The Pixels of Dorian Gray

Great googly moogly! I was idly googly-mooglying Barb and my past lives as Late Night Monster Movie Hosties, when hoot toot and a hit, we now live forever on YouTube! It seems a citizen and taxpayer has treasured his 22-year old Millie tapes, and is digitizing them and posting them on the Millie channel! Not only that, but he has the uncommon good taste to start with one of the better shows, leastways as far as I remember them. I remember that particular show; and looking at the cuts from the show, I can honestly say that I only remember remember the infamous cold open. I don't remember any of the other inserts at all, but yep that's the show and that's Barb in the glasses and me with my hand up a puppet's hinder.

I expect I ought to make it a summer project to write down as much as I can remember of the life and times of those shows; except that of course we've long since tossed our treasure trove of memorajunquilia hauled around from storage to storage through the moves. We haven't looked at the tapes in 20 years; I assembled a few minutes of material for Barb's thesis show, as a humorous cold walk-in; and the learned toads evaluating said show were pretty darn aghast at the temerity of it all, probly woulda yanked that degree right outta her hands if it didn't make for bad form in academe. From a performance standpoint, I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the thing holds up (at least given the internal terms of the show itself): no air, pacing is good (well, not mine), all the pieces mix together, lighting stunk but we never changed the basic rig and some of the things we tried worked OK given they never tried this stuff before ... plus, it's entertaining and funny. That's the mark we were trying to hit -- be entertaining and funny, be worth staying up until 3AM Sunday morning.

I also can see now, which I couldn't see then, the huge influence of the Rabb on the show. The only time that Keith the Director and I had a serious Artistic Difference was when he accused me of writing a radio show and not a television show, to which I replied "You're the director, making it a television show is your job." Sure enough, the next week it started becoming more of a television show, and the more confident he got about videography stuff the more opportunities I wrote in. But peace and blessings be upon Al Gore for inventing the Internet, I found some air checks of the true Johnny Rabbitt, to whom I and many another Midwest teen wasted the hours of 7PM to 10PM every night between '64 and '68; and be damned if I can't see the Rabb in the show.

That's the real point for this meminiscence: Rabb n Bruno took the kids seriously, entertained on his terms and assumed we'd keep up with him, worked hard for the money and did Good Work. That got imprinted in whatever part of my brain drives the work; and every piece of art and work that I've made since then has got a piece of the Rabb in it. Unconsciously, that's all through those Millie clips: we had a lot of fun doing those shows, and even though we chose to make it look cheesy, we put a lot of work into the limited time and resources that we had available to us. And as a result, at least one teen in midKentucky held onto his tapes, because he got the message -- work hard, be smart, have fun. I am just floored and humbled by that thought, and will never again wonder if it's worth it.

I shall write our fan, and tell him the truth: we surely read his letter, and I hope we read it on the air -- usually the few we didn't read, we showed so that they could see that we got 'em. We taped every letter to the set, so that we'd see them every week. And I shall thank him, from the bottom of both of our hearts, for remembering and reminding.

Nom nom nom

Not only did I do a less-than-stellar job of Giving Up Something For Lent, I seem to be doing an excellent job of binging on the always available sugar products carefully placed in my path thereafter. Eat, eat, manga manga the devils urge as I stride forth purposefully from my secure hundredsquarefeet to the water cooler or, saints preserve cosset protect and defend me, the coffee pot. Looky looky Girl Scout Cookies the devils rejoice as I dump my tasty n scientific lunch all over my tastefully dented desk, has it been five years since we took them out the boxes (oh yes it has). Daddy I has made dessert Nan pronounces as I enter Chez Nous, fagged out from another day in the data mines searching for low-hanging bacon to bring home. Ach du lieber, mein head she's a buzzin from the sugar rush; while I go under the digital hood to stare balefully at the nonfunctioning modem stack and perfunctorily poke at it with a cyberstick to try to urge it, me and us back on line. So that I can do my taxes. Nom nom nom indeed, chortles Leviathan; I'm getting rolled in sugar for something, or else I'm getting rolled, and no sir, I don't like it.

Are we having fun yet?

Traveling to Las Vegas last week-plus, clearly located in the sub-basement of hell as evidenced by being in a valley below the desert floor, the young wahinis in the back of the plane began woo-hooing for the benefit of the rest of us stuck in the airborne tube. This followed by cha-chaing up and down the aisle, hooting "Viva Las Vegas", shimmying somewhat like someone's sister Kate, and generally confirming that some people do in fact have no shame. Can't say for the rest of my fellow Americans, a good number of which were not my fellow Americans but Germans in plastic cowboy hats traveling for a Swinging Bachelor Party with pockets full of euros and a banjo on their knees. I'm having enough trouble with the five hours from Dulles; seems to me that spending the better part of a day leapfrogging from world airport to world airport to get to Las Vegas is ... well, I hear Paul Scofield in my head chastising his on-screen son-in-law, "It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?" I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the plane making that connection; the Deutschers are yammering a mile a minute in Deutsch, the Young Wahinis would surely be classified a near occasion of sin were it not for the collective several hundred extra pounds unevenly distributed among the lot of them, the plane is yes orbiting, not descending -- that or the Luxor has been put on wheels sometime in the last couple of years and is being towed around the valley, and the pilot feels constrained to repeatedly crack wise about, wait for it, Lost Wages, nyuck nyuck nyuck ... if you just let me please get off this plane and go about my business I promise I'll wander the city in sackcloth n ashes buttonholing lawyers and advising repentance, or perhaps prance about flicking my tail and demanding that way be made for my master, the Marquis of Calabash, one ... Fortunately my reverie into 50s Let's Make a Deal Catholicism is interrupted by the plane finally landing, the cabin door popping open, and the promise of stepping into the perpetual cloud of nicotene glory that shrouds The Garden. Fi-na-ly.

