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Not a Fan
Posted 3:06 PM, Jan 30, 2008 |
Not a big fan of the previous poem/post, so I should write something else, so let’s talk baseball, since it’s the week prior to the Super Bowl.
So the Twins are going to trade Santana unless something weird happens. While it seemed, months ago, that trading Santana was the inevitable conclusion, as time carried on and the weeks passed, I think most Twins fans probably reserved a tiny corner of their hearts for the hope that Santana would get re-signed, rather than traded. (I don’t think anyone really hoped he would stick around for just one more year, to the end of his contract, and then walk with the Twins getting basically nothing.)
But now it looks like he’s gone. They keep showing this clip on Sportscenter - they’ve been showing it for months - of Santana smiling and pointing to someone, laughing, having a good time. I’m sure he’ll have a good time in New York, and he’ll certainly have money to spend, but it’s too bad that the Twins lost two of their big, marquee players and personalities in Hunter and Santana.
Should Twins fans be mad about the trade? Beats me - most of us don’t know enough about the Mets prospects we’re getting to have any opinion (other than that none of them are named Johan Santana). In the past, the Twins have made great deals, turning Frank Viola and Chuck Knoblauch trades into deals in which the Twins definitely got the better end of the deal, and then of course the A. J. Pierzynski trade to San Francisco that added Joe Nathan, Francisco Liriano, and one Boof Bonser to the roster.
Side note: One also wonders how much Liriano would have benefited from being in the rotation with a two-time Cy Young winner. Instead, now Liriano is, if he retains last year’s pre-injury form, the best and most talented pitcher on a very young staff but with no player to learn from.
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The Emptiness of Morning
Posted 10:40 PM, Jan 26, 2008 |
Where would you go
in the middle of the night,
black all around us,
my body hibernating,
the sheets in thick, slippery knots?
Where did you go
while I slept and dreamt,
the sound of rain like insects on aluminum,
the sound of my slow breathing,
a long sigh’s breathy exhale?
You are elsewhere -
The imprint of your head in the pillow
is a wide, pearish crater
with a single hair like a tectonic fracture
down the middle.
The smell of your shower, like post-rain,
is all that remains;
I pull the sheet away
and discover it was being held aloft
by a memory which has lost its shape.
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Gallery: VA Plus
Posted 4:43 PM, Jan 26, 2008 |
The Veterans Administration grounds are always good for some photos, as well as asbestos and lead poisoning. I’ve yet to break into one of the buildings with my tripod and go crawling around, so this series is more exterior photos.
VA Plus
In addition, smattered throughout are a few photos taken elsewhere, in small neighborhoods near Ye Olde Math Shoppe. Enjoy.
(Other Veteran Administration galleries are here and here.)
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Confrontation
Posted 10:17 AM, Jan 23, 2008 |
The other day I saw a large, business-owned, company truck being given a parking violation for parking in a driveway with the entire cab basically out in the street. The truck driver was animatedly berating the parking enforcement officer, using every obscene word in the book, and some not in the book (but proudly, none that I hadn’t heard before). The parking enforcement officer, either trained or experienced (or both) in such matters, calmly said, “You can talk to me after I finish writing this ticket.” I did not witness the conclusion.
In other news, I recently received a parking ticket. I wasn’t paying attention to the signs, of which there are many, often requiring pencil and paper and some sort of Venn diagram of unions and intersections of times, restrictions, and lack of restrictions. Many of them are much like the rule to determine if a year is a leap year, which is basically:
If the year is a multiple of 4, then it is a leap year UNLESS
the year also ends in 00, in which case it is not a leap year UNLESS
the year is also a multiple of 400, in which case it is a leap year.
But I silently paid my ticket (online) to the tune of $47.
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Celebrity Illness
Posted 10:11 AM, Jan 23, 2008 |
Here’s a piece about Britney Spears and the media coverage and media responsibility, basically encouraging the media to leave Britney alone and instead write something responsible about mental illness. Instead of doing this, of course, the media is almost ignoring the mental illness aspect of the story and, at the same time, doing their best to make it worse, and thus sell more issues, get more readers, etc.
