July 2005 Archives

It gets harder and harder to stay recharged after vacations these days, so we're heading out again, this time for a week in DC. We'll visit family, we'll visit all the fun kid spots, like the Holocaust Museum, the Vietnam Memorial... Not really interested in seeing the White House, though, until after they fumigate the place in 2009.

When I get back, I'll disappear into a work hidey hole for a few weeks. The critical performance tuning that I've been wanting to do for 6 months now, but which was never considered my most important task, has now suddenly become the most important thing in the universe to a lot of people. Every company, it's the same story..."that's not really a priority...that's not really a priority...that's not really a priority...OH MY GOD IT'S A DISASTER CAN YOU HAVE IT DONE BY TOMORROW?"

Sigh...Oh well, at least I get to work on something interesting. And there's that money thing.

I saw a guy mowing the grass at the DPS last week, just driving a big tractor around in the sun, and I was envious.

But then there's that money thing.

I'll have my laptop with me all week, so do lots of blogging and emailing in case I get lonely.

The IRA has called an end to the armed struggle and renounced violence as a political weapon.

Were they defeated militarily? No.

Was their base of support eroded by British armored vehicles rolling through their neighborhoods for decades? Hardly.

No, the end to this war (which lasted, depending on your perspective, either 40 years, 91 years, or 833 years) came about because the British government recognized that the only real solution was a political solution, and they reached out through back channels to negotiate a settlement with the IRA. Yes, you heard right: John Major's government *gasp* negotiated with terrorists. They attempted to prevent terrorism by trying to address the political and social root causes which would cause an otherwise normal young man to want to blow people up. And the end result is a major terrorist organization renouncing violence. Funny how that works.

For the whole story on how John Major's government came to this stunning realization and executed on it, once Thatcher was safely out of the way, I highly recommend Behind The Mask: The IRA and Sinn Fein by Peter Taylor.

To understand how British arrogance and ineptness transformed the 1960's IRA from a room full of toothless ideologues into one of the most fearsome terrorist organizations of the 20th Century, see The Irish Troubles: A Generation of Violence 1967-1992 by J. Bowyer Bell.

I hear from conservative pundits all the time about how the British really know how to deal with terrorists, they really know the score. Well, yeah, they do. But not in the way conservatives would like to think. Thatcher's Northern Ireland policy, much like Bush's Middle East policy, was a recipe for eternal war, and a miserable failure. Thankfully more rational humans eventually were able to influence events for the better.

We can only hope the same happens here. Eventually.

Sally: We are just going to be friends, OK? Harry: Great, friends. It's the best thing...You realize, of course, that we can never be friends.

Sally: Why not?

Harry: What I'm saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form - is that men and women can't be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.

Sally: That's not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.

Harry: No, you don't.

Sally: Yes, I do.

Harry: No, you don't.

Sally: Yes, I do.

Harry: You only think you do.

Sally: You're saying I'm having sex with these men without my
knowledge?

Harry: No, what I'm saying is they all want to have sex with you.

Sally: They do not.

Harry: Do too.

Sally: They do not.

Harry: Do too.

Sally: How do you know?

Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.

Sally: So you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive.

Harry: No, you pretty much want to nail them, too.

Sally: What if they don't want to have sex with you?

Harry: Doesn't matter, because the sex thing is already out there, so the friendship is ultimately doomed, and that is the end of the story.

Go here for the scientific analysis. Brought to you by the geniuses at Intellectual Whores.

Criticism:That's not true Answer:Yes it is. Q: Are you serious or is the site just satire? A: Nothing is just satire.

The stress of not having read the new Harry Potter yet and trying to dodge all the spoiler landmines in the blogosphere is killing me. I finish Tim Powers tonight, but Gina hasn't finished Potter yet so I'm gonna have to fight her for it.

I was hoping to go into it completely fresh, but I already know that something really huge happens, something dire, and now thanks to an accidental blog entry I know which character it involves. [Update: I've since been informed that I don't know as much as I think I know.]

If I wait a few more days I'm gonna accidently hear the whole damn thing and then I might just say "fuck it" and wait for the movie to come out.

As a group, y'all...shut the fuck up for another week, OK?

Tonight was our wilderness search and rescue training with the City of Austin. It was, in a word, bad-ass. (Or is that two words?)

We spent a couple of hours getting classroom training on basic orienteering, map reading, compass use, that sort of thing, and then carpooled down to Bastrop State Park. The objective was for us to break into teams and do a basic orienteering exercise, navigating to three predetermined markers and reporting back on GPS radio as we found each one. We'd do it once in the daylight, and then anybody who wanted to do so could try a second exercise after dark.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

When we got to the ICP (Incident Command Post), it was just about sundown and it was starting to rain, so the exercise instructors just gave us our instructions and our team assignments and said "go".