Hello, what's this? We are not greeted by the perpetual cloud of nicotene glory and the asynchronous gonging of the airport slots that hold down the center of the D concourse. That's because no one's dispiritedly dropping quarter after quarter into the airport slots that hold down the center of the D concourse; and if no one's there to drop quarters then no one's there to fog up the biosphere with burning pipeweed either. In fact, the airport sounds remarkably like ... the Charlotte airport at eleven PM on a Thursday night. Except this is The Garden's airport, and it's seven PM on a Thursday night, and quite frankly downtown DC was a lot livelier. Something seems to be amiss here.

Continuing to my next milemarker on La Tour D'Enfer, I hike to the baggage carousel (I figure that if the only thing my airfare buys anymore is luggage check, we're going for it; besides, there's no room in the overhead bins as they seem to be full of, um, luggage and as I'm not a big fan of being klunked in the chin with steamer trunks swung out of the overhead bins I figure that the person behind me will appreciate me all the more for not klunking him or her in the chin with my steamer trunk), which me trusty pedometer tells me is a couple of miles from the jetway, and the cab stand snake line another half-mile or so beyond that. The snake line is about three hundred feet long and snakes back and forth on itself five times ... and there's no one in it. The line is still set up, I guess on the off-chance that a few thousand people might suddenly deplane, embaggage, and crave immediate transport to The Strip or adjacency. The Garden is the epicenter of wishful thinking. The Deutschers and I serpentine back and forth with teutonic determinism, the Deutschers because they cannot but follow the rules and me because I'm now hearing Peter Falk in my head urging me to "serpentine, Shelly, serpentine." Fortunately I have a driver who doesn't speak English, doesn't know where I'm going, doesn't have a map, doesn't have a GPS, insists on confusing "Carpenter's Training Center" for "Corporate Center", but does have a friend with a computer who can get on Mapquest and give him directions in any of several polyglot Arabic languages. All I know is we seem to be going back and forth a lot on the same nondescript industrial access road, the meter seems to be spinning like I'm buying gas (which come to think of it I am), and frankly none of us are getting any younger or prettier. I'm seriously considering breaking out into "Viva Las Vegas" my own damn self, but the irony is about as appealing as the gelatinous glop that's likely to be what remains for dinner tonight. Finally and quite by we stumble across my lodgings, right about the time the hack is berating me (this time in English) for not staying on the Strip in some whitened sepulchre he's familiar with.

This is going to be one productive week, ho ho. Can't hardly wait to get to work and hobnob with my brother wizards n such.

Now, one of these things is not like the other.
This
is not much like this
although both probly represent about the same investment of human and financial capital, adjusted for the time. Perhaps one day I shall do the math and confirm this, for no reason other than sheer cussedness. But one is nobler -- visibly so. Besides the WPA deco touchs (I particularly like the clocks on the intake stations, that tell me that it's Nevada Time on the left and Arizona Time on the right), I was touched by the dedication inscription: an Exact Representation of the stars in the night sky the evening of the dedication. This done in the certainty that someday Mankind would Journey to the Stars, exploring Strange New Worlds and New Civilizations, and generally Boldly Go Where No One has Gone Before; and when they did, and brought back snapshots, Learned Scientists would compare those pictures with the Night Sky Plaque and learn Something New. I'm OK with that.

I'm just having a hard time getting all deconstructivist with Phake Noo Yawk; I can barely work up enthusiam to get all deconstructivist with Real Noo Yawk.

Google me, I'm Irish

Things I do not like include the increasing certainty that I am not merely not on the leading edge of The Curve, not merely behind The Curve, but rapidly falling far enough back in the pack to not even know that there's an Ahead with a Curve somewhere in it. Apparently it's a wiki world, and me not even a wikiterial , sakes. I thin I'm somewhere still in the gawrsh it sure is cool not being dependent on The Man's mainframe, hyuk hyuk. Maybe it's because I dare to write on a Dell machine, which as Our Andrew never fails to point out is hardly the textbook def of y. Our Andrew is not a Mac bigot; he's been agitating for Alienware ever since the fabled Tector was a fabled pup, and we do take the opportunity to point out that Alienware has been oh how should we put it assimilated by Dell. But I think it's because I have resisted being assimilated entirely into the Googleplex.

I dunno: I like Word. I'm kinda fond of Excel. I like my files where I can find them. I'm not convinced of the wisdom of hanging my so-called intellectual property (which it's the equivalent of a Balmer rowhouse) out in a server farm in Oregon and trusting Larry Page and Sergey Brin to remain warm n fuzzy n Wozlike, and not morph overnight into dare I say it Bill Gates (insert scary Elmer Bernstein music here). Other than it seeming kinda incomprehensible that given power corrupts and absolute power corrupting absolutely how is it different that Gates' inherent evility stems from selling out to The Man with MS-DOS whereas Page n Blin are magically incorrupt even after The Biggest IPO Ever (insert Those Were The Days cue here, o so long ago in the fabled days of yore when disposable incomes strewed daffodils across the land and mortgage companies showered us with monopoly registered trademark money), I should very much like to know? Ah well, mebbe I should just retire to my detached garage and push globs of Turtle Wax into my T while I'm at it, or fahgeddabout this furshlugginger keyboard and just scribble all over the screen with my vaguely sharp crow quill and let the ink kinda ooze into the Aether.

Say, what is that giant rock heading our way out of the sky? Not to worry, it's just a commercial airliner. Although I'll grant that when TSA gains access control over everything, which will likely be in about a week or ten days given today's news, there might be advantages to having all of one's work stored in a server farm in Oregon, since the only place we'll be able to go in and out of without a biochip ID will be our living rooms. Well, I've always wanted to be a sim.

Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncey ...

It's hard to be a pedestrian in the city. But how else would I get to see the Wonder of the Age, the solar-powered trashcan.

