Rainy Night Impressionism

These are a series of pictures I took on my way home from work, after dropping Brandi off at Glamorama. I know it probably looks like I dared death itself, snapping photo after gorgeous photo as sheets of water cascaded off the windshield. My only answer to that is, yes, I am a daredevil, and a sexy beast, and also water looks a lot larger when you stick the camera right up to the glass and manually focus on raindrops the size of pumpkin seeds.

The Problem with Radio Shack

I walked home from work yesterday. For my father, for a period of about ten years, this would have been a feat of profound ease, since he lived directly above his business by six floors. I'm about seven miles away. Luckily, I wore my iPod Shuffle mom got me for my birthday, my distance running shoes, and a good attitude. The miles went quickly. I took some shots of the UIC campus at golden hour - the magical time just before sunset when the refraction of the Earth's atmosphere brings the reds, oranges and deeper colors (green flashes just before the sun disappears) normally bounced into space back to the planet. Combine that lighting with just a little slow motion, body armor and Viggo Mortensen and you've every third shot from "The Lord of the Rings". They reminded me of the three years Brandi and I shared in our old apartment. Sure, it was small, but every cloudless sunset we watched downtown turn into a pumpkin-hued faeryland. Then the sodium lights of the parking garage came on and night turned into a permanent sunset from the south. It wasn't our favorite direction anyway.

I walked through some prospective neighborhoods. Chicago has changed so much since I moved here. I remember my friend Dave advising me to live anywhere but Cabrini Green. Now there are condos going up opposite the mall there. Yeah, you can still see the shattered hulks of the low income skyscrapers dominating the view there, and, yeah, only the brave or the foolhardy really live there just yet, but you have to admit it's a step up.

Not that all change is positive. ComedySportz lost its lease on the space it occupied for five and a half years, the former Steppenwolf space, soaked in history and the screams of the victims of David Mamet's early stabs at dialogue, because the owner sold the building out from under them to build condos. The Annoyance Theatre got it worse: they turned it into a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell refused to comment.) Sometimes you work so hard to improve an area that your reward is your failure to afford anything there.

Still, Chicago looks nice. We're in for a good time this Saturday when we go out to look at condominiums. Bucktown, Wicker Park, Humboldt Park and other spots along the Blue Line elevated train may be on the slate. I like to know a place with my feet. My feet give thumbs up. This is painful, and I won't ask them again for their opinion.

Ultimately, besides wanting to get home, I also targeted Toys R Us (how the hell do you get the dyslexic "R" on a standard keyboard and how are they listed on the stock exchange: "TZRS"? Or is that a company that makes tazers?) and Radio Shack. Toys, etc. had the usual bevy of games, dolls, action figure and - my favorite - shape shifting robots that transform from robots to cars, airplanes, rockets, video cameras, construction equipment, dinosaurs, enormous spheres... and back! Unfortunately, I'm a little too Down-the-Rabbit-Hole to appreciate what's out now. Haunting all the Transformers forums waiting for the next leaked shot of MegaSCF Starscream or the Cybertron Jetfire repaint they're calling Astrotrain has spoiled me during non-virtual toy runs. Of course, I've still got the itch. Just ask Brandi how many times we've gone to Target that I have had to go to the toy aisle to look at Transformers. (Every time.) So, while I pondered the wisdom of dropping $35 on a Millennium Falcon that transforms into roboticized versions of Han Solo and Chewbacca, I ultimately decided against it and just used the free access to the Little Boys' room to relieve seven miles' bladder pressure. Then it was off to Radio Shack where, try as I might, I could not make myself enter.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. I wasn't tired, at least not tired enough to walk two doors down. I had enough time, though we were nearing nine o'clock, I still had at least fifteen minutes to spare. I needed to go; the aforementioned GP2X has a loose spring inside the battery compartment that is just waiting for me to grow some guts and solder it down. I needed solder and possibly a new soldering gun. I like looking. Why did I dread going inside?

