A carnival of technology

Man, am I glad that’s over. I’ve spent the last week and half or so away from home for various holiday revelries, and I’m about sick of these special days for a good while. No one’s getting any more celebration out of me until Groundhog’s Day, at the least.

I kicked things off with a drive to Alabama to spend Christmas with the parents. I’m really bad at picking light reading (I brought along a copy of V. this time), so I wasn’t always able to concentrate enough to thus fill the lulls, but I kept myself occupied for most of the time. I worked on my sister’s bike for a bit, so hopefully she’s now riding around Savannah with a mountain bike instead of the slightly more inappropriate BMX bike she had been using. All of the usual Christmas rituals were performed: we ate cookies, cooked some kind of an animal, exchanged gifts and went to watch TV instead of finishing the job of cleaning up the wrapping paper and boxes. I got some warm socks and some kind of wine out of the deal, which is pretty nice, as well as a bicycle workstand, which is very nice but would have been useful that day I was replacing Kat’s derailleur cables. El Niño Jesus is big on timing and surprises, so I just got to get a little joke out of it too. Hehe. Cables aren’t really difficult, and Kat’s bike at least has a kickstand, so I don’t mind too much, but I did find it kind of funny.

The present I enjoyed the most, though, was the one that Kat and I got for mom and dad. Wanting to give them something fun to do together, we got a PS2, a pair of wireless guitar controllers and a copy of Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is a rhythm game made by Harmonix along the lines of Frequency, except that instead of hitting buttons at the right times to unlock a flashing psychedelic tunnel of sound, you rock out with a fake guitar, using five buttons along the neck to choose notes and a strum bar to play them. It’s pretty rad. I guess all those nights playing Amplitude on Mike’s PS2 paid off, since I picked it up pretty quickly. I was able to play it most of the way through on the medium difficultly level, unlocking all of the regular songs, and we took turns facing off in the multiplayer mode. I hope that mom and dad enjoy the game as much as I did. I think I’m going to have to get a system of my own now.

My after Christmas plan was to drive up with dcantrell to New Hampshire on the 27th for his New Year’s bash, after which I would fly home. With that in mind, I left Alabama the day after Christmas for home. I spent long enough back at my apartment to get all the stuff out of my car, do a load of laundry, and then drive off again. I parked at a MARTA station (airport parking is for chumps) and rode with David deep into the heart of Gwinnett. In the interest of an early morning start, I was offered and accepted a bed in the Cantrell’s house in Snellville, where everybody’s somebody. After a delicious breakfast made by Mrs. Cantrell, David and I headed out around 8:30 on the 27th to points north. It was a day of new experiences for me: I ate my first McRib when we stopped for lunch (I could have done without the pickles, and that slab of mystery meat really isn’t so great, either), and I got to experience my first turnpike-style service center since those not-at-all-remembered family vacations through Ohio or wherever. We stopped at the incredibly dirty Maryland House on I-95 and ate at Roy Rogers—also a new thing for me—for some unexciting chicken. Mashed potatoes would have been really nice, but they were out and about to close. Boo to Maryland House Roy Rogers. We stopped for the night in North East, MD (Dear Maryland, if you’ve run out of town names, you should stop making towns. Your friend, David) and began anew in the morning.

The tolls through the northeastern states were a bit unusual to my free-driving Southern sensibilities, and the traffic kind of sucked through Connecticut, but other than that the drive was pretty uneventful. We picked up one of David’s coworkers and the coworker’s girlfriend in New Jersey and made it to Nashua intact. Thus began my week-long residence on David and Chris’s couches and a host of New England experiences.

One thing that I wanted to try in New England was Moxie, America’s oldest cola. I had believed at one point that Moxie must be some sort of well-kept secret, a delicious New England treat so wonderful that, were it to be exported, supply could not match the demand and chaos would rule. I learned before trying it that this is most definitely not the case, so my desire to find the stuff instead became for the sake of curiosity, much like the reason I tried Vegemite that one time. Some population group enjoys the stuff, so I felt I would better understand my fellow man if I were to know the taste. It sucks. I describe the taste as “carbonated bitters.” Sonny, who arrived on the 30th, described it as “rum and coke with really, really bad rum and no alcohol.” We’re both a little bit right. I now wonder whether it’s some kind of New England practical joke.

