So if you're a regular reader you've probably noticed that I haven't updated this in a while. Actually, if you're a regular reader you probably need to Get A Life since I don't appear to update this frequently enough to encourage regular reading. But anyway. Maybe you're using spyonit and letting the online-diarist-addict's best friend tell you when I've updated.

Curiously, they sent me email several weeks ago, the content of which was, "we notice lots of our users are setting up spies for your site, wanna put up a button for them to make it easy?" My response was, well, a non-response. Although I did check around with other diarists I know to find out if they too had gotten the email. I think one of them had, the rest all uniformly went, "Spyonit? What's that?" If you want to set up a spy, you probably already know how anyway and don't need no steenking button.

Anyway, I haven't updated because I haven't really been particularly communicative or had any interesting anecdotes to relate, or at least ones about which I could come up with more than 50 words or so. I get this way occasionally. Ask me a personal or pseudo-personal question and you'll get about four words out of me. You could say, if you were the sort of person inclined to say such things, that it's my own personal Calvin Coolidge mode. Not Very Wordy. Odd, that, considering how Overly Wordy I am on most occasions.

(Astrologers among you will be quick to point out that Mercury was retro recently, coinciding with my lack of verbosity ... you're probably right, but I never bothered to line up the dates with an ephemeris all the other times this happened and I'm not about to start now. That would require getting up off the couch.)

This is going to be an entry where I say "anyway" a lot. I can tell.

Anyway, since I left you I've seen Brave Combo twice, passed on one additional opportunity to see them because it would have involved a three hour drive (potentially rainy or in thunderstorms) to an outdoor venue (potentially wet due to rain during the day) for an evening show (50% chance of more rain that night) on a school night, and passed up a much less inconvenient show the next night in Baltimore because I somehow knew that if I went home I'd be asleep by 11. And I was. The two shows (Raleigh and Silver Spring) were quite good, my calves were sore for a couple days, and I really enjoyed getting to see Amber again and getting to meet her fiancé. He'd look better with a shave and a haircut, but what do I know? Other than that superficial comment he's very nice, and possibly the most awkwardly geeky of anybody I've seen Amber involved with (but I don't think I'd be considered an impartial judge).

Um. What else?

Two movies this week, both with Rob: Tuesday saw us at Jesus' Son (go, see it, trust me on this), last night (Rob returned my call of Saturday morning - a possible invitation to go see DC United and Newcastle United play an exhibition game, which turned out not to sound interesting enough to be worth $14 to either of us - to reveal that he'd inadvertently splashed toilet bowl cleaner (diluted with bowl water, luckily) in his eye and was at the hospital when I'd called) at Dupont for the rereleased Blood Simple (go, see it, and you shouldn't even need to trust me on that one).

This reminds me I came up with a framework for a novel. Unfortunately I don't actually have a story to go in said novel, so I guess I can share the framework with you: Footnotes. I talk in parentheticals too much as it is. So, extend that idea out to the point that there's a running column on every page of all the possible parentheticals, to the extent that there's probably more notes than actual text. Now that I write that out, it occurs to me that T.S. Eliot already did that. They call it his masterpiece. I did my senior paper in high school English on it. Oh well. There are no new ideas after all.

Anyway.

I spent far too much of this weekend sprawled on the couch watching the teevee. I used to be one of those people who "didn't watch TV" - except that I didn't even make it to the 7 hour average per week usually watched by people who claimed they didn't watch television. When I heard that statistic I monitored myself for about a month. I came to maybe 2 hours in a heavy week. The Simpsons did me in.

