May 2005 Archives

Or, if you have nothing to say, Photoshop it!

Okay, the first thing I've been losing isn't my fault. Every now and then Haloscan freaks out and stops showing me that you're commenting, so my apologies for thinking the worst of you (and me, for not providing topics worthy of comment). I've reset it, and all is forgiven.

Not long ago I wrote about an uncharacteristic streak of losing things. Add to that an entire book. I've never lost a book before in my life. Ever. I even have a guess where I left it -- a doctor's office. If so, somebody else picked it up. It was a fantastic book called "The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life." To say that its story of a Jewish Azeri oilman's son who somehow transforms himself into an image of Muslim mystery as part of the community of Russian expatriates living in Berlin during the rise of Nazism is fascinating would be the understatement of all time. Tom Reiss not only weaves the incredible tale of someone who was once one of the best-known writers in Europe, but explains the impact of Bolshevism and revolution on the lands of the East and the changes and repercussions that we see there to this day. I started with a copy from the library, and when I couldn't finish it in time, I knew I had to have this book anyway, and I special ordered it. And then, just to support Tom Reiss and the new Manor Block Books in Troy, I lost my copy last week, and will now have to order another.

Spouse actually asked me last night, "Is there a new 'Star Wars' movie out or something?"

What I would give to be able to ignore pop culture sometimes.

So please don't tell her that they're remaking "Kolchak: The Night Stalker." Or that Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts will have their own series this fall. I want it to be a surprise.

Someone left a comment on a photo I posted at Flickr, so I went to his page to see what his photos were up to. First image: a "Supertramp" album cover, with a caption proclaiming it his favorite album of all time. His other pictures are of cycling, so you can see that I'm real torn on what to think here. Supertramp? (Gotta go kick up the iTunes before anything gets stuck in my head.)

At the risk of being considered even more un-American than I already am (an odd thought, since my ancestors came here in 1637), I am now going to admit that I have never seen a single Star Wars movie. Not one. I've barely even seen pieces of them -- when they come on TV, I switch the channel. I just have no interest whatsoever. And the few snippets I've seen from time to time over the years have not made me want to watch them. They just don't seem to be . . . good. So, having admitted that, my defense at my deportation trial (and, really, where do you deport someone like me to? Sussex? Perhaps Saxony?) will be that I tried to see the first movie, once, on a date (at the hideous old Cine 1-Whatever at Northway Mall, nasty from the day it opened, and always growing another theater or two). This was fully a year after the movie had opened, but for some reason on this night there was a line and we couldn't get in, so we chose a different Mark Hamill vehicle, Corvette Summer. Twenty-seven years later, I can remember the title; the movie I'm pretty sure I'd forgotten a week later. One summary:

High School Senior Kenny Dantley's only love in life is cars. For a shop class project, he and his classmates build a Corvette ("Stingray"). The car is a big hit -- so big, in fact, that it gets stolen! Kenny, having fallen in love with the car, sets out on a summer-long adventure in Las Vegas to find it. Along the way, he meets up with a "hooker-in-training" named "Vanessa" (played by Annie Potts). The two encounter danger and romance as they try to steal back the Stingray.

Just imagine.

In further movie news, I've just learned that the "Fantastic Four" movie is going to start sucking very soon (you simply cannot put Victor von Doom in the rocket with Richards, Grimm, and the Storms. You cannot.), and there's an Antonio Banderas/Catherine Zeta-Jones version of "The Legend of Zorro" coming out. I'm not sure what to make of a Welsh Mexican, and I generally only like Antonio when he's being handled by Robert Rodriguez, but who knows? The trailer looks like things blow up pretty good.

Saw two great movies last weekend for the first time: "Garden State" (I know, I know, where've I been?) and "Garage Days." "Garden State" was so good, so personal, so well-conceived and perfectly delivered that one has to wonder what on earth Zach Braff could possibly do next. "Garage Days"is a surprisingly slick, fast, funny and visually fantastic Australian story of a band trying to make it big. One of the funniest, sweetest rock 'n' roll movies ever made.