One also wonders if there will be any sort of realistic, important journalism to come out of Heath Ledger’s death, which may or may not have been linked to mental illness. (Any realistic, important journalism won’t come from CNN, certainly, though.)
As most who know me already know, I don’t really care what celebrities are doing on a daily basis. I think celebrities are useful for entertainment (not in their real lives, but on screen, music, etc.), but also as mirrors for what is going on in society. The article from Poynter.org talks about Annette Funicello and how there were “social forces in place… that saved us from the worst forms of exploitation.” Celebrity stories today aren’t interesting other than that they reflect the absence of that net that was erected by society once.
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Dream Job
Posted 12:21 PM, Jan 20, 2008 |
As you may or may not know, my dream job, something I am merely aspiring toward and not actually working toward, is being a question — er, answer — writer for Jeopardy!. (How do you end a sentence when you end it with a title that has punctuation at the end of it? Do you need the additional, proper punctuation, or is every sentence that ends in Jeopardy! automatically enthusiastic, resulting it lots of positive press? I suppose I could rewrite the sentence so it doesn’t end in Jeopardy!, but I’m sure there’s a rule out there to just punctuate it properly.)
Ahem, well, anyway. So that’s my dream job, right after astronaut, Major League Baseball player, and princess. Here is a piece by a Jeopardy! writer, currently on strike, about why he likes his job. His reasons are a combination of reasons I had already thought of and reasons that make me want the job even more. Unfortunately, it sounds like they have a low turnover rate and only 9 writers.
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Wa5te at the “Post Office”
Posted 3:47 PM, Jan 19, 2008 |
I returned to the aforementioned “Post Office” and noted their trash can this time. They have one with a swinging door, the kind you associate with fast-food restaurants, and they have engraved on the front of the swinging door the word, presumably, “Waste” (without the quotation marks, blessedly). However, what is actually engraved there is the following:
WA5TE
It’s clearly a 5. One wonders why they would be so sloppy on the engraving form, but even more, why the engraver would actually engrave such a thing, even if it looked like that what they wrote, and even more, why the U.S. government would accept such a thing. One theory was that the engraver’s “S” was broken or damaged, but really, you aren’t going to get far engraving things without an “S.”
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A Sign at the “Post Office”
Posted 1:53 PM, Jan 16, 2008 |
Today I went to post office that I usually don’t go to: the one in Westside Pavilion, near YOMS. I’ve been there before, but today finally remembered to post, no pun intended, when I returned.
They have numerous signs they’ve made on a printer that say things like “Post Office” along with the address of other locations. The thing is, on their signs, the words “Post Office” are really in quotes. They have a penchant for improperly-used quotation marks. Another sign reads:
- Please make sure you have all your “forms filled out.”
I’m not sure what that means.
The best sign, though, has the following text:
- It is “your responsibility” to “make sure” that you received the correct “stamps and change” before “leaving” the “post office.”
Not kidding. There are really five sets of quotation marks on the sign, which is reproduced at every register. Someone thought it was a good idea.
A further question prompted by the sign:
Why is it my responsibility to make sure their employees don’t give me the wrong stamps or change?
And, in other customer service news, I recently ordered a shirt from Neighborhoodies, a custom shirt place. My shirt took 6 business days to ship, will take another who-knows-how-long to arrive, and will cost me $28 by the time it gets here. I filled out a customer service ticket in which I noted the 6-business-day processing time and the ridiculous $8 shipping charge. Their response was that it looked like everything on my order was right on time and it should be here shortly, as it’s already in transit, as if that was an amazing feat. When I replied back, they simply deleted my ticket.
Hopefully it’s a nice shirt, because it’s bad customer service.
