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Cavalcade
Posted 9:55 PM, Oct 31, 2006 |
Here’s a collection of things I’ve been holding for a while:
1) Minneapolis is going to close some branches, maybe sell them, even though it just spent a lot of money on a brand new library building downtown, which, it’s noted in this Star Tribune article, isn’t “the kind of library the public deserves.” Smashing. I hope the Minneapolis taxpayers were thrilled to pay for a library that causes other libraries to close down and aren’t really what they should be.
2) Dilbert creator Scott Adams has regained his ability to speak normally, after suffering from Spasmodic Dysphonia for about 18 months. This is kind of old news (which means it happened last week) but his personal blog post and an older Washington Post article about another condition Adams suffered from that caused him difficulty with fine motor skills make for great reads.
I had other things to say, but seem to have deleted them instead of carefully holding onto them, so instead, two little personal tidbits.
3) I am, right now, listening to Not Dark Yet by Bob Dylan, a song which I once listened to on repeat 6 times in a row.
4) Bob Dylan and Paul Simon provided the greatest concert experience of my little life when I saw them outside on the shores of Lake Superior in a foggy, muddy rain in Duluth, MN. That was well worth it, and to think that my friend and I almost sold our tickets, the line snaking all around the arena and canal. Good thing we didn’t.
5) The other day I burned two fingers on a George Foreman grill. The one we have doesn’t have any sort of indicator light (or at least not one that I can see, obviously) and we (used to) leave it out all the time, which is a bad thing to do when you can’t even tell if it’s on or off. You get used to it being off, and then when you pick it up and it’s on, and George Foreman starts grilling your fingers, well, you become less of a fan. It needs to have some sort of safety feature, you know, for the kids. Instead, it functions more as one of George Bluth Sr.’s Cornballer machines, a basic menace to society.
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Gallery: BowWowWeen 2006
Posted 7:53 PM, Oct 29, 2006 |
Every year for the last 5 years, BowWowWeen, a costume contest and general dog-Halloween festival has been held in Brentwood. It was a surreal place, with tons of dogs in wacky costumes - some of the ones not captured in the photos below included a white tiger, a black cat, a Trojan horse, and California road construction workers. But, I did capture some, which you can find below.
BowWowWeen 2006
That might be all the photos of dogs for a while, but rest easy, I suspect there will be some more sometime.
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Gallery: Pacific Design Center
Posted 8:45 PM, Oct 28, 2006 |
The EC and I went to the Pacific Design Center a couple weeks ago to see a preview screening of The Prestige, but the screening was overbooked and we didn’t get in. We spent some time walking around the outside of the building, which is pretty interesting, and I thought heading back for some photos would be a good idea.
While walking around, waiting for the sun to set a little, I noticed a security guard coming towards me from a fair distance. I took a left turn, figuring maybe I wasn’t allowed where I was headed, and walked about 80 feet along the front of the building. I turned around, and the security guard was standing there looking at me. Pleasant chap.
Later, sitting by the fountain at the PDC this evening, I accidentally used the flash on a photo, and a security guard promptly came over and told me there was no photography allowed on the premises, and all photographs had to be taken from the boulevard streets adjacent to the Center. Huh?
So they get some swell architect to come and design this building, and they spend all this money building it, and then they don’t let people take pictures of it unless they’re standing on public property? A bit like buying the Mona Lisa and hanging it behind a black curtain. Why pay to have an interesting building designed and built just to be a curmudgeon about it?
Well, anyway, I took photos, some from the boulevard, some on their precious property. So, with no thanks to my hosts:
Pacific Design Center
If they’re really concerned about it, they can stand outside the building where I live and talk to me about it from the street.
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Gallery: Dog Park
Posted 5:10 PM, Oct 26, 2006 |
I took a trip to the post office today, and right near the post office is a giant dog park. There’s really two dog parks, one for small dogs and one for large dogs. The park for the large dogs was bustling, with about 20-25 dogs there when I arrived. I sat down and snapped some photos, which you’ll find within.
Dog Park
Most of the dogs kept their distance from me and hung out in a giant pack, but occasionally one would wander over.
Maybe someday I’ll visit the small dog park, but there was only one little tiny pug and a whippet there when I left. At least I think it was a whippet.
