Then there was the time

I love road trips. No, I mean I really love road trips.

Solo ones, ones with friends, spur-of-the-moment or planned out in detail, trips to the coast or just one state line crossed, or multi-day multi-state trips.

Sometimes there are consequences, fairly dire ones. But usually, just good times and amazing memories.

What is it about the lure of the open road? Our world's dependence on cheap gasoline and oil will change, must change, in the future, but I hope future generations can still see past their anger at our indifference to the damage it did and see that long trips in a car through the wide-open countryside were romantic, dammit. Or am I just romanticizing it all?

When I was a kid, growing up, my family would go on road trips. California, to Los Angeles for Disneyland, was the big one, but we'd go to the beach, or to Seattle. But the first road trip I remember taking without my parents, with just me and some friends, was a trip to Kah-Nee-Tah resort in Central Oregon.

It's difficult to pin down the exact date, but it was after I graduated from high school. I was dating Amy, who would be my first long-term relationship and the first girl I had ever slept with. Funny how those two things go together, huh? We would be together for about 3 years total, spanning my senior year in high school until I got and kept a job two years later, and my opportunities for dating exploded. Is that bad to point that out? I basically broke up with Amy because I had built up some confidence and wanted to see other women.

But in the summer of 1983, all of that heartbreak was ahead of me. I'm pretty sure it was a weekend, and Amy's mom was away or at work or something, so I had stayed the night. In the morning we were woken up by a phone call.

It was my friend Terry. He was trying to track me down. He had somehow gotten a friend to loan him a car for the weekend. Terry was always doing things like that; trading favors, making deals, making connections and benefiting from them. He was far more socially adept than I was, or would ever be. It was a skill he had; and one I envy to this day.

The car was a brand-new, black, Pontiac Grand Am. Turbocharged, sleek, T-tops. Terry wanted to put the car to it's paces, and that meant only one thing.

Road trip.

Did we want to join him?

Our answer was not just yes but Hell yes!

An hour or so later, he drove up to pick us up. The car was a black monster, all metal and rubber. I had never seen tires that wide or low before. Terry tried to keep it cool in town, though, and drove it rather sedately. For him. But just sitting behind the wheel of that car put a huge smile on his face. C'mon, we were 18 and had few responsibilities.

Terry picked our destination, a resort out in the Central Oregon desert, on a Native American reservation belonging to the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Since the Fourth of July was coming up, Terry figured we could pick up some illegal fireworks while we were there.

I have to admit today that most of that trip is a blur to me now. I remember the long drive up Mt. Hood and down into Eastern Oregon (anything on the other side of the Cascades is "eastern" to a Portlander). Google Maps tells me it's a 2 hour and 20 minute drive from Sellwood to the resort; somehow, I think we made better time than that.

Driving that car intimidated me, I won't be afraid to say it. I didn't have much experience at the time with driving, and didn't even have a license. But I took a turn behind the wheel all the same. But not for long; it wasn't Terry's car, after all. Mostly I rode in the tiny back seat, and allowed my girlfriend to sit up front. The tape deck, which may have actually been an 8-track, competed and won against the wind noise from the open roof and the growl of the turbo-charged V-8.

In my memories it was a warm, sunny day. We wandered around the resort a bit and swam in the pool. They had a few simple video games, which were brand-new back then: I remember a Pong game and the ultimate (for it's time): Lunar Lander. Trying to get that damn spaceship to land properly with just rotate and thrust was so hard, I burned through many quarters trying. Arcades back then were full of pinball machines and not CRTs and computers; real bells and whistles, not simulated sounds.

We ate dinner there, and as much of a food lover as I am today, I barely remember what I ate. Probably some kind of steak. It was fancy for a trio of teenagers. White cloth napkins and crystal goblets. Terry, who was the only one of us with a job, picked up the check.

And on the drive home, just after sunset, I remember a moment when Terry pulled over to the side of the road, and we all got out and stared up into the brilliant night sky. With the mountains blocking most of the light from distant Portland, out there in the high desert, the stars were brighter than I had ever seen them. I could make out constellations that I had only seen in books; all the stars in Ursa Major, the long dragon tail of Hydra, and I could even see the red mace head of the Orion Nebula.

Not sure I'd ever want to be 18 again, but with memories like these, I think I had it pretty good. • 6:45 AM 0 comments

Remember when?

Han Solo once said, of Lando Calrissian, "Of course I don't trust him. He is my friend, y'know."

Wait, maybe you don't know what that means. It's simple, really.

'Cause, see, Han and Lando were friends way way back but they hadn't spoken in years because Lando thought that Han had cheated at cards.

So Han needed Lando's help to escape the Empire and repair the Millennium Falcon (Han's spaceship), but it turned out Lando had already betrayed Han to Darth Vader and arranged to have Han and Chewbacca tortured and Han sold to the bounty hunter Boba Fett, the droid C-3PO broken down into parts, and Princess Leia turned over to Darth Vader for nefarious purposes.

So Han was right not to trust Lando - but it was already too late when he said that.

That's how Han got frozen in carbonite.

Luckily Lando had a change of heart and, at the last minute, helped Chewie, C-3PO and Leia escape from Cloud City, and even eventually helped rescue Han from the clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt, to whom Han owed money.

Man, I miss those movies.

But, still, bottom line: Lando shouldn't have been trusted until he'd earned Han's trust again.

Really, I shouldn't have to explain this. It's elementary. But some people aren't as interested in a classical education these days. • 6:09 AM 0 comments

The first time

I've written before about my first time at a strip club. Except it wasn't my first time inside the club. Just my first visit to the club. And I'll never know for sure if the girl I drove to work that day was a waitress... or a dancer.

A missed opportunity, to be sure. Life is full of those.

But the first time I ever stepped inside a strip club was a bit different.

My best friend in high school, Terry, had, after graduation, gone away. To Japan. To be with the woman he eventually married and had children with.

I had moved in with a couple of high school friends, three single guys sharing an apartment, while I kept a dead-end job as a sales clerk in a boutique game store. I spent way more money than I made, which was a recipe for disaster. But I didn't really care.

And then Terry and his wife came back from Japan. This was before they had had any kids. Terry was going to help manage his mom's business, which was a boutique clothing store.

The night Terry came back, or shortly thereafter, found the four of us guys hanging out. And Terry suggested we hit the Acropolis for a steak.

Even then, the idea of the Acrop as a steak house, rather than a titty bar, was the cover story. Don't get me wrong; I like the steaks there. Locally grown beef, cheap and cooked simply.

But, c'mon. People go because of the naked women.

I was reluctant to go but gave in because, hey, my friend was back, just like in the song. We almost had to go to a strip club.

Sadly, my memories of that night are slim. I remember the discontinuity of being served a steak while a woman showed her naughty parts just inches from my face, in a dark smoky room. I remember being almost unable to eat, so distracted was I.

I'm almost positive I didn't have a beer; hard to believe now, but back then I wasn't much of a beer drinker. The question is - what did I drink? I can't recall, but it was probably scotch. I was going through a scotch whiskey phase back then, single malts. Mmmmm.

And I can't recall the dancers, except that they were busty. One of them was able to make her breasts move asymmetrically - first one bounced, then the other, back and forth. That was worth a dollar.

Terry introduced me to the ways of strip clubs - a dollar a dance if you were sitting at the rack. If you didn't want to pay, go sit elsewhere. And talk to the dancers. Make them laugh and don't treat them like servants or robots or animals. They're entertainers, first, and foremost, and believe it or not, human beings with lives and thoughts outside of the club. They were working for many different reasons and each one had a story to tell. And if you were lucky, they'd tell you a story. Was it true? Who knows and who cares? That's all outside the club.

Which is where I always wanted to find a dancer - in the mythical realm outside, where I wasn't a customer and she wasn't a stripper; we were friends. I chased that dream for many many years. I still sometimes catch myself thinking, mistaking the dream for the reality.

The reality is: you don't meet strippers outside the club. You meet women. You meet people. Some of them may work as strippers; in Portland, which is known for having the highest per-capita number of strip clubs, there are so many girls who strip or used to, that it's inevitable for a single man to eventually date one or two or more.

But that's a lesson I did not learn my first night. The first night was just the taste, the hint, of what was to become my favorite hobby, my abiding eternal entertainment, the sinkhole into which my free time and spare thoughts would disappear for years to come.

It all started there. Dammit.

Labels: stripclub

• 6:17 AM 0 comments

So many ways to say it

Tracy and I have so many different rituals around saying hello and goodbye. Almost all of them in text or IM.

I was just thinking about this the other day. It was morning, and I was on my way to work, and, per usual, I decided to pull out my iPhone and text Tracy a message. And I thought to myself, "Which greeting do I feel like, today?" In other words, which one accurately represented how I felt right now?

Because there are various combinations of words and punctuation. If I gave the wrong one, she'd have the wrong impression. Can't have that.

Here are the various ways to say "hello" or start the day off, in order from least enthusiastic to most:

1. Hey.
   
2. Hi.
   
3. Mornin'.
   
4. Hey!
   
5. Hi!
   
6. Yo! / To!*
   
7. Mornin'!
   
8. Good morning! (rare)
   

* My iPhone auto-corrects the word "Yo" and replaces it with "To". After a while, I eventually gave up changing it back and the word "To!" has become its effective equivalent. I even use it verbally now.

But there's more. If, on a weekend, one of us takes a nap, we have the greeting "G'nap!" which can be used both as a wish for the other person to have a good nap, and a warning to the other person that we will be napping for the next hour or two. Tracy invented that one.

At the end of our work day, we've devised a shorthand call-and-response for when it's time for us to leave. Using our enterprise IM system, we send:

Call: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
Response: ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Whoever thinks of it first gives the first one, and the only proper response is the second one. The lack of initial capitalization is important, as is the correct number of exclamation points (Tracy doesn't always follow the punctuation rules but she's still my best friend). Also, I tend to send enough letters to flow over onto a second line.

The "eeeeee!!!" is short for "Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!"

The "oooooo!!!" is short for "You, tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!"