You laugh. Behold the Big Belly, the pride of Seahorse Industries and the new secret weapon of Our Nation's Cities in the war against ism or litter, one:

This was even better than the forlorn Hillary supporters vainly trying to elicit any signifier of interest from commuters escaping from the subway tonight. Poor fools! Don't you know better than to get in the way of Very Important Suburbanites heading for their townhouses, so as to fire up their computers immediately upon entering and check their feeds for any updates more recent than when they left downtown an hour earlier?

See, you throw your trash into the belly of the beast; and then the solar-powered compactor solarly compacts your trash, carbonless footie-prints and all! Scoff scoff, I scoff at the PJM grid! By tossing my trash into this technological triumph, I strike a blow against the empire woo hoo!

Only thing is, it doesn't seem to work worth a patoot after dark. Maybe if I stood over it with a lit candle ...

Back to the future

Trying fecklessly to keep to a schedule with 2/3 of the boys down with the ague, laboring under the foolish assumption that a Nice Night of Family Television would be just the ticket, what should we discover but a TCM offering of 2001, uncut and remastered just like it was on the premiere roadshow engagement of spring 1968? Well, here's a teaching moment to show at least budding cineaste Andrew th' source of more movie cliches in the last forty years than I don't know what. We decided to play the "They ripped that off from (insert more contemporary pop reference here)", although I'm not entirely sure that the notion of backwards-compatible ery was chronologically sound ("I think the point is to establish that the earlier image shows who came first." "I saw my image first, so it came first." "No, it came second." "I'm not talking about who came second." "Who came first." "I dunno." "He came third, we're not talking about him.")

On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.

On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."

Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.

Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.

Kahn! K-A-A-A-A-A-HN!

Professionally, I get to spend some time thinking about the Unthinkable. The problem is you can't really think about the Unthinkable, because it's well unthinkable. This is not a Cheap Laff; we forget how to think about the Unthinkable as we learn self-preservation as a useful life skill. So we content ourselves with thinking about the probably not-able, and pretend that's an acceptable substitute for the Unthinkable.

A few years ago I got to manage company preparations for Y2K. Who remembers Y2K, the most expensive Unthinkable non-event in human history? For those of us who can't remember such pretend-disasters, Y2K was supposed to potentially be the end of civilization as we knew it because unprescient early computer programmers economizing on coding, on account of a criminal lack of memory available in prehistoric steam-driven computing machines, left off the "19" in writing date/time codes. The programmers assumed that somebody would come around and patch the code long before the turn of the century. If it wasn't fixed, then at 00:00:00 on 1/1/2000, the computing machine would think that it was 00:00:00 on 1/1/1900 and be unable to access any date-certain file until 85 to 95 years later, which would be inconvenient when applied to things like power transmission systems, or the world's monetary system, or setting your VCR to record Walker, Texas Ranger. Problem was, that hadn't been done with bet-your-life certainty by 1998; and thanks to the well unthinkable explosion of computing machines integrated into many if not most electromechanical conveniences of modern society, no one could say with any degree of certainty that every single device that could be affected by the rollover had been identified and properly patched. And it became sadly apparent that because there was potentially a computing machine in every single electromechanical device, in order to be fully prepared one had to audit every single electromechanical device in a business/personal inventory and verify that it was patched. In this regard, IT departments busily checked the obvious computers that were part of the business' normal IT inventory; but their scope, interest, professional concern stopped at the limits of their inventories. All those other devices were Somebody Else's Problem. For most American businesses, the Somebody Else was the facilities department; and the luck of the ticketpunch put me in that particular hot seat in 1999.

So we had to check and test everything that was digitally controlled in any way. Now if the computing machine head end was fairly obvious, like say an HVAC or building system controller, you could check with the vendor for a patch, which was usually available for a hefty fee since it was not considered to be a routine upgrade. But if the computing machine head end was not obvious, like say the timer in a coffeemaker or the thermostat in a refrigerator, that was a little trickier to verify. It meant conducting a pre-forensic audit of every mechanical thing that you owned; and the audit not only had to account for the presence of the thing, it had to account for a field test that verified either that the device was unaffected and would function properly, or was affected and patched, or was affected and unpatched but a patch had been identified and was on order and would be installed well before The Day, or was affected and unpatched and no patch was available so the device had to be taken offline and either replaced or junked with a patched device. This was an incredibly tedious, time-consuming and expensive process.

At one point we were checking emergency building systems; and because the Worst Case Scenario was that Y2K would shut down the PJM Interconnection, which is the entire east coast power transmission network, we needed to verify that the emergency generator would in fact function properly in case of a full power grid failure. Once I actually spoke these words I experienced the full pushback of the entire maintenance operation, because a full grid failure was, well, Unthinkable. Had never happened in Our Nation's Capital, not since the grid was turned on back in ought-whenever. The closest thing anybody could think of was the occasional power failure caused by summer storms, which never lasted more than a day. Or a week. And happened every summer. But had never happened downtown, we being on the same grid as the White House dontcha know and the White House will never be affected by the same reality that affects you and me and Bobby McGee. It seemed to me that that being the case, it was likely that the emergency systems had never been tested since they were commissioned, which was almost twenty years previously: there were certainly no records of testing, not even of turning the generator over to make sure that it still kicked on. In which case it seemed unwise to test the generator involuntarily at 00:00:00 on 01/01/00; we probably wouldn't be able to get a repair guy in until well after the Apocalypse. So I proposed that we simulate a total grid failure, take the entire building completely off line just to see what happened. This provoked Son of Pushback; as I recall, it took the better part of two weeks and the expenditure of every erg of clout and the call-in of every chit I had out there, plus a couple of well-placed threats of termination for insubordination and the payout of a bunch of overtime, to put a fake blackout in play. Because such a thing had never happened, could never happen, and preparing for it was the dumbest thing said by a white boy since the Greaseman ran his mouth on the air. Just, well, Unthinkable.