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Trivia Lineage
Posted 11:45 PM, Oct 25, 2006 |
As you may remember from my previous adventures, the last time I attended a trivia night with some people, we named ourselves Mr. Edward Yen and were the recipients of a scoring error that allowed us to finish in the money, which is to say, we won a bar tab discount.
Well, it happened again. I can’t tell you our name because it’s an actual person (and no, it’s not Amelie Mauresmo), but we were again the recipients of the good end of a scoring gaffe.
In the first round, we opted to use our “Double or Nothing” option, which means exactly what it says. We were positive about 5 of our 6 answers, but weren’t sure which king from the House of Stuart had tons of illegitimate children, but didn’t sire a legitimate heir. (If you usually read Ken Jennings’ Tuesday Trivia, well, this question probably bores you to sleep, and we probably seem like real dopes.) We guessed and opted to use our Double or Nothing. Well, we guessed wrong, but rather than being awarded the Double or Nothing’s namesake (Nothing), we received 5 points for our 5 correct answers.
This resulted, once again, in us taking second place. Do we feel bad about this? No.
On our way out, they did stop us and say they had to correct a scoring error, and we actually had to return our prize momentarily while they straightened things out. But, as good luck would have it, we remained in second place and never found out what the scoring error was, and so the long, historical lineage of Mr. Edward Yen lives on.
(If you’re wondering, the answer to the question was not King Henry VIII, but Charles II. And personally (like I need to offend another country), I never understood all those kings and, well, the point of all of it).
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Outlet
Posted 12:19 AM, Oct 25, 2006 |
st. mary’s river drains unnoticed
in the bath, the ice-covered basin;
filching pennies from the change
jar in the kitchen, the sue-bee honey bear.
the shoreline runs 2,726 miles
 (including islands),
in a giant circle, roundness and life
and death wrapped up in cold sand,
jagged rocks, stony beachheads.
the retention of the beast, 191 years,
a human,
from womb
to grave
to womb
to grave,
slow turnover.
boats afloat, aground like beached
whales, running to the outlet,
ships sideways, like breached babies clutching
the watery fetus.
1,332 feet deep, water pressure crushing
hulls. my ancestors, standing end to end,
foot to head, might hold a stone
above the wave-ripped surface in the deep.
strange fish swivel in one-student schools,
beady eyes glowing like long-lost
relatives, aunts who pinch your cheek
and uncles who clap you on the shoulder,
beer between their whiskers and tobacco
in the duck-webbing between their fingers.
a circle tour runs the highways,
minnesota,
ontario,
michigan,
wisconsin,
guiding travelers like wayward children
curious about christmas.
“where is santa?”
“north pole,” parental terseness, a mystery on thin ice.
“why?”
“because.”
that age-old reasoning, why-because-why-because-
the-lake-said-so, and nobody
argues with the lake, especially
not 3-foot-tall children, easily
swept up in its foaming arms.
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Amelie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Posted 11:39 PM, Oct 24, 2006 |
Recently, they have been a ton of people that have wandered by looking for information about Amelie Mauresmo, the brutish French tennis player. I don’t know why this site has been becoming a haven for Maursemo-ites, but it has. And I can only imagine their crestfallen faces upon finding my ramblings about online gambling and “American movies.”
If you’re looking for information about Mauresmo and how she’s frighteningly mannish, here’s my original post. (Of course, you could have always used the handy search engine.)
Also, I’m sorry that I don’t have anything nice to say about Amelie Mauresmo. If you’re French and offended, keep in mind that you also made that movie Le Fabuleux desin d’Amelie Poulain, which I happen to be a big fan of. So it all kind of balances out in the end, you know? Vous savez?
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Serious and Informative (?) Post
Posted 1:53 AM, Oct 23, 2006 |
I recently received an email from Firepay, a company that processes credit cards and makes withdrawals from bank accounts for other vendors. It’s pretty similar in purpose to PayPal, if I remember correctly, although it’s been a long time since I used Firepay.
The reason Firepay contacted me is because they are going to stop transferring money to online gambling websites, due to President Bush’s signing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act, which was tacked on to the Safe Port Act.