Another year, another Tour de Cure for the American Diabetes Association. The event, which starts and ends in Stillwater, NY, just a little ways north of here, is one of the biggest in the country, and it's a huge amount of fun. Hundreds of riders and their supporters, and it's one of the top fundraisers for ADA. A bunch of readers last year ponied up some ducats in support of this event, and I hope you will again. (However, I don't intend to try the public radio ploy of annoying you into it. I'll barely mention it, I promise.) If you can help out this worthy cause, please visit my page at ADA, and click on the "Sponsor me" button. For those with a healthy fear of identity theft or credit cards that don't work the way they should, my address is there, too, and I'll happily take checks made out to the ADA. Thanks!

I was as surprised as anyone else, I think, to learn that Julianne Moore really felt that way about me. And sure, she's much shorter (thought not much red-headeder) than I usually go for, but that was something I was able to overcome. It was the question about whether she really felt something or if this was some kind of class thing, some Hollywood mind-f, some slumming project. But she definitely felt it, I was certain. She may be an Oscar-winner, but those kisses weren't acting.

And then, of course, I woke up.

Totally unrelated thought for the day: A bent ruler never tells the true time.

We were awakened bright and early yesterday morning by the sound of heavy equipment pounding the street. Five a.m., there's yellow iron out at the intersection, banging away. We figured there must be a reason, and of course there was -- broken water main. Okay, fine. That meant there was no water for showers, etc. in the morning, but we got by (I biked in yesterday anyway, so I showered at work).

Last evening was the big school budget vote and the middle school's open house. Not a coincidence. I had, of course, forgotten about both things as I got tied up at the end of the day with enforcement against a recalcitrant entity which shall remain nameless, but which is basically pleading ignorance of the speed limit despite having been caught, ticketed and fined many, many times before. Called home to say I was finally on my way up the hill, and was reminded of the need to go to the middle school, so I said I'd meet the family there, if eldest daughter wouldn't be too mortified by having her father wander around her middle school in spandex. (She's apparently just used to me by now, though eventually I know that will be too much for her to bear. If my father had shown up at school, or anywhere, in spandex, I would simply have died.) So we went, we rocked the vote, we viewed the art, toured her classrooms, and finally got on our way home. When we got here, there were supposed to be baths taken, but Rebekah said the dishwasher had taken up the hot water. Odd, but not impossible. So she was going to skip her bath. A little while later, it occurred to me, sitting downstairs, that I heard the water running, so I thought perhaps Hannah had decided to get her shower. Spouse asked if she was, because she heard the water running, too, but when she went up to check, no one was in the bathroom. Well, we've previously experienced water main breaks that we could hear in our pipes, so that was our fallback. But spouse went down into the basement, thankfully, and called up, "This is bad!" In fact, it was bad -- the rush of water was our own, from a blown hose feeding the dishwasher. Water everywhere, an inch deep in places, but surprisingly little real damage because everything down there is up off the floor anyway. It flooded a couple of tool drawers, but mostly hit the drawers where I store lead type, which will dry out just fine, and my expensive planes, but I can clean and oil them easily. So, a lot of work cleaning up, but no real damage done.

Except, of course, that while I was down there, I heard the telltale spit and sputter of a hot water tank leaking onto its flame. The damn thing isn't four years old, and was in fact a replacement for a previous one that went bad after only a few months. Arrgggh! I am officially too old to hump water heaters up and down cellar stairs myself, and I'm tired of getting stuck with a gigantic, very heavy (our water is VERY hard, and there is a lot of settling in the tanks) old water heater that I can't get rid of for months on end. So, as much as it goes against everything I stand for, I think we're going to have to hire a plumber to replace the heater. (Which is okay, because we've been ignoring another minor drip for oh, say, a year, and it really needs to be attended to; my efforts and, in fact, previous professional plumbing were not permanently successful.)