So we pulled the plug on a mid-week night in early August. Nights in August in Our Nation's Capital are hazy, humid, hot and horrible. Pulling the plug showed us two things: the 800,000 square foot building did not hold temperature worth a poop as it quickly equalized to outside temperature in about 15 minutes; and the emergency generator spun up as soon as the last power leg was taken off line, and just as quickly shut itself off and took all the life safety equipment down with it. Huh. Unthinkable. And great was the embarassment across the land. Turns out that the generator's power sensors had been miswired from the get-go; and instead of monitoring the normal building power feeds for proper power flow, it monitored its own output. So as soon as the generator kicked on, it measured power flowing (well yeah, that's what a generator does -- it generates power, dontcha see) and it shut itself down again. Which it would have done every time it was turned on and tested. Which meant that it had never been tested or exercised since commissioning; and that it had been commissioned without testing. Which was extremely embarassing to the maintenance department, many members of which had been around since the system was commissioned.

Me, I thought it was a great test because everything failed miserably. That meant we didn't have to assume anything worked, so we might as well fix the whole thing. It also occurred to me that there was a pretty good chance that somebody knew that everything would fail miserably, hence the pushback; but I couldn't prove it, so that battle would have to be fought another day.

But what does this have to do with thinking about the Unthinkable? Even I wasn't prepared to think this one all the way to its logical conclusion, which would have been to arrange for backups and transfer systems sufficient to provide 11.7 kilovolts continuous service for up to four weeks. Basically, this would be generators the size of locomotives, transfer switches the size of bedrooms, and a supertanker full of diesel. Would have been kind of a tough sell to the Board of Directors, would probably have required the entire organization budget for the year, and would probably not have been available as a minority set-aside government procurement -- and all for a "just in case the world ends we can maintain normal business operations for a month" scenario. Because that's Unthinkable.

We had a few more adventures like this, and at 11:55:00 on 12/31/99 four of us hanging around at work with nothing better to do at the turn of the century decided that we might as well mosey on up to the security command center and peep over the operators' shoulders as the computer terminals rolled over from 11:59:59 12/31/99 to 00:00:01 01/01/00, just in case. Which they did. Kept right on going, too, Lights didn't go out or nothing. All that plywood we bought to board up the windows in case Our Nation's Capital went blip and concerned citizens decided to throw a few celebratory trashcans through said windows, for naught. Sighs of relief and toasts of Diet Coke all around (we were on duty and on the public's dime, you know) and home we went, accompanied by the happily tipsy revelers in their dumb paper party hats and horns tooting the Millenium and their fabulous lives.

1.75 years later some guys flew some planes into some buildings. Didn't see that one coming, either. Unthinkable.

Tomorrow I am going in for crowd control duty. For seven hours I will do my best to direct 30,000 people one at a time to two ticket will call windows or two credit card terminals. I don't want to think about what would happen if we had to get all those people out of the building because a fire alarm goes off, or some young person thinks another young person looked at him/her in a less than wholly respectful way and decides that a few disciplinary rounds from their personal peacemaker, or a scientifically applied whack from their personal machete, is in order; or a student of a variant sect decides that another wakeup call for the Great Satan is in order and detonates himself in a field vest filled with C-4 and nails. Because that stuff is, well, Unthinkable.

It's okay, I'm with the bandwidth

In this Homely House we have one desktop, one laptop, one XBox in the shop, one VOIP phone modem, two Nintendo DSes and one PSP all simultaneously sucking bandwith through a Linksys router. I'm thinking that perhaps we might have some bandwidth issues, especially as it's supercritical to the guyses that they must connect their handheld goodies to the wery World Wide Web its own bad self. That Al Gore invented the internet just so's Little Michael can play Super Mario Pinheads in real time with some wowser in Upper Canuckistan, for which we are all eternally grateful I'm sure. However, in order for Little Michael to play Super Mario Pinheads in real time with some wowser in Upper Canuckistan, I shall have to Flash the Firmware. I'm attempting to do so while one of Our Andrew's heathen friends keeps popping up on screen, intent on IMing Our Andrew with his vulgar assessment of the rigors of the upcoming weekend Scout Campout. I have resisted replying to his IMing, since my instincts are to reply "This is Andrew's Dad. Do you want me to get him?" and hope that the IM screen just sort of puckers into oblivion while making a cartoon noise like the air being squeakily let out of a balloon, but that would be too much to hope for.

I think I would really rather turn this project over to a professional, like 9-year old Little Michael; somehow Flashing the Firmware-type operations usually result in the software equivalent of a sodden mess, followed by wiping the hard drive and starting over. So perhaps we would be better to attempt this foolishness in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, I think I will ask the IT wizards tomorrow if one desktop, one laptop, one XBox in the shop, one VOIP modem, two Nintendo DSes and one PSP all simultaneously sucking bandwidth through a Linksys router might create bandwidth issues. Ya think?

Adlai Stevenson at the Pinewood Derby

Oh how we all worked and engineered away on Mikey's Pinewood Derby car! First the internet search, for the Secrets of Pinewood Derby Life n Such. This involved a necessary download of the Car Guys proffering their theories about the Pinewood Derby (they're either in favor of it or in favor of laughing at it, one). Then Dad whacked away at the regulation block o pine with the Skilsaw to establish the basic profile of the vehicle; Mikey paging through hundreds of Batmobile designs, picking out the parts he liked (and doing a pretty good job of combining them into one integrated vehicle), and dragooned Our Andrew into assisting in the sanding, weighting and painting consultation. The Mama and The Dad machined the regulation nails and wheels into the preferred mirrorlike finish; we ignored the Internet recommendations for calipering the diameter to insure perfection, perhaps this was our downfall. The Pinewood dry run actually got Mikey's hopes up; the consensus of his brother Scouts seems to have been "You've got a fast car there, dude."