Online gambling has always been illegal (as far as I understand) in the United States, and online casinos are run from other countries (for example, I think Party Poker is regulated by the government of Gibraltar, whereas PokerStars is licensed through and located in San Jose, Costa Rica.) From a speech by Jim Leach (R-IA) introducing H.R. 4411:
[The bill] will create strong tools to help federal and state governments enforce existing gambling prohibitions; it has been designed to cut the money flow from gamblers to Internet gambling sites by prohibiting the use of banking instruments such as credit cards, checks or fund transfers to be used to settle wagers.
The legislation’s main purpose is to limit how players can deposit money into their accounts at these various sites. And that’s where Firepay comes in (or goes out, as the case may be). Firepay is now refusing (as they should) to deposit money to or from any poker sites, giving their customers 10 days to withdraw Some sites, like Party Poker and Paradise Poker, are going to refuse to allow customers who live in the U.S. to play on their sites for real money. (Almost every poker site offers two “forms” of its site, one at a .com address and one at a .net address - the .com is geared towards real money players, and the .net is geared towards play money players - when you see sites advertised on television, they always advertise the .net site, with the note that “This is not a gambling website,” since they are prohibited by law from advertising the .com portion of their business.) There are a few sites, like PokerStars, that are going to continue just as before. PokerStars says:
PokerStars has received extensive expert advice from within and outside the U.S. which concluded that these provisions do not alter the U.S. legal situation with respect to our offering of online poker games. Furthermore it is important to emphasize that the Act does not in any way prohibit you from playing online poker.
So I guess PokerStars is correct, since they don’t have any money-transferring tools themselves (the only way to get money to their site (and most poker sites) is through third-party vendors like Firepay). The statement that “the Act does not in any way prohibit you from playing online poker” is a little dicier. If they mean any online Poker (i.e., for play money), then they’re correct. But if they mean for real money, then I don’t follow.
But the point is less about PokerStars specific policy than it is about the comparison between sites like PokerStars and PartyPoker. The former, as above, is going to continue with business as usual, while the latter has “ceased taking deposits and wagers from American players,” which seems to be the most common action. So, what gives?
The bigger question, and I’m not the first one to ask it, is why doesn’t the U.S. government license these online sites? They don’t have to license all of them - they can license whichever ones they want - but then charge the companies a flat rate or a sliding scale fee or whatever for the license to do business with American customers. It’s a lucrative market, obviously.
Poker players are griping about how the government is telling them what they can and cannot do with their money, complaining that the government is “ruining their fun,” and maybe they’re right.
It seems like allowing licensed companies to do business and forcing those companies to use some sort of age verification service would solve the problem on both sides of the argument, except for those who believe gambling should be outlawed entirely, everywhere, which is unreasonable. Maybe that age verification thing is a Pandora’s box, I don’t know.
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The Prestige, Heat, & More
Posted 10:19 PM, Oct 22, 2006 |
The EC and I went to see the new Chris Nolan movie, The Prestige today. Pretty good. Very good, actually. Better than The Illusionist? Not sure. Different, and darker, too, from the beginning.
Also weird how there are two movies out about illusionists and magicians, as well as two Hugh Jackman / Scarlett Johansson movies (this one, and Scoop), and how, even though I don’t see movies that often, I’ve seen all of these (and plan on seeing the next Hugh Jackman movie, The Fountain (and saw his last one, X-Men 3).
So, if you’re thinking of starting a Hugh Jackman fan club, count me in, apparently.
And, in more strange movie connections, saw the preview for Babel today, which stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who were both originally cast as the leads in The Fountain but were replaced due to creative difficulties and a shrinking budget.
In other news, finished Bill Buford’s excellent Heat, about his experiences in the world of professional chefs. The book is highly recommended to anyone who eats.
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Happy Illiteracy
Posted 12:20 AM, Oct 19, 2006 |
Oh great. A “news” story about how kids that do well in math are “less happy” than kids that do poorly. (More interesting is the fact that the most confident students do, on average, worse than their more confident peers in mathematics.)
It is possible that maybe we should stop babying kids and making them think that everything has to be a blast? Possible? (Here’s a comic.)
Envision this future conversation (and by future, I mean tomorrow morning at some breakfast table somewhere):
Parent: Did you finish your math homework?
Child: No, but math makes me sad.
Parent: I can’t have you being sad! Not my child. Let me tell you what, Child, you throw that math book away. You tell your teacher you don’t have to study anything that makes you sad.
