April 2006 Archives

The White Stripes' "My Doorbell" is Ray's favorite song at the moment. According to him, he likes it "so, so, so, so much." He also needs it played "loud 'cause I like it loud." And every time the word "doorbell" is sung, Ray repeats in a voice full of wonder that there can be a song about a doorbell, of all things.

I found the video on You Tube. It's in arty black-and-white with Jack and Meg playing... to a crowd of small children.

How appropriate.

Link in case the embedded player doesn't work

You'd think that after my last experience with a low-cost haircut that I'd learn my lesson. But no....

In a shocking turn of events, the former front-runner, Nnenna, is now history. I mostly agree with Tyra and the judges that Nnenna started out strong and then really didn't improve, but compared to Sara and Furonda, for example, Nnenna was a superstar!

At this point, with five girls left, the race is really down to Joanie and Danielle. Jade is consistently doing well, but her attitude and age will keep her out of the top spot. Danielle is more model-like than Joanie, but her thick Arkansas accent is a major drawback for her on the "spokesmodel" front (and, remember, the main prize is a $100,000 Cover Girl contract, and there's lots of spokesmodelling to be done). Joanie is a solid performer with a likable personality, and I can see her going all the way unless she royally screws something up.

Oh, and it turns out, neither Amy nor I got the exotic foreign locale right -- they went to Thailand.

My pal Holly over at Self-Portrait As recently wrote an amusing and informative post in which she describes the benefits of a cinematic education and her attempts as a college professor to incorporate film into her curriculum. Given my background in film studies, I enthusiastically applaud her pedagogical emphasis on the silver screen.

I have found that when people hear about film used in an educational context, they immediately jump to the conclusion that you have to show obscure "art" films or literary adaptations. Indeed, when I was high school (and even some college courses) when we had a "movie day," it was usually something dreadful and ponderous.

Both Holly and I, however, share an appreciation of the low-brow. One of our favorite films, for example, is the wonderful Zorro, The Gay Blade, starring George Hamilton in one of the most amazing comedic performances captured on film. Think Johnny Depp was good in Pirates of the Carribbean? I'd agree with you. But Mr. Hamilton's embodiment of both Don Diego de la Vega and his twin brother, Bunny Wigglesworth (not to mention both characters' interpretations of the Zorro persona), is the stuff of legends and was an unfortunate omission from the 1981 Academy Award race.

In Holly's post, she expresses her reaction to learning that a student has a profound ignorance of a critical aspect of the cinematic canon.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an extremely bright student who is almost 30 and who has never seen a single Monty Python movie! Is this OK? I submit to you that it is not!

I am giving this student a chance to improve his grade simply by watching Life of Brian or Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

I'm happy to see that Holly is carrying this time-proven method of educational assessment into the higher education arena. I'm sure that my mother will completely agree with Holly's final paragraph on the matter:

How can you go through life not having seen The Holy Grail? It's unthinkable. But there will be people on this planet who have seen this movie because of ME. And on certain nights when I can't sleep, I remember that fact, and it calms me.

The Tigers were in town last weekend for a three-game set, and proceeded to sweep up the pathetic Mariners.

Right before I moved to Seattle in 2004, my former employer gave me a sweet going-away present: a package of tickets to 16 Mariners games. One of those games was against the Tigers, and I was curious about where my loyalties would lie. I grew up with the Tigers but it had been over a decade since I lived in Detroit and the team had not exactly been giving anyone cause to remain a die-hard long-distance fan. The Mariners were now my adopted home team, though they, too, hadn't been tearing up the American League standings.

After the first inning, I fell right back to rooting for the Tigers. Even today, I find myself checking the Tigers' box score before the Mariners', and I feel more of a sense of loss if they are defeated than if Seattle goes down.

I mentioned this phenomenon to some colleagues the other day. One of them said he had heard that childhood sports team loyalties are the hardest to shake. A child may shed his parents' politics or religious beliefs, but rarely do kids ever lose the team loyalty they shared with their folks.

Go Tigers!

Link to first story updated, but may disappear again since the Seattle Times doesn't seem to understand how to archive stories with persistent URLs.

Kennewick woman found alive in California landfill

I thought: "This sounds really fishy."

Then today:

Kennewick woman admits her alleged kidnapping was a hoax

Ha!

