Town ride
On a crisp and slightly chilly day, did an in-town ride with Caesar. 23 miles. Fun.
Perfect day for riding
What a day. Perfect weather–upper sixties, little wind, and the air was so clear I almost thought my vision was improved. Needless to say, I took this opportunity to go for a ride. Went down to Buda with Caesar. 45 miles.
Gosford Park
Saw Gosford Park today. Good movie. Like other Robert Altman movies, it involves a lot of really good actors all talking at the same time. In this one, many of them were speaking in accents that I had a little trouble with, and the relationships between the characters were occasionally mystifying, but in the end, the main points came through quite clearly. Ornate plot, ornate settings, lots of layers, and a few interesting twists and turns. Joe-Bob says “Check it out.”
Auditory obliviousness
I’ve heard it said that a mother of a newborn has olfactory immunity to the smell of her baby’s shit. I think dog owners must enjoy a similar acoustic immunity. Two of my neighbors have dogs that like to howl or bark. A lot. When one gets going, that starts the other, on and on in a vicious cycle. If I go outside and holler “Cleo, shut up!” Cleo’s people will notice that and bring her inside. But Cleo’s much louder howling? That they don’t notice.
Clown bike
Well, somewhat belatedly, I have received my birthday gift from my parents. They got me a clown bike, reckoning that was the one kind of bike I don’t already have (anyone who has a front-wheel-drive recumbent trike is pushing the limits). I put this thing together and rode it around the house. Made me feel like Artie Johnson on Laugh-in.
My parents have a great sense of humor.
360
Rode 360 with Caesar today. 27 miles. Excellent weather–sunny, blue sky, cool but pleasant. Wind was from the north, so we rode southbound on 360, and I was just jamming up the ascents with the wind at my back.
Stopped at Amy’s Ice Cream after for shakes. I had a coffee-ice-cream shake, C had Belgian chocolate. Also on the menu was one of Amy’s inimitably whimsical flavors, Copstop, which turns out to be coffee and donuts.
Chicago: home for the holidays
I returned on Thursday from a 10-day trip to Chicago, Dec 24 to Jan 3. It was a pretty good trip.
There’s a longstanding tradition of Christmas dinner at the home of my high-school buddy Forrest’s mother. This is one of my main reasons for flying up to Chicago for the holidays. My sister Lissy and I went this year. It was kind of a let-down. None of my peers were there except for Forrest’s brother Hamilton, who I don’t really get along with. The tradition of going bowling after dinner was also broken, though Lissy and I did drive past the Waveland Bowl alley and made obeisance as we passed.
For much of my trip, I crashed at Lissy’s new apartment, a basement unit with heated floors in Old Town. Pretty cozy, and it’s fun mapping out the hot-spots in the floor.
There’s an exhibit of Van Gogh and Gauguin going on at the Art Institute right now (I am tempted to call this Van Gogh Gauguin a-go-go). I walked down from Lissy’s, got there at 10:30 AM, and discovered that show was sold out for the whole day. Oh well. I figured I could buy tickets over the phone for a later date if I wanted to. I decided to go for a walk instead. I wound up going for a really long walk, which is one of my favorite things to do in Chicago. I took a zigzag course all the way up to my old address at Roscoe and Halstead, then zigzagged down to the building where I grew up on St James Pl, and finally worked my way back to Lissy’s. I was back before she was off work for the day, so I stopped into a nearby coffee shop, found a copy of the Onion (cool!), and made myself quite content with that and a big latte. My feet were sore. My father estimated I walked 15 miles, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch.
Saw Lord of the Rings on this trip. Good movie. I was just finishing up the trilogy around the time I saw it, so that was good timing. It was uncanny how closely some of the images matched the mental images I formed reading the book–Gandalf, the giant statues on the river, Weathertop, Moria, etc. Some things were different than I imagined, but in many cases, more impressive. Also saw Monsters, Inc on this trip, which was a great movie. Finally, I went to an exhibit of Dale Chihuly’s glass art at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. This was a high point of the trip–the art was fantastic, and the setting was genius. I took some pictures.
New Year’s Eve was spent at a friend-of-a-friend’s place. I was invited along sort of as a tag-along guest, I suppose. It was OK, but nothing memorable. New Year’s Day was my folks’ typical bash, with a vast quantity of good food. Chili, turkey, various salads, dips, and sauces, numerous deserts. I ate a lot.
