Help me with this quote

OK, this is in lieu of about a dozen other posts I don't have the energy for right now. It also lets me avoid writing a post that just says "I am tired" - or even worse, "I got nothin'."

It's a quote that came up in an IM conversation last night.

"Life is full of little disappointments."

It sounds pseudo-philosophical (and most of its appearances on the Internet are, in fact, pseudo-philosophical), but it was intended sarcastically - and I'm pretty sure it was intended sarcastically the first time I heard it. But where? It sounds like it could have come out of the mouth of a villain - or a super-villain - but which one? Casanova Frankenstein in Mystery Men? Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman? The arch-nemesis in the old Dungeons & Dragons-inspired TV show Wizards and Warriors?

The tone is mock-sympathetic and mock-wistful. It reminds me of Tony Shalhoub's "It's the little things" in Galaxy Quest (after he has successfully transported the Rock Monster into a chamber full of bad guys), and, for some reason, of Winona Ryder's "It's good to want things" in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (a movie I've never seen, but it was in the trailer, which I did see.)

It may not have even been in a movie. (I definitely didn't hear it in Against the Law, a movie I never even heard of until I tried looking this up.) Maybe it was in a book? Somewhere? Maybe? Anybody?


Posts you're missing out on:

Words have power
"Snakes on a Plane" and the 2008 elections
A Rock Too Heavy To Lift

I'm pretty sure I'll write each of those. But not tonight.

Podge and Rodge

People in America seem to think that Ireland is all drinkin' and feckin' and fightin' and "Top o' the mornin' to ya" and "Faith an' begorrah, they're tryin' to steal me Lucky Charms!" But it's not like that at all. (Except for the drinkin' and feckin' and fightin', which is all totally, totally true.)*

One of the things I discovered on my last trip to Ireland was an interview show featuring puppets Podge and Rodge. It's not available in the U.S., but like almost everything else at the moment, bits of it are available on YouTube.

Here's a little sketch where Podge and Rodge discover the online world. "Show me the filth!"


Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

*It is. Really.

Where's Barack?

Last Monday I ran into an old friend at work who is something of a political gadfly. In the past he has been an enthusiastic Bush supporter, having taken time off to meet him during his campaign stops in Northeastern Pennsylvania during the 2004 race. But over the past few years he has become disenchanted with the man he once supported, and now has changed sides to support Barack Obama.

I didn't know this yet when I mentioned to him that I would be going to see Hillary Clinton at her Scranton High School appearance later that day. I had half expected he might go, since he seems like the sort who can't stay away from any such event. But, no, he wasn't going. He did confide to me that he had heard a rumor that Barack Obama might be showing up at Scranton's Saint Patrick's Day Parade on the 15th.

Wow, I thought. That will turn what is already a traffic nightmare into something much worse. And then there are the security concerns...

That night Hillary Clinton confided to the gathered crowd that she would be appearing in the Scranton Saint Patrick's Day Parade.

Fight, fight! Drunken Hillary supporters meet with drunken Obama supporters and...

And nothing. Barack Obama didn't come to the Scranton Saint Patrick's Day Parade today. In fact, he isn't even in Pennsylvania today! So where is he?

Plainfield, Indiana.

Indiana holds its Primary May 2nd. Pennsylvania holds its Primary April 22nd.

Barack Obama does have some events scheduled for Pennsylvania coming up, including a few in Northeastern PA. But unlike Hillary's appearance last week, these are closed events, either being held for select groups or by invitation only. Even the Plainfield, Indiana event requires tickets for admission - and there is room for only 2000 at the venue, the Plainfield High School Gym. (Hillary Clinton drew at least twice that many attendees to the Scranton High School Gym, a venue that held 3500 people.)

Has Barack Obama given up on Pennsylvania already? Or has he decided to let the Clinton campaign play itself out here? Chelsea said that she would be in the area for two weeks, so perhaps after that date the Clinton campaign plans on sending its big names to start campaigning in the next states on the roster. Maybe he's waiting for them to move on before he moves in.

Still, it seems like Obama could be showing a little more interest in the people of Pennsylvania, especially if he wants the people of Pennsylvania to show more interest in him. I look forward to seeing him on his campaign stops in NEPA. But I fear that unless those stops are both open and accessible to the general public, I might not get a chance to see him.

Barack vs. Hillary, Clinton vs. Obama

Francisco de Goya, Fight With Clubs

A few months ago, nobody thought the Democratic Primary process would go on long enough to reach Pennsylvania with more than one viable candidate. Hillary Clinton, the anointed candidate of the party bosses, would certainly by now have ground all of her opponents under foot with the aid of the full strength of the Party machine behind her.

Or: Barack Obama, the popular and charismatic upstart from Illinois, would have ridden a swelling wave of popular support that would have led all of his Democratic rivals to throw in the towel and jump on the bandwagon.

Or: Hillary Clinton, the one candidate certain to energize the Clinton-haters of the far Right, would have been advised by Party leaders to withdraw from the campaign, lest she create a backlash that results in a greater Republican turnout that there would be without her.

Or: ...well, you get the point.

Political Vocabulary Words
for Research and Reflection:
demagogue
platitude
cult of personality
Pyrrhic victory

But here we are. Sort of.

Once again, Pennsylvania doesn't really count. At this point it is mathematically impossible for either candidate to win the nomination outright through victories in the remaining contests. So whoever wins Pennsylvania will only be incrementally closer to having locked up the nomination. They will also have to get the votes of a sufficient number of "Superdelegates" in order to secure a win.

And winning the nomination will not mean that the fight is over. No, events have taken an uglier turn than that. Hillary Clinton is attacking Barack Obama on his qualifications; Barack Obama is attacking Hillary Clinton on her character. The attacks are working, and voters are becoming disenchanted with both candidates.

