Areas of Unrest

22 June 2001 - Leftovers

QOTD: "The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum." - Havelock Ellis

Reading: Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Listening to: Paris Combo, Living-Room

On Sunday night I had the odd notion that being in town all week would give me a chance to catch up on things, including a few things I wanted to write about in here. Somehow, the week got away from me. The downside of our alternate work schedule, which gave me today off, is that I actually do stay later on the other nine days. Which isn't so much a problem in and of itself, but it seems to catapult me into worse traffic. And I'm just that much more tired when I get home. I think it's worth it to have every other Friday off, but we'll see how it goes in the long run.

Anyway, I have a few leftover odds and ends from last week to mention. For example, I did eat one restaurant meal in Boulder last week that had nothing whatsoever to do with tuna. I finished early enough the last afternoon I was there to have lunch out and drove over to the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse for their Indonesian peanut noodles. My attempts at duplicating this at home have been unsuccessful so far. Not that the results have been awful or inedible - they just aren't the same. The real issue is the sauce, of course. I'm perfectly capable of steaming broccoli and carrots and tofu and cooking noodles. I had high hopes for some Thai peanut sauce I found in the supermarket, but it isn't quite right. I am working my way through various satay recipes.

The "what were they thinking?" department has a few items in the files. The woman sitting across from me on the rental car shuttle should have been taught that you ought to be careful about how you cross your legs when you're wearing a wrap-around skirt. Then there was the local tire shop that advertised a "blow-out" sale on Firestone tires. And, finally, there's the rather peculiar advertising strategy that Microsoft has taken for Office XP. If you go to Clippy's web page, you'll see that their main selling point seems to be that they got rid of a feature in their existing products that everybody found incredibly annoying. I'll note that the quicktime movies on that page are the single Microsloth product I've actually found enjoyable to use. But this being the Evil Empire, the games on the page crashed my browser.

Moving on to this week's news, brings me to the ever popular subject of celebrity deaths. I noticed that Carroll O'Connor got about a page and a half in the L.A. Times, while John Lee Hooker got just over half a page. The person whose death was eclipsed by those was Broadway lyricist, Joe Darion. Darion, who got only about three column inches, was best known for "Man of La Mancha." He also wrote the lyrics for "Shinbone Alley," a truly obscure musical based on the "Archie and Mehitabel" stories by Don Marquis.

Cal Ripken's retirement brings me to the subject of baseball. I like Ripken and I think he's made a good decision. However, I don't for a moment believe that his poor performance this season wasn't a factor. I've been entirely unable to think of any player who left baseball at the top of his form. And why would they? If you're playing well and you're in good health, you might as well earn the big bucks while you can.

In other baseball news, how about them Red Sox? Oh, shut up - I know it's only June and they're just setting up to maximize the agony. But I plan to enjoy it while I can.

The work week included a day out in Azusa for a design review. On the way out there, I had a sudden realization that it was the third Tuesday of the month, so I took advantage of being east of everywhere already to go to San Gabriel Storytellers. I told "Border Crossings" and it wasn't until I was in the car going home that I realized that I'd left out an entire section. Nobody noticed - but, then, of the people there only Leslie had heard it before. I want to have it in good shape to use for one of the swaps at the conference in Providence. I've also decided what to use for the storytell swap - "Sam Short's Story" is under three minutes and will make other people from the list realize just how insane I am. (It's over 400 words long, with every word starting with "s".)

I've also discovered a new correlary of Murphy's Law. Namely, the longer you spend arranging a business trip, the greater the likelihood that the meeting will be cancelled. I'm happy not to have to go Dayton, but it would have been nice had things been cancelled before I spent hours trying to get things sorted out so I could fly from Dayton to San Jose and have an actual hotel room waiting for me in San Jose. The really amazing part is why the meeting was called off. One of the key people from our contractor had forgotten that he was going on vacation. Now, I don't know about you, but that's pretty much on the top of the list of things I'm unlikely to forget. By the way, this doesn't mean that I get to stay home. I still have meetings in Sunnyvale to go to. But that's much more straightforward from the travel standpoint.

So how did I spent my first Friday off? I took advantage of two of the things that the alternate work schedule makes far easier. Namely, I got my car serviced and I went to a bargain movie matinee. The movie I saw was "Himalaya." It was okay, but a bit slow-paced and the real reason to see it is the Nepali scenery, which makes up for a predictable story of the generation gap amongs yak herders. I saw a better movie (at full price, alas) last week. That one was "Songcatcher." It also features spectacular mountain scenery, as it tells the story of a female musicologist in the early 20th century who uncovers the connection between Appalachian songs and British ballads. The music is wonderful, too, as several well-known folk/bluegrass musicians are in it, including Iris Dement and Taj Mahal. The reviews have all commented on Emmy Rossum, whose vocal clarity is, indeed, impressive. And it doesn't hurt that Aidan Quinn is quite attractive as the male lead. The story is fairly predictable and one can argue that the Appalachian poverty comes across as rather too genteel, but it was still worth seeing.