A carnival of technology

Hey, everybody. The past couple of weeks have been a bit strange, so I’m going to do one of those choppy stream-of-consciousness entries. I hate stream-of-consciousness as a literary tool since it’s just plain lazy, so it’s a good thing that I never go back and read these things. Also, this isn’t really stream-of-consciousness, since I’m still using paragraphs and stuff like that, but the paragraphs have nothing to do with each other.

The most significant event was on Saturday: John Reeves Hall, who had been fighting cancer for the past year or so, passed away. Reeves was a good friend, and, though I feel like I ought to write something about this, the words that come to mind seem shallow. dcantrell wrote a nicer obituary (http://www.burdell.org/?p=352) than I’m able to, and Reeves’s diary of his fight with cancer is available at http://overcode.yak.net. Although it ends as a tragedy, the tale is inspiration of the finest sort. He kept his spirits throughout the whole ordeal. I suppose that it’s impossible to avoid an event like this—the loss of a friend—yet the death of someone so young cannot but evoke thoughts of one’s own mortality.

I tried taking my bike into work today. I thought that it would be a good idea to try it on a weekend to see whether or not a bicycle is a feasible means of locomotion on a weekday, and the answer is quite definitely, “No.” I parked my car in the lot off of Wileo by the county line, next to the river, and, though there are some nice bike trails between there and Riverside Dr, the hill from Riverside to Holcomb Bridge is kind of brutal. I’d estimate that it’s about a quarter of a mile uphill in medium traffic, but, since I’m incredibly out of shape, I had to stop every few minutes to catch my breath. To add to the fun, the section on Holcomb Bridge that crosses that creek is about the least safe section of road that I can think of. Somehow the memories of pedestrian fatalities on that section of road didn’t factor into my route planning. I did eventually manage to make it to the office, and I was able to get a ride back from a coworker who happened to be in the office on Saturday. When I got back to my car, the Roswell Park Police were there, either planning on towing my car or guarding it; I’m not sure which. I received an oral warning that the park closes an hour after sunset and there have been a lot of break-ins and blah blah blah. Biking into work from there totally isn’t worth it. Maybe the ‘burb would let me park there and ride into work. It wouldn’t save much gas, but it would still be some exercise. Also, I like alcohol and pizza.

I received a pamphlet today from State Representative Rob Teilhet. As someone who registered to vote last year, I’ve received a handful of mailings from local officials detailing their victories in the past year’s legislative battles, but this is the first to invite me to participate in town hall meetings. Favorite phrase: “he went and got a law passed.”

I still need to find a place to buy a needle and thread. I lost a button from one of my hawaiian shirts, and, though I vaguely remember how to repair this from that home ec. class I took in 7th grade, I have no clue where to get the materials to do so. So far my only attempted store, Target, the big-box store that depresses me less than Wal-Mart, has failed to deliver. Someone on the Internet has suggested that sewing kits are available as stray items, out of place in the aisles they call home, at Food Lion, the nearest of which is in Carollton. Someone else has suggested Wal-Mart, which, as noted above, makes me sad. Maybe I’ll try Michael’s. Sewing’s a hobby, right? I’ll probably pay too much, but I can walk there, so, something.

I don’t like the New Yorker. My daily adventures of clicking shiny things on the Web brought me to a review of a book that I happen to own, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s a somewhat odd book since it claims to be a treatise on the strictest of punctuations, yet it’s more of treatise on using punctuation as a mostly unregulated art. Punctuation marks each have a purpose, of course, yet that purpose is mostly in the mind of the writer. Punctuation as an art form is continually reinforced through the presentation of historical changes and uncertain cases, yet the New Yorker managed to ignore all of this, instead deigning it necessary to spend the first half of the critique tearing into the incorrect punctuation of the book, making at least one error itself, only stopping to acknowledge the purpose of the book in order to demonize that, too, as this can only be a failure for a novel that is overtly advertised as a manual on punctuation. Clearly, such a book cannot allow for inconsistencies. Apparently it’s also a sin to be British, since they’re a bit looser with stops in relation to quotations and other such things. Man, what a bunch of dicks. I think I’ll stick to Creative Loafing for my intellectual needs. Any time the phrase “nonrestrictive appositive” comes to mind, it’s probably time to step back and ask yourself, “Am I being a total jerk?” The answer, of course is “Yes.”