Whoever notices first that it's 4:20 (nearly always PM not AM) will text the other "4:20!" or some variant. The standard response is "Dude!" although sometimes we will embellish on that, especially if we're late in responding by more than 2 minutes. I, personally, started this one because neither Tracy nor I are potheads. At all. No, seriously. In fact, I've lost opportunities to hang out with strippers because my automatic response to "Hey, do you smoke pot?" is "No", even when it's being asked by a beautiful naked woman. If that doesn't convince you that I don't smoke pot, nothing will.

And then, of course, every night before we go to bed, we send "G'night!" to each other. Often also adding "...bestie!"

Which, of course, is short for "best friend". Which we are. • 6:47 AM 1 comments

Zones of comfort

As has been the case this winter, it was cold out in the wee early hours of the morning while I was waiting for the bus. I just wanted the bus to get here, so I could be warm until I got out and walked the several blocks to my office. I was dressed warmly enough; as warm as possible. But still the chill crept in around the seams, and up the sleeves and down the back of my neck and on my cheeks.

I've been really cold this winter. Yes, I'm probably complaining a lot about it. But damn, I'm cold. When someone touches my hand they're shocked. I just can't seem to warm up.

I've joked that maybe I died and didn't know it, and I'm now a zombie. I will admit that brains seem more delicious to me. But mostly because fresh brains would be warm, dammit.

So there I was, at the bus stop on that cold morning last week, waiting for the bus just for a chance to warm up.

It showed up, I stepped up, showed my bus pass, and went to sit down. My stop was early enough and near the start of the route, so I was the only passenger.

And the bus was still cold. As cold as outside had been. And I wasn't even out of the wind, at least, because the driver had the fans on full blast.

Ah, I thought, he's got the fans on. Soon enough, the bus will warm up.

But three stops later, and the fans were still blowing frigid air. Arctic air. Nanook of the North couldn't take this kind of cold air. Other passengers had boarded and they all seemed resigned to the cold. And they all had noticed it. One girl who often knits while riding pulled out her knitting, and then had to stop, her hands so chilly in the blasting frozen wind.

I knuckled down and pulled in my arms and legs to conserve warmth. I rode it out. No use saying anything to the driver; the ride was only 20-25 minutes. Soon enough I'd make the walk to my building and have a chance to warm up.

My stop approached. I rang the bell. As the driver pulled up to the stop, I walked up to the front door.

...and into a tropical zone.

The area where the driver sat was warm. Very warm. Hot, even. I lingered there as long as I could, soaking up the heat. I did not say anything to the driver. What could I say? Was he aware that, after 20+ minutes of running the fans, the middle of the bus was still freezing?

Or was he just passive-aggressive? • 6:32 AM 1 comments

Missing something

It had been a hard Friday night so far. My friend Ken had totaled his car in a traffic accident on the drive home, on the night we had planned to see Battlestar Galactica at the Bagdad Theater; a little chance for Ken to get out of the house and have a "guy's night out" away from kids and the wife (if Merry's reading this, that's my words, not Ken's).

Ken had decided to go out, anyway - mostly because his wife was studying and didn't want him underfoot while she did so (again, that's my interpretation of events). So there we stood, in the beautiful old lobby, standing in line with more than a half-hour to go until the show started, waiting to buy some beer.

Then I discovered that I had forgotten my apartment keys. Oh, boy. I do that a lot, it seems, which is why I have several backup plans: my sister has a spare, and so does my best friend Tracy. So I started with my sister, just because she was closest (in theory). Sadly, she wasn't home, she couldn't get a hold of her teenage son, my atheist nephew; and her husband wasn't home. She thought my key was in a drawer in the laundry room, but without someone at home to check for it, she couldn't swear that I could get it. Plus, I was going to be late - BSG wasn't going to end until 11:00 PM, and I wasn't going to miss the show even if it meant being locked out overnight.

So I checked with Tracy. She was home, but she lived in Canby, which was approximately 23.2 miles from the theater. Y'know, give or take a little. Plus it was going to be late. Tracy was worried about having to drive to where I was; I was worried about asking Ken to drive me to where Tracy was. I offered to get a ZipCar, but Ken graciously agreed to drive me there after the show. Treat your friends well. I owe Tracy and Ken both.

Oh, and I got to apply a little guilt to my sister. That was fun.

So all that had occurred and had been straightened out. Now Ken and I just wanted some beer and some sci-fi.

A dude with a camera walked up to us. "Hey guys, can I get your picture in front of the KUFO sign?" I looked, and there it was: a cheap plastic banner with the logo for the local radio station that was sponsoring this weekly event.

I shrugged. "Uh, sure."

I stood there while the stranger in front of me in line made some kind of finger-gesture. Ken made an air-guitar stand. Me, I just stood there, dumbly, not sure what pose to use.

That's not very rock-and-roll of me.

It wasn't until afterward that I thought of what was missing: half-naked chicks. I mean, if this was supposed to be some kind of rock radio promotion thing, where were the half-naked chicks?

I'm pretty sure I would've had a much better pose then. • 6:57 AM 1 comments

Overheard at work by one teammate to another co-worker as we attempted to pack up her computer and move it to a new location

"You're a bad example, because you do things right." • 6:47 AM 0 comments

Seriously?

Snow? Seriously? More snow?

This is the worst Portland winter ever. And by worst I mean coldest and snowiest. • 9:54 AM 0 comments

Rags-to-riches

Yesterday I scratched another movie off my Oscar best picture list.

I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" in a packed matinee theater.

Here's what I knew going in: it's a rags-to-riches story about a poor kid who gets on a game show, and it might be a musical. Oh, and the leading lady is stunningly beautiful.

Here's what I learned while watching it: it's set in India, specifically in Mumbai. It is not a musical. It's directed by Danny Boyle, an Irish working-class guy whose previous movies include an awesome zombie movie, a sci-fi flop, and a movie about drug addicts. And the structure of the movie intrigued me as a writer.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is being tortured because he's suspected of cheating in India's version of the game show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" Seems the local corrupt constabulary don't believe that a kid who grew up in the slums could possibly know all the various trivia that lets him work his way up the ladder until he's on the verge of winning twenty million rupees (about US$407,000 - not a lot to you and me, but I'd imagine it's a life-changing amount of money in India).

Jamal has had no formal education, he's scammed his way around India with his cruel but loyal older brother, Salim, and his only goal in life is to find, and rescue, Latika, the young girl who joined the two brothers as the third Musketeer to their Athos and Porthos but was kept by a Mumbaikar Fagin and forced into a life of crime.

But as he tells how he knows the answer to each trivia question, the movie flashes back to show the specific circumstances that led to him gaining that knowledge. The coincidences add up as the movie fills in his squalid life until he's got a semi-respectable job as a "chai wallah" (tea server) in a customer call center, but I never lost my willingness to suspend belief. I did sometimes recall Cliff Claven's dream board in Jeopardy, but Boyle and his screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (who adapted the novel "Q&A" by Vikas Swarup) never play it for laughs and each incident seems organic and natural. It's only on reflection after the fact that I began to question it all, and by then the charm of the story had overcome any misgivings I had.

In fact, now that I think about it, the story parallels the rise of an adherent of Hinduism through the ranks of the four Puruṣārthas, or goals of a human existence. But I don't know much about that beyond what's in Wikipedia. Someone more scholarly than I is invited to analyze the story from that perspective.

Me? I just enjoyed the hell out of that movie.

Labels: movies

• 6:27 AM 0 comments

It's like 12 years vanished down the memory hole

The New York Times thinks partisan bickering began when Democrats took control of Congress in 2006.

"For the past two years, majority Democrats often denied Republicans the chance to alter legislation on the floor, mainly so they could not force politically charged votes or scuttle important legislation.

Now, heeding Mr. Obama’s call for cooperation, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, is tentatively testing the notion of letting Republicans offer amendments to legislation and having the parties engage in a battle of ideas on the floor. The fact that Democrats now have a majority of 58 seats rather than the 51 seats they previously held makes the concession far less painful."

Weird. Do they not remember now-indicted House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX22) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and the myriad ways they prevented the minority from amending or introducing legislation on the floor of Congress? The "nuclear option" that was named by Sen. Lott (R-MS) and which option was used as a club by Sen. Frist? Rep. Delay's misuse of the FAA to track down and attempt to arrest the Democratic representatives on a private plane? Rep. Delay's K Street Project to force Washington lobbyists to only hire Republicans?

To the traditional media, as well as those inside the Beltway in general (including, I'm afraid, our new President Obama), "bipartisanship" means marginalizing and silencing the left. It's Democrats giving Republicans what they want. • 6:04 AM 0 comments

Flirting?

The other day, I ran into my Republican co-worker at the coffee cart in the lobby of our building. We made small talk, and I made small talk with Amy, the cute red-headed coffee cart girl, while my Republican co-worker bought an energy bar, and I bought a coffee and donut.

Because I have had to tell him that we should stop talking politics, every new conversation he strikes up with me fills me with dread. Is this going to be the conversation that will finally break the taboo? Will he bust out some crazy story about how the Clintons were actually responsible for Watergate and the Vietnam War? Or will his insanity spill over into some new topic, like cooking or basketball or high definition TV? So I hoped for a largely silent walk through the building.

Sadly, no. On our way back to our office area, my Republican co-worker turned to me and leered. "So, you're single, right?"

I had no idea where he was going with this but a chill went down my spine.

I kept what I thought was a normal look on my face, though, considered not answering at all or asking him why he wanted to know, and finally just settled on a direct answer. "Yes, I am." Did I want to know why? "...why?" I added, finally.

He took no notice of the lengthy pauses in my response (he never seems to pick up on any but the most blatant body language, like turning completely around and walking away, for instance) and, still leering, said, "She was flirting with you."

Who? Oh. Amy. The coffee cart girl.

I quickly reviewed the conversation in my head. Nothing obviously romantic or sexual stuck out in my head. The topics covered were coffee, payment of coffee, the weather, and my favorite kind of donut (of which she seemed unaware).

But my Republican co-worker seemed to get a kick out of it.

I shrugged and said, "No. No... no. Amy's got a boyfriend."

My Republican co-worker chuckled. "Well, how're they doing?"