Travel was uneventful, but had the strict security checks that are now de rigeur. I set off the metal detector at O’Hare even though the only metal on me was the zippers and rivets in my jeans and boots, and my eyeglasses–no keys or change or anything like that. Of course, there’s some metal in me too, but that’s never set anything off. I think the metal detector was calibrated to be too sensitive.
Anyhow, it’s good to be home.
Manor back-loop
Rode the Manor back-loop with Susan today. 35 miles. Couldn’t ask for nicer weather–it must have hit 80°F. Sunny, little traffic, light winds. Perfect. Really weird that it is supposed to get down into the 20s tonight.
Copy-protected CDs
So we’re starting to see Copy-protected CDs from one of the major media conglomerates, Vivendi/Universal. The point is to make it impossible to rip MP3s from them (which, even under the absurd Digital Millenium Copyright Act isn’t necessarily illegal, I don’t think), but the net effect is that copy-protected CDs simply will not play in many computer CD-players, or even some plain-old CD players. If you buy one of these, return it as defective.
I’ve asked amazon.com to post a notice on their info page for every copy-protected CD they sell, so I’ll know not to buy it. Perhaps if enough people make the same suggestion, they’ll do it. This should make Universal sweat a little.
Hic
Party at DuShun’s. Guiness. Rum. Pete’s Ale. Sangria. Oh yeah, I’m going to have the bedspins tonight.
Postscript
A postscript to that last entry:The next morning, I discovered I had a flat on my back tire. I must have been riding with a slow leak, I reckoned, since I didn’t notice low pressure when I was riding.When I patched the tube, I discovered a complete nail was poked all the way through the tire. That’s unusual.
Three days in one
I love those days that are like two or three days rolled into one. Friday was just such a day. In observation of my b-day, Jenny took my out to a movie and lunch. First we went by Flight Path, where we figured out how to start up the wireless networking on her fancy-schmancy new Powerbook G4. It worked, and that was cool. Ram was there, he came over and was pretty wowed by the machine.Then, after doing a little web-surfing and caffeinating, we headed over to the re-opened Highland 10 movie theater. Highland 10 used to be owned by one of the big chains, but they closed it. Not a surprise, the place was kind of a dump, and some of the auditoriums smelled noticeably of mold. Well, it has been re-opened by some penny-ante operation that not only has done nothing to remedy the mold situation, but has done a laughable job of keeping up such infrastructure as remains. Case in point: the RESTROOM sign was made by cutting a template out of electrical tape and cardboard. This might have been a 2nd-grader’s class project.The movie we saw was the new Ocean’s Eleven, which was quite entertaining. Not the most cerebral of movies, but that’s fine. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. He’s good.After that we went to lunch at Kim Phung, a big Vietnamese joint. Noodles, spring rolls, Vietnamese coffee. Good. Then we stopped at the My Thanh grocery next door, where we amused ourselves greatly looking at strange food products and purchasing some of them. I bought two packs of these gummy ginger candies that are just fantastic. They come in what look like kretek packages.
Jenny dropped me off at home, where, lucky me, my recently ordered firedancing video had just arrived, so I watched that.Tracy was having a little happy-hour get-together at Opal Divine’s, so I then made my way down there by bike, meeting her and some of her friends. Caesar was at another table with another group of friends, oddly enough. Jenny showed up on foot (she had gone for a run) and she had my birthday present with her, a very slick leatherman. As Jenny might put it, it’s juicy. I like it.I then rode to the Blue Genie Art Bazaar, where Shanti (among many others) was having an exhibit/sale of her stuff. I hadn’t seen Shanti in, like, forever, so I was looking forward to going. The place is a little hard to find, and as I was making my way there, what do I see but the distinctive yellow Beetle driven by my also long-not-seen friend Audrey, who is headed the wrong way trying to find it. We meet up and say hi.The Blue Genie warehouse is a huge place, really cool. I saw a woman working there who works at Vulcan Video, who I only know because she looks curiously similar to someone else I know. She pointed me to Shanti, and Shanti and I had a brief chance to catch up. Shanti introduced me to Rory Skagen–one of the Blue Genies, and an artist whose work I really dig. There was lots of interesting art to look at, and lots of interesting people-watching to boot. The postcard for the event promised firedancing, and it turns out the firedancers were Sage and Natalie. I asked Sage “need a bucket man?” and she did, so I volunteered for that. John showed up.Sage, despite having recently suffered some nasty burns, and despite a goopy gravel driveway to perform on, put on a typically excellent show, as did Natalie and, what’s her name, Addie (?) who performs with a flaming hula-hoop.After the show, I bumped into a friend of Justin and DuShun’s, Jay, said hi to him, and waved hello to Raq. Said my goodbyes and headed out, catching up with Audrey as I left.I turned north on Springdale, took that to Airport, and decided that, even though Airport is a pretty nasty road to ride on, it would be the most direct way home, so I took it. It was the first–and second–time I’ve been chased by a dog on an urban ride. And they were both junkyard dogs, too. They didn’t get close though. Phew. Made it home feeling totally jazzed, and decided to record the day for posterity.