Oh, and since I had put down on the form that I had previous orienteering experience (which I did...once, in 1979, traipsing around Philmont with a bunch of Boy Scouts), the instructors put me down as a team captain.

Ulp.

It's drizzling, it's getting dark, and I am supposed to lead a bunch of total strangers out into the woods on a mission, and get them back safely, without getting lost, without getting hurt.

Did I mention that this was all off trail? Through ravines, through creekbeds, through brush thickets and poison ivy? At night?

We did great, though. We managed to find all of our objectives. We had no injuries, in fact we only had one person slide down a ravine a few feet but she was OK.

We were the last ones getting back to the ICP, around 11pm, and in fact most of the other teams had already got on the road back to Austin, which was a little embarrassing. Until we found out that most of the teams hadn't found all their markers, and one team had given up without finding any. I'm also pretty sure that of the teams which found all their markers, we found them all the fastest, we were just slow getting back home.

Yeah, we rocked.

A few pictures here, and more on the flickr blog.

This one is us at our first objective, marker 9:

This is the second objective, marker 34:

And this is us safely back at the ICP (the umbrella is kind of an in-joke...by then the stars were out):

Note how our shirts get progressively wetter as the night wore on. That's not rain any more, that's sweat. I kept having to wipe my compass with my sleeve when checking bearings because the sweat kept dripping onto it from my nose. And the picture lighting is really misleading...that's all from the camera flash, it was actually pitch black where we were, with nothing but flashlights.

I don't know about the other teams, but my team rocked. I'd get lost in the woods with these folks any time.

Without comment.

http://www.nipponham.co.jp/winny/kazari/

iam spent the week at Concordia's youth baseball camp, which was recommended by our neighbors whose sons are pretty awesome players, even if they are Yankees fans.

Today at lunch was the awards ceremony. 115 kids would get a Certificate of Participation, but only 12 kids would get trophies. I could tell Liam was on the edge of his seat, wondering if he was going to get one, but deep down inside I was prepared for the disappointment. I've never been much of an award winner myself, and this past year Liam has had a couple of letdowns where you could tell he thought he might get something, and he didn't. Story of my life, and I hate thinking it's gonna be the story of his too.

(Plus there was the whole disastrous basketball season at Rich Punk-ass Brat Youth Association, where he was put on a team full of kids who were older than him and lots meaner, but that's another story. Needless to say West Austin is thickly populated with a lot of 10 year olds who deserve a good smack, but their dads are coaches so what are you gonna do.)

Anyway, the funny thing about disappointment is that right about the time you've resigned yourself to it, something comes along to take it away from you.

Meet Liam, "Most Improved Player", with his bad-ass trophy:

Sara W. is back toying with the idea of blogging again. Everybody go leave her comments, maybe then she'll feel obligated to update it more than twice a year. Make her put that freshly minted BA in English to work!

"Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all unless it's been whipped with whips. Everyone knows that."

I went into the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie with a mix of excitement and skepticism. Skepticism because, well, I almost always hate remakes. Excitement because I thought (before I saw the previews) that maybe they were going to make something a little more true to the books than the Gene Wilder one.

Well, surprise on both counts. OK, I confess, I remember almost nothing about the books, but I'm pretty sure that lots of the new movie wasn't in them. But it didn't matter. This movie rocks.

Gone are the 45 minutes or so of sappy songs that precede the entry to the chocolate factory, the parts that everbody fast-forwards through. (Admit it, you know you do.) Gone is the simpering little blonde-haired wuss version of Charlie Bucket. And gone are the grotesque orange-painted oompa loompas.

I don't want to give too much away, so I won't, but the oompa loompas are perfect. The Salt family, the Beauregard family, the Gloop family, are all perfect. The Wonkavision homage to 2001 is brilliant. And the chocolate factory is as wondrous as you'd expect given that CGI has replaced all of the teetering styrofoam sets from 1971.

Depp's Wonka takes some getting used to...a psychologically-damaged, socially-inept, foppish recluse instead of Gene Wilder's smooth wise-cracker.

But the more I think about this movie compared to the old, the more I realize that the only thing the old movie had going for it was Gene Wilder. Take him away and it's a sappy, weak, grade-B musical. The new film is more of a complete package.

And Doxy, you need to get it just for the scene in the first ten minutes with the chocolate palace in India. You'll have to change your panties afterwards, but, well, most things that are worth it have a similar price.

We saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, and when I saw the menu special I couldn't resist. The Violet's Gum Special: tomato soup, roast beef with baked potato, and blueberry pie. Plus a glass of fizzy lifting liquid...sadly, I had to get the kid-friendly one instead of the champagne drink and I only got two rather lackadaisical burps out of it.

But better than the alternative. We tend to yell "Fart, Charlie, fart! It's your only hope!" when we watch the old one at the house. We're like that around here.

(And no, I did not turn violet, Violet.)

Yesterday Liam and I were watching the Red Sox when Gina came in to say that she saw a funeral go by with a flag on the casket. I told her it could have been any veteran, it doesn't mean it was necessarily somebody killed in the current war(s).

Liam said "Good thing it wasn't Uncle Chip", and so I explained to him that Uncle Chip was in the embassy inside something that's kind of like a giant fort, that he never leaves the fort and really only the soldiers who have to leave the fort are the ones who get hurt because the roads outside have bad guys on them.

He thought about this for a second, and then said, "Do the people who live in Iraq think we're the bad guys?"

I have to admit I don't think my long rambling vague answer satisfied him much. Fuck, what do you say about that to an 8-year-old that they'd understand?

I remember asking my mother a similar question when I was the same age. I liked drawing war pictures, and I remember remarking about how the Japanese were the bad guys in the war, and in my pictures. She pointed out that the Japanese were good guys now and that the war was a long time ago, and I said "oh yeah, Vietnam is the bad guys now". And I remember her saying something kind of vague and confusing and non-commital about how it's not always about good guys vs. bad guys.

All I knew was it was on the news every night. Vietnam and the Middle East. The Middle East and Vietnam. And some place called Belfast, which I thought was also in the Middle East since the guys with guns wore the same face masks all the time.

The events around the release of The Half-Blood Prince have left barely a dent around the house.

Cassidy still hasn't finished Order of the Phoenix after all these years. I think the overwhelming bulk of the thing just depresses her, and she's got a bunch of summer reading assignments to finish before middle school.

Liam kind of skimmed the first book, but he tends to think of Harry Potter as a movie series. The first movie came out when he was around 4. He likes to read, but he'd rather read Spiderman and Lemony Snicket.

Gina just finished Liquor, but she's rarely in a huge hurry to jump on the latest book. Busy, busy, busy, y'know.

And me? I'm still working on Last Call, and I refuse to start another book until I'm done with it. But lately I've been frittering away my valuable reading time playing around with my new PowerBook. And to be honest, I kind of skimmed a lot towards the end of Order of the Phoenix. That big battle scene just seemed like it was written with the camera shots already in mind...it was dull dull dreary and dull. I liked the book, but it could have been even better about 20% shorter. So I am actually torn between starting Potter next, or getting back into the next few volumes of Sandman. But the longer I wait, the more likely I am to run into spoilers in the blogosphere...what, Voldemort is Harry's father? Deja vu!

Bookwise here, it's been the opposite of the Perfect Storm. Just the Perfect Meh.

I said my mother's dead
Well I don't care about it
I said my father's dead
Well I don't care about it
It happens anyway
It happens anyway
We're on the edge of Burma
We're on the edge of Burma

Two hours of barely controlled mayhem. I don't know how many broken strings. Their guitars never made it off the plane, so they were playing with borrowed equipment and they still tore it up better than most kids half their age even dream of.

It was the usual crowd at these old-school punk reunion shows...older, and geekier. Kinda like the band. I saw Andy from KOOP, met some newer KOOP-ers. Saw several Spiderhousers as well. What is it with the old punk bands that they bring in all the recovering drunks?

Both bartenders at the outside bar have almost full body coverage from Chris Trevino, so we chatted tattoos for a while. "Uh, Ray...what were you doing at the bar?" Dude...they have Red Bull on tap. They sell it by the pint. "High as a kite on a windless night...."

Like a dork, I completely forgot to bring my camera. Plenty of other people had them, though, and I've run across a few on flickr. This one, by somebody whose blog is called So Dig This Big Crux, which means she gets it (Circe, have Karl explain it to you), technically has me in it, you just can't see me:

See tall curly-haired boy on the right? See bald guy in front of him? See short hot Asian girl on the left? I was behind bald guy, in front of curly haired guy, right night to hot Asian girl. It was loud standing there.

I love that this music is back, but I have mixed feelings too. Remember when we were 19, 20 years old? And people old enough to be our parents were still going to see The Who and Crosby Stills & Nash and still mourning the Beatles? And there were kids our age who listened to nothing but 60's music, oblivious to all the new underground music around them that was just as cool?