It reminds me of a quote from Braveheart. Edward Longshanks, chief villain of the film, proposes the Droit du Seigneur, whereby any bride who marries a Scot must spend her first night at the castle of the English lord, presumably with the English lord, and not necessarily sleeping. "The problem with Scotland," Longshanks says, "is that it's full of Scots. We'll breed them out."

The problem with Radio Shack is that it's full of Radio Shack employees. I'm not sure what part of their training adds that extra sheen of craziness when they ask what they can help you find but I inevitably feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end when they get near me. Probably, they know a lot more than me about electronics, but that doesn't help them find what I need, just gives them better segues between RJ-11 phone cord and selling me last year's Cingular clamshell phone and plan. I feel what I think a doe would feel in a sporting goods store: sure the all-cotton shirts feel nice and I can even nibble on some but doesn't that "hunting" section have something to do with harming my relatives and OH MY GOD, I think some of those shoes are actually made out of my Aunt Berenice. The three nicest words in English may be "I love you", but in the hands of an expert, the four creepiest are, "Can I help you?" followed by the nine creepiest, "Can I help you find something at Radio Shack?" No, please, gosh no. I would feel worse about my prejudice, but the chain that foisted both the Tandy brand and the TRS-80 on an unsuspecting America deserves a little pain, I think. If I need a top of the line remote control car, I'll pay the dumb consumer tax at Sharper Image. If I want something more reasonable, I'll hit the eBay, where I'm sure there are thousands just waiting to get out of the homes of kids who grew out of burning through AA batteries chasing squirrels around pavement and now burn rubber chasing the ladies in their beaters. Besides miniature electronics sold for 99 cents in little dime bags, what the hell else does Radio Shack have that other chains do not? It's not customer service or a dedication to quality (Apple) or kitsch (Spencer). When they're not busy lurking in their own stores, what other things do Radio Shack employees do? And who would want to work there?

The secret may lie in those little dime bags after all. I had a disturbing thought: what could explain all that gear, survival in one of the harshest retail environments, a longevity that would put the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers to shame, and why do they bug customers with a metronomic regularity? What if the last human employee of Radio Shack died sometime in the early nineties, having not hired his replacement, but BUILDING him (her/it) in his significant downtime? What if Radio Shack is staffed by robots, inhuman golems driven only by the desire to sell little bits of themselves in lilliputian sandwich bags and sipping freely of the AC wall sockets during lunch? I know we were all worried about Steve Jobs being replaced by a Steve Jobs-bot, but HAS IT ALREADY HAPPENED and IS IT SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MEDIOCRE THAN WE EXPECTED?

I can say no more. That Tickle Me Elmo is watching me with suspicion and malice. I have to distract it, either by tickling or a flamethrower and I'm all out of tickles.

Arty Pics

This is Bob, a great, great guy. Bob stood up for me at my wedding and helped make my Cape Canaveral bachelor party interesting by shooting up insulin at the children's section, just after we saw all of the Mennonites go into the robot exhibit. This story is starting to read like a Palahniuk novel, but, honest to gosh, it's true. Bob also improvises, directs, writes, draws, and teaches his new puppy amazing tricks because he is better to his dog than Shaggy ever was to Scooby, and all of that art in his life breathes a lot of life into a dumb off-the-cuff lunchtime shot like this. I swear, women in bonnets and men with the crazy beards, making a big beeline to the robot exhibit while my bachelor posse stood by and made jokes about making a horse drawn spaceship... but while we laugh now, perhaps we won't be so amused when our robot masters place their Mennonite best friends in the food mines while the rest of us labor away in the solar drilling fields.

This is a picture of a pole on the way to work in the morning. I like it because I think it looks like a modern take on a Jurassic forest, with metal apatosaur heads looming in the distance, while a bestickered tree stands in the foreground, advertising the dominance of the alternative punk band mammals that will dominate the landscape after the great Lawsuit descends on all from the skies. Watch the punk bands swell absurdly large, then give rise to a strange new lifeform in the musical scene: intelligent record execs! Seriously, though, if you're running late, try not to do it in Roscoe Village, because it is impossible to catch a cab there even though there's a gas station on the corner. They just don't come through. Roscoe is one of those middle streets, sitting between the much larger arteries of Belmont to the south and Addison to the north, but Damen, the north-south cross street, is too far west to be lakefront and too far east to be the highway. So you sit and wait for the bus even if you're running really, really late.