David and Chris also took me candlepin bowling, another unpleasant New England experience. Some guy in the ’50’s (which might mean there’s still someone alive that I could punch in the face) in Boston devised a bowling game using a small, grapefruit-sized ball, narrow lanes and a set of straight, narrow pins. You get three bowls per frame, and the pins aren’t cleared between bowls, so you can use fallen pins, or “deadwood,” to knock down other pins, but even that doesn’t help. The pins are spaced such that, even if you were to perfectly hit the head pin, you’ll only knock down that pin and three or four behind it. I’ll admit that I’m not a good bowler, but I can still get a strike now and again and, in most games, at least break three digits. Between the four of us playing, we were unable to collectively cross 300 for either of the two games we played. Candlepin bowling sucks. It’s extremely frustrating, and I’m not convinced that it’s possible for anyone to ever bowl a strike. I don’t see why New Englanders have to be such masochists. I thought the weather was supposed to take care of that.

To complete a hat trick of disappointment, I also sampled some of the Conecuh Ridge whiskey that I brought along with me, which, per Act of Alabama 2004-97 is the official state booze of Alabama. The resolution, introduced as HJR100 during the 2004 special session, was overridden by Governor Bob Riley who felt that the state shouldn’t go around endorsing commercial products and maybe special sessions shouldn’t be used to discuss what to drink. The legislature in turn voted that the Governor is a big wimp and overrode the hell out of that veto, putting Clyde May’s product on the shelves with the state’s approval until December of that same year when Kenny May, the son of the late moonshiner Clyde, was arrested for various bootlegging-related crimes, causing a cessation of the distribution of his product. All of that’s since been cleared up, so I was given the privilege of spending a ridiculous amount of money (about half again the cost of Maker’s) for what I could only believe would be a delightful beverage. Besides the ridiculousness of the fact that Alabama has an official state spirit at all, there were a few things different I found interesting about Conecuh Ridge. Firstly, Kenny May claims that the original product was only aged for one year, which, due to the Alabama summers, was sufficient. I don’t really believe this, and the actual product, distilled and aged in Kentucky (also ridiculous) (Kenny claims that he wants to move the aging down to Alabama) is aged for four years, but it was at least a weird little tidbit. Secondly, the whiskey is aged in used charred oak casks, which is why the whiskey carefully claims to be a whiskey made from bourbon mash rather than a bourbon outright, which, legally, it is not. Used bourbon casks are far from useless—scotch and snooty beers use them all the time—so I thought that this might be an interesting change. The shit tastes like freaking raw moonshine. It’s as rough as I-20 and as smelly as Courtland. It gets you drunk, but so does the vodka that comes in a plastic jug.

Chris and David have Guitar Hero II, so I did have some fun while there. I kind of wish I’d gotten this game for mom and dad instead of the first one. It has a cooperative multiplayer mode, instead of only the more competitive mode in the first, where one player takes lead and the other rhythm or bass, and the songs seem to be overall more awesome. Guitar Hero II includes songs like “Miserlou” and “YYZ” as well as a ten-minute version of “Freebird.” It’s pretty sweet. I got pretty good at “Message in a Bottle,” set a high score of 191000 in normal mode, and still have that stupid song stuck in my head. If that had been one of Sting’s songs with that umbrella not big enough line, I probably would have borrowed David’s glock and shot myself by now. It sure is fun to play fake guitar, though.

As for the New Year’s party itself, I’m afraid that I wasn’t able to enjoy it very well. The 30th seemed to be the day for everyone to fall ill, and I started things off by waking up that morning with gut problems and a fever. After typing the symptoms into the Intertubes later, I probably had food poisoning, but whatever it was, I spent most of that day lying on the couch. I didn’t fully recover until the 2nd, so I didn’t enjoy the party as much as I would have liked. I feel bad for being so ill while there, and I feel worse worse when I think that I might have been a carrier for some kind of non-food sickness, but there wasn’t much I could do. I didn’t drink champagne or raise a ruckus or anything like that, so I guess I’ll end up with evil spirits or whatever in 2007. I don’t like champagne anyway.

In conclusion, New England is a pretty neat place. It has its quirks like anywhere else, and I had fun when the pills let me. I would have liked to see more snow, but the weather isn’t cooperating this year. In all, I think New England is pretty nice, and I think that I need to pick up a Playstation sometime soon.