Mikey is the most competitive of the guyses. He s losing. He despises losing. He abominates losing. He's not happy losing. Problem is, every year he loses. That happens when one is competing one's Pinewood Derby car against, well, real rocket scientists. But this year, it looked like Mikey might just have a shot at a Fabulous Prize.

We did a bunch of managing expectations. We had many family conferences with Mikey, reminding him that it isn't if you Win or Lose, the Cub Scout Motto is "Do Your Best" and not "Winning is the Only Thing", that it's an exercise in Grace Under Pressure, all that kinda motivational stuff; and on the way to the track, Mikey allowed that he was satisfied with his work, as he should have been. A couple of tweaks at the Official Weigh-In, and we were ready for racing.

Six heats for each car. Mikey won five out of his six, as well as a run-off. Not good enough for a Fabulous Prize. Sigh.

It's hard for a competitive little guy to accept that sometimes one's best isn't as good as someone else's best; and that just missing is, in technical racing terms, well not to put too fine a point on it, losing. He's taken it harder, but still ... he took it hard.

It amazes me how much we need the validation of a Fabulous Prize to reaffirm our basic worthiness. Another manifestation of our fallen nature, I reckon. Still: it hurts to see a little guyse hurting so; and even though he managed better than he ever has, it hurt too much to laugh, and he was almost too big to cry, coming so close and missing by so little.

It's the end of the world, and I feel fine

Shortly after moving here I remember watching a Major Teevee Movie Event called Amerika, about the Soviet occupation of the former America following some offcamera significant event or other. The Newspaper o Record made sure all us mouthbreathing lipmoving readers knew which night the all-over ruined architecture of Our Former Nation's Former Capital, and by extension our own former miserable yet curiously unimportant lives n livelihoods, would be showcased; as I recall it was showcased through the windshield of a pretend Soviet helicopter orbiting the Capitol dome, or matte painting or miniature or whatnot, which had a handsomely art-directed hole allegedly blown out by a bazooka-totin' partisanist something or other. Somewhat later I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a picture of an exploding White House on the cover. The headline was "Boom!"; one wonders how many and how long the grownups met in their editorial cabal to settle on that one. The article was a feature on a Major Malloplex Movie Event called Independence Day which also featured exploding Empire State and Capitol Records Building miniatures rendered lovingly in equal opportunity miniature and matte destruction, albeit neither the beauty cover shot for Newsweek nor lovingly recreated in IMAX for, um, the Smithsonian. Not that long ago Our Nation's Malloplexes featured global warming glaciers appearing out of story nowhere to engulf New York New York, the town so nice they named it twice --and, given prevailing weather patterns presumably my home, place of employment and person were both securely at the bottom of said glacier. In the last month we 've had a digitally kudzufied Brooklyn Bridge and a digital flying Statue of Liberty head digitally degraded to look all YouTubian n such, this last coupled with the trailer for Star Trek XI which is promising to return to the utopian Roddenberry future imagined in The Original Series -- one can clearly hear John F. Kennedy urging us on to the moon, Smilin' Al Shepard wishing John Glenn Godspeen, and Neil Armstrong announcing that the Eagle has landed before Leonard Nimoy whispers "Space ... the final frontier" all actorly n such while protoBorg weld up a digital Enterprise not in SpaceDock, cue the rough beast fanboys slouching. Thus setting up a big ol' steaming heaping serving of Consonant Dissonance for those malloplexians who failed to leave their brains in their little pink houses, value added with their admission.

I'm thinking that there's a thesis project for someone willing to play Find the Link among these examples of apocalypse, the ends of terms of certain sitting Presidents, the then-current general condition of the economy, and the agreed-upon accuracy of American popular art's reflection of the Zeitgeist. I'm wondering about this while trying to keep my head down and my powder dry during an increasingly dreary primary season which seems mostly an exercise for Certain People to scold us peons for not hurrying up, getting with the Program, and confirming the Fixes that have been In for the past two years, while assorted groups of taxpayers and voters remember certain remarks consigning their persons to Flyover America and, well payback certainly is a painful rectal itch, ain't it.

Monetarily, times are tough. I'm not liking it. I'm not seeing much to be optimistic about. It feels like 1991 again, kinda, but I don't recall civilization as we know it ending at that time, unless one counts the election results as proof. I'm considering that the American empire probably has come and gone siccing transit on Gloria Mundi her own bad self; the euro isn't all that happy a substitute especially once those Brits, crafty Deutschers and Franish persons decide to hell with this and go back to their own homegrown and much prettier currencies, and that if we were really foresighted parents we'd be making sure the guyses were fluent in Chinese, that is if we were cleverly and subliminally setting them up for worldly success for the rest of their lives. And I'm also considering that some of us are trying to talk the rest of us into a recession, probably as an election strategy. And I am really not liking that, not one little bit.

Now I am not an economist, don't play one on teevee. and am having personally one devil of a time keeping my personal head above the immediate and certainly rough financial waters. And I normally have no truck for conspiracy theories, because conspiracies are work and people don't like to put that much effort into work. But I also know a thing or two about th tools o th authorial trade, and the artful deployment of smoke and mirrors, and I'm hearing way too much hollering and not enough prooftesting comprising the Recessionalypse Now drum solo, which itself is sounding more and more akin to the young lepetomane Buddy Rich demonstrating how to whack a few strategically placed noisemakers louder and faster n any hombre for a hunnert miles around and trying to force us to gape like jeeters at how goshdarn frantic and unknowable it all seems. And I see the nozzle of the smoke machine in the wings and the fingerprints on the mirrors, and I wonder what those jaspers are doing behind that curtain, anyway.