One of Amy's and my favorite things to do is try new restaurants. With Ray's bedtime ritual beginning at 6:00pm, however, we don't get much of a chance to do that much anymore. Nevertheless, Amy never misses a "Seattle's Best Restaurants" or "Dining Guide" issue of whatever newspaper or magazine we happen upon, and she carefully plots out our dining-out plans so we know where to go when we get a night off.

Amy's mom is in town, so we were able to try out Flying Fish, a well-reviewed Belltown eatery, on Sunday night.

I'm no food photographer, and my cell phone takes really lousy pictures, but following the jump, you can take a look at the marvelously-constructed and super-tasty dishes we consumed on our night out.

I had a business dinner with the CFO of another University last night. The guy's originally from Ireland; he moved to the U.S. about 40 years ago when he was in his 20's. I'll call him Sean.

The conversation turned to politics and we all had a good time excoriating our embarrassing President. The mood darkened a bit, however, when Sean told us that when he goes back to Dublin, he has never before encountered the level of hatred that Europeans have for Americans.

Note that he said "Americans," not "America."

He said that even during Vietnam, Watergate, and the Reagan years, Europeans may have hated the President or the U.S.'s policies, and even during Bush II's first term they felt some sympathy and pity for the U.S. people. But now, he reported, they hold us all responsible for re-electing the man they say is more hated and feared in Europe than Osama bin Laden. "People like him created Osama bin Laden," they observe.

Way to go, George. The only thing I don't understand right now is how your approval rating is as high as 32%.

It's always dangerous to draw conclusions from bad data, and there's probably no worse data in the universe than web site statistics. In fact, I am reminded of a concept Douglas Adams described in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- recipriversexclusive, which refers to a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. Web stats are a pure form of recipriversexclusivity; "42" hits can be anything other than 42 actual page views.

I think I can safely assume, however, that the data is uniformly bad over time, so I feel comfortable drawing certain conclusions about trends, even though any given number bears no correspondence to reality at any one time.

Readership of "Out of the Mist" is soaring. In January, I averaged about 18 visitors per day; so far in April, I'm getting about 85 -- a 472% increase. I don't even know 85 people (in fact, I'm not sure I know 18 people) so I have to assume that strangers' eyes are upon me (cue that Rockwell song). Or it might mean that 3 people read my site in January and 14.25 are doing so now, but it's still an upward trend.

My stats package (awstats) makes a good college try to determine truly unique visitors on any given day. I have blocked all of my own addresses to eliminate instances of me hitting "Reload," and excluded all known search engine robots. It cannot, however, deal well with phenomena such as proxy servers and NAT's (especially AOL's annoying tendency to route every single request through a different proxy). However, in looking at the raw data, the hits from "something-random.proxy.aol.com" are consistently proportional to the overall hits, so, again, I think I can safely conclude that readership is up.

Sorry for the second meta-post in a row; more juicy content goodness coming soon.

I just re-read some of my recent posts, and, man, can I be long-winded! No wonder it's such a Herculean task for me to churn out at least one blog post per day*. I am in need of an editor or, at least, a more intimate relationship with the "Delete" key. All that stuff about the "three enduring myths" here in Seattle? Blah, blah, fuckin' blah. Why didn't someone stop me?

I've always had this problem. I tend to believe in providing too much information about a point, which often has the effect of causing no information to flow to the listener/reader. I suppose I can blame this on graduate school. My first few papers were full of big ideas and claims, but I was marked down for not backing everything up. At some point I must have unconsciously said: "You want supporting material? I'll give you supporting material!" Hence, the birth of verbosity.

I used to get pretty irritated at people I worked with for not reading my email announcements. "What do mean 'Why is the server down this morning?' Didn't you read the email I sent out the other day?" It never occurred to me that burying the server outage note under three paragraphs of exposition explaining and justifying it caused readers' eyes to glaze over. Even after I figured that out and changed my ways, I was still resentful of people for not paying me the common decency of reading the words I had labored to produce.

So now, even though one of my goals in writing this blog was to hone my writing craft and to learn how to be more succinct, I find myself tending toward the plague of prolixity again.

A few months ago, I added a word counter to the footer of each of my posts; I now vow to be mindful of it and use it as a gauge to curb the logorrhoea.

* -- I know I missed yesterday, so no need to tell me. But I thought about posting on this topic, so that counts.

