larsenopolis

Flash Fiction Inspired by Real Life

2010-07-09T12:55:00.001-07:00

DOS and DONTS

by Matt Larsen

Taking CTRL of years of hoarding, DEL had asked his girlfriend Susan if he could RUN old manuals down to her basement cache. It should have been BASIC, but things got complicated after he asked to give their relationship a BREAK.

"Fine," she said, "Then I CMD you to pick them up or else I'll put them out for garbage collection."

"SU, come on! I need HELP. I thought you were a capacitor," he said, "Not a resistor."

"GOTO hell," she said.

But all that came back was an ECHO. He'd already ended the CALL.

Dreaming, May 26, 2010

2010-05-27T06:36:00.001-07:00

Last night, I had a vivid dream of flooding. Constant rain drummed at the windows of the office where I worked, a combination of the drum-shaped Thompson Center and 200 S. Wacker where I work in my waking hours. I watched the large drops spatter and explode against the thick panes. You could feel the bass of their landing. A great shared space occupied the interior of the building, and if you looked up you could see sheets of it cascading against the multicolored glass rooftop. I went outside when the rain abated to a dull drizzle. The building sat at the water's edge, a Great Lake of one kind or another filling the horizon with blue under the gray, leaden sky, a sandy beach extending all the way down to the cresting waves. People played on the beach, enjoying the lull or perhaps unconscious of or uncaring about the earlier downpour. The scene reminded me of the photo I saw yesterday from the Boston Times' Big Picture, of children in Louisiana playing in a pair of plastic pools on the beach, the better to keep the Deepwater Horizon oil at bay. I trotted a little distance along the shore, climbing amid some whitewashed pontoons lashed together into temporary docks for small sailboats. Returning to the beach by my office building, I noticed the waves piling up.

As happens in many of my wave dreams, they began to grow larger, enveloping more of the beach with every curl. They reached my feet. I stepped back, up a stone embankment, wondering whether the storm might drive the water farther inland. The quickly-cresting waves answered that question, washing past my feet again to lap at the windows of my office building. At once a great wave came down, swamping me and crashing against the glass. I slogged inside to inform my officemates, and we drew up a plan to retreat to the higher ground of downtown Chicago--I did mention this was a dream, right?--and drove up the road to the taller skyscrapers there.

We made it just in time, too. Looking back, we watched massive waves crashing into the rounded curve of our now abandoned building. We knew it would not last very long against the onslaught of murkey gray water. Yet still the waves came.

We checked into a motel room at the highest ground we could find. There were several men in business casual attire, shirtsleeves plastered to our bodies by rain and not a small amount of panic. Suitcases and backpacks littered the corners. The rear balcony gave us a view of the city as it was swallowed by water. The skies had cleared, but the waves rolled in, less destructive but still inexorable, like the world was a bathtub filling up.i think we breathed a collective sigh of relief. We'd survived, for the moment. We even took a stab at normalcy, resuming a presentation, but our hearts weren't exactly in it.

Some of the lads left to contact families, take smoke breaks, or buy groceries, eventually leaving only me to witness as our room, through a miracle of architecture and rising water, detached from its foundation and began floating away from the remnants of the city's high ground. Watery devastation lay all around. Even the edges of the mythical tall Chicago downtown lay buried beneath the waves.

I floated on. The ceasing rainfall turned the maiden voyage of my motel room into a pleasant, drowsy journey, but, since I had no idea why we could float in the first place, I worried the integrity of what passed for a hull might be compromised. Sure enough, each trip I took outside, the balcony felt lower to the water. I ate some pretzel sticks and tried to nap, dreaming within the dream.

In time, I heard a noise, a booming voice hailing me from outside my window. I looked out to see a stubby pirate ship no larger than an average motorboat but clad in wooden planking and decorated in iron chains. Sails billowed above. Her captain stood on the railing, a dirty blonde beard erupting from his windburned face, under a hawkish nose and piercing blue eyes. He asked permission to come aboard. I accepted and he climbed up the balcony.

"Interesting choice of sailboat, lad," he said.

I tried to explain about the rain and the waves that swallowed the city. He waved me off. Maybe he'd seen the destruction firsthand, or his stubby pirate ship came from the same thing. In any case, he said, the thing to beware now was not waves, but vermin, and to demonstrate he lifted a couch cushion to reveal an insect in the rather disturbing cast of an earwig--pincer mouth, scuttling legs atop a bulky body more like a linebacker than the dainty tapered waists of your wasp or ant, nightmare rear claw like a funhouse reflection of the front of the insect--bright blue in the body and traffic cone orange in the legs and a little bit larger than your average squirrel.

What could I do? I screamed. I'm pretty sure he screamed. We both jumped back in a way not unlike the time in waking life when Brandi and I walked in on a pissed off rat stuck in a large glue trap in an old apartment. My instincts were the same: burn the place down.

At any rate, the captain agreed to take me on his mini ironclad, and I looked around for any valuables I couldn't bear to leave behind. Nope, nothing. I walked precariously over the ropes he had helpfully strung between our vessels, and he stayed behind to scuttle the motel boat. Returning to his own vessel, we watched as the last known bit of Chicago was claimed by the hungry ocean of rain.

At this point, I knew our adventures were effectively over or just begun, depending on your perspective, but my unconscious could not help getting in one last twist. As we settled in to trim the sails, my perspective shifted to the outside of the pirate ship, where the anchor line emerged from the water. One of the enormous earwigs swam through the water, scuttling up the chain of the anchor and into the ship, presumably to wreak the same havoc there.

Sheesh, unconscious, way to twist the knife.

Returning from the Void

2009-10-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

Hi! Thanks for tuning in or reading back to this post.

It's been a while since updates and I owe you an apology. Unfortunately for me, it's got to be a bigger apology than just one blog post. This blog has been dark for quite a while. Some things changed, others stayed the same.

Most importantly, very shortly Brandi and I will welcome our daughter into the world, at which point this blog will likely be inundated with pictures and anecdotes about the cutest baby in the world. I don't really believe this. Most babies to me look like Winston Churchill, but they say all that changes when it's your baby. We'll see. Babies steal your brainwaves, so if there's an even longer gap (say, until she goes to college), well, at least I tried.

I've changed posts within the University and now work at just one office as an IT Support Specialist, a title made up just for me, which automatically makes me an expert in the field. Consider me the sniper of malfunctioning applications.

I've been published! (Online.) I will be posting links to stories as I find them. Some, I've microblogged over at Facebook and need to dig up once more, but if you're interested you will be able to find my fiction.

More to come!

GRR

2009-02-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

From Acme Heart Maker.
Inspired by my work with Dell Tech Support.

The Holiday Lush Decorations Must Come Down!

2009-01-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

I saw this yesterday on a walk through my neighborhood, an entire
wreath made of corks at the doorstep of a local charity resale.
Finally, the Christmas decorations for alcoholics are coming down.
(We've been busy, dammit! And sick!) Maybe it's time to start on a
brand new cork wreath, which means spending less on screw top bottles
and maybe dipping a little more into our dialysis money. I wonder if
they found a use for the bottle tree and the beerstletoe.

On a side note, Brandi and I bought a bunch of wine on our trip to New
Buffalo, MI, which apparently has winery tours where they drive you.
Wow. A frozen paradise, we stopped into the supermarket for snacks and
toothpaste and walked out with six bottles of wine and no toothpaste.
The only thing standing in the way of drinking, womanizing and writing
like Hemmingway is that I am no Hemmingway, since I never received the
requisite turtleneck. Some fantasies must remain forever that.

And some, like a wreath made of corks, are blessedly within reach.

Me and Tuxedo Cat

2009-01-19T12:36:00.001-08:00

Patrick and I try a Photo Booth shot together. I think it turned out well, particularly because he's always so well dressed.

I deliberately cut off the top of my head because my hair has gotten too darn long. It's a protest against cold weather and snow. I don't think winter got the message.

Mammal

2009-01-17T09:32:00.000-08:00

Brandi and I are on our writer's retreat at the southwest corner of Michigan. We came in last night, taking off from work early and braving the beginning of rush hour traffic and sub-zero temperatures that caused the windows of our car to not only fog but ice up. It's always particularly frustrating in winter to put on all of your layers, hop in the car, and then struggle to get the top layer off while you're sitting at a traffic light or, worse, driving on the highway. I've grown quite skilled at yanking my gloves off with my mouth.

Of course, even if you get down to just a t-shirt in front of vents pouring out heat like jet engines, you've still got the long underwear and pants, and, if you're like me, the pajama pants you added in between because, hey, it's not layering unless you're having trouble flexing your knees.

Oddly, I'm starting to get used to the weather. Today, it warmed up to ten degrees and on our trip to the grocery store, Brandi and I couldn't stop remarking about how warm it felt. Is it warm when a can of soda will freeze so hard it pops the top for you? Warm when you can't get the car washed but have to settle for brushing the salt off the windshield with your glove? Warm when the icicles on the house across the street stretch practically roof-to-ground? Compared to yesterday, my body somehow says "yes."

This is the crazy part of being a mammal.

I made the choice Thursday to walk from a train stop up to a Polish restaurant where Brandi and her work friends (but good work friends, Diane and Ryan) planned on tucking away the heaviest potato-and-veal-based foods Eastern Europe has to offer. It was about minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and I had the option of waiting for the bus, but Chicago bus drivers have the same "meh" attitude you saw in the Soviet Union.

"It's not as though they have to stand out in the open," they might say, and they would be right, because the CTA saw fit to provide shelters every mile or so with roofs and walls that only leave a two foot gap at the bottom, so the wind chills only your feet, ankles, knees and lower thighs. Most have advertisements that you can read over and over again while you curse your god and wait for the bus that never seems to arrive.

I walked about forty minutes and saw a bus come only once, when I was about a half a block away from the restaurant. True irony? or just the Alanis Morisette style of terrible events that nobody wants to happen to them? By that time, the cold had killed the battery in my iPod, which went from a 50% charge to 20% to dead in the span of about a minute after I took it out of my coat pocket. If you're like me, you never pay attention to the optimal operating temperatures of electronic devices when you buy them because you so rarely come close to them. Next time, I'll probably keep it on the inside.

Of course, I didn't realize that cold had killed the little music player at the time, so when I got to the restaurant--first, as the rest of our small party was running late--I pulled it out, trying to figure out how I could plug in my USB to charge it. It was so cold, the glass on the front began to acquire condensation, and then that condensation began to ice up. Remembering what water can do to electronics, I treated the player like a hypothermia victim and stashed it close to my belly. It worked. The little guy is still alive and kicking to this day.

This is the great part of being a mammal: saving electronics with your own belly warmth.

I look forward to the springtime, when my antlers begin to grow and I am forced to spar with my fellow males over the attentions of the females who will bear our young. Luckily, unlike some species I don't care to mention (spiders), they will not eat our heads when we mate.

This, too, is the great part of being a mammal.

Testing the Limits of the Unknowable

2009-01-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

I read an amazing article in New Scientist recently, about scientists searching for gravitational waves and possibly finding something much more important. This is kind of a neat by product of good science, where the person doing the testing finds something went wrong and says, "Oh, that's interesting..." before going on to, for instance, invent the microwave oven, penicillin, or the flying machine.

You can pretty squarely blame Stephen Hawking's brilliance. Once again studying event horizons , he theorized that information from an "evaporating" black hole does not get lost when it disappears, but is mapped onto the virtual quantum particles at its edge. That edge, kind of like a shadow, is a two dimensional form that exists in our three dimensional universe, and that information has to make a weird transition from the inside of the black hole, where it's 3D, to the outside, where it's 2D. Another good example of 3D information mapped onto a 2D surface is holograms, hence the title, "Our world may be a giant hologram..." which is slightly inaccurate, since the set of things that might be holograms include every particle in the universe, of which our world is only a tiny, tiny part.

They go on to connect more dots. The event horizon of a black hole is roughly analogous to the the Big Bang, when everything in the universe was packed into a segment of space smaller than an atom. What blew it apart is a complete mystery still, but the behavior of all that mass in that tiny amount of space is exactly like a black hole. Even more amazing, if you were able to travel faster than light, 13.7 billion light years in any direction, you would reach the edge of the universe, where you would see an inside-out version of the mapping going on at the edges of black holes. In fact, all of the matter in our universe would have the information of the big bang mapped onto it.

All of this really gets my science and science fiction juices flowing, so I'm going to subject you to some of my thoughts. Here goes:

As a black hole evaporates, the event horizon grows smaller, since the mass inside of it no longer has the ability to capture light as far away from the singularity inside of it. Our universe is different, though, since it's basically a black hole turned inside out. And evidence has shown that the energy inside of our universe is increasing, as matter is pushed farther apart as the result of "dark energy," which might, uncounted eons from now, result in space flying apart so quickly that even atoms are unable to hold together. This would be called "the Big Rip." (Which is the opposite of what scientists expected when they made up "the Big Crunch.")
Does this mean that the total amount of information in the universe is increasing? And can an increasing amount of information result in the one-way temporal direction known as entropy?
What caused the expansion of the universe in the first place? This is beyond the scope of the article, but I'm dreadfully curious. Since the force is so mysterious, almost any speculation is useless, but I wonder if I can spin another analogy with atomic nuclei. Put two protons near each other and they fly apart, but include a neutron and they stay together, forming a helium nucleus. Put two neutrons and it's a helium nucleus in a special case known as an alpha particle. Three neutrons and it's unstable again. Move up the periodic table of the elements in order of neutrons and protons and you see this happen again, with the more things packed into the nucleus, the more unstable they become. Except... as humans experiment with energies not found in nature, there is some evidence that there might be what some call "islands of stability" hidden in the far recesses, well after Thorium and Einsteinium and Yourmomium. What if the universe is the inverse of that, with a lot of stability in relatively lower masses ("lower" being a relative term, since we're talking masses smaller than galactic superclusters), but explosive when enough mass is reached.
Given that quantum mechanics means almost anything can happen if you wait long enough, and virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear and disappear constantly at a scale impossible for us to detect, eventually in a very, very long timeframe, it is possible that a particle could appear that is the mass of the entire universe. The challenge is that it's impossible to test, except in very, very long timeframes, and I just don't have that kind of patience.
One result of the above is that an antiparticle would have to also have been produced, which is interesting, because I always wanted to have an evil twin. And now I've got one.

Normally, I like to include a picture with a post, but the photographer I sent outside the universe to take a snapshot is bound by the laws of spacetime, and promises to return in 27.4 billion years, which is well below the time constraint for "the Big Rip," but too late for this post to have any relevance. I'll do better next time.

Traffic Out the Window

2008-12-17T17:35:00.000-08:00

Surreal and beautiful.

Up in the Air

2008-11-04T19:50:00.000-08:00

On my path to the north end of the park, I spied a cluster of people
who climbed into the trees to get a better look at the mega screens.
People stood in a big fan in front of them and sat in rows along the
curb at street level. Families, including a surprising number of kids
under ten, are starting to find seats on the lawn. Here in the "B-
list" rally, we were allowed to bring in bags and blankets, so we have
that over our 78,000 friends. Food is not permitted... to bring in,
though Connie's Pizza thankfully bridges the gap for the hungry. Lines
for pizza and sodas are as long or longer than the people camped out
in front of the CNN displays.

In my quadrant, police took the unusual step of forming a double line
of modular fences to split the field in two. For the life of me, I
cannot fathom the reason for this, except perhaps to give them a place
to hang out and scan the crowd. Not far from here, super bright arc
lights create a pool of daylight no doubt attractive and useful to the
numerous camerapeople wandering the rally. I briefly considered
hanging out for camera bait, but mischief is far from my mind tonight.

Red states are starting to go for McCain, pushing him over 135. In
spite of the jump, CNN explains that his path to the White House is
increasingly perilous. People cheered when CNN brought up the Senate
race in Minnesota, Al Franken versus the Republican incumbent, what's-
his-face. I like those people. I read at dinner that Hillary Clinton
made her 75th appearance in favor of Obama while promoting Franken and
trying to push a 60 Democrat filibuster proof majority in the Senate.
Good on her.

CNN is showing Star Wars-level 3D graphics that lead me to suspect
that after this race they are going to assault the Death Star.
Meanwhile, the third person has tripped over my feet while I sit here
writing this. For the umpteenth time, I wish I had packed sneakers to
go with my black leather dress shoes, all-but invisible in the pool of
darkness formed by my body.

I was stopped on my way here for directions to Monroe, a challenge
since there is one way in or out of this rally and it does not cross
Monroe.

A Land Rover commercial just came on, voiced over by the actor who
plays Mohindet Suresh on Heroes. Just one problem with the soothing
British tones emanating from the tube: the actor is American
(surprise!). What a pity for that actor to achieve fame unrelated to
him as a person. I guess he has to settle for diving into his vault of
money a la Scrooge McDuck. Poor soul.

Live from Chicago's Election Rally B in Millennium Park

2008-11-04T19:08:00.000-08:00

I walked from work over to the Millennium Park election rally. I'm
kicking myself now knowing that I could have had tickets to the 78,000-
attended "A-list" rally through Brandi, but it's time to make lemonade
from lemons.

A number of enormous, 150" televisions around the park make it feel
like an enormous sports bar, minus the liquor and crappy food. On the
way in, I watched a couple students take a pull from a hip flask, and
my heart opened to envy. After running the Chicago marathon last year
and the year before, it's nice to spend time in this place feeling
something other than exhaustion. Or at least, exhaustion of a
different kind.

Entrepreneurs make their way through the crowd selling Obama t-shirts,
buttons, photographs. A silver-painted man is posing for photographs
with some out-of-towners. Also on the way in, a number of fringe
groups earnestly handed out pro-whatever literature: Communism,
Socialism, Darwinianism (I think). Greedy.

The lines aren't too bad at the port-a-potties, which are themselves
showing above-average decorum. Around construction sites, you see them
with funny names like "Lepre-CAN" and "Honey Bucket." Here, we see a
simple sticker reading "National." Way to go, toilets!

Every time CNN calls a state for Obama, the crowd raises a cheer, and
a boo for McCain. A lot of the talking points echo meaninglessly from
competing monster stereos near the televisions, unless you're huddled
closely enough. Obama is over 200. It's time to move out.

Failure as Artwork

2008-10-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a shiny toy while Brandi was out of town: an eeePC netbook, 8.9" of screen almost enough to squint at while writing the great American novel.