I don't watch a whole lot of teevee anymore, and I don't watch it with any regularity except for the FOX Sunday night lineup (and probably South Park and Space Ghost on Sunday nights as well, if I remember to watch them both and if South Park isn't a rerun). But since moving into the basement and getting the new big teevee I've been watching more. Or at least it's been on more. I don't consider myself a "TV Watcher," and I've never seen Survivor or Big Brother, or the revival of Twenty-One, and I've only seen about 10 minutes of that R*g*s show on ABC. Regardless, I've been a lazy-ass mofo the past few weeks and I've soaked up quite a bit of the Discovery Channel. (Note to the Discovery people: perhaps you wouldn't have had to pull the IPO for discovery dot com if your ads for it weren't so lame - they even fail at irony, guys). And there was the free preview of all the Showtime networks that had me suffering through Hideous Kinky (I kept expecting that at any moment it would actually get interesting - or at least we'd get to see more boobies, since I'm sure as hell not going to rent Titanic just to see them - but it continued wandering aimlessly around apparently hoping that a cohesive plot would suddenly materialize, much as its protagonist seemed to think that if she wandered around Marrakech long enough then enlightment would just find her) but then having the Sundance channel redeem itself with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Somehow I'd not managed to see that in theaters, although Rob had seen it and would have gladly seen it a second time if I'd wanted to go.

This reminds me that I used to pay for Sundance Channel and grew weary of it - only to find out when I called to cancel it that if I wanted to reconnect it in the future they'd charge me more money. Never mind that they'd never told me anything about the price increase before I canceled. Whatever. It's not worth nine bucks now. I guess maybe if I knew there'd be two movies every month that I'd definitely watch then it would be worth it, but I can't say when I had it that I watched it four hours per month. I'm such a cheapskate.

Ooo. Skate. I need to get out on my skates at some point. Remind me. I enjoy the skating when I actually do it. Do I ever actually do it though? No, I do not. The K2s continue to sit in the closet, most decidedly not going anywhere. Oh, and does anybody know if the actor playing the dad on Malcolm did his own skating? I'm thinking he did all the simpler stuff but they had a double for the real stunts, considering where all the cuts were (you never get a look at the face of the guy doing all the tricks in the same camera shot, so they could be using a double). Blah blah blah. I'm random tonight.

Work sucks less, but has been quite busy the past couple weeks. We're interviewing people for the group I've been working in (more involvement than I expected or wished for), but I've been in that and also meetings and conference calls about software platforms, and also a new project that I'm supposed to get involved in, and I'm supposed to write up yet another executive summary of the thing I've already written three executive summaries of since the executive in question couldn't be bothered to read the first three. Guh.

At least it's getting better. But then I got my "raise" for the new company year (they just went to a corp-wide review/raise period of July-July) and it's a prorated joke, so they take a step forward and a step and a half back. Ugh.

Yawning. Late. Tired. Maybe I'll fill in more random stuff tomorrow. Later today, really. Then again, maybe I won't.

link (2000-07-24)

Combo! Combo! Combo!

Combo!

So, one of my most favoritest bands ever is finally coming out here to the Eastern Seaboard, and I'm psyched. I'm driving down to Raleigh on Thursday after work to go hang out with Amber and then see the show there on Friday night.

Then on Saturday morning I'm hopping back in the car and driving back to DC to see the show here (yay!) on Saturday night. Or I guess I should actually point out that the show is here and not just anywhere random in the DC metro. I will be there. Not literally with bells on, but I'll be there.

And then Sunday, if I'm up for it, I may drive up to Lancaster, PA to see them there. I'm undecided on that. I used to see them about three times a year before I moved out here, so if I saw them three times this weekend that would get my average for the year, but it wouldn't catch me up for the two years in between.

So, any of you fair readers who are in the DC metro, go to the show on Saturday. Tell your friends. Have them tell their friends. (Yes, I can hear you now. "Polka? Are you insane?" The answer is no, but you really have to hear them to believe me. They've won multiple Grammy awards)

So anyway, Combo! Combo! Combo! Combo! Combo!

Is that unsubtle enough for you?

Oh, special added bonus for you DC folks ... I may decide to sing with the band. I've done it before and been invited to join them any time. Miss the show and you'll miss it.

link (2000-07-10)

So I took this fencing class in college.

There's a term in fencing: right-of-way. I can't remember the original French term and I can't find it immediately on the web, and since it doesn't really move the story along I'm going to stick with the English.