Tonight went a little better. Replaced the hose on the first try, although the shut-off valve, which hadn't been used in twenty years, of course leaked when I reopened it. Hoping I don't have to replace that, but we'll see.

Sometimes I just wish I didn't know how to do these things.

About a year ago, I went grocery shopping without my iPod. (The whole dead battery thing, now resolved with a very cool, flashy new battery that lasts forever.) This is always a dangerous thing, and can lead to terrible earworms. It can also be surprising what kinds of songs get into programmed grocery store music these days, and it's not all bad, though there's something infinitely less cool about bopping along to Blondie coming from the store's speakers than bopping along to Blondie on your iPod. It's just the way it is. (Not that being a 44-year-old man bopping along to anything in a grocery store is cool.)

Point? I'm getting to it. Point is that I was in the bread aisle and the song that was playing suddenly grabbed hold of me. It was a kind of lilting, sweet-voiced thing, somewhere in the neighborhood of SixpenceNoneTheRicher, and I realized that I had heard this song many, many times, that I really, really liked it, and that I had no, no idea who did it. In addition, I could remember just about none of the lyric, just that it had "year" in it, something like "time of the year" or "memorable year." So I started scouring the lyrics sites with these hopeless fragments, and of course found nothing. Then I scoured the sites of the bands that I thought sounded like this, including Sixpence, but came up empty. I searched through Top 100 lists from the past few years, thinking it was a kinda mid-90s sound, but didn't find anything likely. And I would do this from time to time, but never quite found what I was looking for. I even hit on a site called Sirens of Song, which was dedicated to women who sang in just about the right register for what I was looking for. (Turns out I should have scoured that site a little harder.) But I knew I'd hear it again someday and get more of the lyric.

Yesterday, we were at a benefit cookout for our ballet school at a local country club, and as they were doing the raffles, I heard this amazing song come over the muzak, ever so quietly. I actually got up and went out into the hallway, hoping to catch a snippet, but there were no speakers out there, so I dashed around to the foyer and positioned myself directly under the only speaker out there, cupping my ear so I could hear. I got a couple of lines but knew I was going to forget them if I didn't write them down -- but I had no pen, pencil or paper. Technology to the rescue: I went to the coat room and grabbed my phone, figured out how to enter a "voice note" without forgetting what I had to say.

As soon as we got home, I raced to the lyrics sites and found out what I had almost found out once before from the Sirens of Song site: it was The Sundays, featuring Harriet Wheeler, singing "Here's Where the Story Ends." (Older than I expected, too: 1989. Where was I?)

Now, was that so hard? Very thankful there's an iTunes store in the world.

Burt Lancaster has nothing to do with Harriet Wheeler, except that we all sat down to watch "Field of Dreams" together on Saturday night. I don't think I've seen it since it came out, but we saw a fragment of it a few weeks ago and we're all suckers for a good baseball movie, and memory had failed to remind me that in fact this is a great baseball movie. But what really surprised me was the final movie role of Burt Lancaster, who always had an incredible screen presence, a fascinating combination of strength and grace, a certain ease of gesture that I never saw in another Hollywood star. Turns out he was a former acrobat who worked to keep his physique throughout his career, something that shows in subtle ways in his movies. But in this one, he plays the doctor who gave up baseball after a bad debut, gets a second chance, and gives it up again to save a child. And as much as I know this is just a silly fantasy of a movie, when he steps off that field and transforms back into the doctor, and you know he can't go back again -- Niagara Falls, Frankie. I weep like a baby.

My poor kids have the world's most unreliable tooth fairy. I'm pretty sure we didn't even actively start this ridiculous myth, but once you're in it, there's no way out. Unfortunately, ours only appears on the appointed night about half the time -- and last night, following an extraction for orthodontic purposes that has left a fairly swollen lip and an uncomfortable child (a procedure that generally fetches five dollars from the mythical realm of the "dentylle folke"), our fairy failed to appear.