Almost immediately, my attention was drawn to it, especially after I realized I wasn't going to make it through my Java programming class in one piece. So I dropped the class and picked up the mini computer.

After a day's worth of tinkering with it, I realized I had completely hosed the system and had to wipe it, reinstalling from the DVD Asus kindly included. This happened shortly thereafter when I installed the wrong system, very deliberately as it turned out.

Eventually, I figured out a less ambitious vision of what the computer could accomplish and put that together. The final system could compose documents in OpenOffice's Writer, race lightcycles in Armagetron, and play text-based adventure game Dungeon Crawl, a game so addictive that it advanced ahead of the twenty-years-more-contemporary Wii to become my favorite computer addiction.

Eventually, I got curious again and started adding things to the system. I went a bridge too far on that one. Turns out, the package manager for the Basic desktop is not compatible with the Synaptic Package Manager, and the security update I thought myself so clever for downloading hosed my system to the point where, to update any programs, Synaptic told me I had to uninstall absolutely everything. Xandros, and probably Linux in general, is one of the few environments where you can actually dig so vigorously that you will open a hole underneath you into which you will promptly fall. And so I did.

I lost a few things: the ability to compile Java, a few weeks' worth of diaries that mostly recorded my angst at dropping the class (and yet still receiving email updates from the teacher) and trying to write more stories to fill the gap of creation, a desktop I thought pretty cool. I wish for the life of me I could recall how I ever got the Java compiler to work on this computer, but it may call for the blood of a goat, and we ate the last of him two weeks ago.

Also hammering home the lessons of failure for me this week, my agent sent me on two auditions, with a third one tomorrow. I don't think I did well. Today, I spent an hour and a half waiting to perform four lines of a monologue about the great, low prices offered by a local flooring/carpeting company with a famously low-rent theme song. Ninety minutes to memorize the four lines, and when they asked me to go off script ("Okay, now we'll drop the crutch...") I just stared blankly. Off... what? I'm terrible at memorizing. The first two went all right, delivered in a spokesman tone, but the last two, a testimonial, I'm pretty sure I whiffed. And here I'd hoped I'd finally made it (locally) to be played ad nauseum in local commercial spots. Damn my Absent-Minded Professor attitude!

At least there's always tomorrow.

Blue Sky Day

2008-10-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

Today, I:
- Drew a picture.
- Submitted a short (98 words) story.
- Folded laundry.
- Worked.
- Programmed Java.
- Blogged.
- Told my wife she was the best thing that happened to me.

Tonight I will:
- Work out.
- Clean.
- Pet my cats.
- Eat dinner.
- Sleep.

I am:
- Very happy.

Invader from an Alternate Dimension

2008-09-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

I got tired of shaving my whole face this week, so the evil look is
starting to take shape.

Funny thing is, I carved out the shape of the Van Dyke (goatees are
chin only; no mustache) Tuesday. Thursday morning, as Brandi and I got
ready for work, she turned to me and said, "When did you start growing
THAT?" We'd been hanging out for a day and a half already. I think my
baby needs new glasses.

New Term Friday

2008-09-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

It's Friday, and, not necessarily apropros to the day, I would like to coin a new term I'm finding a lot more in my job: a Vystery. This is the error that happens in Windows Vista that happens once, or perhaps over and over, and which has no obvious or search-friendly reason or solution. It just happens. It's happening to me, now, on a new tablet, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why this particular Fujitsu freaked out on me when I went into tablet mode, then refused to give me the Task Manager when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.

"Logon process has failed to create the security options dialog," is about as friendly as it got, which wasn't very.

Yet after restarting the little beast, everything was nearly hunky-dory, as though, in the locked room Agatha Christie mystery, the lights went out and the body just disappeared. Still, as your faithful computer Poirot, it's my job to see where that body went and who did it. And I'm looking at you, Captain Fellswarth. Your sordid history with Windows DLLs means it's entirely likely you kidnapped C:\Windows\system32\dbgeng.dll and stashed her in your secret cove, only to have her washed away with the reboot tide. Your days are numbered, Fellswarth.

Get Curious!

2008-09-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

The weekend before last, Brandi and I gleefully took a few days off and headed out west to Portland, Oregon, to see Bob and Stacey. A bit of backstory on those two: Bob and I started working together years ago... a number perhaps measuring as high as a decade... when we both took classes at the Annoyance Theatre. Bob later joined the cast of my children's show, "Kid Mystery," which alarmed director Fred Mowery and I due to the fact that after we had cast him as the insatiable eater Tad Huff, he revealed he was a diabetic and shot up insulin three times a day. He also said it was okay, and that he wouldn't eat before a show, which in retrospect should have shown me just how dedicated Bob was to the art of performance.

Later on, I would have the pleasure of performing with Bob on iO's longform improv team, "Space Mountain," in ComedySportz, and forcing him to both sing and dance in my other children's show, "The Paper Spaceship," during which time he took his first tentative steps towards a relationship with his now-fiancée, Stacey.

Much to my regret, I would not have a chance to hang out with Stacey much until the formation of the movie making group, Monday Pictures. Time wasted! Stacey has a rich history in theatre, improvisation, animation, film making, production, and, oddly, credit history. She gave me good advice on everything. Stacey also performed with Bob's Playground improv group, International Stinger, and with the all-ladies group Firecracker. A woman of talent, Stacey had an extraordinary dream:

TO BUILD A THEATRE

So when Brandi and I went off to Portland, we felt a bit of trepidation as to what we would find. Would we have to "ooh" and "ah" after some two-bit shopfront operation, knowing that our amazing friends would some day turn it into a viable operation? Or would it be some seedy establishment, the burned out husk of a former porno theatre, abandoned after a developer's halfhearted stab at condo renovation? Or would there be nothing at all, an abandoned hobo's hat on the ground next to a cloth where seven wannabes performed their interpretation of Julius Caesar via an hour-long game of Freeze Tag?

I'm happy to say we saw none of those things. Curious Productions is going to be amazing.

The theatre space is enormous, as you cannot tell from this picture of Brandi with Bob, exposed steel studs behind them forming what will eventually be the coat room and part of the bar. With seating for 120 people, perhaps more with the balcony, the buildout has so far taken months and the time and efforts of many talented volunteers, all coordinated by Bob and Stacey, and all of which you can watch from the safety of the web, here. When we saw it, everything was wood studs and exposed drywall, but Stacey, who somehow holds all of this more or less in her head, hauled the architectural renderings out for us to show us how the footprint of the finished product would look. At the time when we first looked at it, we hadn't seen the space, so the stage looked a bit small to us, so we just nodded and smiled. Then we saw the space. The stage is normal sized, with a few steps up and a foldout handicapped ramp to accomodate wheeled humans and heavy sets. There's a classroom on the second story, a restaurant space, Men's and Women's handicapped bathrooms, a coat room, and additional bathrooms and showers in the back to accomodate bicyclists, of which there are many in Portland. In front, a water flows across a peaceful rock garden. It's THAT classy.

All of this would be meaningless without productions to put inside of it, which, to Bob and Stacey's credit, are numerous. There will be a sketch show, a musical, improvisation, and much, much more. Bob and Stacey are nearly tearing their hair out getting everything done, and yet they flattered us with not just their presence, but their company and conversation. It was one of those trips where I felt slightly guilty relaxing with (and occasionally without, as when Brandi and I took a short trip to the Portland zoo) my friends because I could tell there was always something MORE to do.

(By the way, the photos above are from a fancy restaurant Stacey took us to that, true to most fancy-schmancy restaurants, served amazing food with portions large enough to please a small cat. Brandi and Stacey had the tortellini with flavored foam. FOAM! I ordered and then gulped down glorified spaghetti with meat sauce, and Bob had the monkfish, which you can recognize because they shave their heads and live in oceanic cloisters. Afterwards, we went out to Ground Kontrol to play video games and try to talk amidst the general chaos of a Rock Band party, then over to Hobos, where we met friends and more or less ate dinner again. It was an amazing time.)

I can't wait to see what Bob and Stacey put together, because if it's half as good as what we saw in the pictures, it will be a million times better than anything we could have anticipated. We look forward to helping with that, as much as we can, stuck in this podunk Chicago neighborhood. It's going to be awesome.

If you would like to donate to the theatre, and I suggest you do, click here.

All-You-Can-Think

2008-09-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

It's been my shame over the last four years to have worked for a university and not taken advantage of the free tuition they offer as part of my job benefits. In recent months, as chances of any significant pay raise changed from "slim" to "none," it became a kind of mission for me to squeeze the brain juice out of this State-run behemoth. And, yes, when I'm tired, I use big words. Litigate me.

Being a state-run institution, the University of Illinois runs atop an enormous bureaucracy that, if given the chance, would grind you underneath a mountain of its paperwork wheels. I should know. Two and a half years ago, I switched with a co-worker to the Alumni office, noticing as I did a small pile of equipment to surplus. The University requires us to follow certain procedures before we get rid of computer parts, so it took me a few months to determine the proper forms, their recipients, machine labeling and Babylonian deity and its preferred sacrificial meat. Still, the equipment sat. I stacked everything into a small wall atop the filing cabinets that for some reason took up a wall in the tech office and contacted my bosses in Urbana to let them know that their lackey in Chicago awaited their word on surplus. Nothing. They took away the filing cabinets shortly before we replaced more equipment. I re-stacked the equipment and waited. And waited. To this day: nothing. The air grows close in the confines of this office. Tell my wife I love her...

...at any rate, I had low expectations for any answers I had about taking classes, but it turns out that if you determine you want to do something here that does not involve a lot of heavy lifting and cross-campus coordination, and you go about it like an Agatha Christie inspector unraveling a locked room mystery ("SOMEONE here has the proper forms for a Graduate Student, Non-Degree Seeking, and none of us are leaving until I get it!"), you can shoehorn yourself into classes. Unfortunately, by the time I had lined up all my scholastic ducks, the easy class I wanted to take, Spanish, was irredeemably filled. I settled for something I knew would complement my job: CS 102, Introduction to Programming.

I like the class and writing Java input with things like the Scanner method (import java.util.Scanner; Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in); userInput = keyboard.nextInt();) really rocks my world. Seriously, I'm courting obsession here. Studying has become something like a videogame, especially since the intructor uses a homework-tracking and programming site called CodeLab. There, you complete assignments, and if you've done it wrong, it marks it in red and gives you a chance to correct it. Once done properly, you get a little green box and move on. In class, someone asked a question several assignments ahead. I'm about a week behind in the reading and a week ahead in CodeLab because I WANT TO WIN.

It is funny to sit in class with people almost twenty years younger than me and compare our experiences. We took programming in middle school, writing BASIC or LOGO on Commodore 64s. Rich people owned computers with tape drives, or 5.25" floppies. My freshman year of college, my dad bought me a Mac with no hard drive, just two 3.5" floppies, and it was great. Yeah, and I walked six miles to class, uphill, both ways. These people grew up with the Internet. They take Open Source for granted. They think A-ha is retro. (They're wrong. Analogue came out in 2005.)

I also find myself going through all of the same anxieties that going to school used to bring out in me. Can I get to class on time? Will the teacher notice? Am I even in the right classroom? Laugh if you will, but I've already attended the wrong lab for the ENTIRE LAB. I also went to what I thought was the right lecture hall and started to get out my books when I realized that all the students around me HAD THE WRONG BOOK. Lucky me, I figured that one out in time.

I spent half of Monday morning running back and forth to the professor's office trying to log in to the University UNIX system, something I had not done because I'd foolishly taken two vacation days after Labor Day (for an awesome trip to Portland and my awesomer friends Bob and Stacey, and another trip-within-a-trip to Seattle to see equally-awesome friends Darrah and Jason; it was so awesome, I'm probably going to need a new adjective soon).

Sweat poured off of me as people approached me in the office, for my job, saying innocent things like, "Can you take a look at something weird that happened to my computer?"

"NO! I mean... can I come back? I've got another issue to attend to at the moment."

In the end, I find I sympathize more with those who juggle education with jobs, family, taxes and all of the 1,001 distractions of modern life. I hope I pass this class and, if not, at least acquit myself with dignity as I debug my dodgy code.

Where am I not? Work.

2008-08-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Washington, on a train ride as easy as Sunday
morning, on Sunday morning. The only sad thing about the trip was
having to temporarily say farewell to friends Bob and Stacey after
they kindly drove us to the train station. But we'll be back, taking
the same train south in two days. Good times ahead.

The Shirt I Did Not Purchase

2008-08-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

In Toronto's Kensington Market

Toronto Dispatch: Rainbow Photomontage

2008-08-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

You could not beat the weather on the drive up with a stick. The sun came out, dramatic clouds filled the horizon, and we were in Indiana for a blessedly short period of time. It was so nice, I said to Kathy, one of my car mates, "Man, I hope we get some rain on the way back. It would be a shame to have to drive through the SAME weather all the time."

Later, when it rained cats and dogs and we were stuck in a construction-related traffic snarl for forty-five excruciating minutes while we watched lightning play havoc in the sky, arcing horizontally from cloud to cloud over the horizon, Kathy said, "Wish granted."

So, like any city next to a Great Lake, the weather changes on a dime here. Before the start of my my long run yesterday, I made sure to give my teammates a dry t-shirt so I would have something to change into when we got to the theatre. Unfortunately, they forgot it. Later, they realized I could have worn one of Ben's shirts. O fickle fate! At any rate, I was never too uncomfortable, having grown if not accustomed at least resigned to the elements during my marathon training.

On the way to the theatre last night, the skies opened up again with big, fat drops that felt much colder than should be legal during the summer. At the same time, we were treated with golden hour sunset. I told my mates to look around for a rainbow, since low solar angle + heavy rain = rainbow. It turns out that warning was unnecessary. Plastered over the sky, in the direction of the theatre after we parked, was a complete rainbow. It was beautiful, and a good sign for the show to come (zombie infestation at a wedding in the middle of a dramatic love triangle; I was an inadvertantly stoned fifteen year old who knew jujitsu but could only pick up a piece of drywall and say "BAM!" because I'd accidentally eaten a joint). Pity my iPhone has no zoom. Enjoy the crudely-assembled photo montage!

By the way, it's sunny and completely cloud-free right now. Later, though, weather calls for a 20% chance of precipitation. Judging by yesterday's drenching over a 30% chance, I would say there is a 100% chance that is bullshit. Time will of course tell.

Toronto Dispatch: Boozing

2008-08-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Edison, part one of two of my roommates, likes to wake up at six o'clock Chicago time (seven Toronto) and was up for two hours at least before I got up yesterday. We still beat Chris, the final chapter in my roommate saga, by another two hours, so we got up and wandered around the block, settling on a little bar/coffee shop next door called Croissant Tree. This place was super cute, very like a shop back home except for fact that they also served beer. We took note of this, but did not drink, observing the "before noon, and you're an alcoholic" vacation rule that I just made up in my head.

Still, this did not stop us from returning later in the day, when the rest of the group needed a place to go to and I noted that Croissant Tree also had free wifi (with purchase). The gang headed over, laptops in tow, to get lunch, compute, hang out, and, for me, do some random work stuff that always seems to hit me on vacation. At some point, Chris, who had eaten already, wandered in and, pressured by the French Canadian (Quebecois?) coffee house owner, ordered a soda for himself and a beer for me. Oh! How kind! Well, we can hardly allow this beer to go to waste, right? So I drank it while the heavens first threatened us and ultimately poured down their mighty wet wrath upon us. I had omitted bringing a bag for my laptop, so I dallied a little longer, enjoying my teammates' company, eating my soup and a work webpage with the latest applicant PDFs, just like I would have at home, except that I was drinking beer.

Of course, this would bite me in the butt later.

After the coffee place, we planned on visiting the Bad Dog Theatre, one of the two places we at which are performing for the Toronto Improv Fest, to pick up whatever they use for passes, check in, and hand out fliers for our second show, Open Court, which relies on audience participation to build instant long form teams, and would kind of miss the point if it was just us, again. Not that I would be sad to perform two festival shows with this group, but we sold ourselves on the fact that we integrate seasoned improvisers with those more new to the fold, and we surely hate to renege on that promise. My Google Maps showed the theatre was only 3.3 km away, which is meaningless to me, since the English system has poisoned my brain, but others assured me was about two miles, an easy run for me. I programmed the route into my phone, handed a clean t-shirt over to the driving crew, and headed out.

A vital note: when getting directions for a trip, make sure the first few streets on the actual route agree with the virtual map. Otherwise, there is a very real chance you're headed in the wrong, and perhaps opposite, direction.

As I was running from urban to suburban Toronto, this exact thought failed to occur to me.

It was not until I saw that I had been running for twenty minutes--plenty of time to reach the place, even at a my slow pace--that I thought to re-map my route. Instantly, or perhaps not, my route changed from two miles-and-change to four miles. I phoned the group, who had also gotten lost en route, and turned around, this time checking and actually finding Bloor Street, which was vital since both theatres were on it, separated by a distance of four miles. After dodging downtown foot traffic for four miles, I made it, noting with dismay that the theatre was dark. Nobody would stir until shortly before the improv fest began and, what was worse, my team had gone AWOL. Ben, ever the gentleman, called me to let me know that they had been waiting patiently but, like Bishop waiting for Ripley at the end of James Cameron's Aliens, had been forced to move the ship/car because emissions from the nuclear meltdown made it too unstable to hover nearby/signs said they couldn't park on the street during rush hour.

Chris and Ben offered me the chance to ride in the car to the other theatre, but, having just run six miles, I only wanted to go back to the hotel and get cleaned up. Also, with five improvisers in their car already, I would not fit and while their plan to displace two teammates to ride the subway to the other destination was clever and very kind, I knew I still had another two miles in me. So I ran back, on the way pausing to snap a couple of shots on the bridge leading out of the city.

All this is to say: at first on the run, the alcohol held me back, made me sluggish and kind of bummed me out. Later, I was grateful for the carbs keeping me going for eight Canadian miles, which is equivalent to a bazillion kilometers, according to my fake English-Metric conversion system.

Toronto Dispatch: Lifesavers

2008-08-16T07:51:00.001-07:00

International Stinger is taking the Toronto Improv Fest by storm... or
at least performing there. This is the first of hopefully many posts
describing the experience. And since it's Saturday morning and I'm
grumpy after a restless sleep last night, I've decided my first post
will be a picture of my ears and blue earplugs.

