The Pain!

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

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

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

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...

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!

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...

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

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...

It arrived today. Sweet mother of mercy.

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

It's worth repeating...

<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...

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

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

The Nicest Gunship Pilot You'll Ever Meet

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

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

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

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)

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?

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..."

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

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

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

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.