I just finished reviewing a bunch of résumés for an open position where I work. Since I'm not leading the search, I wasn't confronted with the task of narrowing down the 50+ applications to the 10 I had to look at, but 10 is still a significant number of documents to read and evaluate.

I have served on a number of search committees at three different higher education institutions over the last 12 years. Here is some of my advice to job applicants.

Last month, I mentioned that I had been nominated for an award at work. I later learned the award came with a big, fat check for a cool grand.

I didn't win it.

But, you know, it's an honor to be nominated, blah, blah, blah....

:-)

Three of the most enduring modern myths (besides god) are manifesting right now in Seattle.

The current cycle of "America's Next Top Model" is in the home stretch; the original thirteen have been pared down to six after Brooke's long-awaited departure last night. Here's my take on the remaining "girls."

I just got back from a 3-hour panel discussion on information systems that was organized by this "task force" I'm on. Big-wig IT honchos from Seattle-area companies such as Washington Mutual, Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom's, and T-Mobile were among the panelists.

Though business is a far, far different world than higher ed (and I'm glad for that), we found commonality in that the strategic position of IT within either structure is remarkably the same. Our respective sectors may have different goals (profit vs. graduation rates, for example) but it has taken leaders in both a long time to recognize that IT has a strategic value and is not simply a background service or utility and is just a money sink.

Today, topic after topic kept coming back to, essentially, ontological discussions of the true meaning or strategic position of IT services and the fact that many CEO's just don't get it. Throughout my 12 years in this field, the hardest fights I've had to fight have been to have the work that I and my staff do be taken seriously by upper management and to be included in strategic planning discussions. Even the fact that I, as an IT professional, am on this task force was not a foregone conclusion; I had to make a case for IT representation in what is largely a discussion of business systems. Involving IT leaders in such business discussions is still not an automatic connection that even the most enlightened leaders make. Yet every panelist admitted he spends more time on business strategy than technology strategy.

Some of the other salient (and sometime contradictory) points I took away from the discussion are:

Apart from some lullaby CD's, we never invested in any baby or kid's music for Ray. The poor guy doesn't even know such staples as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," or "Mary Had a Little Lamb." A few weeks ago, we were the only parent/child duo present at the bookstore during an impromptu sing-along of "Baby Beluga" who didn't know the song. From an early age, he seemed to respond positively to the music that Amy and I listen to, so we just kept going.

I remember once rocking him to sleep as Bauhaus' "Swing the Heartache" played, soothingly, in the background. Once he gained a modicum of control over his body, he would bop up and down to the beats of various songs on the radio -- not all of them; just the good ones. On his early childhood playlist were such numbers as "Float On" by Modest Mouse, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day, "Be My Girl" by Jet, and "London Calling" by the Clash. He could recognize David Bowie's "Young Americans", and he sang along to the choruses of The Police's "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" and Marc Broussard's "Take Me Home" from an early age. Even now, his nap-time music is Norah Jones' "Come Away With Me," and he's lately begun to fancy (and often request) the whimsical avant-garde stylings of The Fiery Furnaces -- especially the fantastic "Blueberry Boat" -- and the fierce acoustic chords of Ani DiFranco.

The other day, however, he threw me for a bit of a loop. We were driving back from the grocery store and listening to KEXP. The reggae show "Positive Vibrations" was on. I don't know anything about reggae, and once I realized it was on, I changed the station to look for some alt rock. Ray immediately protested from the backseat: "Noooo, I like that song!" I restored the station, and for the next 15 minutes or so, we both bopped to the Dub beats of The Rocker's All Stars, Asher & Tremble, and Rhythm & Sound.

I only learned the names of the bands we were listening to after looking them up on KEXP's website, which lists the time and date of every song they play. I then fired up iTunes on the Tablet PC, called Ray up onto my lap, and began to play samples of the music for him. His face lighted up with a big grin as the heavy bass, funky reverb, and deep echoes of the Jamaican sounds poured out from my speakers. I had to admit, that I thought it was pretty good, too, and I immediately scratched some names down on my music shopping list.

I wonder if I'm the first adult in history to be turned onto reggae by a two-year-old....

I know all you Major Readers are sitting in front of your computers incessantly clicking "Refresh," and wanting to find out the resolution of both my battle with MLB.com over their unauthorized credit card charge and our plumbing problem that resulted from my attempt at DIY home repair. You can breathe easily now; the suspense will soon be over. Just click on through for closure.