I shook my head. "I have no idea."

"I'm just sayin'... maybe she's lookin' for something else."

This conversation annoyed me on many levels. "That was just a normal, everyday conversation."

My Republican co-worker shook his head in disbelief, as we reached my cubicle. He leaned in for one last comment while I dropped my bag, took off my jacket, and began starting up my computer. "Just think about it," he said, still leering - over what, I was not sure. I silently hoped he wasn't picturing me in an intimate situation with Amy, the coffee cart girl.

I remember when I thought that normal everyday conversation with women was actually flirting and foreplay. It wasn't that long ago, actually. • 6:48 AM 1 comments

My movie list for the next couple of weeks

The Oscar nominations are out as of today, and I've seen two of the five Best Picture nominees:

• "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
  
• "Frost/Nixon" (Universal)
  
• "Milk" (Focus Features)
  
• "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company)
  
• "Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight)
  

Looks like I know what the next three movies I see are going to be. Anyone care to join me, just say the word. The one I'm most interested in is "Slumdog Millionaire", but "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is still playing in my neighborhood theater, I think. • 10:22 AM 1 comments

Thoughts on Mayor Sam Adams

Disclaimer - I voted for Mayor Sam Adams in the last election. Did not contribute time or money towards his campaign. I did wear a button with his name on it, which was about the extent of my contributions. I also shook his hand when introduced to him at "Candidates Gone Wild" by a family friend who has been involved in local politics for many many years.

You may have heard that Mayor Adams, 42, has admitted to sleeping with an 18-year old intern. Mayor Adams is openly gay. There's lots of questions and accusations being thrown around about the whole thing. I'm not going to summarize it here; the story has hit the national news in addition to being a local scandal.

I wasn't going to write about this but since there's already competing blogs calling for both his recall and for him to stay (hi, Hollie!), and there's metric tonnes of electrons being spilled on Twitter (among other places, I'm sure), OK, fine, I'll say my piece and move on.

I have no problem with the following, which are the facts as I know them as of writing this post:

1. Had a brief, two month relationship with a man 24 years his junior that apparently included consensual sex.
   
2. Lied about it when asked by co-workers, rival political candidates, and local reporters.
   
3. Convinced the young man to lie about it, too.
   

I had heard the rumors about Mayor Adams prior to the election, and it did not sway my vote. Because, again, it did not matter to me. I don't fucking care who a politician sleeps with. I didn't care when President Clinton was accused of sleeping with Monica Lewinsky; it did not matter to me in the least. It made the scolds who talked about it, endlessly and in national venues, look tiny and small.

To all the gasbags saying that it speaks to Mayor Adams' "character" or whatever - fuck you. Stop pointing your fingers. I imagine that many of the critics would gladly sleep with an 18 year old, if given the chance. 18 year olds, either male or female, are hot. Duh. And if accused of doing that, I imagine the fear of being found to be a hypocritical Puritan would make those critics lie, too.

I would very much like to see politicians who are brave enough to stand up and say, "That's not only none of your business, but please feel free to eat shit and die, too" when asked about anything other than policy or professional decisions or the duties and responsibilities of their office.

Having seen "Milk", I understand that the fear of being open about a minority status might lead to a nutjob aiming a gun at you. I really do understand that; I belong to the most hated minority group remaining in America today, the atheists. There's so much material just on this very blog that would prevent lots and lots of people from voting me into any office, small or large. I'm an open atheist. I'm scornful of the basic tenets of Christianity and God-belief in general. I frequent strip clubs, and I actually get private dances from the girls; in fact, I'm a regular customer of a small number of them. I drink to excess. I gamble. I spend my money un-wisely. I have testified against my boss. I have a poor work ethic, even though I'm a union steward.

I have often, though, toyed with the idea of running for office anyway. Not just acknowledging all of that, but making it a part of my campaign. There might be enough booze hounds, atheists, waitresses, bouncers, strippers, philosophy and art majors to get me a simple majority, don't you think? And even if it didn't... it would be a hell of a party.

But I still think I know the issues well enough to debate them on their merits. I'd like to think I can be logical and reasonable in weighing the pluses and pitfalls of different policies. None of what I do as entertainment would really disqualify me to represent my peers. Would it? Seriously? Feel free to weigh in.

Mayor Adams has big plans for Portland - transportation, energy, sustainability. You name it. And it all fits in with my values, and the values of my friends and family. He can lead on those issues as well as anyone else could, and perhaps, now that he's been a bit humbled by his mistake in trying to cover up this relationship, he'll be more willing to work with others to get these things done.

I'm glad he's apologized for his error in judgement. Now, Mayor Sam Adams should stay, should face up to his accusers and tell them it's a personal matter, and should get back to the business of making Portland work for everyone in it. • 6:50 AM 4 comments

Inaugural roundup

Here's some quick hits and links that will stand in for a real post:

• Can someone do this to SE Bush Street in Portland, too? Especially around where it intersects with SE Clinton Street, please. Better yet, how do we start the process for formally renaming it?
  
• Didja catch the shout-out from President Obama (I am so incredibly happy to finally say that) to non-believers in his speech?
  

  As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
  
  Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
  
  We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort -- even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
  
  For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

  
  My emphasis.
  
  I was not the only one watching that who gave a yelp of surprise and cheered.
  
• Amanda Marcotte praises the President for explicitly mentioning us godless ones; when non-believers are invisible it makes it easier for people to accept all the freakin' religious references from our political leaders.
  

  "One might safely infer that the sudden shift towards more aggressive, activist-oriented atheism and skepticism has been working. Which of course is why it’s so strongly resisted. Complaints about big meanie atheism from Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher are stemming mostly from a fear that big meanie atheism is effective. I think that among secularists, the issue of raising non-believer visibility has been a troubling one, because we don’t necessarily see the purpose of it. After all, our government institutions should be secular as a matter of principle, and for the benefit of believers as well as non-believers. So, why should we have to raise atheist visibility?
  
  But politics isn’t just a matter of rational arguments. If people contextualize this country as being one that has multiple faiths but not that many faithless, people are going to have a hard time seeing the harm and unfairness of all this god talk coming from government institutions and other issues like faith-based funding. People aren’t going to see the harm so long as all references to god and faith are generic enough. But if you can point to a group of people who are still being excluded, no matter how generic the references, then people might have a better idea why the only fair solution to the issue of religious diversity is to keep religion private and make government spaces secular."

  
  Read the whole thing, and the comments, too. Seriously. I didn't want to cut any of it.
  
• Penn Jillette disagrees and thinks that the small inclusion was a sop compared to all the prayer and God.
  
• My atheist nephew texted me: "Why is religion so involved in American politics?" I replied: "Because some people haven't yet put aside childish things, as the Bible teaches us."
  
• To put today's ceremony into terms that a gamer would understand, Obama unlocked an achievement today, after crushing the Republicans, taking the head of John McCain and Sarah Palin, and winning the Electoral College.
  
• I love the fact that, precisely at noon Eastern time yesterday, the time specified by the Constitution for the transfer of power, whitehouse.gov was switched over to include the President's new blog and plenty of policy positions and agenda items. These people are tech-y and fucking with it.
  
• If you're geeky, you'll smile at the fact that the Robots.txt file for whitehouse.gov went from almost 2400 lines of exclusions to just two lines, including all search engines. If you're not geeky, it means you couldn't Google the site under #43 but now the whole thing is Google-able. If that means nothing to you, hang on; one of President Obama's goals is to get you folks up to speed with the rest of us.
  
• From now on, I'm going to simply refer to our former president (damn, I like saying that almost as much as I like saying "President Obama"!) as #43. That's snarky but still with a tinge of respect. Right?
  
• I had to add the words "Barack" and "Obama" to the spell-check dictionary on my computers today. Got tired of the red squiggly line for MY PRESIDENT.
  
• This is my new wallpaper (replacing a satellite image of all the freaking snow in December). It shows the crowds in D.C. this morning from space.
  
• So much more I could say but I'm almost overwhelmed. When I got a text from the Obama Inauguration team last night asking me to text back my wishes for President Obama, I thought for a bit to condense my thoughts, hopes, wishes and, yes, fears, into 160 characters, and sent this:
  

  "Congrats! We are the power and the promise; you are our symbol and leader."

  
  Obama has been clear that it's not about him; it's about us, all of us, together. Yes, we can.
  
• Finally, my hopes and wishes go out to Senator Ted Kennedy, who collapsed yesterday during the inaugural lunch. Speedy recovery, Senator.
  

• 6:30 AM 0 comments

I lost a bet

A couple of weeks ago, #43 took the unprecedented step of revoking a Presidential pardon.

To my knowledge, that had never been done before (which is why I used the word "unprecedented", actually). And it seemed to be over such a minor issue - a developer convicted of mail fraud and tax evasion. And #43's mouthpiece claimed that the administration didn't want to "create the appearance of an impropriety".

Huh?

So outing an undercover CIA agent and lying to the grand jury so badly that it interfered with the investigation into whether or not there was a cover-up is OK, but pardoning a minor crony because he donated money to the campaign is out of bounds?

It just didn't make sense to me at the time.

But people argued back and forth about whether or not a president can actually revoke a pardon. Some said yes, it's inherent in the ability to grant them in the first place. Others said no, once it was issued you can't take it back. Josh Marshall had a great round-up of the debate.

The argument for revoking seemed to be based on the difference in time between when the president signs the form issuing the pardon, and when the lawyers at the Department of Justice actually execute the pardons.

The argument against was that, if #43's (or, more likely, the legal weasels on his administration) theory was correct, it would insert an extra-Constitutional department into the Executive Branch's Constitutional power. Ain't no DOJ in the founding documents.

I guess, because I didn't hear any more about it, that people decided it was OK. I could be wrong, and the opposition just might be under the radar or moving slowly, as justice often does.

And then, as the final hours of #43's term ticked down, folks were waiting for the midnight pardons - the last-minute ones, the ones that would hopefully slide by in the dead of night. I particularly expected #43 to issue a blanket pardon for himself and his top aides.