Is it just pathetic and sad that the older I get, the more comfort I derive from Mission of Burma and the Minutemen and Wire and Gang of Four? Or is it more pathetic and sad that there are kids now who live in a past that they never experienced? More and more I am meeting people in their 20's who live for Burma, for Joy Division. It's like a nostalgia for this past when alterna-rock was truly underground, when you couldn't see mosh pits in stadiums...it's almost the same as the 60's nostalgia that some folks had in the 80's.

Or is this not sad, but just the natural evolution of music? After all, music is not good and bad depending on how old it is. I don't really think it's sad, my first instinct is to think it's kinda cool. That this music that we thought was so important when it was happening is now appearing to be even more important when you view it in its historical context. And sometimes you can't shut me up about the past when I run into some kid who thinks it's "so coooool" that I got to see the Minutemen or the Big Boys or Negative Approach.

I guess it's just that when finally I left KOOP for good a few years ago, I stepped off the train of obsessing over fanzines and new releases and new labels, and just started listening to whatever feels comfortable...and a little part of me tells me that that's what it feels like to get old.

OK, I'm rambling and I haven't had my coffee yet.

Karl, you're an old man, what's your take? Karl? Has anybody seen Karl?

Will somebody pull Karl out from under that pile of strippers for a second?

Turns out the Mission of Burma profile on Myspace is actually being run by Roger Miller himself, and Clint Conley also has a profile there.

I sent Clint an email the other day, since he and I have some fairly important things in common...he had his own struggles with alcohol and other substances back in the day and has been sober for a long time.

The reunited Burma played in Austin at La Zona Rosa during SXSW 2004, when I had less than six months under my belt, and it was my first time back in a nightclub after having given it all up. So I was a little nervous, to be honest. Am I going to want to drink? Am I going to have fun? Am I going to be miserable and bored?

Turns out I had a blast. (It also turns out that most people at the club don't drink nearly as much as I remember they did. Who knew?) But it was a special added bonus knowing that another sober guy was there, too, up on stage playing the bass in typically monstrous fashion.

So today I get a very nice email back from Clint. These Burma fellas, despite being rock gods walking the earth, are very nice regular guys as well.

Clint has a band of more recent vintage, Consonant, which also features former Bedhead and Codeine members. I haven't heard it, but I plan to go out and buy some this weekend.

Burma tonight at Emo's. If you're in Austin, absolutely do not miss this show.

I got work done on Monday adding actual color to the tattoo, instead of just the black and grey that's gone on it up til now. I'll post current pictures when it's stopped peeling, but these pictures here were taken before the most recent session, and are the first pictures to show the black swan which was filled in back on Memorial Day.

The lighting on these is a little wonky, since we took them in the back yard right around sundown and Gina is still getting used to the new camera, but the first one came out pretty clear.

The color on the flowers looks pretty cool (photos soon, I promise), although a little more blue in the petals than I intended. I'm going to see if he can sharpen up the white next time around. He also plans to add a blueish sheen to the swan and also go over the swan outline again to make it stand out more. That and a little touching up of the background and it'll be done.

Weeeeee!

I've just read on Stan's blog that Usenet and rec.arts.bodyart icon Keith Alexander has been killed in a bike accident.

I haven't kept up with RAB in many years, and I can't say that I knew him well, but I always remembered him as one of the good ones.

It's a sad sad day.

"We have to do this song because we have to do it..."

Today I got this friend request at my Myspace account:

Hi Ray

Mission of Burma would like to be added to your Myspace friends list.

By accepting Mission of Burma as your friend, you will be able to send
Mission of Burma personal messages, view Mission of Burma's photos and
journals, and you will be able to interact with each other's friends
and network!

OK, I realize this is probably their publicist running this, and I just got added because I belong to the MoB group on Myspace and I'm in Austin and they're playing here Friday. And they have almost 2000 friends on their list, so it's not like I'm special or anything.

But still. Fuuuuuuck. You have no idea how important this band, and all their spinoffs (Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Volcano Suns) have been to me for the past 20 years. Getting an email like this is like getting a personal email out of the blue from Wire, or Gang of Four, or the Gun Club or Husker Du.

The internet just gets weirder and weirder and smaller and smaller.

No pink haired girl, she's off today, but the other employees were just as cool, even if lacking in alterna-style.

I am now blogging from my PowerBook G4.