What's that sound? Why are you moving your fingers back and forth like that? Oh, damn you, World's Smallest Violin, you always ruin my Pity Parties! Someone fetch me more Pity Punch.


Someday, my kid will ask me, "Where do you work, daddy?" and I'll eventually tell the wee one that I support two offices' networks at a state university. Then I'll pull out these pictures to show that it's really not as bad as it seems. First, though, I'll probably say I'm a super spy with a bunch of documentaries about my adventures called, "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and, embarrasingly, "Octopussy". By that time, I hope to say that I have been played by a number of different actors, including Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalten, Pierce Brosnan, and that guy from "Layer Cake" nobody's quite sure is going to work out. And since I'll have all the usual gadgets one has working on a network - Cat5 Ethernet cable, laptop, palmtop, flash drive, USB hubs, network switches, flat panel monitors, and the kid won't know any better, I can say that they were gifts from Q, my inventor, and that anyone else who has them is just copying, and can't press a button for the keyboard ejector seat. Probably, the only way my kid will see through my ruse is by calling out my lack of British accent, which I can rectify in advance by always having one around my children.

I took this shot of downtown Chicago looking out from I290, which I cross every day to go between both of my offices. I mean, when I'm acting as a double agent between East and West Germany, both of which still somehow exist as political entities. I know it looks like that dark zit in the top half of the photo is a plane about to run into trouble, but you have my word that it is not going to collide with anything and we don't need to pass any more Patriot Acts to assure ourselves that Big Brother is looking out for our best interest. The building to the right of the Sears Tower (center, black, ugly) is nicknamed the cake building, for reasons that have nothing to do with what the food court serves. I know. I asked. I think the footprint somehow resembles a cake, although if I had a cake shaped like that at my wedding, I don't think I would have been able to top it with Transformers, because my weird quotient would already have been filled. The cake building looks orange in this light, but is actually a shade of pink, and very tall, though not as tall as its friend across the street, who cheats by adding all the spires to its official height.



Chicago for the Legally Blind

Finally, these are a few deliberately blurry shots showing off the power of not using autofocus. I guess you can click on them for the larger shot, but as alternative that uses no bandwidth whatsoever, you could also lean closer to your monitor.

Little Gray Pillbox

For some people, it's young, young, young, dead. James Dean famously lived his mantra, "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse," although how you're supposed to judge the aesthetics of your funeral when you're the guest of honor is a little beyond me or anyone else without an advanced degree in metaphysics or witchcraft. Some people live this without actually dying young. Were Keanu Reeves to depart us tomorrow, I think a lot of America would believe he's in his forties. You can hide a lot behind Botox. Just keep a close eye on how far it penetrates into your acting.

Other people are destined to look old forever. Walter Matthau could have done "Grumpy Old Men" in his mid-twenties. Peter Falk is just now catching up to the age he played in "The Princess Bride", but the chorus of "but he's too young to look so old!" never reached my ears. You can watch Steve Martin age on the covers of his old standup albums, hair turning within just a few years from black to jet white.

And so we come to my darling head. My friend Melanie plucked my first gray hair out of it at sixteen, in French class. I was kind of excited. Another person - Mike Myers I think - observed that Europe is a funny place, with young people pretending to be old and old people playing at being young. Proof: men utterly unqualified to wear Speedos subjecting everyone around them to the torture of caged cellulite. I always looked forward to growing up. Here, I was already growing old. Bonus!