I'm going to change this whole thing around -- I'll offer a service through dentists' offices that guarantees tooth fairy service. While it's impractical to sneak into people's homes at night and stuff things under children's pillows, maybe we can change it so that instead of money under the pillow, kids expect free MP3 downloads to appear in their email. Then at least some good will have come of my inattentive parenting.

Trio has been showing "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" every night. I saw it when I was a kid and it made a huge impression. It was on cable again when I was in my twenties, but I didn't find that it had held up well. Now, in my forties, I'm stunned by what they could get away with on TV then that probably wouldn't make it on screen now, especially some of the stuff that really addressed race in ways we just don't try to do anymore. Do you think that today anyone would use the term "darkie" as a joke, and have someone as prominent as Sammy Davis Jr. play along with it? But more than anything, seeing these old shows with their cross between vaudeville and high-speed sketch comedy has made me realize that what the world needs now (at least the comedy world) is more Joanne Worley.

I'd be lying if I said that I was able to ride my bike yesterday without thoughts of three horrific crashes that had taken place in the previous couple of days. One was a pro rider in the Giro d'Italia, Alberto Lopez de Munain, who went out in what Velonews described as a "ghastly" high-speed crash when he touched wheels with another rider and went into a metal guardrail. It's a sign of how bad the crash looked that the initial reports indicated with some relief that he had only broken some ribs and his collarbone and had collapsed a lung. The picture is too disturbing to post -- a body shouldn't look like that.

Then there was a cyclist killed in NYC on Sunday, a young waitress who biked between Manhattan and her apartment in Williamsburg, hit by a garbage truck whose driver never even knew he'd touched her. And much closer to home, a rider with the local club, apparently a very popular and well-known fellow who owned a restaurant in Guilderland, died in a crash when he had a blow-out going down a steep hill. He was helmeted, but sometimes that just won't be enough, and if you blow out, bad things are going to happen.

So yes, on last night's ride home from work (which I stretched by running out to Best and Luther and then back), there was just a touch of nervousness and worry, and I did stop and pump up my tires a little when I thought they were just a tad soft for the conditions. I'm never going to go out by touching wheels with another rider, but cars and trucks are a constant threat (cellphone and youth being extreme multiplying factors), and a blow-out could happen to anyone. I stopped riding for nearly twenty years because I had had a couple of bad accidents -- one in traffic, down on gravel on a busy, dangerous road where I could easily have been run over, and another in a safer location where I went right over the handlebars and onto my back, which left me with a concussion and shock that lasted for several days. Those were when I was about 21, and helmets were pretty much unheard of, but they kinda put me off bicycling for a very very long time. When I got back into it just a few years ago, I was originally unsure if I would ever be comfortable in traffic again, but it's just like riding a bicycle, as it turns out, and while I don't love it, it doesn't exactly scare me, either. I guess all one can do is be as safe as it's possible to be (I ride pretty conservatively), keep eyes and ears open (I never ride with music), be ready for anything, and be prepared to chase down and kill a'holes who throw bottles out car windows.
Tomorrow, I ride again.

Was that one of the most miserable, dreary spring weekends in memory, or what? The weather, combined with a sickness known only as the creeping crud, and the sudden blossoming of my elder daughter into full-blown adolescent insanity, made it all kinda blah. Anytime a trip to the mall is one of the highlights of my weekend, you know I haven't really had a great one.

The cause of the trip was a sudden need for a laptop. Spouse has taken on a new job that will involve travel, and in order to travel, she needs to be able to work on the road. That meant sudden need for a Powerbook. Not a lot of choices, and you get a LOT of computer for $2500 these days, including a hard drive bigger than the two that are on our main computer (which needs constant paring down). But the Powerbook came with the new Mac OS, Tiger – note came with, not came installed, an important and unsubtle difference. Without having done another single thing to the Powerbook, I tried to upgrade it to Tiger, and instantly got into a “blue screen of death” scenario. Ended up reloading all the original programming and starting over from scratch. In a bizarre twist of fate, the upgrade on my old G4 went perfectly – which has never ever happened before. So yesterday was pretty much spent drinking tea, blowing my nose, and installing software on two of our three computers. Hard to believe how much life has changed, that three computers are not just a good idea, but virtually necessary (okay, the kids’ now ancient iMac is pretty much just for fun, but it keeps them off the main machine.) We still have only one TV, though, which somehow seems important. Of course, the imminent need for a Powerbook put at least a temporary end to my dreams of an Apple Cinema display to replace our gigantic old CRT.