Like safety glass and airbags, these things save lives. I took mine
along to wear in the car, during naptime on the ten hour drive, but
then I drove all the way here. When we got in late, late, late
Thursday, I was not long for consciousness, and, bidding goodnight to
my roommates, stuck them, turned over and slept like the dead. Good
thing, too, since one of my roommates shores like a chainsaw breaking
up with a woodchipper. Without these, I suspect the relative fun of
our trip would have been marred in short order by a murder-suicide.

Time Warp

2008-08-12T08:38:00.001-07:00

Addiction is a terrible thing, really. My productivity has suffered massively lately due to Hedgehog Launch, an hilarious game in which you are given a little bit of in-game money, a store, and an infinite supply of hedgehogs, with the goal of launching them heavenward to either earn more money to fund the next launch, or for the ultimate and noble goal of helping them transcend the boundaries of the Earth's atmosphere, and escape this fragile blue ball to the endless frontier that is space. It's addicting as hell. First, it's a very simple action game. You can buy fuel for thrusters that can maneuver you right/left in the air, or upgrade those thrusters to give you more "oomph." You can buy longer poles for your launcher or a stretchier rubber band. With lots of money, you can buy booster rockets, or parachutes, although the latter are a waste of time for the spacebound hedgehog, since the goal is only to reach space, not to fall back to the ground unharmed. The cartoonish graphics do not allow anything grotesque to happen to your furry friend, but you can fill in the gaps with your imagination. In the air, you'll find little dots that represent money, along with platforms which do the same as well as launch your hedgehog avatar upwards. With enough maneuvering fuel, radar and luck, you can exploit these platforms to increase your height. The amount of money you make for any one stage is your found money times your highest altitude, multiplied by the time you managed to stay airborn. For some, I'm sure it's as exciting as tax time, but for me, as with any game with economic differentials, it's a candidate for a new twelve step program.

Thanks to the iPhone, I've also been watching a lot of Heroes. I'm incredibly behind the curve on this one, so if you see me, please don't even tell me how it begins, much less ends. I'm still on season one, probably episode thirteen or fourteen by now, and finding the connections and play with powers to be a lot of fun. I'd also recognized the actor who plays Sylar--Zachary Quinto--from the show So NoTORIous, where I found him to be hilarious and not creepy in the slightest. I guess it's how they light you. I am excited to see how he portrays Mr. Spock in the upcoming Star Trek movie, but J.J. Abrams has let me down often enough that I don't exactly have high hopes for it.

As an aside about So NoTORIous, I caught an ad for it last year while I was running on the treadmill and immediately thought, "Wow, that is a great Tori Spelling impersonator. She can sing really well. I'll bet the REAL Tori is pretty pissed that someone is cashing in on her reputation." And it was only later that, also while running, I found out it was her, and that she's funny. Dammit, Hollywood, just when I was ready to cynically dismiss all of your second-generation wannabes as talentless hacks raised up by their producer fathers, they actually show talent, and more-than-average at that. Is nothing sacred?

So, anyway, the above are my excuses for not posting so often, although I reserve my apologies for times when dramatic things are ACTUALLY happening.

Honey Baby

2008-08-12T08:16:00.001-07:00

My cousins came up from Cincinnati for the weekend to take a nice post-wedding-anniversary vacation in Chicago and, as a happy byproduct, see Brandi and me. Oh, and they also brought their youngest, Lilly, who as you can see here, is rapidly growing into a beautiful fair-haired chunky monkey. Sigh. I hope when the time comes, Brandi and I make kids as pretty and well-behaved as she is.

Not that life is all roses with her. Around feeding time, she would get very cranky, but in that respect she's exactly like Brandi and me. Also, when we went to Turquoise, our favorite restaurant in the neighborhood we had to give up when we started looking around for a place to buy because it was too expensive, her diaper started leaking onto her outfit, so her mom had to excuse them both to the bathroom to clean what amounted to baby sewage off her daughter while we pretended to be okay with that. But, again, who hasn't been in that position?

We settled on some fun, quick sightseeing, unfortunately skipping the architectural boat tour because Saturday's weather didn't know what the hell it wanted to do, and by the time the rain tucked away, the 60-minute cruise was sold out. We did make it to Navy Pier, though, touring the stained glass museum there while Kristie walked and fed Lilly. That's talent. Brett, who is older than me by two-point-five weeks, but who outranks me in the dad department by one daughter, two boys and a dog, agreed with the rest of us to go up on the Ferris wheel despite a mild fear of heights. His wife made fun of his clammy palms, but I applaud his pluck. Meanwhile, we got some nice shots of the Chicago skyline, and Brandi got to spend a little time with her littlest cousin, a match made in that part of heaven that Ferris wheels touch. (The bottom part.)

Bike the Drive pics I am too cheap to pay for

2008-07-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

I get emails from the Chicagoland Bicycling Federation with offers to buy pictures they took of me from Bike the Drive, the Memorial Day event where they close off Lakeshore Drive for five delicious hours and allow bicyclists to turn it into their personal pedal-powered paradise, a description that is almost too illiterative to allow to live but which I am leaving in because it's exactly that annoying to receive these emails. They're a kind of betrayal. First, although they strongly encourage you to sign up for Bike the Drive and pay your $40+ fee for the privilege of not choking on petrol fumes, and even deliver a t-shirt and number to stick on your helmet, they hardly enforce the helmet sticker on the road. (I'm told you need one for rest stops, which I took advantage of when I got to the southern end of the course, at the Museum of Science and Industry at 57th Street, so perhaps they're at least good for two bananas, a fig newton and lemonade, especially if you didn't think ahead and bring water or sustenance.) The sticker is there, I must then surmise, so they can photograph and identify the bicyclists, photos which they then turn around and sell to said cyclists. I apologize for the second round of alliteration. That stuff gets in your blood something fierce. That leads me to second: I didn't ask to be photographed, and it's not like I could have opted out when they had at least four photographers at different ends of the course. Do I look like the poster boy for Chicacoland cycling here, with my wraparound sunglasses, uncool helmet and fold up bike at six o'clock on a Sunday morning? No? Well, safety demands my picture be taken just in case of... well, JUST IN CASE.

Third, these photographs aren't cheap, and the Chicagoland Bicycling Federation already have my money, which they took from me in order to charge me more money for photographs I didn't ask them for. Sounds like capitalism at work. The only way it could get better is if at rest stops they only sold me bananas with pictures of me on them eating other bananas. On second thought, perhaps it's best not to give them ideas.

I really do like the idea of photographs, even if I think I look like I've been photoshopped onto the bike I'm riding. It would just be so much cooler if they included the photos in the price of the event. Afterwards, instead of them pushing emails out to all participants with offers to sell them photographs, they send out gentle reminders that, hey, we all had fun, didn't we? And, by the by, you can download pictures of yourselves from our website... look for them by your helmet number, which we've handily catalogued using the same OCR that turns your scans into an editable Word document.

Like so many things technological, this is so much easier in my mind than in actual practice. Still worth doing, though.

Bran Sammich

2008-07-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

As part of what feels like their neverending kindness to us, my Aunt
Ellen and Uncle Dave offered us their basement to sleep in after the
day's festivities on the Fourth. We like their basement. For one, it's
verboten to the dogs, so we don't have to worry about one of us
getting up to use the bathroom only to find the other smothered under
doggy paws and kisses. For two, it is almost completely dark, which of
course satisfies the part of me that looks for places to hide when the
zombie apocalypse strikes. The undead would never think to look for me
here! Now as long as I train myself never to need food or water, I can
outlast the dead and repopulate the earth with my wife. Taxes? Never
again!*

Dave and Ellen even went so far as to buy a new air mattress when they
pulled their old ones out of storage and found out both of them
leaked. Dave was off walking Charlie and Wylie, the dogs, so Ellen,
Brandi and I dragged everything out of the box to see how it fit
together. The mattress was straightforward, albeit a little tight in
the space. The inflating agent, as Ellen explained, was a little
nonstandard: a vacuum cleaner from the 1950s that reversed flow by
detaching the hose from one end of the fire extinguisher-like cylinder
and attaching it to the other end. This was completely baffling to us,
so we waited for Dave et al to return. The final setup also involved
jamming the hose into a funnel, itself stuck into the valve of the
mattress. It worked surprisingly well. Inflation took just a few
moments.

And then we knew we had a problem.

Dave insisted it happened when he twisted the now-full mattress away
from the entertainment center, gouging a hole in the side. I worried
it was my fault, unfurling it so close to the entertainment center in
the first place. Either would do cause the wave of air we felt washing
over our faces. Thinking quickly, Dave found a roll of duct tape and
slapped a pair of patches over the tear. "Air is like water," he
explained. "It finds places to go." The tape, he hoped, would be
secure enough to hold the mattress until morning. Just to be kind, he
filled the mattress again. We went upstairs to spend some family time
and put the matter out of our minds.

When we came back, the mattress was already partially-deflated. Brandi
sat back on it and bravely decided to sleep on it. A quick test showed
that both of us would probably suffocate if we tried to sleep side by
side; the curvature of the mattress took us both in the center,
leading to collission and probable tragedy. I took the couch.
Surprisingly comfortable, I slept through the night, waking only once
because it was so dark I couldn't figure out where the hell I was. In
the morning, though, Brandi's mattress was flat as a pancake. Somehow,
my wife slept through the whole thing. Nice work, dear!

That day, and without explanation, Dave took the mattress back for a
full refund.

* Except a death tax that would only apply if you were dead, still
working and had a social security number. And in this case, by "tax" I
mean "bullet to the brain pan."

Fourth of Julawesome

2008-07-16T12:24:00.000-07:00

Brandi and I drove down to Columbus the morning of July 4th so we
could Represent (and, not coincidentally, Keep It Real) at the family
picnic hosted by my cousin Sandy. This is the branch of the family
that looks the most fractal: my grandmother and her sister each had
boatloads of kids, although Gabby Hefner stopped at six, Patty Eckel
went on to have twice that many. Now, so many years later, not only
have those kids had kids, but those grandkids--my generation,
approximately--are also having kids. Sandy does a great job
controlling what would otherwise be mass chaos. Parking is on the
lawn. Kids play on the driveway with hand-me-downs or toys Sandy buys
from garage sales, and everyone brings a dish, most often homemade. We
punted, preferring to bring two of Jewel Osco's enormous frosting-
covered chocolate chip cookies (actually, three, but it appears there
was some snacking on the drive down), but nobody seemed to mind.

It was nice to see the family again. Last December, we lost my
grandfather to pancreatic cancer, and, while that was a sad and trying
time for some--my mom, aunt and grandmother particularly--what they
say about weddings and funerals is nearly as inevitable as death and
taxes. They brought us together. I looked forward to the rematch. Of
course, trying to remember names stretched my limited brain pan to the
limit, as it always has, but my Uncle Dave clued me in to a trick that
part of the family uses to at least pretend familiarity: call everyone
"buddy." It works, too!

At least, nobody felt like calling me out on it.

At the end of the night, all the firefighters (there are four) trudge
off to the middle of Sandy's DEEEEP backyard and light off fireworks
like you would not believe. The kids get glow necklaces to add to
their glow-in-the-dark temporary tattoos and everybody "ooh"s and
"ah"s for the next twenty minutes.

Here, Brandi and my nephews Hogan and Nolan look at pictures of the
fireworks on Brandi's phone. The day was simply so fabulous, we could
not possibly cram in more fun.

So the next day we drove back to Chicago. AND finished off the big
cookie.

More Geekery

2008-07-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

Today, I:

Installed the iPhone 2.0 software on my phone, one day early, using the direct download link and following instructions carefully.
Downloaded and tried out many new, free iPhone applications. Man, when just the freeware for a phone rocks this hard, I cannot even imagine what the applications are going to look like going forward.
Loaded my fourth OS onto my MacBook. Following the installation of the new hard drive and the extra 160 GB capacity it gave me, I added Ubuntu and, now, Vista to my collection of emulated operating systems. Soon enough, I'll hopefully install software as well. This, more than anything else, is what I think the future will look like.
Ordered DSL for my mom, hopefully setting in motion a crazy, half-baked plan to free her from the MSN dialup to which she's been chained (at my behest, originally) for the last seven years.
Had several writing idea I think are worth pursuing. I can't wait to wade through the ideal-muck, as it were, to see what comes up. For now, consider this a teaser for cool things to come.

Today was a good day, a geeky day.

In prase of Torx

2008-07-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

Brandi's four-plus-year-old computer bummed her out. It crashed all the time. It ran out of memory: 512 MB RAM might look great in 2004, but in 2008 it feels a little like a corset: quaint and painfully tight. Every time she used Photoshop she would get an error indicating the hard drive was full. The page file (the bit of the hard drive Photoshop uses to store all of your previous versions, so you can go backwards through 20 or more changes) took up all the remaining space. Brandi would get upset; I would get upset that I didn't have time to deal with the crisis, hard words would be exchanged and, inevitably, the feelings of a 6 lb lump of plastic would get hurt.

Well, the week before last, I took matters in my own hands with her iBook, stripping down the machine into its motherboard, plastic casing, aluminum inner casing, and about 50 screws, all of which I carefully labeled and most of which I returned to their proper positions. (There are always parts left over.) Eventually, I replaced the 40 GB hard drive with a much newer 160 GB hard drive that I DARE my wife to fill up before the computer dies. And the one mystery screw? No worries. If the remaining 49 don't hold the machine together, natural laws are meaningless and we all have moments to live anyhow. Luckily for us all, so far they have.

Well, this little daylong project (about 3 hours of screws plus another 2 of hard drive copying), gave me confidence for my Macbook. In the intervening two years between the sale of Brandi's computer and the advent of mine, Apple took it upon itself to reinvent the way users accessed the guts of its machines. So all it took to get to the hard drive of mine was the removal of the battery and a small cover inside the battery slot, about fifteen fewer steps. I had done it before, for fun. (I'm insane.) All I needed to do it yesterday was the proper hard drive.

This was my first great big, "Aha!" in a while. Last Christmas, I got a tiny portable external hard drive from Brandi's father. It looked a lot like a 2.5" hard drive in a plastic enclosure, but how best to tell? Brandi's computer taught me that sometimes equipment manufacturers just use plastic clips to tie everything together, and that the proper torque might pop them open without breaking them. It was a risk, though, so I practiced at work with another version of the drive I'd asked for from my supervisors. (I love these drives. I'm also insane.) I got it open with a minimum of breakage, and, what was more, the guts of the drive were a 2.5" SATA hard drive, exactly the same kind of drive as inside of my laptop.

So it was with great excitement that I fired up "SuperDuper," a cool program for cloning an Apple machine to another drive, set it running, and, three hours later, performed my second Apple brain transplant. It worked! I'm typing on the new/old computer at this very moment!

Only a few questions remain at this point:

Does the new drive use more power or less? Will I take a hit on battery life because of it?
I used to edit video off the external drive, and I assume connecting it more directly to the motherboard will increase throughput, but will access time beat the old drive?
What to do with all that space? I used to liken hard drive space to that of a warehouse, but with warehouses, you can calculate space at a glance. Empty hard drives are like digital clocks versus analog clocks: harder to quantify. Very likely some of that space will be virtualization software. I've been dying to load Ubuntu on the Macbook for a while, and my job sometimes takes me into Vista territory, so now might be my chance.
Do I get any geek cred for this? Probably not for hard drive replacement, but for guessing that Western Digital packed a standard SATA inside a plastic enclosure, then ripping everything open? Come on, don't I deserve at least a little?

Oh, and the Torx? A couple of years ago when I wanted to build my picture frame computer, I bought a pair of Torx screwdrivers to disassemble the lid of my old PowerBook. At the time, I thought, "That's $15 wasted. When the hell will I ever need to use these again?"

Now I've used them again, in the last 24 hours, not once but TWICE. Thank you, Torx.

Last night's dinner pic at Being Brandi

2008-06-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

Orange at Orange

Fresnel Cyclops

2008-06-24T09:34:00.001-07:00

Brandi took this picture of me in Walgreens, waiting in line for the pharmacy. I'm wearing my end-of-the-weekend stubble, which sometimes inexplicably lands on my face in mid-week, depending on how busy I am or how little I care.

I've spent a lot of the last several weeks preparing for a sketch comedy show at Second City, part of the final project for my talented friend Ric Walker, who is completing the director's program. Our show, which may or may not be typographically correct, is currently titled, "Im-polite Company," and will feature a lot of scenes (and two songs) about what happens when people just stop caring about what other people think. I've been absolutely in love with the ridiculously talented cast, Frankie Benavides, Kate Duffy, Sherman Edwards, Elana Elyce, JW Kuebler and myself (I love myself, a little, and hug myself every day just for trying), and that's perhaps a good thing because we've been meeting twice a week or more in order to put the show together. Sketch comedy takes WORK. We go up July 5th, at 10:30 PM, at Donny's Skybox Theatre at Piper's Alley at North and Wells, running six weeks until August 9th. And I'm psyched.

In the meanwhile, Myopic Cowboy nears completion, which is good, because summer is well past here and all the good vibes and great lighting means I'm itching to get a few more videos under my belt. On the other hand, the comic book convention is in town this weekend, and I'm also really excited to spend some time with my awesome friend Zander in and among the nerd giants of comic-dom. Time management should be a course they make you take in college.

The Penguin in the Mann Movie

2008-06-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

I've spent a couple of sleepless nights this week playing extra on a
movie shooting in Hollywood. I took notes and will post them later,
but in the meanwhile, please enjoy this very regal pose I struck in
the Extras Holding Area I spent approximately fifteen seconds in
Tuesday and Thursday nights. The majority of the time I spent HURRYING
into wardrobe, HURRYING to get hair done, HURRYING to the set and then
waiting for the shot to get set up, waiting to get assigned a path
through all the other seated extras, and, finally, pretending to wait
tables. The shoes they gave me aspired to an extremely low level of
comfort, and I spent the first night in a great deal of back pain
because, at least for movie extras, waiters don't sit down. Last
night, it was because I would wrinkle my apron, but I found ways
around that, such as taking it off during extended breaks.

More later. Lots of drama ahead.