Fast forward another sixteen years. What do I have to show for all this time? At this point, I expected my eyebrows to be gray, but all I really have to show for it is a set of gray racing stripes and a bunch of gray cowlicks at the crown of my head. Looking at it in the mirror, I observed to the woman shearing my head down to a bearable length tonight, it looked like a gray pillbox hat, or perhaps yarmulke. Happy Jewish New Year to me. Time to party like it's 5999. (It's 5576, I think.) Probably it will be 5576 on the Christian calendar before the last mousy brown hair falls out of my head, but, you know, near-immortality is a nice trade-off.

And anyway, now that I'm older I can start pining for the days when I was younger. I've already started with Transformers, comic books and calling my beautiful wife my "girlfriend" (she's so adorable). What next?

Larsenopolis Goes Interactive: now soliciting comments for World's Worst / World's Best

Hi. I'm not sure if you're out there, especially after my especially long hiatus from web logging, but if you are, I would love your help.

I'm going to start a new entry for this blog called "World's Worst / World's Best". This is a joke. Not the fact that I am starting it; that is no laughing matter. "World's Worst / World's Best" will be like the classic short form game "World's Worst", except there will be only one player and two jokes. The first is what the world's worst BLANK will say in a given situation. The second is what the world's best BLANK would say. You supply the BLANK.

As a particularly lame example not to be confused with comedy, I offer the following:

World's Worst Banker:

"Interest rate? Well, I'd date you but I wouldn't take you home to mom."

World's Best

"I've taken the precaution of securing your money in my chest, next to my beating heart. Mint?"

If you are interested, please add a comment to the blog. I would prefer you add them to World's Worst / World's Best entries, but we're not exactly doing brisk traffic here, so I and my army of Larsenopoli will scour all comments for, say the next week. At least one will be chosen, the the person submitting given credit, especially for humoring me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Weekend Snapshots

The eBay eFfect

I accidentally bought a digital camera off eBay. I say this with the full knowledge that nobody slips and makes a bid. At some point, you're serious. I was looking at DSLRs, digital single lens reflex, cameras that use viewfinders and sensors sharing the same light. Not that it matters as much today with viewfinder-less digital cameras , but the cool thing about SLRs before they went D was that the mirror that sent the image to the viewfinder popped out of the way when you pulled the trigger to take a picture. This made a satisfying potato chip "click". Camera makers now sometimes add "click" sound files to bring back that soul-satisfying virtual celery crunch, but it always suffers from small camera speakers and you can't feel the camera jump in your hand like a startled pet. There's also the issue of interchangeability. SLRs have (expensive, holy cow!) lenses you can pop on and off depending on whether you need to shoot a hummingbird mid-flap or Lindsay Lohan in a bikini on a private beach, 300 meters away and hiding behind a particularly long blade of sawgrass. Finally, in the realm of "what you immediately get with the camera besides promises and a neat sound", we have depth of field. In a nutshell, this means the camera will get a shot of your subject in focus with the background out of focus. It's a way to make the viewer see the final picture in 3D without resorting to headache-inducing polarizing lenses, dorky glasses or intricate modelwork.

I put in a bid at what seemed an absurdly low price for the camera. It was. Another eBayer outbid me in about an hour. I thought, "I'll check back later and see how high this sucker gets." I did. Numbers stayed low for the unit, so I made another bid. And, I think, another. I'm kind of stretching the word "accidentally" here, aren't I? Like a bad gambler, I did not establish an upper limit for myself, and higher prices started to seem quite reasonable. This is why, on the eve of my first foray into the tense world of home buying with my partner, pal and caller-outer Brandi, I found myself trying to explain why our household needed a fifth digital camera (sixth, including the camcorder, although I also count crappy 640 x 480 camera phones). The fact that I needed a piece of tape to hold the battery compartment closed did not help my case.

So I'm hoping that posting some pictures I took this weekend redeems my cause somewhat. Also, bitterly muttering, "silly, silly me".