Just as I was settling into my seat on the morning bus to write about how AOL networks annoyingly inflate my page view statistics since they seemingly route every single page request through a separate proxy server, I found a surprisingly high number of referrals suddenly coming from AOL City Guide: Seattle. Sure enough, yours truly is featured on their home page under "Blogs We're Reading"!

So, welcome potential Seattle visitors. I hope you tour around both this site and my fair Adopted Hometown of Seattle, and enjoy yourself during your stay. Read some posts, leave some comments, make yourselves at home.

All I can say is that my dear son Raymond should be very thankful that my critically-acclaimed turn as the Mad Hatter in a children's theater production of "Alice in Wonderland" when I was 18 didn't lead to the fame and superstardom that I deserved. Otherwise, according to Sunday's New York Times article on celebrity baby names, he might have ended up named HotDog or MekkaLekkaHiMekkaHeinyHo. And he'd be pals with Apple, Moxie CrimeFighter, Makena'lei Gordon, and all the other celebrity babies destined to keep Hollywood therapists rolling in dough for at least the next generation.

Boy names are not easy. Amy and I had a long list of girl names picked out even before we learned her fetus had XY chromosomes. We had a couple boy name ideas, but they were not slam-dunks. For boys, if you try to avoid the common, the biblical, names based on states or cities, names of Amy's ex-boyfriends, and names of annoying co-workers, it doesn't leave you with much. Luckily for us, Amy's grandfather had a name that met all our criteria: classic yet uncommon, shorten-able, with no bad associations (in fact, Amy's granddad was much beloved, which made it all the more perfect). The only downsides we could think of were that insipid sitcom ("Everybody Loves ... blah-blah-blah") and the fact that "Ray" rhymes with "gay," which will undoubtedly lead to much playground taunting.

But it's not just the celebrities who are screwing up their offsprings' lives. One of my favorites websites, "Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing: A Primer on Parent Cruelty" lists thousands of horrific monikers gleaned from commoners posting to online discussion forums and other sites. The examples are annotated with snarky comments by the author.

Here are some highlights:

The current issue of The Stranger carries an article that shakes me and my beliefs that we live in a safe, progressive society to the very core.

On March 31, three students enrolled in the advanced clown class at Denny Triangle's Cornish College of the Arts caused a major disruption in the student body. For their final senior project, the students of the Acting Special Topics class were asked to produce a comical performance about a historical event.... [One group] chose a trickier subject: the civil rights movement.... To the dismay of many of the 50 students and faculty who attended, the three white students' performance seemed to satirize the civil rights movement itself.

In Googling around for "coulrophobia" (for my "An Environment of Fear" post yesterday) I came across an interesting marketing tactic for a phobia treatment program.

Google for any phobia -- coulrophobia, aerophobia, etc. -- and within the first 10 results, you'll see a link from a site called "Change That's Right Now" (http://www.changethatsrightnow.com)

When you follow the link, you may be greeted by a "disambiguation" page that lists the various names your selected phobia is known by, but in the end -- no matter what phobia you searched for -- you'll get a page that describes it and recommends a treatment.

What's unusual about that, you ask? Well, the text, graphics, quotes, and recommended treatment listed on all the pages are exactly the same, save for the name of the phobia and a brief description of it.

I rented a "Kinetic Water Ram" (pictured at right) today to clear our slow-draining bathtub and bathroom sink. I've used one of these before, and they are quite fun -- it sends a burst of high-pressure air through your drain to smash out any blockages. It also delivers an awesome kickback.

After success on the sink, I turned to the bathtub. I first tried 10 psi only to be greeted with an unsatisfying "Pssssh" and no real action. I then muscled it up to 20, which produced a bit of movement but nothing was dislodged. Finally, in true action movie hero style, I said "Fuck it, I'm goin' to 40!"

After the smoke (read: particles of gunk forcibly ejected via the overflow spout) cleared, I was shocked to see a pool of still water left in the bathtub. No movement. No drainage.

We went from a slow-moving drain to a non-moving drain with one super-powered burst of air.

The plumber we then called was also stymied. The blockage, apparently, has moved down the pipe in front of an old trap that he can't remove without breaking the pipes on either side. "It's not a necessary piece of plumbing," he reported. "Someone can come on Monday and just cut it out. That'll solve your problem."

So, apparently I was successful in propelling the offending wad of muck to a place in the plumbing that only an expensive repair job can reach.