There is a new sort of madness taking root. I have heard it from both sides of this internecine conflict, though more often, and more vehemently, from one side than the other. People have become so enamored with and dedicated to one or the other of the candidates that they are saying "If (Clinton)/(Obama) wins, I'm voting for McCain. Or I'm not voting at all!"

So what is is this? Stupidity? Insanity? Immaturity? Ignorance? Embracing the cult of personality so strongly that the person matters more than what they stand for? Maybe a "Well, if we're not gonna play the game my way, I'm gonna take my bat and my ball and go home" mentality? (For a fairly intense and well-referenced discussion on this topic, see this entry on Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy.)

I suspect the shrivelled claw of Karl Rove in this, but that may just be a touch of paranoia.* But there's a very real chance that these threats may be more than just threats - that Democrats will once again find a way to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory and once again let the Republicans take the White House**, and maybe Congress in the bargain.

There's a hell of a lot at stake in this election. There was a hell of a lot at stake in the last two elections, but many people didn't see that as sufficient reason to vote for the Democrat- and look where two Bush administrations have brought us. Are you better off than you were eight years ago? Did this country run better with a Republican President and a Republican-controlled Congress?***

I will vote for the Democratic candidate, whomever that candidate may be. I will vote for the Democrat because I know that whichever candidate gets sworn in next January, they will not simply lead us further along the path that George W. Bush has sent us down. I will vote for the Democrat because I have listened to what both candidates have been saying, and I like them both. I wish I could vote for them both. And maybe, if one or the other is willing to swallow their pride and sign on as the other's running mate, maybe I will.

Both sides need to stop playing the politics of personal destruction that have long been the hallmarks of their ignoble opponents. Hillary Clinton and her people need to stop undermining Barack Obama, creating an argument that Obama is inferior to McCain. And Barack Obama and his people need to stop demonizing Hillary Clinton, need to stop making her out to be some sort of monster that she isn't.

And both Clinton and Obama need to rally their forces to pledge to give their support to the other candidate, when the time comes that one or the other of them is no longer in the running for the Presidency. If the people threatening to vote for McCain or not vote at all will not listen to either reason, moral suasion, or impassioned appeals to emotion, maybe they will listen to their chosen candidate.

This is too important to lose. Again. Eight years of a Republican at the helm steering the Ship of State into the rocks is long enough.

Be friends, you English fools, be friends: we have French quarrels enow, if you could tell how to reckon. - Henry V, Act 4, Scene 1

*That's the wonderful thing about being an evil genius: you can be in a million places at once, because people will suspect you of involvement in anything that bears any resemblance to anything you have ever done before. For all I know, Rove may be in the Marianas Islands with Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, enjoying the company of underage laborers who have been forced into prostitution to pay for the abortions they were forced to undergo by their sweatshop bosses. Or he might just be lounging around in his underwear, watching his collection of Girls Gone Wild videos. Who can say?

**I have a confession to make: Unlike many members of his own party, I do not hate John McCain. I think he is a man of honor and principles, though I believe his principles have often been compromised on behalf of political necessity in the past - and will be again in the future, regardless of the outcome of this election. But I believe he is the wrong person to put in the White House next January. And, for all his qualifications and experience, Republicans felt he was the wrong person to put in the White House in previous elections. They determined he was less qualified than George W. Bush to be President in 2000 or 2004. Do we really want someone in office who has been determined by his own party to be inferior to the guy who has brought this country to where it is today?

***Oh, it ran smoother, I'll grant you that, when the Republican Congress only had to churn out legislation for their beloved leader to rubber-stamp, and could easily ignore any dissent from the Democrats in Congress. Why, you would never see this nonsense about FISA courts and concerns about "privacy" if the Republicans still held Congress!

Two more awards, and a song

I wanted to do a longish post on the whole Barack vs. Hillary thing, but Blogger is going down in a half hour and I don't have time. I'll try to do it tomorrow. So let me encapsulate it: Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1. I don't know if the relevant line is contained in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that excerpted this scene, so check out the Branagh version if you can, or just grab a copy or read it online. See if you can pick out what I'm referring to.

Whim has awarded me two awards in the past month, and I have failed to acknowledge them. Let me do that now.

Back on February 18 Whim passed this award along to me. It's very cool to know that I have made someone's day! I'm supposed to pass this award along to ten people, but I've been so slow to even accept it, you can count on me to be at least as slow to pass it on.

Today Whim informed me that she had presented me with this award. (The symbol means "heart" or "love" in l33tspeak.) (I had a longish bit here, but it wound up getting reduced to <3>. Now I can't remember what I wrote. But thank you, whim!)

I have to admit that I don't really "get" what awards are all about. When I first saw awards floating around the blogosphere, they were being presented by groups or organizations (or individuals posing as groups or organizations) and were often presented after a competition or a voting process. But now it seems that lots of people are making up awards and passing them around...which is totally, totally cool. I may actually do some myself. I have one in mind that would be awarded to a single person, and could be awarded by anyone to anyone at any time. But that may take time to cook up.

In the meantime I have another award that has no button: the "Blogs Worth Reading" award. That goes to all the blogs listed along my right-hand sidebar, which are there not because of some reciprocal-link agreement or anything like that, but because these are all blogs that I read, and I wanted a convenient way of getting to them. If I read them, they're worth reading.

And now the song:

"Elvis Presley and America" is from U2's The Unforgettable Fire, and was the last song on side 1 of the cassette if I recall correctly. It was a legendary song among U2 fans: the mumbled lyrics, the strangely familiar music, the non-repeating structure of the vocals. Stories and explanations sprang up around it, most of which turned out to be true, more or less. (The Wikipedia entry on this song has what I believe is the true story, though it omits the bit that I heard about Bono being drunk during the recording.) I spent a lot of time in college with fellow U2 fans trying to figure out just what the hell Bono was saying, and what it meant.