Brandi's Fantasy Bookcase

2008-06-02T16:24:00.001-07:00

Two levels of books. We talked about becoming extremely wealthy,
buying out our upstairs neighbor, then converting the condo into a
duplex. It was just the "becoming extremely wealthy" part we couldn't
figure out without selling an organ or resorting to crime.

We took this at IKEA, which is a fantastic homeowners' fantasy world
for the fact that they build whole rooms and even apartments using
just their furniture, so you know how much it would cost you and just
how much flat pack furniture you can squeeze into a Manhattan-size
studio apartment (answer: quite a lot, actually). It's generally very
frugal, but occasionally they must tell the designers to go nuts,
because this because a library this size legally can only be owned by
an English lord, a mad scientist, or a vampire, depending on regional
laws, local taxes, etc. Because Brandi's reflection is clearly visible
in the mirror, I think we can safely rule out the last.

The Science-Hero Haircut

2008-06-02T16:12:00.000-07:00

I recently got the call to work as an extra, but since I'm
contractually obliged not to blog about the movie (and have nothing to
write in any case; extras are the bottom of the barrel, Hollywood-
wise), I'll treat you to a photo I snapped of the groovy haircut I got
free of charge on Friday. My stylist worked very hard to give me
something appropriate to the 1930's, and in addition to succeeding
admirably, turned in a little extra credit in the form of my science
hero 'do.

Now, I've always kind of loathed my sideburns, but despite my best
efforts, they creep down my face as my hair grows between haircuts.
Shaving too far up makes me afraid for no good reason, so every time I
shear my little Eurobeard off (I go a while between shaves, mostly
because my job lets me get away with it), the razor goes a few
millimeters shy of the line. So the sideburns grow. I guess they look
natural enough that the stylists I usually go to don't even think to
cut them off, and of course I forget, but it's nice to be reminded
what I could look like with a little effort. The result was nice
enough that one of the extras playing a prostitute remarked, "Wow, you
rock that."

I thanked her and went inside for my wardrobe fitting.

The only thing I can think of better than science hero is science
villain. And the more I look at my head under dramatic lighting, the
more I see the pre-transformation Joker from Alan Moore/Brian
Bolland's "The Killing Joke."

So don't cross me.

How is a cat like an iceberg?

2008-05-22T12:12:00.001-07:00

90% of her is below the surface.

Rio's new trick is to lay on the hole in the cat tree in just the
right position to leave her belly sticking out. She apparently thinks
this is a perfectly rational cat thing to do and I am not one to argue
with her. We've had fierce enough conflicts in the last few days, from
her jumping into the refrigerator to the catfight she picked with her
brother under our bed, what this cat wants this cat gets.

Which, come to think about it, would be a good catchphrase for when
I'm dressed in a suit wearing mirror shades.

Heart Model Recall

2008-05-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

Since I'm supposed to be finishing a short story right now, I thought I would procrastinate by posting some of the notes I made about a month ago, during my brief stint as a heart model. My other incentive is Karen Maxwell, who reminded me during her visit last weekend that it looked like I was welshing on my promise to write about it. So, here it is, largely unedited bullet points from my halcyon days of cardiologists, ultrasound, and grainy images of my aorta:

We've got a total of six models for three scanning beds. The SOP is two hours on, two hours off.
The scanning techs don't mind if you fall asleep, although yesterday my tech Mark woke me up when it looked like some important people were wandering by. It took about ten minutes, but when they finally walked up, the grayest-headed among them said, "Aha! A model who is actually awake!" Score one for Mark and me.
Lying on a bed while people scan your heart would seem like the easiest job in the world, except for a few things. Laying on your side without moving very much can be a challenge. Also, spending any amount of time in a cold convention center can give you the sniffles. Now take your shirt off and cover half your chest with ultrasound goo. It gets cold. Sometimes they give you a blanket to keep yourself warm, but I didn't know that at first and toughed it out my first two hours. Consequently, my first two hours kind of sucked.
I spotted a couple of friends on the way in this morning, wearing red and white jumpsuits that read "bad" and "good," respectively. They were, apparently, cholesterol. Another heart model explained to me that they and their cohorts stood on escalators, sometimes getting in the conventioneers' way, sometimes helping them out. That's what cholesterol does! See how much your heart is like a bunch of medical professionals checking their Blackberries at a Chicago convention center?
Our booth has more square footage than our condo, and probably cost the company as much to rent for three days. They have several TVs (like our condo), a MacBook Pro (very like our condo) which is connected to a $50,000 base station used to process the imaging from ultrasound paddles attached to it (not at all like our condo). Because I was curious about other machines, I offered to rotate with other heart models, but I was met with apathy and in one case resistance because the guy said he'd bonded with his scanner. All right.
While hanging out waiting for direction today, another demonstrator started talking to me and another heart model about the necessity of getting female heart models in, since having topless women demonstrating machines would be a significantly bigger draw. We chuckled politely. Even though it was the first time I'd heard it, it didn't feel like a very original joke, and since I'm a couple decades past adolescence, it's lost a lot of its titillation. Then the guy started talking about how great it would be to get the female models lubed up with ultrasound goo, at which point I said, "Um, awkward." The other model left. The guy who made the comment started a new conversation, the "my machine is better than your machine" tack, with which I could not argue, since I didn't design my machine, I just sat under it.
One of the booth presenters this morning walked in with a cheese and ham croissant that she wasn't going to eat and offered it to us. Another heart model, Spike, whom I had helped yesterday by looking up CTA routes to McCormick Convention Center, had not eaten breakfast and took her up on the offer. He went back to the area they designated for us to stow our stuff and returned about three minutes later. "Did you eat that already?" I asked. "I was starving," he explained. We made jokes about their scanning his chest and discovering it, completely whole, lodged in his heart. That's what passes for humor in this place.
Convention food costs, as Spike observed, are "minibar prices." Other, smarter models brought their food. I am not smart, not in that way.
Yesterday, I made the mistake of buying a Starbucks "Skinny Vanilla Latte" in "Venti," which would mean "Large" if "Large" weren't the smallest Starbucks size. This drink, which was skim milk, sugar-free vanilla, and I guess espresso, messed me up almost the entire day. My stomach hurt a couple hours after drinking it. By the end of the day, it hurt to move my eyes. Even being allowed to lay back and sleep on the table kind of sucked when the pounding behind my eyes would not stop. When Brandi picked me up afterwards to go grocery shopping, I leaned heavily on my cart like someone four decades older. I can see how old people really love those walkers with wheels and seats, because my kludged version worked great.

The Tale of the Fish

2008-05-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

Our dear friends the Maxwells visited this weekend, and we traipsed all around the city Saturday, showing them the Bean, the lions of the Art Institute, the Lego store, American Girl Place, and our Nintendo Wii, as dictated by the laws of hospitality. They left Sunday, hopefully as triumphantly exhausted as we felt, although they, too, had a full day ahead of them.

As dictated by Maxwell tradition, we all gathered on the sofa for the final group photo. I offered my tripod. Karen said that would be perfect, so I went inside the office to retrieve it. It was tangled up with my camera bag, per usual, so I freed it and hopped back to the chaos in the living room. Unbeknownst to me, the door to the office lay slightly ajar. We all scrunched together, dramatic Evelyn, squirmy Henry, Karen and me, with a hole for Dave who was setting up the timer. Dave finished up, squeezed in at the end of the sofa, and we all put on our best smiles.

Something splashed in the office. Distracted, I blinked, and saw the flash through the red of my eyelids. I realized two things simultaneously:
1) we would have to take the photo again
2) Margaret, the Betta fish Brandi took home from Publications International, was in mortal peril from avid fishercat Patrick.
Already, we could hear more splashing. We needed to act, and quickly. Brandi and I jumped up and ran into the office. Both cats had availed themselves of the forbidden space, Rio strolling underneath the desk, Patrick standing over... Margaret, out of her tank and clearly punctured behind her left gill. She lay very still.

Behind us, Evelyn started to cry. She didn't know exactly what happened, but sometimes feels overwhelmed when grownup display heightened emotions. Karen ushered her back into the living room. Brandi and I swept the cats out of the office, ignoring the body of the fish for the moment while we dealt with the photo op. Evelyn continued to cry, and we asked her why. She said she was afraid that Patrick was hurt because he had been bitten by a fish. Brandi assured her our cat was fine and un-bitten, delicately omitting the part of the story where Patrick did the reverse. Brandi smiled tightly and said, "Well, you were right," referring to our longstanding and slowly-simmering argument about whether or not one should take care to close the office doors. After all, what could happen? I asked her not to joke. The thought of playing accomplice to murder, even of something as small and flushable as a fish, made me feel guilty as sin. Dave set up the camera again, and we smiled, some of us falling back on our acting training. This time, everything came out fine, and the Maxwells prepared to head out to Cedar Point on what was turning out to be a decidedly crummy, rainy day. Wait, though, a new wrinkle: Karen still needed the weather report for Sandusky, Ohio. Would the roller coasters still run? Might the sun shine yet on the largest wooden roller coaster in the world? Brandi hinted that we needed to use a computer not in the office. Luckily, my laptop lay on the floor of our bedroom where I'd dropped it the night before, hoping for and, in the end, sleeping through the chance to get some homework done on a sketch writing show. We looked up the weather (lousy) and I helped take the last of the bags to the car, holding the big blue and yellow IKEA umbrella to keep raindrops the size of mothballs off the kids and Karen. Dave did the same with the second umbrella. Finally, waving in the archway of our building, I saw them off and went inside.

Brandi was in the process of cleaning up the office when I saw down heavily on our overstuffed living room couch. She had a paper towel which she was carrying to the bathroom for the traditional fish burial. Suddenly, she stopped. "I felt it twitch," she said. "What do I do?" I didn't know. She opened up the paper towel and saw that Margaret's gills were still moving. "How long can a fish live out of water?" Omce again, I had no idea, although later it would occur to me that Bettas, which in the wild inhabit tiny mud puddles they occasionally hop out of, might have evolved the ability to survive considerably longer than, say, a tuna. "I just don't want her to suffer."

"Well," I said, "Did you keep the tank? Can we put her back in it?"

"I threw it away."

"I'll get a glass. Meet me in the kitchen."

I filled a glass and Brandi dropped Margaret in. We watched for a few seconds as she drifted somewhat lifelessly in the water, the puncture wound all-too clear. But then her gills started moving and her fins got in the act as well. While not exactly speeding through the water, she was clearly hanging on, and I decided it was worthwhile to see how long we could extend her tiny fish life. I pulled her bowl out of the garbage and filled it, and together we poured her from the glass into her old home. Again, she drifted for a few seconds, but this time we could see clearly that she wasn't bleeding into the water, and therefore might not be mortally wounded. So, once again, we set her up on the desk in the office and crossed our fingers. Brandi submitted a question to an online fish expert about where to go from here, and later that afternoon got the answer: droplets to dechlorinate the water and help Margaret restore her natural, fishy slime. Directions call for one teaspoon per ten gallons of water. We put two drops into her softball-sized bowl and called it a day.

Two days later, Margaret is still not floating on the top of the tank, and my guilt is starting to rest, even if my paranoia over open office doors is strong as ever.

Evil in the Friendly Confines

2008-05-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

So, we're at the Cubs vs. San Diego whatevers (San Diegans? I don't
know; sports are complicated) and our team is just creaming those West
Coast softies. The score is 12 to 3 in the seventh inning, and I've
seen more home runs in the last hour than your average episode of Red
Shoe Diaries (what ho!). The Cubs finished two innings with five runs
per, and held the other team to just one run. So it's exciting as heck
in Wrigleyville tonight.

Adding to our excitement, we're not paying for any of this. Brandi's
work has a lounge at Wrigley Field, so we parked for free in the Brown
lot, walked a block and a half to the field, then enjoyed kosher dogs,
Caesar salad on a pita, chips, nuts, quesadillas and alcoholic
beverages. There was even a dessert cart just loaded up with carrot
cake, chocolate cake, Snickers pie, ice cream, gummy bears, M&Ms,
liqueurs in chocolate cups, chocolate-covered strawberries, cheesecake
and cookies of both the chocolate chip and Reeses Peanut Butter Cup
variety. My worst heartbreak this evening was thinking I would have to
choose just one. The nice cart lady let me have four (Snickers pie,
vanilla ice cream, raspberry syrup, and a chocolate cup filled with
Grand Marnier... Which, by the way, tastes like Deep Woods Off
mosquito repellant... in chocolate). My diet is toast.

You can tell from this blurry picture, because I seem to have gained a
lot of weight in my chin. I now have a passing resemblance to Tim
Curry in Ridley Scott's "Legend."

I'll trap your earth in snow forever unless Tom Cruise puts on some
pants. Now.

Wrigley Field at Run 12

2008-05-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

Brandi and a very swarthy me at Wrigley Field, courtesy of Brandi's
work.

Is your marathon half full or half empty?

2008-05-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

I chose half full.

Unfortunately, my sister had prior obligations, including shuttling my nephews around to no less than three sporting events, as well as seeing my brother in law off to the airport, and could not spare the time to do the full marathon. So this is where we diverged in our running choices. I still think she did a great job and can't wait to see what her running future brings. Her friend Janis apparently finished just before me (how dare she?), so congratulations are in order all around.

Funny thing is, I remember coming to this point one year ago, when I did the Flying Pig half marathon, and wondering what it would feel like to take the other option, the Road Less Traveled. Now that I've taken it, I have zero regrets. The weather was as perfect this year as last, and I had only a few major twinges, like my left knee sending shooting pains through my body as though promising to secede from the rest of me and form its own Confederacy. Easing back on the throttle helped that a lot, and while I still feel it two days later, I don't think it's a permanent condition.

My other photo, for this post at least, comes from early in the run when we turned back into downtown Cincinnati after briefly foraying into Lexington, KY. I noticed last year and this that one of the bridges bounces a bit alarmingly as you run across it. For a few moments, it felt like gravity wanted to play tricks on me, as the ground fell away from me and then rushed up to greet my not-yet-sore legs. Then lessons from twelfth grade Calculus-Physics class came back to me, specifically the image of the Tacoma Narrows bridge as winds tore it to shreds, and I just prayed the bridge would hold together long enough to get all of us runners across it. The bridge held.

I have a different view of this shot than when I first took it. I blame my sunglasses for making me think I could shoot into the sun and get decent photos. Now, I think the photo looks like Postapocalyptic Zombie Run, a competition where the first undead runner to cross the finish line gets the first bite of the only remaining human. Sure, the race planners hold stops along the way, but they just serve parts of the carcass. It's better when they beg.

I should probably have never seen "28 Days Later."

View from the Flying Pig

2008-05-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

I finished a marathon yesterday, my fourth one and fastest (by nine
minutes, at a still-slow 4:40). The weather was positively glorious,
starting off in the forties and rising to just shy of the sixties, but
without a breeze or a cloud in the sky. 22,000 people ran, all told,
including half marathoners and relay racers, who raced in quarter-
segments and whom I cursed for their freshness as my fatigue started
to set in. I sneaked my iPhone onto the course, despite the ban on
electronics on the raceway, as well as a bag of steroids for those
really steep hills. I kid.

I took what shots I could as I ran and will be posting those later.
The quality ranges from poor to atrocious, probably thanks to my shaky
hands, sunglasses, and my bad idea to always shoot into the sun. What
can I say? My brain was on marathon. I'm happy I could even slur my
words when my mom called me to tell me where she was waiting along the
course. (She played support crew for me, my sister and my sister's
friend, gathering jackets at the six mile mark and cheering us on.
She's great and I love her.)

More pics and commentary to follow.

In case you forgot...

2008-05-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

Chicago after a rainstorm can be just heartbreaking in its beauty.
Sunset under the clouds reminds you that sometimes, and very, very
rarely, God doesn't need a goat sacrifice to smile down on Wrigleyville.

Missives from Mexico, Part the Third: Silly Fun at the Temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza

2008-05-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of conjecture about the functions of the various structures in Chichen Itza, home to the Castillo, the great step pyramid of the Mayans and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. We don't know a lot about it because Mayan culture went through a cycle of growth and dieback probably related to their use/misuse of land and maize production (although this, too, is conjectural), and the site was only lightly occupied by the time the Spanish arrived to conquer the crap out of everyone. When you visit it today, you see labels everywhere describing the sacred symbols and what they might mean with, unfortunately, a lot less critical thought than I would have hoped for.

Case in point: the ball court, which has stone hoops about twenty feet off the ground through which the Mayan ball court players would shoot their natural latex balls by bouncing them off their abdomens. We've since revised this estimate because physics says it ain't going to happen. You just can't get the height. So the stone hoops' function remains a mystery, although archaeologists still claim the game had a religious function. Maybe. The Coliseum in Rome had a religious function, too, AFTER the Christians took it over. Before that, it was mostly theatre with real blood effects. My point is that it drives people crazy to say, "I don't know," but you've got to bite the bullet before you put out a common sense solution that isn't very sensible.

At any rate, Brandi and I had a lot of fun clowning around in the Temple of the Warriors, and given that we're not entirely sure what went on in the Temple of the Warriors, or even if it had a secular function, we hope to spare the wrath of Kukulkan (Mayan Quetzcoatl) for another day. Who knows, really? Maybe hamming it up for the camera and tripod was EXACTLY why the Mayans built the temple.

Please don't eat my heart, feathered snake god.

Missives from Mexico, Part the Second: Cozumel

2008-04-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

We took the ferry to Cozumel, Mexico, during our vacation to Mexico, during which time we did... approximately nothing, and not constructively, either. It was my fault. Even though I had every intention of getting up early to swim, I slept in. Then I finally ran. By the time we got out the door, it was 12:30, and by the time we arrived at the dock, the guide book said the next ferry to Cozumel from Playa del Carmen left at 3:00. I apologized profusely.

Brandi, starting to catch on to this Mexican guidebook nonsense, suggested we try the ferry anyway, since the worst that could happen was that the guidebook was right. She was right; it was wrong. The next ferry left at 2:00, getting us onto the island at 2:00 PM. Plenty of time for sightseeing and even a spot of lunch, right?