Less-than-total recall
Brains are funny. Today, for example, my brain did something funny by recalling a moment from 9 years ago.
I had just moved back to Chicago from Tokyo, and was visiting with some friends. They had rented the movie The Running Man, and we watched that. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a dystopian sci-fi flick in which enemies of the state are entered in a gladiatorial-combat game show (hosted by Richard Dawson, nice touch). When the movie was over and the TV signal came on, what was showing but American Gladiators. For those of you who haven’t seen it, this is a gladiatorial-combat game show (sort of). I had to hold my head to keep it from exploding. “That was supposed to be science fiction!” I shrieked. “What has happened to my country in my absence?”
I guess it’s not only brains that are funny. The world can be pretty funny too. Funny-strange and funny-ha-ha.
Birthday reflections
My birthday has the funny tendency of coming near the new year, and so I get a double-whammy opportunity for reflection. With my birthday nigh upon me, I was in a reflective mood tonight, and in a rare moment, started feeling sorry for myself–this has been a tough year in some ways, and in some ways I felt that I had been stagnating or even moving backwards. A few more moments of thought made me realize that even if there is a kernel of truth in that, the idea that I have any reason to feel sorry for myself, or that I have been moving backwards overall over the past 365 days, is just ludicous. I’ve expanded my circle of friends greatly, tried new things, gotten interested in something new. I can’t complain.
firenight: scary moment
Another Tuesday, another firenight. For the first time ever, I got tangled badly enough that I had to have my safety person put my wicks out–in a behind-the-back move, my right chain got looped around my left wrist and I couldn’t shake it loose. Somewhat amazingly, I didn’t get burned (at least, not in that incident). My other two sets were OK, though, and I tried the 5-beat btb weave for the first time with fire. That went pretty well.
The finger-wand design process
This morning, I shipped off a set of fire gauntlets to a customer. It’s a funny thing: in my fire-gear business, finger wands (which are sisters to fire gauntlets) have not been my most popular item, but have occupied an inordinate amount of my attention. I think I’ve gone through something like 9 design revs on them, if you count major and minor changes. Getting a drill press was a real breakthrough, as it allowed me to use tubing instead of wiring, and I like tubing much better. These fire-gauntlets, though, they’re the first finger-wands (or wand-like product) that I’m really happy with. I can imagine improvements, yes, but this set really balanced competing demands pretty well.
The $3000 scooter
The Segway. Gee. It’s a scooter. A $3000 scooter. Yes, it’s technically cool, but in terms of its practical applications, I am left wondering “so what?” What can this do that a bike, cargo trike, or conventional scooter cannot do? I guess it can save the rider from getting a little bit of exercise. Ooh, there’s a benefit. Pardon my sarcasm.
Dean Kamen has already come up with more important applications for the gyroscopic stabilization system in this toy, which, for some reason, never got much press.
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Saw The Man Who Wasn’t There today. Pretty bleak. Like many of the Coen Brothers movies, it had an austere feel to it. The cinematography–all black-and-white–was beautiful. Very subtle shadings. A reminder that we still haven’t figured out color the way we’ve figured out B&W (I say “we” as if I have anything to do with it. Hah.). And while the story had a lot of film-noir elements to it, I wouldn’t quite call it film noir itself. There was a little too much nuance for that, not the cut-and-dry severity I’d expect in real film noir. And just because it’s B&W doesn’t mean its film noir, anyhow. A good movie.
Blue skies for a change
After a few really crappy days, we had a really nice one today. Blue skies, warm temperatures. Got out for the first time in a few days and worked with my chains. Caesar called and we agreed to go for a ride. We wound up getting off to a late start, and had to keep the ride short to beat the sunset, but we wound up doing a really fun in-town ride on quiet city streets. Fast and hilly. About 18 miles.
Time-shifted rain
Weather last night was very cold for Austin, with freezing rain. This morning, the trees were iced over. As the day warmed up, I started hearing what I thought was rainfall, even though the sky was clear. I realized it was the ice melting off the trees. So in a way, it really was rainfall, it just had to wait until the morning to reach the ground.