(The video, by the way, is made of edited, mixed, faded, desaturated, and grain-added clips from the film Solaris. If you haven't seen that movie, you should, and maybe you should get the book by Stanislaw Lem to try to figure out what the hell is going on. The video was created by the YouTube user handstoheart, and it's a really nice piece of work.)

I'm out of time. I'll close this post with lines from the song:

You're through with me
But I know that you'll be back
for more

See you when Blogger's back online!

Hillary Clinton in Scranton, March 10 2008

I hadn't made my mind up to see Hillary Clinton in Scranton this past Monday until I was practically there. Arriving on Providence Avenue, I did a typical Left-Right mixup and headed the wrong way, only too late noticing the crowd of people behind me. I reoriented myself and drove past the crowd into a nearby complex and parked on some muddy grass. (HELPFUL HINT: If you have a front-wheel-drive car, and you have the option of parking part of your car on pavement and part on muddy grass, put the rear wheels on the muddy grass and the front wheels on the pavement. It will help when you decide to leave.)

The line was already very long when I got to the location at about 4:50. Doors had opened at 4:30, and people had probably started gathering a few hours before that. The gym where Hillary would be speaking could hold 3500 people. The line was moving in fits and starts and we made progress very very slowly.
The point where the line wrapped around itself. There were over 3500 people ahead of me.

Free Enterprise thrived along the line. Button vendors and T-shirt hawkers sold their ware up and down the line to a captive audience eager to buy.

It was at about this point that I noticed several rather...fancily dressed women walking towards the end of the line. Ever since Sex and the City hit the air, there has been considerable overlap between the worlds of high fashion and dressing like a prostitute. Earlier I had noticed a woman dressed like a Dominatrix on the way to meet a client: thigh-high leather boots, short skirt, black coat with the collar pulled up, sunglasses. But the women who approached us were dressed somewhat more...as they approached I noticed some things: The breadth of their shoulders. Their tallness. The huskiness of their voices.

Transvestites! I thought. (Or, as I would later learn they called themselves, "Homos for Hillary.") I turned to the guy behind me, who had also noticed them. "You usually have to go to Wal-Mart after 9:00 on a Saturday night to see that," I quipped. He laughed. (I wasn't joking. I was apparently at the Wal-Mart in Wilkes-Barre late one Saturday night - I forget why - during Transvestite Shopping Hours. The place seemed full of them, though it may have been just two.) I regret not getting a photo of them.

A lone Republican crying out in the wilderness. He's opposed to Universal Health Care, apparently. Stupid babies and old people, why should they get a break?
The Obamanites, a small but vocal group of Obama supporters who chose not to join the other pro-Obama individuals who were going in to hear what Hillary had to say. Barack Obama has not yet announced any plans to visit Northeastern Pennsylvania.

There was another group of protesters across the street from the line. At one point they had a bedsheet with the word "GOOGLE" followed by a good half a dozen terms, apparently a string that you're supposed to type in to go to proof positive that Hillary eats aborted babies for lunch or something like that. Actually, I have no idea what the sign said. By the time I got into position to snap a picture - the only way I could get the entire message - they had apparently gotten tired and dropped the banner. Honest, whatever they were pushing couldn't have been that popular or they wouldn't have needed so many terms. (Lately, instead of giving people my blog address, I just tell them to Google "headless rabbit." Another Monkey, the world's #1 source of news and information on headless rabbits!)

Later one of the protesters walked over to Obama Island carrying a small sign. "Does that say 'War 1955'?" the guy behind me asked. "What war would that be? Korea?"

The sign actually said "H.R. 1955". (I had to explain to him that "H.R." stands for "House Resolution".) This is also known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. Now I'm wondering who these people were. Ron Paul is mentioned in the linked article. Could they have been Ron Paul supporters?

Six o'clock came and went and we were still well outside of the gym - closer, but outside. We were all very cold, and as the sun set behind Scranton High School I noted that we were all about to get a lot colder.

6:15 and Hillary had not yet taken the stage. This was a good thing. But around 6:30 a police officer came and told us that the gym was now full, and they were re-routing people to the school auditorium, where at best people would be able to watch Hillary on a TV. A trickle of people were now heading from the front of the gym to the auditorium.

A few seconds later the crowd began to buzz, and then break up. Either everyone was beginning to disperse, or...

Mad dash! Everyone was suddenly racing up a muddy hillside to the auditorium. The line had dissolved, and it was first-come, first served at the doors.

The auditorium filled up pretty quickly, with people of every race and gender identification. (I learned yesterday that the transvestites were there with us!) But, as we quickly learned, there was no TV screen there to watch Hillary's speech. At best we would hear it, over two Public Address speakers mounted above the stage.

And hear it we did. The audio was lousy, the introductions droned on, and no one outside the auditorium could see or hear us. But that didn't stop the crowd from cheering or clapping at appropriate times. One of the most popular items in both Hillary and Chelsea's speeches was a vow to end "the Unfunded Mandate known as 'No Child Left Behind'," one of the most far-reaching of the Bush Administration's many failures.

People eased out of their seats throughout the speech, which went on for a good while. Hillary opened with a good 10 minutes of local name-dropping ("I remember going to Tunkhannock for ice cream at the Shadowbrook! I just had white pizza in Old Forge!"), but in her case it was legit - she does in fact have family ties to this area (her father is buried in Scranton) and did in fact spend portions of her childhood here. Then she launched into a stump speech that was fairly light on specifics, save for a pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 60 days of taking office. But for the most part, it was just cheerleading to an enthusiastic crowd - two crowds, if you counted us in the auditorium.