I said to Amy: "I thought maybe I couldn't fix it, but it never occurred to me I'd make it worse."

She replied, stoically: "Well, we should have put a little bit more thought into that."

No showers for us for a couple days....

Apparently, Easter is tomorrow. I can never remember when it is until the candy at the drug store is marked 50% off. It's not like I care that much, but I still like to know what's going on in the world. When I become Pope, I intend to change it so it's always on the same day every year. Make it easier for people to plan for, like Christmas. Now there's a well-managed holiday.

Amy has fond memories of Easter egg hunts as a child. We never did that in my family. Our typical Easter started after my sister and I returned from working in the salt mines for the day. My mother would toss the wrapper of a chocolate bunny into our wooden crates out in the back and we'd fight with each other over licking off the chocolate residue. Sometimes we'd even get a ham bone.

Ha ha ha. I kid my parents. Wonderful people. Really. But they were more into Easter baskets than egg hunting. Each year, my sister and I would scour the yard for the hidden basket of goodies and make ourselves sick on the sugary goodness that lay therein. Jelly beans, foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, chocolate rabbits ... and Peeps. Oh, did I love the Peeps.

And, it turns out, you can do a lot more with Peeps than just eat them.

If you don't like Peeps, you can try baking a cake with Cadbury eggs instead of real eggs.

No, no one's died. ObitBlogging is just the term I came up with to describe my blogging habits of late -- pre-writing certain blog entires. The term derives from the practice major media outlets have of pre-writing celebrity obituaries so that, when the famous people die, the papers can run splashy stories without starting from scratch. This sometimes gets them into trouble, however, like when Bob Hope's death was mistakenly announced by both the AP in 1998 and CNN in 2003 (and there have been others).

There are two reasons I started ObitBlogging:

I started playing a game of email chess with my pal Oscar a few days ago, and he's already taking the trash talk public over at the Columnist Manifesto. To me, that's a sure sign of his sense of impending defeat.

I started playing email chess a few years ago with my friend kmk. He and I just completed a game a couple weeks ago, and I've just started another one with him. We'll see how I manage two games at once. [Both game boards are depicted near the bottom of the right-hand column on the very website.]

I'll admit to having never been a very good chess player. It probably has to do with the fact that I'm not a very visual thinker and I'm impatient. In face-to-face chess, I am undone by stupid moves.

But with email chess, there's ample time between moves, and I find that if I just pay attention, work out all possible scenarios, and focus not only on offense (which is my nature) but defense as well, I tend to do OK. In addition, I've picked up some strategies here and there, and played lots of computer chess.

Oscar subscribes to Chess Life magazine and bandies about terms like "Nimzo-Indian."

He is so going down.

Updated 4/14/2006 based on reader's clarifying comment and a re-reading of the poorly-written Pensacola News Journal story. Serves me right for rushing to press.

With Stoll claiming "this is pure religious persecution," we learn from the article that Stoll was previously ordered to cease and desist promotion of a scheme that encouraged people to avoid paying taxes by claiming to be religious entities, and that the park's creator and Creation Science Evangelism ministry leader Kent Hovind failed to pay taxes in 2004.

But that's not the best part.

My posts on Faith, Values, and Atheism and Love Thy Neighbor have inspired a flurry of commenting the likes of which haven't been seen around these parts since ... well, never.

It is usual blogging practice to respond to comments via more comments, but my Loyal Readers bring up some interesting and some valid points about my call-out to the Seattle Times [aside to Oscar: which is dumb and which is dumber?] on their "Faith & Values" section, which I think merit a new post.

My usual bus is the 48 Express, a variation of the standard 48 route that has limited stops and avoids the loop around Green Lake. For my morning commute, the 48 Express route ends at the UW Hospital, where I disembark. The regular 48 terminates deep down in south Seattle.

Without exception, two things happen every day:

In wondering why the Seattle Times hasn't responsed to my remarkably balanced and egalitarian letter, I had attributed it to basic hatred of the non-believer. And then I happened upon these posts on Marginal Utility, which conclude from General Social Survey data that "[a]theists may be relatively more disliked than other groups [Muslims, homosexuals, and Communists], but we still seem to be largely accepted."