Child: But what will I be when I grow up if I don’t learn any more math?
Parent: You mean besides happy?
Child: Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.
Parent: Well, you’ll probably be homeless. But at least you’ll be happy.
Child wanders off to school, kicking his math book and singing, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
END
If you think this is preposterous, I point you to the results of CNN’s QuickVote survey - sure, not scientific, but, given the choice of their child being good at math but unhappy or being bad at math but happy, 80% wanted a kid who was happy that he didn’t know how much he made working at McDonald’s for 8 hours because he can’t multiply 8 by the minimum wage.
Now, consider this question: Would you rather your child be:
a) happy but functionally illiterate, or
b) sad but a good enough reader to be able to read his tax form?
It’s a trick question - it’s the same question as the one CNN was asking, but I wager the results would be flip-flopped.
Sad kids. Get with it! Grow up! When I was a kid I had to cry daily. Had to. Every kid did. Our tears were captured in those cups they give you at the doctor’s office to pee in, and they measured, each day, and if we didn’t cry enough, well, … maybe that’s a story for another day.
Unhappy! Pf.
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Upgrade Upgrade
Posted 4:27 PM, Oct 18, 2006 |
Busy day around here. In addition to comments now being available, I added a search engine in the sidebar so you can search the entire site. Also, I opened up comments on every single main weblog entry, thanks to a swell plug-in, so now you can find all the old entries about monkeys and leave comments.
(Like everything else on here, your mileage may vary. The comments feature isn’t perfect, and when you follow a link from the search page, it often takes it a little time to load the new page, and so you don’t end up in the right spot. If this happens, once the page is fully loaded, use the Find feature in your browser and be happy that I’ve been thinking about you enough to install even a rudimentary search engine for you. Someday, things will be better.)
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Comments Available (Again)
Posted 1:39 PM, Oct 18, 2006 |
Now you can leave comments again. This is through Haloscan, which charges a nominal fee for a customizable comment template and no advertisements. Because the script that runs the comment functionality isn’t located on the server I use, the comment count may be a little behind. Rest assured, your comment has been posted (when you leave one) and will be counted, just like your vote in November. And it’s just as important.
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Ken Jennings
Posted 11:39 PM, Oct 17, 2006 |
The EC and I went to Glendale, to their fabulous public library (no kidding here - it really is swell), to see Ken Jennings read. Wasn’t much of a reading in the sense that he really didn’t read from his book, Brainiac, other than a couple really brief excerpts, but he did talk about the book, which is about trivia, why he thinks trivia is important, why he thinks trivia is not “trivial,” and his Jeopardy! experience.
As I’ve mentioned before (not so long ago), I consider Jeopardy! the gold standard of quiz shows, and so that makes Ken Jennings a quasi-super-celebrity in the strange world I live in.
As one would expect from his blog, Jennings has a great sense of humor. He’s sharp-witted, and generally sharp (as one would expect from Jeopardy!. I didn’t buy his book, at $25, but will get it from the library.
As an extra bonus, the guy doing the introduction, while stalling for time while Jennings finished signing the pre-talk books, was talking about upcoming lectures and speakers. He mentioned a woman who had written a few crime novels and erringly referred to the “chick lit” genre as “shit lit.” I’m sure the books aren’t great, but that seems a little harsh.
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Andantino in C
Posted 12:40 PM, Oct 15, 2006 |
Here’s a little piece, nothing fancy, written by Mateo Carcassi, called Andantino in C.
You know, it’s for your ears.
Andantino in C
And, if you want to play along at home, here are the tabs.
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1 vs. 100
Posted 9:51 PM, Oct 13, 2006 |
I’m a kid that grew up watching game shows, finding reasons to stay home from school so I could gorge myself on them. This was back in the day when they were on every weekday morning from about 9 until noon (at which point soap operas took over, and the non-school boredom set in). So, with the recent resurgence in game shows, I’m always interested in the next one to come about, hoping it will be interesting and, God forbid, challenging.
1 vs. 100 fails on both counts. The idea is interesting - 1 player playing against a group of 100. Each time on of the “mob” gets the question wrong, the prize pot grows depending on the difficulty of the question, and those members that got it wrong are eliminated from the game. The contestant can stop at any point and win the prize pot, and if the contestant gets a question wrong at any point, the prize pot is split amongst the remaining members of the mob.