Towards the end of the speech, after many people had left, a teenage boy in a crumpled gray suit slipped onstage, made a pressing-down ("stay here") motion with his hands, and said something that only people at the front right of the audience could hear. One of them turned and shouted to the murmuring throng. "Stay here!" she yelled. "She's coming! Hillary's coming here!"

Suddenly the auditorium was alive again as people swarmed to fill the positions toward the front. The speech ended, and we waited.

And waited.

People came and went onstage. A microphone was set up. Several people who appeared to be aides, and probably not local - nobody wears long, dangly scarves around here - appeared onstage and seemed to take in the crowd. Several people entered the auditorium from the back and set up a "velvet rope" to define a do-not-cross zone.

At one point the boy in the gray suit peeked around the curtain, and the audience burst into applause and cheers. This became a running joke: every time he appeared the crowd erupted in cheers. Finally he walked across the stage and removed the microphone, stand and all. Huh?

And suddenly, she was there. Hillary Clinton herself. She didn't have to do this, of course. She had just spoken to a screaming, enthusiastic crowd of 3500 in the gym, and we had heard her. What did she have to gain by spending some extra time with a few hundred folks who weren't able to get in to the main show?

But she did. She spoke to us, just us, for a good ten minutes. That impressed me. Then she came down off the stage and into the crowd - I think she was on the other side of the rope - and shook hands and met with people for another good long while.

I found her surprisingly charismatic. While neither as eloquent nor as charming as her daughter, she was still much more pleasant than the monster she is being made out to be by her opponent's fervent followers. And she did stir up quite a bit of enthusiasm in the crowd, quite the opposite of the effect that I am hearing being described in other sources.

Finally it was over and the crowd dispersed. Everyone left and cheerfully trudged to their cars, glad to have seen Hillary Clinton in her first official campaign stop in Pennsylvania.

And yesterday I saw Chelsea. (Call me, kiddo.)

Now I'm looking forward to seeing Barack Obama. If he ever decides to visit Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Chelsea & Me

Chelsea Clinton and a local crackpot blogger

Well, I was going to do a post on my experience of waiting in a long line to hear Hillary Clinton speak at a high school in Scranton yesterday. I was going to mention the transvestites (or, as they called themselves, "HOMOS FOR HILLARY!"), and the T-shirt and button hawkers, and the Obama supporters, and the lone Republican with a sign that said "VOTE REPUBLICAN NOT SOCIALIST", and the two hours spent waiting in line, and the way the Gym filled up completely when I was still about 500 people away, and how the orderly re-routing of people to the auditorium (where we could hear her over a P.A. system, but not see her) turned into a mad scramble, and how after her speech to 3500 screaming fans in the auditorium gymnasium she actually came to the auditorium to see and speak with and meet with the several hundred of us in the overflow crowd.

I was going to do a post on all that. But I'm too tired to get into any of that right now.

See, I'm tired because I learned this morning that Chelsea Clinton would be coming to the grand opening of her mom's Scranton campaign headquarters at 5:30 this afternoon. Well, shucks, I thought, I could do that. So after work today I headed over to the parkade near Tink's where I always used to park back in those days and hiked the two blocks to the headquarters.

Unlike yesterday, when I headed for the event without a coat or hat because a) I figured it would be very hot in the auditorium and b) I figured the less I wore, the less of a hassle security would be, this time I decided to wear both hat and coat in anticipation of a brief and chilly outdoor event. So, naturally, I cooked for nearly three hours inside the crowded, stuffy, one-room headquarters.

But I got to see Chelsea! See her, hear her (she's an excellent speaker!), talk with her, shake hands with her, get her autograph, and - thanks to a very nice lady and her very nice daughter - get my picture with her. (Thank you very much! So sorry to hear about your cannibalistic hamster.)

We have not seen the last of her. She will be speaking tomorrow morning at Wilkes College, and she told us she will be in the area for the next two weeks - will she be with her mom at the Scranton St. Patrick's Day Parade this Saturday? (If you thought traffic was bad normally on Parade Day in Scranton, you ain't seen nothin' yet.) And she promised that we will be seeing lots of Clintons over the next few weeks. I wouldn't mind seeing her again, or her mother. But after them, who else is left?

Now, I wonder when Barack will be coming around here?

Hillary and Leonard

I saw Hillary Clinton in Scranton today. She was much more personable than I expected, and was able to stir the crowd even when she wasn't in the same room with them. A full report will be delivered forthwith. Well, not exactly forthwith. Maybe tomorrow.

Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame today. You may recall that I posted a YouTube video - lifted from Gort - of John Cale (of the Velvet Underground) performing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." This is, I think, the most stirring and beautiful version of this song. This essay (sent to me last week by Gort) states that the late Jeff Buckley's version is considered to be "definitive", though I find his version too melodramatically emo and lacking in the beauty and grace of Cale's. (My first experience of this song was probably a slightly edited version of the John Cale version in, of all places, the movie Shrek. Buckley's version has found considerable play in the current crop of teen TV melodramas, as noted in the linked essay.)

But this is Leonard Cohen's day, so it would be good to give a listen to a version by the man who started it all.

And on the other end of history, here is a much more recent version sung, in turn, by four Norwegian singers.

To learn more about Leonard Cohen, give a listen to this Fresh Air interview from May 2006.

GoodReads

Here's a change of pace after that last post. Ashley from Ink on Paper has persuaded me to sign up on the GoodReads network, and then has further persuaded me to actually participate! GoodReads is a site that lets you easily list books that you have read, are reading, or would like to read, and lets you rate them and post reviews, too.