Anyway, right-of-way works like this: You've got two people fencing at any given time. Only one of them is allowed to score a hit at any time, so in case there are two simultaneous hits registered the judge(s) will determine who had the right-of-way and award them the point.

Now. You get right-of-way by starting your attack. That's pretty much it. If the two of you are standing still on the pitch and one of you lowers the tip of his or her blade and starts moving forward, that person has the right-of-way. The other person is supposed to allow the attack to happen, but is also allowed to parry and riposte - and can score on the riposte. But. If the person on attack doesn't attack, wasting the right-of-way, the person on defense can go ahead and attack anyway, stealing the right-of-way.

So you're probably confused now, wondering what the point is of having right-of-way if the other person can just steal it from you anyway. Which is what brings me to my point.

People around DC seem to drive like a lot of people fence - they take the right-of-way and then they don't do anything with it. Of course, there's no judge out there on the roads to tell you when it's okay to preempt the other person's right-of-way and do your own driving thing. And it's making me batty.

I pass not one but two zebra stripe pedestrian crossings on my way out of the District every morning. The way the law's written, any pedestrian who steps into that crossing has the right-of-way automatically. I usually ignore them because they're doing that urban thing where they don't seem to realize that other people might value their time, and they just sorta stroll leisurely out into the street, oh, somewhere.

So today after blazing past some guy who was on his leisurely stroll in the first crossing, I decided to stop for a guy who seemed to be actually crossing the street in the second one. What did he do? He stopped in the middle of the road and turned around to look the other way entirely, apparently satisfied to be in the middle of a busy street just standing there. Argh.

The driving part wasn't any better, as I saw some guy attempt to signal and change lanes, only to have the minivan in the other lane (with a US Gubmint tag, no less) not give him enough room to get into the lane, but also not speed up to let him get in behind him. The Gubmint van seemed to be willfully blocking this guy from changing lanes. The point? I have no idea. But he did it anyway.

The rest of the drive was more of the same, including the one woman who kept passing me on the right (instead of the left) because, apparently, to pass me on the left would be to admit that she was speeding. So she'd pass me on the right, get stuck, move around behind me, go up and pass somebody else on the right, get stuck, I'd pass her again, lather, rinse, repeat. As I exited I saw her get into the right lane to pass somebody again. All this with not one but two left lanes free.

People are stupid.

link (2000-07-07)

Cosmo is looking very forlorn. His claws were too long - he was even making little claw noises just walking on the carpet, but he knew I had plans and he didn't want to let me near him. So after I grabbed the clippers (note, learned from a friend who saw her vet do this: it's often easier to trim your pet's claws with human nail trimmers than it is to use the claw trimmers. I don't even know where my claw trimmers are anymore, the nail clippers work so well. I use toenail clippers, FWIW) he went scampering away and I did Jester's claws instead.

Cosmo approached me a couple times before he finally decided it was time to lounge on the chaise, er, piano bench (it's a good chaise size for a cat, work with me here), and I was able to grab him and do the trimming.

It's weird, since he seemed to be telegraphing the message of "pleeeeeease trim my claws, pleeeeeease," but he didn't want me to pick him up to do it. Of course, the bit that did it was him running full speed and jumping up onto the couch, slashing my leg through the blanket in the process. Silly cat. You get the crazies around me and draw blood in the process, you're gonna get trimmed.

So Jester and Cosmo have neat front claws now (I didn't do their backs this time), and I haven't tried to do any more of Spike's after the four claws I got last week. I prefer for my skin to be intact, thank you.

Yes, for those who haven't been paying attention, I have three adult cats, all boys. This is why (1) that kitten decided I'd be a good guy, since I seem to ooze good cat vibes from every pore. and (2) I couldn't actually keep him, since the apartment's only 1000 square feet, and that's too small for three cats, let alone four.

Mundane, eh? Let's see, at least the weather's gorgeous this week ...

link (2000-07-06)

So I actually did leave the house. I put some air in the tires on my spent-too-much-for-it-to-leave-it-in-the-house-all-the-time mountain bike, grabbed a fanny pack and put my pager, cell phone, and sunglass case in it, and rode down to the Capitol. Left the house at 7pm. Concert started at 8pm.