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Ceremony Without All The Ceremony
Posted 9:11 PM, Jan 13, 2008 |
The EC and I watched the entire Golden Globes today in one hour, which would normally be a feat fit for Tivo but this year was no big deal, as the “ceremony” (read: the boring parts) was canceled due to the writer’s strike, so they just had some yahoos stand in an empty studio and read the nominees and winners from a three-ring binder. Even this could have been accomplished, however, in less time, as they took some breaks to talk to a couple of jokers about their opinions about the winners. I think the whole thing could have been done, with commercials, in about 50 minutes, which means it’s really maybe 25 minutes of actual material.
That’s the best awards program I’ve ever seen, though. It still has the drama of wondering who will win, something absent from just reading a news article or list, and you still get to see clips of all the stuff, for the most part, and wonder what networks all the good shows are on. Mad Men?
The best thing that could come out of this year’s Golden Globes would be an enormously high rating and lots of positive post-Globes chatter. Hollywood poobahs would realize the best route going forward is simply, as I put it at the time, “to shitcan all awards ceremonies and do them all this way.”
Oh, and also, Atonement? Actually, considering that that piece of dreck won Best Drama instead of No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood, maybe they should just shitcan the whole thing. Honestly. Atonement? Imagine me saying it in a low, gravelly voice: Atonement?
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Phone Attack
Posted 3:23 PM, Jan 10, 2008 |
Yesterday I was talking on my cell phone and I tried to move it away from my face and part of my beard was stuck in it. Ouch. Seriously, what did I do to upset my phone? I dislike everything about it.
Also, it is funny, typing “my beard,” even though I have had it for several years. When I hear “beard,” I imagine a long, bushy thing that belongs on the face of a settler, not a reasonably-short “beard” like the one I have. We need a new word for a beard that is closely trimmed.
But seriously, about that phone?
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Boundaries / Limits
Posted 11:20 PM, Jan 8, 2008 |
So it turns out that maybe I don’t know my own boundaries, which seems hard to believe since I’ve spent 29-plus years inside them. I like to take on tasks that devour all my time with their little tiny digital teeth, but that’s okay.
Things have been busy, what with the holidays, the Righteous Babe Records Holiday Bowl game, lots of work at YOMS as we start up an afterschool program, some other work for the old company that was never named in these pages but should be and is forever after to be known as The Old Company (even though this name is applicable to many old companies), and lots of Guitar Hero III (only 2 songs left on Hard, then on to Expert, from which I may never return).
Also, the new poetry project is eating a fair amount of my time, only because I haven’t yet learned that writing the poem during the day would save me the trouble of getting out of bed to do it. But, I think better or more creatively at night when the brain is just on the edge of its own little bed, slipping off its slippers and its little backdoor flap unhinged in the cold night breeze. As evidence, today, below, is a bonus poem for you.
So anyway, it turns out I usually write things here when nothing is happening and then don’t write when lots of things are happening, like in the last few days. Unfortunately, none of those things are exciting.
The EC found $100 and Mr. Rittonian found $20 in the rain. These were two separate occasions. Mr. Rittonian found his on the street in the rain leaving a Mexican restaurant which later made him sick and gave him a case of the Bob Blows. At least I think that’s the medical term - something about gas in the colon?
Well, anyway, this post was originally about me not understanding my boundaries as evidenced by my continually taking on additional, self-imposed projects, but instead ended with evidence of my own un-understanding of my limits in the form of talking about another person’s gastric distress and innards. Apologies to all.
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close, but not quite
Posted 11:10 PM, Jan 8, 2008 |
i snip words and lines and stanzas
like suzette clips hair at the salon,
shears in hand, snipping like clicking,
the remnants blown across the room
in a jumble of font.
there’s no way i could reassemble them,
all these broken phrases;
sometimes i come up with something
better than before,
sometimes something
disturbing,
but mostly nonsense,
mostly garbage,
mostly waste.
i’ve swept all the trash
into this bag here,
and when i look inside
i remember my old ant farm,
clear plastic, white sand,
a green farm scene above land,
and all the ants scurrying around,
their thoraxes like joined
punctuation, like
some new punctuation mark
that hasn’t been invented yet
but is intended to mean
“i tried, but this isn’t
quite what i meant.”