So, I should give the Seattle Times editors the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're just busy. Or maybe they are "relatively poorly-educated, older, disproportionality unlikely to be white, and female with relatively low household incomes.... mostly Christian, especially Protestant, and attend church much more frequently than average," in which case I'm screwed.

My pal Oscar over at Columnist Manifesto has a highly articulate piece explaining why he prefers the cinema to the stage. I whole-heartedly agree with him, and not just because of my film studies degrees. Despite an early dalliance with live theater as a performer, I have never enjoyed watching a play of any caliber. I especially like this segment of Oscar's reasoning.

I understand that there is "something about live performance" -- though, frankly, I don't feel any closer to a stage actor's distant tiny face from my vantage point in the cheap seats than I do to an actor on the silver screen....

There is always the argument that theatre's extremely limited ability to create a virtual world is good for the audience because it forces us to exercise our imaginations, whereas movies fill in all the blanks and make us more passive receptors of performance. Well, I'm not a huge believer in this "eat your vegetables" theory of aesthetics and, in any event, I can exercise this aspect of my imagination in the comfort of my own home, for a tiny fraction of the cost, by reading a book.

It must be letter-writing kind of day.

The Saturday Seattle Times includes a section called "Faith/Values". They rotate through columnists of various denominations and faiths, feature inspirational stories, and showcase religious events and practices (such as last week's article about faith healing.

It's pretty clear to me that they are doing their best to be inclusive and avoid offending anyone. But, like so many similar well-intentioned efforts, they haven't quite succeeded. They have never featured a non-believer or approached any of the topics from a point-of-view that doesn't rely on the supernatural.

Now, it's not in my nature to get offended by the total lack of atheistic representation within their pages (you know, 'cause I'm not passionate about anything) but I just can't let it go. So, I directed a letter to the opinions editor and the "religious news" editor today, which you can read by following the "Continue Reading..." link below.

I should point out that I get terribly annoyed by most atheists' efforts to address perceived slights by the religious community because, oftentimes, they can be just as obnoxiously single-minded and dogmatic as believers (sometimes more so). When I encounter an omission such as this, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and initially assume that they simply haven't considered that non-theists would have anything valuable to add to a discussion of, for example, faith and values. If, however, the Times editors respond that they have no use for godless heathens such as myself and that I should rot in hell, then maybe I'll get offended. In the meantime, here is my gentle recommendation.

Updated 4/11/2006: Seems I'm not only one with this problem.

I'm getting the sense that Major League Baseball doesn't care about its fans.

I also sent a version of this tale to The Consumerist, a web site dedicated to consumer complaints that I urge you all to check out. We'll see if they believe it merits a mention.

My Fair Birthplace of Detroit now has the best teams in basketball, hockey, and baseball. OK, so it's only 6 games into the baseball season and the Tigers are actually tied for the #1 tier in the sport, but given that they haven't had a winning season since 1985, a Tiger fan needs to praise them whenever he gets the chance.

In reading the recap of their first two series at the creatively-named The Detroit Tigers Weblog, I noted the author's following observation of yesterday's game:

Kenny Rogers was hit around, and balls seemed to be just out of reach of Tiger defenders instead of being tailor-made double plays that we’d seen in the first 5 games. The defense also committed their first charged error when Carlos Guillen couldn’t cleanly pick a grounder in the hole. Ramon Santiago, filling in for Placido Polanco also appeared to neglect to cover second base for a force out.

There's been a bit of meta-discussion, both online and off, about a couple of my recent posts so I thought I'd address some of that here. This is not necessarily a "corrections and retractions" post, but a summary of recent comments, oversights, and second-thoughts.

When I was in college, a group of fellow film studies majors and I fancied ourselves "frustrated artists" and got together to shoot a movie. Sick of the academic milieu and endless discussions about theory, we wanted to grasp a camera in our hands and write some history with lightning. The whole endeavor started out in true Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "let's put on a show" spirit.

"My dad's got a Super 8 camera we can use!"
"My mom works at costume shop at the local theater!!"
"My brother's best friend's uncle did some sound work on a movie once!!!"
"Let's go!!!!"

Our project ran into some early trouble, however, over the matter of the script and actors. What and who would we shoot? Advocates for a more avant-garde approach favored no script and no actors. Traditionalists (such as myself) wanted to adapt a good short story or develop a more character-driven piece. I knew a bunch of people in the theater department, so I didn't think getting actors would be an issue.

I don't remember who suggested this, but at some point we decided to shoot a porn movie.