My g-g-g-generation has been merrily demonstrating simultaneous ineptness and shamelessness for way too many decades now, running increasingly on the diminishing returns of what's left of our parents' good will. I begin to understand why the Xers hope we die before they get old. And I suppose the sorry lot o midgets running for Supreme Leader of th Free World, every one of them ready for their closeup, is fully expecting to be digitally enhanced by hired mythmakers (no writers need apply) into something more Presidential in about three weeks or so Eastern Standard Time, at which point the election will be declared over and We the so-called People can return to Flyover America, press our noses against the explosionproof smoked glass dome over the Beltway and let our betters get on with the business of running the country into the ground. I think that's why we get served tasty supersize apocalpyse burgers with a side o recession fries at these turning points. It keeps us from doing something off-script like looking too closely at the Best Candidates the System Can Spit Up, proclaiming them spinach, and finding and electing a real leader

We've been known to confound these wisenheimers before, and I suspect that if we got our hands on primary sources we wouldn't find a lot of newsprint remarking on how Presidential those Lincoln or Rosenfelt fellows seemed. I do recall that we elected more than a couple of Supreme Potentates on the basis of their remarkable resemblance to Roman statuary already enshrined in the Halls o Congress, I'm looking at you, Messrs. Harding and Hoover. That's the problem with being from Missouri: when somebody comes along heralding the imminent arrival of th Four Horsemen of th Apocalypse who are turning the corner and heading down my block, well ... show me.

Smiling Pirates

Three out of four kinder wanted to see The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything today; the fourth, Our Andrew, didn't object in theory but in practice wanted to go gaming at Games Workshop, the place for gamers to go gaming with gamers dontchaknow. Gamers have their own conventions; we don't host them; out of touch with the real world as per usual and no surprise there, I reckon. So we identified a malloplex within a crow's flight of the neighborhood Workshop, which is not in the neighborhood at all but Our Andrew hopes and hopes that the vagaries of the real estate market (too much vacant new storefrontage too empty too long and too close to his Homely Home) will align themselves appropriately and evolve a Games Workshop a mile or so from the Homely Home. This would put it conveniently within biking distance, but biking I fear is for dweebs and Our Andrew is not now nor has he ever been a Dweeb. We are pedalling madly below water to ensure that he will never be a Droog either, but as always we digress.

Well, if one is looking for the latest and greatest advances in CGI, the Veggie Tales franchise has never been the place to look first and still isn't. In our circles the Veggies appear about the same time as Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine videos, but have on the whole better legs. I'm not sure that this is due to the quality of the writing, or the parents' desire to hold onto the children, or even of the hearts of the creative types and the created's recipients. In fact, the corporate history is all too familiar and sad: head honcho grows bidniss too big too fast, signs One Dumb Contract, it all collapses in a heap of lawsuits and bitterness, franchise gets ed up at firesale prices by disinterested acquisitor, head honcho ends days sadder but wiser.

But.

This being America, there are second acts. And while I was om-ing through the movie, doing my best not to worry about my own problems (mostly having to do with solving the delta between net pay and current bills), it occurred to me that the saga of Phil Vischer, the aforementioned Head Veggie, is not dissimilar to the sage of Brian Wilson, the sounder of our own innocence.

If I'm recalling aright, Phil Vischer had the thought of "Saturday morning cartoons with Sunday morning values", and having the talent around him to craft moral tales with Warner Bros. 'tude, using off-the-shelf video graphics software and a distribution network that put the things in our faces through endcap displays in Our Nation's (Capital's) supermarkets and emporia, the franchise was pretty ubitquitous through the mid-90s. Seems to me the Warner Bros. 'tude was a key part of the package: there's a certain snarkiness in the omniscient tone that is consistent throughout most of the individual pieces of the package (staging, graphics, music, words) -- but not the voices. As far as I know, none of the voice actors were or are trained actors, and so I think there's more of the performers' personas in their roles than there are in, oh say Spongebob (the closest video equivalent I can think of). It was Mr. Vischer and his friends voicing; they performed but did not act, and so they did not or could not really professionally dissociate their selves from their characters. My opinion and $1.75 is that this is what kids responded to; I base this on close observation of my own kids, including Our Andrew the Anti-Dweeb, as well as on observations of 10,000 kids watching the Veggies as warm-up videos before the quadriennal evangelical Christian kid missions to the streets of Our Aforementioned Nation's Capital (the biggest response to all of the warm-ups is to the Veggies) as well as the presence of Veggie tapes in the video libraries of all of the churches we pass through. Mr. Vischer became convinced that he needed to be the Christian Disney, and pushed his company into deals much like the Disney Disney pushed his company into deals sixty or seventy years previously; the difference being that perhaps Disney Disney's backers and bankers were products of their times (growing up in pre-World War I smalltown America) and Mr. Vischer's backers and bankers were products of their times (growing up in 60s and 70s America). And where both Disney Disney and Mr. Vischer trapped themselves into a cycle of borrowing money to float the business so that they could develop product to pay the last round of loans, falling into cycles of diminishing returns and exponentially increasing loans, Disney Disney gambled and won big with Snow White and Mr. Vischer gambled and lost the farm with Jonah, the first Veggie Tales movie. Of course, in the late '30s Our Nation didn't have the weekend box office grosses at our fingertips Sunday evening, and our popular art was not generally evaluated based on the opening weekend's box office. So the Disney company survived with its One Big Hit, morphing into ... well, a company that continues to look fearfully for Disney Reincarnate every ten years or so, now having declared that lo John Lasseter is He for the nonce; and the Vischer company didn't, got bought and bought and bought again, with Mr. Vischer left behinder and behinder, as it was he who was the Boss who, well, ran the company into the ground so to speak.