That’s about it.
Its three major strikes:
- This show steals elements from show after show. It’s got the same kind of escalating dollar values that you’re used to on Deal or No Deal and Millionaire. It’s got “lifelines” in the form of questions you can ask particular mob members. (Incidentally, this seemed really weird, because they’re competing against you - it’s like asking another Jeopardy! contestant what he thinks the answer to your Daily Double is.) It even manages to steal the “big question” idea, from Regis’s, “Is that your final answer?” to Howie’s, “Deal or no deal?” Bob Saget gets to ask, after each question, “The money or the mob?” It’s totally derivative. Strike one.
- The second strike is the pace. It plods along, much like Deal - in the first half hour, there were a total of (I believe) six questions. Compare this to Jeopardy! (which, if you don’t know, I consider to be the gold standard of game shows), which asks 6 questions in less than 90 seconds, and manages to pack in, usually, 61 questions in a half-hour. That’s 2 questions per minute, including commercials! 1 vs. 100 is going to get through about 12 questions in an hour, or about 1 every 5 minutes. Strike two.
- Strike three, much like Millionaire, is the difficulty level of the questions. Sure, Millionaire gets tough questions after wading through about 6 or 8 easy questions. I understand the economics of it, especially when the show is routinely giving away a lot more money than Jeopardy!. (Although Jeopardy! is on 5 days a week, and thus probably gives away a decent amount of money in a week.) While I’ve only seen one contestant so far on 1 vs. 100, the contestant got up to about $140,000 without being faced with a difficult question. I don’t think a lot of contestants are going to go really far beyond that - it isn’t like Millionaire, in which you still get some money if you get one of the later questions wrong. On 1 vs. 100 it’s all-or-nothing, and so I don’t see people risking $150,000 on another question. And so, unlike Millionaire, I don’t see this show getting to the tough questions with anything near the frequency of Millionaire. (And once again, Jeopardy! puts all quiz shows to shame in terms of average question difficulty, which is what a quiz show is all about.) Strike three.
Not that it needs more strikes:
- The audience participation is annoying, much like Deal.
- The bogus contestant-hemming-and-hawing about whether to stop after, say, the first question, is ridiculous in the same way that Deal’s first couple banker offers are superfluous. (At least Regis didn’t drag out the “Final answer?” until the questions get slightly less mind-numbing.)
- Enough with the cross-promotion already - from having Deal models in the mob to asking how many of the 26 Deal briefcases are numbered with numbers divisible by 3. Silly.
- The questions are poorly written. The above question is awful - just ask how many numbers between 1 and 26 are divisible by 3. There was a question about how the U.N. Secretary-General’s name would appear in “The Name Game.” But all the answers involved different names (John, Henry, and Kofi), so The Name Game business was entirely superfluous. If it was included for comedy, well…
You know, it does have a couple things going for it, though. As a game show, it fails, but Bob Saget is at least a passable host. Better than I thought. And it’s nice to see Ken Jennings smiling mug again.
But other than that, it’s pretty horrible.
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Channel
Posted 4:53 PM, Oct 13, 2006 |
I have lots to say today (see below) but why has nobody yet made a television station for real baseball fans? By which I mean:
Aren’t we all, fan or otherwise, tired of insipid questions like, “What were you thinking out there?” Do we expect interesting answers? Isn’t it true that we all know the answers already?
And aren’t us baseball fans - I mean the serious fans, the ones with books of statistics sitting around, the ones that understand profit sharing and Rule 5 players (okay, even that eludes me a little at the moment) - aren’t we ready for a serious baseball channel? One that, if a non-baseball fan turned it on, would wonder what sport they were even talking about, being totally unfamiliar with the Dead Ball Era and the slugging percentage of Robin Yount?
It just seems like baseball needs a channel for serious fans. All sports probably do, but I’m watching baseball now, and thus, the above.
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Return to Sender
Posted 4:44 PM, Oct 13, 2006 |
We’ve got a problem with the mail here. The former resident of our headquarters never filled out a change of address form at the Post Office, so as a result we’ve been receiving her mail for, oh, 5 months or so.