For nearly two years, my web hosting provider, Dreamhost, has been rock-solid. They experienced a couple hours of downtime yesterday afternoon -- which could happen to anyone -- but I still wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone in need of web hosting as they provide the best bundle of services of anyone I came across when I was shopping around. They also have really prompt and knowledgeable support, free domain registration, and they only charge $7.95/month*. What a deal!

And, if you sign up at DreamHost.com and use the promotion code "majorsteel40" you will save up to $40 on any plan.**

* = $7.95 month with no set up fee if you pre-pay for 2 years.
** = $10 off a monthly plan; $20 off a yearly plan; $40 off a 2-year plan.

The other day, I was thinking that it'd be nice to get away for six months or so and catch up on reading, contemplating the universe, and finishing starting my novel. But a vacation getaway for half a year would be prohibitively expensive. It occurred to me, though, that if I could score six months of jail time in a cushy minimum security facility, that would be just as good! I really don't need sandy beaches, fancy food, and umbrella drinks; just some time to myself. I'm sure that there'd be quite of number of fellow inmates with similar agendas, and we'd bond and help each other out with plotting and character development in our novels, etc. It seemed like a pretty good idea. The only question was: what would I need to do to get sentenced to six months time? I didn't want some pansy-ass probation or community service, both of which seem terribly inconvenient. Luckily, I live with an experienced criminal defense attorney, so I posed the question to her.

My sometime bus partner, Y, is man-hunting. Of course, she wouldn't put as crassly as that, but a spade's a spade. The other day, she told me she signed up at eHarmony.com, which is a sort of an online date broker. The way it works, she explained, is that you complete a lengthy profile of yourself and your ideal mate. The site matches you up with someone and allows you to send canned questions to your new potential BF/GF without revealing your identities to each other. After three rounds of eHarmony playing Cyrano to your Christian, you may choose to step out of the shadows ... or give up your email address, as the case may be. If you don't, you simply remain silent and your jilted correspondent can't stalk you.

She told me that one of the questions she sent to a recent match asked him to talk about one of his "passions." He, in turn, sent her the same question.

I got thinking about how I'd answer that one, and I was stumped. I couldn't summon up one thing that I'd consider myself passionate about. I'm just not a passionate guy. Charismatic? Yes. Gregarious? Sure. Humble? No doubt. But passionate?

I weeded and pruned the hell out of one patch of our front yard on Sunday, and I almost went barking mad during the process.

First off, let me explain that I hate lawn care. I derive no pleasure from digging in the mud, and the smell of freshly cut grass simply gives me a headache. Any satisfaction I gain from gazing upon a well-groomed yard quickly dissipates when I picture myself doing all the work over again in a few weeks. If I didn't care about resale value, I'd pave over both yards. To exacerbate matters, we did no yard work the summer we moved in and very little last summer, so the yard has largely gone to the other side.

So, on Sunday, I found myself on my hands and knees digging in the mud. And, as I said, going crazy.

As noted in an earlier post, Amy and I watch exactly two TV programs on a regular basis: "Gilmore Girls" and "America's Next Top Model." What can I say? We're snobs for quality programming. We do, however, frequently engage in some post-facto viewing of critically-acclaimed shows after they are released on DVD. So far, we have completed the available catalog for "The Sopranos," "Entourage," and "Arrested Development." We buried "Six Feet Under" and closed "CSI" after about a season-and-a-half each. We followed "Buffy" as she slew vampires through high school, but have not yet matriculated with her to college. And we curbed our enthusiasm for Larry David's HBO show before the latest disk was released.

This practice oddly serves our twin desires for instant gratification in that we virtually never experience a true cliffhanger either between episodes or stretched out over the long seasonal hiatus. But besides always being a year or more behind on water-cooler conversations and our having to scrupulously avoid spoilers, our viewing habits do present certain problems.

What's wrong with this picture? By itself, nothing. It depicts a simple elevator with 3 floor buttons--1, 2, 3. The elevator in question doesn't even have additional both "L" and "G" buttons, which routinely confound my efforts to get out of buildings. The problem only becomes apparent when you understand that on Friday I had a meeting scheduled in the building this elevator serves ... in room 410.

I sent this email yesterday to the people with email accounts on our server at work. It's an April Fool gag I recycled from a couple years ago at another workplace. I modified it a bit to fit the context.