It appears that that didn't happen. Some border guards got their sentences commuted, but that's it. No other pardons. Which means, I lose a bet and now owe someone twenty bucks. I was so sure.

Again... that just seems weird.

But Josh Marshall made a point: if #43 thinks that pardons can be revoked, maybe he thinks (or, more likely, the legal brains in his administration) that if he issues a late pardon, that Obama could then revoke it as long as the Justice Department hasn't "executed" it yet.

I kinda wish Obama would do that, actually. But it wouldn't fit in with his "unity" and "bipartisanship" themes. More's the pity.

But then I got to thinking. Republicans play the long game. They don't always have an eye on the immediate consequences of things; they pay attention to how things will play in the future. If, in fact, Obama allows #43's new power of revocation to stand... surely the Republicans plan to use this power against any future outgoing Democratic presidents.

Watch out, President Obama! No, seriously - pay attention! Or, more specifically, please please please, Attorney General-designate Holder, don't let #43 get away with this last, slimy trick.

...or if you're going to allow him to get away with it, could you actually make use of this new power to make sure that justice is done? • 8:17 PM 0 comments

They should have seen this day

I mean no slight to those who gave their lives in the cause of civil rights - Dr. King, Medgar Evers, far too many more for me to mention here - but here is a short list of people that I, personally, wish were still alive to see Barack Obama sworn in today as our 44th president:

• Hunter S. Thompson would have been 72. He abhorred President Nixon's lawlessness, and he lost his journalistic neutrality while covering the Democratic primary, writing articles that perhaps helped to get George McGovern the Democratic nomination. Thompson viewed Mr. McGovern as a good, idealistic man. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, Thompson saw it as the return of Nixon and Nixon's policies, and it finally broke his spirit; he committed suicide in February 2005. I'd like to think that Thompson would generally approve of Mr. Obama's election - though he, like me, would criticize Mr. Obama from the left.
  
• Philip Kindred Dick would have been 80 today. PKD was frightened to his core when he was investigated by the FBI in 1955 because of a short story he wrote regarding nuclear power. Many of PKD's novels from the 70s onward until his death in 1982 featured Richard Nixon as a villain. PKD feared abuse of government power and was sure we were all trapped in a recurring cycle of imprisonment he called the "Black Iron Prison". If PKD could have survived the Bush attack on civil liberties and incredible expansion of executive powers (an even more extreme version of the Black Iron Prison's social control), I think he would have been proud to see President Obama take the oath of office.
  
• Dr. Stephen Jay Gould would be 67. A fierce fighter for the idea of science and religion being non-overlapping areas of study, and a strong voice of reason and rationality in education and the making of policy, Dr. Gould is one of the few theists on my list of intellectual heroes. I believe that Mr. Bush's antagonism towards science and uplifting of one specific set of religious myths would have saddened Dr. Gould; hearing President Obama include "non-believers" in his speech today, and hearing him explicitly state that policies must be based on data and science, would have put a smile on Dr. Gould's face.

How about you? • 11:44 AM 0 comments

Hello

Yesterday I said goodbye to Mr. Bush and surveyed the damage his administration has done to our democracy. And it was severe and widespread.

But we yet live in a democracy, even so. And a small part of that idealistic and hopeful system of government survives even the undemocratic reign of George Walker Bush. It survived this time in the form of the largest voter turnout in America's history, in the election that selected the Electors who selected Barack Hussein Obama to be our 44th president. Mr. Obama will be sworn into office today. The campaign he ran was based on hope and change, which are, after all, the emotions underpinning our idealistic form of government. That makes Mr. Obama far more democratic than Mr. Bush.

Two months ago, on Election Night, I celebrated our country's choice of Mr. Obama over his rival, Sen. John Sidney McCain. I danced in the streets. I talked to a woman who had lived in this country for many years but had not been a citizen. After the disappointing election of 2004, however, she knew that she had to do more; she worked hard so that when the election of 2008 came around, she could vote. I'm sure her story has echoes and parallels all over.

I also talked to a gentleman who was visiting our country on business from Switzerland. He was impressed and amazed at the happiness and joy he saw from Americans after electing Mr. Obama. I was proud of my country and of we, the people. He was happy to have been here on that night.

And the next day, I received an email from friends of mine, citizens of the United Kingdom, giving happy thanks to us for electing such a competent and rational president.

Today is our day to celebrate the renewal of the most powerful of our three co-equal branches of government. Today we take the man who won our popular vote, the man who then won the vote of the electors, and the man who was certified by the weakest branch of our three co-equal branches of democratic government, and make him swear before us, and the world, to uphold the Constitution that founded our country.

Not to uphold his political party's policies. Not to protect the businesses, geography, or the religious beliefs, or the idea of democracy in the world at large. Not even to protect the lives of Americans or human beings in general. No, he, as all past presidents have, will swear to uphold the Constitution and the values, ideals, and laws found in that document.

Our Constitution of the United States of America is a very readable and accessible document. It grants many powers to the Legislative Branch, the institution that holds our directly-elected representatives. It grants a few powers to the Executive Branch, the one which will have Mr. Obama as its Chief Executive for at least the next four years. And it outlines the scope of responsibilities of the third branch, the Judicial, which is supposed to arbitrate the balance of power between the first two.

But somehow, over time, we've allowed more and more power for the Executive, largely at the expense of the Legislative. This is good if the person elected President is a good person, bad if the person is a venal or evil person. As much as I believe that Mr. Obama is a good person, I will still work to shift the balance of power back to Congress, and will work to elect leaders who understand that our Constitution doesn't enforce itself.

Mr. Obama was a Constitutional scholar, so I am certain he is well aware of the fears and ideals that went into it, and the history of how it has been amended and interpreted. His knowledge of the details certainly far exceeds mine. But he and I, and we, the people, are all still subject to the laws it enshrines.

Will Mr. Obama bring about as much hope and change as we, the people, thirst for? Time will tell. I will give him the chance, of course. He is my president, and not simply because I voted for him. I agree with some of Mr. Obama's positions, and I disagree with others. That is normal for a democracy; it thrives on opposition. But I will give Mr. Obama the chance to go from campaigning, to governing. He will now have the opportunity to enact policies rather than make promises.

Others may trust Mr. Obama to be a good president in the sense of enacting policies that uphold the ideals of our nation, but I am willing to bet that even Mr. Obama knows that it's up to all of us to hold him accountable and to encourage him when he succeeds and to argue and discourage when he fails. We can do that through our representatives in Congress and at the state and local levels - or we can do that ourselves. And he will have no choice but to hear from we, the people, on what we think of his actions.

Luckily Mr. Obama has taken steps that are unprecedented in our history of opening a dialogue with we, the people, thanks to the tools our technology have given to all of us. I'm encouraged by the visible evidence of Mr. Obama's willingness to listen, in the form of his website, Change.gov. I'm a little less encouraged by his somewhat weak answers to the top questions we, the people, have been asking him on that site, but at least he's willing to engage us.

Mr. Obama values discussion and debate. It's been said he thrives on disagreement. But after the topics have been hashed out, he also urges us to come together around the solution. Unity of purpose after everyone has voiced their thoughts. I can deal with that as long as I feel I have been heard, and as long as the final decision is based on the majority view, and as long as the core values of the Constitution are being followed. I trust Mr. Obama to do that - and I will work to ensure it happens. Mr. Obama would expect no less of us.

The people Mr. Obama has selected for the various departments under his control appear to be competent, educated, and outspoken. A team of rivals. Some of them are already unafraid to disagree with their boss; Eric Holder said in his confirmation hearings that the president is not above the law. Mr. Obama chose his political rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to represent his foreign policy. His Energy Secretary is an actual scientist, well-versed in the nuts and bolts of how we create energy, rather than a representative from the businesses that sell oil, as most Dept. of Energy heads have been in the past. He chose to retain the previous Defense Secretary, Robert Michael Gates, a member of the other political party. OK, maybe Mr. Gates isn't a shining example of competence, unless you count the fact that Mr. Gates has apparently prevented Mr. Bush from invading Iran.

Even where I disagree with Mr. Obama, I am proud of him. I am proud of my country for having elected him in record numbers. And I am eager for the future renewal of our democratic experiment.

Welcome to the White House, President Obama. Congratulations on participating in our democracy. Please leave it stronger than you inherited it. • 6:40 AM 3 comments

Goodbye

Democracy is unique in that it offers its citizens the chance to renew and repair itself, through the process of participation and voting. Other older forms of government were structured to resist change in leadership, but in a democracy, the people who are subject to the laws and responsibilities are also allowed to participate in the selection of the leadership.

Today at noon Eastern time, we the citizens of the United States are ridding ourselves of the undemocratic leadership of George Walker Bush, our 43rd President. Mr. Bush was not elected by popular vote of the citizens of the United States. Because our founding fathers did not entirely trust people, they set up a system known as the Electoral College, which is another layer between the direct vote of the people and the actual selection of our Chief Executive.

Of course, there was another layer even still between you and I and selection of the man who led the most powerful of the three supposedly co-equal branches of our government. Mr. Bush was selected by 5-4 vote of our country's highest court in the unique and supposedly non-precedent-setting case of Bush v. Gore. Never before, and with the effort of progressive citizens everywhere, hopefully never again, will an undemocratic president be inflicted on our fragile democracy.

Strange how "supposedly" shows up a lot, when discussing Mr. Bush.

I was in the minority of citizens who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. I was not paying attention. I voted but barely cared. I did not know how directly political leadership would affect my life.

I was wrong. With Bush v. Gore, and then again on 11 September 2001, and again as our leadership rushed into war with a country that did not threaten us, and billions began to be spent on killing and wounding human lives... I saw.

As 2004 approached, I recognized with fresh eyes the second chance our country was getting to reverse the decision made by a small elite. I did what I could to spread the word of how poorly Mr. Bush reflected the democratic dreams of we, the people. And again, through the work of a small elite, Mr. Bush remained in office for another four years.

Mr. Bush undemocratically locked away those who would disagree with him. Mr. Bush ordered the imprisonment and torture of people whose crime was simply to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mr. Bush undemocratically used his position to reward those who gave him money - a horror at all levels of government, brought into crystal clear relief as Hurricane Katrina tried to erase my favorite city in the world, and millions were turned into refugees. Mr. Bush enlisted corporate executives in his goal to listen in on the conversations of people who had not been accused of a crime - and Mr. Bush punished the executives who refused him.