So the logical first question is, from someone who’s had a total of 8 different addresses in 10 years, is: Why would you not fill out a change of address form?
We get her junk mail, her magazine subscriptions, wedding invitations, her voter information, her jury summons, and today, a toy gift all the way from Hong Kong. Does she not realize that she is missing massive amounts of mail? Do newly-married friends not call and say, “Missed you at the wedding,” and is she not surprised when the words, “Wedding? What wedding?” come out of her mouth.
Last week, despite the fact that we have a roster in our apartment listing the last names of every resident that lives here, the United States Postal Service demanded, by means of chicken-scratches, that we all put our names on our individual mailboxes.
Fine, fine. So we do that.
Since then, we continue to receive the former resident, including, as mentioned about, today’s Hong Kong toy. (I’m curious, but haven’t been able to determine what it is from the packaging.) Also, the mail person, in the process of cramming our mail into our mailbox as fast as she can, tore off the bulk of our label, which I found attached to the back of my most recent issue of The New Yorker.
Speaking of The New Yorker, she’s also delivered two identical copies of a recent double-issue (one is kind of hard to miss - two is the equivalent of a glossy Sequoia) to our mailbox on the same day. One belonged to a guy down the street, which I delivered by hand.
Yesterday, we found a couple pieces of our mail, correctly addressed, leaning against the wall near the mailboxes. Chances are, she delivered those pieces to the wrong mailbox and someone was kind enough to deliver my free Medicin Sans Frontiers address labels by hand.
This mail lady is a disaster. Here’s what I picture happens every day as she makes her way to our building:
One of the numerous little, yippy dogs that lives in our building is out walking his owner, and he smells barbecue sauce drifting from somewhere and bolts. Lunging for the leash, the owner runs straight into the mail lady, who throws all the envelopes and packages up in the air. She’s left scrambling to scoop them all up, and it takes her an extra half hour. If she doesn’t finish her route on time, she’ll miss Judge Hatchett, so she finishes her route by cramming mail wherever there is any sort of gap or slot. Residents find mail stuck between landscaping stones, in cracks on the sidewalk, and under their windshield wipers.
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In Addition
Posted 9:30 PM, Oct 12, 2006 |
I meant to include this below, with the post about the MJT, but forgot. I ran across this today, via kottke:
Stephen Berkman makes ambrotypes (essentially, an early type of photograph in which a glass negative is placed against a dark background) that are truly wacky, from the guy who slipped on the banana peel to the two guys pictured with an alien. Most of them are spot-on and would not be out of place in the MJT.
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The Museum of Jurassic Technology
Posted 3:27 PM, Oct 12, 2006 |
The estimable companion and I recently took a trip over to Culver City, CA, to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Our trip will be poorly documented here for two reasons:
1) It’s really dark in there, and so any photos (flash not allowed) didn’t turn out, or (see #2 for more explanation) don’t make any sense, anyway.
2) The museum doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I recently read about the museum in Lawrence Weschler’s fantastic Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which I recommend you pick up and spend an afternoon reading. I do recall, in the back of my mind, reading excerpts of the book, maybe in The New Yorker, a long time prior, including a piece about the deprong mori, a bat that can fly through solid objects; the exhibit at the MJT includes, among other things, a piece of lead inside of which is encased the only deprong mori ever captured. (Wikipedia has an entry on the MJT that does a good job of explaining what the museum is all about, and L.A. City Beat has an old piece that I dug up for you, too.)
Sound fishy? Precisely.
The MJT also has an exhibit of paintings of Russian space dogs, which is less suspicious but still a little strange; a hair-covered horn that grew from a woman’s head; incredibly miniature sculptures of Disney’s Goofy, Pope John Paul II, and Napoleon, each mounted on or inside the eye of a normal sewing needle; an exhibit sponsored by Ricky Jay consisting of decaying and decomposing dice; and an exhibit about trailer parks.
The musem is 50% truth, 50% fiction, and 112% strange and unsettling. It’s incredibly dark and cramped into this tiny building; the exhibits are spread out in a maze that leads to you becoming incredibly disoriented. The only well-lit room was one which contained a piano, a couple portraits on the wall, and bookshelf after bookshelf of old books, a disproportionate number of which were about Napoleon Bonaparte.