Sixty Pound Cotton

Thanks to Brandi's brave steps in the direction of laundry by the pound, I took a look around my office / dressing area - I like to multitask? - and decided there was a Solution. I loaded all my dirty duds into two bags and dragged them to a swell place by Diversey and Elston. We dropped them off, picked up poker chips for Brandi's Ladies' Poker Night, saw a bunch of condos (more on that later), came back and loaded everything into the car. Wow! I can see why things have gotten hashish-smokin' easy for the modern housewife and overworked, home-schoolin' college dorm dweller. Even the cost is bearable, considering the cost in quarters and time of dragging sixty pounds of mostly cotton blends to the laundromat's bulk washers. Oh, and I also just bought a DSLR. I can't complain about money, ever... again.

Real Estate Note for the Day: a man urinating on your window is a sign you must not buy that garden apartment, even if you really like how much light it gets.

We were out looking at condos and stopped in at an open house around Lawrence and Kedzie in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was one finished unit and the rest you kind of had to visualize. I like that part. Dad sees the world through the lens of an architect, so to relate to him past childhood, I've learned to appreciate architecture in the raw, and hopefully to fill in the gaps between studs with my imagination. The first floor unit looked nice but a tad small. Brandi pointed out that some places work out great for renting but stink when you know you're going to own them. We wandered across the hall to a condo with two bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms and one great room almost as large as a basketball court. The developers had combined the living and dining rooms into a Devastator-esque giant room designed to knock down and steal the candy of lesser rooms. It was nice but just at the edge of what we can afford and, we were informed, headed north by $10,000 in the next week if we didn't snap it up. We finished looking and started back down when we spied the garden-level apartment door open and thought to take a look. One word sprang to mind, "feh." It had decent light for something buried just slightly in the earth, but overall felt like nothing to write home about since it lacked southern exposure and abutted on one side to the building next door. Again, we started out... but, then I spied, just across the back deck, the ground-level version of the light-filled apartment with the uber-room upstairs. The back door was open and, while not explicitly welcome, we weren't forbidden from traipsing across and taking a look.

It looked decent, though varying significantly with the floor plan of the room above. Here, the rooms were more segregated and the overall impression of vast space was dampened by it. I went to the bedroom space forward and realized with a shock why significantly more men live in garden-level apartments than women. A man was urinating, pretty much anywhere he pleased, but certainly on the building and in clear view of the windows and quite possibly on the windows. See, the building on that side went right to the sidewalk, and, to his credit, moments before he had been peeing in front of an empty apartment.

By the way he staggered when he was done, I'm pretty sure he was drunk or ridiculously proud of watering the windows. In hindsight, maybe it's like those movie villains who insist environmental disaster is the earth's immune system trying to shrug off the pestilence of humanity. Maybe the building's immune system was this man, peeing at us from behind the safety of a pane of glass. I don't care. Brandi felt that the neighborhood might need a few more years to turn itself around and I agree, wholeheartedly.

Setting the Chip from Read to Write

June was a busy month. I do not offer this as an excuse for the rarity of my updates, just as a backstory for the even more lame excuse that will shortly follow. My day job was transitioning from one location to another, ComedySportz again offered me a chance at teaching level 202 of the training center as well as a once-a-year gig as one of a bunch of fathers singing Christmas carols about Sears merchandise, and my tertiary career as a graphic designer got some exercise in the form of PowerPoint operator for a chair manufacturer's annual showcase of new products. For a few weekends, I slept more or less where I dropped and cursed the name of that she-devil Work.

Then the money came. One of the things you'll almost never hear Joe American complain about is, "I just think they're paying me too much money. The laws of supply and demand need a rewrite and the first guy who should get the axe is me!" I had such noble plans: throw some of it in our joint account for the upcoming New York trip, make a big car payment, lower the balance on my credit card. Sure, some of these things happened, but another, BAD thing happened whereby I succumbed to temptation and bought another handheld gaming system.

Had I learned nothing from the Game Boy Advance I bought three years ago? I remember my plan to play Metroid on the CTA to shorten my commute boredom turning into an all-consuming passion to race to the end of the game, which I did. Twice. I remember hiding the unit, its charger and cartridges away like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark because, while both contained power enough to touch the face of the infinite, was humanity (or your humble narrator) ready for that? I mean, really?