I am a man who has been known to have a few books lying around. As of this writing I have only listed 10 on GoodReads. I intend to write a review for every one I list, so that will tend to limit the number of books I list there. I've installed a GoodReads widget at the top of my sidebar (since Blogger is currently buggy and is keeping me from seeing the bottom of my sidebar in Layout mode!), so you can click on there to go to my profile, or just click here.* Now, why don't you sign up, too, and start letting the world know what you've read?


*Don't be confused by the name, or the picture. That's me. Unless I seriously screwed up and managed to link to someone else's profile.

Find this murderer

These are two images released by the Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Police Department of a "person of interest" in the murder of Eve Carson.
This "person of interest" was using Eve Carson's ATM card and, it appears, Eve Carson's SUV.

Something about this case has touched a nerve with me, more than all the other random murders that take place every day. By all accounts, Eve Carson was a person of "unlimited promise" - one of those rare and special people who have the potential to change the world completely. Her biography shows someone who had accomplished more in her twenty-two years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetimes. And she was just getting started.

This is the same sort of hat seen in the images. The killer wore a hat like this over a very large afro, all tucked under a hood. (According to this site, this is a Houston Astros 1965-style hat, though that style may have been used since then.)

And now she is dead. Killed because someone had a gun, and a bullet, and was willing to use it to snuff out the life of a random girl - for what? Some money? A car? Just for fun?

Photo manipulation: Remove hat, extend hair across head (assuming consistent length), fill in eyebrow, duplicate eye. Is this the face of Eve Carson's killer?

Somebody knows who this guy is. Somebody has seen him, has talked to him. He went to school somewhere, bought cigarettes somewhere, bought beer somewhere, got his hair cut somewhere, took a piss somewhere, hung out somewhere. He's somebody's son, maybe somebody's brother, somebody's friend.

A second extrapolation, using a skightly different technique and applying a different assumption about the eyebrows and eyes. This version looks somewhat older than the first version.

And he is Eve Carson's murderer.

Somebody needs to find him.

Set the Ray to Mayonaise

I am keeping a close eye on the thin line of water along the edge of the basement wall. It's raining again. It's supposed to rain all night tonight, and into tomorrow. Better take those countermeasures I failed to take Tuesday night.

YouTube Weekend time again! This time it's two fan-made videos for songs by the Smashing Pumpkins.

The first is for a hauntingly beautiful song with an extremely bizarre title. "Set the Ray to Jerry" is subtle and simple: the bass line is a six-second long repeated pattern, the guitars are ethereal, and the drums...well, it reminds me of how Douglas Adams described watching a two-ton Northern White Rhinoceros (now probably extinct in the wild) nibbling on grass in his book Last Chance to See: "It was like watching a JCB excavator quietly getting on with a little weeding." Jimmy Chamberlain's drumming is subtle and complex. Like "Stand Inside Your Love", this is from the Judas O rarities and B-sides album. It's the B-side of "1979."


The other fan-made video is for an old favorite from Siamese Dream. I always thought "Mayonaise" (spelled with one "n" for some reason) would make an excellent first-dance song at a wedding. Just need to have pyrotechnics ready to go off at the 53 second mark.


Enjoy!

March 24, 2008: Deadline to Register to Vote in PA Primary!

NOTE ADDED SEPTEMBER 8, 2008: The information below was about the 2008 PRIMARY Election. For information on the deadline to register to vote for the PRESIDENTIAL Election in Pennsylvania in 2008, go here.

As long as I've been registered to vote I've been a registered Independent. I blame this as much on J.A. Panuska, S.J. , the President of the University of Scranton during my days there, as on anything else. In an interview published in the weekly campus paper, The Aquinas, Fr. Panuska revealed that he had been a lifetime registered Indepedent, so that he would never be beholden to any political party, any more than they could presume his automatic support. It seemed like a good, principled stand to take on a fairly basic issue, so I decided to adopt it for myself.

Besides, I live in Pennsylvania. Just about the only thing being registered for a particular party means (for non-politicians, or those not seeking political favors) is that you get to vote in that party's Primary election to decide who runs in the General election. For the most part I simply trusted my fellow Pennsylvanians to decide for themselves who would best represent their party in the General election. The only election that I seriously cared deeply and passionately about was the Presidential election. And since Pennsylvania's Primary comes so late in the season, it pretty much never made a difference. The candidates were already selected long before Pennsylvania, one of the largest and most diverse states in the Union, ever got a chance to give its opinion.

2008 is different. In 2008 Pennsylvania's vote matters in the Primary race, on the Democratic side at least.

And here I am, a registered Independent. Unable to cast my vote.

Or so I thought.

As I pulled up to my house this afternoon to check for storm-related damage (there is none! HOORAY!) I heard a brief news clip that said that the deadline to register to vote in the Primary is March 24.

Huh? I had always thought it was sometime last November.

I can has chance to vote in Prezdenchal Primerry? Excellent!

I called the Luzerne County Courthouse, intending to run up directly to change my party affiliation. And they told me that, yes, I could run up and fill out the form right away...or I could log on to the series of tubes known as the Internet, go to the county's site, print out the form, send it in, and be all done!

So that's what I did. Here's the link:

http://www.luzernecounty.org/county/departments_agencies/bureau_of_elections/register_to_vote

Of course, this is only good for those of us who live in Luzerne County. If you live in another county, you will have to go to your specific county's website, or fill out the form however it is filled out where you live.

In 2008, Pennsylvania has a chance to determine who will be the Democratic candidate for the President. Don't miss out on your opportunity to be a part of that. But hurry - deadline for registration is March 24, 2008!

A day at the beach

...err, "Reach." I didn't realize that sign didn't say "Beach" until I was getting this photo ready to post.