One of my favorite exhibits was labeled “Out of Order.” Underneath the glass case was a microscope and five circular plates that contained some sort of samples. The microscope lens had been pressed down on one of the plates, which lay shattered in pieces beneath it. The exhibit was obviously out of order and had been purposefully prepared as such. Sort of a meta-exhibit, or something else that, like the whole museum, I can’t quite put my finger on.
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Like a Bird
Posted 3:55 PM, Oct 11, 2006 |
Like a bird trying to leave the nest for its first time, my experiment to move to a more reliable host resulted in the site nearly plummeting to its death.
I have plenty of issues with my current host, but look, here I am, updating my website without any problems - sure, there’s the occasional downtime, the occasional snafu, but apparently in the world of Internet domain hosts, that’s par for the course.
Unfortunately, Bluehost, the failed new host, got a bogey on the course (if I can stretch the metaphor that far). After lousy live chat technical support (one session of which was highlighted by the technician, unable to resolve my issue, pointing out that the scripts which run this site are copyrighted and can only be distributed by permission (Note: I have permission to use the script, and am in no way further distributing it), and then closing the chat when I didn’t accept that as a “solution”), as well as the run-around on their telephone tech support line, I quickly moved back to my current company.
They were entirely unhelpful, unable to answer any of my questions, and unable to get Movable Type, a pretty common blogging software, running on their site. The blamed it on me, that I had done something incorrectly, etc., which is patently false.
I guess the long and the short of it is that I’m back home and the show will go on, albeit with occasional power outages and goofy lapses, but that’s better than the show not going on at all.
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Upcoming Downtime
Posted 5:29 PM, Oct 8, 2006 |
Well, the time has come to transfer this domain to a host that’s more reliable than the current one. The web address here, all that stuff will remain as is, so you won’t have to update your bookmarks or anything, but it might be a little while before everything is up and running again. So be patient. Hopefully things will get better soon!
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End of Season
Posted 10:30 PM, Oct 6, 2006 |
So the Twins’ season came and went. The season always seems to start so fast, with the first 20 games or so disappearing like nothing, and then before you know it, it’s the All-Star break, and then the long days of summer sort of stretch the season out, in that period just after the break but before the real playoff stretch run. And then the last month of the season, this year, was constant scoreboard watching, checking Chicago and Detroit and Boston, and then Chicago and Detroit, and then just Detroit.
The season had a walk-off grand slam, a batting champion, a Cy Young winner (presumably), an amazing run, the best record in the majors in the second half of the season, lots of scrappy determination, and finally landing in the lead on the last day of the season.
And then it took three games, one fifty-fourth of the season, to undo all that work.
That’s not entirely true - the big league experience and confidence gained by players like Mauer, Morneau, Bartlett, Liriano, Cuddyer - all that will reap benefits next year. It’s unfortunate that next year is what I have to look forward to, as far as baseball is concerned.
Watching the game slip away today, pretty early and then really slip away late, you could see the Twins just looking, with blank stares, from the dugout. I didn’t see any disappointed - more shock, amazement, that something that took 6 months to work as hard as they possibly could to attain just slipped away in 96 hours, basically, and it wasn’t even close. Everyone knows there’s next year, and everyone knows they exceeded expectations, but, well, imagine your disappointment as a fan, and then put yourself in the shoes of someone like Mauer, who obviously did all he could for 162 games.
It makes me feel better and worse at the same time.
But, that’s why baseball is great - there’s always next year.
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Mr. Edward Yen
Posted 9:22 AM, Oct 5, 2006 |
Last night, a group of folks, myself included, attended a local trivia night. We named our team “Mr. Edward Yen,” because we thought it would be funny to name a group of people with an individual person’s name, especially a made-up one like Mr. Edward Yen.
We played pretty close to the lead the entire time, and when the last round came up and it was simply, “List all the teams in the Big Ten (Eleven),” we thought we were golden. Well, some of us did. After quickly filling out our sheet, making sure to include Big Ten powerhouse Illinois State and omit Purdue, we realized our error, but alas, too late.
Side note: It’s possible Illinois State’s teams would do better if they changed their team name, or at least their website. Their team name is Red Birds, which is vague and nondescript, but even worse is their athletic department website, http://www.goredbirds.com, which I initially read as Gored Birds. Those sad little birds.