And Mr. Bush believed, and was allowed by those entrusted to check his power to maintain the belief in, the most undemocratic idea of all: that the law should not apply to all the citizens of our country. "If the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

I thought about trying to find some good in Mr. Bush's presidency. But I realized that finding even a tiny seed of positive would distract us from the many destructive policies he pursued and was allowed to enact. Our Congress, the first branch of government, allowed itself, first under Mr. Bush's political party, and then under the supposed (there's that word again) opposition party, to become much less than co-equal. Slow to investigate, weak in applying what consequences and punishments our founding fathers gave them, our directly elected representatives only worked to preserve their elite positions under Mr. Bush's presidency. In spite of growing outcry from the majority of America's people, our Congressional leaders re-arranged the chairs so that they could sit with their friends. Friends like Joseph Isidore Lieberman, a Senator from Connecticut, who was voted out of the Democratic Party in 2006 by a majority of his constituents. Our Senate leaders chose non-Democratic Sen. Lieberman over the voices of a majority of the people who elected them to high office.

As the outcry against the undemocratic reign of Mr. Bush grew from our citizens, our Congressional leaders first dangled the promise of using the powers granted them by our founding fathers in the form of "subpoena power"... and then took those powers "off the table" after increasing their power by those promises.

Abdicating their responsibilities is undemocratic.

If the people did not oppose Mr. Bush, he might still be in office today. He would not be leaving office with the lowest approval rating of any modern president. But we, the people, did oppose him, and we continue to oppose our Congressional leaders. It's a process, not a goalpost. The endpoint isn't getting rid of one, or several leaders; it's about participating, and taking steps, big and small, every day to ensure that our system of government works to the benefit of all of us, and not just the elite.

But stopping to pay attention to the steps is important, too. They are the measure of how far we've come, and point in the direction of where we're going.

Tomorrow we will celebrate a huge step. But today, I wanted to take the time to say: Goodbye, George Walker Bush. I shall not miss you. • 6:40 PM 0 comments

Service

Does writing over 2,200 words about outgoing undemocratic President Bush and incoming hopefully-democratic President Obama count towards my day of service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr?

I hope so.

Writing is what I do best, and my words will be free to anyone who wants to read them.

Stay tuned later tonight for part one, and tomorrow morning for part two! • 2:50 PM 0 comments

Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On this day, in honor of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr's life of service in the cause of unity, many blogs will link or mention King's "I have a dream" speech.

Surely, it's the most famous one he gave.

But for myself, living in an America that has elected Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency largely on his promise to end our Iraqi invasion, I would ask you to listen once more to the words of Dr. King on why he was opposed to the Vietnam War.

On 30 April 1967, Dr. King stood up in Ebenezer Baptist Church and preached the following sermon:



Transcript of the speech can be found here.

Bring them home, Barack Obama. End both our wars. • 6:24 AM 0 comments

Stripperoke

In just a few short hours, some friends and I will be having dinner, and then heading out to Devil's Point to watch, and perhaps participate, in the unique combination of karaoke and strippers known as "Stripperoke".

I don't entirely know what to expect. Not sure what or how the strippers "help" the karaokers (Mac OS X does not recognize that as a word). Not sure just how many drinks I will need before taking the stage.

But I know one thing: I'm glad my friends will be there with me, and I'm glad I live in a city that welcomes and embraces the more underground forms of entertainment.

And there's lots of strip clubs, too.

Labels: stripclub

• 4:53 PM 0 comments

Organizing

Had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine last night, via text. I was out and about, on my way to catch the mid-season premier of Battlestar Galactica's final season. As I waited for a bus transfer, I spotted a small group of guys wearing clothing that identified them as employees of the same company as my friend. So I shot her a text, just as a tease. This was around 8 PM, not work hours, so such a gathering seemed odd to me.

She replied back and asked if it looked like they were unionizing.

Aha.

I had caught my bus by this point so I couldn't examine the group any further. I replied back and reminded her that I'm pro-union, just like I'm pro-democracy (which, to me, are one and the same).

She responded that she's anti-union but pro-democracy.

Hrmmm.

I sensed that this conversation was getting too big for SMS, with its 160-character limit. But I wanted to challenge my friend, who is intelligent and motivated but perhaps had never considered the connection between representative government and representative unions. They're one and the same.

So I just told her, as an open-ended offer, "I welcome your counter evidence!" Implying that there will be a future conversation on this topic (I hope that's what I implied).

She responded "No need 2 sell what ur not buying." Sounds like an admission of defeat to me. But, seriously, I'm fascinated to learn what evidence would allow one to be in favor of people voting for their leaders in one sphere of life, and be actively against it in another area of life. I just don't see it.

Uh, workplaces without unions are dictatorships. Some may have benevolent dictators running them, but not all. That's a simple fact. Unions are the only democratic institution in the workplace.

Of course, my friend is in management at the company I will not name to protect this organizing effort. I can understand why someone would see a union as perhaps threatening their privileged position. But perhaps she never made the connection between the idea that the people are justified and enabled to elect their political leaders in a democracy, and the idea that employees can use their organizing powers in the workplace to effect positive changes for themselves and to the benefit of the company.

Let me clearly state that I'm not blind to the flaws in actual, functioning unions - just as I am not blind to the flaws in our current, damaged but still functioning, democracy. That's a point for another day and another post. But the solution is the same in each case: more participation and involvement from people, and better leadership, will resolve those problems. It's not a coincidence that low turnouts in elections favors anti-democracy Republicans, and more voters than have ever voted before were required to elect pro-people Democratic President(-elect, until Tuesday) Barack Obama. Obama is not perfect and I will not always agree with him, but our country functions better when I, and all of you, too, join in the conversation and make your voices heard.

To that end, it is imperative that the Employee Free Choice Act be passed into law. I intend to write more on the EFCA in the future, and on this topic in general. The law, in its current form, will make organizing unions easier, and will take power away from the employer (the current dictators and royalty) and put it in the hands of the employees.

And bring more democracy to the workplace, where it belongs. • 6:26 AM 0 comments

Medical embarrassment

I can't make a doctor's appointment without feeling like a hypochondriac.

Seriously, unless I'm actually bleeding or something (which almost never happens), it takes a lot to convince me to pick up the phone and call the the appointment nurse.

And sometimes, I'll make an appointment, then when it's time to go in (usually at least several days later), I'll cancel or just not show up at all.

Which means, the next time I need to make an appointment, in addition to my normal resistance to accept as real any symptoms I think I have, I have to deal with the guilt of having stood up my doctor from the time before.

I like my doctor. I'll call him Dr. Carl. For one thing, he just looks like a doctor, a classic TV doctor. Handsome, mature, late middle age, tall, not overweight. Blond hair, blue eyes. Tasteful wire-frame glasses. Friendly but not overly so; doesn't flirt with the nurses or female patients; professional but approachable.

My work insurance is not an HMO. It allows me to choose my own doctor, and years ago, I chose Dr. Carl. His office is in my neighborhood so I can walk, or, if I'm ill (hardly ever) I can take the bus and it will drop me off right in front of the door, even though it's just 10 blocks away.

But... still, I wonder when I make an appointment. Is this serious enough to take up Dr. Carl's time? Is this something silly, something frivolous? Does he roll his eyes when he sees that I have an appointment, think to himself (or, worse, chuckle and mention to his staff) "Oh, it's that guy, Brian. Wonder what he thinks is wrong with him this time?"

I guess what I'm saying is that I feel like I don't deserve Dr. Carl. That's what I'm saying, isn't it? I've got an inferiority complex.

It's my health, though. I'm the one making the decisions. If something is bothering me, no one else is going to see to it that I get it taken care of.

Part of it is that I live alone. Ever have those lonely nights when you can't sleep and you wonder "If something were to happen to me right now, how could I get help?"

I suppose, especially so since I don't really endear myself to my neighbors. Neighbor, I mean. Specifically Old Barfy. Ugh. The thought of having to rely on that old drunkard makes me even more anxious. But I accept the consequence of my actions; I don't rely on O.B. because I don't think he's reliable.

That just circles around back to the idea that I have to take care of myself. Which means, if I think something is wrong, I need to pick up the phone and call Dr. Carl, or his nurse, technically, and make sure I go in and explain what's going on.

I learned a rule from a friend, who told me once, "My doctor and my lawyer get the full truth, no exceptions, all the details. They can't do their jobs unless I speak up. Everyone else, though..."

Even when I might be embarrassed, I force myself to tell the complete story to Dr. Carl. Even when I'm having problems in an embarrassing part of my body, like, say, my brain.

Luckily, I've only had to do that with a lawyer once. • 6:34 AM 0 comments

Cylons and beer

I'm getting ready to head over to the Bagdad Theater, to drink beer and eat some dinner with friends. Oh, and to catch the first of the last Battlestar Galactica episodes.

I'm hoping that the build-up for the final hours of the show does service to the awesome three and a half seasons of drama and metaphor and character that have preceded it.

And if not, at least I will have my friends and beer and food. • 7:13 PM 0 comments

Not interested

I consider this a "warts and all" blog about myself. I will (and have) post about things that may not put me in a very good light. I'm not ashamed to say that I am human; I have flaws; I make mistakes.

This week is an example. I'm hoping that people will feel free to comment, pro, con, or indifferent, on this. G'head, I'm an adult and responsible for my own actions.

I've written about Old Barfy before, the guy that mooches off my neighbor and sits on her front porch, a 40 in his hand, smoking like a chimney.

A couple of nights ago, as I was walking up to my front door, he approached me. "Hey, Brian," he said. I ignored him. "Brian, hey, Brian," he kept repeating. I ignored him until he was almost next to me. Finally I looked over my shoulder at him. I stood on my front porch, facing the door, key in hand and, basically, my back to him.

"Do you have fluorescent lights in your kitchen?"

"Why?" I said. Not "yes" or "no" but "why?" Can you tell I don't like him?