As I mentioned yesterday, I scheduled today off so I could take my mom for a follow-up to her cataract surgery. Her last appointment took a while, during which time I did a fairly good impression of some homeless bum dozing in the waiting room of an eye clinic, so this time I resolved to spend the time out and about getting photos in the general vicinity.
My first stop was a sad one. I had planned on visiting the Tudor Book Shop one last time today, but I got an e-mail over the weekend telling me that this past Tuesday would be their last day. So it turns out my last visit was the Saturday before last, when I stopped in while killing time before picking up my friend to go see RENT. I didn't even buy anything that day. Now they're gone.

After that I headed for the Susquehanna River, which forms the border between Kingston and Wilkes-Barre. I parked on Pierce Street on the Kingston side and walked across the bridge to get some pictures of the swollen river. Here are some trees that are usually well above the river's edge.

Here's a shot along the Pierce Street Bridge looking South towards the Luzerne County Courthouse.
Here's another view of the Courthouse and the other buildings along the riverfront. To the left of center you can just make out a statue - I think it's Christ the King (though it may be the nearly-identical Christ the Redeemer) atop the Administration Building at King's College.
Turning further to the West, here is the Market Street Bridge. (Compare this to the third image on the linked post, which was a shot of the Pierce Street Bridge from the Market Street Bridge!)
Finally, as I headed back to the car something else caught my eye and I grabbed one last image. To the East, dimly visible, are the local windmills - err, the wind-driven electrical generators, or "wind generators" for short. Here are three of them (I think out of a total of eleven) lurking behind a Martian Tripod cleverly disguised as a water tower.
Blown-up version:

The windmills are currently turned off - perhaps as a precaution because of yesterday's storms, or perhaps because of the presence of migrating birds in the area, birds whose presence was made obvious by the enormous quantity of droppings that now coated the car. Someday when the air is drier (and there are fewer large migratory birds in the area fueling up for the last leg of their journey North!) I will have to go back and try to recreate this shot.

Pumping and mopping

I hate taking days off from work. I value my vacation days and hoard them for things like vacations, when I take them.

My mom had cataract surgery on her second eye today. My brother had the day off, so he agreed to take her to and from surgery. I scheduled tomorrow off to take her for her follow-up surgery.

It turned out I had to take today off, too.

A huge locomotive of precipitation rolled diagonally through much of the Northeast yesterday. Upstate New York got some of the ugliest of it in the form of snow and ice, but Northeastern Pennsylvania was treated to heavy and nearly continuous rain. It lightened up a bit yesterday afternoon and evening, and when I went to bed our basement was still dry. I hoped for the best and failed to prepare for the worst.

I woke up this morning at 4:30 and put my sleep-sensitized hearing to work. No tell-tale bubbling of water seeping through concrete anywhere. I switched on the TV and watched the weather for a bit. I got up and out of bed at 5:00 and headed for the bathroom. As usual, my cat Nicky raced ahead of me, wanting to get into the bathroom before me.

He made it two feet into the bathroom and stopped. I didn't need to switch on the light to know why.

The "unfinished" part of the basement was full of water. Just a thin film in most spots, about three-quarters of an inch at its deepest in the corners. The bathroom had water that had seeped in from the bordering section of the basement - again, just a thin film.

Dammit.

I could have set up some towels on the floor in preparation - wet towels serve as fairly effective barriers to water flow, for a little while anyway. I could have gotten up at 2:00 or 3:00 and checked to see if I needed to set up the pumps. I could have done a few things. But I hadn't.

I got out my pumps and extended the hoses out through the garage door. I fired them up and started pumping. I grabbed some junk towels, and some beach towels that have only seen the beach once in the past four years, and started sopping up the standing water. I noticed that the water levels were rising, and that the water in the bathroom had now flowed out the bathroom door.

Fine. I would have to call off.

Six hours later I'm still pumping. We had one final burst of rain around 7:00 this morning, but now it's done, and it was downright sunny not too long ago. The first towels have already been in and out of the washer and dryer and are about to be pressed into service again; towels in the dryer wait to replace them, and towels in the washer are waiting for their turn in the dryer.

This isn't as bad as past floods, and it's the first flood we've had since we - and a helpful Nanticoke city official - convinced our neighbor to stop directing all of his downspouts onto our property. (Now he is merely directing most of his downspouts onto our property.) I had hoped we would get away without basement flooding this time, but I guess that was just unrealistic.

Soon the pumps will go dry, and the towels will have absorbed as much remaining water as they can, and it will be time to break out the mops and buckets and disinfectant again. I wonder if I'll have to just use bleach again? Hooboy...


UPDATE, 7:20 PM: All done. That only took me...all day.

Well, most of the time I wasn't actually doing anything. Set up pumps, let run. Throw down towels, sop up water, wash towels, dry towels, repeat. Mop floor, let dry, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Damage was minimal. Well, nothing actually got damaged, though there's always the chance of mold and mildew down the road, despite my use of bleach as a disinfectant. (I finally got to use those stupid white sweatpants that look ridiculous whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't involve mops and bleach!) You learn a few things after going through this drill a dozen or so times. If you haven't learned from hard experience, Ashley from Ink On Paper wrote an excellent article for Associated Content called "What to Do about Basement Flooding." It's a must-read for anyone who has ever had to deal with this problem, or anyone who may be dealing with it in the future.

Gary Gygax is dead

I forgot to get gas on the way home today.

I was in a hurry to get to my house to see if the heavy rains we're experiencing today had managed to flood my kitchen by way of the water leak which has almost-inexplicably appeared in my stove. (Melting snow dripping down the chimney and snaking through the stovepipe into the inside of the oven and gathering in the bottom of the body of the stove, which eventually sprung a leak...what, do you have a better idea?) There was no flood when I got there, so I took a leisurely inspection tour of the house, stopping in the bedroom to take my Garmin GPS thingamajig out of the suitcase I keep up there. (Garmin GPS thingamajigs are easy to lose or misplace; suitcases are not.) I was planning to use the data stored in there as the basis for today's post, after I stopped downtown to fill up.