Which doesn't on the surface of it seem to have anything to do with Brian Wilson, who by his own admission frittered his music and his life away for 20 years or more in a kind of passive agressive hoovering of everything that wasn't illegal, immoral, fattening or nailed down on the Left Coast. I'm guessing that there were far more people around Mr. Wilson enabling his bad behavior than there were around Mr. Vischer; and as far as personal toxicity goes, I'm guessing that Mr. Wilson's toxic behavior was far more destructive to his personal self and immediate family -- hard really to see any toxicity other than well-intentioned hubris at work in Vischer, although I suspect that when Vischer's company collapsed far more people lost their jobs than when Mr. Wilson slid into his personal oblivion. Mr. Wilson's self-destruction is part of My Foolish Generation's legend, and is I think known well enough to not be improved by my retelling. What is so wonderfully surprising was his willingness to finally get off his butt and own the art again.

I have a couple of posts boiling up inside of me about Good Work and Just Doing the Damn Good Work. They're not ready yet. Mr. Wilson let go of his hubris and finished Smile; Mr. Vischer let go of his hubris and finished Pirates. Both works are naive; that's OK. Both works are from the creators' hearts; that's OK. Both works are major works from people who are supposed to have been Written Off. My mind wishes for more meat on the bones of these works; my heart's OK with them. The Little Boys are quite happy with the latter, and aren't ready for the former; the Little Boys are still hopping around the living room reworking scenes from the movie and incorporating themselves into the scenes. That's successful work.

I'm glad to live in a time and a place where Phil Vischer and Brian Wilson can rise and fall and rise aright again.

Neither Eminence Nor Eminem, Definitely Griese

The reason for advancing to the Western Front was a wangled invitation to the 20th anniversary of a professional organization that I joined oh 20 years ago or so it would seem. Among the pitifully few real envelopes that crossed my desk one day, thankfully falling out of the catalogs advertising goods and services that I stopped buying three or four years ago, there came this invitation to the Swank Anniversary Gala Party. It not seeming to me to be wisdom incarnate to propose spending public dollars to attend a Swank Anniversary Gala Party, much less spending public dollars to travel 3000 miles to the Western Front to attend a Swank Anniversary Gala Party, much less spending public dollars to do anything when the very Office of Tax Collection Its Own Bad Self seems to have enjoyed an ongoing looting of some 31 millions of the public dollars so that the perps could attend Swank Atlantic City Casinos (an oxymoron methinks). And then another group I have the honor of associating with, when I'm not considering Groucho Marx's axiom concerning groups who would hang with the likes of me, desired that a big-deal initiative of theirs get in front of as many groups as possible as fast as possible, including -- the wery group that desired me to travel 3000 miles to the Western Front to attend their Swank Anniversary Gala Party. Synergy, sez I. Suggestions were posited, e-mails exchanges, approvals in triplicate secured, shoes were doffed, planes were boarded and deboarded in Seattle, City of Light (Not).

On the Left Coast Hand, it was wonderful and the very blessing of the world to visit with friends from Back in the Day, when the organization was just starting up and we made things up as we went along. On the Right Coast Hand, um ... where did all these young persons come from? Must have been not paying attention, imagine that. And let's not strike out into any territory that might putatively be defined as Eagerly Awaiting Poils of Wisdom; cross that out and make it Here Be Monsters instead. Truth to tell, given the notion that half of all Received Wisdom is obsolete within five years, I'm long overdue to be hung up in the antechambers, arms and legs akimbo, muttering disconsolately about the Old Days ("Pleasing an Impossible Customer? Hah! Let's talk about Reagan's Second Inaugural!" "Um ... wasn't he, like, ?" "Well, that didn't come until later.")

Still, most all of our great and good friends from those Particular Days were there, and they emitted appropriate fabulosity, generally more so that my particular self. I will admit to sporting a strategic pair of red Chucks. You would think these things would be growing off trees in Seattle, but no ... It occurred to me that during my August Presidency, this organization began at its gathering of clans to dance; now it would seem that the dancing never stops. Master Po advises me that this is neither good nor bad, it just Is. Parm me for a sec while I recommend Master Po to Bite Me. As the whippersnappers of the last century did say.

Andrew still calls me Daddy

Back home from traveling, westward ha for this trip (kinda hard not to travel west, especially if one's flying outta Dulles, peace and blessings be upon TSA the creatures). Besides the indignities heaped upon us the non-business class non-first-class traveling public by the airport architects, airport authorities, airport securitymongers, airport airlines and airport obellos for all I care, the time differential between the Left and Right Coasts ensures that should the traveling parent wish to call home to check in or otherwise let all know that all's well the traveling parent mought as well dial directly into voicemail. Pfui to all that; traveling is becoming fairly pointless as we strive to upgrade our urban environments to ensure that at ground level there ain't a euro's bit of difference between Seattle and Baltimore. The Armchair Traveler has coopted urban design; hence I travel 3000 nautical miles westward ha, first thing I do is scope out the Starbucks.

Playing bedtime roulette one night, madcap that I am I gambled on actually reaching an awake guyses, and won -- Andrew picked up. No one else was home; The Mama and the other guyses were out gallivanting about, dilspatching sleeper agent J to ize the very librarians of the world. I could see them in my mind's eye, J dashing through the library, The Flash albeit with arms akimbo, books tumbling off the shelf in his supersonic wake, kinda like Slimer but cuter. Pleasantries exchanged, no seriousity no depth, the point of the exercise really is just to keep reaching out to each other, it's so easy to get out of practice in reaching out, the step before losing one's way, never to recover unless we wake up on the train and find ourselves pulling into Willoughby. So after comparing the mutual weathers (similar), outfitting of the speaking rooms (dissimilar), current times of day (ditto), and the highlights of our fascinating days (ate, stared out a window, watched TV, ate -- in other words, similar), we concluded that we had just about exhausted conversation for now -- brains were not engaging, 'sallright it happens. So we bade each other goodnight, and Andrew said "Goodnight, Daddy."