"W-well," he stammered, paused, and continued, "We've got a bulb out, and I bought a replacement tube, but it don't work." His words were a bit slurred around his lack of teeth and his apparent blood-alcohol level. "I was thinkin' I could try it in your fixture, if you've got the same kind as we do..."

"Ask Chris," I said, flatly. Chris is the landlord. He's actually very helpful, I thought. Why wouldn't you ask the landlord for help like that?

"Oh, well, I didn't wanna bug him. I just thought..."

"Or take it back to the store."

"I, I mean, I don't... I don't have eight dollars to blow on a light bulb, y'know!"

I said nothing further. Still wasn't my problem.

"Oh, well... nevermind." He hunched over and went back to the stoop of the apartment he shared with my next door neighbor.

I went inside, fuming. Why does he continue to talk to me? I resent his attention. I just want him to leave me alone. Is that so hard to understand?

I did not want him in my apartment, not at all. I've seen him digging in other people's garbage. He's shown a level of interest in me and my things that makes me feel creeped out. He keeps a shopping cart in the narrow strip of yard behind my building, and fills it with bottles that he cashes in regularly. One Saturday morning I woke up, opened the curtains to see the sun - and there was Old Barfy, messing around with his scrounged cans. He immediately ducked down to avoid being seen.

Yes, he's shown some compassion for my problems in the past - particularly with regard to Smacky, my cat, who went missing last year. Yes, O.B.'s son died in Iraq, and I think one of the worst tragedies in human existence is a parent who outlives their children.

But when he talks to me, I feel a skin-crawling need to get away. I can't avoid him enough. And the fact that his contribution to the neighborhood is to sit for hours on end, drinking, or collecting cans for the nickle deposit, or that he was apparently evicted a year or two ago but managed to talk a lonely old lady into sympathizing with him enough to take him in, like a stray... He can do what he wants, and other people can respond to him as they want.

Me, I just want him to leave me alone. • 6:13 AM 1 comments

Payday

Today is payday.

Thanks, job, for giving me a regular paycheck, and benefits, and a nice warm place that is not my apartment to spend 9 hours in five days out of the week.

What? I'm just sticking to the basics.

Didja ever notice that there's a lot of candy bars named for financial concepts? Payday. $10,000 Bar (or more recently, the 10 Grand). Mounds.

Snickers is actually a slang term for loose change in Zimbabastan. True story. • 6:18 AM 1 comments

Symmetry?

I may have found the perfect place to celebrate our newest president. I'm pretty sure there were no parties in Portland for President Bush that featured dancing girls. I could be wrong, though.

I definitely remember dancing girls when President Clinton was elected, though. Of course, that's around the time I started hanging out in strip clubs, so there may not have been any actual connection to the inauguration; it just might've been my normal Tuesday night.

This year, though - both dancing girls and a celebration of our new Democratic President!

Apparently the very same bar in which I watched Obama's acceptance speech on election night, The Slammer, is having an inauguration party next week that will feature dancing girls on the roof. • 8:06 AM 0 comments

Bus groupie

There's a bus driver in my neighborhood who has a groupie.

The bus he drives goes through my neighborhood, anyway. And he only drives this route on the weekends, as far as I know.

And every single time I get on his bus, there's a lady in the front passenger seat, talking to him. She's an older lady, about the same age as the driver. Sometimes, she has a little girl, about 10 or so, with her. Sometimes she's alone.

I could ride the bus from one end of the line to the next, and the lady never gets out at a stop. And I've never seen her board, either. She's just... always... there.

From the little bit of conversation I've heard between the driver and the lady, it doesn't seem that she's his wife. I never look for a wedding ring so I may be wrong, but I don't recall any particular topic that would make me think they share a house at all. Maybe a girlfriend?

But it's been going on for years now.

Sometimes, when other passengers get on and ask the driver questions, the lady will answer instead. I'm sure she knows this particular route as well as the driver, and likely the rest of TriMet's system, too. She'll talk about transfers to other routes, or where different businesses are along the route, or fare structures or where to buy monthly passes.

I've seen her in that seat on rainy, stormy days. I've seen her in that seat on sunny, warm days (and as a side note, man, I miss those sunny warm days right now). I've never seen her with a book or a music player or a magazine or newspaper. I've never seen her with groceries or shopping bags. I've never seen her engage other regular riders, like me for just one example, in the same way or with the same intensity that she talks to the driver.

I don't really know what else to call her, but a bus groupie. • 6:21 AM 0 comments

Why am I still waiting?

Feel free to follow along with me.

I've got a first-generation, 2G iPhone. 8GB of storage. It's still in pretty good shape; a little dent on the back, but the screen is pristine, since it's been covered with a protector for all but about 2 minutes of the 14 months I've owned it.

Since I'm getting a small refund from the Feds on my taxes this year, I started thinking about upgrading to the 3G iPhone, which is $199 for the same storage space I have now, or $299 for double the storage space. Also, they come in sexy, sexy black.

But what could I get for selling my old iPhone? My usual way to determine such things is to hit eBay, do a search for completed listings for stuff in the same general condition as the thing I'm selling. That gives me an idea what people will pay.

Color me surprised to find sold iPhones, just like mine, still selling for up to $400+!

Tossing out the broken ones, and the ones that sold for $1000 or more (I smell a scam there), the mid-range is still $250-$300. That's... that's just nuts.

Is it because 2G iPhones can be jailbroken and unlocked to work with other carriers? That's the main reason I can see for the used selling price for the first generation to remain so high.

Which means I might be able to upgrade to the newer iPhone and gain money.

Of course, since the monthly data plan for iPhone 3G is higher ($30/month for 3G vs. $20/month for EDGE; and texting isn't included, so that's another $20/month - I text a lot and need unlimited), that money would go towards paying the extra monthly fees.

Even so... daaaaamn. So tempting. • 6:14 AM 0 comments

House bees

I dreamt that I was wandering around a house, some kind of vacation home. It was dark inside but light and sunny outside.

I've read somewhere that when one dreams about a house, the house represents the person. I don't know if that's true for everyone, at all times, but since reading that and internalizing it, it has become true for me, after the fact. So now, when I wake up and analyze a dream of mine, if there's a house, the automatic assumption is that the house represents myself.

Sounds nice and logical and easy-to-understand, in a metaphorical way, right? Well hang on.

In this house, I'm looking for the bedroom. I've been traveling and I want to rest. I'm warm and wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

And then the bees find me.

Clumps of bees land on and around my joints; a group in the pit of each elbow, a mob in each armpit, some in my groin and some around each knee. They don't attack at first, just land and stay there, while I walk around and wave my arms trying to dislodge them without angering them.

So, what do bees mean? In the context of the house-is-me metaphor?

Eventually the bees do, indeed, begin to bite me. Or sting me. One or the other. The pain is low-key but definitely there. In dream logic, I just walk around with the bees clumped around my various joints. I don't swipe at them or brush them off because, well, they'd bite me. More. Or... something.

And I walk into the bedroom, finally. A small mattress, big enough for one person, and some blankets lies on the floor of an otherwise empty room. And on the bed are several kittens. Small, fluffy, orange kittens.

They see me and the bees, and the kittens yowl. They jump and cling to my arms and legs and crotch. And they begin to attack the bees.

In their excitement, they are not very accurate.

So now I have kittens biting me and the bees, and the bees are agitated and biting me, too.

That's when I wake up.

I have no idea what it means.

Feel free to share your bizarre dreams in the comments... • 6:38 AM 0 comments

Happy birthday, dad!

Got a text from my youngest nephew letting me know that there will be a dinner celebrating my dad's birthday and that I was invited.

After reserving the closest Zipcar to me (4 miles away), missing a bus that turned the wrong way and missed my stop, then having to walk a half-mile to catch another bus and having to walk another half mile to actually get to the car, then having to put gas in the car (curse you, whoever had the car before me!), well, I was late.

But I was there in time for cake! Dad got chocolate chocolate cake with chocolate chips in the frosting, yum.

Got to hear more stories of my sister and my birthday. Mostly my sister's - apparently mom and dad were living on N. Vancouver when my sister was born in November '63, and the taxi driver who took them to the hospital (St. Vincent's, which was off of West Burnside) was very very nervous the entire ride. Dad was working in a camera store at the time, and they did not have a car. Luckily dad's friend lent him a dark blue 1963 Corvette Stingray to bring mom and baby Lisa home. I believe that was a split-window coupe that year. Damn. No, my sister did not have a child-safety seat; she just rode home behind the passenger seat. Ah, those were the days...

Dad did not tell any stories about his own birthday, unfortunately.

Happy birthday, dad! • 10:03 PM 0 comments

Obama is already saving me money

Barack Obama is already saving me money!

On my first pass through on my 2008 taxes, I owed the state of Oregon $55. Then I remembered my contributions to Obama's campaign!

BAM! That dropped my payment to just $5!

Thanks, President-elect Obama!

Yes, I know it's early for doing taxes, but since I'm expecting a $680 refund from the Feds I like to get that money in my hands as soon as possible.

I'd love to be able to make it all come out even, but this is the best I've done in recent years. I prefer to have as much of my money in my hands throughout the year.

Here's hoping your taxes turn out for the better, too! • 6:41 AM 0 comments

Some use it well, some don't

JetBlue responds well to Twitter. I know this because I watched Jonathon Maus of BikePortland blog a BTA staffer's complaint about JetBlue's handling of a folding bike, and later saw that JetBlue found out on it's own and responded via Twitter. Final result? JetBlue changed it's policy to a more folding-bike-friendly one.

That kind of customer service rocks. Does that surprise you? It doesn't surprise me.

And reading it reminded me of a similar incident from last month. I didn't blog about it at the time, but now I realize that I should. Good behavior should always be mentioned.

It started when J. D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly asked for input, via Twitter, on which online financial software was best.

I had used Mint but didn't like it, and had just started using Quicken Online, a free service that interfaced with all my banks, showed me real-time what my balances were, and offered lots of ways to slice and dice the information. Did I mention it was free?