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Overdoing It
Posted 1:09 PM, Jan 5, 2008 |
After compiling last year’s statistics, I started to feel metaphorically unwell (or literally unwell, literally) at the number of books I had read and the number of books I had failed to really, I don’t know, get anything out of. As such, after finishing David Mitchell’s most supremely excellent Cloud Atlas after retuning to Los Angeles post-holiday, I took about a week off. Not intentionally, but my mind made sure it happened. I haven’t read anything other than a page or two or Infinite Jest each night.
Today, I went to the library and picked up four books on hold, but the bad news is they’re all due in two weeks. I’m trying to pace myself this year - I think 52 books is a good goal in terms of a maximum, rather than a minimum, to read this year.
I wrote a poem about my experience, too. We’ll see how it all goes.
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Bad Advertising
Posted 11:38 AM, Jan 5, 2008 |
Pitchfork regularly asks bands for a sort of “guest list” of favorite things, and the most recent band they asked is Pinback’s Rob Crow. Crow gives a whole bunch of snarky replies throughout, like:
“Favorite New Band: Uhhhhhhhh….”
“Best Purchase of the Past Year: Toilet paper.”
“Favorite Video Game at the Moment: Guitar Hero III (Even though most of the actual songs are terrible…)”
Not like I’m a big listener of Pinback, but who wants to support some narcissist who thinks his band is better than everything else out there and everything stinks. Yeah, what a joker. No Pinback for me, thanks, Rob Crow.
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Trouble Brewing
Posted 1:50 PM, Jan 3, 2008 |
In the last couple months on the block where Ye Olde Math Shoppe is, there have been two (at least) robberies, the copper pipes from the air conditioning units on the roof have been stolen, as was someone’s catalytic converter from a car left overnight - apparently catalytic converters contain some valuable metal pieces. In addition, there’s been a small spate of graffiti and, in the last week, two cinder blocks left outside to prevent damage to the door of YOMS (it’s hard to explain how they’ll help, but they will) have been smashed in the parking lot.
We have a gate that, for some reason, doesn’t have a lock. It closes, and has a hole for a lock, but no actual lock. However, even so, the gate only protects our building, which is good, obviously, but other buildings around us have been victims of some of the above-mentioned crimes.
One would assume the police have been notified, as the landlord’s handyman has been around numerous times in the last month, but nothing seems to be changing. I just put a new cinder block last night to replace the one that was smashed over the New Year’s holiday, and it was smashed at some point last night.
I’m tempted to put another one out tonight, but I don’t work tomorrow. I may put another one out on Sunday night and then, if it is smashed on Monday, put another one out Monday night and contact the police, as it will almost assuredly be destroyed and they could, if they felt like it, catch someone in the act. We shall see.
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New Year’s Eve Recap
Posted 12:03 PM, Jan 2, 2008 |
It’s not that it took me all of yesterday to recover from New Year’s Eve festivities - it didn’t. It’s more that I was simply lazy, playing Guitar Hero III, and eating at Souplantation, instead.
New Year’s Eve was spent with the EC, the Rittonians, and Nello and the Swede, both of whom are new characters to these electronic pages. The Swede made dinner for us, including [several misspellings of hors d’ouevres here] some pre-dinner snacks, crackers and bread and cheeses as well as oysters, which I passed on, but enjoyed seeing the slurpy drippings on everyone.
We hung out until the New Year, when Nello arrived back from work, just in the nick of time, and then chatted while the finishing touches were put on dinner. Around, say, 2:30am, we sat down to dinner, which included white bean soup with truffles; potatoes; salad; and a gigantic salmon. The food was delicious, and was followed up by a tasty little chocolate mousse, also homemade.
We also had some Rittbrau, a home-brewed beer by the Rittonians, as well as some Chimay, some port, and lots of champagne.
The EC and I arrived home somewhere just shy of 4:00am, which is the latest I have been out and about in many, many moons.
A happy new year to all of you. I’ll talk to you soon.
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