Apparently I’m three degrees of separation away from country music singers. Joe, a former coworker, now retired, invited me last weekend to a show led by one of his friends from college, Tony Arata, who has written songs recorded by people like Garth Brooks, Patty Loveless, and, most recently, Bonny Rait. That’s way better than Kevin Bacon. When was the last time you reached for a Kevin Bacon movie when you were feeling down?

I just threw out about $20 worth of food.

Last night, Moshe threw a party at his house out in distant extremes of northeast Cobb to celebrate his final weekend in the United States before his upcoming year or whatever in Spain. As in other times that Moshe has thrown a party, food was provided in a potluck fashion, with a request made that all dishes be vegetarian, out of fear that us gentiles will bring something non-kosher. I remember bringing some sort of sweet potato dish the last time, using a recipe from Mom, that was prepared in the biggest rush ever, since I woke up around 2pm for a 4pm party (Moshe learned a little of a lesson for this one and set the time at 5) with no ideas or ingredients for a vegetarian dish. It was pretty good, though I don’t think it went over well with the other party goers, favoring the store-bought vegetable lasagna and assorted breads, instead. Ungrateful bastards, all of them. Anyhow, this time, out of a desire to say that I brought bacon cheeseburgers, I bought some veggie burgers, veggie bacon, and veggie cheese. Holy crap, all of those things suck. The burgers, a brand recommended by my vegetarian sister, whom I had to call to find out where the veggie burgers and bacon are kept in grocery stores, were very reminiscent of the bizarre patty-shaped salads served at Brittain dining hall that I tried one time, late at night, after becoming bored with the chicken patties, the only other item still made available at 10pm. I think that Mike, eater of fish paste and bizarre Asian foods, was the only person to try one, and his reaction to them was not one of enjoyment. The veggie bacon was disgusting for trying to taste like bacon. The reddish strips of protein slurry seemed to depend upon the “NATURAL SMOKE FLAVOR” for their bacon taste, and it just tasted overpoweringly wrong. The soy protein offers no flavor, of course, so the only taste provided by the crumbling mass of vegetable matter is a sickly sweetness, a dead imitation by something that has never known death. It was pretty gross. Frying the strips of fake bacon did little more than make them warm and soak up all of the oil that I put in the pan.

I don’t mind vegetarians. I even tried being one myself in 2001, motivated in part by the realization that the line for crappy vegetarian food at Brittain was shorter than the line for crappy meat, and partly because a girl I liked at the time cared about animals and stuff. It wasn’t too bad, really, and, though I do enjoy the taste of flesh, I can live on a vegetable diet. What bothers me, though, is when people try to make meat out of vegetables. It’s not meat, and it will never taste like meat, no matter what you do to it. Reproductions through tofu and textured vegetable protein will always scream of falsity, and, if you’re seeking these products out, perhaps vegetarianism isn’t really your thing. If you want animals, eat animals. If you want vegetables, eat vegetables.

I did keep the fake cheese, though. I don’t know why I bought it in the first place—I suppose that I just wanted as many fake ingredients as possible, and I would have bought fake bread if I had found any—but it tastes pretty much like a Kraft single. A little less salty, perhaps, but still well within what’s expected out of fake cheese. I don’t have a definitive answer for why fake cheese is an acceptable food whereas fake meat is not, but my guess is because products like Kraft singles, the fake cheese’s inspiration, don’t pretend to be anything other than pretend cheese. Pretend bacon is not bacon, no matter what it claims, and I think that its uniquely foul qualities, acquired in the name of trying to taste like meat, prevent it from becoming the American cheese of animal products. Maybe if the manufacturers tried harder to create something palatable rather than something similar to their competition, fake bacon would have a place in the American refrigerator, but, for now, it belongs nowhere but the trash.

Nuclear Power. In the best hands, it is dangerous. In the hands of Lex Luther, it is pure evil. This is Superman’s greatest battle. And it is for all of us.