I've used the software version of Quicken for many years, but in recent years they seemed to abandon the Macintosh market; instead of the three different levels (and pricing) found on the Windows side, only the most expensive version was available for Mac OS X. I limped along by continuing to use the last version I got free pre-installed on my iBook, transferring the program to my new MacBook Pro, until it finally stopped working on the most recent version of Mac OS X.

So I'm very pleased with the free online version. It doesn't have all the features found in the full install, but it has more than enough. For instance, it doesn't handle cash accounts, and if you have a lot of stocks and bonds and investments you should probably pony up for the full version, you cheapskate (or pay your accountant better). Since I don't have any stocks and bonds and investments (beyond my one share of AAPL that I own for philosophical reasons, I'm cool with it.

I summarized all that as best as I could in 140 characters or less.

The next day, Twitter user QuickenPRChels (if you can't decode that, it's a Quicken Public Relations person named Chels, probably short for Chelsea), thanked me, publicly, for the compliment.

Does that surprise you? It doesn't to me. One of the things that makes Twitter great is that the vast majority of the conversation is public, and between the awesome search functions and the use of an RSS feed, it's easy to find out if others are talking about a topic you're interested in. I have searches for my own name and the name of my blog, for instance. Sadly, not many people talk about me unless they're already my friend. But someday, someone's gonna tweet something about me, and I will know. Hopefully it'll be positive!

But, see, lots of people are likely to talk about large corporations, and Twitter, with it's 140 character limit and "of the moment" feel, makes it easy to voice a complaint. So there are companies that have Twitter accounts, and they watch for complaints. That's generally a good thing, unless the company in question just uses that channel to promote their products - that's a losing strategy.

But actually responding to complaints and taking them to heart (as it were - corporations don't have heart, but the people who work for them do) - that's a step beyond.

Sorry for the background, but back to my story; when I saw that QuickenPRChels had thanked me for the compliment, I wasn't sure if this was strictly PR, or if it was that one step beyond kind of service. I filed that away for future reference.

About a week later, Intuit "updated" QuickenOnline. But in doing so, they removed a simple feature that I liked; I had to click down another level or two from the main page to see the last time my bank account information had been updated. Did the total on the main page include my latest charges or not? Click, click, click - oh, there it is. Grr. I didn't have to drill down in the old version.

Now was the time to find out about their customer service. I tweeted to QuickenPRChels my complaint. After a quick back-and-forth, which seemed mostly a limitation of the 140 character limit, I explained the problem.

And the next time I logged in to QuickenOnline, the last update time had been restored. Problem solved, and question answered. Intuit's programmers were listening, and able to address customer complaints.

Does that surprise you? It doesn't surprise me. Not anymore. • 6:08 AM 1 comments

Overheard from one of the Daves at the corner market

"This store has enough video cameras in it to float a battleship." • 9:09 AM 1 comments

Hypothetical

Let's say that someone had some beef that may or may not have been slightly bad. Like, f'rinstance, the "use or freeze by" date was the previous day. But the beef gets cooked and put into, say, a cheeseburger. And eaten, with some ketchup and a little mustard and Tillamook sharp cheddar cheese on some toasted 9-grain bread.

Y'know. Hypothetically.

Let's further say that that all happened last night. And it's now about 12 hours later.

Should the hypothetical person in question be sick by now? Or can this person stop worrying about it?

Feel free to leave your answers in the comments. • 6:41 AM 0 comments

I've forgotten

When I read this article, that talks about a study that showed that playing an involved video game that requires a lot of attention, like Tetris, immediately after a traumatic incident can ease the pain of that incident...

...I'd forgotten just how much Tetris I had played when I was younger. • 7:44 AM 0 comments

New word alert

Is there a word for the time when you're having a conversation with a friend via text, and each side of the conversation is seeing and reacting to something entirely different because the texts are arriving out of order?

Because that's so annoying, it needs a new word.

Like... noncontextism. • 6:18 AM 0 comments

Smoke gets in your eyes

I was grumpy, it was cold and rainy. This was a couple months ago, so it wasn't as cold as it has been, but cold enough. I stood at a bus stop, hoping to catch a quick ride over the bridge to get some lunch and get back to my office before my hour was up. I stood under the shelter, out of the rain.

A gaunt older man, in jeans and a flannel shirt and ski jacket, walks up, looking in the direction the bus will be coming. Not seeing one, he steps under the shelter, pulls out a pack of smokes, lights one up.

I was grumpy, it was cold and rainy. But, whatever, I can live and let live. Bus will be here soon enough. I pull out my iPhone and surf so I don't have to pay attention to the smoker flouting the non-smoking rule at the bus shelter. I tune out.

Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of some interaction between a car and a bike in the green bike box that ends with the car honking its horn. The smoker reacts with a laugh. "Did you see that asshole bike?"

No, I didn't, but since the bike probably had the right of way, now the smoker has annoyed me. "Did you know that bus stops are non-smoking areas?" I replied.

He looked at me. "Oh. All of them?" I nod.

He leaves the stop and walks away, into the rain, cigarette still smoldering from his lips.

Last night, on my way home from work, I'm tired and it's raining. iPhone tells me that the bus is less than 10 minutes away. A lady walks up, chattering on her phone, looks up the street, doesn't see the bus. Out comes the cigarettes.

Again, as long as she stands over there and not near me I don't care. I stand and wait, my back to her and the wind.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a bright red spark rush pass my foot. Startled, I look down and see that the smoker has dropped her ash and it had blown past my leg.

Now angered that she's annoying me with more than just breaking TriMet rules with her carelessness, exaggerating it into my mind into willful endangerment ("She tried to BURN ME ALIVE!" echoes in my head), I turn and ask her if she knew that bus stops are non-smoking zones. I try (and likely fail) to sound polite and genuine.

"Only the shelters," she says, standing just outside the shelter, her arm brushing up against the glass.

"Are you waiting for a bus?" I ask, more snark in my voice.

"Yes," she says, the phone still hiding her ear. I had obviously interrupted her phone call.

"Then you're at a bus stop," I reply with impeccable (to me) logic, and I turn back to watch for the bus, which soon arrives.

She keeps glancing at me even after we're on the bus.

Look, smokers, I'm sure you all feel like some kind of oppressed minority right now. We can all live together. But if I have to put up with your poisonous, carcinogenic smoke blowing around me, can you at least try to be polite about it? Can you not drop your fucking ashes on my shoes, or set me on fire, or make grating, annoying assumptions about other people?

I swear I only get pissy when smokers piss me off about something else. If you want to flout the law, don't be a fucking dick about it or my own, inner, fucking dick will come out. • 6:09 AM 0 comments

My favorite quote from Apple Senior VP of World Marketing Phil Schiller, substituting for CEO Steve Jobs, at today's Macworld Expo keynote speech

"I can't tell you how appreciative I am that you all actually showed up." • 7:56 PM 0 comments

A personals ad reply

This rescued draft post almost reads like a subtle parody of a reply to a personals ad. And yet, I'm almost positive that I wrote it in all sincerity.

I can't recall if she ever replied or not. I don't even recall anything about the person who posted the original ad.

It was years ago, I'm sure.

At any rate, something to ponder on this cold (but not snowy) Tuesday morning.

---

Browsing the profiles on Salon, I've become cynical and jaded. Since at least the time Salon switched over to the new format, but probably even before that, it seems that replies and actual connections with like-minded singles had been, well, falling off. Drying up, even. Maybe it's me and my profile, maybe it's the season (are standards higher during the holidays?), who knows? But, I paid for it, so I still go through them from time to time, looking at the pictures, reading the clever answers to the clever questions. Shopping, basically. Window shopping.

I saw your profile. You seemed cute. Tall, and I'm a tad shorter than you - that's sometimes a problem for women to overcome, I understand that. Not for me, of course. I read further to see your clever answers.

And in the very first space I get a bolt of lightning. Arthur Nersesian! I have at least four of his books and love them all. "Chinese Takeout"? I haven't heard of that one! I surf over to Powell's website and search - and not only do I get a hit for "Chinese Takeout" I find ANOTHER book by him I haven't read! Have you read "Unlubricated"? Me, either, but now I know I have to go to Powell's on my lunch break and pick both of these up (I work downtown, 5 blocks from Powell's - it's a favorite hangout. A burrito from Baja Fresh on 11th and browse the stacks in the City of Books).

Am I trying too hard? Maybe. But some women think that's cute. At any rate, even if you don't write back, I wanted to thank you for the early Christmas present you unwittingly sent my way. Thank you, and I hope you find what you're looking for this season.

Labels: draft

• 6:06 AM 0 comments

Pirates take the lead

I discovered that there is an entire store devoted to Nothing. But. Pirate. Stuff.

This boggles my mind. There are so many ways that's awesome.

In the eternal battle between pirates and ninjas*, I admit, I'm a pirate partisan. So I'm gonna have to score this round to the pirates. Do ninjas have their own stores? No. I think not.

Sure, there are "martial arts" stores and stores devoted to Asiana, but specifically and exclusively ninja stuff? I see none. There appear to be some online stores, but no actual storefronts.

And to those who would suggest that ninja stores are just hidden, I say, again: show me the evidence.

If nothing else, pirates take the lead. Good job, pirates! Or should I say, "Arrrrrr!"

---

* Isn't it just as awesome that there's an entire page on Wikipedia devoted to the eternal battle between pirates and ninjas? I love Wikipedia. • 6:58 AM 2 comments

"Let The Right One In"

Since it was my first visit to Living Room Theaters, I'm tempted to review the theater, rather than the movie. Large, comfy seats, foot rests, an upscale bar/dining room attached, in-theater service, premium sound and crisp all-digital projection, and only a small premium over the "regular" theaters (my matinée was $9)... nice. Only downside was a distracting reflection on the screen, but it wasn't enough to bug the management about.

Still, as my first movie of 2009, the film itself deserves some mention. It's about a lonely kid who meets a strange kid in the woods one night. The strange one doesn't mind the cold, is smart enough to solve a Rubik's cube at first sight, and one night, attacks and kills a grown man, drinking his blood.

Yeah, she's a vampire.