Otherwise, nothing was accomplished this weekend. We showed the kids a really enjoyably bad Roger Corman monster movie that was packaged with a bunch of others (never overlook the dollar bin at the Target). It had everything, including a singing part for the slightly long-in-the-tooth ingenue and a murderous sea captain who just happened to have little garden rakes along in his trunk (two of which were sharpened up to simulate the attack of a sea monster, two of which were kept as spares for a plot device later). Drive-in movies used to be a whole lot more fun in the old American International days.

As mentioned, daughter is going headlong into the teenage thing. It’s going to be a long few years, and there will be much stomping and storming and slamming of doors. How she’ll react is anyone’s guess.

and how often have I used that headline?

It's always a question of exactly how much to divulge -- enough to be interesting, but not so much that the true depths of my patheticness are revealed. Hmmm . . . .

See, last week I was out doing the weekly groceries and decided to set the iPod on "stun" with what I had intended to be an ironic, awful collection of songs from the '70s, which I had called "Sucking in the Seventies." (No apologies to the Stones, and I never thought that album title had even a trace of irony to it.) But, perhaps sadly, perhaps not, I actually found myself deeply digging the songs I was hearing, much to my amazement and dismay. Songs that I had long since thought I had gotten over, back in my good graces after only a few decades of waiting out on the curb. Well, maybe it'll pass.

So, what were they? Well, really, I'm not going to give you the whole playlist, because it's just too embarrassing. But here are some:

• "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature," The Guess Who. Actually, I have always liked No Sugar, but only the 45 version. This full version is very funky, sincere, and meaningful in a way few have tried since the '70s. There's a reason. But it's a good song.
• "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," Crosby, Stills & Nash. Now come on. What were we thinking? You call those harmonies? We thought these guys were great? We waited outside the stage door, trying to tempt Stephen Stills with submarine sandwiches? (The wrong stage door, as it turned out.) A huge, sprawling mess of a song that lit a million Bic lighters at concerts across the country. It has no discernible point, no hook to speak of, it begins one place and ends another, and takes a hell of a long time to get there. But I was digging it in the cereal aisle, baby.
• "Woodstock," ditto + Neil. "Woodstock" reminds me what I don't think we'll be able to convey to our children -- people really thought the revolution was coming. Now I'm afraid it did, but it was the wrong one.
• "Sultans of Swing," Dire Straits. I completely equate this song with a particular campus bar where I whiled away many millions of hours drinking and playing pinball and PacMan, a place that was renowned for its jukebox, on which this was one of the few very up-to-date songs, so it got played a lot. I really thought I'd heard all I needed to hear of this song back around 1980, but there it was last week, and it was good.
• "More Than a Feeling," Boston. Okay, admittedly, I couldn't last all the way through this one. My most vivid memory of this song, which at least one reader (which would be about 50% of my readership) may share, is it blasting out at an Explorer dance at the highly swank Ramada Inn in Schenectady, where the dance floor vibrated so hard from the dancing that we couldn't keep the needle in the groove and kept having to restart the record. I gained a deep fear of dying in a Ramada collapse that I haven't completely lost to this day.
• "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Elton John. I mean, what the hell is this about? But man, it takes me back to a sweltering summer night, a very very long time ago, so vividly I can smell the air.

More will not be revealed.

Edition 3,561:

"Stop trilling and finish getting ready for bed!"

"When I was a kid, if we'd wanted to fax each other the homework, first we would have needed to get a time machine."

As promised, Hannah in her new glasses (from Friday, when I went on her class trip to the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. She went back down to NYC for another field trip yesterday. She may not be completely spent, but her parents are).