I timed the setup. From start to finish, it took me 22 minutes to get myself started up and on the net. And that includes time for putting on appropriate mood music (The Saints), finding a sharp knife to cut the tape holding the box closed, unpacking, plugging it in, turning it on, futzing around with my wireless router (I had to turn off WEP temporarily until I can figure out how the keys work), and registering with Apple.

If it wasn't for the WEP issue, I wouldn't have even taken the User's Guide out of the shrink wrap.

This shit makes Dell look kinda sad.

I am so switching. Today.

I ran across Remote Desktop Client for Mac, which lets you remote-desktop to a PC from a Mac client.

This was the only thing keeping me from taking my PC outside and releasing some tension with a sledgehammer.

And since I discovered this site, my PC has been blue-screening every 15 or 20 minutes or so. Desperately trying to prevent me from researching Powerbooks. God, he so wants to be Hal.

"Open the Apple Store URL, Hal."

"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. Beginning dump of physical memory..."

A quick check of the finances looks good.

Get ready, pink-haired Apple store girl. I'm coming for you!

Yesterday I was in the Apple store at Barton Creek mall picking up a gift card for a birthday present for one of the kids friends, and gazing wistfully at the iBooks...if I didn't absolutely require Windows Remote Desktop for telecommuting, I'd switch in a heartbeat. (And if you can tell me how to do something similar with a Mac that doesn't involve VNC, hit me.)

Anyway, the girl who helped me was a very charming former bike messenger with pink hair, a few tattoos, and lots of piercings. And while we chatted about notebooks and iPods and biking and tattoos, she mentioned that her manager gives her a fair amount of grief about her appearance.

I was slightly, well, flabbergasted.

"You're kidding. Aren't you an Apple employee?"

"Yeah, we all are."

I asked her if she had access to the company employee directory and sure enough she could get to it right from the computer at the register, so she pulled me around to peek over her shoulder and I said "Look up Jeff Dauber".

Jeff's goofy bald noggin and stretched ear piercings popped up into view. (Ya gotta admit, Karl, that's a big goofy Jeff-grin he's got there.) She said, "Oh, cool!"

"Now look up Karl MacRae".

"Ha! Elvis! That's awesome."

"So next time your boss gives you shit about how you look, show him how they do things back in Cupertino."

I think I need to write this manager guy a letter and tell him what a great asset to the store his pink-haired employee is.

Oh for fucks sake. My daughter just started IMing today, and already she's got that weird language virus:

(16:47:34) Cassidy: yo when r u going 2 b home
(16:47:45) Ray: uh...cassidy?
(16:47:54) Cassidy: yah
(16:47:55) Cassidy: ha
(16:47:57) Cassidy: ha]
(16:48:02) Ray: don't type like that. i hate that.
(16:48:08) Ray: "use your words"
(16:48:08) Cassidy: ok
(16:48:23) Cassidy: when are you going to be home

So I probably blew it here, by making it something that Daddy disapproves of and thus a tool of rebellion. But I need to figure out how to convey to her that the kids who type like that are the kids who listen to Usher and Justin Timberlake, and that the really cool kids who listen to Tegan & Sara and Green Day all know how to spell.

I guess I don't really have anything profound to say about the London bombings. I've tried to summon up something coherent...some kind of outrage against extremism, or cynical comments about the Bush administration, or analysis of where this is all going. But you can find all that elsewhere.

I've tried to somehow relate it to things I know a lot about, like the IRA, but I can't really make sense of the analogies.

"Ich bin ein Londoner"....eh. I've been to London, once, but not to any of the places involved.

All I feel is a kind of numb sadness. Or a sad numbness is more accurate. More numb than sad. And relieved. I feel relieved that I don't know anybody in London. Relieved that it didn't happen in Boston or New Orleans or Houston or San Francisco. Relieved that another news day went by with nothing bad happening to the embassy in Baghdad. And a tiny twinge of guilt that while all this is going on, all I can think about are my own selfish wishes, my own gladness that "hey, everybody I know is OK."

It's a sad, fucked-up world we live in.

I survived five days at the in-laws house. In a rural area near a suburb of a suburb of Fort Worth. Five days of eating too much, poolside reading, boredom, relaxation, baseball, etc, etc.

I got a new toy the first day up there, a Canon Powershot A520. Lots of new pictures on the flickr page, hopefully of slightly better quality than my usual. I'll have more to say about the Red Sox game later; the pictures will have to do for now.

Be forewarned, new toy == new hobby == Ray driving everybody batshit like he always does when he's got a new obsession. So there are lots of sequences like "what kind of pictures can I take without leaving the hammock?"

and, "hey, I wonder what all these buttons do?"