Wrong-o, mister. Cozumel is a lot bigger than it looks like in a guidebook (where it looks to be about the size of my palm; how crazy would that be? Each new visitor would have to knock an earlier visitor off). So popping down to the lighthouse was out of the question. Nor could we visit Mayan ruins, since they closed at 4:00. Time drew tight. We finally hired a cab from the port to the ecological preserve, with its cool lighthouse, and he was very nice and somewhat skeptical that we could fit it in, to the point that he called ahead for reassurance that it would be open. He got it, and off we went. Only... by "open" they meant, "open if you got there at 2:00, since after that they kick people out." So we had a 500 peso ride from downtown to the southern end of the island for nothing. Still, our cabbie took pity on us, and offered to drive us on a long loop around the island for 400 pesos. To this day, I'm not sure why he was so determined to make lemonade of our lemons, but I appreciated it. He took us around and I got lots of shots of the island, which, outside port, was exceptionally barren but for a few restaurants clinging to its rocky shores.

Here comes the panorama:

We took lots of photos, and at the end of the day (which came all too quickly), my only complaint was the strange force of gravity that made me look fat in almost every single photo taken of me that day. Blame it on wearing a t-shirt with English on it, an excess of burritos, or the eerie pull of the Bermuda Triangle about 1,000 miles away, but somehow I walked away with a face full of bloat. See it here? My tummy is clearly trying to escape from my clothes, and has conscripted Brandi's forearm in its efforts. Also, the horizon is tilted, but our cab driver can't be great at EVERYTHING. Can he?

Missives from Mexico, Part the First

2008-04-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

Wow, it looks like Sweeps Week for the Larsens has turned into a blood bath of events. Depending on how much downtime I have at work--and right now, I must admit, it looks pretty good--I hope to be able to shoehorn as much as possible into my blog. In the interest of kicking things off, I would like to present a couple of cell phone pics snapped in Mexico:

Here, Brandi shows off her chicken enchilada smile, courtesy of a tiny, open air restaurant we found next to an only-slightly-larger hotel in Playa del Carmen, which everyone insists on calling just Playa. We drove into town to get a measure of its famous fifth avenue, called Quinta for reasons obvious to the bilingual, and I accidentally got off the highway a touch too far north of the city. We drove through a neighborhood that looked impoverished, and by that I mean, filled with trash. I think you can chart a direct graph of neighborhoods in Riviera Maya, correlating "Ghetto-ness" on the x-axis to the rising amounts of trash per square yard on the y-axis. I worried that the guidebooks had exaggerated very badly the tourist appeal of this quaint town by the water, but, it turns out, it puts on its best face as it gets closer to the two mile long strip of shops and hucksters. The restaurant we found was at the northern end, which we dutifully walked after stocking up on tacos con pollo, sopes and enchiladas. Brandi ordered in Spanish, which she did pretty much everywhere we went, because I did not study and get very shy trying to convey my thoughts through flailing. My hero.

Image two also comes from my iPhone, and was also taken at Playa, but about four days afterwards. It is probably the most flattering shot of my body that has ever been taken, somehow completely downplaying the lunch belly I doubtlessly acquired when we returned to the exact same restaurant (Saturday before we left was a kind of "best of Mexico" that played a little hectically). Pictures just do not do justice to the many colors of the sky, water and land, which, if printed, would exhaust the blue toner in your color laser printer almost immediately. It's beautiful. It's also hot. Temperatures while we were there topped out at 90 degrees F. I noticed you could always tell the natives because they walked around with umbrellas during the day to shield themselves from the sun, which just put the beatdown on you. Yesterday, I had several people tell me they could see I wore sunglasses, and knew what shape they were. Since air conditioning costs so much, and the temperatures vary so little, most of the architecture takes a passive cooling approach, which basically means they're umbrellas shielding you from the sun and rain. Lots of them use palapas, or bundles of grass, including the roofs of most of the buildings in the Grand Mayan resort where we stayed. We had a bit of trouble finding the lobby because, we learned, it had burned down, and they were either temporarily "improving" it or "improv-ing" it by putting up an air conditioned white tent we were supposed to just know to head towards when we drove through the elaborate front gate. You see a lot of relief in photos we took of ourselves in the water, not least of which because the sea, or lagoons, or whatever water-based goodness we've stuck ourselves in, cools us off and keeps our brains from baking.

Also, as you're looking at the picture, take note of the lump on the left side of my body. That is the shape of my shoes, which I've removed, tied together, and hung from my key clip to keep dry. That's the kind of ingenuity you can do when you're not baking your brains.

More later.

Stuffed Sheep Meets Puppet Snake 1

2008-04-29T07:28:00.000-07:00

Stuffed Sheep Meets Puppet Snake 2

2008-04-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

Stuffed Sheep Meets Puppet Snake 3

2008-04-29T07:25:00.001-07:00

The home face

2008-04-27T21:28:00.001-07:00

Brandi and I are back in Chicago following a weeklong vacation to
Riviera Maya, Mexico, where we swam with dolphins, swam in the ocean,
ate mounds of salsa and chips, snuba'd, and taught/learned to drive a
manual shift. This, following a joint 34 person Seder with the
talented and amazing Sara Wolfson. We're glad to return to a place
where it does more than threaten to rain.

More photos from our vacation will follow. Meanwhile, the data silence
ends NOW*.

* Technically, at the start of this post.

View from the Bottom

2008-04-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

I ran on Saturday, and kind of a lot. Brandi did me a favor and let me sleep in while she went to class, but I knew it was only a minor reprieve, because the Cincinnati marathon looms and I needed very badly to bump my mileage up to cross that finish line. I might still do the 1/2 (though, as my friend Kevin noted, quoting the comedy of Dave Gorman, one half of success is still considered failure), but I wanted to at least have tried. Pity the skies refused to cooperate. Weather outlook called for rain and snow (!), with a high of about 42 degrees. I ran a marathon in temperatures like that, but not with rain, and it took a lot out of me. Saturday, I intended to run nearly as much with lots less support.

Luckily, as a heart model--an experience I still need to write--I had bought a track suit to keep me some approximation of warm. I wore my hat and gloves, strapped on my iPhone and psyched myself up by loading on Goldfrapp, which most straights hate. Since nobody told me in high school that the Pet Shop Boys, my musical tastes have wandered into a decidedly gay territory. I like early-period Wham. Who cares? I like the beat... and women (specifically my wife). Leave it to the historians to figure that out.

The running path was understandably deserted. I ran pretty slowly, pacing myself. It's so hard when you see a goal like the Hancock building slowly creeping forward in your viewpoint. If you run faster toward it you still don't get there all that fast, and you run the risk of burning yourself out. My landmarks were: Foster Beach, Irving Park, the bridge at Diversey, the North Avenue beach restaurant shaped like a landed boat, the Hancock, Navy Pier, and finally Shedd Aquarium, for a run of about 10.5 miles. But wait! I also had to come back!

At this point, I snapped the above photo and took my first drink of water from one of the few drinking fountains running at this time of year. You might think that running in rain would stop you from sweating, but I had a tough time regulating my temperature across all the zones on my body. Hot hands are the worst, but so are hot legs, sweaty back, matted hair and the chaffing that accompanies any of the above. Wind blew rain in my eyes, so I naturally assumed when I turned around that things would get a lot easier and the wind would blow at my back.

How wrong I was.

It turns out the wind was at my back, but eddies in it blew rain into my face. When I turned around, I got hit with a full blast and realized, uh-oh, this may be a lot harder than I thought. I'd brought my bus pass, cash, ID and keys, so I could always get back the easy way, but that would mean giving up, and I'm terrible at doing that. So I soldiered on. Drinking water chilled me somewhat, so I found that I had to put my had and gloves back on and zip up my jacket fully. I was still cold. I tried to run harder, but at this point, exhaustion was taking its toll. My gloves were soaked and my hands reduced to five-pointed popsicles. My hardest point came at the stretch of concrete pier between Navy Pier and North Avenue. Nothing blocks the wind coming off the lake, so it blows right through you. It felt like a huge cold hand was pushing me backwards. I kept at it, realizing that I needed to focus on the distance runner's method of putting one foot in front of the other, knowing you'll get there eventually.

Somewhere between North Avenue and Irving Park I felt my eyelids getting droopy, a sign of hypothermia. I started looking for places to sit down, maybe rest my legs for a bit. Part of me knew that would be a bad idea, worrying about my legs stiffening. Also, I could have fallen asleep and then I would really have been in trouble. So I soldiered on.

Eventually, alternating between walking and running, I made it to Devon Avenue, only a half mile away from home. There was a 7/11 I planned to stop at to celebrate. I'd been planning my purchases for the last three hours, so it was a great joy to walk inside. I bought a half gallon of orange juice and a banana. It would have been funny to watch me struggle to get my money out of my pockets at this point. My hands were so frozen that I couldn't find the dexterity to push my fingers together, or feel them well enough to know when I was holding money. When I tried to apologize for the wet money--rained, not sweated on--my voice came out in a weird slur, "Shorry," because, unknown to me my face had frozen. I probably should have bought coffee, but knew the cold-fighting properties of vitamin C would come more in handy in the long run.

At my door, I struggled with my house keys. At the start of the run, I had tied them together with a rubber band to keep them from jingling and annoying me. At the end, I didn't have enough dexterity to pull the rubber band off, so I basically bit it off. Sticking the door key in the lock also proved tricky because I didn't have enough strength to turn it. Funny how you take for granted the ability to grasp things between your thumb and forefinger. Luckily, bringing the other hand into play solved that problem. Two more doors and I was inside, amongst the cats and ready for a bath. I shivered through half of it. Our building is kind of quirky in that three units share the same (small) hot water tank for the shower or bath. So if anyone has taken a shower at any point during the day, you're going to run out of hot water. Hot water will run in the sink, dishwasher or kitchen all day long, but in the place where you might actually dip your body it's guaranteed to run out. I usually route around this by putting a big pot of water on the stove, settler-style, then pouring it in the bath after it gets appropriately hot. In that moment, I had a chicken-and-egg problem in that I needed to feel warm enough to get out of the tub to put on the pot to feel warm enough. I got it, eventually, but, geez, somebody needs to get on that.

Post-bath, I enjoyed hot beverages, cats and Battlestar Galactica, season three, on the couch for the next several hours. I figured I deserved the break.

XP Bad Boy

2008-04-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

What's got me all worked up in this photo? Besides the Metra train schedule for the Chicago to Kenosha line? It's the fact that I got Windows XP to run on a Toshiba Satellite A215. It took some doing. Probably resulting from some Faustian deal with Microsoft, Toshiba sells many of (possibly all of?) its consumer notebooks with Windows Vista. The woman who bought the notebook, a co-worker of mine who is just starting to explore the possibility of life after the University, wanted things to work as much as possible the same as her desktop, which runs Windows XP. I offered to help her as a favor. This led to six tense hours yesterday as I installed XP (easy!), downloaded additional drivers from third-party sites (less easy...), and finally went searching for the drivers from step two that did not install properly (very much not easy at all, except that it involved little physical effort). If worse comes to worse, I reasoned, I could always reinstall with the original system DVDs and offer my most profound apologies for wasting everyone's time.

I hate that crap.

So I sweated through it. My earliest breakthrough was installing the display drivers. I can always tell on a laptop (or any flat panel) when the display is set to a nonnative resolution. Everything looks soft and weirdly fuzzy. Once I got that down, I tracked down wireless drivers, which helped me bootstrap the Ethernet drivers into the machine. The last little bit came when I got the SD card slot driver to work. Now when I looked at the Device Manager, no little yellow icons with exclamation marks peeked out at me. The machine was clean as a whistle. I only had to patch it.

More than a hundred updates later, and it's still going. I can't wait for SP3.

I'm also wearing that expression to make my hair look smaller. I've got a proper 'fro going on and badly need a trip to the hair cuttery. Soon.

Laundry

2008-04-07T08:36:00.001-07:00

Sunday, I did a ton of laundry. Not a metric ton, and not at once, but about seven loads. I'm guesstimating that I haven't done laundry in about a month, or if I had, it wasn't a very organized affair. I think I squeezed in a couple of loads that I never bothered to fold. I'm slightly bothered by the wording, "squeezed in a couple of loads," but I'll trust you to draw the right conclusion. It's an incredible feeling to look into your closet on a Monday morning and see a nigh-endless vista of possibilities.

One casualty: I had to part with one of my favorite pair of khakis, whose pocket I had ripped beyond repair. Holes in legs I can forgive. Shredded cuffs look pretty cool. Pockets, though, I use. You may take my life, but don't force me to surrender my pants with the extra pockets at the knees. If I could get away with parading around in a flight suit with pockets from neck to shins, I think I probably would just buy a pair of goggles and have done with it. But a ripped upper pocket means you can't hold your cell phone, or your wallet, or have to transfer one or the other to a dangerous back pocket (which for cell phones means potential crushing, wallets, stealing) or to a knee pocket (which can cause damage to your knees when you run). I've thought this through entirely too thoroughly. At any rate, the pants now rest in peace in the kitchen garbage, the closest large garbage can to the laundry.

In the middle of the laundry, Brandi and I took a trip to Best Buy, where I bought a USB network adapter for my Mac Mini, the better to hook our newfangled flatscreen television up to a computer, which we could then network and do videoconferencing from our couch. Surprisingly enough, this vision of a networked den worked on the third try, and we had a nice midday chat with Brandi's parents in Florida, marveling at our ability to say "hello!" and "what's up!" and other things of not much of consequence through 1800 miles' distance, and for nearly free. It was at Best Buy where we snapped the above picture, which is also an homage to my father in law, Eric Kleinert, author of "Troubleshooting and Repairing Major Home Appliances." The t-shirt comes courtesy of our friend Marla, who toured America on behalf of a major hotel chain and returned with free snarky tees for friends. The saying on it looks a bit like a surreal caption: who, after all, wouldn't wake up after finding himself trapped inside a washing machine? And why do we need reassurance? Shouldn't we be helping this chap?

Brandi looks way cooler in her shot:

Weekend on Bikes

2008-04-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Brandi and I took some much-needed R&R this weeekend, resting up and getting ready for countdown to April's seder and our trip to Mexico. Saturday, we took out the bicycles and went for a ride along the lakeshore path down to Foster Avenue beach. The weather was a bit cool, but perfect with a sweatshirt, and a welcome respite from the cold weather blues that got pretty much everybody down this winter. On the additional plus side, Brandi and I now both have padded seats, to combat the inevitable numbness that besieges our bony backsides.

I think my wife looks absolutely adorable in this picture. I, on the other hand, thanks to the wraparound mirror shades that Brandi advised me not to buy in the store, but which I thought fit nicely and would stay on my head when I went running in them (and do!), look like a complete jag. Seriously, doesn't this picture just scream, "Get off my beamer, you jobless hobo!" Even my canines look fake.

Just to add a counter to that photo, here's a picture of me on my ride, a Citizen, which is a folding bike I can (theoretically) take on the train.

Geek cred restored. +50 HP.

Does this even need explanation?

2008-04-04T09:57:00.001-07:00

File this under "Why not?"

2008-04-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

On the way into work today, in the elevator, I had what I hope is a cool revelation and not just a cold medicine brain fart. Our building recently replaced both the main and the service elevators. During the long period of construction, I got used to using the service elevator, so that now every time I walk into the main elevator, I get a little confused by the button layout and hit the wrong floor. This is a dumb mistake; there are only five floors in the building. So I add about 30 extra seconds to my commute having to wait through the fourth floor to get to the fifth. So, no big deal, right?

But, I thought, what about the old prank where a punk kid hits all of the buttons on a high rise elevator and runs off cackling while the passengers are forced to endure a stop at every single floor on the way to their destinations? Short of the taser, there has to be a way to stop these mischief makers, as well as iPhone-absorbed chowderheads like myself.

THEN IT HIT ME

Why don't they program the buttons so that if you hit them a second time, you don't go to that floor. I'm no elevator button expert (I'm hired for my looks), but to my mind, relative to hardware that reduces your chances of a Speed-like plummet to your doom, the costs to change the panel should be trivial. Training would be pretty fast, too:

1) Hit a button once, go to that floor.
2) Hit a button twice, don't go to that floor.
3) Hit a button again, go to that floor again.
4) Hit it a fourth time, don't go to that floor.

This kind of odd-even button interface would work fine with anyone who has ever used a light switch. We understand on/off. We can make this work, people.

I hope you're listening, America.

Big Hair, Brown Sweater

2008-04-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again, when my haircut has grown past all bounds of respectability, and yet I continue to ignore it for another week because I don't work or live near a hair cuttery and I'm too busy to find one. Sigh. Most days I like being a mammal. I don't grow torpid in cold weather. Hot weather makes me sweat instead of, I don't know, die. And while I cannot personally lactate, I can in theory make kids who could, and help out in their live birth by encouraging my wife to breathe. The fur part bugs me, though. As you can see from how tall my hair gets when it grows out, I could easily replace it with a crest of feathers, or an especially nice bony protrusion to help me ward off intruding males. If possible, I would also like clear membranes to slide over my eyes when they get dry, so I don't have to blink.

So while it would be a shame to have to give up my inner ear bones (what up, hammer, anvil and stirrup?), I might consider it a fair trade for not having to look like Eurotrash every time I forget and/or feel too lazy to scrape the front of my face with sharpened steel. Also, I wouldn't have to feel shame when I took a trip to the beach, and revealed testosterone's effect on my shoulders, which look like they're taking on the overflow of refugees in the resettlement from hairline to back.

People are gross.

The Princess Tent

2008-04-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Brandi and I were at my dad's place, getting ready to head out to breakfast, when we noticed the princess tent my dad set up for my niece, Regan. After looking at it wistfully for a few moments, my wife said, "I wish I had a princess tent." I agreed, and said that every home should have at least one, the better to live out the following scenario:

"Honey, I'm home. Honey? Where are you?"
"In the princess tent!"

This naturally led to the speculation as to whether or not Brandi would fit inside the princess tent, which she did, and led to further speculation as to whether or not I would as well. I'll spare you the details of the origami-like folding of our legs. As you can see from the photos, despite a combined length of nearly twelve feet, we both fit inside the tent.

Unfortunately, while cramming yourself inside a pink nylon tent never intended for the outdoors might be a fun way to spend a few moments, and despite the pillows helpfully strewn about the floor, sitting in the tent for more than a few moments was decidedly uncomfortable, and, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, or, perhaps more appropriate to the decor, like human birth, we were forced to emerge into the outside world through an opening only marginally large enough to fit us.