As I rolled down the hill to the older of Nanticoke's two traffic lights a story came on NPR's All Things Considered about Margaret Jones' Love and Consequences, the latest fake memoir scandal to hit the publishing world. This one sounded semi-interesting; as opposed to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - which, when presented as fiction, attracted very little interest from publishers, but which became a bestseller when recast as a memoir - this new book was apparently an elaborate hoax from the word go.

I left the radio on while I was pumping gas. (Don't worry; that won't blow up your car any more than using a cell phone while pumping gas will. Leaving your car running or getting in and out of it while pumping gas will put you and anyone around you in some danger, though.) I only heard bits and pieces of the report, but as I was finishing up I heard these ominous words on the radio:

"E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons..."

Oh, crap. They're probably not introducing him for an interview. Did he die?

Yes. Yes he did.

I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons from a Parade Magazine article back in 1980 or so. It gave some descriptions of a game in progress, some background, the requisite "college student found wandering in the sewers last year" warning. I thought it was interesting. I decided I wanted to see what it was about.

That Christmas (well, a day or two after) , I took a bus into Wilkes-Barre with my brother and sister. We were 16, 13, and 12 at the time - back then such things were not inconceivable - and our pockets were stuffed full of Christmas loot to buy the things that Santa forgot to get us. I forget what my brother and sister got, but I picked up the boxed edition of what was called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" (a.k.a. the "Blue Book" version - according to the current revision of the Wikipedia article, this would have made this 1981.)*

The contents of the box were...interesting. A blue book of rules and information something like a thick magazine, an introductory adventure ("The Keep on the Borderlands"), and an array of numbered squares (or "chits") printed on glossy cardboard. These "chits" were designed to serve as random number generators, and came with a little treatise on normal distributions and whatnot. I believe there was also a coupon included which allowed you to order "polyhedral dice" for the princely sum of $2. (I think the game had cost me $9. I had originally paid $12 for it in one store, but returned that one when I realized I could save 25% by buying at another nearby store.)

I was a little excited by this, as the "polyhedral dice" came in the shapes of the Platonic Solids that Carl Sagan discussed in one of the appendices to Cosmos. The tetrahedon, or four-sided pyramid; the cube; the eight-sided octahedron; the twenty-sided icosahedron; and, most precious of all, the dodecahedron, the twelve-sided die whose faces were pentagons. (All of the other dice, except for the cube, had triangular sides.) In D&D terms, this set was made up of a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. No d10 for us, baby! Back in my day, sonny, the d20 was numbered 0 to 9 twice, and you had to color one set of the faces to designate it as "plus ten". But this die could also serve as a ten-sider, and if you rolled it twice, or if you were rich and had two of them, you could use it as "percentile dice" to randomly generate numbers from 0 - 99 (or 1 -100, if you counted "00" as 100.) But a d20 was the essential die for "saving throws", those little chances that maybe you got lucky and managed to avoid getting hit by the point-blank shot, or happened to be immune to the poison, or didn't get fooled by someone's persuasive words.

And that was it.

Basic rules. Some funny-looking dice. Pencil and paper. Some friends. And lots of imagination.

Remember, this was a long time ago. The Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20 (with its super-fast cassette tape drive) were state-of-the-art back in the early 1980's. Video games were primitive things.

Fantasy role-playing games like D&D presented kids with the opportunity to flex their imaginations and their creative skills. At its most basic sense, the game was a form of collective storytelling. One person - the "Dungeon Master", in D&D terminology - would set the stage and provide the backdrop and plot twists; the other players would decide how the story would play out through their characters' actions. Some people played without dice. Some people played without rules. Some people played without pencil and paper. The game was flexible like that.

People who played D&D were looked down upon as freaks and weirdos, geeks and social outcasts. And maybe this was true, to an extent. Maybe the level of imagination and creativity required by the game set players apart from most kids their age. But at its heart, D&D was a social event, even if the people you were socializing with were not generally accepted by a lot of society.

The game spun off. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came out a little while later, with more complicated rules and more expensive books. The game was revised several times, and the "rules" evolved from flexible "guidelines" to hard and fast "rules" that ensured portability of play. It waxed and waned in popularity. Ownership passed from Gary Gygax's TSR to Wizards of the Coast, the people who made the Magic: The Gathering card game. In 2000 it was revised again as part of the d20 System, a codification of rules that aimed for uniformity of rule structure across role-playing game formats and platforms.

This past weekend a friend mentioned Mazes & Monsters to me. This is an ancient Tom Hanks TV-movie, a cautionary tale which, I think, involves college kids going nuts playing role-playing games and winding up wandering in the sewers. It's laughably bad, I have heard, and is watched mainly for entertainment value. My friend said that coming across this movie on the TV listings made him think of Dungeons & Dragons. He hadn't thought of it in years, since a bunch of us would get together and play it at my mom's house. I was the Dungeon Master...

Maybe I'll dust off the old books and bring out the dice sometime. I'll draw up an adventure, and a few of us will get together and pull an all-nighter, just like in the old days. Maybe even introduce a few members of the younger generation to a "game" that doesn't require an X-Box or PS3. Just some rules, some dice, some friends, and some pencil and paper. And lots of imagination and creativity.

Thanks, Gary Gygax.


*My own introductory experiences parallel those of "Unseelie" on this discussion board. I wonder where in Pennsylvania Unseelie lived?

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Tomorrow is the big day. What happens in Texas and Ohio will almost certainly determine whether or not Pennsylvania's primary will be relevant to determining who will be the Democratic nominee.