Washington would be a perfectly bikeable city if it weren't for two things: the weather and the traffic. The weather wasn't completely terrible today, but it was muggier than I would have liked. And in spite of the traffic I figured this would be a pedestrian enough day that I could opt against wearing a helmet. That turned out okay, as I did not end up under the bumpers of any cars (I've done that once, and I'd prefer not to repeat it).

So I got down to the Capitol, where the NSO was playing a concert starting at 8pm. Unfortunately, while the Capitol is a lovely building and a nice place to assemble if you don't need to, um, see anything, there are a few too many trees to make it an optimal concert venue except for the few people who can devote an entire day to nothing more than staking their claim on a spot with a good view of both the stage and the Washington Monument in the distance. This meant that I, strolling up half an hour before "curtain" and with a bicycle playing the role of albatross, was not particularly likely to get an optimal spot for both listening and viewing.

I moved around a bit until the concert started. It was led by Barry Bostwick, who apparently is Patriot Actor Number One after playing George Washington in that miniseries years ago. It kicked off with the ever popular Seventy-Six Trombones from The Music Man, and bumped up and downhill from there.

Audra McDonald indeed has a glorious voice, and I should pay attention the next time she's performing anywhere near me so I can get a ticket and go see her under better circumstances. She did the National Anthem and didn't sound bad, which is all you can hope for from an old drinking song. She also did a couple things from the "dearly loved" Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Um. Dearly loved by the people who actually have bothered to pay attention to the music, but most people hear the names Rogers and Hammerstein and think Oklahoma, or The Sound of Music, and not Carousel, their thickest and most inaccessible work. Anyway.

Then they did two pieces by Aaron Copland. Do you want to guess which two they were? If you guessed Fanfare for the Common Man and the Hoedown from Rodeo you are correct. And a special note to Leonard Slatkin: it's not pronounced like the drive in Beverly Hills, it's pronounced like the thing with the horses and the bulls and the cowboys. Duh.

They then trotted out James Galway, because there's no better way to celebrate your country's independence than by featuring an artist from another one. Here's where things started to get unbearable. He started off with Baby Elephant Walk, moved onto Pie in the Face Polka, then an Irish jig I forget the name of, then something he just referred to as a tarantella, but which revealed itself to be "Funiculi, Funicula," among other things. Before the first one and between each of the others, he implored the crowd to get up and dance. Ugh. Having been to a number of Brave Combo shows where there was hardly enough room to stand, I can attest that it is impossible to polka properly under the sort of crowd conditions present on the West Lawn of the Capitol tonight.

After Galway, they introduced an actress as having received the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical last year - Kristen Chenoweth, for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I went, "wait." Then she said something, and I really went, "wait." I looked her up when I got home. I did a community theatre production of Anything Goes with her about 10 years ago. Small world. It's not like you could go up to her and go, "remember that guy who played one of the Chinese guys in Anything Goes, not the short one with the BO problem, but the other one, the tall guy? Remember him?" Well, I guess you could do that, but I doubt you'd get a positive reaction without the aid of a program with my name printed in it. And it's not like I'm now going to sell rights or anything ("touch me, I knew Kristen Chenoweth before she was famous"), but it's weird to hear somebody's name like that and go, "wait, don't I know her?"

Anyway, they did a medley of Peanuts stuff as a tribute to Charles Schulz, an odd mishmash of things from the Broadway show and some stuff by Vince Guaraldi - who had nothing to do with the Broadway show. Neither one of those really translates well to an outdoor orchestral show so I hopped back on my bike and headed to find a good spot to see the fireworks.

There was one place I almost stayed where I couldn't see the stage, but they had speakers turned around to go across the reflecting pool, and there was plenty of room within earshot of the speakers and sight of the Washington Monument. But then it occurred to me that there were four cannon on the other side of the reflecting pool (for the inevitable 1812 Overture), and I probably wouldn't want to be that close to them when they started firing. So I headed west and ended up across 14th Street from the Monument itself. This, I tell you, is pretty primo location.