The results, far more comical than your average birth, are posted below. Brandi's exit has not been captured due to the fact that she cares whether or not she is humiliated in a public forum. Having performed comedy in baseball pants and a bowling shirt (or, occasionally, a referee jersey) for the better part of a decade, I have no such reputation to protect.

Family

2008-04-02T09:53:00.001-07:00

We went to Cleveland last weekend to attend my grandmother's funeral. Grandma Larsen was 87 years old when she died, in the care of the staff of the Normandy in Bay Village. She had been suffering from Alzheimer's for nearly eighteen years, and the end, when it came, was comparatively painless. While losing his mother broke my father's heart, he was glad to have had a mother like Grandma Larsen, and grateful to have had the chance to say goodbye.

The memorial service took place at Bay United Methodist, which Grandma, raised a Lutheran, rather mysteriously attended for the majority of her life, eventually guiding her son John into the ministry. Uncle John spoke last at the service, and he was funny, touching, loving and respectful not just to Grandma, but to his brothers as well, repeating my Uncle Bob's anecdote about Grandma reading the book, "The Little Engine that Could," and its effect on his life. Three of the cousins, Brett, Kelly and me, were also asked to speak, and I really enjoyed their take on growing up with Grandma in Vermillion, Ohio, with life on the beach and trips to the candy store. Really, you can't Hollywood a better story than that.

Afterwards, we all gathered at my father's house in Rocky River, and eventually took this photo. Unfortunately, my sister Heather and her family couldn't stick around, as they had a number of events they had to make for my nephews. Whenever I think I'm busy, I think about Heather and her amazing ability to keep track of two boys, one girl, a husband, a household, *and* run a marathon. I think she's brilliant and organized well beyond my own small ability. At any rate, we gathered what family members we could find and posed for this shot on the back deck. It was fun afterwards to compare the faces of the family to the photos my dad took almost two decades ago in my uncle's church in Salem, OH. Kids have grown. Weight has shifted (mostly to the face). More kids came onboard (from where? STOOOORRK!). It's important to remember that the silver lining to losing a family member is having these moments with your family.

PS - thanks to Brandi for driving the entire way back. We make a nice team.

Bourne Again

2008-03-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Natalie asked me to tape her sketch comedy show, "Mass Hysteria" Friday night, and so I showed up with my camera and tripod slung across my back like an A/V assassin. The show was fun and hopefully I kept everything in focus enough to produce an entertaining and instructive 30 minutes. Instructive because she, her cast mate Vinney and her director will be reviewing the DVD tonight. In order to get the disc in her hands, I made arrangements to meet her mid-day by her office. Natalie, being by far the funnier of the two of us, joked that we should call it vague names like "the stuff" and not look each other in the eye when we handed it off. Since I'd just watched "The Bourne Ultimatum," I was more than game, and planned for a full scale police chase across LaSalle and into the subway tunnels. As evidenced by this photo, I wore gloves to prevent fingerprints, and disguised my hair using a special graying formula that, used properly, takes years to put in. When I got close, unable to trust voice communications (okay, I was having problems with my cell phone), I texted Natalie, and hid behind a light post.

Well, imagine my disappointment when after handing it over, no sirens went off, and we wound up chatting about the show and how dumb it is when people tell you to do two things at once and, when you ask which is the highest priority, respond with, "They're BOTH my highest priority." Since my deep cover continues to be successful, I will retain the identity of "Matt Larsen," a person who does not know karate, or car-fu, and who, when surprised, tends to scream like a nine year old girl. I do, however, make really great stuffed peppers.

Dangerously great.

Heart Model

2008-03-20T14:01:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I drove to the suburbs so my heart could audition for a modeling gig.

You heard me.

A couple of years ago, I learned from my friend Shad that the companies that manufacture ultrasound scanning machines periodically hold trade shows to sell their machines to the doctors, hospitals and Tom Cruises of the world. At the conferences, they employ tall, fit men for the simple expedient that there are fewer layers of flesh between paddle and the organs. The job of the models is to lay there and be scanned, and, by the way, not talk. It sounded too close to my ideal job of getting paid to eat to pass up, and, when Shad's agency called to offer me a position, I happily accepted. What I didn't know at the time, though, was that I didn't have the job yet. They were actually giving me a chance to audition for the part, in the middle of a conference. More challenging, I couldn't get into the conference until someone from inside it let me inside. Surprisingly, it gets worse. I was not the only person trying out. Being a nice guy, I let the other guy go first, taking the one badge that was available and heading inside. Outside, I waited. And waited.

Turned out, the guy went in there and said I never showed. The machine scanners pretty much just needed whoever turned up first, and, because I was a nice guy, I lost out. The agency took a little pity on me, and paid me a token amount just for showing up and getting dumped on, but it was still a major blow to my finances to miss out on that kind of opportunity.

When the same agency called again, I took it with a grain of salt. I drove out to the suburban office still carrying a little baggage in my heart, which I hoped they would detect.

It came as no surprise that the security girl at the front had no idea what to do with me. I came with a contact name and a phone number, and they still managed to bungle it. A gentleman named Dave came out, shook my hand, and guided me to a room just off the reception area where they had a machine set up. He apologized for the chilly room and the chillier ultrasound gel, had me peel up my shirt and started scanning my abdomen. At that point, I probably should have asked more questions about why he was scanning my belly instead of my heart but, hey, I'd never gotten one of these done before. It tickled. Like a fifties housewife, I lay back and counted ceiling tiles. He complimented me on my pancreas, which, I was told, had a nice tail. He was also impressed that I had come without eating breakfast, since it left my gallbladder full of gastric juice and prevented pockets of gas from bouncing back to the ultrasound paddle and ruining the image.

Flattered into silence about the heart scan I'd been promised, I said I rarely ate breakfast. Dave continued on, noting one healthy kidney and the other, both in the right place. (Apparently, unbeknown to the owners, kidneys may or may not rise to their proper positions; one man Dave had scanned, a prisoner at a facility in Joliet, found out inadvertently that he had what was called a pelvic kidney. Mine was fine.) At some point, he showed the image of my heart, and I relaxed a bit. What I knew about ultrasound was confined to friends' pictures of their unborn children--"Skeletor babies" they call them--and Dave seemed pretty knowledgeable.

Did I mention that while all of this was happening, caterers were setting up for a meal?

Finally, a woman came in and started comparing names to lists. When she couldn't find mine, she realized I was with the OTHER unit, for cardiology, and I was politely asked to wait once more in the lobby. Dave seemed vaguely sad that he had learned how to operate the machine on me and would have to soldier on without, but another model was there and more than willing to help calibrate. I went back to the lobby, to sit and ponder the irony.

Eventually, I noticed a minor hubbub at the check in desk. I walked over, remembering the penalty one pays for timidity, and was rewarded when I looked at the name badge of the woman there and saw my contact. This was it! There was another heart model there, also named Matt, and if I hadn't come by when I did, I might have been sitting on that couch still. Luckily, they took us both into a different, less chilly room, where they gently scanned our hearts and noted the results on a piece of paper. As a bonus, the woman who scanned me also did my carotid artery, so by mid-morning I'd had everything from neck to belly button scanned and logged. I joked with her that I'd hoped Dave did a good job cleaning off the ultrasound gel, lest the cardiology folks get jealous. I was met with weak laughter. What can I say? I'm a heart model, not a comedian.

My telekinetic wife

2008-03-18T11:20:00.001-07:00

Okay, I guess you could argue she was having a bad hair day. Or maybe the atmosphere was charged up just prior to a thunderstorm. Maybe she just walked too fast across the carpet.

But I'm still sure we never should have let the government experiment on her using the same drugs they used to create Project: Akira. That was just one of our bad ideas. We probably shouldn't have bought that motorcycle, either. It just wasn't in our budget.

I knew we never should have moved to Neo Tokyo.

(Hop over to Being Brandi to see the original.)

Link to AKIRA!

Babyshop

2008-03-17T12:57:00.001-07:00

With apologies to dearest friends Clair and Shane, I am posting this adorable little throwback to 1998 with an animated GIF of their son, who is adorable even as he gazes upon you with the intensity of Goldfinger. A site I stumbled upon last week offered up fake 3d images created with animated GIFs shown at slightly different angles. It tricked the brain into seeing depth. I wondered if I could do the same using our friends' baby as a test subject. I think he made it through okay, except Blogger seems to have stripped out the animation. So it goes...

Next baby test: the Milgram experiment.

It's St. Patrick's Day and it's no joke...

2008-03-17T11:41:00.001-07:00

Just like the joke goes*, it's Saint Patrick's Day and we really did get patio furniture. We had to travel to two different Targets this weekend to find what we were looking for: a love seat glider plus ottoman. Here it is, weatherproof and everything. Doesn't it look simply lovely? Since stores nowadays don't actually trust you to be able to get the thing you're purchasing, we looked around the outdoor furniture section, looking fora Target team member, but apparently the humanity-reducing plague struck there first, because there were none to be found. (Brandi and I are robots, and therefore immune. Thanks for asking.) We then made the mistake of going to the front of the store, where we found a cluster of red-shirted Target team members and one slightly-less-red-shirted, harried Target team member. This turned out to be a manager who, when we asked about the lovely outdoor love seat, grew irate that nobody was on call in the section we had come from, then grew more irate that the item we wanted was out of stock in the store room. He apologized profusely, after reaming out his underlings over his headset, and offered us two alternate Targets.

On a whim, we headed to the northernmost Target, at Logan and Elston, in part because we were already driving that way to avoid the drunken spectacle following the parade on Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. At first, it seemed like they didn't have it there, either, as the team member we approached began using stockroom lingo that fooled nobody (and certainly not two intelligent, virus-immune robots). "It's a ghost," he said into his walkie talkie. Then, following another search, the love seat was found, sans ottoman, which would have to come from the warehouse. It was a shock to find out that Target stores are that large and yet much of the inventory must come from a warehouse EVEN LARGER THAN THAT. Did we want to come back? (No, not really.) Wait. It would only take ten minutes or so. Did we want to wait? (Yes, okay...)

When we brought the box out to the car, we knew we would have another problem. The team member who helped us (our fifth or sixth of the day; apparently, buying furniture, like raising a child, takes a village) thought we could just shove it in the back of our Scion xA, but, having moved 12,544 metric tons of stuff in that car, I knew exactly what would and would not fit. Also, as Brandi pointed out, the box was clearly larger than the opening. Still, he thought it worth a try. No go. So we pulled the love seat out of the box, and, lo and behold, everything fit.

I told our helper, "Give that box to a kid who wants to build a fort." Probably, it got crushed. Hopefully, it was empty.

We are finally ready to celebrate spring in style.

* Classic ComedySportz groaner.
Ref: "Hey, Mr. Voice, how are you tonight?"
Mr. Voice: "Oh, I'm okay. There's this Irish guy on my porch who won't leave."
Ref: "Oh, really, who?"
Mr. Voice: "Patty O' Irish Stereotype."

Team Armsen-Larsbruster

2008-03-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

My mom called me the other day to let me know that my sister, who ran the Cincinnati Flying Pig half marathon last year, would be doing the full marathon this year. I almost cheered. My sister is a full-time mom of three who has hardly enough time during the day to take a breath. For many years, while the kids were very small, she hardly had time to walk, much less train for a marathon. Brandi and I asked her to stand in our wedding about a month before she found out she was pregnant with child number three. My sister had a little more than eleven months to be pregnant, get fitted, have a baby, and lose the baby weight to fit the dress again. She did, and it amazes me, and I'm a DUDE.

It amazes me even more that we'll be running this race, kind of together. Heather has a group she runs with, and of course we're at completely different paces, but with any luck afterwards we can get into a fight over who is more sore, and where. She is my sister after all.

What are you doing... Dave?

2008-03-12T13:41:00.001-07:00

One of my duties as a network administrator is to set up the videoconferencing equipment for communications between Chicago and Urbana. In other offices, this would be as mundane as turning on a switch and a couple of TVs, laying microphones out on a table, and bidding everyone a good session as I walk out the door, humming to myself and counting the days to my retirement. At least, that's how it would work in the magical fantasy office that I've built out of the sad reality of our Rice Building office. For starters, the machine, a Polycom ViewStation FX, is at least a decade old, probably older, having sat in the Office of the President's conference room for that long before being shipped to us in a big cardboard box as part of a spring cleaning program that netted them two flat screens and us this machine plus two CRT televisions only slightly lighter than a Volkswagen Beetle. The TVs perch precariously atop steel carts, waiting, I believe, for the smallest tremble to hurl themselves face-first into the floor, where their weight will carry them, China Syndrome-like, to the center of the earth while the rest of us scramble to get the hell out of the way. For obvious reasons, we don't move them around very much.

The ViewStation, which is basically a mysterious streamlined base station with a disturbingly HAL-like eye poking out of the top and a few triangular microphones emerging from the station like Martian tentacles, also acts just like a Martian in that it's mostly dead or at best hibernating in anticipation of warmer, wetter climes. The on/off switch at the back works about 50% of the time, resulting in an amber light at the front of the unit. DO NOT BE FOOLED by its yellow glow! Anything short of solid green means the machine is cycling endlessly through its "clicking phase," a term I just pulled out of my ass to describe the faint humming emanating from inside of the plastic beast. Sometimes, in its cleverness, the amber/green diode won't light at all, then suddenly blink amber a couple of times, and shut off again. To solve this, I shut it off and turned it on again, repeatedly. Sure, occasionally, I would experiment with holding the only other button on the right side of the machine, but it usually amounts to nothing. I usually start off with a half an hour to do a setup that should take less than five minutes. As the failures mount, I start to hit that power button with increasing desperation. My boss usually shows up about five minutes before the scheduled meeting. She has less interest in videoconferencing than I do, and sometimes offers to hook up the speaker phone, but usually she makes fun of me first. It's hard to sit there, moronically hitting the power button over and over again, waiting desperately for the Polycom logo on the TV, and argue that I'm doing the best job I can.

For a long time I thought it just hated me, or I was as retarded as my sister thought I was growing up. But, no. Last month, I found a post on older Polycom equipment, and the silver soldering they used to connect components. Over time, the silver corrodes, leaving an insulating surface, and the machine stops working. They've since switched to gold, which is great, but they're expensive as hell, which is not. So, I continue to sit there, at first confidently, but slowly moving into begging and eventually all-out prayer to the machine god to stop hitting the snooze button and get to work. It's only a matter of time before I punch that thing in its goddamn HAL 9000 eye and set up the speaker phone. Which is also Polycom, but it works.

Looking at the world through rose-colored...

2008-03-12T13:21:00.001-07:00

I wore glasses to work today. It's been ages since I wore them last, and my co-worker Scott observed, "You just don't see glasses that big anymore." True, I'm desperately out of fashion. I got these glasses a little bit less than a decade ago, when I was at work and started getting an ocular migraine. At first, it looked like a tiny spot of static in the corner of my eye, then it began to spread, taking over my right eye and the periphery of my left. Then the headache hit me. Apparently, the optometrist told me, I was compensating for 20/25 vision in my right eye with the muscles around my lens, which had gotten fatigued and decided to stab me through my nerve endings. So I bought glasses, nice ones at the time, ending a two-decade era in which I also wore glasses, but fake ones, since I had 20/20 vision in both eyes.

Now I'm older, but apparently my eyes aren't getting significantly worse, despite the fact that I a) read pretty much all the time, b) work on computers, c) draw with my face about 2" away from the paper. I wonder if the extra muscle strength is due to the fact that I punish them, and if one day they won't just pop out in search for a better owner, like pugs, except without the smashed face.

I never noticed it until now, but this face looks an awful lot like my "Sling Blade" pose. Some call it a kaiser blade. Mmmn-hnnh.

Moo

2008-03-05T10:25:00.001-08:00

I got a call yesterday that a telecommunications company is holding a look-see audition, and would I be so kind as to attend? Since I have a pretty paltry acting resume at the moment, and can always use the money the gigs bring, I excused myself from my day job and headed over to the photography studio. It was pretty far west, so I had to take the train to a bus. A couple of other riders, it turned out, were headed to the same audition. I should have realized. Most people riding the CTA in the middle of the day don't bother looking too glammed up. When we got to the door, the four of us went inside to a proper cattle call.

Times past, I've gone to auditions and been pleased to find that the casting people grouped me among the "attractive, tall, full-head-of-hair, Caucasian males," which flatters me even as it assures me I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting the part. Face facts: I'm mostly a "comedic type" with a decent, if not 0.8% body fat, physique. They come taller, broader-shouldered, lots less gray. Whatever group they add me to, it's usually pretty narrow. For a photo call, I come in, fill out a card with availability, sizes (I'm never sure of "shirt"--medium? Do I need to know my arm lengths? Chest? Neck? Taper?), conflicts, get set up, flirt with the camera under bright lights and flashes, then go. This, by the way, makes me seem a lot more prolific than I am. This happens every couple of months at best. Acting for me is a part, part, part, part time job. I usually can get away with sneaking out on a lunch hour. Once, I went out while it was raining heavily and convinced my visiting boss that the massive
wetness staining the shoulders of my blue dresa shirt was part of the shirt's pattern, and that I hadn't gone anywhere. I got that part, perhaps due to sheer brazenness.

Today, though, the place is packed. People, pretty people of all stripes, ages and ethnicities, sit on every available horizontal surface. I don't know how I'll make it back to the office in time for
an early afternoon meeting, or the audition at my agent's offices afterwards. Really, this kind of logjam only happens once every couple of months. I'm happy that I was honest, this time at least.

My smiling headshot looks up at me, mocking, from my knee. I got a seat by default, in the same meritless way you get one on the CTA: someone got up right behind me. A slight awkwardness as he came back afterwards and asked for his coat, which I was slouching against. He held no grudges. In fact, seeing me type on my iPhone, he held out his own and said, "You should watch out for those soft cases. A friend of mine had one and dropped his phone, and his headphones stopped working." I pointed out that my silicone case helped me run with my phone. "Cool," he said. Neither of us were auditioning for AT&T. Potentially awkward? Only if they catch me!

Does it count as a white lie if you make money off it?

Hardened Criminal

2008-03-04T07:36:00.001-08:00

I moved a lot of stuff this weekend, wearing nothing when I should probably have invested 1.5 seconds putting work gloves on. My hands are a mess of nicks, scratches and splinters in need of pulling. Still, looking haggard in my hands doesn't bug me as long as you leave alone my pretty, pretty face.

