Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Familiar
Last night I saw something in the Independent Film Revival's showing of "The Squid and The Whale" that shocked me and turned the movie from being a dark comedy about an upper-middle-class family falling apart into a study of where I, personally, may have gone completely off the rails.I'm still processing it.
Labels: movies
Unknown
It was close to 10:30 PM. My neighborhood grocery store was almost deserted. I was on my way home, and because of the intersection of me having a lottery ticket for tonight's drawing and being near the store where I'd bought it, I had stopped in to see if I was a winner.The answer is almost always no. Even when it's yes, it's for small amounts. So my normal course of action is to delay finding out for a long time, to delay even finding out if anyone has won the big prize. The longer I can go without, the more fun I can extract from dreaming about what I'll do if I find myself suddenly rich.
Quit my job. Buy and operate my own strip club. Travel the world. See a baseball game in every major league stadium. Take intensive martial arts training, buy a supercar, like a Dodge Viper, and drive from town to town, righting wrongs and living and loving (possibly with an exotic pet, like a monkey or a talking cat).
As you can see, my dreams quickly spiral out of control. I mean, c'mon. One can't run a strip club without a connection to organized crime. Who am I kidding?
My friends see me as a very rational person, and so, knowing the mathematical odds against actually winning the lottery, they seem surprised that I play. I don't pay more than a dollar or two at a time, though, because I know that spending more doesn't appreciably increase my chances. However, the difference between having a ticket and not having a ticket are measurable. Also, see above - I like dreaming a little, but I still need a basis for my dreams. Like buying a ticket.
The Oregon Lottery puts self-serve machines in various establishments, to let ticket holders scan their own tickets to see if they've won or not. It was before one such machine that I now found myself.
I held the barcode under the laser, watched the thin red lines criss-cross the printed paper, and then the cold blue LEDs lit up. Invariably, the machines say:
"Sorry Not a Winner"
..but this time, it said:
"Congratulations Please See Retailer"
See, it doesn't tell you how much you've won. Just a simple yes/no on the fact of winning. I don't know why they've chosen to do this, except perhaps as further marketing and hype. Get the winning customers thinking about their winnings as they're forced to approach another human being, hopeful, optimistic. A dream shared is a dream more than doubled. Trebled, maybe even quadrupled.
Just so, I approached the lone cashier, an Asian lady whom I recognize from years of shopping here but with whom I've never really made any kind of connection. "Excuse me," I asked, "Can you help me cash this?"
She looked up from counting money, glanced back towards the same place I had just checked this ticket. "There's a machine over there..."
"Oh, I know. It said this is a winner, but I don't know how much." I explain.
She turned her head the other direction and looked towards a dark glass counter full of baked goods and pastries. "Oh..." she sounded customer-service-sad, "The register we pay lottery tickets out of is in the Bakery, and it's closed. I'm sorry."
I smiled as if to say I was not put out by this. In fact, I wasn't. "It's OK," I said as I walked off, "I'll just spend tonight dreaming of big money."
That was last night.
I still haven't checked it.
Nobody spoil it for me. I like walking around pretending I'm a millionaire.
I'm pricing Porsches as I type.
Killing
Cheetah kills crocodile:Whoa. (h/t to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer)
Sunday, July 20, 2008
All the frustration of the day in one simple interaction
I sat at the bus stop, tired, checking up on this and that on my iPhone. The bench was comfortable, and no one else was around. Cars would drive by, and around the corner people waited outside the sushi shop, but there was no one in my immediate vicinity.The bus wasn't going to show up for another hour. Even though it was only a 20 minute walk home from where I sat, still, I sat and surfed and ignored people.
It had been a long day. My frustration at Tri-Met's erratic bus schedules on Sunday was just under the surface. Yet another stupid way religion impacts the non-religious. But I tried to let go of my frustration. I knew it grew from being hungry, and tired, and a little bit sunburned.
A thin lady walked up and stood right in front of me. "Is the bus coming? Do you know when it's coming?" She talked fast, and wavered on her feet, and appeared to have different ideas about personal space than I did.
"An hour. It won't be here for an hour," I said. "Eight-fifty-six."
"An hour?" She looked at her cell phone, closed it, put it back in her purse. "Well!" In one smooth movement she pulled out a pack of smokes and spun around to sit right next to me. "Well, I'll just smoke a cigarette then go back to the bar, then!"
My tiredness and frustration came to a boil. She's going to smoke. Right next to me. At a bus stop.
Which is supposed to be a non-smoking area.