Due, apparently, to a scoring error, Mr. Edward Yen ended up stealing (literally!) second place and winning a $20 discount on our next bar tab. I’m proposing sending at least half of that the Illinois State to for the Mr. Edward Yen Annual Scholarship, for which only students who were accepted by some sort of clerical error would be eligible.
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Improv Everywhere
Posted 10:08 PM, Oct 2, 2006 |
In addition to the crap below about Kansas City and other wastes of time (haha), if you haven’t been over to Improv Everywhere, check it out - they now have DVDs available, which means nothing to you if you haven’t been there. Their most recent mission is to have an agent, Rob, go to the concession stand at Yankee Stadium and then have trouble getting back to his seat. A lot of trouble. Check it out, particularly the first and third videos.
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Kansas City
Posted 10:01 PM, Oct 2, 2006 |
Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, etc., has a poker story that’s worth reading, if you like reading poker stories, over at the Freakonomics Blog.
And Ken Jennings has a weird story about Union Station in Kansas City, MO (one of my former places of residence) over at his blog.
I’ll tell you what about Kansas City - I lived there for about a year, teaching at a local high school. I knew I wasn’t sticking around for more than a year - I was finishing my Masters degree at the same time as teaching, and so I had to teach in Missouri so my advisor could come watch me educate America’s youth, etc., but I knew once I got my degree I was bailing, back to Minnesota (as I write this from Los Angeles). And so, as a result, I:
a) never bothered to explore much of Kansas City outside of Chipotle , record stores, bowling alleys, and movie theaters, and
b) spent most of that time by myself, not bothering to make friends, because attachment breeds fear and sadness (at least according to Lars Farf).
I went downtown in Kansas City sometimes, to take photos, to wander the streets, to sit on the corner and sing my sad tale of woe to the Kansas Citians passing by, upturned fedora at my feet, a couple pennies in by noon. Or something like that.
But Kansas City was, well, kind of lame. I’m sorry if you’re from Kansas City - not because I said it was lame, but rather because you’re from Kansas City. Even though I didn’t make much of an effort to go do anything, well, there’s nothing really going on there. It’s kind of a dull town.
There is an excellent toy and miniature museum with some excellent miniatures, very intricate. I went through the museum, taking pictures (no flash) until I was coming down the last staircase, taking a photo of a giant miniature lighthouse (yes) when someone told me, “No photos in the museum.” Good thing for them that I didn’t try to steal the replica of a French parlor in the 17th century in my shirt, because their security was miniature.
Make your own joke about miniatures here.
So that’s my thought about Kansas City. Feel free to share your own thoughts about Kansas City with someone close to you.
Also, if you’re from Kansas City, at least you’re not from Wichita, which I’ve heard referred to as “the armpit of America” on more than one occasion, including from someone who grew up there. Kansas City, you’re more like that nook between your big toe and the one next to it that occasionally gets a spot of lint in it.
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Recap
Posted 7:14 PM, Oct 1, 2006 |
Last year at this time, I was glum, the Major League Baseball season having ended for the Twins with not much to show for it. But this year makes last year not so bad, surprisingly. It makes last year an important year for players like Michael Cuddyer, Justin Morneau, and Joe Mauer, giving them all a chance to adjust to their expected roles. This year’s terrific run through the second half of the season wouldn’t have been possible without last year’s disappointing season.
The Twins won the AL Central today after beating Chicago and then waiting for the Tigers to get swept by the Royals. It’s the only time in Major League Baseball history that a team has taken sole possession of first place for the first time on the last day of the season.
This season is the only time for an American League catcher to win the batting title (which was won three times by two different NL catchers: Gene “Bubbles” Hargrave (‘26) and Ernie Lombardi (‘38 and ‘42). So a catcher hasn’t won a batting title in 64 years in either league.
This season also featured the appearance of Francisco Liriano, Matt Garza, and one Boof Bonser.
Lots of crazy things happened this year. The Twins might, in addition to the batting champion, have a Cy Young winner and an MVP (and, if Liriano had stayed healthy, a Rookie of the Year candidate (and maybe, in the same person, a Cy Young winner)).
The Star Tribune put together a nice photo gallery of the post-game celebration over on their site.
And now the playoffs. At least we don’t have to play the Yankees, at least not yet.
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