That ended last night.

We went to bed early, around 9:30, still groggy from weekend drama. The cats, as usual, found warm spots on top of the covers and we cuddled up. Rio, our orange demon furball, sometimes feels unsatisfied with the top of the covers, and will climb underneath in order to snuggle closer to our--to her--giant, warm, pillow soft and pajama-clad bodies. Most nights, it's like wrapping your arms around the ideal stuffed animal. She goes to sleep. We go to sleep. At some point in the night, she gets hungry, bored or rolled-over, and clambers out with tabby stealth. Not last night. Something in our configuration upset the cat, and she climbed out hastily, pausing to land a back claw directly in my temple.

"Are you okay?" Brandi asked.

"I think I'm bleeding," I said. Awake, now, and no longer warmly cradled in the arms of sleep, I went to the bathroom and peroxided my face. It could have been worse and no malice was intended, so I shrugged it off and went back to bed. It took another 45 minutes to get to sleep, then my dreams were weird, and I got up very early in the morning to eat Girl Scout cookies. I wish they had healing properties. If I'm 50 pounds too heavy to run the marathon in May, Thin Mints are to blame.

Wilmonts Are Go!

2008-03-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

Adding to the drama of the weekend, our delightful friends Clair and Shane introduced us to the most marvelous, and certainly the youngest fellows it has been our privilege to meet, their son. Though a quiet, studious type, it is clear from the full head of blond hair and the fisticuffs maneuver which involves raising his hands to calculatedly cover his face that he has great potential for rogueishness. That, and the fact that he is, as his father says, "The most beautiful baby in the world. I'm not kidding. Absolutely beautiful."

Shane also said of his son, "NOT to eat."

Plans to build my candy home proceed apace.

Congratulations to Shane and Clair. Thank you for letting me hold "DC."

2008-03-03T09:42:00.001-08:00

The cowboy rode yesterday and it was a hell of a ride. Ryan Dee Gilmour and I started moving props and the set out of my basement at 3:50 AM Sunday morning, and worked until 7:00 PM. The cast was great. Director Kevin Chatham kept his cool all day long and took in stride the two parking tickets the city of Chicago issued his car, several of which came minutes before his meter ran out. Some of them run fast, I don't doubt it.

Typically, we ran very behind at first, caught up with ourselves, got ambitious, ran behind again and several things failed completely. I beat myself up that I thought cranberry juice would work as a substitute for real fake blood. It just ran too clear on camera. Those will have to be re-shot, in close-up, with the sets we saved, unless people accept that being shot results in a massive loss of lymphatic fluid. Perhaps it's innovative?

At any rate, many thanks to the talented cast, my patient and lovely wife, and chief set designer, architect and builder, Heather Elam, who amazingly juggled time between job, partner and young daughter Daphne to do something nearly impossible.

I'll post more as we near a final product.

Busted

2008-03-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

So, this post may appear very derivative, especially if you like me are an avid reader of the blog of Tim Ryder, but I'm going to take part in a very special forward, called the 123 Meme. The rules:

123 Meme Rules: (1) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating! (2) Turn to page 123. (3) Find the first 5 sentences. (4) Post the next 3 sentences. (5) Tag 5 people.

Now, here's where my nerdiness is revealed. Because I have the option of either: a) MCSA/MCSE Exam 70-290 Training Kit: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, or b) an ebook by Charles Stross called Scratch Monkey that I've been reading on my iPhone . I'm rejecting choice (a) because its pages are numbered in maddening non-linear chapter-pages, meaning there is no page 123, nor is there a 1-23 because chapter 1 ends at page 22. Other chapters might go as high as 60. Also, who really wants to read sentences like, "The DSADD command, introduced in Chapter 2, is used to add objects to Active Directory." Boooooring.

So here's Charles Stross, who is anything but...

Oshi came to her feet suddenly, felt her blood pressure drop and blipped her adrenal glands into play -- aren't military bionics wonderful -- and looked round. Green contours of light tracked through every surface, revealing and concealing the secret life that surrounded them. She pursed her lips and whistled, experimentally; in one corner a cobweb flickered lucent blue.

Now comes the viral part. I'm tagging Brandi, Ryan Dee Gilmour, Mom-in-law Eileen, Dave Maxwell, and Shane Wilson, to hopefully kickstart him off this blogging dry spell that recently culminated in the birth of his delightful son, Dashiell.

Luck to you all.

The Pain!

2008-02-29T08:42:00.001-08:00

Thanks to del.icio.us, I've recently come across a site http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/ featuring clips of classic Garfield cartoons without the central character. What's left is a little baffling, existential, and tremendously entertaining.

"The Pain!" is my favorite.

Happy Two Times Two

2008-02-29T08:11:00.001-08:00

Brandi and I celebrated our four year wedding anniversary yesterday at La Donna restaurant in Andersonville, on Chicago's north side. Four years! It's passed, not in the blink of an eye, but well, I think. We each had the prix fixe menu, because nothing says "married four years" better than a good deal, and great food, including pear salads to die for, salmon (me) and ravioli (her, then me, because I am a food Hoover) and finally mint chocolate chip gelato, which is like ice cream but formed out of Italian. The server was so nice to remember or overhear that it was our anniversary and included these little candles in our gelato, one for every two years. Is this the tradition? It is now! She was also kind enough to run, then re-run, then re-re-run our credit cards after a mix-up with the table next to us, which had a couple also out for a romantic evening, who had also ordered wine and the prix fixe menu, but who paid with a different credit card. If the price had been closer, I wouldn't have minded paying for theirs. At the end of the night, they said, "Our anniversary is in November. See you then!"

November, got it. I'll be wearing the red carnation.

Boot Failure

2008-02-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

I work in computers. Most often, a boot failure means the hard drive died, or, less often, the power supply or the motherboard. On very rare occasions, the RAM dies, or the heat from the other components causes a part to become separated from the motherboard.

This morning, I had a very different boot failure on the way to work. This kind turned my leather Caterpillar work boots into one half of a pair of flip flops. When I walked into the office, every other step went, "FLUP!" (pause) "FLUP!" (pause) "FLUP!" It doesn't help that I wear men's 11-1/2 boots. Ironically, this morning I was thinking about bringing my running shoes to work, in case I got uncomfortable or wanted to work out, but the threat of snow later made me reconsider. That's it; we need time travel PRONTO.

I wound up fastening a pair of rubber bands from the heel to the little leather piece that sticks off the back of the ankle, just to give me a little more stealth. Later on, Joe, a very kind man who works in my office, hooked me up with some super glue. That, plus the rubber bands, should keep me from having to make an emergency visit to Payless.

Stuff like this reminds me that this week, in my life, is Sweeps Week. So much drama.

The Challenge of Hauling Lumber in a Compact Car

2008-02-28T09:35:00.001-08:00

Brandi and I did a little post-work tango last night, where she drove to class downtown and picked me up so that I could drop her off. Why? Myopic Cowboy errands, picking up bedsheets (Big Lots, in Niles), olde tyme bottles (American Science and Surplus, in Chicago), and lumber (Home Depot, in Evanston).

The last was kind of a magic trick, for anyone who has met our car, "Pip." A Scion xA chosen for its price and good mileage, Pip has served us for the two years we've owned him. He's driven Brandi to work, us to Ohio, and, last year, hauled half our stuff from our old apartment to our new condo. This took about twenty trips. (For the other half, we hired movers, who broke a window at our old place and promised to but never paid for it.) I know this car like Russians know Tetris. When I bought the lumber, a part of me wondered, "Can I get this stuff inside my car or do I have to strap it to the roof and spend another half hour outside in twenty degree weather?" Another, more swaggery part, replied with, "Ahhhh, forget about it. You got this." When questioned further, this squirrely personality fragment said, "No, really, it's easy. You run the 2x4s diagonally through the cab with the passenger seat laid flat and the rear passenger seat backs down. If that's not enough, you may even be able to wedge some boards under the passenger footwells." Sure enough, this worked, as evidenced by the photo, which looks like our car has been tragically speared.

For the curious, the navigation system Brandi's parents bought us is called "Gigi."

Winter is still very pretty...

2008-02-27T07:07:00.000-08:00

Winter, our eyes met across the dance floor. You were dancing with the sunrise while I stood in the corner, swaying to the beat. I admit, I blinked back tears, though whether they were for the remorse in my heart or the stinging wind peeling off the upper layers of my facial epidermis, I can't say. I do know that when I captured this picture, of a bubble of ice surrounding the bud of a tree, that your heart is

cold, and you turned away from me once again.

Don't call me, winter. And my email is off the hook.

AKIRA!

2008-02-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

I am a nerd, and I do Photoshop, therefore I subject you to this photo, taken at the 2008 Chicago Auto Show by my lovely and terribly patient wife.

Winter, I'm breaking up with you...

2008-02-26T07:35:00.000-08:00

That's it. I've had it up to here with you, winter. I'm sick and tired of your attitude, and I'm breaking up with you.

We used to be really great friends, winter. When I was a fat kid, you used to be the only time of the year I felt comfortable to play outside, since every other season made me uncomfortably sweaty. I used to really love making snowmen, going for sled rides, skiing, tobogganing, and even sitting by the fire gazing out at your monochromatic majesty through frosty windows. You didn't make me wear a t-shirt in the pool to cover my gross fat ripples. You were the great equalizer. Everyone wore coats! I used to love to pull down the icicles you made drip from the sides of buildings, pretending to be a pirate, or a Jedi, or a space Jedi pirate. You were adventure!

Even when I grew up, you were a pleasure. Last year, you came and went and like a nice fling, I never really knew where I stood with you. You came and went so often. Was it global warming? You taught me to enjoy the time we had, so I even forgave when you dropped ten degrees below, freezing the pipes in the apartment below ours, and flooding our basement. I know it wasn't your fault, winter! You said so! And they were cheapskates who didn't pay for the gas to heat their place, so you taught them a lesson. I wasn't afraid of you, then, either. When you snowed, I knew that in a week or two, the roads would be clear of it and I wouldn't have to worry about potholes or slipping on the sheet of water that melts off and then re-freezes when the temperature drops back down to the teens. You were temperate and kind and when you left for spring, you didn't pull the trick of popping back down to freezing to kill off all the early budding plants. You just went, and my memories were fond.

Now, though, you don't leave. Like the Cranberries, you linger. You make lawns look like glaciers. You nearly broke my elbow when I fell on a sidewalk covered with a thin sheen of nearly frictionless ice. You make me feel unsafe walking under a large building. Sure, icicles look fun when you're a kid and they're hanging from the second story. Now, hanging from the fortieth story, they look like they could slice you to the bone. And they might. When did you turn murderous, winter? And why do you cost so much? When heating the apartment to livable temperature means sacrificing my kid's college education, I can only conclude you suck. What you've done to my car, between salt and potholes, is unforgivable.

Winter, I'm breaking up with you. If you don't take your snow and leave in the next two weeks, you'll be hearing from my attorney.

Myopic Cowboy t-minus 6 days and counting

2008-02-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

We started building sets for my next short this weekend. "Myopic Cowboy" will shoot on Sunday, March 2nd, at the Playground Theatre, and will require transforming a very nice black box theatre into a saloon set. Thanks to the incredible talent and planning of Master Carpenter Heather Elam, we're off to an excellent start. We drove out to Home Depot Saturday to buy supplies. I had a sneaking suspicion at checkout that the number they charged us was strangely low. Sure enough, after securing the seven faux-wooden panels and plywood to the top of Heather's car and loading in the 1x4s, 2x4s and 2x6s (I sound construction-y!), I checked the receipt and found that they didn't charge us for any of the panels or plywood. We basically (accidentally) walked out with about $100 in building materials. So Home Depot gets a credit.

Afterwards, we transported everything from the car to my basement, Ryan Gilmour having very nicely chipped a safe path through the glacier forming in the back walkway of our condo building. Every time it snows, people trudging through to walk dogs form a new glacier that gets incredibly slippery and dangerous if you're carrying anything heavier than a fountain pen.

My original plan called for us to buy everything next Saturday, start building immediately after the final Playground show, and then tear everything down after we finished shooting and before the evening show on Sunday night. The modified plan is only slightly less insane. Now, we'll build 80-90% of the sets in my basement, transport them to the Playground immediately after the final Saturday night show, finish and rig Sunday morning until the cast arrives about 8:30 AM.

So far, we've got a bar and several panels of what we're calling "wainscotting" for the back wall. The Playground is a very wide theatre, so I thought the majority of the cost of this project would be the back wall paneling. Thanks to Home Depot, I can now blow that money on my weight in M&Ms, if I please. As the week winds on, I'll be finishing the top of the bar, buying sheets to cover the back wall of the Playground, and staining the shelving for the area behind the bar. I've got a talented cast and director and can't wait to see how this turns out. Basically, Sunday calls for a lot of coffee and optimism.

I'm very excited. Can't you feel it?

The coda to my day...

2008-02-21T13:31:00.001-08:00

It arrived today. Sweet mother of mercy.

Next step: wire (and unwire) up the living room.

It's worth repeating...

2008-02-21T12:17:00.000-08:00

<lecturing>

I don't often post links. Arrogant? Perhaps. I'm not the most interesting person I know. Still, I think the time has come (and gone and come again) to call your Congressperson to put more pressure on the Bush-Cheney administration to open up the documents created during the "Energy Task Force" held in spring of 2001, when the Bush administration was yet young and untroubled. Our Vice President, who has earned the double entendre of his title many times over, has fought quite successfully to keep what went on in that meeting secret, although eventually it did come to light that solar, wind and geothermal need not apply, but the major US oil companies had a free hand. When this came to light, the Bush administration trotted out a last-minute energy policy, which was basically, "More of the same. Global warming, schmobal schmarming." It was lame. Why this would necessitate bringing together enormous energy companies who all basically already agree remained a mystery we can only speculate on.

Jon Taplin, however, does it particularly well here.

I don't mind oil. I own a car. We heat the condo in the winter using gas and while I really like the solar panels on top of the Uncommon Ground at the end of our street, I kind of hate the atmosphere. Utilizing oil is a good idea, but I'll tell you what... using it wisely is a better idea. Passing laws to force automakers to make more energy efficient cars, or to pay a tax for the guzzlers they do make, is a good idea. Advising homeowners on better insulation and tax breaks for solar energy is also good. It doesn't take a heroic amount of change, just someone interested in a little belt-tightening. Because if we don't figure it out soon, we're all going to groan under the weight of $200/barrel oil.

And that's not even factoring in the human cost. Don't get me started.

</lecturing>

Ooh, day...

2008-02-19T14:05:00.001-08:00

Day, you broke my heart today, a little, but you're not over yet. You've still got time to pull it through.

First, it you took away my Active Directory-integrated DNS on my server. So everyone's Internet crumbled like a stack of cards. Yeah, I'm looking at you, day. Sure, you doled out the discoveries: you taught me how to break my Internet and restore it without flying into a tizzy or having users approach me with pitchforks. Soon, perhaps, you'll let me use NSLOOKUP without fear of retribution. Come on, day, you can do it.

Second, you sent me a box. But not just any box, day, the box that should have held the little Airport Express thingy I ordered more than two weeks ago. You and those Apple folk pulled a little prank on me last time by sending it to the building but not the suite number where I worked. It all worked out in the end, though, or at least it should have if there were anything inside the box. Instead, empty of anything but a packing slip and some brown paper, meant, I imagine, to cushion the nothing they sent.

Remember that moment in "Se7en" when Brad Pitt looks into the box? And you never see what's there but you just know what's inside? I think it was this:

PACKING LIST

Ship to:
Golden field by power lines

Ship from:
Constant rainy, hellish city

Line number:
002

Quantity shipped:
1

Part number:
M9470LL/H

Description:
Human head, blonde, female, blue eyes, possible future star of "Shallow Hal," "View from the Top"

I would have shot Kevin Spacey, too, whether or not he had anything to do with it. That would have made my day.

Acting

2008-02-19T08:00:00.001-08:00

...is as easy as sneezing. People know when you're faking it.

The Nicest Gunship Pilot You'll Ever Meet

2008-02-17T13:34:00.001-08:00

My lovely lass, at the gun turret of a massive Army helicopter that, the Army rep inside it said, he landed on the roof of the convention center, took the blades off, and helped push into the auto show. Again, cheating... sure it has wheels, but how many other cars there can fly?*

* Three. This is, after all, the Future.

Steampunk Bumblebee

2008-02-17T02:56:00.001-08:00

Several fun things about the Chicago auto show:

- The cars are pornographically shiny. You can see from the shafts of light on our faces in other photos that there are a lot of high intensity spots giving everyone indoor tans. What I did not capture were the polishers, who wore blue jumpsuits and carried buckets of buffing stuff (try saying that ten times fast) and whose job I believe was to try to stay ahead of the sticky fingered mob. Good luck with your Sisyphan task, say I.

- The old cars on display, blocked off by railings and curtains, drew an okay crowd that was a drop in a leaky bucket compared to the Army section, which had a helicopter. Now THAT'S cheating. Second-most popular: the yellow 2008 Camaro featured in the Michael bay action porn Transformers. Here, the exhibitors cut out the middleman and a lot of explaining by titling the placard not "2008 Camaro as featured in the Michael Bay robot snuff movie Transformers, code-named Bumblebee" but simply "Bumblebee Camaro."

- I really like the idea of what would have happened had the robots of Cybertron emerged just a half score of decades earlier. Of course, having played with Transformer toys more than half my life, I can't look at a Scion xD without wondering how the legs would flip out, and whether you can see the head from the underside.

Trunk and Disorderly

2008-02-16T19:21:00.001-08:00

I made Brandi take this photo of me at the auto show because I think it's funny to see large men in tiny spaces. On the other hand, I've always been more of a claustrophile. On car trips as a kid--my mom, my sister and I used to drive ten hours from Cleveland to central Illinois--I used to wedge myself in the footwells of the back seat.

Growing up was bittersweet. On the one hand, I could fight back when my sister wouldn't stick to her side of the car. On the other, I lost the soothing vibration of the driveshaft, mere centimeters from my face.

Chicago Auto Show Rule No. 1

2008-02-16T18:38:00.001-08:00

Safety first!

Seriously, who is that kid? She makes the "Matt gets stuck in the safety sign" work ten times better than it should. It's still, only moderately funny, but thank heavens for little girls, eh?