It turns out, no, I really had learned nothing except how to fool myself into thinking I was learning a useful skill. See, even though I had been ogling the PSP for more than a year and couldn't walk into a toy store without trying the DS touchscreen, I could not justify in my mind the idea of buying a gaming platform. There's no font for contempt, but, boy did I want one for that last sentence. Here, Gizmodo and Engadget had given me just enough knowledge to make me a danger to myself and others. What gaming system played homebrew games, emulated NES and SNES games of yore and could play movies and more, all using as its operating system a special flavor of Linux? Why the GP2X, that's what!

If you've never heard of it, never fear, most of America joins you in ignorance. It comes from Korea and doesn't even have a distributor here in the States. My box comes, like Rod's girlfriend in "Avenue Q", from Canada. It comes in a sexy black cardboard box with a listing of everything it does printed on the front, two AA batteries and a spare USB plug. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with anything else: no headphones, no CD, no free SD card to hold your games, and certainly no instructions on how to get things from your computer to work on this dual processor, 200 MHz Linux workhorse. Start it up and you'll see options for Games, Movies, Utility, Explorer, Music and System, but figuring out the difference between "Explorer", "Utility" and "System" takes a little thinking. Not to mention the fact that regular ol' MPEG movies just didn't play on the GP2X and you've got a somewhat-sexy (like Scarlett Johansen, it's a little thicker than its press shots would have you believe) black box that plays MP3s and is about two and a half times larger than the video iPod which dwarfs it in capacity. It took a lot of good hours at work - hours that I would normally have devoted to updating my blog, surfing the web, writing sketch comedy or even, lord forbid, updating status reports - to figure out how to install homebrew games on it. A few more hours went down the sucking time vortex of the GP2X before I could even figure out which of those games did not suck, and their numbers were not large. Then I found the tutorial on encoding AVIs in DivX-friendly formats and another on NES emulators and everything started to fall apart. The nail in the coffin: the ROM for Super Mario 3.

History repeated itself. Hours vanished from my life. People called, but the message just went to voice mail. I went through batteries like gangbusters. Well, I recharged them like gangbusters. Even if I'm throwing my life away it's no reason to throw the environment into the toilet. Work got put off. I even tempted my darling wife into my corrupt lifestyle, enticing her with a homebrew game within a homebrew game called "The Minigame Project", itself called "Fruity Guy". See, it's fantastically simple: you start out with 60 seconds. You run around a green field until you hit the strawberry that appeared anywhere on the screen. When you do, another stationary strawberry appears, along with a non-stationary ball that moves across the screen either horizontally or vertically on the same axis as the strawberry you "ate". Hit the ball and the game ends. Don't do anything until the sixty seconds are up and the game ends. Keep eating strawberries and more balls appear on the screen, until eventually the game ends... Unless... and I probably shouldn't even be mentioning this, but sometimes a slice of watermelon appears. If you eat that, you become large for five seconds. Don't think of this as a punishment! No! During this five seconds, the tables are turned and, far from the balls destroying you, YOU CAN DESTROY THE BALLS! Even better, for every ball you destroy, another second appears on the game clock. Play the game right and it might never end! Except for one thing (else): balls get faster the higher your score. Eventually, you can't outrun them. What can save you? Blind luck, maybe? Skill? Ha! I laugh at this thing you call "skill".

As well you might laugh at me. Now the GP2X sits in its beautiful box, at the bottom of a drawer, left at work for the first time in a month and a half and I'm writing about how much it's destroyed my life in a plaintive, abused lover kind of way. It's sad. Imagine all of the blogging I might have gotten done if I hadn't felt compelled to get Mario the fireflower so he could beat Bowser in the castle on board five of level one in game three. Imagine how sad it would be if you understood all of that, or even cared.

So it's time to set that chip from "Read Only" back to "Write" and let you know a little more about the real world drama in my life, which I promise is more exciting than warping from level two to four and then on to five. Really.