Rated PG
Rated A-II by the USCCB (link)

Starring Christopher Reeve (before the accident), Margot Kidder (before the breakdown), and Gene Hackman as an art-deco villian lost in an 80’s pop-culture world in this touching fish-out-of-water tale.

Viewed 2005-08-23 by susi, dcantrell, dane, mike, and dshea

Most bad movies seem to fall into one of two general categories: the exhausting, and the ridiculous. Superman IV is one of the later.

To me, Superman starts off at a disadvantage. Growing up, I preferred the Marvel characters to DC, since their powers were more specific. Characters like Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men all had a very specific set of powers, and adversaries and obstacles had to be overcome within the confinment of these powers. Sure, there were exceptions created as lazy plot devices, but for the most part Marvel characters were less capable of unlikely feats as DC’s Batman, whose powers extended as far as his fancy gadgets allowed, and Superman, whose powers merely had to be super. The original statement of Superman’s powers were that he could “leap 1/8th of a mile; hurdle a twenty-story building… raise tremendous weights… run faster than an express train… and that nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin!” (Action Comics #1, 1938, via superman.ws), and his powers have evolved ever since. In Superman IV, his powers apparently include super hearing, bionic vision, heat vision, x-ray vision, telekinesis, super breath, the ability to erase other people’s memories, the ability to fly through space, and the ability to prevent others flying through space sort of near him from dying. Maybe the telekinesis one could be better explained by someone more familiar with the history of Superman, but it still seems pretty lame that he can move things without touching them or using any obvious temperature altering rays from his eyes. And, finally, Superman is a bit of a jerk. Specific to this movie, Superman turns global crises into personal conflicts, exploits the relationships of his friends and coworkers, and at one point takes Lois Lane for a cross-country flight for the purpose of clearing his mind and, once she remembers that he’s Clark Kent and everything seems happy, erases her memory. Superman’s expanding powers have apparently turned him into a self-centered asshole.

So, as you can see, Superman IV doesn’t begin with the best of settings. In addition to Superman’s appearance as a lazily-written, unlikable character, the plot of the movie centers around a heavy-handed political message. After some wacky hijinks between Margot Kidder and Mariel Hemmingway at the newspaper and even more painful comic relief with Lex Luthor and the teenage stereotype at the chain-gang quarry, the goal of the movie eventually becomes to disarm the world. Obviously, the best diplomat to handle the threat of global thermonuclear war is Superman, someone who settles conflicts through super strength and mind control. After an unlikely sequence in which all the countries of the world launch their missiles into Superman’s space net, Superman unknowingly throws a box of something from Lex into the sun about halfway through the movie, creating Nuclear Man. Nuclear Man is a really dumb villian. Besides his unfocused goal of destroying everything in sight rather than simply destroying Superman and getting it over with, Nuclear Man’s weakness is shade. Fight inside, Superman! Ugh, eveyone’s an idiot.

Superman IV is a Golan-Globus sequel, and it shows. Unbelievable (even within the constraints established by super powers) action sequences are interspersed with tedious comedies—mostly based around Superman’s double identity—with no attention paid to pacing, characterization, or overall enjoyability. I can’t even remember what happened to Nuclear Man. I think the moon was involved. Maybe he got locked in a dark closet. This movie is dumb.

Hey, everybody! I spent the Labor Day weekend in Savannah visiting Kat. Apparently she’s dyed her hair black now. She also has a pet kitten now, who is adorable. I got some pictures of her (Isobel? I just remember that’s it’s spelled goofily.), which I will post when I’m feeling more motivated.