I mean this in no way creepily. Safety first!

You can buy it, too! (Car not provided)

2008-02-15T07:09:00.001-08:00

One of the things I stumbled on during my trip to Target this morning was a remote start / remote entry system for a car. I don't know what to say. We've impressed a lot of friends and family with our "CHIP-WIP!" (sound of car unlocking) system. Now this little $80.00 doohickey wants to narrow the gap. I won't be able to use my increasingly warmed over joke with Brandi:

Me: [walking up to the car after Brandi used remote start on our car] Brandi, don't you care about global warming?

Brandi: Sure I do, buddy. What's up?

Matt: Well, you left the car running. No wonder we get such crummy gas mileage.

Brandi: Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Note: I may be exaggerating Brandi's response by one "ha." I have now told this joke about 10,000 times.

Where in the World Has Our Fed Ex Package Been?

2008-02-14T11:16:00.001-08:00

I took this shot a month ago, but I only just hammered out posting
photos to my blog directly from my phone. So here we go!

With all that labeling, how does FedEx know where to deliver your
package? One word: owls.

It goes like this, "Da da DAH, DAH DAH da dada..."

2008-02-12T14:55:00.000-08:00

I wish you could Google music. This morning, I'm listening to a Paul Oakenfeld track called "Zoo York," which uses the exact refrain from the trailer for "Sunshine." And anyone who saw that incredibly intense trailer knows how hard the music ratchets up the tension.

Which is doubly amazing when you consider how often a trailer about a menial office worker who rises above his circumstances is set to the music from "Brazil." (Listen for the percussive typewriters.) Or a wacky gang of mismatched eccentric types take to the road set to "The Breakfast Machine" by Danny Elfman from "Pee Wee's Big Adventure." And the entire John Williams Star Wars score is just a rehash of Holst's "The Planets." I may be overreaching. Nevertheless, I will continue to do so until my demands are met: tell me the name of that song.

Steaknives

2008-02-08T20:10:00.001-08:00

I got my first set of grown up steak knives today, cashing in the points on my credit card (it was that or gift cards to Best Buy and other retail stores I might as well buy stuff with a CREDIT CARD at). The knives came with a sharpener, which is how I know they're for grownups, as well as the sharpness that can slice through child flesh all-too easily.

Carrying them home on the train made me feel like a superhero, although any criminal who would wait for me to pull them out of their cardboard sleeves and then be intimidated by the resultant 5" of steel should probably find another line of work. The handles are walnut. This is one of those few instances where I'll condone the willful destruction of a tree, the other being when I'm cold and there's a fireplace, or chainsaw art. Come to think of it, my wood morals are a lot more loose than my feelings about leather.

C'est la vie.

Open Court Drama

2008-02-08T20:02:00.000-08:00

Last night at Open Court, an old teammate showed up to play. I wasn't very thrilled. He and I used to play on a team that had zero chemistry and broke up, partly, over him and the fact that he could never do a show sober. You know those old clips they play of Elvis having his Vegas meltdown? Imagine that, except every show, improv, and he was never all that famous to begin with. Welcome to my last Thursday night.

First, he walks in while Erin Pallesen, playing MC, introduces our intrepid audience to the idea of Open Court, where everyone who wants to plays on an insta-team, and announces, interrupting, that he would like to join the second group because he was just coming from another show. Erin took it in stride, he paid his money and we all hoped he would at least be a little less dramatic.

We divide the audience into two groups of about nine people apiece. We warm up. My old teammate cannot keep it together, even during a rather banal game of "Zip-Zap-Zop." He keeps interrupting to apologize for lacking focus, in the process... draining our group's focus... saying also how excited he is to see me and meet my wife, who I'm reasonably certain was my wife when last I saw him three years ago. But maybe not. I don't know. Deal with it, dude, my wife is HOT.

So, we name our group and do the "Toin Coss," which in an ordinary show would determine group order. Last night, purely perfunctory. The other group took the stage. My friend disappears for the next twenty minutes. Hilarity ensues. The other team finishes, and we're up. Our suggestion: alcove.

My friend immediately takes the stage, doing all three of the things he's good at: accents, ignoring his partners' input, and talking a lot without actually saying anything funny. He hits the suggestion over the head, hard, with, "I'm making this phone call in this ALCOVE." Don't forget to add a funny German accent when you picture this, because it makes the moment unforgettable.

So we get a few scenes away from this, thankfully, when in should wander my old teammate, this time in an Irish accent, calling himself, alternately, "Terry" and "Teddy" Kennedy. Now, I realize with certain accents these two names can sound alike, but he was enunciating and nobody on stage had any idea what the hell to do with his input because a) it had next to nothing to do with the scene, which was not crying for a walk on by ANY Kennedy, b) my friend's grasp of politics and particularly the complicated history of Ted Kennedy and his affair with fast cars and booze was shaky at best. So we watched him ruin another scene.

At the end of the show, he told me how excited he was to see me again, that he'd been in the hospital for four days beating back the flesh eating bacteria with powerful antibiotics, and that he was producing a Broadway show now. Certain things must be taken with a grain of salt. Those with hypertension should probably steer clear of my friend.

Everyone else was great, though. If you've never been to Open Court, come, Thursdays at the Playground. It's guaranteed to be entertaining, at the very, very least.

Warm Feet, Cold Head

2008-02-06T10:29:00.000-08:00

In anticipation of the weather, today I wrapped my feet in socks and boots, and in between the two I stuck plastic baggies to keep my dry socks waterproof. It's a sad fact of winter in Chicago that, like Forrest Gump and his box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. What we've gotten for the past week is very soggy snow. I wear my Asics running shoes a lot and I'm always plotting my path to make sure I don't spend the day with wet feet. In the last couple of weeks, my big toes started poking out of holes in the top... luckily, they don't much care about the appearance of a Network Admin at work... and every time I walk on linoleum after a tour on wet pavement, my right shoe makes this weird, tiny squishing sound that I like but others doubtless find annoying. I can afford shoes, but these ones are veterans of the Chicago Marathon 2007 (AKA the Bataan Death Marathon) and I've only just gotten around to breaking them in. At any rate, no squishy sounds coming from my feet today, just warmth radiating away from industrial-strength leather and soles thick enough to make me as tall as Tim Ryder. If you know or are Tim, you know that's an accomplishment and, hopefully, a compliment.

Still, on the opposite side of my body, my head is cold today because I finally got a haircut last night. I'd ignored my head since we shot "The Crashers," and it was not flattering to me in the slightest. My hair doesn't get long so much as big. Much as I tried to pin it down by shampooing and conditioning, it still sprouted out like a big gray-brown dandelion. Lucky they don't care much about my appearance at work, but at some point I figured I had to do something about it. With Brandi busy working up Super Tuesday stats at wgntv.com, and a temporary reprieve from the gym due to my having donated blood, I headed out to the SuperCuts to get the kind of buzz that won't get you in trouble with the law. At least, here.

As a sidebar, the dude cutting my hair was very cool, and covered in tattoos. I noticed one on his arm was kind of mechanical, put two and two together and said, "You've got a cyborg arm tattoo!" He was impressed; apparently, in the two years since he got the tattoo, nobody had realized it was supposed to look like his skin was peeled away, exposing the mechanics underneath. Looked pretty obvious to me. Then again, part of me secretly believes I'm surrounded by robots anyway, so you'll forgive me if I treat this as proof.
As another sidebar, to finish up my college English degree, I took a summer class in differential equations. The most interesting part of that class was the equation for finding out the temperature of a body colder or warmer than its surroundings. As the body approaches the ambient temperature, it slows the rate of its cooling, so you cannot chart the change in temperature linearly. That's where differential equations--mathematics in which the output of one equation feeds into itself at a different point in time or space--come in, to help you calculate the temperature of the object at any time. The same equations are used in chaos theory to make those cool graphics and loose weather predictions and by Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park" to explain why dinosaur containment will inevitably fail.

I guess the rest of this story is anticlimactic. I got enough taken off that anyone who doesn't notice the change isn't looking or hasn't seen me in two and a half months. I'm looking forward to running and swimming again, having now recovered enough blood or at least fluid to keep me conscious, and having lost enough hair that I can keep cool even in a mild sprint. I used to like winter so much, but now I just wish it were as simple as the other seasons.

Sigh.

Goodbye, 1-08

2008-01-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

It's coming up on the end of January and I realized I hadn't updated any news about myself recently. What a pity. Here to rectify that is a short and hopefully poignant numbered list:

1) Brandi and I still live in our condo at the upper north end of Chicago. We love the unit, although occasionally a) the ceilings rain water (last week, 2:30 AM, our neighbor's clogged dishwasher drain) b) the door to our garage closes only if you ask it really, really nicely (someone struck and bent the track that closes it and the landlord who owns it won't fix it until one of us fesses up; not it!), c) it takes me an hour to get to and from work (by Red Line or by Metra, I either have forty minutes of walking or forty minutes of sitting plus transfer plus more sitting; today, I used the time to take a nap), d) it's colder than crazy here.

2) I am still employed by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and working in Chicago. Explaining my complicated and rich work history to a cab driver yesterday, I was struck by how unique my resume must look to the uninitiated. How to explain that I got into network administration from graphic design, and that I didn't go to school for graphic design but for creative writing? I used to be proud of this, but now I'm just a little confused, like looking back from Mt. Kilimanjaro to see a crooked path in neon leading back to your bedroom by way of the Louvre. I think. Clearly, there are people with more unique resumes than me, and I'd like to meet them.

3) I just signed up to my fourth marathon, the Flying Pig in Cincinnati, in May. Cold weather has me training indoors, which I don't mind, and I'm trying to bump up my speed. Last week, I ran five miles at about eight minutes a mile. Truthfully, like Ben Folds sings in "The Luckiest" I don't get many things right the first time, but I'd really like to be faster than my first marathon, at 4 hours 46 minutes. Anything under would be fine, and way under would be extra credit, although I don't think it's realistic to expect an 8 minute per mile pace for all 26.2. Guess we'll see.

4) Monday Pictures continues to make movies, albeit at a drastically reduced pace due to winter, the holidays and the fact that attrition has dwindled the ranks of our group. Nevertheless, we are gearing up for another short, "Myopic Cowboy," and starting to add members again. The prospects are exciting. Check us out on YouTube.

5) Our Sprint contract ended in mid-December, and less than a week later Brandi and I found ourselves the proud owners of iPhones. The learning curve was a little overwhelming at first, but they quickly wormed their way into the space in our chest cavity where our hearts are supposed to be. I especially like the calendar function, which allows me to keep a super-secret journal filled with the minutiae of my day, in a manner not unlike a blog, but about topics that I consider too boring or mundane to post to a blog. Honestly, do you CARE that I'm wearing long underwear, pajama bottoms and a pair of pants to keep my skinny legs cold? Yes? Internet pervert.

6) Brandi and I have no babies yet besides the two furry ones with fangs who lick themselves to stay clean. We will let you know. On the other hand, our friends the Wilson-Clairmonts are expecting shortly and we look forward to babysitting, which for the uninitiated is like parenting except you can give the urchins back. We have adorable photos from helping out with Daphne, thanks very much to Heather and Judy.

7) I am continuing to perform with the brilliant Playground team International Stinger. Last Saturday, with only four of us to do the show, we varied from the form the team usually performs (called "The After Party") to do a post-Apocalyptic form set in one room. The suggestion was "Paraguay," and the form of this particular horseman was an ape. That's right: an Ape-pocalypse. Monkeys running rampant, throwing feces and generally wrecking up the place turned our earth into a living hell. What's more, getting bitten by a monkey would turn you into a monkey. Chris Biddle said, "Well, now monkeys rule the Earth." I replied, "Well, technically, they ruled it before, but they were, you know, us." Also amusing: with nothing to eat, Chris and Edison Girard shared an Altoid that Chris was already eating at the top of the show. Erin Pallesen then showed up as a guy who had eaten his fill at a Whole Foods and returned with nothing and, in a sort of third-act twist, had gotten a tattoo of an avocado because he just loved avocados. Once again, I am faced with the fact that I am performing with my fourth amazing improv team, the first three including Lindbergh Babies, Mourning in Denver, and Space Mountain. The support and brilliance the people who have played and do play on those teams helps fuel my creative drive and I am eternally grateful for the opportunities I have had to perform that art.

8) I just finished a conference in Mobile, Alabama for Southern LINC, where for two days I made up graphics and pushed a button every time a light turned on. It was surprisingly exhausting, but lucrative, and a nice chance to get out of the winter doldrums in Chicago. I also flew in last night through part of a howling snowstorm, so today I am especially grateful to be alive, on the ground, and blessed with weather reports that tell me when to wear three layers of pants. (Perverts.)

That's all for now.

Matt

Proof that you're never fatal enough

2008-01-25T14:19:00.001-08:00

I stumbled across this picture by way of the site www.littlegun.be and all I can say is that you just can't be fatal enough. I mean, somebody had the presence of mind to build a pistol into a fish hook.

Consider, for a moment, how you might put this sophisticated piece of steampunk to use:

- You're a horror movie slasher. Finally, you're within striking distance of your victim, but she dances away with the litheness of a gazelle. So you shoot her.
- You've caught the ultimate sockeye salmon, but the fish struggles as you load it into the boat. So you shoot it.
- The bond villain you've relentlessly pursued has captured you and forced you to work behind the bar on his enormous luxury yacht. Luckily, you've convinced him that an ego outsized enough to plan world domination requires a gin and tonic to scale, which in turn requires enormous blocks of ice. Also, very luckily, Q outfitted you with this tool, so that, when the villain takes his first sip, you shoot him. In the back. Because he made you lift all that ice.

As Brian Brown in "F/X" said, about SuperGlue, "A hundred and one uses. Now, a hundred and two."

The Crashers

2007-12-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy holiday season this year, juggling family stuff, finances, gadgets and the purchasing of presents, but somehow we found time to create this heartwarming tale of a man (me) who contracts a computer virus and unwittingly infects the entire city of Chicago.

Enjoy.

Too Long

2007-12-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

I once decided that if I ever wrote a book about improv, I would dedicate it to my favorite improv teachers. Del Close and Martin de Maat, two men who often saw themselves on opposite sides of the fence, died less than two years apart, and Chicago improvisation has never been the same since. I think they would have both chuckled to find that they share space in my head. Martin served as artistic director of Second City's Training Center, an amusing choice, since Martin often quipped, "It's so easy to be funny. Why bother?" He's the main reason why, when I graduated college in 1994, I wanted to move up to Chicago. Sure, I had vague ideas about making it big in improvisation, then returning to my main love, science fiction, with all of the leisure time I would have, but at this point it's clear that I might as well have said, "I'll get that transfusion as soon as I've squeezed this blood from this stone. Hope it's A-positive!"

Martin taught me to stop seeing life as a series of stepping stones. He observed that everyone who auditioned for Second City's Touring Company didn't want to understudy TourCo at all. They wanted the movie deal based on their hit SNL character. To do that, they had to get TourCo, move on to ETC, then mainstage, land a gig performing for Lorne Michaels, and finally score a hit with viewers with something inane but irresistible, the "Lothar" of the modern era. Consider this: it's like throwing a dart and hitting five consecutive bulls eyes. With the same dart.

So, I can't say that I didn't expect the day that I would graduate the Training Center with nothing more than an expensive t-shirt. I just wish I had had more time with Martin, or that more teachers took on his, "You are pure potential" viewpoint. Stephen Colbert taught my Level 5 class, and he was very nice, but my class didn't get along and he wasn't the character he plays on TV. He was interesting and hardworking and, in retrospect, I wish I had gotten to know him better, because he says such interesting things about Del.

It took me a long time to get into Del. My first workshop with him proved only how much of a jerk he could be toward college students. I guess having written The Book on what he saw as the future of improvisation led him to feel a little embittered about having to give workshops to people who had never read it, but, man, watching him bum and smoke cigarettes while he visibly hated our game of Freeze Tag made it hard to like that son of a bitch. It wasn't until I reached the end of my IO classes that I realized how much we had in common: the man was a science fiction nerd. That was cool.

More than that, once he saw a scene break out of the usual tropes of improv, becoming something closer to Art, he opened up like a flower. I was lucky enough to perform with some of the most talented and motivated people at the theatre at the time, and together all of us learned new stuff every time we took the stage. If Martin saw us as pure potential, Del saw us as the fathers of Art, mothers of Chaos, children of Science, siblings of Melodramatic Capitalization.

Too many years have gone by since their passing, and there's no rhyme or reason why I would think of them today. Perhaps it's just the season, or the loved ones we've lost recently and the many more ahead of us. It's too bad that just coming up with the quote doesn't get the book written, but that's life. Here's what I would have said:

To Del and Martin, who would have been surprised to find they share this page.
Gurus, legends, friends (but not with each other). May the heavens thunder with your wit.

Successories

2007-09-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

A little while ago -- perhaps years, it's hard to tell with my porous brain -- my friend Sara asked me to help her out with her parents' anniversary making cool fake Successories signs that she and her sisters could print out and frame to mock/honor their folks. I just ran across one of them, a graphic I faked up of a signpost leading to nowhere, and liked it so much I thought I would upload it.

Sara's caption:
Direction: not letting the claim of a "one-way street" stop you from driving the wrong way. Or driving on the sidewalk. Or knowing where you're going at all.

Sara is cool.

Evan

2007-09-23T23:30:00.000-07:00

Monday Pictures is a group formed at the start of the summer of 2007 to make short, fun movies to share on YouTube and various other short, fun movie outlets. We were sad to lose Bob and Stacey at the end of the summer, but otherwise life goes on. And on it did go, as Ryan Dee Gilmour and I took turns directing the script written and co-starring the brilliant Erin Pallesen. Here is the embedded video.

My name is Matt and...

2007-09-17T19:47:00.000-07:00

...and I confess I have no idea how to pronounce the name of the actor Matthew McConaughey.

A. Muh Con A Hee ?
B. Muh Con Uh Ghee ?
C. Mih Conga Hee ?
D. All of the above ?

I'm lucky he's not in more movies. Maybe an easy to pronounce name is Kevin Bacon's career secret. You can't imagine six degrees of Jürgen Prochnow*, can you?

* Most recently seen in Primeval but also known for starring in Das Böot and The Keep.