I got there about ten minutes before 9:00, which means fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the fireworks. They started pretty much on time, first with lights on the Monument with gels or slides inserted so that the oversized blue mortar pattern familiar from the renovation scaffolding was back (nitpick - a couple of the slides were out of focus, on the north side they were skewed, and they didn't account for the extra distance the projections had to travel up top so the mortar pattern got bigger the higher it went, but anyway), then they relit it with full lights and started the fireworks. And wow.

It's pretty interesting to be near enough you can hear the mortars fire, since you get the effect of "whump ... sparkle ... boom," and depending on how many whumps you hear (they sound like a muted kick drum, but really loud) you can sorta predict how impressive the display up top is going to be. The really large ones had a significant enough explosion up in the air to provide a shock wave down on the ground, and this is the first time I've seen anybody actually keep the sky lit continuously for whatever extended period of time. Not to say that they did that for the full half hour of the show, but there would be long spans where the sky was pretty much fully lit by fireworks, instead of the usual "whump whump ... bang bang ... pause ... whump ... bang ... pause ..." you see in most municipal fireworks displays. The one complaint I'd have about the show itself wasn't really anybody's fault: there was so little wind that much of the display was obscured by its own smoke cloud. Whenever the breeze picked up, the fireworks looked better.

The show lasted half an hour and was by far the most impressive fireworks display I've ever seen, eclipsing last year's on the mall too. Although that might be the unfair advantage that last year I was on top of a building in Adams Morgan and this time I was a couple blocks away and had the Washington Monument, against which to measure the height of the fireworks.

So then I had to ride my bike back home through the ridiculous crowds. I just wanted to tell every pedestrian, "I will not hit you, as long as you don't walk into me." It took until Pennsylvania Ave before I managed to put some distance between myself and the pedestrian traffic on 14th Street. There were numerous DC police officers standing around in the intersections not even attempting to direct traffic. How that's supposed to help, I have no idea. Umm, crowd control? Anyone? The smell of Cordite (or whatever it is the fireworks use nowadays) was intense all the way to Penn as well, but it seemed to clear out around there.

Once I started up the hill at about G Street, the pedestrian traffic was behind me and I only had the car traffic to worry about, plus other bikers who did stupid things like get in front of me when I was stopped at a traffic light, then ride slower than me but make it impossible to pass them without getting dead. Argh. Luckily the number of pedestrians in the street meant that they had sort of mob rule, and there wasn't a whole lot of auto traffic to fight.

So on the whole, it was a pretty good way to spend the last Fourth of the old Millenium. I kinda wish the musical programming weren't quite so heavy on the old saws, but I guess even the NSO has to put butts in seats and the people who provide the funding probably ask specifically for things like Fanfare for the Common Man and the Hoedown from Rodeo (otherwise known (*shudder*) as the "Beef. It's what's for dinner" song), since those things mean "America" to so many people.

Me, I'd love to hear Audra McDonald do, say, "My Man's Gone Now," or maybe let's get Dawn Upshaw to come sing "This is Prophetic." Let's hear something we don't have to hear every year, please please please. I guess I'm asking too much.

link (2000-07-04)

Mmm ... crack. Er, linen.

Surprise day off today, well a surprise as of last Monday anyway. For whatever reason it didn't occur to me to check and see if we were getting the third off until I heard somebody talking about their four-day weekend, and by then it was too late to make plans.

So I haven't done a whole lot. Saturday involved visiting Koog, who managed to land herself back in the hospital with a blood infection. She needed earplugs, and knew that I was the sort of person who generally happened to have spare earplugs around, so she called me on Friday. Didn't manage to get back into the District early enough on Friday to make it over to GW during visiting hours, so I planned it for Saturday evening.

