasant tone would have been enough to satisfy any conceivable standard of politeness. Anyway.) Today it rained about five times and was sunny at some point in between each rain. The oscillating weather gave me an all-day headache. I am not happy. I would like something good to happen right…now. Okay, that didn't work, but how about right…now? Naw. Maybe this will work when I upload the page. We are 10 whopping reviews from having finished putting up all my film criticism on this here Web thing. The best part is that the review of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is now up, because for some reason is unavailable in the archives of its original publication venue, the Diamondback. As I note at the bottom of the review's page, I always smile when I think of this review. Sometimes I think if I ever was offered a reviewing job in which I wouldn't be free to do stuff like this, I wouldn't want it. Then I realize how crazy an idea that is.
Saturday, 8/2/03 No Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday updates because I have been going to each night's 7:30 show of the ComedySportz National Tournament at the DC Improv. (ComedySportz, some of you may remember, is the outfit with whom I took a couple classes in the art of improv; I've also being going to ComedySportz shows since before I could drive.) Here's an article in the Post about the goings-on. All I myself can say is that the past three nights have been three of the most hilarious nights in my memory. Each evening's performance has reduced me to a quivering mass of ecstatically laughing organic matter. ComedySportz attracts some truly talented people, and the cream of the crop from across the United States has been holding it down. The problem with attempting to review improv is that it may well be the most of-the-moment performing art there is. The exquisite tension when someone has been passed a tricky rhyme in a singing game and the triumphant relief when that person scales the obstacle with style and grace just doesn't translated to the printed page. Last night, for example, Indianapolis and San Jose played a game called "Sing For Your Supper" in which they improvised a song about Chutes and Ladders (don't tell me you didn't play Chutes and Ladders as a kid) that, I have no doubt, would be startlingly unfunny if transcribed for your perusal. It's nothing you'd think was funny if you thought more than a millisecond of thought had gone into its composition. But that's exactly how it was invented, and the uncanny skill with which the players overcame the various difficulties that kept on a-mounting made it one of the funniest things I've ever seen. So I'd encourage you to go to the shows tonight (I will probably end up buying a ticket to the 10:00 show to see DC in action). If you do, look for me; I'll be pounding the Leinenkugel. But even if you don't, I have to tell you: I've seen shows in DC that have been every bit as funny as the shows I've seen this week (even if DC is understandably not as consistent as this parade of all-stars). Check, check it out. In soberer news, today I was walking past the Silver Spring Metro Station when a homeless man, lying on his side on a white poncho with his bent arm propping up his head, spit at my feet as I passed him. I was wearing sandals, so the loogie would have hit skin, but he missed by about two inches. I noticed it, and was surprised, but then didn't get angry. I just thought to myself, "I don't need to get into anything with you to prove I'm better than you, because at the end of the day I'm going to go to my bed in my apartment. Or maybe I'll eat some food from my refrigerator. Or maybe I'll just check the balance in my bank account, which is full of cash from the job I hold down." Then I was a little surprised by this reaction. I normally try to be a little more sympathetic than that. But I wasn't the one who spit, either. I'm still a little puzzled by the whole thing, since I hadn't, you know, done anything to the man. Have any possibly clarifying thoughts about any of this? E-mail me. Also there's an interesting article about the business of the comics section here, which I will pass along without comment except that Charles Schultz's heirs should quit riding the gravy train so enthusiastically. Make room for new artists, people. Otherwise our half-century will never get its "Peanuts" and the comics will slide into irrelevance.
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