My fifteen year old son, beginning to tower over me his body stretching out now like Mr. Fantastic, working on his Eagle Scoutship, phone voice deeper than mine, experimenting with loud electric guitars and long distance puppy love friends, movie nights out with his friends (obligatory pizza afterwards of course), careful in public to be seen as Tres Cool, testing the parental leash ever so tentatively but testing it indeed, my beloved young man in the quiet of our solo nights, still calls me Daddy.

In that moment and in his backyard I am richer than Bill Gates. I am still Daddy to my Buddy, and I now know I always will be. God is good.

Cold comfort

The Mid-West is cold. The Mid-Atlantic is not necessarily cold. It will get cold soon enough. Sometimes during the winter it gets cold, a no-matter-where-you're-from-we-agree-it's-cold; once in a while it gets Cold. Mostly, in the City, it gets let's-stipulate-it's-cold. I believe this is due to the abnormal concatenation of lawyers. I believe that we get all spun up about potential weather on account of the abnormal concatenation of lawyers. If I had a nerf cannon, and I shot it off in my little corner of Cubeland, I could hit four lawyers easily and I don't work in Legal anymore. And every one of them was cold today. But it wasn't as cold as it was in the Mid-West.

Actually, I'm glad. I don't miss frozen feet, or frozen noses, or frozen ears, or frozen teeth. I don't miss deep cold in my bones, that doesn't thaw until May. I don't miss a sullen snow on the ground from November until April. I don't miss fingers that can't grip a pencil. I don't miss dry skin so itchy it seems I'm showering in starch daily. Nope, nope, no sir -- I don't miss it.

If we must live through the grey days, at least our grey days are pretty much limited to February, a thoroughly useless month anyway. It's only there to round out the calendar. February is for starting plants and tax returns.

The Mama has from time to time threatened great bodily harm to my person when broaching the subject of pursuing work in Chicago/Minneapolis/Milwaukee/any place with latitude much further north than say the front yard. No lake effect for her. Can't say that I blame her.

Bring on da hats. Bring on da gloves. Bring on da mufflers. Bring on da wool. Counselor, you may stipulate it's cold all you want. I choose otherwise.

Auld acquaintance? Fahgeddaboudit!

We were holed up the past fortnight or so, emerging only for the necessities (that is to say food, church, and gazing at other people's light displays) and didn't get back Into the World until yesterday afternoon and return-to-work Wednesday. Yesterday was clear and cool, with the chilliness clearly visible in the western sky headin' our way -- but not yet arrived for our holiday walk. Ve vere planning to volksmarch, until we found out that the volksmarchers were a couple of hundred miles south of us -- seemed a silly idea to jump in the car, drive for three hours so that we could walk for an hour, then drive back. Counterproductive, counterintuitive, yet insufficiently countercultural. So instead to the woods went we, Mama and Nannie and Dogberry made three. Not including J and The Michael. And yr. correspondent. So that's six, and the memory Comedy Routine-o-Matic spins up Bob McKenzie asking how much six would be in metric <>.

Homes should abut woods. Ours doesn't, but there's a woods about four blocks away, so that's close enough for my particular butt. Dogberry's first woods trek; we made a good fifteen feet in fifteen minutes, what with all the plants that needed to be sniffed and cataloged in the Doggiewiki. There was like a whole forest of flora. And it was full of other woodswalkers, which never happens. My theory is that these were people for whom the prospect of endless college bowl games was about as appealing as <>, anything would be better -- even dare we say it communing with nature.

It seemed to me at the time that it being January 1 and all, the appropriate greeting for meeting other humans upon the trail would be "Happy new year!" I seem to remember that at one time people said that. Must have seen it on teevee as a child. So I greeted all and sundry with about as cheery a "Happy new year!" as I could manage, what with supervising Dogberry's ongoing research and such. You shoulda seen the looks we got. Maybe I should have eschewed the traditional and opted for a heartfelt "Fish slime!" or "Shoes for industry, comrade!" I thought for a second that the Birkenstock Trio would have doused me with thirty gallons of holy water, much like the aforementioned victorious college football teams practicing their jolly sporting ways on their beloved coach, the better to induce my spontaneously combusting given the look of horror evinced; but then again I should think the Birkenstock Trio would themselves have spontaneously combusted if they found themselves within a half-mile of the stuff. They contented themselves with warding off the Evil Eye and studiously studying the trail for possible signs of aliens or predators. Maybe it was the attempted eye contact. Or the presence of children.

Well all righty: aging boomers keep to their own clans, film at eleven. Except that we got the same reaction at BigBoxBooks, picking up a book that The Mama ordered from the endless interchangable supply of scornful Xers that BigBoxBooks keeps dehydrated in the back for just such occasions. "Ugh! Human contact! Must -- resist!" Ditto the various representatives of the various regional public transportation systems this morning, the Teeming Masses silently staring at train tracks hoping to conjure up a bullet train to elsewhere, not to mention my fellow cubedwellers as who likewise returned to the Land o Gainful Employment this morning (as opposed to the sensible ones remaining elsewhere still). The folks who actually responded, in fact beating me to my salutory punch, were my Muslim friends at work.

Hi ho, the paradoxical life suggests that when the countercultural becomes cultural, it stands to reason that culture becomes counterculture. That being the case, perhaps any marginal culture sufficiently organized would logically fill the vacuum vacated by the putative nt culture, which in our slice o geography at least seems to be so busy shirking its responsibilities to, you know, Set an Example and Lead. Maybe Arthur C. Clarke got it right: any sufficiently advanced culture appears as magic to a lesser culture. Wever. Personally, I rejoice to accept and return wishes for a Happy New Year, and if my fellow masters of the universe can't be bothered with such trivial poop the back of my hand to them.

So Happy New Year, I tell you! And may the blessings and peace be upon us yet, the ceiling not fall on us, and our hearts not attack us.