Most of Saturday and Sunday were taken up by the Playstation, as I finally finished up Tomb Raider - yes, the first one. I'm that far behind. Most days I forget I even have the Playstation, so turning it on and playing stuff on it is all the more rare. But the new teevee allows me to keep it all connected, so playing is less of a hassle (tells you how lazy I am, that unplugging an A/V cable and plugging another one in is too much of a bother). I got impatient though, so the last couple levels were more or less assisted by the previously linked walkthrough. Overall I did about two thirds of the levels myself, and the other third were either slightly assisted or totally handheld by the walkthroughs.

Today, determined to get out of the house, I headed out to Potomac Mills, where I intended to go to IKEA. After wandering around the mall a bit, I had a half dozen pairs of boxers from Old Navy, no new shoes (didn't know I wanted new shoes, did you? Neither did I until I got to the mall, but it was time for a new pair of leather sneakers), and not a whole lot of interest in anything at IKEA except for the restaurant and maybe some frames for all the prints I have stored in a shipping tube.

So I ate an early dinner at the restaurant, the Manager's Special. The Manager's Special at IKEA is always the same, some sort of running joke I guess. I don't know why they don't call it their "Featured Item" instead of the Manager's Special, but anyway, it's a plate of meatballs with gravy and lingonberry sauce, potatoes, salad or soup (I chose salad), and a large drink (lingonberry drink for me, of course), all for $5.95. Can't beat it with last year's Yankees. I added the almond torte for another two bucks and had a nice meal. Didn't buy anything, since I determined that I probably want to measure the prints I actually want frames for, and I hadn't thought to do that in my rush to leave the house.

So then I headed up to Tysons Corner, since the mall there has a JC Penney, and I figured (rightly) that the JC Penney would have the shoes I was looking for - some adidas Stan Smith Milleniums. The dude at Foot Locker in Potomac Mills had tried to tell me they were discontinued and the "Smithsonian" was the new model of the same shoe, but I thought they were sorta silly looking and didn't want a part of them. JC Penney came through, which makes the second pair of shoes nobody's had that they had in plenty. The others were my first pair of Converse Jack Purcells, which were actually lined with blue terry and much more padded than the Jacks available now. They took about two months' looking after seeing an ad in, I think, Rolling Stone. Sorta like the Milton Berle wore khakis ads Gap runs, 'cept they were for sneakers, and I think the ad was a picture of James Dean. I own a pair of the unlined ones too, but the first ones I had are still my preferred iteration of the model.

Anyway, bought the shoes, went to the Gap to look for bargains and found none. Went to Eddie Bauer to look for linen trousers, found none. Went to Banana Republic to look for linen trousers, and they were on sale. I'm no longer the size I used to be (feh) but I picked up a couple pair of trousers, plus a purple linen shirt also on sale. Then in the car I remembered that I'd gotten a gift certificate for bananarepublic.com from 800.com when I bought my teevee. D'oh!

What the heck. I ordered two more pair in different colors and used the gift certificate. I can always use more linen. As Krapsnart has said repeatedly, it's like crack. I avoided the linen boxers, which were not yet on sale, and it's just as well. I can see me not being able to deal with cotton boxers anymore after the first day wearing linen.

Oh, and speaking of boxers, somebody around here (Marn maybe?) was talking about how difficult it is to get men to throw away old underwear. I throw mine away when they die, including a pair that ripped that just went in the trash this weekend (I meant to throw them away after the last round of laundry but forgot they'd ripped until I wore them and ripped them some more). I have a couple pair of superstitious boxers (f'rinstance, the ones I wear on the first performance of any play or opera I'm in, for good luck) and those are pretty much relegated to only being worn on their superstitious occaisions, lest they get worn out and have to go. Because then where would I be without my lucky underwear? Anyway, except for those certain pairs I have no attachment to any of my boxers and I will certainly toss them when they're worn out.

Tomorrow's the Fourth, and there will be all the usual rah-rah, USA! USA!, my-country-TIS-of-thee down on the Mall (not the shopping mall, mind you - that'll be closed), but I have no idea if I'm going to partake of those festivities or not. Last year we ended up at a party on top of an apartment building in Adams Morgan with a great view, so it's not like I haven't done the Fourth in DC yet. Dunno.

link (2000-07-03)