Yes, I said "she". This ain't "Twilight". It's "Låt den rätte komma in" ("Let The Right One In"), a Swedish import. It's creepy and sweet and sometimes hilarious (apparently cats, in Sweden, hate vampires to an extent I didn't think possible)... but mostly creepy.

Eli, the vampire girl, played by Lina Leandersson, has that other-worldly affect and world-weariness that seems far beyond her years. Truthfully, so does Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), due to his preternatural, almost albino, blondeness.

Oskar doesn't seem to know what he's getting in to by befriending, and more, a vampire. Or care, which sends a chill down my spine. Hey, she convinces him to fight back against the bully who torments him at school. It all seems to end up all right - or does it? The fate of Eli's dad at the end of the second act hints at a darker ending in store for Oskar.

Labels: movies

• 7:19 AM 0 comments

Like having new ears

Continuing in the vein of "things I never noticed before", while I'm sitting here waiting for laundry to finish, CAKE's "I Bombed Korea" came up in iTunes. CAKE is one of my all-time favorite artists, and I must have listened to all of their albums hundreds of times.

Hang on... OK, iTunes tells me that I've listened to this song 64 times. But I'm sure there's times that iTunes hasn't captured. But, still, call it a hundred. Point is, I've listened to this song, and all of CAKE's stuff, many many times.

My iTunes computer outputs to my home stereo, and for the longest time, my home stereo was badly connected. I'm not sure what was wrong, but I got no equalization at all and lots of noise and hiss. But after my new carpet was put in, I took the time to carefully re-hook up my stereo and now it sounds so much better.

Back to the present. That song came on...

...and this time, unlike the dozens of times before, I heard a second, syncopated (is that the right word?) voice in harmony with John McCrea's voice. Never before, only today.

To be honest, most of those times were on an iPod and through Apple's own earbuds, but some of them were on this very home stereo system.

It's amazing what I can hear with new ears. • 1:52 PM 0 comments

Update on the smoking ban in Oregon

Holy crab! I can see the other side of the room!

Did not realize until last night just how much haze there is in a bar full of smokers.

I'm glad it's gone.

Also noticed the bouncers being a bit more lenient about the cover charge if they think you're stepping outside for a smoke. • 9:05 AM 2 comments

Doin' stuff automagically

I'm not sure if this will be interesting to anyone else but myself, but the process I used to produce my linked movie list was fairly complicated, and for myself and, perhaps, others, might be useful as an idea of how to get things done on a Mac (although there may be similar tools available on Windows).

I started by compiling the list of movies I had seen last year. Luckily I had the foresight of trying to post about, and tag, all of them. So getting the starting point was as simple as clicking that link.

I wanted the list for my year-end (year-beginning, I suppose) post to have each title linked to it's Internet Movie Database page. But when I contemplated doing a search for each one, by hand, and copying-and-pasting each URL, and writing out each link with all its tedious a href="" and angle brackets and whatnot.

Now, I use TextExpander to save me steps when typing out common phrases, and especially when blogging and typing out links. Such genius. I've long used similar programs going way way back; they run in the background, and when they detect a specific key combination, the program automatically expands that into the actual phrase. For instance, if I typed ahreff, TextExpander substitutes the code for a link, and moves the cursor to the right spot for me to type out the actual URL.

But that wasn't gonna cut it for a list of 50 movies. Even saving me a few steps, it would take forever, and with the added pain of having to copy and paste from my browser into another program... no. There had to be a way to automate it.

If I were a programmer, or better at shell scripts or scripting languages like Perl or PHP, I would spend a small amount of time writing a program to do all this for me. Alas, I'm a power user, but not a programmer. I have written small shell scripts, but I thought this was beyond me, at least now.

I could conceptualize the basic process, which is the first step:

1. Take list of names, one by one, and:
   
2. convert the name into a search term, then
   
3. use that search term to find the IMDB page
   
4. copy that resulting URL, then
   
5. construct the link text.
   
6. And insert it around the movie title in a new text document.
   
7. Repeat for each item in the list.
   

Luckily, I discovered that there's a way to create a URL that will force Google to give it's top hit for any search term, also known as "I'm feeling lucky". I don't remember where I saw it first, but this page describes the technique.

I thought that if I could figure out a way to insert the movie name into a Google "Lucky" URL, then having some way to automate opening up a bunch of those URLs would give me the list of IMDB addresses I needed.

Then it would just be a matter of creating the whole text that represents the linked movie name.

Not being a programmer, I still had an awesome tool to work with: Apple's built-in Automator. It's a GUI program where you drag and drop different modules representing each step of a workflow. It's beautiful for repetitive actions, though it has its limits. And it was perfect for me. Or so I thought. It actually took two different Automator workflows to get what I needed.

First, I had to do a bunch of search-and-replace on the list of movie names. A URL doesn't have spaces in it, so I replaced all the spaces with + signs, and took out all the other punctuation. When I tested the Automator workflow on a small sample, I realized that some movies were so popular that some other site, not the IMDB page, showed up as the first hit. So I explicitly added +imdb to each movie name, just to be sure. Then I turned each one into a link with another set of search-and-replaces.

Next step was to open the resulting list of links in Safari, and turn the first Automator action on it. This action had three steps:

Get Current Webpage from Safari -> Get Link URLs from Webpages -> New Safari Document.

This opened 50 new windows, in alphabetical order. Then I used the next workflow I'd figured out, which consisted of:

Get Current Webpage from Safari -> Copy to Clipboard (which copies the results of the previous action, or the IMDB address I needed) -> Set Contents of TextEdit Document (by appending) -> Run AppleScript (which was tell application "Safari" to close the front window" - an important step for working back through the 50 windows) -> Loop 51 times.

I actually had to reverse-sort the original list, because once I did the second step, I had a list of addresses with no way to tell, without opening them in a browser again, which movie they represent. IMDB uses a string of numbers for their webpages, not something human-readable, like, say, Wikipedia. But using Wikipedia had it's own problems, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

The final step took me a bit to come up with, but was pretty simple once I'd figured it out. Again, a programmer could write code that would string together each part of the link and spit out a fully-formed URL: front-half-of-IMDB-link + Movie Title + closing-tag.

What I did, instead, was copying each list into a spreadsheet (I used Google's free online one), each type to a column, then exported it as a text file. A quick search-and-replace to remove all the tabs from the tab-delimited list, and ta-da! I had my linked list.

I think, now, that I know enough to write a simple AppleScript to run each Automator workflow, but I'm not sure how to automate the final step. Still, it's a significant savings in time and effort.

If you start noticing lots of linked lists on my blog, now you'll know why. • 6:08 AM 1 comments

2008 stats

In 2008, the first full year I hosted this site on my own hardware, I received 899,943 hits, and 105,841 unique visits.

My daily average for the year is 2,465 hits from 290 unique visitors.

My averages have dropped some, which may or may not have anything to do with the tweaking I've done on how the stats are reported. Or maybe I just have fewer visitors.

Still, almost 300 people a day read the words that I type. That's a decent sized auditorium. If I could just get each of you to chip in a dime for every visit...

...cue wavy line fade...

Ha, ha! Just kidding. I do this because I like doing it, not because I want to extract money from y'all. If I ever start putting ads on here, or start a membership drive, I'll have to step up on the value of this site. For now, it's just my little internet soapbox. Knowing you're out there, reading, is more than enough.

Still, if you feel like chipping in, based on any entertainment value or knowledge you've gained, there's a PayPal link down there in the left sidebar if you feel so inclined. If not, don't worry about it. I rarely ask and I won't beg.

Happy New Year! 2009 will be rockin'.

Labels: meta

• 8:43 PM 0 comments

Movies of 2008

The following are all the movies I saw in the theater in 2008. It includes some second-run flicks because, for a while, I was attending the Independent Film Revival group's Monday movies.

I didn't think to keep track of any movies I saw on DVD or online or at friend's houses. Maybe I'll do that next year.

Each movie is linked to it's IMDB listing, and after each movie is a link to my post about it, if available; the link indicates how many stars I give it, on the standard 5 star scale.

This is 50 movies, and two of them I saw more than once ("Iron Man" three times and "Quantum of Solace" twice). That makes 53 trips to the theater, or just over one per week. Man, I really love movies.

• American Movie - ***
  
• Annie Hall - ***
  
• Atonement - ***½
  
• Boogie Nights - ***
  
• Burn After Reading - ****
  
• Charlie Wilson's War - ***
  
• Choke - ***
  
• Cloverfield - ***½
  
• Ed Wood - ***
  
• Expelled - ½
  
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - ***½
  
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall - ****
  
• Frost/Nixon - *****
  
• Get Smart - ** (missing vital ingredient of the series - Steve Carell is not Jewish)
  
• Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson - ***
  
• Hancock - ***
  
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army - ***½
  
• In The Company of Men
  
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls - ***
  
• Iron Man - ****
  
• Jumper - **
  
• Kung Fu Panda - ***½
  
• Leatherheads - ***
  
• Michael Clayton - ****
  
• Milk - ****½
  
• My Name Is Bruce - *
  
• No Country For Old Men - ****
  
• OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies - ****
  
• Persepolis - ****
  
• Pineapple Express - ** (probably **** if you're stoned)
  
• Quantum of Solace - ***½
  
• Role Models - **½
  
• Rushmore - ***½
  
• Secretary - ***
  
• Sing-Along Grease - ***
  
• Speed Racer - **
  
• Sweeny Todd - ***
  
• Synecdoche, New York - *****
  
• The Fall - ****
  
• The Royal Tennenbaums - ****
  
• The Spirit - **½ (probably * for anyone who doesn't love Eva Mendes' ass like I do)
  
• The Squid and The Whale - ***
  
• The Visitor - *****
  
• There will Be Blood - ****
  
• Tropic Thunder - ****½
  
• Vicki Christina Barcelona - ***
  
• Wanted - *½ (drops a whole star for the shitty attitude towards the audience at the end)
  
• War, Inc. - **
  
• Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden? - ***
  
• Zack and Miri Make a Porno - ***½
  

Now I'm going to hit "publish post" before I re-think my star ratings. Feel free to disagree with me. By the time anyone comments, I'll probably have changed my mind several times.

Labels: movies

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