Savannah was beautiful, and I had a chance to ride around it a bit on my bicycle. While looking for lunch, I found some bike route signs that I think lead out to Tybee Island. I didn’t get a chance to go quite that far, but being able to go there on a bike seems like it would be a neat trip. About the only part of Savannah that really bugged me was River Street, since it seemed to me like a celebration of everything that’s wrong with tourism. You could have moved River Street anywhere else—any Florida city, a Caribbean island, Fisherman’s Wharf, even Atlanta’s Five Points if you put a canal through the middle of it—and it would be the exact same experience. For a city that claims to have so much character, I’m surprised that such a generic parade of restaurants and souvenirs is tolerated, both by the residents and the visitors whose money creates such a bazaar. I had a few drinks at the bar Kat works at while waiting for her to get off of work, and even this place, with the best Bloody Marys in town (which come out of a bottle) was just very unexciting. All the drinks at the bar were served in plastic cups. How lame is that? Besides reminding me that I hate tourists even when am I one, though, Savannah was quite a nice place. Sure, the historic district is riddled with poverty and crime, but I feel more comfortable there than I do out here in the ‘burbs. There’s just something about it, perhaps the oldness of everything, that has a very pleasant and calming effect, as if the place is trying to tell you that it stands for something, that it has it all figured out, and it’s best to just go along with it. Maybe it’s the Spanish moss. We don’t get any of that stuff north of Macon.

The drive to Savannah was the most boring thing ever, of course. I think that I-16 was twisted through the least populous areas of middle Georgia by design, emphasizing its purpose as no more than the Macon-Savannah connector. Of the 19 counties [1] I passed through on this wild ride, 11 of them were on I-16, and yet, excluding its endpoints, it only held three of the cities through which I passed [2]. It’s not that these counties don’t have cities, it’s just that their cities aren’t anywhere near I-16. I think that Laurens county was the most densely incorporated on my path, excluding Chatham and all those silly islands, and yet even there it seemed like I passed through Dudley, a city of 464 according to the 2000 Census, purely by accident, as if they mistakenly claimed I-16 while trying to acquire some land on the other side of the road.

In other news, upon my return to Smyrna, the Jonquil city, I managed to sprain my ankle in a few short hours upon arrival. Unlike Savannah, which is mostly flat and filled with slow-moving cars, riding a bicycle in the Atlanta suburbs is a truly harrowing experience, since everyone drives about 55, no matter the road, and it’s rather hilly, so it’s difficult at times to maintain a pace that’s more than a crawl next to the cars. Out of this fear of becoming a hood ornament, I usually ride sidewalks where possible in Smyrna. On Monday, while on the way to Barnes & Noble, I hopped off of the sidewalk on Cumberland Parkway or Boulevard or whatever it’s called near the h.h. greg greg to dodge a family that was walking on it, and, when I tried to get back on behind them, I found that the next ramp wasn’t so much a ramp as just a shorter curb. I hit a lip of two inches or so with my tires nearly parallel to it and went down in a pile of spinning wheels and swearing. Either the sounds of the crash or the foul language attracted the attention of the people I was dodging, but apparently I looked healthy enough while sprawled out on the grass that they just kept on going. I’d like to extend a big thanks to the guy across the street who at least stopped and asked if I was all right. Sure, I didn’t have any obviously broken bones or life-threatening injuries, but damn, that hurt. As someone whose scars come mostly from bicycle injuries, that was the most painful spill I’ve ever had, especially since my ability to walk is still impaired a day later.

My ankle isn’t broken (it doesn’t hurt like a son of a bitch, just half of one), but I may have sprained it or something. It’s not so serious that I can’t still hobble around, and, in fact, I had the stupid idea of continuing on to the bookstore as soon as I had picked the pieces of my headlamp out of the street, but it does hurt, and it’s bruised up in a rather unattractive manner since yesterday. During that accident I also managed to put a hole in the shoe of my other foot (along with the sock and the foot itself), which means I need to get new shoes now. Grr. I remember buying those during the last ice storm, so I don’t think I’ve had them even six months yet. What a waste.

Political boundaries along I-16 were determined mostly through the use of GDOT maps and occasional help from county GIS services.

[1] In order from Cobb: Fulton, Clayton, Henry, Spalding, Butts, Lamar, Monroe, Bibb, Twiggs, Bleckley, Laurens, Truetlen, Emanuel, Candler, Bulloch, Bryan, Effingham, Chatham

[2] In order from Smyrna: Atlanta, Morrow, Stockbridge, McDonough, Locust Grove, Forsyth, Macon, Dudley, Metter, Bloomingdale, Savannah