Tomorrow is also the day that work begins on some bridges on I-81 between Moosic and Avoca. Just some maintenance work, safety stuff, some traffic tie-ups and delays. Should be done in...about two years. I kid you not.

Yes, it's a pain in the butt. But we all remember what happened in Minnesota last August, don't we? No, we probably don't. It took me a minute to remember just which state the bridge was in. Well, this work is to make sure images like this one, of I-81 just North of Avoca...
...remain just amusing glitches on Google Earth that result when the program tries to display non-terrain features in 3-D mode. That's a big drop, and I drive over those bridges twice a day - and all the other ones they'll be working on, too.

So I already set my alarm a half-hour earlier, to 4:30 AM. I'll bump it back even earlier if need be. I'd rather do that than plummet to my doom in some scenic gully or mountain pass in Northeastern Pennsylvania!

UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle, I now know that these repairs have been put off until next...Sunday??? From WNEP.com:

Major I-81 Bridge Project Delayed
Last Updated: March 3, 2008 08:06 AM EST

The start of a $7 million bridge project on Interstate 81 has been postponed until March 9. Four interstate bridges, two northbound and two southbound between Avoca and Moosic will be under construction. For the first week, expect night-time southbound lane restrictions. After the first week, expect possible on-and-off lane restrictions southbound and no lane restrictions northbound. On-ramps from Moosic to Interstate 81 southbound will be controlled by a stop sign. Crossovers are being built in the median but they probably won't be ready until late this year or spring of 2009.

Super.

YouTube Weekend: The Meme

A lot of people have the wrong idea of what a "meme" is. Somehow the definition has gotten distorted and corrupted to mean "a thing that gets passed around on the Internet that requires you to perform some function and then pass it on to somebody else." But that's pretty far from what the word was coined to refer to.

Richard Dawkins originally used the term in his book The Selfish Gene to refer to a unit of information that is capable of reproducing itself. Memes are concepts, ideas, ways of doing things that are copied and replicate and spread from individual to individual. As he writes in Chapter 11 of his book:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

It's rare that you witness a meme at its birth. But I think I have. Marc from Wilkes-Barre Online has made me realize that with this post.

I don't know how long Gort at Gort42 has been doing his "YouTube Weekend" posts, but it might possibly have been since before my friend John built me a computer that was capable of playing YouTube videos. It may go back to this post, which doesn't actually contain an embedded video, or it may have started even earlier.

The idea is pretty simple, as contained in this post:

It will be another light and lazy weekend. I'll just surf YouTube and share what I find just like last weekend.

(Oddly enough, the YouTube videos Gort had posted the previous weekend were a clip of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy being shot in the head, and "Seconds" - a song/video that incorporates bits about JFK's final hours - by the Human League. Not exactly the fun stuff I've come to associate with Gort's YouTube Weekends.)

Like Garfield Minus Garfield, this idea has legs: instead of doing a full post for a weekend, just do a quick post that includes a favorite video for the weekend. I've been doing it for a while, inspired in part by Gort, and in part by Michael Plank's Content, which has long featured YouTube videos - though, like Michael Plank, I don't restrict my video postings to weekends, and I often do the video posts in addition to, rather than in place of, my regular posts. (Some of my video posts are wordier than my non-video posts!)

Jen has gotten into the act at Jennifer D. Wade Journal. Marc at Wilkes-Barre Online has put his own spin on the YouTube Weekend with his Video Flapdoodle - see the first two entries here and here. Now even Bill at Bill's Notes has taken to posting YouTube videos with this weekend's posts. Twenty-seven YouTube videos, over the course of seven posts, all posted today. That's...rather a lot.

I'll leave you with a video. This is a home-made video, by a teenage girl in Glasgow, Scotland. It's a video for "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine. "When You Sleep" is possibly MBV's most upbeat song. I've always thought of it as a "Summer Song", the sort of song I could imagine blasting out of a car as it rolls down the street, or out of a boom box while you're washing your car. The video is just her and her friends screwing around, but the style, the blocking, the editing, the matching up of video to audio, the use of in-camera imagery and speed changes to create special effects (check out the trampoline-and-lens-flare starting at 2:08), the everything is just gorgeous. It perfectly captures the feel of the song. If this girl does not go on to pursue a career in this, the world will be the poorer for it.

"When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine , video by lithiumkx:

Photos on MySpace

I've just uploaded nearly a dozen additional photos to my MySpace site. (This link should take you directly to the photos, though your life will be vastly enriched and encoolend by hanging out on my main page and listening to all of "It's Bad You Know" by R.L. Burnside.) These photos are, for the most part, nothing that hasn't already been posted on this blog. (And I just realized you might not be able to see them at all unless you have a MySpace account and have signed in. Damn you, Rupert Murdoch!)

One thing hit me while posting them.

Photos like this represent a moment in time captured photographically. This was a Saturday afternoon in November of 2005 - November 12, to be exact. I had just given my 72nd pint of blood and had decided to stop and take advantage of the beautiful Fall weather and the still-bright leaves on the ground while coming back with my traditional post-donation Chinese food. As I was heading back to my car after taking the photos a friend's father stopped by and asked what I was up to. We chatted for a while. Then I went home and almost immediately posted the photo.

My realization today was that anyone can try to recreate this photo, if only they knew where to stand. Using Google Earth, I was able to work out the exact location of the intersection of Washington and Walnut Streets where I took this picture. To within a few yards, the picture was taken at 41° 11' 51.42" N, 75° 59' 48.77" W.

You may notice from the Google Earth image above (rotated to approximately match the photo's orientation) that to get this photo I needed to be standing in the intersection, risking my life for my art and your entertainment*. Should you decide to try to reproduce this photo and venture to this very spot, GPS tracker in one hand and camera in the other, be careful not to get your fool self run over. You have been warned.

*ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?