In my own smooth movement, I swung my messenger bag over my neck, stood, and put my iPhone away. I turned to walk home, even though I was tired. I did not want to yell at the lady, which I knew I would do if I tried to explain. I think the no smoking rule is stupid, because there's no way to enforce it except by social pressure, which is easily ignored. And I'm not confrontational enough, especially when I'm tired, to do the enforcing. So tonight I'd rather walk.
"Oh, you don't drink?" the lady said, sarcastically.
I turned around briefly. "No. I don't smoke." But I fumed for several blocks thinking about that encounter as I walked home.
39 years
Thirty-nine years ago today, men stood on the moon for the first time.Will we ever go back?
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Hellboy II
In spite of being about a demon who is fated to destroy the Earth, "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" is surprisingly... cute.Labels: movies
Friday, July 18, 2008
Deep thought
Apparently California uses more gas and oil than China.This makes sense.
When I picture a scene in China, I picture lots of people on bicycles. Don't you?
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
What I've been doing
Pretty much nothin'.Oh, wait. I went for a walk in my neighborhood last night. I walked down to Oaks Park because I'd heard that the Rose City Rollers were having team tryouts, and I thought looking at Goth-y, tattooed chicks on roller skates and yelling at each other might be entertaining.
It wasn't, or at least not as much as I'd hoped.
On their website, the Rose City Rollers had said that the tryouts would not be open to the public, and so I'd practiced a line that I thought I'd give if anyone challenged me; I'd tell them I was a writer, and I was preparing a story. If they'd asked what paper I wrote for, I would just tell them I'm a freelancer.
No one challenged me. And I didn't talk to anyone or ask nosy questions, like what were they doing the night of the murder, or if they noticed a light in the upper window of the old MacNaughton mansion. I just hung around outside the big green hangar and watched them skate around and talk about the team for 20 minutes.
A friend had mentioned she might be there, too, and she's hot, so that gave me even more incentive to be there. But it was muggy, and I was tired, and poorly dressed (jeans and t-shirt and sexy (but hot-in-a-temperature-way) hat) so even though I showed up and poked around, I ended up leaving probably too early to meet up with her. I wandered around the midway of Oaks Park for a bit, and watched kids and families having a grand time on the rides, and eat snow cones and cotton candy and drive bumper cars and get swung around in the air in various ways. I think I'll go back later this week and just spend an hour wandering around, as long as the weather stays nice. It's kinda fun.
After that I walked back across Oaks Bottom, or as I like to call it, "the swamp", and up the trail into Sellwood Park, and then into Moreland, where I bought a gelato (half hazelnut chocolate, half raspberry (locally grown!)), which was delicious and also put me just under my calorie goal for the day. Then I got some groceries and grabbed a bus home.
Oh! And also, I upgraded my iPhone to the 2.0 OS. Which I'm kinda regretting, because it's kinda buggy. The keyboard was hanging up the whole phone the past several days, getting worse and worse, which frustrated me. And it uses up the battery faster. Or maybe that's just because I'm playing with it more; I can't tell. Anyway, I did a restore without restoring my backup, which is the iPhone equivalent of reinstalling the OS from scratch, and it seems to be OK now. It doesn't freeze up like it did before. But I'll keep worrying until Apple puts out a patch.
Oh, and I'm writing movie reviews for a 'zine that's coming out soon. At least I'm going to submit them. We'll see if a) they get accepted, and b) the 'zine actually gets published. It's all up in the air. But I have to move fast on that because the 'zine is going to be published soon. So be mad at me if I don't actually do something in the next couple of days, OK?
So... yeah. Not much goin' on.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Two-thumbed fist
Saw "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" last night, a documentary about one of my intellectual heroes.It made me sad that he's gone, and mad that he's not here to excoriate the Bush Administration and other politicians, and it made me want to get really drunk and write a lot.
So I'd say it succeeded.
Strange that two of my heroes, Thompson and Philip Kindred Dick, shared so many traits. Both incredible and prolific writers, both addicted to drugs, both haunted and fearful of politicians and particularly President Nixon. Both reclusive but social, opening their homes to strangers and newfound friends (and young nubile women), to the detriment of their marriages.
And both of them with personality issues.
Hmm. Food for thought.
Labels: movies
Sunday, July 13, 2008
The Sucky Section
Ken found some video from Thursday night's Foo Fighters concert at the Rose Quarter. Apparently YouTube user crawlingkitty shot several videos from the show, situated as she (he? I mean no offense, I just can't tell) was in the General Admission section on the floor.Ken spotted the fact that I appear several times in the video below (and he's probably a bit sad that he didn't show up, since he and his wife were right next to me):
What's that? You didn't see me? Had a hard time spotting my magnificent hat in the blurry phone-cam video? Here's a screen grab, from around the 1:36 mark:
Click pic to embiggen
Dave Grohl's pointing right at me! Or something.
